WP222 Ideologies of language revival in adult-child interaction

This paper investigates the implicit ideologies undergirding language revival and the semiotic processes through which ideological dominance is challenged, examining these from the perspective of research on language ideology and language socialization.? It analyses everyday interactions in families engaged in re-acquisition of a “native” language of their ethnic identity, focusing on 15 hours of audio-recorded interaction in an urban family of ethnic Kazakhs in which children brought up speaking Russian are enrolled in a Kazakh-medium pre-school. The paper combines the micro-analysis of interaction with findings from a large-scale survey indicating that urban Russian-speaking Kazakhs are undergoing dramatic changes in their language views, use and proficiency.? This shift in the conceptualization of Kazakh ? from a vernacular associated with low prestige and backwardness to the high prestige language of school ? can be seen in the details of talk.? In codeswitching in adult-child interaction, the re-imagining of Kazakh is accomplished through four mutually reinforcing metalanguaging practices: limiting Kazakh to pedagogic formats, constructing Kazakh as school talk, confining Kazakh to “prior text”, and the co-occurrence of a shift to Kazakh with a shift to a meta-communicative frame. These findings expand our understanding of discursive processes through which the ideology of revival is created and sustained in day-to-day interactions. The study adds to current research in family language policy by providing empirical evidence for conceptualizing the family as a dynamic system in which language policies and identity choices are shaped by parental ideologies and by the broader social and cultural context of family life.