Making language choices that work for your family
Raising a child with a sign language in a bilingual or multilingual family, especially where one or more family members are deaf, can be complex. It can raise important questions that don’t always have straightforward answers.
- How do we balance signed and spoken languages?
- What are the long-term impacts of our everyday small decisions?
- How do our language choices connect with our family identity and sense of belonging?
Who is this session for?
This session is for deaf and hearing parents who want space to think about these questions together.
Drawing on research by Annelies Kusters, Maartje De Meulder, and Jemina Napier, we will explore the idea of a family language policy. A family language policy is not a strict plan, but the everyday choices and long-term decisions families make about language.
In this session, we will:
- Reflect on what your languages mean in your family
- Think about how you make decisions about language use — and why
- Talk about how deafness and multilingualism shape family life
- Share experiences and learn from other families
There is no “perfect” way to raise a bilingual or multilingual child. Families make different choices at different times, and those choices often change as children grow.
This session offers a supportive space to pause, reflect, and think more confidently about your family’s language journey.
About the Course Leader
Professor Annelies Kusters is deaf and grew up in a deaf–hearing family in Belgium, with hearing parents, one deaf sibling and two hearing siblings.
She now lives in the UK with a deaf–hearing family, a deaf partner from India, and two hearing children. Across these contexts, she has experience with multiple spoken and signed languages and with communication that moves across different modalities, including speech, signing, fingerspelling, writing, gesture, and touch.
Together with colleagues, she has led projects (2018 and 2026) focusing on how multilingual and multimodal communication works in deaf–hearing families, and how families’ language choices change over time.
Contact
For further enquiries, please contact Dr Stacey Steen at S.Webb@hw.ac.uk