It has been argued that transnational modes of 21^stCentury cosmopolitan-vernacular transformations cannot be understood without a thorough examination of changing ideals of linguistic legitimacy, their entanglement in politics of sensing and embodied knowledges of all parties involved (e.g.Heller and McElhinny 2017,Author 2023). Researchers therefore focus on interactions between the material and the social by examining scale-making practices among transnational individuals and groups, their embodied enactments and entanglement in network cultures and specific rearrangements of materials. This paper contributes to these discussions by drawing on recorded audio-visual material in Polish-English-speaking transnational families living and working in the UK, part of the ESRC-funded Family language policy project, a multi-method, multi-community and multi-family-type investigation into transnational family practices in London in 2017-2019.  

In the talk, we focus on the ways in which human and non-human entities came together to ‘do’ families (Madianou 2016) through scaling of entities and actions in situated events.Analysis of selected audio-visual material highlights how the transnational families were making use of and recontextualising their semiotic-material resources at times of radical change, and how this enabled emergence of multiple reconfigurations of categories and practices. By focusing on dynamics of multiparty talk in the same activity type in two families with similar family make-up, but different verbalised ideas about language and culture, we demonstrate how transnational actors go about localizing and extending themselves into multiple locations and how the conceptual and material worlds are always interconnected. The paper contributes to discussions in embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2016), highlighting how sensorimotor capacities are entangled in bodily experiences and how they are embedded in their sociocultural and technological contexts. It argues that a close examination of distributed agency helps understand how participants develop their stances towards contradictory positions of ‘bad immigrants’ and ‘hard-working pillars of the economy’, ‘Poles’ and ‘cosmopolitans’, etc.