Tracing Stories of a Family Language: Personal Accounts of Diasporic Experience

Abstract

In this chapter, we share narratives from our personal experiences with a shared focus on the relationships between personal identities and family language. The acquisition of a family language is said to be accompanied by a specific ‘intercultural burden’ (Kagan 2012), which is manifested at the intersection of different influences and psychological tensions. This psychosocial and cultural reality has the potential for the development of a true intercultural identity that brings together contradictions and conflicts of inherited cultural differences. Here, through a prism of three personal narratives, we create a series of questions and reflections in relation to the family language. The three voices are articulated through three auto-ethnographic accounts of individuals – two linguists and a theatre scholar who are both personally and professionally invested in the topic of post-migration. The common thread of the three narratives is the experience of Serbian as the first language. As an aspect of personal identity, the idealised concept of family language affects one's identity and makes a decisive impact on investment and potentially life-defining decisions.

Citation

Jovanović, A., Kojadinović, A. and Portmann, A. (2023), "Tracing Stories of a Family Language: Personal Accounts of Diasporic Experience", Arrocha, W. and Xeni, E. (Ed.) Migrations and Diasporas (Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 223-235. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83797-146-620231014