1 Introduction

The new directions explored by recent family language policy (FLP) studies have shed light on language practices taking place in under-examined geographical locations, where different family constellations use languages beyond the more commonly studied Germanic and Romance languages (Curdt-Christiansen 2018; King 2016; King and Lanza 2019; Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020; Lomeu Gomes 2018; Smith-Christmas 2017). Yet, this subfield has reproduced a substantial limitation present more generally in sociolinguistics, namely, the over-reliance on northern voices, experiences, and epistemologies to the detriment of southern ones (Levon 2017; Milani and Lazar 2017).

Working towards redressing the lack of southern voices, experiences and epistemologies, in this article I examine the ways Brazilian parents make sense of their transnational and multilingual experiences in Norway, and the language ideologies that inform their language practices in the home. In doing so, my goal is to take family multilingualism into novel empirical and theoretical directions.

Feeding into the burgeoning body of research on family multilingualism in Norway (e.g. Johnsen, forthcoming; Lanza 1997; Obojska 2019; Obojska and Purkarthofer 2018; Purkarthofer and Steien 2019), the empirical focus on Brazilian parents in Norway allows us to gain a better understanding of this understudied group of people in their South–North migration trajectories as they raise their children multilingually (for Brazilian families in the UK, see A. Souza 2010, 2015; for Latin Americans in Norway, see Pájaro 2011).

Theoretically, I emphasise the relevance of unveiling the connections between the lived experiences of parents in intercultural encounters and broader social, cultural, economic, and political processes from a southern perspective. This gives us a more nuanced understanding of the language ideologies and practices of multilingual families, particularly those engaged in South–North migration. More specifically, in this article my interests lie in understanding:

• how Brazilian parents make sense of their transnational, multilingual experiences in Norway, and

• what discourses inform parental language practices in the home as they raise their children multilingually.

While these foci resonate with current research on family multilingualism (e.g. Curdt-Christiansen 2016; Moustaoui Srhir 2019; Soler and Roberts 2019), I argue that an express engagement with epistemological and ontological assumptions akin to a southern perspective (e.g. Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007; Connell 2007; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Santos 2014, 2018) opens up the field of FLP in ways that incorporate into its agenda issues and discussions that remain untapped by current literature. More precisely, the overarching claim put forth in this article is that a southern perspective allows us to understand the racialised structures of inequality that the participants have to navigate in their daily lives; to incorporate the intersectional dynamics of social class, gender and race/ethnicity into analyses of language ideologies and practices of families; and to examine the historical links between contemporary language ideologies and practices, and social hierarchisations that date back to colonial times.

In the following, I first present contextual information about Brazilians in Norway. Subsequently, I discuss how family multilingualism research has been carried out within the Eurocentric canon of knowledge production in the past two decades. Then I describe the data generation and analysis processes and discuss my locus of enunciation. In the analysis, I examine data from interviews with two Brazilian mothers living in Norway. Before presenting some concluding thoughts, I discuss how this particular case can contribute to family multilingualism research more broadly.

2 Brazilians in Norway: South–North entanglements

The South–North migration trajectories experienced by the participants in this study are part of a broader flow of people. Considering the scarcity of published studies about Brazilians in Norway, it is worth scrutinising the discourses about each country that circulate in the media. On the one hand, it is not uncommon for Norway to be portrayed by Brazilian and international media outlets as the happiest country to live in (Borenstein and Keyton 2017). A solid welfare system that grants free access to healthcare and education, high salaries, and policies to promote gender equality are usually some of the characteristics highlighted in representations of Norway. On the other hand, Brazil has regularly been represented as one of the countries with the greatest gaps between the richest and the poorest in the world (Canzian et al. 2019) where the public healthcare and education systems are deficient, violence marks the lives of many, especially black, male youth, and corruption scandals involving politicians have been very frequent in the past few years (for more on inequality in Brazil, see Arretche 2018 and Schwarcz 2019). The warmth and resilience of its more than 200 million people, great achievements in football, the flair of samba dancers, especially women, and its delicious and varied cuisine give less distasteful tinges to some representations of Brazil in the media and possibly populate the imaginary of people across the globe. Fundamental to the overarching argument presented here is that these representations are deeply rooted in histories of colonialism. And if we want to better understand how these representations and histories are interlocked in the lived experiences of people engaged in South–North migration, a suitable framework is needed. Inspired by and feeding into similar endeavours (Heugh and Stroud 2019; Milani and Lazar 2017; Pennycook and Makoni 2020; L. M. T. Souza 2019), a potential alternative is the southern perspective employed here.

The stereotypical generalisations mentioned in the media representations above could be – and in fact are, as I demonstrate – made relevant in the ways participants make sense of themselves (and are perceived) as immigrants in Norway. In particular, the cases in this article speak to processes of exclusion similar to those discussed by Goffman (1963: 139) in relation to how stigmatisation of certain ethnic/racial groups serves as a way of keeping them from “various avenues of competition”.

Focussing on a certain group of immigrants based on their nationality, however, brings about certain methodological issues. One of these issues relates to how the category immigrant is defined. For example, Statistics Norway (2019) has six different immigrant categories, as shown in Table 1 (adapted from Statistics Norway 2019).

A related (and not less problematic) issue is that dealing with such fixed categorisations risks essentialising national identities in ways that do not correspond to one’s self-identification. Furthermore, official data usually fail to consider those whose migratory status does not conform to national immigration laws. Based on the criteria employed in the categorisation of Table 1 (i.e. country of birth and nationality of parents), the mothers in this study would belong to the group of 5,042 people (i.e. born in Brazil to non-Norwegian parents), while their daughters would belong to the group of 3,077 people (i.e. Norwegian-born with one foreign-born parent).

Moreover, the gender differentiation available in official data is also bound by a binary understanding of gender. For instance, within the “immigrants” category (i.e. 5,042), the dichotomic division between males and females (roughly 25 and 75%, respectively) overlooks the need to consider a fuller spectrum of gender and sexuality identities and expressions, mirroring a current limitation of FLP studies (King 2016).

With these remarks in place, the understanding of national identity employed here is motivated by Alcoff’s (2005: 42) more general definition of identities as “positioned or located lived experiences in which both individuals and groups work to construct meaning in relation to historical experience and historical narratives”.

One of the few publications about Brazilians in Norway is Horst, Pereira and Sheringham’s (2016) study on the role of social class as a factor to account for the incentive or inhibition of further migration of Brazilians to Norway. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, they demonstrate that there are two main reasons for Brazilians to migrate to Norway: family reunification and work. Moreover, among Brazilians in Norway, there seems to circulate an idea that women from the poorest areas in Brazil migrate to Norway through family reunification once they marry Norwegian men; whereas middle class professionals come from wealthier regions in Brazil and migrate due to work (Horst et al. 2016).

Another case in point is Zapponi’s (2015) investigation of psychological constructs such as motivation and expectation as they relate to the migration experiences of Brazilian women in Norway. Drawing on the analysis of narratives elicited through semi-structured interviews, she claims that having access to the Norwegian welfare system had a positive impact on the participants’ adaptation process.

The findings of these two studies serve as good entry points to start an investigation about the intersection of class and gender in the examination of the lived experiences of Brazilians raising their children multilingually in Norway. Family multilingualism research has already considered the pertinence of these social categorisations in examinations of the language practices of families. Yet, its theoretical apparatus has been fundamentally limited in that it either conceals its ontological underpinnings or draws largely on Eurocentric ways of conceptualising social reality, as I discuss below.

3 Family multilingualism within the Eurocentric canon

In one of the pioneering childhood bilingualism studies focussing on parents’ perspectives and expectations regarding their children’s upbringing, Piller (2001) examined the choices parents made in relation to what languages to use in the home, the ideologies that informed these choices, and how they were put into practice. She Piller (2001: 61) pointed out that parents who make careful choices about what languages to use in the home are particularly “elite bilinguals”, highlighting the relevance of social class as an analytical construct to investigate family multilingualism.

Expanding Piller's (2001) findings, King and Fogle (2006) claim that such careful planning is not a phenomenon restricted to the elite as many of the participants in their research belonged to the middle class. In this study, I follow King and Fogle’s (2006) proposition that parents evaluate information from external sources against their personal beliefs, and suggest that, in order to better understand the language practices of transnational parents engaged in raising children multilingually, it is crucial to also examine the experiences of these parents in intercultural encounters as they make sense of their transnational trajectories.

Similarly, Curdt-Christiansen (2009) examined the circulating ideologies drawn upon by Chinese families in Canada. Among her findings, Curdt-Christiansen highlights the relevance of parents’ educational expectations for the development of family language policies. Curdt-Christiansen (2009: 353) asserts that more attention should be paid to the role of social factors on the ways in which parents think about literacy and language and define their literacy and language practices: “there are various forces and contexts in society that will exert influence on family language ideologies and practices and may give rise to different language agendas”.

High educational expectations and aspirations of parents are also noted by Kirsch (2012) in her investigation of Luxembourgish multilingual mothers raising their children in Great Britain. Kirsch (2012) contrasts the circulating discourses about multilingualism in Luxembourg, where the use of more than two languages is highly valued, with the prevailing discourses in England, where a monolingual ideology is more salient. Kirsch (2012) finds that the mothers demonstrated willingness to promote the acquisition of Luxembourgish by their children. However, the mothers themselves felt pressured to be integrated into British cultural practices, which ended up being reflected in the more frequent use of English in interactions with their children.

In general, these studies have highlighted the relevance of in-depth examinations of how parents (re)appropriate circulating discourses about language and culture as they make sense of themselves and raise their children multilingually. Particularly, they have stressed the importance of categorisations such as social class (e.g. level of education of parents, aspirations for social mobility) and gender (e.g. mainly mothers have been interviewed) in better understanding the relations between language practices and ideologies in the home and broader social, cultural, economic, and political processes. Nonetheless, the theoretical frameworks that anchor the analysts’ understandings and operationalisation of such categorisations (i.e. social class and gender) are left unclear. In some respects, this shortcoming seems to substantiate what drives Block (2014) to call for a social turn in a related discipline, namely, applied linguistics. Taking a social turn to study language-related phenomena would mean “including in one’s work substantial and sustained discussions of key constructs and frameworks based on readings in the social sciences. This, as opposed to just a passing mention and/or a brief gloss of these key constructs and frameworks before moving onto research” (Block 2014:15). Engaging with theoretical advancements in the humanities is also advocated for by McNamara (2015). While language studies can benefit greatly from answering these calls, the dialogues proposed by these authors are markedly restricted to engaging with developments of canonic Eurocentric critical literature. For example, a Marxian critique of political economy, a Bourdieusian approach to class and habitus, or an intersectional approach centred around social class (i.e. Block 2014; Block and Corona 2014); and a poststructural critique influenced by (but not only) Derrida (i.e. McNamara 2015).

Turning this discussion to the examination of family multilingualism literature, in her interdisciplinary conceptual framework of FLP, for example, Curdt-Christiansen (2018) appropriately calls attention to how processes taking place in the sociolinguistic, sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical contexts exert influence on (and are influenced by) language practices in the home through the mediation of language. An aspect of this framework that could benefit from further attention is the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of these broader social, cultural, economic, and political processes. Thus, the southern perspective employed here moves in this direction by drawing on social theory to provide a theoretical anchoring for analyses of social reality; also, it exposes the imbalance between northern and southern perspectives in family multilingualism research.

Furthermore, it builds on an ongoing discussion about the epistemological and ontological limitations of Eurocentric critical thought. For example, Latin American scholars involved with the decolonial turn (e.g. Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007) suggest that frameworks aiming at discussing social, cultural, and epistemic inequalities, and economic-political relations between the centres and peripheries would be severely limited unless they attend to the historical links between the European colonisation in Latin America and hierarchisations of social categorisations such as social class, gender, and race/ethnicity.

In turn, Santos (2018) points to the affinities between conservative and critical European thought. That is, considering the contemporary levels of social and epistemic inequalities, and the global rise of political forms that are strengthened by and perpetuate these inequalities, Santos suggests that Marxian-inspired scholarship (along with other forms of scholarship) that self-identify with the label ‘critical’ have not been particularly successful in understanding and, more importantly, changing the world in order to diminish or end these inequalities, especially for those in or from the global South. An “alternative thinking of alternatives” (Santos 2018: 6) is required, he claims.

In a similar vein, Connell (2007) advocates for a kind of social science that expressly engages with knowledge produced beyond the European–American canon. She suggests that in theoretical texts in sociology, it is usually the case that ideas developed in the peripheries are exotically mentioned in passing, rather than being central to the process of theory building.

To summarise, the southern perspective employed here examines, in light of the historical links of colonialism and hierarchisations of social categorisations, how participants engaged in South–North migration make sense of their transnational trajectories and their language practices in the home. Taking a step towards increasing social and epistemic justice, it also engages with alternative ways of thinking of alternatives, without overlooking the important contributions developed in critical research the North. In doing so, it brings epistemological and ontological assumptions about social reality developed in the global South to the centre of the debate, while establishing a South–North dialogue (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam 2017; see also Coetzee 2018).

4 Data generation, data analysis, and locus of enunciation

This study is part of a larger, three-year ethnographic project in which I examined the language practices and ideologies of Brazilian parents raising their children multilingually in Norway. Participants were recruited via online posts on social media groups and in social events catering for Brazilians in Oslo, Norway.

Focussing on data generated in semi-structured interviews with two Brazilian mothers raising their respective child multilingually in Norway allowed me to tap into how they make sense of their transnational experiences in intercultural encounters in Norway, and their language practices in the home. The interviews covered themes such as participants’ transnational practices, language beliefs and practices, and life before migrating to Norway. They took place between June and August 2017, and each lasted just over 1 h. The names are pseudonyms and some details have been purposefully omitted to protect the participants’ identity.

The audio recordings were fully transcribed and each generated a Word document containing between 10,000 and 11,000 words. Upon transcribing and listening to the recordings multiple times, certain social categorisations (i.e. social class, gender, and race/ethnicity) emerged as relevant for the present analysis. Thus, subsequently, instances where participants oriented to such categorisations were coded under the respective social categorisation. For example, references to education, employment, and lifestyle were coded under social class; references to social roles of men and women were coded under gender; references to skin colour, body attributes, and national and regional affiliations were coded under race/ethnicity. This procedure was analytically helpful for it provided an overview of how salient such references were in the whole corpus.

A complicating, and illuminating, factor was that certain passages could be coded under more than one category, which is what was done. Therefore, the categories here are not conceived of as mutually exclusive. Rather, in line with an intersectional approach (Cho et al. 2013), they are understood as interconnected, hierarchical constructs traversed by complex, multi-layered relations of power.

Drawing on epistemological assumptions of discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistic, and linguistic ethnographic approaches (Copland and Creese 2015; Heller et al. 2018, Martin-Jones and Martin 2017; Pennycook 2001), I acknowledge that my social position as a Brazilian male university researcher could have influenced the participants’ responses in many ways. Likewise, my social position also shapes the locus of enunciation from which I develop my analysis.

For example, attending to the reflexive nature of data generation and analysis in ethnographic research, it became clearer to me how certain aspects of my social position gained specific meanings in the interview context. I told the participants about how certain events and experiences of my life trajectory coalesced into my current research interests: e.g. moved to the United States to study English upon completing secondary education in Brazil, worked in Brazil in the field of language education for over 10 years, pursued a postgraduate degree in the UK, and a yet higher academic degree in Norway.

It could be argued, then, that education was perceived to be the main driver behind my moving to different countries, which is a somewhat sound, though certainly partial, perception. However, this perception might have also concealed my background growing up in Brazil on the blurred fringes between working class and middle class. Still, having the choice and the material means to go abroad to study is a privilege enjoyed by few who belong to the capital, cultural, and academic elites in Brazil.

This short autobiographical note about my transnational practices and socioeconomic background illustrates a few of the multiple ways my social position might have influenced participants’ responses. In fact, in the next section, I point to ways it arguably did.

I move on now to analyse excerpts of interviews with each of the two focal participants to discuss (i) how they oriented to social categorisations such as social class, gender and race/ethnicity as they made sense of their transnational, multilingual experiences as Brazilians in Norway, and (ii) the language ideologies informing parental choices in relation to language use in the home as they raise their children multilingually.

5 Brazilian parents in Norway: intercultural encounters and family multilingualism

The analyses that follow do not aim at providing a snapshot of “Brazilians in Norway”, as if such generic and abstract entity existed. Rather, examining the particular case of two Brazilian mothers shows precisely how such overriding categories can be problematic, but it also allows us to consider certain similarities. This is in line with Santos’ (2014: 356) understanding of culture, which further motivates the ethnographic approach of this study: “Cultures are monolithic only when seen from the outside or from afar. When looked at from the inside or at close range, they are easily seen to comprise various and often conflicting versions of the same culture.”

Below I present ethnographic portraits of the two focal participants, Berenice and Adriana, and analyse data excerpts where they narrate certain intercultural encounters they experienced in Norway. This is followed by analyses of data excerpts related to their children’s multilingual upbringing. Their cases are particularly interesting because they reveal how two Brazilian women with different backgrounds orient to social categorisations such as social class and race/ethnicity as they navigate complex life circumstances, disputed identity positions, and multilingual language practices in Norway. Moreover, examining their cases through an intersectional approach allows us to gain a better understanding of the connections between broader social, cultural, economic, and political, and language ideologies and practices in the home.

6 Contributions of a southern perspective to family multilingualism

Family multilingualism research has been limited in reach because of its Eurocentric bias (Smith-Christmas 2017). I suggest that an important part of addressing this limitation entails examining critically the epistemological tenets upon which current family multilingualism research draws, as well as its implications. This section is also an attempt to answer the call put forth by Block (2014) and McNamara (2015) in relation to the need for engaging more thoroughly with theoretical discussions in language-related studies.

A helpful epistemological stance in the endeavour mentioned above can be that taken by Castro-Gómez (2007) who, in the context of decolonising the university in Latin America, proposes the notion of hubris of the zero point: an epistemological model which presumes the objectivity of the place from which the analyst produces knowledge (i.e. the zero point). A similar discussion is proposed by L. M. T. Souza (2019) in his analysis of theoretical developments in applied and sociolinguistics related to recent conceptualisations of language that do not acknowledge the locus of enunciation as a fundamental aspect of theory building. In dialogue with these positions, I suggest that taking a southern perspective is a way of addressing this current limitation in family multilingualism research.

Drawing on epistemological assumptions of southern theory (Connell 2007), epistemologies of the South (Santos 2014, 2018), and decoloniality (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007; Mignolo and Walsh 2018) the southern perspective proposed here is an analytical position that: (i) assumes the situatedness of knowledge production; (ii) aims at increasing social and epistemic justice; (iii) opposes the dominance of Western-centric epistemologies; (iv) sees the global South as a political location, not necessarily geographic, but with many overlaps.

Like the participants in this study, my life trajectory has also been marked by South–North migrations and it is undeniable that these experiences have shaped my current research interests.

Moreover, a Southern body trained in academic institutions in the global North permits me to inhabit a locus of enunciation that resembles Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands, a location of border culture where border thinking (Mignolo 2000) takes place. As such, in this article I have attempted to put forward a South–North dialogue in a critical sociolinguistic vein, expressly engaging with epistemological assumptions present in the theorising done by scholars from the global South, while also employing concepts developed in Northern contexts.

More specifically, conceptualising intercultural encounters as events where intercultural translation takes place allows us to conceive of them as sites for reaching cultural understandings that acknowledge differences. Santos maintains that intercultural translation

consists of searching for isomorphic concerns and underlying assumptions among cultures, identifying differences and similarities, and developing, whenever appropriate, new hybrid forms of cultural understanding and intercommunication that may be useful in favoring interactions and strengthening alliances among social movements fighting, in different cultural contexts, against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy and for social justice, human dignity, or human decency (Santos 2014: 212).

While Santos (2018) highlights the collective dimension of intercultural translation as a tool that allows for different social movements to share experiences that might be mutually beneficial in their struggles against different forms of oppression, I explore it at an individual dimension as persons from different cultures come together in mundane encounters. However, the work of intercultural translation does not imply completeness or finitude as if a static culture A would find in its particular, predefined sets of practices and ideas expressions that could be perfectly transposed into culture B, matching culture’s B respective sets of practices and ideas. Rather “[t]ranslation […] implies incompleteness and ignorance and the need to overcome both; translation refers also to the fact that overcoming both of these in order to attain the desire of completeness is beyond realization.” (L. M. T. Souza 2019: 20).

Similarly, Viveiros de Castro (2004) characterises the work of translation as essentially marked by equivocation. This is not an understanding of translation as a practice that is doomed to failure. Rather, what should be envisioned as a premise of translation is, in fact, the realisation that communication by differences is possible. Arguing that equivocation is at the foundation of relations, Viveiros de Castro (2004: 10) proposes that: “[t]o translate is to presume that an equivocation always exists; it is to communicate by differences, instead of silencing the Other by presuming a univocality—the essential similarity—between what the Other and We are saying”.

In sum, combining the notions of intercultural translation (Santos 2014) and equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004) opens up the possibility of conceiving of intercultural encounters taking place in contact zones (see Pratt 1991) where different cultures meet. Importantly, these notions espouse an understanding of culture as dynamic, complex and marked by heterogeneity. While these ideas would not sound too unfamiliar to family multilingualism scholars working with ethnographic approaches, the southern perspective I propose here gives adequate theoretical grounding to the analysis and shifts the power/knowledge imbalance of contemporary sociolinguistic research.

7 Conclusion

The South–North entanglements illustrated by the migration trajectories examined in this study pose questions that have underpinned the endeavour undertaken here:

• How do the Brazilian histories of colonialism influence the continuous structural reproduction of inequality in contemporary migratory flows?

• In what ways do power relations at the intersection of social class, gender, and race/ethnicity operate in the participants’ account of intercultural encounters in Norway?

• How does the lived experience of Brazilian parents abroad shape their language beliefs and language practices in the home?

I suggest that a southern perspective gives a suitable theoretical anchoring for the particular kinds of questions thrown up by the South–North entanglements analysed here. That is, a southern perspective on family multilingualism is particularly relevant to the analysis of the experiences of Brazilians in Norway because, following Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel (2007), it considers that despite having gained independence at a political level, the hierarchical economic and cultural relations between centres and peripheries have not been significantly transformed with the end of colonialism. Also, it perceives the complex interweaving of power relations that reifies hierarchies of social class, gender, and race/ethnicity. Finally, in trying to unveil the forces that operate in transnational migration flows between central and peripheral countries, it gives equal footing (unlike Marxian World-system analyses in general, and most Anglo-Saxon postcolonial approaches) to the political economic dimension of the material relations of production, and to the symbolic, discursive realm where these relations gain meaning (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007).

The studies reviewed here underlined the importance of scrutinising the social, cultural, economic, and political processes relevant to parents’ lives in order to better understand how they make sense of themselves as members of multilingual families raising their children multilingually. In Section 5, I explored how parents made sense of their transnational, multilingual experiences in intercultural encounters in Norway. As noted, the participants reported experiencing conflicting situations in which their interlocutors positioned them in places they felt did not capture well their complex social positions. Attending to their orientations to social categorisations such as social class, gender, and race/ethnicity from an intersectional perspective was crucial to the building of a better understanding of how power relations – that encompass social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions – between centre and periphery are discursively reproduced and challenged in intercultural encounters.

In conclusion, drawing on a decolonial approach, the southern perspective proposed here reveals how hierarchisations of social categorisations present in the Brazilian context are transplanted in complex ways into the Norwegian context as multifaceted power relations are discursively and materially reproduced and resisted. This helps us to gain a better understanding of how the broader social, cultural, economic, and political processes, particularly those relevant for those engaged in South–North migration trajectories, shape the ways parents make sense of their transnational, multilingual experiences which, in turn, influence their language practices in the home.