Ideological approaches to language socialization

Abstract

In this chapter, we offer an account of the history, stakes, and possibilities of a concept that has long been a part of the language socialization tradition, even if it has rarely been at its center: beliefs or ideologies that take as their object the process of socialization itself (i.e., “ethnodevelopmental” beliefs). We show how two major approaches in language socialization—peer language socialization and the “classic” approach to language socialization (as exemplified by Ochs 1988 and Schieffelin 1990)—address this issue in ways that simultaneously diminish and provide purchase for language socialization work. In contrast, we develop an approach to these kinds of beliefs or ideologies—framed in our idiom as “ideologies of relative inability”—that maximizes the utility of the concept; we use it to inject a set of sociopolitical concerns directly into the basic machinery of the language socialization paradigm. To do this, we draw on our research on Marshallese children in the US educational system and Peruvian gamers from Indigenous backgrounds.