Language socialization concerns the role language plays in a person becoming a member of a social group and how a learner is guided, overtly or covertly, to use language(s) as a cultural competency. Children’s early utterances and gestures are not primarily produced for referential purposes but rather as co-constructed social acts (e.g., ‘bye-bye,’ ‘uh-oh!,’ and ‘peekaboo!’). As individuals learn to participate in verbal activities and acquire the structural complexities of their language, they also learn what speaking (or not speaking) means in the community and how to use and attend to language as a way of knowing and being with others. Processes of language socialization with children are interwoven with semantic and pragmatic development and integral to the study of cognition from comparative and developmental perspectives. Initially focusing on learning a first language, the concept of language socialization has been extended to language practices and speech registers learned throughout the lifespan and to any novice developing a (sub)cultural identity or group membership, including situations of multilingualism, hybrid identities that draw on diverse linguistic and cultural inputs, and an individual- or population-level shift from using one language and set of cultural practices to another.

History

Language socialization began with questions about learning language as a sociocultural skill, drawing on the fields of language acquisition (with a focus on innate human capacities and psycholinguistic development) [see Language Acquisition] and anthropology (with a focus on the social construction of personhood in diverse contexts). An important starting point was Hymes’ (1972) concept of communicative competence, a theory of skills for contextualized language use, contrasting with universalist theories of linguistic competence as a psychological attribute. Communicative competence guided researchers to examine how children were involved in discourse (who was talking to them, when, how, about what), drawing on ethnography of communication approaches that require individuals to observe and think about the wider context of verbal and nonverbal communicative acts (e.g., what makes an utterance ‘eyewitness testimony’ as opposed to ‘telling on someone’) as well as local beliefs about language and its acquisition.

Grounded in ethnographic and linguistic field research in Western Samoa and Papua New Guinea in the 1970s, Ochs and Schieffelin (1984) compellingly discussed the importance of explicitly attending to linguistic detail as embedded in social exchange between children and their companions within a specific cultural environment. Without this attention, and without a diverse research base, science was at risk of interpreting behaviors of urban white middle class Anglo-American caregivers and children as universal strategies integral to language acquisition [see WEIRD]. The language socialization paradigm, inherently interdisciplinary and centered in linguistic anthropology, was embraced across other research areas, most significantly second language and multilingual acquisition, and culture contact (see Ochs & Schieffelin, 2017 for further history).

Core concepts

Acquiring any one (or more) of the 7,000 or so languages spoken and signed today is a process embedded in cultural practice and social interaction (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Language socialization argues for a focus on both the diverse details of communication systems (e.g., grammar and lexicon) and the contexts in which that learning takes place (for example, as analyzed using an ethnography of communication approach). Even something as apparently basic as who talks to children (let alone what they say) can be culturally modulated. For example, in a sample of interactions involving children from five different language communities, North American children received less input from male speakers than for certain other languages and heard less input from other child speakers than in all other language varieties studied (Bunce et al., 2024). Situational differences of this nature potentially impact on the kinds of interactions that children experience and the language features that are made relevant to them as they learn.

Consider the common practice of using prompting routines, where children are explicitly encouraged to verbally initiate or respond in interaction (e.g., ‘say juice!’). In the Sesotho-speaking Basotho community (Lesotho, Africa), prompting routines were observed to be typically triadic (speaker A prompts child B to address C), contrasting, for example, with the mother-child dyad common in white middle class Anglo-American promptings (Demuth, 1986). As well as providing a different range of formal structures (e.g., pronoun use that includes third-person reference forms as well as first- and second-person forms), a triadic context gives opportunities for modeling interactions with different kinds of interlocuters (e.g., peers, elders). Thus, a major function of Basotho prompting is to provide a framework for recognizing social cues and modeling appropriate responses accordingly (Demuth, 1986: 76).

The importance of language use in learning and enacting social roles is also seen in asking/sharing routines with Kaluli children (Papua New Guinea). Specific ways that children are encouraged to request, share, or refuse activates central relationships in Kaluli society, communicating expectations of affect, reciprocity, gender, and agency (Schieffelin, 1990). Older sisters are expected to share with younger brothers, a relationship that bears the special reciprocal kin-term adε. Adult caregivers will facilitate verbal exchanges between adε that meet these expectations (e.g., ventriloquizing a baby boy begging for food from his older sister) and sanction interactions that disrupt them (e.g., a sister’s refusal to share). As they grow older, children themselves reproduce these routines and encourage younger siblings or cousins to initiate kin-appropriate interactions, moving to verbally inhabit the role of instructive caregiver.

This child-to-caregiver shift points to three further core concepts in language socialization studies: (i) the potential agency of the (erstwhile or current) novice as an interactant, (ii) the fact that language socialization is open-ended and potentially lifelong, and (iii) the understanding (e.g., as displayed by adults and older children) that some routines and language practices are specific to interactions involving babies and young children. In some cultures, this can be identified as a special register that involves conventionalized vocabulary, grammar, and content with its own label (e.g., baby talk). Child-focused speech varieties may in turn reflect local language ideologies, including theories, expectations, and attitudes toward language and language learning (e.g., when and how children expected to demonstrate verbal understanding and which elements of a language are considered hard or easy). Language ideologies can become especially explicit in multilingual or multidialectal situations and in institutional settings (e.g., schools), where caregivers or experts may encourage or discourage particular language choices based on the perceived value or functionality of different varieties (e.g., Bayley & Schecter, 2003).

At a macro-level, acquiring language is both embedded in and constitutive of socialization into group membership, representing a bidirectional process (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; 2017). Zooming in a little closer, researchers have speculated that interactional routines and linguistic features (e.g., grammatical morphemes) can be mutually facilitative in learning and in psychosocial development. For example, a proliferation of (fake) threats and promises in child-directed discourse might support the acquisition of near-future morphemes (Sarvasy, 2022) or even scaffold understanding that utterances can evoke alternative realities and imaginings, a gateway to explicit theory of mind (Brown & Gaskins, 2014) [see Theory of Mind].

Questions, controversies, and new developments

Language socialization uses a field-based, qualitative methodology that emphasizes the relevance of real-life context. Classic studies paradigmatically involve a foundation of long-term fieldwork with the speech community, and analysis demands ethnographic and linguistic expertise as well as the ability to track behavior over time. Core data ideally consist of a comparatively large corpus (e.g., 80 hours) of transcribed and annotated naturalistic interactions, along with additional observations and interviews. The approach to the data is largely qualitative, attending to aspects of interaction (including comprehension and production) that resonate with broader cultural tropes. However, critics have raised concerns about representative sampling and over-generalization from selectively analyzed material as well as practical limits on the transcription process. Recording, processing, and analyzing greater volumes of naturalistic interaction is becoming more feasible (e.g., Casillas et al., 2020), and there is ongoing exploration into how to combine quantitative analytic methods with qualitative observations (e.g., San Roque, Norcliffe, & Majid, 2024) so that theories of what children and caregivers do with language can be examined through more comprehensive and multi-layered corpora (e.g., combining information about morphosyntax, prosody, posture, gesture, interactants, objects in the immediate environment, etc.; see Casillas, 2023). This gives potential to renew and enhance investigation into a wide range of topics, including how specific features of grammatical development may interface with cultural practices and preoccupations (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2006; San Roque & Schieffelin, 2018).

Researchers in language socialization or related fields have at times grappled with the concept of novice. For example, it is important to be analytically open to the novice as an active contributor to their own socialization and potentially as an agent of culture change as well as to recognize that the same person can flip between novice and expert roles depending on the context (e.g., Berman & Smith, 2021; de León & García-Sánchez, 2021). Such issues, along with broader concerns around treating dynamic systems (language, culture) as static entities, have been relevant to the expansion of language socialization to encompass socialization across the lifespan (including changing needs and technologies), language use with special populations (e.g., neurodivergent children and adults), language socialization within institutions (e.g., school, work), multilingualism, cultural hybridity, and language shift (e.g., Kulick, 1992; Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2023; Ward, 2024). Beyond this, language socialization could yet be better integrated with socialization theories and approaches in other disciplines (Brown & Gaskins, 2014).

Broader connections

Language socialization research has made a strong contribution to the documentation of cultures, languages, and moments in time. It presents a nexus of research interests that are underrepresented in cognitive science, most obviously in relation to linguistic and cultural diversity, but also to examining conversation [see Conversation], connecting in turn to staples of social cognition such as turn-taking, joint attention, social learning [see Social Learning], and the understanding of others’ minds.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Petros Kilapa and Bambi B. Schieffelin.

Further reading

• Casillas, M. (2023). Learning language in vivo. Child Development Perspectives, 17(1), 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12469

• Duranti, A., Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (2011). The handbook of language socialization (1st ed., vol. 72). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444342901

• Garrett, P. B., & Baquedano-López, P. (2002). Language socialization: Reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1), 339–361. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085352

• Schieffelin, B. B. (1990). The give and take of everyday life: Language socialization of Kaluli children. Cambridge University Press.