As a settler nation, the United States is a contact zone unto itself, with a dynamic ecology of migrating, multilingual speakers of minority and minoritized languages, and emergent language varieties. This chapter examines the linguistic, social, and political policies associated with many of these communities, drawing on research that examines the real and imagined pasts and presents of language users. Acknowledging the inherently political and ideological practice of separating and naming languages, the chapter focuses on the mobilization of diverse linguistic resources, highlighting the fluidity of multilingualism in US contexts. The chapter provides a broad and, by necessity, selective overview of Indigenous and immigrant language contact, change, loss, and survival in the US. Starting with a brief history and overview of current work with respect to immigrant languages, the chapter then describes examples of current research on Indigenous languages in the US. Discussion in each section is organized around contemporary research and theory on language status, language corpus, and language acquisition. The chapter concludes with consideration of the possibilities created by multilingual speakers’ adaptive strategies to help their languages survive and thrive in the US’s aggressively monoglossic context.

Claire Kramsch grew up between four different languages, French, English, German, and Yiddish. She tells how beyond the differences in languages, it is the misunderstandings between the speakers of these languages that have always fascinated her and that have guided her research. Literature and discourse analysis led her to develop the concept of symbolic competence.

While some heritage languages enjoy large numbers of speakers and vibrant communities, centuries-old and ongoing sociohistorical and sociolinguistic oppression has resulted in the extreme endangerment of many Indigenous languages. To counter this linguistic and cultural loss, a growing number of communities have engaged in language revitalization efforts that are tied to broader objectives of ethnic reclamation and cultural resistance, aiming not only to maintain but also to strengthen what has been lost. Heritage language revitalization is a long-term project that demands change and engagement across many aspects of community life, work that is ripe with tensions and contradictions. This chapter considers three recurrent questions in heritage language revitalization: what efforts should be prioritized in language revitalization, who should take responsibility in revitalizing a language, and how should revitalization efforts navigate the perceived need to establish linguistic norms and standards while concomitantly supporting linguistic diversity. To date, these questions have been described as tensions or problems that reveal conflicting priorities, often the result of historical inequalities, and that frequently hinder language revitalization efforts. Rather than framing these questions as problems, the present chapter considers how communities have responded to these challenges to create new opportunities for collaboration and new approaches that embrace ambiguity and pluralism.

In many parts of the world, the enduring inequalities in both educational experiences and academic outcomes across linguistically and culturally different groups complicate widespread discourses of “diversity” and “inclusion.” The study of discourse, as a means of theoretical and methodological inquiry, has advanced our collective understanding of how social power and inequality are enacted, (re)produced and resisted through texts and discourse-in-interaction in educational contexts. This chapter begins with an overview of early work that has yielded remarkable insights into how diversity and inclusion are patterned in and through everyday classroom socialization routines. It then proceeds to sketch how current trends of discourse study have enriched our discussion of the complexity of language, ideology and power inherent in the educational discourse. We present ongoing tensions concerning the theoretical, methodological and applied dimensions of this work. The chapter concludes by delineating some implications for educational practices and future directions for expanded work in the study and understanding of discourses of diversity and inclusion.

Minnesota has a decades-long history of welcoming and resettling refugees, but there exists a longstanding gap in programming for minority language students and an absence of instruction to develop and build upon students’ native languages. To address these educational inequities, the 2014 Learning English for Academic Proficiency and Success (LEAPS) Act was written and passed in the Minnesota state legislature. This sweeping state law revises many statutes to draw greater attention to English learner education, including recommendations for increased support for native languages. Drawing on interviews with key policy officials, close analysis of the text of the law, we examine the development and implementation of the law. We demonstrate how local culture, in particular what has been termed ‘Minnesota Nice,’ has shaped both the law’s development and implementation path. This chapter demonstrates the utility of narrative analysis in yielding insights into how language policies are developed, interpreted, and prioritized.

Key Words: diminutive, evaluative morphology, emotion, narrative, evaluation, Spanish, Andes, maternal speech

ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates how emotional words and diminutives function as evaluative resources within mother–child narrative conversations. Participants included 32 Indigenous Spanish-speaking mother–child pairs from the southern Ecuadorian Andes. Mothers were asked to record interactions in which they participated in narrative conversations with their child. Findings suggest that diminutives played a salient part in the socialization of emotion in this Indigenous community. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated gender differences in uses of these types of evaluation and, in particular, in how diminutives and emotional words were used together, with 5-year-old girls hearing significantly more diminutives in emotional utterances than 3-year-old girls and more than boys of both age groups. Implications for narrative evaluation and language socialization are discussed.

INTRODUCTION

Narratives are often defined as stories about actual or imaginary past events (McCabe, 1991). Early and foundational work on narrative (e.g., Labov & Waletzky, 1967) identified evaluation as a central narrative component. As Labov and Waletzky (1967) demonstrated, a narrative's referential functions might be carried out perfectly well; however, without evaluation, the narrative tends to be difficult to understand and lacks significance – in their words, “it has no point” (p. 33). Daiute and Nelson (1997) extended this work, pointing out that as children develop narrative discourse skills, evaluation helps them learn how to situate or position themselves within society.