Language policy under the radar: do nurses practise what they preach in multilingual infant welfare clinics?

Language policy is often assumed to reside in declared guidelines or explicit advice, yet it may also operate under the radar through routine institutional practices. Drawing on a tripartite understanding of language policy as comprising language beliefs, practices, and management, alongside a mechanism-oriented perspective on how de facto policy is enacted, this article examines language policy in multilingual infant welfare consultations in Belgium. The primary dataset consists of 29 video-recorded consultations involving 11 nurses and multilingual families, complemented by video-stimulated reflection interviews on nurses' reported orientations. The findings show that language policy rarely emerges through sustained discussion of language itself. Instead, it takes shape through everyday practices such as language choice, assessment, repair, and advice-giving. Dutch commonly serves as an initial baseline, while other linguistic resources are used pragmatically when needed. Comparing nurses' reported orientations with their observed conduct reveals both convergence and divergence. Normative advice tends to favour language separation and consistency, whereas nurses' own interactional practices are more flexible and multilingual. Nurses may thus simultaneously accommodate multilingualism in delivering care and manage multilingualism when advising families, highlighting preventive healthcare as an important yet under-examined site of de facto language policy.