Intercultural harmony as a conceptual lens on disagreement in multilingual family talk

This study introduces intercultural harmony as a conceptual lens for understanding intergenerational interaction in multilingual families. Rather than treating harmony as the avoidance of conflict, we conceptualize intercultural harmony as an interactional principle and achievement through which linguistic, cultural, and epistemic differences are collaboratively managed in intergenerational family talk. Drawing on an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of mother–daughter conversations in Chinese multilingual families, this study examines discussions of socio-cultural issues to explore how participants negotiate disagreement. The analysis identifies different interactional processes through which disagreement is negotiated via the interplay of alignment and affiliation at both sequential and affective levels. These processes enable participants to sustain engagement and relational cohesion despite ongoing linguistic, cultural, and epistemic differences. While alignment and affiliation function as interactional resources, intercultural harmony operates at a broader level as an emergent process of sustaining relational cohesion across differences. By bringing pragmatic understandings of cooperation and harmony into dialogue with interculturality, the study offers a new lens to examine multilingual family interactions, in which intercultural harmony functions both as an interactional principle guiding participants’ engagement and as an interactional achievement emerging through the collaborative negotiation of difference.