In this paper, we apply Archer's (1995, 2000, 2003) realist social theory in which human practice is viewed as the source and origin of social life and social world. Cultural practices such as language use is thus taken to emerge from human action. However, human action, or agency, is taken neither as 'free will' nor 'totally determined and formed' by social structure. Rather, agency emerges in response to and interaction with social structure. Advocating an analytical separation of structure and agency, agency and structure are both considered to have real, distinct, and emergent properties that are irreducible to one another. Working within this school of thought, we seek to argue how under certain circumstances where minority languages are not institutionally supported, and thus, families alone have to shoulder the responsibility of raising their children bilingually, patterns of family formation and settlement could have a real impact on language use at home. Drawing upon Sealy and Carter's (2004) "demographic agency," we illustrate here how such an agency could be of an influence giving families a competitive edge against home-external detrimental forces such as monolingual educational policies. As Sealey and Carter (2004, p. 11) argue, "people collectively can exert an influence simply by virtue of their numbers," and "this cardinal power of agency" does not necessarily depend on only "the property of self-consciousness." In other words, in such communities, language ideologies and practices can just take a specific form because, rather than being a conscious decisions, they have been "accumulated and learned during biographically phased processes of socialization" (Blommaert, 2019, p. 5).
Archer, M. S. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M. S. (2000). Being Human: The problem of agency. Cambridge University Press. an example of agential effect without any activity involved: dumb pressure of numbers
Archer, M. S. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge University Press.
Blommaert, J. (2019). Foreword. In S. Haque (Ed.), Family language policy: Dynamics in language transmission under a migratory context (pp. 1-5). LINCOM.
Sealey, A., & Carter, B. (2004). Applied linguistics as social science. Continuum.
