Speaking with Style: The Sociolinguistic Skills of Children

In acquiring communicative competence, children must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Although rules for appropriate language use may vary from culture to culture, they are usually sensitive across languages to many of the same factors, including the context and the topic of the discourse, and the sex, age, familiarity and relative status of the speaker and the listener. There is detailed evidence available of the ways in which adults consistently modify their speech to foreigners, of the phonological, syntactic, and lexical markings of language in professional settings, and of differences in men's and women's speech that are tied to their roles in society. This book examines young children's knowledge of the socio-linguistic rules that govern appropriate language use, exploring such topics as the repertoire of registers (speech varieties) that young children possess. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics.