This book explores the question of family language policy in multilingual households. Presenting six case studies which focus on the experiences of parents and children in French-English bilingual contexts, the author draws conclusions about the impact of parental language management on the family as a whole which can be applied to transnational families from other linguistic backgrounds. While many parental guides on bilingual childrearing have been published in recent years, little attention has been paid to the possible impact of such language strategies on the experiences and interrelationships of bilingual family members. This book is unique in focusing in depth on the psychology and experiences of the child, and it will be of interest to readers in fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, sociology of youth and family, and child psychology.

Five months before her death of tuberculosis in 1884, Marie Bashkirtseff, an aspiring artist and a would-be mondaine, composed a preface to her personal diary. In it, she brazenly declared that in the event of her early death her diary was to be published. Three years later, a truncated version of the diary appeared. Translated into English, championed by Barres and Gladstone, taken up by young diarists from France to the US, the diary created a major sensation, remaining standard reading for young women in both the anglophone and francophone worlds until the 1930s. The first full-length study to explore the questions that reading Bashkirtseff s journal raises with respect to both genre and gender construction, Personal Effects examines the genre and gender issues at stake in Bashkirtseff s bid to go public with the personal, and explores the discursive strategies by which Bashkirtseff writes her journal from the private context of its keeping to a public context of reading. Wilson reads the diary as a performance of writing, one in which a display of the personal mediates between the subjective and the social, the private and the public.