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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1103

Part of Session 166: Indigenous Minority Languages in Urban Areas (Other abstracts in this session)

Role-play in two languages

Authors: Kleemann, Carola Babette
Submitted by: Kleemann, Carola Babette (Finnmark University College, Norway)

The indigenous minority of Norway, the Sámi, are about 40 000 (Statistics Norway, 2010), and about 23 000 speakers of Sámi in Norway (The Norwegian Sámi Parliament). The majority of Sámi-speakers live in Finnmark. Although Finnmark traditionally has been a multilingual area, the contemporary situation in the urban localities on the coast, is predominately monolingual Norwegian. However, these urban localities are regional centres, and a new multilingualism is now emerging, where Sámi speakers have moved in and there is at the same time a local language revitalisation of Sámi. There is a need for education in Sámi for the new generation of bilingual children, which is provided by Sámi kindergartens and some municipal schools offer Sámi education.

My phd-project is part of  “The including kindergarten”, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. I am studying the way bilingual children, perhaps being a minority within a minority, use their languages.  I analyze sequences of role-play during periods of free play, an in-group child-driven activity in the kindergarten.

In this presentation I will discuss the discovery I had during fieldwork, that in bilingual role-play, role-play as situation/setting motivates language alternation. I set out with an idea of role-play somehow mirroring the language society at large of the children, but have been made to see that it is the language pattern of a far smaller society that governs language choices: that of the peer group, or even the single interaction of two role-players. It is important that role-play is social interaction and confirmation of relation between children as well. Most of all, the rules of form of role-play seems to govern language alternation. Still, play is an arena for improvisation over a theme and sudden shifts, so there are no absolute rules. In role-play there are different sets of motivations to be considered: the social motivation for interaction and choice of language and the formal motivation for following the rules of role-play including keeping order with different levels of reality. To analyze sequences of play, I use the tradition from Auers Bilingual Conversation (1984) with its inspiration from Conversation Analysis. And since role-play as a situation, or form, also is motivating, terms and aspects from Myers-Scottons Markedness Model in Social Motivations for Codeswitching (1993) are also useful to discuss the complex interaction of role-play.

Role-play is performed in two languages in my material, and I use the terms “language alternation” and “codeswitching”. Important in the discussion on how to use the terms, is whether to treat language as “the” code, or “a” code. Some of the earlier research, like Peter Auer and Carol Myers-Scotton, has been done with a somewhat monolingual bias (see Gafaranga 2007 and Alvarez-Caccamo 1998 for discussions on this), and the field of bilingualism might look different if you were to take a bilingual perspective. Gafaranga (i.a. 2007) brings in “bilingual medium” to explain the linguistic praxis of bilinguals: they can use either of the monolingual mediums they command for appropriate situations, or they may, in the right situation, use a bilingual medium – a third choice.