Doctoral Dissertation Research: Children's Verbal Practices and Social Change

Cuny Graduate School University Center, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Languages are key to both the organization and the transformation of communities. Particular language practices underpin some types of social relationships while also hindering others. As social relationships change, languages change in form and function, enabling new forms of sociality. The research supported by this award asks: What new ways of using indigenous and global languages are emerging today? And how are these new verbal practices enabling or preventing social change? Supervised by Dr. Miki Makihara of City University of New York, anthropology doctoral student Mariapaola Gritti will investigate these questions through a 15-month linguistic-ethnographic study of children's language practices in a village in American Samoan, a U.S. territory. This project will advance understanding of social change, expand existing linguistic methodologies, and clarify how language practices can underpin the sustainability of communities. It will also inform language policy. By documenting children's communicative practices, this project will enable mid- and long-term monitoring of one such policy: the Samoan-language instruction program currently piloted by the American Samoa Department of Education and aimed both to improve educational achievement and foster local language and culture maintenance in this U.S. territory. American Samoa is an particularly appropriate site for this research because residents there face changes on multiple fronts, including, their environment, culture, forms of social organization, and possibilities for political participation. In addition, transnational kinship and economic relations, migration to Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, official use of English, attempts to introduce Samoan-language instruction in schools, and campaigns promoting Western pedagogical models all affect American Samoan ways of speaking Samoan and English. The intensity and simultaneity of these developments make the linguistic effects more salient for identification, documentation, and analysis, particularly in young children's speech. Therefore, Gritti will audio and video record and observe daily children's spontaneous social and linguistic interactions. She will survey these children's families and conduct ethnographic observation and interviews in the community. Her analysis of the language corpus will focus on two aspects of children's speech: (1) English borrowings into Samoan, which children use with variable frequency and phonology; and (2) personal pronouns, which children may use with a mixture of English or Samoan syntax and semantics. Employing the innovative concept of "semiotic potential," Gritti will monitor changes in frequency and effects of variants across situations, among children, and over developmental stages, to highlight how children's emerging grammar systems reflect their communicative needs, while also contributing to change in the language they speak. Finally, children's mimetic or play activities will be analyzed to identify children's ideas about the different variants, about Samoan and English, and about the changing world around them.