Multilingual children’s imaginative worlds and their language use: A chronotopic analysis

Abstract

This study applies the notion of chronotope as an analytical tool to explore the role of globalization, immigration, and transnationalism in shaping multilingual children’s awareness and use of semiotic resources in changing social contexts. This study is a part of an ongoing collaborative autoethnography (CAE), in which the data come from the second author’s cross-cultural transnational family and are shared with the first author for a collaborative interpretation and analysis. Data were collected through recording the observations of language practices of a nine-year-old girl in a transnational family, including her plays on her own or with her peers in and outside the home. An ethnographically grounded discourse-analytic approach was employed in analyzing the data. Despite rich linguistic and cultural repertoire, the child situated English on a higher scale level in a hierarchically layered system, and she found imaginative play as a space in which she could explore not only linguistic repertoire but also certain cultural chronotopes. She also demonstrated her awareness of and skills in drawing on variation within the English language to index certain social personae. The originality of the study lies, first, in the uniqueness of the case being in an Indian-Iranian multilingual transnational family and, second, in the unique methodology—using chronotopes as a theoretical and analytic tool to analyze audio-recorded interactions in a multilingual child’s imaginative plays. The study has implications for our understanding of how children pick up indexical meanings of linguistic choices and reproduce them in their imaginative worlds. It also sheds light on how language ideologies and practices reproduced by children may result in hierarchization and power difference between linguistic varieties.