‘Who was the best?’: Power, knowledge and rationality in bilingual girls’ code choices¹

Abstract

This paper examines how pre‐adolescent bilingual girls employ linguistic choices to construct relations of dominance and subordination in a competitive exchange of knowledge and expertise in a pretend‐school activity. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that code choices used by the girls to constitute and exploit different sources of power are systematically related to the construction of currently salient identities, prevailing structural constraints, and individual goals and desires. It is argued that even young children act as rational, social actors who actively make strategic and meaningful linguistic choices with the overall aim to achieve optimal outcomes in a given interaction.

Code-switching and the optimal grammar of bilingual language use

“…Further, as a means of creating affective identity affiliations and conveying "warmth", "closeness", or "intimacy" (Camilleri, 2001;Pavlenko, 2004), CS again instantiates SOLIDARITY. The functions of CS that can be motivated by the metaprinciple of POWER have been equally well-documented in the literature. These include switching to increase social distance (Eastman, 1992;Rindler-Schjerve, 1998), assert "control" (Gal, 1979;Heller, 1988a;Woolard, 1988;Zentella, 1997), negotiate "interactional power" and "statusful power" (Myers-Scotton, 1988), produce or resist "symbolic domination" (Bolonyai, 2005;Gal, 1988;Heller, 1995), and engage in the act of "powerwielding" (JPrgensen, 1998;Li, 1998). The construction of dominance and inequality through CS is also apparent when CS is a means of "exclusion" (Callahan, 2004;Grosjean, 1982), "divergence" (Burt, 1992), "boundary maintenance" (Blommaert, 1992;Woolard, 1988) and "elite closure" (Canagarajah, 1995;Myers-Scotton, 1990).…”

“…The construction of dominance and inequality through CS is also apparent when CS is a means of “exclusion” (Callahan, 2004; Grosjean, 1982), “divergence” (Burt, 1992), “boundary maintenance” (Blommaert, 1992; Woolard, 1988) and “elite closure” (Canagarajah, 1995; Myers-Scotton, 1990). Other documented examples of hierarchical switching include CS for the assertion of “superiority” (Myers-Scotton, 1988), “authority” (Gal, 1988; Myers-Scotton, 1993; Stroud 2004), and “expertise” (Bolonyai, 2005; Gal, 1979). In the next two subsections, we turn to the empirical motivation of these two principles.…”

‘We won't get ahead speaking like that!’ Expressing and managing language criticism in Hawai'i

“…Drawing on Bolonyai (2005), those in Hawai'i who maintain linguistic, cultural and symbolic capital are most equipped to oscillate smoothly across diverse speech communities. As a result, they are granted access to both professional and social ingroups and opportunities.…”

“…In multilingual settings, people choose to speak a given language based on an array of normative (Myers-Scotton 1998) and complex cultural forces (Bolonyai 2005). For instance, non-English speakers in the USA often speak their mother tongue because doing so enhances social solidarity with their peers.…”

Bidirectional Linguistic Change in Rural Child and Adolescent Language in Syria

“…For example, Nesdale & Rooney (1996) indicated that children evaluate language use from preschool age and these evaluative responses increase with age. Similarly, Bolonyai (2005) presented a case in which preadolescent girls use strategic and meaningful linguistic choices or codeswitches between English and Hungarian to achieve distinction, dominance, and power. Stanford (2008) showed children's orientation at a very young age to the variety of their father's clan even when spoken to in their mother's matrilect.…”