Language and Place in Children’s Worlds
Voices remembered from childhood, and retrieved by diasporic and exiled writers attest to the profound connections between language, place, memory and identity. Research on children’s language socialization provides a complementary perspective for understanding the ways in which young children are socialized into existing social worlds, as well as seeing how they create their own. Ethnographic and sociolinguistic data from two societies, Dominica (West Indies) and Kaluli (Papua New Guinea) illustrates the importance of place and the role of language(s) in mediating social relationships and remembering them, as well as providing symbolic resources for narrative, language choice and play. As speech activities are always located in particular places, and are often about particular places, even in their earliest use of language, children are sensitive to and learn culturally specific meanings of and ways of talking about place.