Twenty-Seven Views (plus one) of language socialization

Abstract

The “Twenty-Seven Views” alluded to in the title of the current chapter correspond to the individual chapters of a recent book edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin (eds.; The handbook of language socialization, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, 2012, pp.xvi + 660. As to the year of publication, there is a slight divergence between the book’s cover page and colophon, where the year is given as “2012,” and the bottom lines of the individual chapters, where the year occurs as “2011”). The excess “plus one” view is the present author’s: It will pop up with intermittent and unexpected intervals throughout the text, and in this way do more than merely present a conspectus of the work under consideration; rather, it aims to compare and evaluate the (sometimes very divergent) earlier and contemporary views on language socialization presented here and elsewhere in the literature, and thus endeavors to achieve some measure of convergence, if not homogeneity, of the various authors’ points of view.