In contemporary Finland most families have ready access to a wide range of communication technology, such as laptops and smart phones, and children learn from an early age how to use them to communicate by combining textual, visual, and spoken modes of communication. Many families also use communication technology to keep contact with family members who do not live in the same household or even in the same country.
This project fills a gap in research by examining digital practices in multilingual families in Swedish-, Russian-, and Polish-speaking communities in Finland (with 290.000, 75.000, and 5.000 mother tongue speakers, respectively). By combining a large-scale online survey on digital practices with a more in-depth ethnographic study in a smaller pool of families, we gain knowledge about how family members’ beliefs and attitudes, practices, and management of multilingual digital practices interact with family relationships and roles across time and space.
Åsa Palviainen (PI) interviewed by Elin Almér about the What's in the App?-project at University West, Sweden, in December 2019
