Part of a wider study of family interaction, this chapter focuses on the interactional competence of a person living with dementia and some ways in which her independence is facilitated, and personhood validated, by her interlocutors. Drawing on a corpus of 15 hours of naturally occurring conversation, the study investigates the interactional practices of a woman diagnosed with dementia (Dana) in conversation with a variety of interlocutors including family caregivers, teenage grandchildren and community service providers. This chapter examines sequences of advice-giving, shared reminiscence and occasions of confusion. Dana first draws on a lifetime of expertise as a waitress to advise her granddaughter who has recently begun her first job; second, in a sequence of reminiscence, conversational partners describe a shared experience that Dana is able to assess and engage with despite potentially being unable to remember the details for herself; finally, the analysis shows how the actions of probing and testing can lead to interactional breakdown and confusion, but then note how Dana is able to recover from the situation by moving to a familiar topic and claiming epistemic authority.

Chapter 12 explores the relationship between cognition and interaction. The longitudinal study, spanning over two years, utilises Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate the cognitive and interactional abilities of a person with Alzheimer’s disease, ‘May’, through 70 audio recordings of telephone conversations with family members. The chapter acknowledges a close relationship between language and cognition by examining how memory and memory loss are displayed in verbal conduct over time. Furthermore, the chapter sets out to challenge the deficit-focused perspective pervasive in dementia literature, showcasing how May employs sophisticated communicative strategies and transacts routinised practices of interaction even with more advancing dementia. The findings suggest a nuanced understanding of cognitive abilities in dementia, questioning the binary framework of competence versus incompetence in analysing complex cognitive issues and interactional events. The findings contribute to understanding the complexities of Alzheimer’s disease, emphasising the need for tailored communication strategies to enhance the quality of interactions for individuals and their family’s facing dementia. The chapter underscores the significance of using interaction as a window to cognition, offering insights into the degenerative consequences of Alzheimer’s and paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of cognitive decline in the context of family communication.

This chapter demonstrates how a community of professional caregivers changes its view of a mealtime situation as a result of a communication intervention involving video guidance. We use data from a Finnish communication intervention model called OIVA, in which caregivers film everyday interactions and discuss these scenarios with a trained OIVA guide. In the 90-minute session investigated in this chapter, the community analyzes the interaction in a video where a caregiver spoon-feeds a resident living with dementia. This chapter focuses on how the OIVA guide uses practices such as hypothetical questions and reformulations of previous contributions to redirect the work community’s focus towards the interaction between the caregiver and the resident in the video. It is argued that, during the video guidance session, the caregivers begin to view the task of feeding as a social event and an opportunity to communicate with the resident.

For this chapter, we examine everyday interactions involving a person diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; pseudonym Trudy). Drawing on the methods of conversation analysis, our specific research focus is placed on how knowledge is solicited, displayed and resisted in contexts of viewing family photos. Our data are taken from video recordings of Trudy at home in the presence of family, caregivers and two researchers. We found that looking at family photos comprised three different activities, each aiming to elicit a response from Trudy: ’Who are they?’; ’Who is that?’; ’Find X!’. Epistemic stances taken up by the participants were found to index Trudy’s ‘reduced’ epistemic domain with respect to her ability in recognizing family members in photos. On the other hand, it was also found that she was able to take up a position of epistemic authority when asserting who is not in the picture. To conclude, although Trudy was at times able to take up a position of epistemic authority to reveal her biographical knowledge, the conversational agenda mainly involved testing Trudy on what she knew, with the unfortunate result being that it was often made clear where she was lacking in knowledge.

This chapter explores the challenges faced by individuals with dementia and their caregivers in communication. It focuses on the potential of personalized communication applications on tablet computers to support interactions. While various communication aids have proven valuable in addressing dementia-related communication issues, digital tools like tablet computers are relatively new in this context. The analysis centers on two key aspects of interaction: caregivers’ use of questions and the management of communication support devices. Results reveal that questioning individuals with dementia can be both challenging and rewarding. The chapter emphasizes the importance of awareness regarding potential issues with certain types of questions and the readiness to address difficulties in interaction. Regarding the management of digital applications, the study suggests that aligning with the associations of the person with dementia and being responsive to their contributions may enhance conversation development. The findings underscore the significance of prioritizing conversation over facts and being attuned to the person with dementia’s conversational trajectory to promote their active participation and engagement. Overall, understanding how the management of communication support influences outcomes may enhance the effectiveness of such tools in facilitating meaningful conversations with individuals with dementia.

In this introductory chapter, an invitation is provided to begin a journey into the intricacies of Black Caribbean immigrant literacies through the use of Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, as exceptional Black imaginaries already inscribed in the world. Through the adept depiction of racialization and transracialization steeped in the Black experience in the US as juxtaposed against the notion of Black immigrants as a ‘model minority,’ the necessity for examining race in relation to the languaging and semiotizing of Black Caribbean immigrants is outlined. Presenting a brief overview of the emerging global project focused on racialized language, this chapter lays the groundwork for the painting of a compelling portrait of the holistic literacies of Black Caribbean immigrant youth. By signaling the attention to an ultimate positioning of flourishing as a necessary imperative for and alternative to rethinking literacies based on ‘success,’ the chapter concludes with a focus on solidarity between Black Caribbean and other populations as a key impetus for this work.

In this chapter, I acknowledge the intertwined histories of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies across the Black diaspora. In doing so, I draw from the notion of ‘transcendent literacy’ to attend to the long legacy of languaging emerging out of the Black race and reaching across the Black diaspora while also lamenting the invented illiteracy often imposed in characterizations of Black peoples worldwide. Acknowledging the traditional lineage of ‘Diaspora Literacy’ in making visible interconnections across Black peoples within and beyond the US, I then present Caribbean Englishes across the Black diaspora, describing the languaging, Englishes, and literacies of English-speaking Afro-Caribbean students in the Caribbean and in the US. Based on this discussion, I call for a silencing of the historical tradition of invented illiteracy used to characterize Black peoples across the diaspora and invite a strengthening of accessible knowledges surrounding the rich literate and linguistic heritages they inherently possess. Through this discussion, it is possible to understand the broader transnational contexts influencing racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing in Black immigrant literacies and thus, the inherently induced economic bases for racialization of language.

For over fifty years, Canada’s language regime has centered - in theory, policy, and practice - on a binary: linguistic duality and authority of the two settler colonial powers, English and French. The legislative enshrinement of status for these colonial languages, by way of the 1969 Official Languages Act, has on most accounts failed in multiple ways. As is well documented, legislated equality between French and English has rarely manifested itself in practice. Less attention - scholarly or political - has been paid to the Indigenous languages erased by both political discourse and public policy in Canada. What limited policy attention there has been has focused on Indigenous languages as second languages. The development of the Canadian Parliament’s Indigenous Languages Act, launched by the Government of Canada on December 5, 2016, attempted to fill this gap. Analysis of this process reveals the tensions within Canada’s established language regime, while putting into sharp relief the difficulties of policy and policymakers to attend to - and move beyond - Canada’s colonial past and framework.

In this chapter, I begin by complicating how Black immigrants’ perception as a ‘model minority’ in the US creates a challenge for equitably engaging with their literacies and languaging as a function of schooling. Joining the conversation on immigrant and transnational literacies, I present foundational language and literacy research in the US that has functioned as a backdrop against which Black Caribbean immigrants’ literacies and languaging are considered. To situate Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies within its broader contexts, I then discuss education, migration, and cultures across the Black diaspora addressing the historical and contemporary educational landscape of Black people in the Caribbean. I further accomplish this situational placement of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies through a discussion of the historical and contemporary socio-educational landscape of Black immigrants in the US. Through this broadly painted portrait operating at the interstices of the educational, racial, historical, social, linguistic, and religious domains in the lives of Black Caribbean peoples and specifically youth, this chapter serves as a nuanced and contextual backdrop against which to understand the analyses of Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s language and literacies presented in this book.

Path dependency relies upon historicity and context to understand how institutions sustain themselves through time and are compelled to change at critical junctures. Some consider this approach as being deterministic, focused on external shocks to institutions and better at explaining stability rather than change. Others consider that there is also agency in institutional change, that actors may seize upon opportunities within institutions to find novel solutions to new challenges, or that a succession of incremental changes may fundamentally alter institutions without any external shock. We understand language regimes as being path dependent, while accepting that various actors may work within the regime to bring forth incremental changes in language policies. These changes may occur through various policy processes rather than through major disruptions. The impetus for this process may come from within the institutions, where state actors may try to adjust policies to a new context, or from language groups who express dissatisfaction towards the regime and mobilize to demand change. The chapter first discusses the possibility that language regime can change; second, it draws upon the institutional literature to describe how a language regime may change; third, it uses the case of French in Ontario to illustrate this process.

In an increasingly integrated Europe, state language regimes are not the only ones that matter. It is also essential to understand how they interact with supranational language regimes. As Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries worked towards and then gained European Union membership after 2000, to what extent did their state language regimes become “Europeanized”? This question is examined through the case of Romani in Slovakia. The chapter has two aims: first, to demonstrate that the concept of a language regime can be fruitfully applied to supranational entities, and second, to examine the impact of such regimes at the state level. The Council of Europe’s language regime led it to advocate for increased support of Romani, as well as increased minority language rights in member states more generally. This work became bound up in the wider dynamics of Europeanization and European pressure on CEE states. At the level of the Slovak state, official policies towards Romani were changed in response to such pressure. Implementation of such commitments was limited, however. An analysis of state treatment of Romani language in Slovakia from approximately 1998 to 2018 thus illustrates a process through which a state language regime was altered but not transformed.

In this chapter, I present findings from interpretive analyses of the data as they relate to the multiliteracies and translanguaging practices engaged in by six Black Caribbean immigrant English-speaking youth across their Bahamian and Jamaican Caribbean home countries and the US. Specifically, I contextualize these findings within (decolonizing) interpretive analyses that clarify the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies informing students’ multiliteracies and translanguaging practices. This chapter shows how the literacies of Black immigrant youth are enacted holistically by adeptly illustrating the languaging associated with these literacies and the ideologies influencing these literacies. Based on these findings, I propose and discuss the framework of semiolingual innocence for understanding how elements of multiliteracies and translanguaging practices as well as the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies intersected to clarify the literacies leveraged by Black Caribbean immigrant youth. In turn, through semiolingual innocence emerging from transracialization of the Black immigrant as an analytical prism, I invite a reinscribing of the innocence of Black youth, whose ancestors have for centuries leveraged semiolingually, sans white gaze, their multiliteracies and semiotics for agentively reading and writing themselves into the world. Moreover, I argue for a semiolingual innocence of all youth, made possible through the cultivation of translanguaging and transsemiotizing imaginary presents and futures.