Sociolinguistic Variation in Children's Language
Acquiring Community Norms

Investigates when and how preschool children acquire the vernacular norms of the community they come from.

Jennifer Smith (Author), Mercedes Durham (Author)

9781107172616, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 May 2019

232 pages, 88 b/w illus. 1 map
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.51 kg

'For scholars interested in language acquisition, local linguistic variation, style shifting, or the idiosyncratic charms of tiny children, Smith & Durham offer an intriguing text for intellectual consumption.' Rachel Sona Reed, Language in Society

How we vary our speech is fundamental in signalling who we are, where we're from and where we're going. How and when does such variation arise? Here, leading experts Jennifer Smith and Mercedes Durham address this question through a sociolinguistic analysis of the speech of preschool children in interaction with their primary caregivers. Bringing together two fields of linguistic research - variationist sociolinguistics and first language acquisition - the study focusses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of a range of variables to show when and how variation is acquired by young children, and the effect the caregiver's interaction has on this process. In doing so, they tackle a fundamental question in language research: when and how do children acquire the highly complex patterns of variation widely attested in adult speech?

1. Introduction
2. Methodology
3. Getting to grips with the data
4. Lexical variables
5. Lexical-phonological variables
6. Phonetic variables
7. Morphosyntactic variables
8. The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: synthesising our findings.

Subject Areas: Child & developmental psychology [JMC], Sociolinguistics [CFB], Linguistics [CF]