Deconstructing Family Language Policy through Translanguaging in Spaces of Family and School: Indonesian Transnational Families in Australia

With the increasing number of families pursuing transnational migration, researchers in sociolinguistics have increasingly explored language use in the family home and in education contexts as critical sites of intergenerational heritage language transmission. Migrant parents navigate the dual challenges of transmitting their heritage language to their children, while supporting their success in the language of schooling. These competing pressures influence how families use and value their linguistic resources and how they transmit cultural identities and help their children negotiate belonging in their newly adopted home communities. Family Language Policy (FLP) has become a pivotal area of inquiry for understanding how heritage language use unfolds in contexts shaped by global mobility and the inherently precarious conditions of migration. For families pursuing lives across borders, the value of their linguistic resources is continually renegotiated amid the pressures of educational achievement, integration and economic mobility. Within families, everyday choices about which linguistic resources to mobilise, when, how and with whom reflect a broader power struggle to balance heritage language maintenance with the demands of educational success that requires mastery of the dominant societal language. This study aimed to explore how FLP takes shape within Indonesian transnational families in Australia, foregrounding the ecological-spatial dimensions through which multilingualism is negotiated in the migration context. Aligned with the continuum of plurilingual FLP proposed in the systematic review (Sanjani et al., 2025), this study adopts an ecological perspective by employing the notion of translanguaging space to conceptualise the family as a dynamic site of multilingual practice that overlaps with the school as its closest counterpart in supporting children’s language practices. The family space is conceived as an ecological space rather than a purely private domain and ‘language’ is understood as a fluid and dynamic meaning-making resource within these spaces. The research was conducted in two culturally diverse suburbs of Sydney, using a multi case study design. It involved three Indonesian families comprising highly mobile sojourners, first-time sojourners and permanent immigrants as well as six public school teachers engaged with these families. The families were recruited through Indonesian community networks and personal contacts, and, once the children’s schools were identified, the teachers were subsequently approached for participation. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with families and primary school teachers who taught the children. In addition, the research explored natural conversations between parents and children to cross-validate reported language use data from the interviews, and to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamic interactional spaces of family language use in the home. Data analysis followed a multi-layered approach combining thematic, narrative and discourse analysis informed by interactional sociolinguistics (IS). Findings show that translanguaging spaces were constructed differently across the three families, reflecting their diverse migration trajectories, parental ideologies and aspirations for their children’s education. These differences highlight how multilingual practices are enabled, constrained, and redefined across the overlapping contexts of home and school. While translanguaging space was promoted and sustained through parent–child negotiations, it was also constrained by prevalent monolingual ideologies. The study has important pedagogical and policy implications by emphasising the need to acknowledge the dialogic relationship between the interactional domains of home and school. It highlights the value of home–school partnership that recognises families not as passive recipients of policy but as active agents with a critical role in shaping children’s linguistic and educational trajectories. In doing so, it proposes a policy framework that positions the family at the centre of children’s linguistic and educational experiences.