Family Talk Online

Not long ago, the dinner table was the heart of everyday family life, a place where everyone gathered after work or school to share their day over food. Today, instant messaging has become a new kind of virtual dinner table. Families move, live apart, and span generations, yet family talk continues-online. This fascinating book explores how contemporary families, including families-in-law, gather and connect in family chatrooms. Through the lens of Interactional Sociolinguistics 2.0, it shows how family members use not just language but also everyday photos and videos to build family talk, manage familial relationships, and shape family identity. Offering a detailed sociolinguistic and cultural account, it highlights three key phenomena that define family group chats: text-image-participant relations, multimodal displays of power and solidarity, and the interplay of frames and chronotopes. Together, these insights reveal how family talk continues to thrive in the digital age, beyond the dinner table.