Abstract
This chapter on francophone language socialization defines la francophonie as the many nations, neighborhoods, and institutions where a variety of French is spoken as a result of the political and cultural reach of the French state, ranging from regions of France and its overseas territories to parts of the world marked by prior colonization such as Québec and creole-speaking parts of the Caribbean. Reviewed here are studies that illuminate how French in its many varieties (from the “standards” taught in classrooms and other institutions to the French-related vernaculars used in homes and streets) are socialized, as well as how the associated behaviors, ideologies, and identities are reproduced and transformed via social interaction in these settings throughout la francophonie. The chapter highlights research that employs classic language socialization methodology – that is, research which entails long-term ethnographic fieldwork as well as the recording, transcription, and analysis of natural discourse among “novices” and “experts.” However, because this form of intensive language socialization research is still rare within la francophonie, other studies are considered as well – that is, research that was conducted primarily through surveys, interviews, generalized observations, and various forms of testing, in order to reconstruct the forces and processes involved in language socialization within a particular speech community. The chapter promotes the growing tendency to integrate a politically focused sociolinguistic analysis into the language socialization studies conducted in francophone settings.
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Keywords
- French
- Francophonie
- Language socialization
- Language ideologies
- Symbolic capital
- Habitus
- Communicative competence
- Speech community
- Language shift
- Bilingualism
- Multilingualism
- Code switching
- Creoles
- Standard varieties
- Vernacular varieties
Introduction
To examine how language socialization occurs within a community marked by a shared language or language family (e.g., Riley 2014), one must first define the wider linguistic community in which access to that language is the norm as well as the specific speech communities in which varieties of that language are acquired and used. Secondly, one must examine how communicative resources and other sociocultural practices and values are developed via linguistic interaction within these specific locales in ideologically organized ways. Finally, one must review research that has shed light on the topic even if the approach does not completely fulfill the requirements of the language socialization paradigm.
In this chapter, I define the wider community as la francophonie and its specific locales as the nations, regions, neighborhoods, and institutions where some variety of French is spoken as a result of the political and cultural reach of France over many centuries. I review studies that illuminate how French (from the “standards” required by institutions to the French-related vernaculars , code-switching codes, and creoles used elsewhere) are socialized as well as how the associated behaviors, ideologies, and identities are reproduced and transformed via social interaction throughout la francophonie. The chapter highlights research that employs classic language socialization methodology, involving long-term ethnographic fieldwork and the recording, transcription, and analysis of natural discourse among “novices” and “experts.” However, research that has been conducted primarily through surveys, interviews, generalized observations, and testing is also included here in order to reconstruct the forces and patterns of language socialization found in particular speech communities throughout the broader linguistic community.
Early Development
The language socialization paradigm was formulated in the 1980s in the English-speaking world (primarily the USA and England) and spread only slowly to the francophone world (France, Québec, etc.). Works in French or about francophone communities referring to la socialisation langagière or citing the work of Ochs and Schieffelin appeared rarely, even after 2000. Nonetheless, even in the 1970s, sociolinguistic investigations of everyday francophone interactions began to explore some of the same terrain as later language socialization studies. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Bourdieu (1982) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1970), this research framed language and culture as resources that are acquired in structurally constrained linguistic marketplaces (la marchée linguistique) and addressed how ideologies about language (représentations linguistiques) influence the socialization process as well as the symbolic capital of the acquired resources. In this way, the elite transmit and maintain their own habitus (their deeply embodied linguistic and cultural practices and values) to the continued disadvantage of those who are politically and economically disadvantaged. This (neo)Marxist vision of language (re)production has had its impact on more recent contributions to language socialization research both within and beyond la francophonie.
These sociolinguists used some of the same methods as classic language socialization studies. Few immersed themselves as anthropologists do – eating, sleeping, and working alongside community members – or employed their subjects in the reflexive task of transcribing their own everyday interactions. However, many attempted to observe, record, and analyze “natural discourse” in their field sites, rather than simply conducting surveys or interviews. This ethnographically informed version of sociolinguistics is exemplified by Heller’s (2011) multisited research in Canada. Especially in a French-speaking school in Heller (1994), she employed long-term ethnographic observation and fine-grained discourse analysis to study how youth acquired and negotiated the sociolinguistic resources and ideologies to which they were exposed in this French-speaking institution.
By contrast with early language socialization research, sociolinguists of this ilk were investigating the relationship between macro-political economic forces and individuals’ linguistic engagements within a range of (semi-)formal institutions, whereas language socialization researchers were focusing on the impact of ethnolinguistic routines and norms on children’s development within more domestic settings. In other words, the sociolinguists’ emphasis was on the sociopolitical nature of identity formation rather than on the culturally shaped developmental process. However, Bourdieu has not only inspired the research of a number of scholars working in French-structured educational settings (see Jaffe 1999; Heller and Martin-Jones 2001) but also contributed to how language socialization scholars in francophone settings began framing their questions in new and more political ways. These have begun more and more to integrate a focus on how individuals are socialized to develop culturally appropriate ways of speaking, thinking, and behaving, with an analysis of how macro-political economic structures and ideologies influence individuals’ acquisition of linguistic resources and strategies for negotiating stance, status, and identity.
Major Contributions
Ethnographic studies of language socialization were first conducted in francophone contexts in the 1990s (Schieffelin 1994; Doucet 2003; Garrett 2005; Paugh 2012; Riley 2007). Scholars studying related phenomena in French-dominant school contexts were using similar methods (Jaffe 1999; Heller and Martin-Jones 2001; Salaün 2010; Ndayipfukamiye 2001; Monada and Gajo 2001). Around 2000, researchers began to cite the language socialization paradigm in a range of francophone settings, from domestic to institutional, but without employing language socialization methods (Williams and Riley 2001; Riley 2013; Lamarre and Rossell Paredes 2003; Lamarre et al. 2015; Patrick 2003; McAll 2003; Roy 2003; Van Den Avenne 2001). Despite their differences, all of this work has contributed to our understanding of how individuals develop language and cultural knowledge via language in la francophonie.
These studies could be categorized by settings or participants (e.g., homes vs. schools or peers vs. hierarchies) or by their focus on the socialization of language(s) and language use or socialization of related sociocultural factors (e.g., values and identities). However, while never losing sight of these facets, this review is organized according to the political economic structures and language ideologies that influence the socialization and construction of lives and relationships. Thus, I begin with mainland France and other settings, such as Switzerland, where French has a long history of being the official language. Next, I look at the impact of French in regions of the world where this language has come to dominate other languages (from Provence to the Caribbean), both in informal and institutional settings (i.e., from homes to schools to workplaces). Finally, I identify situations in which the French language has been disempowered by other empires (usually Anglophone) or because French-speaking immigrants have moved into societies where some other language (usually English) is dominant.
Where French First Developed and Still Dominates: The Metropole (and Its Immigrants)
Most language socialization studies conducted with native French speakers in the metropole have been food-focused. The family meal studies first organized by Ochs via the UCLA Sloane Center’s CELF program (http://www.celf.ucla.edu/) have become a model and/or source of comparison for such food-and-language socialization studies elsewhere in the world (see chapter “Language Socialization and Family Dinnertime Discourse” by Blum-Kulka, this volume). However, in France, because food and meals are understood to be the archetypal venue for explicitly socializing children, researchers are not always conscious (despite Bourdieu!) that this means of socializing children is a culturally specific and historically constructed process.
For instance, the study by Morgenstern et al. (2015) presents a fascinating analysis of the ritualized and frequently explicit routines through which parents socialize their children to eat dinner appropriately: both the order and content of the courses. The children develop an understanding that they must finish their plates so that everyone can move on to the next course; they also learn the value and proper means of eating the appropriate amount of the appetizer course, where most of the (assumed to be dispreferred) vegetable matter of the meal is found: to try at least some of it and not just play with it.
A similar study of mealtime discourse in a privileged suburb of Paris (Riley 2009) revealed many of the same culturally salient means of structuring children’s acquisition of pragmatic resources and sociocultural knowledge. This indicates the apparent stability of these strategies and the efficacy of their transmission within this region and class of people. However, as a non-native researcher, I was sensitive to some distinctive nuances in the socialization practices. Thus, a comparison of my research in France and French Polynesia (Riley 2016) reveals how all children learn to negotiate norms of sharing and consuming food, but the specific rules they learn and how they learn them are distinct. For instance, the art of critique is learned early in France (see Riley 2009), in contrast with the art of teasing found in the Marquesas (Riley 2012).
Rabain-Jamin and Sabeau-Jouannet (1995, 1997) conducted one language socialization study with French-speaking parents in France that was not food-focused. Instead, they compared the infant-directed communications of French-speaking mothers and Wolof-speaking mothers from Senegal, both in the Paris region. The focus was explicitly on cross-cultural differences in the ideologies of caregiving as manifested by socializing practices (e.g., the use of “baby talk” or physical interaction, direct visual and verbal address, use of pronouns, or pronoun-like particles in the case of Wolof, in directives).
The majority of language-specific socialization studies conducted across domestic and institutional settings within the metropole have focused on immigrant populations. For instance, Ghimenton and Costa (2016) studied the language socialization patterns of educated Italians working and studying in Paris and Grenoble. These researchers explicitly apply language socialization theory and method, collecting natural discourse during mealtimes (though the foodways are not the focus of analysis here) in order to research how the parents socialized their children’s multilingual competencies and sociocultural knowledge about behaving appropriately at home and school.
An article by Leconte and Mortamet (2005) manifests familiar themes from the language socialization paradigm by examining the influence of the different cultures d’apprentissages (i.e., the home cultures’ methods of socializing children) of multilingual adolescents arriving in France from sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. The authors analyze how these adolescents apply different strategies for acquiring French in their classes d’accueil (classes for integrating immigrants into schools).
Similarly, Leconte (2005) applies the lens of socialisation langagière (language socialization) to examining the narrative capacities of 5–6 year old children of immigrants from north and sub-Saharan Africa and Turkey at a public school in Rouen (France), assessing their linguistic competence in French and the sociocultural import of the stories they choose to tell – usually traditional French contes, such as the Three Little Pigs or Little Red Riding Hood, presumably learned from older sisters. But Leconte also elicits and interprets stories such as a description of life in Tunisia or a traditional tale from Senegal.
In another study of classes d’acceuil, in the French-speaking region of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Mondada and Gajo (2001) investigate the socialization of immigrants from a wide range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, identifying how the multilingual resources of these students from many cultural backgrounds could be treated by teachers as useful pedagogical tools, rather than impediments.
Finally, focusing on an older cohort of immigrants, Van Den Avenne (2001) found that Malian adults who arrived in France as young adults expressed contradictory feelings in a series of entretiens interactifs (i.e., interviews conducted and analyzed as situated interactions). The analysis of their discourse revealed that their early years of heterogeneous language socialization in Mali led them to believe that the acquisition and usage of multiple languages just comes on its own and that transmitting one’s home language to one’s children should be the natural by-product of good child-rearing. By contrast, the symbolic violence experienced since arriving in France has led them to revoice the dominant discourse about the monolingual standard: their choice of using French over their mother tongue to socialize their children is justified as necessary for their children’s well-being in France.
By contrast with these studies of immigrants who face society-wide stigmatization, Jeanneret and Zeiter (2013) focused on an adult Dutch immigrant to Lausanne, who had recommenced her study of French at a university in order to better integrate with her Swiss husband’s family, friends, and surrounding community. However, this study too finds evidence of tensions over identity affecting the immigrant’s desire to learn and transmit French to the next generation. Appealing to the notion of socialisation langagière, the study analyzed the student’s biographie langagière (linguistic biography) which included her reflections on social moments of linguistic insecurity and resistance to social minoritisation . Here, the concept (minoritisation) refers to the feeling of linguistic impotence derived from a lack of linguistic competence, which drove her attempts to acquire French while also raising her daughter bilingual by speaking Dutch to her.
Kinginger’s (2008, 2013) research resembles the previous study in its research design: questionnaires, interviews, journal keeping, and language assessment are used to assess the differential acquisition of communicative competence by American students in French study abroad programs. She concluded that success and failure stems from both dominant discourses and individual predispositions connected with the value of social engagement, cultural immersion, and language learning in general, as well as sentiments specific to the historical moment – for instance, the influence of anti-American sentiment, globalized media forms, and consumerism.
Relatively affluent, adult students studying French at a university, as in Kinginger’s work, represent a very different pool of subjects from immigrants who arrive at all ages from the global south and east and from a wide spectrum of political and economic backgrounds. Nonetheless, comparing these groups provides an opportunity to investigate the many sociocultural variables influencing the French language socialization of les étrangers (foreigners) within the metropole and this by contrast with how the French socialize their own.
Where French, Empowered by the State, Dominates Indigenous Languages: Provence to Tahiti
Ideologies of monolingualism – i.e., assumptions that a society only flourishes when unified by a common language that facilitates communication and inhibits the influx of corrosive foreign ideas – have deep and specific roots in France, being the result of republican idealism and nationalist pragmatism (see Costa and Lambert 2009). These ideologies have spread along with the language throughout the French colonial and postcolonial francophone world (Riley 2011).
Many studies conducted in these contexts are, not surprisingly, concerned with the transmission of indigenous languages in the face of the ideological force and socializing practices of the dominant language (i.e., French). For instance, Costa (2017) has examined in depth the impact of these ideologies on the reported beliefs and practices of Occitan activists in Provence, Southern France. Similarly, Corsica presents a similar pattern of activist concern over the loss of language (as symbol and essential element of Corsican identity) due to the imposition of French schooling in the early twentieth century and diminishment of familial transmission of Corsican since then. Jaffe’s work (Jaffe 1999, 2009) focuses primarily on ideological debates, status planning by the regional government, and the institutional transmission of language through schools and other media. However, much of her research provides a window on language socialization – i.e., a study of the interactive processes through which language ideologies and practices are developed by children and adults.
In the Caribbean and Pacific, there are a number of studies of the impact of French language and schooling policies on both linguistic practices and formations of psyche and identity by indigenous and creole peoples. For instance, Léglise and Migge (2007) edited a volume of papers that touch on these topics in French Guiana (e.g., studies aimed at improving the quality of French education for the Guyanese from various backgrounds). Similarly, Salaün (2010, 2012, 2015) has studied the impact of French schooling in both New Caledonia and Tahiti. As with the Caribbean work, none of these explicitly take a language socialization approach to examining how linguistic and cultural competence are acquired (or not) in these French-structured contexts. Instead, they survey the ethnohistoric and sociopolitical contexts, assess linguistic and literacy competence, and collect psycholinguistic data based on tests and interviews. However, one study from an overseas province that approaches language socialization research is Tessoneau’s (2005) investigation of politeness formulae in Guadeloupe. Employing an ethnography of communication method (but without recorded and transcribed examples), he traced differences between traditional and contemporary society and how basic principles of facework were transmitted across the generations despite some changes in the actual formulae.
My own ethnographic study of multilingual socialization in the Marquesas (Riley 2007, 2012, 2016; Riley and Tetahiotupa 2006) was designed to understand how (bi)cultural identities and the communicative competence to utilize both French and Marquesan across various contexts were developed by children and adolescents at home and at school. Through the process of transcribing everyday child-caregiver discourse with the aid of the caregivers, I came to understand how French language ideologies , learned at school, have influenced parents’ socialization routines as well as activists’ attempts to revive “pure” Marquesan and block children from acquiring charabia – i.e., “mixed-up” language.
Finally, a number of studies have been undertaken in postcolonial contexts in which French is the official language used in schools and other formal contexts, while indigenous or alternative languages are being spoken at home and in other public spheres. Doucet’s (2003) ethnographic study of language and schooling in Haiti focused on the language ideologies and metalinguistic talk about the two languages spoken there, French and Kreyòl, thus laying the groundwork for the sorts of ideological analyses needed in order to understand politically contextualized language socialization processes.
Ndayipfukamiye’s (2001) study of code switching in two schools in Burundi, one rural and one urban, examined not only the relative status in general terms of the two official languages, French and Kirundi. It also used transcribed discourse to examine how the children’s dominant language, Kirundi, was used to reinforce comprehension, while French was used to frame and mark the lesson (in this case about thatch-roofed vs. multistory buildings). Even more complex is the situation studied by Moore in (2006), where she explicitly adopted a language socialization paradigm to focus on both everyday interactions in the home, primarily in Fulfulde, but also pedagogical interactions in French-medium state schools and Arabic-medium Qur’anic schools. The contrast between the latter two contexts was striking, not only in the goals of schooling but also in the socializing practices employed and the cultural ideologies undergirding these (see Moore’s chapter “Multilingual Socialization and Education in Non-Western Settings” this volume).
Where French Was Dispossessed (Usually by English) but Remains Vital: Canada, Etc.
French has been a powerful language in the global marketplace, and French language ideologies have structured the acquisition of French in many parts of the world for several centuries. However, the world dominance of French was brought up short by English in the nineteenth century. In particular, French Canada submitted to English domination, followed by a number of other small colonies in the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and the Pacific. Nonetheless, I begin this section with studies in Québec (the only province where French was declared, in 1977, the official language) and then move on to Canadian provinces where the status of French is primarily protected by federal legislation intended to maintain the equal status (at least symbolically) of the two languages, before moving on to areas of the world where French no longer has any official purchase.
Québec has been the site of several sociolinguistic studies since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. For example, Heller’s (2011) study of the ideologies governing bilingual usage in a Montreal brewery in the 1970s identified the contexts in which new forms of interaction in several varieties and mixtures of the two languages (along with the stances and identities associated with these) were socialized and negotiated. And McAll’s (2003) survey of studies focused on transformations in the status and use of French in various Montreal workplaces shed light on how the political economy constructed settings that constrained the value of knowing and learning French.
Another focus in Québec has been on how the (then) new language laws affected First Nations people and allophones (i.e., immigrant speakers of other languages). For instance, Patrick (2003) studied the influence of language attitudes and usage patterns on the socialization and acquisition of French, English, and Inuktitut in public and private settings in Nunavik. With respect to allophones, two similar projects on the multilingual socialization histories and code-switching patterns of youth in Montreal emerged in the early 2000s (Lamarre and Rossell Paredes 2003; Lamarre et al. 2015; Riley 2013). While not full-scale language socialization research, the studies did undertake structural and ideological analyses about how and why young people have learned to value, develop, and use the linguistic resources afforded them in this richly heteroglossic time and place.
One school-based study (Lafontaine and Le Cunff 2006) contrasted the socialization of oral skills in francophone preschool, primary, and secondary schools in France and Québec. This study interviewed teachers and analyzed filmed interactions to understand teachers’ means of assessing and promoting these skills with the goal of improving pedagogy. The findings revealed some interesting similarities (possibly a cultural inheritance) in the pedagogical styles in France and its erstwhile colonial offshoot.
Outside Québec, studies related to francophone language socialization have touched on several themes, including how Francophones manage to retain their francophone identities given their minority status within a sea of English speakers. For instance, Roy’s (2003) study examined a call center in a southern Ontario town with a small community of Francophones. Using ethnography and interviews, she examined the factors that allowed for the reproduction of French in this community.
Schools are an obvious site for studying tensions over which languages will be valued how and acquired by whom. Heller (1994) looked at how French and English were deemed variously useful to students at a French school in Toronto, depending in part on the speaking context (in or out of class), the topic (school material vs. global English youth culture) and participants’ identities as Anglophones, Franco-Ontarians, Québecois, or Francophones from elsewhere in the world. A more recent report on francophone education in Ontario (Dalley and Villella 2015) suggested that the situation has not changed significantly for the students, as the diversity of linguistic and cultural francophone backgrounds continues to create problems in the formation of linguistic competence and community.
One recent study (Marshall and Bokhorst-Heng 2016) of the attitudes of teachers in a French immersion program in New Brunswick indicated that purist ideologies about the relative value of various Frenches (Parisian French vs. Québecois French vs. Chiac, a variety of Acadian French) were contributing to students’ linguistic insecurities. Investigating a similar issue in a school in Moncton, Boudreau and Perrot (2005) interviewed teachers and analyzed classroom discourse in order to understand the consequences of these ideological pressures on the students’ acquisition of standard French and/or Chiac. And in an ethnographic study of French immersion programming in Calgary, Alberta, Roy (2010) found that students, teachers, and parents were awash in official Canadian discourses about the difficulty of acquiring true “bilingualism, ” thus hampering the Anglophone students’ acquisition of French.
One more theme relevant to French language socialization in Canada has to do with the tensions between older francophone communities and many newer francophone immigrants. Visible minorities in particular confront racist attitudes when attempting to integrate within established francophone communities. For instance, Gérin-Lajoie’s (2006) volume presented work done on multilingualism and plural identities in Canadian schools, while Carlson Berg’s (2014) collection examined how non-mainstream (non-white, non-Christian, and non-heterosexual) francophone students are excluded.
Similarly, Carlson Berg (2010) discussed the challenges to integrating immigrant Francophones into the Saskatchewan school system. The first hurdle was that immigrants judged the Canadian schooling style as too relaxed compared to their home countries (e.g., no corporal punishment, mainstreamed learning), leading to substandard academic results and the loss of children’s respect for their elders. Secondly, although the Fransaskois (francophone minority in that western Canadian province) had themselves suffered stigmatization from Anglophone society, they were not above applying similar exclusionary thinking to other minorities. However, tensions such as these do not always arise within francophone communities in Canada, as is evidenced by Salaün’s (2015) study based on interviews with New Caledonian students at a technical mining college in Québec. These students positively assessed the teaching style and content of this program by contrast with their French education in New Caledonia (in the South Pacific).
Finally, several language socialization studies have been conducted in parts of the world where French has no official status and yet holds its appeal for individual families and whole villages. For instance, Williams and Riley (2001) examined how French-Canadians in New England, USA, maintained the French language over several generations via traditional institutions brought with them from Québec (français à la maison!, church-and-school-centered villages, newspapers and aid associations). Language shift to English resulted from the breakdown of these institutions following World War II and the encroachment of American norms via state education and more mobile employment opportunities. Schieffelin (1994) researched another immigrant group to the USA with ties to French. Her study of the socialization routines of a Haitian family in New York City revealed the ways in which a child’s development of French, Kreyòl, and English was scaffolded by the caregivers’ use of code-switching and translation.
In two studies situated in the Caribbean, Garrett (2005) and Paugh (2012) researched islands, St. Lucia and Dominica, respectively, where the French and British traded places as colonial powers for centuries before the islands achieved independence from the British. This history left a legacy of English as the official language and a French-based creole as the vernacular in many rural villages. Both Garrett and Paugh found that village children were being socialized to use the officially prestigious English not only at school but also at home. Nonetheless, the vernacular creole retained its covert value for the adults, associated as it was with local identity and intimate interactions, this being an ideology that the children also acquired.
Work in Progress
Since 2000, studies in la francophonie have increasingly used the language socialization paradigm to focus not only on how children are socialized by their elders (older siblings, parents, teachers, etc.) but also on how young peers socialize each other in less institutional settings and in multiple languages. Much of this research has manifested an increasingly explicit concern with social justice – not only in looking at immigrants and other oppressed populations but also in looking at the power relations that operate within groups according to age, gender, and class.
For instance, Paugh (2012) recorded and analyzed the interactions of children among themselves in Dominica, showing the influences that even small children can have through playful interactions on the direction of language shift in a society marked by (post)colonial inequalities. Similarly, other researchers have dug more deeply into this area of peer socialization and the agency of youth in francophone settings. Lamarre and her colleagues (Lamarre and Rossell Paredes 2003; Lamarre et al. 2015) have engaged in a complex analysis of language socialization across the life trajectory by employing a longitudinal approach that focuses on the multiplex mudes (or nodes) in which individuals are socialized to use languages. Lamarre’s research goal is to explore how linguistic resources may be acquired and lost, repertoires developed and redeveloped, beyond the home and school across an individual’s lifetime and in response to many structural-ideological and personal-happenstantial factors.
Lambert and Trimaille (2011) have studied the language socialization of adolescent immigrants in afterschool (Trimaille 2003, 2007) and school programs (Lambert 2005) in France in order to understand how they negotiate a sense of identity in the face of structural violence. Similarly, although not employing a language socialization framework, Tetrault’s (2015) work has explored how immigrant youth in France forge their semiotic codes and identities through peer interactions. Finally, Barnèche (2005), again without explicitly analyzing language socialization processes, has focused on youth in Noumea, New Caledonia, and the role they are playing in the transmission of the vernacular languages in opposition to French.
One other important avenue of work has been a return to and elaboration on the earlier dinnertime discourse socialization studies in France. However, the field has now been widened, first of all to include studies of contexts of food production and exchange as well as food preparation and consumption. For instance, Jaffe (2016) has examined how tourists to Corsica are socialized by vendors at farmers market and by culinary tour guides to understand the authenticity and authority of local foods (honey, sausage, etc.). Similarly, Riley (2016) has been looking at how children in the Marquesas are socialized to value imported food commodities over traditional foods, even as traditional foodways continue to be transmitted while growing, preparing, and consuming these foods. Implicit in much of this work is an interest not only in food as another semiotic modality alongside language but also in its connections to issues of environmental and social justice.
Problems and Difficulties
Generally speaking, conducting ethnographic studies of language socialization in the (now) traditional sense can be difficult because the projects require a great deal of time and energy, first of all to undertake the long-term fieldwork that allows for an analysis of the context within which socializing interactions take place and second to complete the transcription of the many hours of natural discourse collected for the analysis of both normative patterns and developmental changes. This process is especially difficult because this transcription is best accomplished with the aid of a participant from the community of practice under study.
In the case of French language socialization studies, some of these difficulties are somewhat alleviated by the fact that more and more francophone researchers themselves are undertaking these studies and are already competent in the language(s) of interest. However, within immigrant and (post)colonial francophone settings, the variety of French spoken and the ways of speaking it (for instance, alternating between French and other languages) may be quite distinct from the “standard” variety used (in “standard” ways) by the researcher, unless the researcher is in fact a scholar native to that community. Additionally, external researchers need time to develop sensitivity to the ideological and structural differences and must be prepared to be socialized in the field to develop a range of linguistic resources and practices needed for interacting appropriately in the communities of practice they are studying (e.g., Riley 2009, 2012). Finally, the perspective of a community participant is invaluable and contributes immeasurably to the overall data collected, and the process of constructing collaborative research relationships, though time-consuming, is in and of itself illuminating.
Some fascinating language socialization research could be accomplished within la francophonie if research teams were formed out of scholars trained in the classical language socialization tradition and scholars working within an explicitly political-economic sociolinguistic tradition, especially if any of these were themselves members of the community under study. For instance, I have collaborated with Edgar Tetahiotupa, a Marquesan sociolinguist working on bilingual education in French Polynesia (1999), on some preliminary analyses (Riley and Tetahiotupa 2006). This has brought our methodological talents and theoretical insights together while also drawing on the contrast between insider and outsider perspectives in these specific locales.
Future Directions
Ideally, future work in language socialization in la francophonie will continue to push the boundaries of what has been done, expanding the methods used along with the settings and participants, and the modalities and ideologies studied. Additionally, we should more perfectly merge the language socialization paradigm first formulated by Anglophone scholars with a form of political sociolinguistics that emerged in the French metropole.
With respect to communicative modes, consider a whole issue of Glottopol (Sabria 2016) devoted to sign language in la francophonie. One study was situated in Quebec, looking at the impact of various schooling options on the amount of oral production practiced by deaf Quebecois (Luna and Parisot 2016). Another study looked at the impact of the alternation between French and LSBF (the francophone Belgian sign language) on the learning of hearing and deaf children in a Belgian primary school (Ghesquière and Meurant 2016). Though both of these articles considered the impact of social factors, language ideologies , and communicative practices on the learning process in these francophone settings, neither study was based on ethnographic fieldwork or analyses of socializing discourse. Ideally, future work will bring the language socialization lens and methodology to bear in such contexts.
Another way to push into unfamiliar territory would be to record and analyze interactions among adults in work and recreation settings. Earlier studies by Heller (1994) and Roy (2003) have initiated this genre of research (in a brewery and call centers, respectively); however, neither recorded, transcribed, and analyzed interactions over developmental time as is done in the work of classic language socialization studies with children. An important aspect of this endeavor would be that of exploring the distinction between a simple socializing interaction and those in which socialization – i.e., structural transformation at the level of language or identity – is occurring. For instance, in Koven’s (2007) work with Portuguese immigrants to France, she focused on the construction and presentation of identity by these young women who say they feel themselves to have developed different identities via their different languages (French for modern and assertive, Portuguese for polite and submissive). More recently, Koven and colleagues (Miller et al. 2011) alluded to the possibility of applying a language socialization approach by collecting and analyzing bilingual narratives at different points in time, thus providing insight into the formation of these different identities over developmental time.
Finally, I will end with a call for more work that explicitly integrates analysis of the ontogenetic development of individuals with the historical transformation of francophone societies. For instance, work by Paugh (2012) in the creole -speaking Caribbean, my own research in the Marquesas (2007, 2011, 2012), and Moore’s (2006) research in Cameroon contextualize analyses of childhood language socialization with ethnohistoric research into sociolinguistic practices and ideologies. Furthermore, as we continue to return to our field sites to work with our familiar participants, we are able to watch transmission across generations – i.e., over real time. These studies merge the political sociolinguistic tradition of Bourdieu with the developmental language socialization paradigm of Ochs and Schieffelin. The latter began with a bottom-up, domestic focus on children as agents acquiring and sometimes transforming the social and linguistic norms of their elders. By contrast, the sociolinguistic tradition of Bourdieu stressed the top-down impact of structural and institutional constraints (e.g., of schools, religions, and socioeconomic systems). However, both are true and mutually constitutive forms of analysis of these dialectic and dialogic processes of transformation, and both are now needed in order not only to understand but also to respect humanity in all its diversity.
Related Articles in the Encyclopedia of Language and Education
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Paul Garrett: Researching Language Socialization. In Volume: Research Methods in Language and Education
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Monica Heller and Mireille McLaughlin: Language Choice And Symbolic Domination. In Volume: Discourse and Education
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Kendall King and Lyn Fogle: Family Language Policy. In Volume: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education
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Sandra Lee McKay: Sociolinguistics And Language Education. In Volume: Second and Foreign Language Education
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Thomas Ricento: Researching Historical / Political Perspectives on Language, Education and Ideology. In Volume: Research Methods in Language and Education
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Anna Verschik: Language Contact, Language Awareness And Multilingualism. In Volume: Language Awareness and Multilingualism
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Riley, K.C. (2017). Language Socialization in Francophone Communities. In: Duff, P., May, S. (eds) Language Socialization. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02255-0_31
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