Playground Learning: African American English in Latinx Linguistic Repertoires

Abstract

ABSTRACT This case study applies a raciomultilingual perspective to pre-adolescent language socialization in a majority-African American social and educational context. I examine naturalistic recordings of elementary-school Latinx children during a formative period of migration to Washington, DC, comparing these to contemporary Latinx linguistic repertoires and contextualizing them in the local social environment. Latinxs’ use of AAE historically and in the present day, and in a range of contexts, suggests that AAE features acquired through peer socialization are an enduring part of the local Latinx linguistic repertoire. Results add insight into English language learners’ bilingual repertoire formation in contact situations where minority groups are the local majority and highlight the importance of peer interaction and play in educational contexts as part of language and dialect acquisition more broadly. Findings underscore the inadequacy of linguistic ideologies that assume a one-to-one correlation between language or language variety and ethnocultural identity. The Latinx children are not crossing; rather, their use of AAE appears to be normalized in line with language sharing as part of community socialization.