What’s in the family app? : Making sense of digitally mediated communication within multilingual families

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ What’s in the family app? : Making sense of digitally mediated communication within multilingual families © 2020 Equinox Publishing Ltd. Accepted version (Final draft) Palviainen, Åsa; Kędra, Joanna Palviainen, Å., & Kędra, J. (2020). What’s in the family app? : Making sense of digitally mediated communication within multilingual families. Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, 1(1), 89-111. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmtp.15363 2020 https://doi.org/10.1558/jmtp.15363 jmtp vol 1.1 2020 89–111 ©2020, equinox publishing jmtp (print) issn 2632-4490 jmtp (online) issn 2632-4504 What’s in the family app? Making sense of digitally mediated communication within multilingual families Åsa Palviainen and Joanna Kędra Abstract Communication within contemporary families is increasingly and to a significant extent mediated through technological devices and digital applications. Although the everyday reality of many multilingual families is permeated by technology, research on their digital and language practices has been scant. This article argues for the need for eclectic approaches that draw upon theories, practices, and findings from research on transnational families and migration, digitally mediated family communication, parental mediation, multilingualism online, and family multilingualism and language transmission. Two empirical case studies are presented on multilingual family constellations in Finland in which the instant messaging application WhatsApp was used to create space to sustain transnational family relationships, to negotiate about agency, to create cultural identity and group membership, as well as to practise and develop literacy. Whereas previous research has focused on digital practices in families, on multilingual practices on internet platforms, or on language transmission processes in families, we argue that future research should focus more on the digital multilingual family and explore the role of languages as embedded in digital media activities and interwoven in everyday family life. Keywords: Digitally mediated communication; family multilingualism; WhatsApp. Article Affiliation University of Jyväskylä, Finland. email: [email protected] (corresponding author) 90 What’s in the family app? 1. Introduction Communication within contemporary families is increasingly and to a significant extent mediated through technological devices (such as mobile phones and tablets) and digital applications (e.g., WhatsApp, Skype). As these digital affordances facilitate instant multimodal communication across time and space, they play an important role not only for transnational families whose members live in geographically distant places (King-O’Riain, 2014; Madianou and Miller, 2012) but also for family members who share the same household (Christensen, 2009). Communication technologies may serve the whole range from the management and coordination of practical aspects of daily life (such as a parent sending an SMS to a child about when to be picked up from their hobby), to long-term objectives of nurturing and sustaining emotional relationships (such as a migrant worker keeping contact through Skype with his or her family back home). In families where more than one language is used every day, digitally mediated communication also involves explicit or implicit language choices. The everyday reality of many multilingual families is permeated by technology, and although there is a recent growing emphasis on, for example, understanding how multilingual family practices intersect with transnationalism, globalisation, and digital media (King and Lanza, 2019:717–18), empirical research is still scarce. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we will argue that an understanding of contemporary multilingual families and their digitally mediated communication requires eclectic approaches in which theories, practices, and findings from different research fields are drawn upon. Examples of such relevant fields, which we will discuss in more detail below, are those around transnational families and migration, digitally mediated family communication, parental mediation, multilingualism online, and family multilingualism and language transmission. After this, drawing on all these fields, we will go on to provide empirical evidence of how the use of the instant messaging application WhatsApp in two different multilingual family constellations created spaces for language and identity negotiation, child agency, and the development of literacy. 2. Insights from previous research 2.1 The connected family Research on how transnational family members keep contact and manage relationships over long distances has been pursued for a long time within migration studies. A transnational family can be defined as a family (nuclear or extended, or involving other significant kinships) that has living arrangements Åsa Palviainen and Joanna Kędra 91 spread over two or more countries and an active desire to maintain family relations (Hirsch and Lee, 2018:884). Research includes, for example, the classic works by Olwig (1999), Parreñas (2001), and Baldassar, Baldock, and Wilding (2007) on adult members of a family (typically the mother) moving to other countries to earn a living, and how they care for children or ageing parents from a distance. As communication technologies have advanced and become more accessible, the relationships in these families have increasingly become mediated, sustained, and nurtured through digital technology. Madianou and Miller (2012:8) introduced the concept of ‘polymedia’ to refer to the social and emotional consequences of choosing between a plurality of communication technologies in transnational families. In recent years, we have seen an ever increasing body of research on digitally mediated communication within different geographic, social, and cultural family contexts (Benítez, 2012; Farshbaf Shaker, 2018; Francisco, 2015; Kang, 2012; Lim, 2016a; Nedelcu and Wyss, 2016), as well as studies on families living apart because of education (Jeong, You, and Kwon, 2014), with long-distance love relationships (Greenberg and Neustaedter, 2013), or among refugees (Leurs and Smets, 2018). A related field of research focuses on how family networks are digitally connected: what communication technologies are used by which family members, how, why, when, and with whom (Neustaedter, Harrison, and Sellen, 2013; Taipale, 2019). This research shows that not only does the family shape the practices of technology, but technology contributes to shaping the family (Taipale, 2019). As the technologies develop, so habits change over time: whereas Stern and Messer (2009) in their survey study from 2005 found that the landline phone was favoured over the mobile phone, and that email had emerged as important, Christensen (2009) found mobile voice calling to be the most important intra-familial communication channel. Rudi et al. (2015) found that texting was a crucial activity for the parents who took part, particularly in order to share information and coordinate the activities of their school-age children. Hänninen, Taipale, and Korhonen (2018) found that while young adults used WhatsApp, SMS, Messenger, and Facebook to keep contact with most of their family members, they favoured voice calls to their grandparents. Baldassar (2016) presented a case study of polymedia (Madianou and Miller, 2012) practices in a transnational extended family with members living in Europe and Australia, and concluded that the range of communicative opportunities available to many contemporary families (such as mobile phones, tablets, SMS, FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, voice calls, and Facebook) has led to a qualitative shift in the way technologies and mobilities mediate intrafamilial relationships across long distances and bring members closer. Clayton et al. (2018) showed that mobile workers (working away from home overnight for extended periods or with some regularity) used a relatively small range of 92 What’s in the family app? technologies (smartphones, tablets) to engage in a wide variety of mediated interpersonal interactions, routines, and family rituals when away from home. The research field of parental mediation (or digital parenting) engages with the complex issue of parents raising children in the twenty-first century and balancing between protecting the child against the potential risks of being online while at the same time enabling and guiding the child in the digital society (Bruess, 2015; Clark, 2011; Lim, 2016b; Livingstone and Helsper, 2008; Mascheroni, Ponte, and Jorge, 2018). Whereas the focus of studies is typically on parents mediating and managing their children’s media practices, there are also studies taking into account the fact that children sometimes know more about digital tools and applications than their parents do, and they take the lead in introducing new technology and digital practices into the family. Van den Bulck, Custers, and Nelissen (2016) refer to this as the child-effect. Other related terms used in the literature to refer to child expertise are warm experts, proxies, and digital natives (Hänninen, Taipale, and Korhonen, 2018). In the study of connected family communication, it is important to take into account the dynamics between parental and child competencies, practices, and agencies. In the complex research interface of migration, family relationships, and digital affordances, there are certain recurring themes, like the mediation of intimacy and emotions, the availability and choice of digital media, parenting, caring and maintaining relationships, kin-keeping and guarding roles, as well as power, gender, and age perspectives on these issues. Studies on digital family communication practices provide important insights into access to, and the employment of, polymedia, and how the practices relate to age, localglobal distances, the distance of family ties, and frequency and type of contact. However, within these rich bodies of research, there is a striking lack of (socio) linguistic and multilingual perspectives on the connected family (see Lanza and Lexander, 2019, for an exception). 2.2 Connecting multilingual families The study of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) dates back to the 1970s and, as the name indicates, refers to communication in and on computers and the internet. Over the years, and in response to new environments and practices, new and partly overlapping concepts have emerged, including new media, Social Network Sites (SNS), digital media, Web 2.0 and social media (Bakardijeva, 2016). Concepts such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the more recent polymedia refer to the multitude of tools, applications, and platforms through which communication is mediated today. Åsa Palviainen and Joanna Kędra 93 The history of the study of multilingualism in digital environments is relatively short; it began only in the early 2000s. The earliest research was mainly on text-based digital discourse in and about English. As time went on there was more interest in other languages too, in aspects like code-switching and CMC-adapted language features, as well as (youth) language practices in online communities (Androutsopoulos, 2008; Danet and Herring, 2007; Lee, 2017). Current research focuses on multimodality, multiliteracies, heterogeneity, creativity, and language teaching and learning (Leppänen, Kytölä, and Westinen, 2017). Rather than examining internet language practices as an isolated phenomenon, Leppänen, Kytölä, and Westinen (2017) call for sociolinguistic perspectives on digital media activities as connected and enmeshed with other aspects of everyday life, because physical and virtual settings are often intertwined. This embeddedness of digital media in everyday life is particularly evident in the doing of family. It is enhanced by the wide accessibility and use of smartphones, that hand-held and mobile device that is a combination of familiar media and new applications constantly being developed (Miller, 2014; Pettegrew and Day, 2015). Research on multilingualism online therefore needs to expand its focus and understanding of applications beyond the internet and world wide web, and begin to include family networks. The language practices of bilingual families and bilingual development in children have been under the microscope for decades (e.g., De Houwer, 1990, 2009; Döpke, 1992; Lanza, 1997; Ronjat, 1913). In processes of (home) language maintenance and change, the family is regarded as a critical domain (Fishman, 1991; Schalley and Eisenchlas, 2020; Spolsky, 2012). Over the last decade, research on multilingual families has grown exponentially as part of the field of family language policy (FLP) (King and Fogle, 2017; King and Lanza, 2019; Smith-Christmas, 2017). Over time, the focus in this field has developed from questions about how language planning, strategies, and parental beliefs—as well as the impact of contextual, societal factors and language ideologies— relate to children’s bi-/multilingual development towards an increased interest in processes of meaning-making in multilingual families, the inclusion of wider ranges of family types and societal contexts, and the roles of emotions and child agency. However, despite the deep embeddedness of digital media in contemporary family life, research within FLP has, so far, only to a very limited extent taken this reality into consideration empirically, methodologically, and theoretically. To adjust to the circumstances of contemporary families, Palviainen (2020a) suggests that the classic definitions of FLP (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009; King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry, 2008) should be expanded to include digital practices. FLP is then to be understood as explicit and overt, as well as implicit and covert, planning among members in a family network for their language use, and digital and literacy practices. The digital practices should 94 What’s in the family app? be seen not only as an outcome of family language planning but also as a significant mediational tool. Some relevant work has, however, been conducted at the intersection of digital media and multilingual family practices (for a comprehensive overview, see Lanza and Lexander, 2019). By way of example, there are studies on how FLP is negotiated in public space in online media. Piller (2001) examined online communities (newsletters and mailing lists) for bilingual families, with a focus on parents’ reports on their language planning, while Hirsch (2018), in her seven-year longitudinal study, traced the negotiation of FLP over time in Facebook online communities with English-speaking transnational settler mothers in Israel. Lanza (2019) has used online blogging and vlogging as sources of data and points out that the private family has become public in the age of social media. In a study that combines questions from the field of heritage language transmission with those from parental mediation, Little (2019) conducted a survey and interview study of 212 families in which she examined the potentials of game-based technology for heritage language and literacy development. The results showed that the reported use of digital tech - nologies to support the heritage language depended on complex variables such as the availability of resources, technical skills, and the attitudes of parent and child towards both the heritage language and online games and applications. Similarly, Szecsi and Szilagyi (2012) found that the use of media technologies positively affected children’s heritage skills in Hungarian, but also that this relied on parental mediation and effort. Video calling as a means of keeping contact within transnational families has already been researched for some time (Ames et al., 2010; Share, Williams, and Kerrins, 2018). Studies have shown that video calling enhances ‘shared living’ (Greenberg and Neustaedter, 2013), ‘emotional streaming’ (KingO’Riain, 2015), and ‘omnipresent co-presence’ (Nedelcu and Wyss, 2016) in contexts where family members live apart. King-O’Riain (2014), in her study of transnational families in Ireland, showed that Skype was an important means for families to keep contact with extended family members abroad and maintain emotional as well as cultural and linguistic connections between grandparents and grandchildren. Palviainen (2020b) examined two single-mother family constellations with preschool-age children in Finland and explored how they kept video-call contact with family members elsewhere in Europe. In the first family constellation, Finnish, English, and Dutch were used and mediated via daily FaceTime calls that required active collaboration among the participants to make them work. In the other family, Russian was used in daily Viber calls with grandparents in Russia and served as a counterweight to the dominant presence of Finnish and English in the daily life of the mother and son. Åsa Palviainen and Joanna Kędra 95 A call for further research attention to the multilingual family as situated in a mobile and digital world has been put forward by several researchers (King and Fogle, 2017; King and Lanza, 2019; Palviainen, 2020a). Lanza and Lexander (2019:245) conclude that greater research emphasis should be placed on digital as well as non-digital family language practices in order to gain further insight into important questions such as ‘how families make sense of multilingualism across generations, how language is woven into family dynamics, and how families make decisions about language.’ We will now turn to a discussion of how these types of study can be framed, and present two empirical case studies. 3. Towards an eclectic framework We argue that in order to understand contemporary digital multilingual families one must be very ambitious: the goal must be to encompass the full ecology of non-mediated as well as mediated communication in a family network. In order to achieve this, already existing knowledge, theory, and methodologies from neighbouring fields can inform, and also assist in transforming, the field of research (Figure 1). Figure 1. The study of the digital multilingual family at the centre of different fields of research. Research on transnational families and migration has provided important insights into how families keep up their emotional relationships across distances using communication technology, and studies on digitally mediated family communication have demonstrated how individual members of 96 What’s in the family app? different generations make use of, and make choices between, a range of media. The field of parental mediation has shown that parents have a pivotal role in guiding as well as protecting their children in their media use, but also that children themselves can have a strong agency and sometimes have more advanced digital competence than their parents. Research on multilingualism online has provided rich knowledge on CMC-adapted features, mediated linguistic creativity and multimodality, and code-switching/translanguaging practices online. Socioand psycholinguistic research about family multilingualism and language transmission has provided ample evidence of how family language planning and practices, the amount and quality of linguistic input, and the sociocultural and sociolinguistic environment relate to child language development and to processes of language transmission across generations. Neighbouring fields have thus made different, valuable contributions to our understanding, but they also have their blind spots: research on the connected family lacks the perspective of language practices, and research on the multilingual family often lacks technology-mediated communication as part of its protocol. An eclectic framework can help us to understand many relevant but often overlooked aspects: how linguistic and cultural relationships and identities are digitally mediated across time and space in transnational family constellations; which media and applications individual family members use to communicate, using what linguistic resources, for what reasons and with what linguistic consequences; the role of child agency and the internal dynamics of the digital family; the hybrid and multimodal family communication that integrates online with offline practices; and how language is negotiated and transmitted across generations as a function of these environments. Although the goal of describing a full ecology of communication is a very ambitious one, a bottom-up perspective can be applied and can reach far. In the following we will demonstrate how analysis of the use of one single mobile application—WhatsApp—in two different multilingual family constellations can produce knowledge about several of the issues mentioned in the previous paragraph. The data collection was carried out as part of the research project “What’s in the app? Digitally-mediated communication within contemporary multilingual families across time and space,”1 which focuses on Swedish-, Russian-, and Polish-speaking families in Finland. The project has the explicit goal of trying out different methodologies, and this led to the choice of two case-study families: both of the families were multilingual and used WhatsApp on a daily basis, and the choice allowed for the exploration of different data collection methods and methods of analysis. While the first case study relied on interview data, an auto-driven visual elicitation methodology, and a qualitative analysis, the second combined interviews with access to full WhatsApp conversation data, which were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Åsa Palviainen and Joanna Kędra 103 (rather than voice messages, pictures, or video clips) and that Swedish clearly dominated over Finnish and English. Table 1. WhatsApp contributions (N=1,522) by son (Lukas) and mother (Stina): distribution of types. Son Mother n%n% Swedish text only 514 71 555 69 Emoji 53 7 73 9 Photo 31 4 104 13 Finnish text only 26 4 4 0 English text only 15 2 3 0 Number 14 2 3 0 www-link 11 2 13 2 mixed Swedish/ Finnish text 5 1 11 1 misc.* 50 7 37 6 Total 719 100 803 100 *Video clip, voice message, punctuation marks, mixed Swedish/English text, copied text in Finnish from another source. As the table shows, about 70% of the contributions consisted of Swedish text only. The number of (Swedish) words produced was 1,360 by Lukas and 3,331 by Stina, adding up to a total of 4,691 words. This extensive exchange of messages written in Swedish should be considered against the background that Lukas attended a Finnish-medium school where he was taught Finnish and English—but not Swedish. The mother reported that Swedish was the main spoken language used in their home, but the WhatsApp conversations were actually the only space where Lukas wrote (and read) in Swedish. WhatsApp therefore served as a critical space for the boy’s informal literacy acquisition in Swedish. As the data included time stamps, it was possible to follow Lukas’s literacy development over time, from age eight to age 12. One of the very first exchanges included a language policy request by Lukas in Swedish—‘Kan vi skriiiva på finska’ (Eng. ‘Can we write in Finnish’)—and Stina responded, in Swedish, ‘Du kan skriva på finska så svarar jag på svenska!’ (Eng. ‘You can write in 104 What’s in the family app? Finnish and I’ll respond in Swedish!’). Despite this fairly pragmatic suggestion by Stina, Lukas continued to write in Swedish for most of the time. In tracing Lukas’s spelling development, it became clear that to a great extent he relied on his oral skills in Swedish (‘spell like it sounds’) as well as applying Finnish orthographic rules. In Example 3, when Lukas was nine years old, he misspelled some words in the same way as Swedish children at the same age would do (e.g., ‘jillar’ instead of ‘gillar’) but he also applied Finnish spelling conventions for some of the vowels (e.g., ‘gudis’ instead of ‘godis’). The word for ‘buy’ in Swedish is ‘köpa’ [çø:pa] and was spelled by Lukas as ‘khopa.’ The initial segment [ç] does not exist in Finnish phonology and Lukas’s analytical approach to this was to spell it with ‘kh’ (which is impossible in both Swedish and Finnish orthography). Example 3: Message exchange in Swedish in WhatsApp between Stina (mother) and Lukas (son, aged nine). Spelling errors in bold. 1 Lukas Kan du khopa kudis till mej Can you buy some sweets for me 2 Stina Ja det ska jag! Vad gillar du bäst? Yes I will! What do you like best? 3 Lukas Jag jillar omar gudis okc marabu mix den röda puosen Sej vad de fins do Klockan ett kan du gu khopa gudis kan du 2 puosar Khopa 2 I like omar sweets and marabou mix the red bag Tell me what there is then At one o’clock you can go and buy some sweets can you 2 bags Buy 2 Despite the spelling errors, and thanks to her Finnish skills, Stina did not seem to have any problems understanding the message. One year later, at the age of ten (Example 4), Lukas had acquired the correct spelling of ‘köpa.’ Also, the word for ‘and,’ which was incorrectly spelled as ‘okc’ at age 9 (Example 3, line 3), was now correctly spelled as ‘och’ (Example 4, line 3): Åsa Palviainen and Joanna Kędra 105 Example 4: Message exchange in Swedish in WhatsApp between Stina (mother) and Lukas (son, aged ten). Spelling errors in bold. 1 Lukas For jag köpa 8€ i et spel Can I spend 8€ on a game 2 Stina Ja. Men inte mer. Är du hos mummo och pappa? Yes. But not more. Are you at grandma and grandpa’s? 3 Lukas Ja Inget och göra Yes Nothing to do The WhatsApp messages sent between Lukas and his mother served many different functions, similar to some of those found by Christensen (2009) for intrafamilial mobile voice calling. The functions included the coordination of daily activities, greetings, ‘how is it going,’ telling of exciting news, and Lukas asking his mother for permission to do something (Example 4). Stina also travelled as part of her work, which meant that she used WhatsApp to re-create a sense of home when she was away and to keep up family rituals. She also involved Lukas in her travel experience by sending photos (Clayton et al., 2018). The exchange in Example 3 took place when Stina was returning home from a trip abroad and wanted to take something home for him. 5. Discussion The cases of the Nowak-Dantons and Aho-Strands add empirical findings to the emerging body of family language research focusing on how digitally mediated practices create meaning among the members of a family, promote language development, and give children agency. More specifically, the examples show how the instant messaging application WhatsApp functioned as a virtual transconnective space where family members got together and created a sense of family belonging (Hänninen, Taipale, and Korhonen, 2018). Research on transnational families has shown that video-calling routines increase the family’s sense of virtual and emotional togetherness when they are geographically remote, and bridge the time between physical meetings (Ames et al., 2010; King-O’Riain, 2014, 2015; Palviainen, 2020b). The data from the Nowak-Danton family show that the daughters kept in contact with their grandparents in Poland through Skype, as did the father with his parents in France. In addition, the family used WhatsApp to keep contact with relatives in Poland and France between physical 106 What’s in the family app? visits to these countries. The activities in the WhatsApp groups then served to sustain linguistic and emotional connections when the families were apart. In the Nowak-Danton family, the daughter Julia played the role of founder and administrator of two different groups—one Polish, one French—and was the person in power, who decided who was eligible for group membership. Julia and her younger sister were granted membership in both groups. One of the groups included the girls’ father and extended family members in France, the other group included their mother and extended family members in Poland. Although a joint language (French or Polish) was a criterion for membership, it was not enough: the mother was a fluent speaker of French but was excluded from the French group. It thus seems that Julia constructed the groups with identity and nationhood as a defining characteristic. In the Aho-Strand example, the one-to-one conversations had included only Lukas and his mother, whereas the father (who was also proficient in Swedish) was excluded. This means that in this case the WhatsApp space was a mother-and-son space. One important finding is that WhatsApp created opportunities for language development and informal literacy learning (Lanza and Lexander, 2019). The data from the families and their WhatsApp practices show that Julia wrote in Polish (Example 1) and French (Example 2), her sister Lidia wrote in French (Example 2), and Lukas wrote in Swedish (Examples 3 and 4). In Julia’s case, Olga explicitly said that she regarded WhatsApp as a means for her daughter to write (correct) Polish (Example 1, line 3). It seems the language choices and writing practices of all three children were natural consequences of the shared oral language practices with the individuals in question as, for example, in the case of Lukas and Stina. It is well established that the type and amount of linguistic input plays a decisive role in a child’s development of one or more languages (De Houwer, 2007). The WhatsApp data from the Aho-Strand family show, in mere numbers, that during these four years, Lukas read more than 3,300 words in Swedish and himself produced over 1,300 words. This means that the instant messaging application provided the child not only with a substantial amount of written language input but also a space where he could practise and develop language in an informal and meaningful way. 6. Conclusion As Kaufmann and Peil (2020:230) point out, ‘[m]edia communication has become … so profoundly embedded in people’s everyday life that it permeates a plethora of daily routines, practices, and social interactions.’ It is therefore of the utmost importance that research on contemporary multilingual families takes this point seriously, theoretically as well as methodologically. In order to do this successfully, we argue the need to draw from different research Åsa Palviainen and Joanna Kędra 107 disciplines, such as migration research, research on digitally mediated family communication, digital parenting, and multilingualism online, and research on family language policy and practice. Admittedly, there are other relevant fields of research as well which we have had to exclude for reasons of space, such as family systems theory (e.g., Lanigan, 2009) and mediatisation (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). With an eclectic and multidisciplinary approach, we might be able to answer Lim’s (2016b:27) call for ‘innovative research protocols that can make sense of the mobile multi-screen, multi-app, multi-media, and multi-modal environment that surrounds families today,’ and add multilingualism to this protocol. Then we could address critical questions such as how language choice and multilingual practices are shaped and multilingual discourses constructed through multiple devices, and how these affect family members’ everyday linguistic activities (Lee, 2017:136). It would also help us to understand not only how the technologies offer the possibility of sustaining the multilingual family configuration in a particular way, but also how they shape the practices of communication (cf., Couldry and Hepp, 2017). Notes 1. Academy of Finland (2018–2022), Grant No. 315478. For project details, see http://www .jyu.fi/whatsinapp. 2. All names are pseudonymised. 3. Transcription conventions: (( )) = non-verbal or other contextual information, [ ] = overlapping turns, (.) = brief pause. 4. The data were transferred from Stina’s iPhone using the ‘Export chat’ function available in WhatsApp. About the authors Åsa Palviainen is Professor of Swedish in the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). Her research interests include biand multilingualism, family language policy, child language development, technology-mediated language practices, and mediated discourse analysis. She has more than seventy scientific publications to her name and has been the leader of several externally funded projects. She is currently the PI of the four-year research project “What’s in the app? Digitally-mediated communication within contemporary multilingual families across time and space (WhatsInApp),” financed by the Academy of Finland (2018–2022). Joanna Kędra works in the Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä (Finland). Joanna’s research interest is in visual 108 What’s in the family app? culture studies, visual literacy education, photography and visual research methods. Currently, as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the project “What’s in the app? Digitally-mediated communication within contemporary multilingual families across time and space,” she is researching digitally mediated communication practices of Polish-speaking transnational families in Finland. 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