Learning language regimes: Children's representations of minority language education

Abstract

Minority language education initiatives often aim to resist dominant language regimes and to raise the social status of migrant or autochthonous minorities. We consider how participating children experience these alternative language regimes by analysing drawings made by children in two minority education settings—a Slovene‐German bilingual school in Austria and an Isthmus Zapotec (Indigenous) language and art workshop in Mexico. We examine how children's drawings represent language regimes in the social spaces they inhabit. Considering these drawings in relation to ethnographic observations and interviews with educators, we illustrate differences between how the social spaces are planned by educators and how they are represented and experienced by learners. Generally speaking, the children in our studies depict flexible, multilingual experiences and spaces, in contrast to the educators’ agendas of separating or emphasizing languages for pedagogical purposes. Mexican children's perception of themselves as participants in fluid language regimes, and Austrian children's increasing appropriation of multilingual space over time through both (school‐like) routines and (fun) exceptions can inform the efforts of minority language educators.

7 Intergenerational challenges: Of handing down languages, passing on practices, and bringing multilingual speakers into being

“…Across the world, it seems to be a shared experience that adults and elders complain about the perceived loss or infrequent use of minoritised languages by children. As Purkarthofer and De Korne (2019) have shown for Slovene speakers in Austria and Zapotec speakers in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, this might not be the view of the children who see themselves as speakers of the minority language. In other contexts, children are even seen to be the driving force behind language differentiation and thus the emergence of "new" indigenous languages (e.g.…”

Language Activism

“…The workshops were sponsored initially by the Smithsonian through project-leader Gabriela Pérez Báez, and eventually by donors of a crowd-funding campaign that Gabriela and I ran when the initial grant money was exhausted. The core team included Lenia and José, who had volunteered in the first workshop, and several other residents of La Ventosa who had worked in the ethnobotany project and were interested in engaging in outreach (see also Pérez Báez 2018;Purkarthofer and De Korne 2020). 45 In a discussion with Lenia and team-member Reyna López López in 2017, they commented on how other members of the community had come to see them as language experts during the years that the workshops had been running; children would come to them outside of the workshop if they had questions about Diidxazá.…”

Shaping participation

“…This ideological dimension underlies language practices and manifests in language regimes, shaped by language hierarchies in which children, throughout their socialization, actively take part (Purkarthofer & De Korne, 2020). For example, children in Dominica (Eastern Caribbean) show sensitivities toward power dynamics between languages and their distinct domains of use during play.…”