Language Socialization: Reproduction and Continuity, Transformation and Change

Abstract

▪ Abstract  While continuing to uphold the major aims set out in the first generation of language socialization studies, recent research examines the particularities of language socialization processes as they unfold in institutional contexts and in a wide variety of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous settings characterized by bilingualism, multilingualism, code-switching, language shift, syncretism, and other phenomena associated with contact between languages and cultures. Meanwhile new areas of analytic focus such as morality, narrative, and ideologies of language have proven highly productive. In the two decades since its earliest formulation, the language socialization paradigm has proven coherent and flexible enough not merely to endure, but to adapt, to rise to these new theoretical and methodological challenges, and to grow. The sources and directions of that growth are the focus of this review.