Language Socialization and the (re)Production of Bilingual Subjectivities

Abstract

Language socialization is the human developmental process whereby a child or other novice (of any age) acquires communicative competence (Hymes 1972), enabling him or her to interact meaningfully with others and otherwise participate in the social life of a given community. Language socialization occurs primarily through interactions with older or otherwise more experienced persons (Garrett and Baquedano-López 2002; Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986a, 1986b), but also, in most cases, through interactions with peers (Dunn 1999; Farris 1991; Paugh 2005; Rampton 1995a). The child or novice’s development of communicative competence through such interactions is largely a matter of learning how to behave, both verbally and non-verbally, as a culturally intelligible subject. While mastering the formal features of the community’s language or languages so as to be able to produce grammatically and pragmatically well-formed utterances (Ochs and Schieffelin 1995), the child or novice must also learn how to use language in conjunction with various other semiotic resources as a means of actively co-constructing, negotiating and participating in a broad range of locally meaningful (though largely quite mundane) interactions and activities — a process that Schieffelin and Ochs (1996) characterize as ‘the microgenesis of competence’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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