Bilingual Creativity and Self‐Negotiation

Abstract

This chapter explores Korean‐American children's language socialization into Korean address terms and their creative uses of these terms in a Korean‐English bilingual context. The data revealed that, while children's acquisition and use of Korean address terms were mostly mediated by language socialization practices with their parents, their bilingual practices were not directly imposed by these practices. That is, children created their own ways of addressing other Koreans, ways which were novel to adult members of the community. For example, children in this study (1) “anglicized” a social superior's name in Korean utterances and therefore established its bivalency and (2) code‐switched from Korean into English in order to avoid terms that index hierarchy and in‐group intimacy. Such improvised linguistic practices illuminate their ongoing negotiation and construction of the self and the creative potential of children's active participation in their language socialization processes.