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Elinor OchsUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORN IA, LOS ANG ELES

Socialization

L anguage socialization research examines how language practicesorganize the life span process of becoming an active, competentparticipant in one or more communities. Communities comprisehouseholds, neighborhoods, peer groups, schools, workplaces, profes-sions, religious organizations, recreational gatherings, and other institu-tions. Un like language acquisition research, the analytic focus rests neither

on less experienced persons as acquirers nor on more experienced personsas input but rather on socially and culturally organized interactions thatconjoin less and more experienced persons in the structuring of knowledge,emotion, and social action. This is an important point, for it implicates amethodology in which the gaze and camera lens of the data collectingresearcher is primarily directed at the activities undertaken rather thanzoom ing in and tracking the actions of any one participant. Activities (e.g.,telling a story, play ing a gam e, preparing and consum ing food, attempting

to solve a prob lem, having an argument) are exam ined for their social andlinguistic organization, including the spatial positioning of more or lessexperienced participants, the expressed stances, ideas, and actions thatparticipants rou tinely prov ide or elicit and, importantly, the responses thatsuch expressions receive. With an eye on interaction, we examine thelanguage structures that attempt to socialize (e.g., the use of strong eviden-tials to claim facts or the use of affect morphology to instantiate moralvalues) and the interactional effects of such attempts (e.g., Are stances,ideas, or actions acknowledged? Do others display alignment? Non-align-ment? Minimally? Elaborately?). From this perspective socialization is acollaborative enterprise, and language socialization researchers are in thebu siness of articulating the architecture of that collaboration.

We tend to think of socializing interactions as repeated and enduringencounters dedicated to the mastery of some community-clefined domain.Yet socializing interactions may be fleeting as wellas when one interlocu-tor momentarily asks another for directions or points out some hitherto

ournal of Linguistic nthropology 9 1-2): 230-233. Copyright 2000, American AnthropologicalAssociation.

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unnoticed phenomenon. This property means that ordinary conversation isan informal resource for transforming self and society and that an under-standing of how conversation unfolds in specific situations and communitiesand the roles of author, animator, hearer, overhearer, and principal or pro-tagonist that less and more experienced participants assume is central tounderstanding socialization as a continuous way of life.

While committed to the close examination of ordinary communicativeexchanges, language socialization research differs from a conversation ana-lytic or developmental pragmatic approach in its insistence on under-standing interactions between neophyte and veteran interlocutors as culturalarrangements. This perspective also has methodological ramifications, for itmeans that the gaze and wide-angle camera lens of the observer is pulledback to situate what is happening ethnographically in a w eb of local theoriesof mind and emotion, local concepts of paths to knowledge, local modes oflegal and political decision-making, language ideolog ies, and the like. Thusa Euro-American parent s praising of a child is tied to local notions of in-dividual accomplishment. A parent s attempt to formulate the meaning ofa child s partially intelligible utterance is tied to the idea that it is possibleand appropriate to publicly guess at what another person may be thinking

and feeling. Simplifying one speech to an infant is tied to the notion thatinfants can be conversational partners. And all of the above practices canbe tied to a child-centered versus task- or situation-centered orientation ofparticipants in an activity.

Language socialization research is aware that generalizations of this sorthave several undesirable effects: for one thing, cultures are essentialized,and variation in communicative practices within communities is underem-phasized. We say, for example, that Samoan caregivers communicate oneway, Euro-American caregivers another way, Kaluli yet another, and so on.Our accounts also seem like fixed cameos, members and communities en-slaved by convention and frozen in time rather than fluid and changingover the course of a generation, a life, and even a single social encounter.Further, in our rush to point ou t to developm ental psychologists that thereare diverse cultural paths to communicative competence and not to mistakediversity for deviance, we have tended to overemphasize the unique com-municative configurations of particular communities and underspecify over-arching, possibly universal, communicative and socializing practices that

may facilitate socialization into multiple communities and transnational lifeworlds.I end here with a brief account of how Bambi Schieffelin and I have

considered such matters in individual and co-authored work. We look at acom munity s lingu istic repertoire as a set of resources for representing ideas,displaying stances, performing acts, engaging in activities, and building so-cial personae. Many of the linguistic resources and the way s they are sociallydeployed appear to be widespread and are candidate pragmatic universals.For example, there are common ways of marking the stances of certaintyand uncertainty and expressing emotional intensity, and common ways ofperforming the socializing acts of prompting, giving directions, guessing,questioning, and clarifying. Although universal, the communicative stances


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and acts themselves are locally organized in terms of who attempts to com-municate them, to whom, when, how often, and how elaborately. Thus

prompting has been reported widely, but its situational scope varies. Inmiddle-income Euro-American families, for example, prompting is infre-quent, endures a few turns, and typically invo lves only an adult-child dyad.Alternatively, prompting in Kaluli households is pervasive, endures acrosslong stretches of interaction, and involves triadic as well as dyadic partici-pation. Similarly, while clarifying may be universal, it is a highly disprefer-red response to children s unintelligible utterances among the Kaluli andSamoan Islanders, while commonplace in Euro-American adult-child en-counters.

Depending upon situational rights, access, expectations, and/or personalstyle, children and other novices com e to understand the linguistic repertoireas a palette of subtle, expressive variations and possibilities. They becomeaware that members draw upon linguistic forms in the palette in differentways. For example, members use language not to portray themselves andothers as generic personae such as mother, father, child, teacher, or expert,but rather to paint themselves and others as distinct kinds or blends ofmother, father, child, teacher, expert, and so on. Further, rather than sticking

to a single portrayal, members transform or rather attempt to transformtheir ow n and others identities continuously over interactional and auto-biographical time. While language socialization research concentrates on therole of language in the cultivation of social convention, it also considersinvention and attempts to distill conditions that promote or inhibit it, in-cluding communicative settings, activities, recognized level of expertise,stage of life, and assigned state of mental and physical health of interlocu-tors. Socialization is ultimately a two-way street, in that more and less ex-perienced m embers leam from each other by creatively dep loying linguisticresources to navigate and construct the human condition.

(See also acquisition, community, expert, healing, identity, ideology, turn

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Ochs, Elinor, and Schieffelin, Bambi B.1984 Language Acqu isition and Socialization: Three Deve lopmental Stories. In

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Department of AnthropologyUniversity of California, os AngelesLos An geles, CA 90095-1553ochs@hum net.ucla .edu

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