Aménagement familial d’un bilinguisme « natif » franco-roumain
Family Arrangement of a ”Native” French-Romanian Bilingualism

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I purport to look into the process by which languages are passed on in the family context from the parents of a mixed couple to their child, and the process by which a ”native” bilingualism is arranged for the child in a Romanian monolingual environment. My analysis relies on the exploitation of a data basis recorded by us (the parents) around our own child, according to the criteria of the ethnographic method, recorded mainly on data cards, but also filmed with a video camera. Also part of the research corpus are some scenes of family life (anniversaries and holidays on the sea coast) recorded with the video camera and three directive interviews carried out with our own child with regards to his language biography and the practice of bilingualism, recorded on data cards. In this paper I analyse the strategies of teaching and acquiring the two languages spoken in the family, Romanian and French, along several stages of the precocious and simultaneous development of this child, and these refer both to the transmitting parents and the receiving child, who builds his own bilingualism. The first stage is one in which the child’s parents build the precocious French-Romanian bilingualism, which is parallelled by a stage in which the child becomes aware of his bilingualism and biculturalism. Another stage, which is one of a favourable and well-organized linguistic arrangement conceived by the parents, which focuses on building a balanced bilingualism of the child (doubled by building biliteracy) corresponds, in this case, to the balanced maintenance of his ”native” bilignualism. The analysis looks at several fundamental factors which characterize this process, namely: the internal and external conditions of transmitting familial languages and building the child’s balanced ”native” bilingualism, the stakes of this family endeavour, the actors involved and their language practices.

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