The family plays an important role in uniting people into cooperative groups. Communication is crucial in family relations and knowledge of appropriate discourse norms starts in the family domaiin. This book focusses on talk in families: talk between mothers and children, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law; grandchildren and elderly grandparents, and talk among adolescents within families. Based on detailed micro-analysis of home-based interactions in Malaysia, Language Choices and Discourse of Malaysian Families: Case Studies of Families in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia provides a qualitative analysis of authentic talk between members of families and reveals how through conversations, relationships are maintained and strengthened.

This book is for anyone interested in the discourse of Malaysian families and is aimed especially at students working on discourse analysis. It uses multiple frameworks of analysis which include the Theory of Accommodation, Second Language Acquisition, Speech Acts, Communicative Strategies and Critical Discourse Analysis.