Karrebæk, Martha Sif. ‘“Don’t speak like that to her!”: Linguistic minority children’s socialization into an ideology of monolingualism’. Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 17, no. 3, 2013, pp. 355–375.
It is of general interest to the study of language in society how ideologies motivating linguistic hegemony get formulated in the context of increasing diversity. This includes if and how linguistic diversity surfaces under conditions that are clearly disfavouring it, and why or why not it happens. Also, we need to know how ideologies of language surface at the micro-level, and how they are continuously passed on, shared, negotiated or contested. These are central issues in this study of socialization into a condition and an ideology of linguistic hegemony in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is illustrated how school-authorities, parents and children co-create Danish dominance and a linguistic ideology of monolingualism during the first school year. The primary focus is on two school-beginners with minority language background in a linguistically diverse classroom, and the linguistic registers of particular interest are Danish, the majority language, and Turkish, an immigrant language. The article builds on field-notes, ethnographic interviews, video- and audio-recordings. Linguistic Ethnography and Language Socialization constitute the methodological frameworks, and Silverstein’s ‘total linguistic fact’ forms an analytic principle.