Linguistic Resources for Socializing Humanity

Towards a sociocultural understanding of children's voice

“…I define 'voice' as speaking consciousness (Bakhtin, 1981) together with a speaker's 'capacity to make themselves understood by others' (Blommaert, 2005: 255). However, I also see voice or, more accurately, voicing, as intrinsically dialogic, incorporating elements of addressivity and responsivity both in relation to speakers in a specific interaction and also in relation to voices from past experience and in the surrounding environment (Bakhtin, 1981; Volosinov 1973 Volosinov , 1976.In the next section below I explain my use of the concept of dialogicality, and go on to discuss how I combine Bakhtinian theory with ethnography and ideas from linguistic anthropology about indexicality (Ochs, 1996;Agha, 2005; Blommaert, 2006). I then introduce the data from ten and eleven year-olds' language experience across the school day on which this article is based.…”

“…Indexicality has also been used in a broader sense by linguistic anthropologists to refer to how particular kinds of language use invoke complex social identities, or past or present experiences. For instance in considering the relationship between language and gender, Ochs (1996) argues that linguistic forms may index a combination of social meanings such as stances, social acts and social activities, which in turn indexes a gendered identity for the speaker. Similarly, Agha (2005) suggests that specific patterns of speech forms (e.g.…”

The Handbook of Language Socialization

“…For example, children freely invoked differing cultural images and ideologies of gender, age-based, or language groups that were salient in their communities. They did so by using various indexical signs (Ochs 1996). These included members' category terms -such as 'girl' and 'boy' (Goodwin 2011), 'Gypsy' versus 'Romany' (Evaldsson 2005)-as well as practices such as parental name-calling, as used among French adolescents of Algerian descent (Tetreault 2010).…”

“…An ethnographic perspective reveals the 'wider social structures and discourses' (Evaldsson 2005: 764) that are available in the broader community of which the peer group is a part and also how the children agentively draw on, reproduce, and resist those ideologies available to them (Ochs 1996;Schieffelin 2003). The studies therefore show how children (even quite young children), not only adults, can be agents of cultural reproduction and change, thereby expanding the language socialization paradigm.…”

“…Koymen (2008Koymen ( , 2010K6ymen and Kyratzis 2009) observed 24-30-month-old children appropriating the expressions of caregivers ('I don't like it when you ... '), provided to children as part of an institutional, curriculum-based mandate to 'use your words' and make their affective states known to peers in negotiating conflicts. The children embedded and 'recontextualized' (Ochs 1996) these formulaic utterances in new contexts that were not the idealized uses of the expressions. In one example, a child used the formula to provoke a conflict with a peer rather than to resolve one, thereby perpetuating conflict and subverting the adult intention of the practice.…”