Family speech is communication between family members, which varies in content and style. Linguists study it to understand social constructs and individual identity formation. Family roles can be identified through discourse. Family speech changes over time and is influenced by technology. The definition of family is debated, making it difficult to identify specific traits in familiar speech.
Family speech is any written or spoken communication between members of a family. Other than that, it’s not easy to define because every family has different standards and ways of communicating. In fact, this is part of what makes familiar speech so intriguing: Linguists want to understand why people communicate differently due to similar familiar tricks.
The discourse present in families is by no means limited to family themes alone. Family talk can include anything from instructions to background information about what a family member has done or plans to do. It can also include data about what the family member wants or wants, or even information about politics, philosophies, and conflicts. Any topic that a family member wants to introduce into written or oral communications is fair game.
Family discourse interests linguists because families are often seen as a microcosm of society as a whole. By studying family discourse, linguists gain some clues about which social constructs are dictating written and spoken communication in the family unit. This is not an entirely perfect art, because families are not confined to a particular region: some cultural mixing occurs. Sometimes it happens that a family speech study gives insight into the culture a family comes from, not the culture they are currently in.
Another reason linguists study family discourse is that psychologists see the family as an integral part of individual identity formation. How a person communicates with his family members has a huge effect on how he sees himself. By manipulating familiar speech, it is theoretically possible to direct the way a person develops.
Written and spoken discourse in a family reveals information about the roles each family member has. For example, if a mother is constantly telling other members what they are good at or giving praise, a linguist might determine that one of the roles the mother fills is “encouragement.” Similarly, if a husband habitually asks what needs to be done or what needs to be finished, a linguist might view the husband as the “activities planner” or “manager” of the household.
Families adapt to the surrounding culture or independently, so family discourse changes over time. A good example is how parents eventually include their kids in conversations with increasingly mature content as kids get older. Even the way familiar speech is presented changes, with technology often paving the way for changes. For example, families are now using mobile devices to “keep an eye on” each other, ask for assistance, or maintain strong long-distance relationships: for better or for worse, it is easier for families to engage in fewer face-to-face interactions than in the past.
One caveat to the discourse in families is that there is debate about what actually constitutes a family. For some people, family refers only to blood relatives, especially close relatives such as parents or siblings. For other people, family refers to people with whom a person lives and who provide a sense of love, connection, and belonging. This is interesting because it implies that familiar speech includes some specific features that should be recognizable in relation to other speech. Identifying these traits isn’t as easy as it sounds, however, because different families are influenced by very different cultural constructs and therefore don’t always use language or behave the same way.
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