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Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children's agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children's cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.

From the \"verbal deprivation\" and \"restricted codes\" of the 1960s to contemporary \"language gap\" discourses, deficit models of children's language have been posited to explain social ills ranging from school failure to intergenerational poverty. However, researchers from a range of disciplines have problematized such models on the basis of the power of language to reflect, articulate, produce, and reproduce structural inequality. This review considers how the discursive construction of language, poverty, and child development contributes to deficit-based research agendas and the resulting interventions aimed at remediating language use in homes and schools. We suggest that an anthropolitical language socialization approach deconstructs ideologies of linguistic (in)competence and more accurately traces how children across cultures and social contexts develop communicative resources, cultural knowledge, and social practices in the face of political and economic adversity; it also helps articulate alternative ways of respecting and building on difference.

In Dominica, rural adults forbid children from speaking Patwa (a French-lexicon creole) in favor of acquiring English (the official language), contributing to a rapid language shift in most villages. However, adults value Patwa for a range of expressive functions and frequently code-switch around and to children. Children increasingly use English but employ Patwa for some functions during peer play when away from adults. This study examines how, despite possible sanctions, children use Patwa to enact particular adult roles during peer play, and what this signifies about their knowledge of role- and place-appropriate language use. Critically, they draw on their verbal resources and physically embodied social action to create imaginary play spaces both organized by and appropriate for Patwa. The examination of children's social worlds provides a more nuanced picture of language shift – and potential maintenance – than observing only adult-adult or adult-child interaction.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2002 AAA Annual Meeting in New Orleans in a session organized by Marjorie Goodwin and Lourdes de León, “Children socializing children through language: New perspectives on agency, play, and identities.” I thank them for organizing this exciting and timely panel, and for their comments on my paper. I also thank Bambi Schieffelin, Ana Celia Zentella, Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, Carolina Izquierdo, Jane Hill, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society for their insightful comments. I am grateful to several organizations which funded the research: the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. My deepest thanks go to the Dominican children and their families who generously opened their lives to me. I alone take responsibility for any shortcomings here.

The relation between work and family is a topic of considerable research and analysis across disciplines. Yet, few studies have examined how children are socialized into working family life through routine social interactions with family members. This study integrates the lives of children more fully into the literature through a language socialization approach. It analyzes video-recorded dinnertime conversations among 16 middle class working families in Los Angeles to illuminate how children are apprenticed into discourses and ideologies of work. Children acquire work-related values and expectations, as well as related narrative and analytical skills, through taking part in and overhearing their parents' conversations about work.

An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles. John Holm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 282 pp.

It is a warm sunny day and the adults have left Reiston (three years and nine months), Junior (nine years), Alex (five years), and Sherona (four years) under Marcel’s (eleven years) supervision while they are at work. After playing school the children begin a new game in which Marcel becomes akochon(pig) and the boys are hunters trying to catch and butcher it. Sherona, however, is excluded for not assuming the role of “mommy” the boys assign to her and instead trying to enact the high status position of head teacher.¹ This is one segment from their imaginary play:

In Dominica, children are at the center of a linguistic paradox. Two languages are in tension on their post-colonial island nation: English is the official language of government and schools, while an Afro-French creole commonly called Patwa (also Kwéyòl) has been the oral language of the rural population for centuries. In the past education officials and urbanites denigrated Patwa as the impoverished language of poor rural peoples and did not allow their children to speak it. Since independence from Britain in 1978, however, the state and an urban intellectual elite claim that Patwa is integral to the nation’s development and