Talking with Abuelo: Performing Authenticity in a Multicultural, Multisited Family

• Published in: Multilingua 2015-03, Vol.34 (2), p.187-210
• Main Author: Vidal, Mónica
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Authenticity; Authority; Bilingualism; Computational Linguistics; Corpus analysis; Cultural Pluralism; Discourse Analysis; English (Second Language); English language; Extended family; Families & family life; Family Relationship; Foreign Countries; Grandparents; Guidelines; Identity; insider/outsider; Language Styles; Language Usage; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Multilingualism; multisited family; Negotiation; Parent Child Relationship; Power; Power Structure; Reported speech; Second Language Learning; Self Concept; Sibling Relationship; Siblings; Sociolinguistics; Spain; Spanish; Spanish language; Speech Acts; stylization; Talking
• ISSN: 0167-8507; 1613-3684
• DOI: 10.1515/multi-2014-1007

Taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach, this study explores how multicultural and multilingual siblings interact with their Spanish grandfather and how, through the use of styling and stylization in these interactions, they negotiate and construct multicultural family identities. Using Tannen’s power and solidarity framework, I analyze three excerpts from a seven-hour corpus of naturally occurring face-to-face recorded conversations between my sisters, my grandfather, and myself, from 1984 in Spain to explore how speakers use stylization to identify themselves as legitimate members of a multilingual and multicultural family, ranging from acts of identity to mockery. The analyses show that while stylization provided Abuelo with resources for creating harmony with his granddaughters as he reappropriated their Spanish usage, it also created a source for mockery among the sisters. In their conversations with their grandfather, the granddaughters used stylization to perform acts of identity through reported speech about their experiences in Spain and their feelings about their extended family, and this styled them as dutiful granddaughters. Finally, Abuelo styled himself as the authority figure in the house by speaking English to the girls, albeit an English heavily influenced by his Spanish. In response, the granddaughters stylized him, mocking his authority in the process. The study demonstrates how stylization is intimately tied with acts of identity and underscores the affiliative and disaffiliative interactional stances for creating authenticity in a transnational family.