Multilingual Education and Family Language Policy in a Changing World

Dear Colleagues,

Introduction and Scientific Background

In recent decades, research on Family Language Policy (FLP) has developed into a dynamic interdisciplinary field examining how families manage language practices, ideologies, and intergenerational transmission in multilingual contexts. At the same time, families do not exist in isolation but operate within broader sociolinguistic, sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical environments, including educational contexts shaped by language education policies (LEPs) (Schwartz, 2024; Spolsky, 2004, 2012).

Multilingual and monolingual education policies, together with national language regimes, increasingly shape the linguistic and cultural trajectories of children and families. Although both FLP and LEPs have generated substantial scholarship, the interaction between family-level language decision-making at the micro level and macro-level educational and governmental policies remains insufficiently theorized and empirically explored across diverse geographic contexts (Global South and Global North) and stages of lifelong learning. Understanding FLP therefore requires situating it within wider systems of language governance and educational policy.

Aim of the Special Issue

This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the most recent advances concerning the interaction between Family Language Policy and educational and governmental language policies across diverse sociolinguistic contexts. We consider contributions that examine how family language practices are shaped by broader policy environments and how families, in turn, negotiate, reinterpret, align with, or challenge those environments in everyday life.

Particular attention will be given to the following:

• The relationship between policy structures and lived experience;
• The role of child and adolescent agency in shaping family language practices;
• Multilingual development as a lifelong process, from early childhood through adolescence and beyond;
• Structural conditions that produce or mitigate inequalities in multilingual education;
• Diverse family configurations, migration trajectories, and sociocultural contexts.

By foregrounding multi-level policy interaction and developmental perspectives, this Special Issue aligns with the aims and scope of Education Sciences by addressing educational policy, multilingual development, equity, and lifelong learning within formal and informal educational contexts. It seeks to advance theoretical models of language governance and contribute to more equitable and context-sensitive educational planning.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Family Language Policy in minority, Indigenous, heritage, and migration contexts;
• Interactional patterns and language exposure processes in multilingual development;
• Child and adolescent agency in FLP formation and negotiation;
• Policy mismatches between home and school and their educational consequences;
• Ideology, power, and identity in multilingual trajectories;
• Lifelong and life-course perspectives on multilingual education
• Coordination, tension, or disconnection among family, school, and governmental actors;
• Early childhood education and home–school language alignment;
• Socioeconomic inequality and access to multilingual education;
• Comparative and cross-national perspectives on policy interaction;
• Digital environments and transnational dimensions of FLP;
• Methodological approaches to researching multi-level language policy.

Original research articles and review papers are welcome.

Dr. Natalia Ringblom
Prof. Dr. Mila Schwartz
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• family language policy
• multilingual education
• language policy
• child agency
• lifelong learning
• language governance
• multilingual development
• educational policy
• migration
• sociolinguistics