Seeing from the North : a Critical Family Language Policy study of a peripheral European minority community

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 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Seeing from the North : a Critical Family Language Policy study of a peripheral European minority community © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published version Laihonen, Petteri; Bodó, Csanád; Gáspár, Judit; Jani-Demetriou, Bernadett; Fazakas-Timaru, Carina Laihonen, P., Bodó, C., Gáspár, J., Jani-Demetriou, B., & Fazakas-Timaru, C. (2024). Seeing from the North : a Critical Family Language Policy study of a peripheral European minority community. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2024.2425659 2024 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rbeb20 Seeing from the North: a Critical Family Language Policy study of a peripheral European minority community Petteri Laihonen, Csanád Bodó, Judit Gáspár, Bernadett Jani-Demetriou & Carina Fazakas-Timaru To cite this article: Petteri Laihonen, Csanád Bodó, Judit Gáspár, Bernadett Jani-Demetriou & Carina Fazakas-Timaru (25 Nov 2024): Seeing from the North: a Critical Family Language Policy study of a peripheral European minority community, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2024.2425659 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2024.2425659 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 25 Nov 2024. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rbeb20 Seeing from the North: a Critical Family Language Policy study of a peripheral European minority community Petteri Laihonen a , Csanád Bodó b , Judit Gáspár c , Bernadett Jani-Demetriou d,e and Carina Fazakas-Timaru f a Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland; b Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Finno-Ugric Studies, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University & MTA-ELTE Collaborative Writing Research Group, Budapest, Hungary; c Department of Decision Sciences, Corvinus University of Budapest & MTA-ELTE Collaborative Writing Research Group, Budapest, Hungary; d Doctoral School of Linguistics, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary; e Institute of the Liberal Arts, American University of Beirut – Mediterraneo, Pafos, Cyprus; f Doctoral School of History and Ethnography, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary ABSTRACT Family language policy research has been focused on migrants from the Global South, their linguistic resources and challenges in the Global North target countries. There has been less research on the countries of origin and of those staying behind. To fill this gap, we investigate a minority speaker community touched by intensive labour migration. The participants (n = 12) of this research were interviewed in RomanianHungarian bilingual villages in the Moldavian province of Romania. We investigate interviews with mothers through methods of interactional discourse analysis. The interviews include recurring narratives of language shift from Hungarian to Romanian and stories about migration as well as more recent narratives about participating in Hungarian language education. Our research questions are based on the Critical Family Language Policy framework: What is a family? what counts as a language? and how to define policy in this context? We conclude that the role and definition of family, the interpretations of what constitutes a language, and most significantly the role of community in discourses about language management are different from those typical in the Global North. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 16 March 2023 Accepted 31 October 2024 KEYWORDS Critical family language policy; named languages; Global South; Moldavian Csángó; community; interview 1. Introduction In this paper, we study members of globally separated multilingual families touched by migration, who stay in the region of origin (cf. Lee 2021). We address those multilinguals staying behind in the Global South, aiming to fill a gap in Family Language Policy (henceforth: FLP) research, which has been focused on Global North contexts and ideas (Lomeu Gomes 2018; Luykx 2021). Previously we have been engaged in sociolinguistic research on a language minority called the Moldavian Csángó and its revitalisation programme aimed at teaching the Hungarian language in the Moldavian province of Romania (see Laihonen et al. 2020). For this study, we have interviewed twelve parents connected to the Moldavian Csángó Hungarian Educational Program. Analysing the interviews, we have recognised that the norms about family, language and policy were different from our own. Coming from societies of the Global North we have contrasted our own norms, ideas and practices with those we encountered in our research, with the aim of understanding © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. CONTACT Petteri Laihonen [email protected] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2024.2425659 FLP from a self-reflective and critical perspective (cf. Pennycook and Makoni 2020, 12; Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020; Luykx 2021). With regards to language we analyse discourses about local language use, ‘the Csángó mode of speaking’ (see Bodó, Fazakas, and Heltai 2017) and its relationship to named languages such as Hungarian and Romanian as well as the role of mothers in language shift and revitalisation (cf. Bull, Huss, and Lindgren 2023; Lane 2010). The policy aspect in the present study is approached from a perspective that differs from the one typical in the Global North, which often entails an individualistic perspective where parents engage in explicit decision making, take discursive effort and make tangible sacrifices to determine their offspring’s future language repertoire (cf. Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020, 750–751). In comparison to mothers in the Global North, who often describe themselves as active and aspirational (Seals and Beliaeva 2023) language policy agents (see Gogonas and Maligkoudi 2022; Piller and Gerber 2021; Torsh 2022; Vorobeva 2021), the Moldavian Csángó mothers appear reluctant to position themselves as aspirational language managers. Our empirical aim is to gain insights into FLP within the Moldavian Csángó community, drawing from the narratives provided during the interviews. These interviews function as collaborative engagements in which knowledge is co-constructed, with the process being notably influenced by the interviewer’s viewpoints and expectations. The data has led us to question our basic assumptions about family, language and policy. With the backdrop of recent developments in Critical FLP Studies, where critical means focusing on the ideas and contexts of the Global South (see Chimbutane and Gonçalves 2023; Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020; Lomeu Gomes 2018), our research questions are the following: What is a family? what counts as a language? and how to define policy in this context? 2. Critical family language policy framework The critical approach to FLP is aimed at contextualising and scrutinising the basic concepts of FLP, with a focus on diversifying our understanding of family configurations, language resources and policies (Higgins and Wright 2021). Seminal works promoting a critical turn in FLP studies (Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020; Lomeu Gomes 2018; Luykx 2021) have stressed the need to expand and diversify the concepts and research sites beyond Western epistemologies and Global North ‘modern’ (Pennycook and Makoni 2020, 1), nation state, capitalist socio-economic contexts. For example, the perhaps most widely spread and still highly popular FLP principle of One-ParentOne-Language (OPOL), is based on the modern European nationalist idea of keeping named languages separate (Pennycook and Makoni 2020, 53; Danjo 2021). The OPOL principle has been recommended for the neo-liberal Global Northern middle class (Lomeu Gomes 2018, 53), as a FLP recipe for their children to thrive socio-economically as ‘balanced’ bilinguals (Piller and Gerber 2021, 623– 624) and at the same time to avoid any mixing of the languages and the mind (see Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020). The reinterpretation of concepts has gained inspiration from very recent research on peripheral sites and marginalised groups of people beyond the privileged middle class of the Global North. Critical perspectives can help us understand how interpretations of family, language and politics are varied (Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020). In our case, we explore how families staying behind in marginalised regions of the geopolitical Global South (Pennycook and Makoni 2020) relate to the multilingualism that is inherent in minority situations and migration. Spolsky’s recent language policy handbook distinguishes family as a unit above the individual, in his view (2021, 24): ‘Whatever other influences there may be, it is the language policy of the family and home that sets the basis for an individual’s linguistic repertoire’. What is more, the diversity of family configurations is a phenomenon that has not yet been fully explored by empirical research on FLP (Luykx 2021). Initial efforts to understand the language policies of Western, educated, heteronormative, biparental and bilingual families living together have been slow to extend to various families involved in transnational migration (e.g. Lee 2021; Takeuchi 2016) and to single-parent and divorced families (e.g. Vorobeva 2021). 2 P. LAIHONEN ET AL. The conceptualisation of transnational families draws on the dynamism and temporariness present in the family practices, so their ‘home becomes a relational concept rather than connected with a fixed physical or geographical place’ (Palviainen 2021, 129). Little attention has been paid to families, such as in our case, where one parent migrates abroad for work while the other parent, typically the mother, stays at home and raises their children (but see Lee 2021). In these transnational families, the evolution of parenting roles, language repertoires, and relationships introduces novel and divergent configurations, practices, and interpretations that challenge the conventional models of the nuclear family, traditionally viewed as stable entities. Our analysis will show how a critical approach to FLP highlights the power inequalities embedded in these structures that affect the unfolding of individual agency, or the lack of it, for the stay-at-home members of families touched by labour migration. The critical reconceptualisation of language as a central tenet in current sociolinguistics is scarcely represented in past FLP scholarship (but see Van Mensel 2018), whether it is concepts such as translanguaging (Danjo 2021; Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020), or multilanguaging (Pennycook and Makoni 2020). These concepts propose an alternative to viewing languages as static entities, traditionally seen as intrinsically linked with the community or nation that speaks a language associated with an imagined national community (Anderson 1991). Named languages are often connected with feelings of nationalist or ethnic pride in the parent interviews, too (e.g. Curdt-Christiansen, Wei, and Hua 2023). The lived multilingual experiences of families can challenge the canonical Western social constructions of what counts as a language (Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020) and raise the question of how to develop a policy whose object is a ‘messy’ concept (Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020) such as a ‘nonlanguage’ (Lane 2023, 837) connected to a peripheral minority such as the Moldavian Csángó. Critical studies in the field of language policy have already pointed at the contradictions between macro-sociologically oriented accounts of language policy and the context dependency of local language practices as well as the language ideologies connected to such practices (Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020). Agency is a central question; whether it is about explicit or implicit language policymaking activities of a mother (Gogonas and Maligkoudi 2022; Piller and Gerber 2021), or both parents (Lee 2021), or children (Revis 2019), it cannot be separated from issues of power and inequality (e.g. Lomeu Gomes 2018). In other words, agency in a speaker’s language choices at home is according to Mirvahedi (2021, 129) ‘emergent in and from larger social, political, and cultural structures’. By taking a realist social theoretical stance (Mirvahedi 2021), which emphasises multiple determination of social factors, agency is in a dynamic relationship with the social and cultural structures, of which language practices are part, but also contribute to their (re)construction. Family members are influenced by the structural constraints of their agentive potential as language policymakers, for example, by stigmatising language practices within the family itself, in its surroundings, or in macro-societal systems. Agency in the Global South can be different from the linguistic agency of people in the Global North, where according to Canagarajah (2022, 3), it serves as ‘the threshold capacity for inclusive citizenship and rights’. As Luykx (2021, 302) has pointed out, there is a great divide between those who have abundant material (for example, access to digital communication and mobility) and knowledge resources (for example availability of school choice) and are thus capable for aspirations in FLP and those families that lack such capital and background, or in short, between the Global North and Global South families. 3. The Moldavian Csángó The Moldavian Csángó represent the Global South in different understandings of the concept. The Global South refers not only to the geographical South, which has been dominated by the global North through different forms of colonisation. Pennycook and Makoni (2020, 1) define the Global South as referring to ‘people, places, and ideas that have been left out of the grand narrative of modernity’ and also use it as a synonym for marginality or marginalisation (2020, 35), which often coincide with geographical notions of east or south or with political notions of centres and INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 3 peripheries. At the same time, Pennycook and Makoni (2020, 7–8) recognise the flaws and contradictions around employing the Global North/South terminology, noticed among others by Lajos (2015) on the issue of modernisation in the Csángó villages, too. Against the backdrop of such complexities, Moldavia is the most eastern part of Romania, where the level of income and education is the lowest in the country. A religious minority, the Roman Catholic Csángó are among the poorest and least educated groups in Moldavia itself (for a statistical view, see Peti 2017). What is more, they are a contested linguistic minority, residing mainly in villages and many of them work in manual labour, either in Moldavia or in Western Europe, where they have migrated in recent decades. As Peti (2017; 2022) has shown, the Csángó migrants typically lack the resources and affordances needed in Western European economies and thus end up in precarious and unstable positions in the target countries. An estimated 50,000 persons, one fourth of the Catholic population in Moldavia, are bilingual in Romanian and the ‘Csángó mode of speaking’ (a contested variety of Hungarian, see Bodó, Fazakas, and Heltai 2017). In 2001, the teaching of Hungarian was launched in Moldavia. In 2020, an educational programme, with the goal of teaching Hungarian ‘mother tongue’ among the Csángó operated in c. 30 villages (see Figure 1) with c. 2000 children (Laihonen et al. 2020). Besides this programme, Romanian is the medium of education in all schools in Moldavia. Csángó has not been recognised as a language by general reference sources. It has most often been classified as an ‘ancient’, i.e. authentic dialect of Hungarian, or in other accounts as a ‘corrupt’ vernacular, a ‘mixture’ of ‘dialectal’ Hungarian and Romanian. The Csángó does not have activists claiming for autonomous status as a language or attempts to standardise the Csángó ‘language’ are not known (see Laihonen et al. 2020 for details). As Heltai (2012) pointed out, language shift and its local reception in Moldavia, is not an individual choice, but a community norm to which everyone adheres. Unlike the imagined ethnolinguistic communities of the Global North, the local Csángó community is not organised on the basis of a separate language with clear-cut boundaries. In other words, language is not seen as major factor in Figure 1. Map with the c. 30 Teaching Sites (2020) in the Moldavian Csángó Educational Program. Copyright Agreed with Lehel Peti and Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities. 4 P. LAIHONEN ET AL. maintaining the local community by the Csángó. As a token of this, the Csángó often argue, what they speak is not a language, but a mode of speaking (Bodó, Fazakas, and Heltai 2017). This has been analysed as a part of their lack of connection to available imagined communities (e.g. Hungarians and Romanians, see Cotoi 2013) which identify with named languages and thus attach ethnic or national pride to such symbolic constructions (Curdt-Christiansen, Wei, and Hua 2023). The Csángó have been working mainly in agriculture. Typically, men worked on the fields, whereas women took care of children and the household. Since the change of system in Romania (1989–1990), the few factories were closed, and subsistence agriculture lost its meaning, too. It appears that the main reason for the mobility imperative (Farrugia 2016) became the lack of meaningful work in rural Moldavia for the traditional breadwinners. The Moldavian region has been most affected by migration in Romania. Especially since Romania joined the EU in 2007, the opportunities for mobility increased and it became a widespread practice to work abroad in South and West European countries (Peti 2022). The tendencies present in the Csángó families’ work-related migration reflect on the changes in the political and economic situations globally. Part of the young women still stay in the villages to raise the children there, however the number of 20-year-olds, and thus small children has dwindled in the Moldavian villages year by year. As we will show, the experience of large scale migration has transformed the concept of the family in Moldavian villages. 4. Data & method of analysis Our data is based on four one-month fieldwork trips by Laihonen and Fazakas-Timaru in 2017–2019. The database contains research diaries, teacher interviews, 40 h of classroom recordings, iPad movies recorded and edited together with pupils, over thousand photographs, and a wealth of visual and multimodal products by the children and other materials (see Laihonen et al. 2020 for details and examples). This data serves as background material, it was generated to shed light on the Educational Programme, on its language practices, participants and teachers. For the needs to study FLP among the Csángó, new data was gathered in the form of 12 interviews. The twelve participants of this research were reached through the networks of active parents met in the events of the Educational Programme. It was our goal to interview the fathers, too. However, we failed to find any volunteers among the few local men. We investigate the narratives in semi-structured interviews with mothers (c. 30 mins to 1 h each). Our method of analysis is interactional discourse analysis. We stress that the interviews as well as the analysis are a joint product constructed as much by the participants and the interviewers and analysts. Our researcher positionalities contain grossly three profiles. Laihonen has been educated and is affiliated with a university in the Global North, he has learned Hungarian at adult age, and has been engaged in research on the multilingualisms of Hungarian speaking minorities for two decades. Bodó, Gaspár and Jani-Demetriou hold a position in a Hungarian university in Budapest. The position of Hungary can be seen as a transitory territory, moving back and forth between East and West, North and South. In any case, the epistemologies of Northern centres are well known and institutionally embedded in universities there as well. Through education in Hungary, Bodó, Gaspár and JaniDemetriou have also been socialised to ideas about the standard form of the Hungarian language as the essence of Hungarian imagined nationhood and of intellectuality (cf. Pennycook and Makoni 2020, 79). As social scientists and sociolinguists they have deconstructed such language ideologies. Fazakas-Timaru is a Moldavian born researcher, who worked also as a local fieldworker. She has experience and knowledge of both local ideas about language and due to her studies in Hungarian medium education in Transylvania and Hungary and work in Western Europe on the concepts and language ideologies in the Global North. The mothers were chosen from those with whom Laihonen or Fazakas-Timaru had established trust during previous fieldwork on the Education Programme and its events. The issues of language shift (see Heltai 2012) and questions of connections to the imagined Hungarian community are often contested and disturbing issues when brought into the local context (see Sándor 2000), thus trust in INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 5 researchers and anonymity of the participants constituted a crucial issue for us. Despite focusing on stories and accounts that are shared by all the participants, our intention is not to homogenise the group of Csángó mothers we interviewed. However, in order not to compromise their anonymity in the local community, we can offer only general information about the participants: Their ages were from 23 to 42, the number of children varied from 1 to 5, most having at least two by the age of 30. Most of the interviewed had a secondary level education, some had attended secondary level schooling in a Hungarian medium institution in Transylvania (Western part of Romania). None had a higher education degree. Some had personal experience of working in Western Europe, all had visited their husbands there at least once. Our study began with listening to the interviews and analysing the discourses together. We discovered that certain issues were challenging to comprehend due to the conceptual and experiential distance between our own lived experiences and the ideas and concepts related to family, language, and policy that we encountered. We thus decided to follow Pennycook and Makoni’s (2020, 12) approach to focus on the perceived differences, which appeared to stem from our position in the Global North epistemologies. A characteristic feature of qualitative research with a critical approach is its emphasis on being reflexive (Patiño-Santos 2020). Reflexivity is the process of assessment in which the observed is calibrated with the researcher’s sense of the situation (Rampton, Maybin, and Roberts 2015, 25). Reflexivity played a pivotal role in the analysis of the interviews, as the process hinged on the researchers’ acknowledgement of the disparities between their own norms regarding family, language, and policy and those of the Csángó mothers. Recognising our positionality as researchers within this study, and juxtaposing our norms, ideas, and practices against those encountered in our research, enables us to explore the intricacies of family, language, and policy in a manner that avoids implying a hierarchy among them. In the analysis section we provide examples in the original local vernacular with translation in English. The transcripts were prepared by Fazakas-Timaru, who was raised in a Csángó community and thus is fully competent in the local Csángó mode of speaking. Her interpretations were considered decisive also for the English translations. The pseudonyms used for participants have been intentionally chosen not to resemble names of the participants to avoid any coincidental reference to Csángó mothers in Moldavia. 5. Findings 5.1. Family Many of the Csángó fathers work abroad while the mother stays at home in the village raising children. It appeared striking, how the nuclear family had seldom been physically together, since the everyday life of the family takes place without the father (cf. Lee 2021). The task of running a household and taking care of the children is ‘the woman’s job’, as one of the interviewees said. This evokes a concept Hochschild (2012) has termed emotion work, a form of interactional inequality, which puts the moral burden of child-rearing on the mother. Such habitual systems shared within a community delimit choices of family members (Torsh 2022). In the interviews with the Csángó women, there is evidence indicating the influence of the community’s expectations on the formation of the women’s role in the villages and motherhood and taking care of the home as their main responsibilities (cf. Bull, Huss, and Lindgren 2023). In the discourses of the mothers there is no room for individual agency, aspirations or accounts of self-fulfilment typical for Global North women’s discourses (see Gogonas and Maligkoudi 2022; Seals and Beliaeva 2023; Torsh 2022; Vorobeva 2021). Among the Csángó the community’s expectations have a great impact on the way women speak about their roles as mothers in the family, silencing their own agency or aspirations. The following interview excerpt demonstrates the difference 6 P. LAIHONEN ET AL. between discourses of family decisions between the Global North and the Global South. Kathie’s husband works abroad; her sons have also joined the father for some time: Excerpt 1: P: És van, ahol mindenki kiment az egész család, vagy? And there are cases where the whole family migrates, aren’t there? Kathie: Vannak. Igen. Vannak. There are, yes, there are. P: Maguk nem akarták, hogy kimenjenek. Didn’t you want to migrate? Kathie: Nem gondoltuk. we did not think so P: Szóval, mert a fiuk kint volt kint Magyarországon, ugye? Well, your sons have been there in Hungary, haven’t they? Kathie: Ó, fiúk. yeah sons P: Igen? Voltak Magyarországra. De nem hosszú időre vagy. Yes? They have been in Hungary. But not for a long time or. Kathie: Nem. Nem. No no P: Iskolába nem jártak ott. They have not done school there. Kathie: Nem, nem. No no. P: Azt nem szeretnének, vagy máshol? You wouldn’t like that, or elsewhere? Kathie: Nem gondoltuk. we did not think so From the repeating answer of the mother, ‘we did not think so’ it seems that this family is not considering joining her husband in the West. The interviewer (Laihonen) is almost cross-examining the mother, as he is persistently asking questions such as: ‘you did not want to go abroad [as a family]?’ and ‘have you been to Hungary?’ Here the researchers’ Global North ideas about the family kept together are confronted with the local norms, where it is neither ideal nor aspired by the mothers to go with the father and leave their home village in Moldavia. Furthermore, the interviewer appears to be presuming a sort of strategic plan for the family. However, in the interviewee’s answers, the decision-making process is not presented as explicit. That is, the Csángó mothers and children may visit the fathers abroad, but the local community norms prefer staying behind. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 7 Ethics statement The data collection and management for the article was approved by the ethical committee of the University of Jyväskylä on 2017 March 8. Notes on contributors Petteri Laihonen is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre of Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä. From 2016 to 2022, Dr. Laihonen conducted an Academy of Finland Research Fellowship project where he explored language ideologies among the Moldavian Csángó and developed new methods for participatory research. His current work reflects a commitment to the study of multilingual educational contexts, with a focus on co-creative citizen science. Csanád Bodó is an Associate Professor at the ELTE Eötvös Loránd University and the Head of the MTA-ELTE Collaborative Writing Research Group. His research focuses on the linguistic ethnography of minoritized groups through a participatory approach. Judit Gáspár is an associate professor and Head of the Decision Sciences Department at the Corvinus University of Budapest, she is a founding member of the Corvinus Science Shop to support service learning and communitybased research activities. She is active in lecturing and research with an interest in decision-making, foresight, and participatory and reflexive methodologies. She is a member of the MTA-ELTE Collaborative Writing Research Group, which supports the cooperation among students with different socio-cultural backgrounds while developing their literacy skills. Bernadett Jani-Demetriou is a lecturer at the Institute of the Liberal Arts, American University of Beirut – Mediterraneo. Her research interests include how linguistic diversity and speakers’ multivoicedness are present in various educational and family environments. Dr. Jani-Demetriou was a member of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund project ’Language revitalisation, socialisation, and ideologies among youth living in the Csángó Students’ Halls’. Currently she is a researcher at the Hungarian National Research, Development, and Innovation Fund’s project ‘The promotion of linguistic citizenship through participatory research’ from 2024 to 2027. Carina Fazakas-Timaru is an ethnology and cultural anthropology PhD student at the University of Debrecen in Hungary. Her research interest focus on the different milestones of life among the Moldavian Csángó. ORCID Petteri Laihonen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3914-0954 Csanád Bodó http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0879-5157 Judit Gáspár http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1908-1616 Bernadett Jani-Demetriou http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0092-4062 References Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bodó, Cs., N. Fazakas, and J. I. 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