Many young people in migrant families perform language-brokering tasks for their parents to help them overcome their everyday challenges of communicating in a new language. Such informal brokering is typically the result of younger people being more exposed to, and becoming more familiar with, the dominant language of their new country. This article argues that such brokering has a digital equivalent in a migrant setting, in which transnational family communication increasingly relies on a grasp of the dominant “language” of smartphones and social media. Using data drawn from a study of Karen humanitarian migrants who have settled in Australia, younger migrants are shown to have had a greater exposure to, and familiarity with, digital technology than their parents, leading to significant communicative differences between two generations. Such differences, I explain, have created conditions conducive to the performance of a new type of intergenerational support in a migrant context: “digital” brokering. This is demonstrated through young people helping their parents use smartphones, social media, and video-calling apps to maintain transnational relationships after settlement.

移徙家庭中的许多年轻人为父母执行语言经纪任务，以帮助他们克服以新语言进行交流的日常挑战。这种非正式的中介通常是年轻人对新国家的主导语言更加了解和熟悉的结果。本文认为，这种中介在移民环境中具有数字等同性，在这种环境中，跨国家庭交流越来越依赖于对智能手机和社交媒体占主导地位的“语言”的掌握。根据对定居在澳大利亚的凯伦（Karen）人道主义移民的一项研究得出的数据，表明年轻移民比他们的父母对数字技术的接触和熟悉程度更高，从而导致两代人之间在交流方面存在重大差异。我解释说，这些差异创造了条件，有利于在移民环境中实现新型的代际支持：“数字”经纪。年轻人帮助父母在定居后使用智能手机，社交媒体和视频通话应用程序来维持跨国关系，就证明了这一点。