Bilingual children turn playful speech into learning and social bonding
A new study of Swedish-English preschoolers reveals that language play isn't mere fun—it's how young bilinguals teach each other words, build relationships, and master multiple languages. The finding matters to educators and policymakers designing bilingual programs: creative speech should be treated as core learning, not peripheral activity.
Originaltitel: Everyday poetics and language play in young children’s interactions in a bilingual institutional context
<p>The study examines young children’s peer group interactions characterized by creative language use. We operationalize the concept of everyday poetics to explore the forms, heteroglossic resources, and the social and aesthetic purposes of children’s peer encounters. The data consists of video ethnography conduced in a bilingual Swedish-English preschool for children aged 1–5 in Sweden. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the study shows that everyday poetics involved young bilinguals engaging in aesthetic, exploratory talk through sound and meaning associations, category explorations, and cross-speaker sound and word play in both institutional languages. Children’s language play served multiple purposes beyond the social relationality of the peer group. Children employed heteroglossia in aesthetic performances and language teaching, which became integral parts of social episodes that began as language play. The study argues that analytical attention to aesthetic and playful features of everyday interaction can contribute to our deeper understanding of human sociality.</p>