Language Socialization: An Historical Overview

Abstract

Language socialization hinges on the potential of embodied communication to engage novices in apprehending and realizing familiar and novel ways of thinking, feeling, and acting with others across the life span. Language socialization presupposes that community members desire and expect children and other novices to display appropriate forms of sociality and competence. Language becomes instrumental in effectuating these ends through symbolic and performative capacities that mediate human experience. Language socialization is rarely explicit, relying instead of novices' ability to infer meanings through routine indexical associations between verbal forms and socio-cultural practices, relationships, institutions, emotions, and thought-worlds. Socialization is sometimes cast as the passive transmission of knowledge from experts to novices. Language socialization instead is viewed as an outcome of synergistic communicative entanglements of novices with sources of knowledge, human, or otherwise. Asymmetries in knowledge do not neatly map on to power and maturity. Indeed, novices' flexibility towards shifting socio-political conditions and technological tools propels innovation. Early language socialization studies analyzed linguistic "input" as enmeshed in ideologies relevant to children's communicative competence. Communities that routinely align infants as partners in dyadic conversations predominantly use simplified speech in their presence. Communities that routinely direct infants' attention to others in multiparty surroundings align them as onlookers, overhearers, and relayers of prompts, thereby immersing them in appropriate registers of adults and older siblings. Contemporary research focuses on language socialization's role in shaping language and cultural hybridity and shift, in both diasporic communities in industrialized societies and indigenous communities in contact with postcolonial institutions.