This study uses Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to heteroglossia for examining the diverse linguistic practices and norms multilingual (Swedish-Kurdish-Turkish-Arabic) children exploit in performing identities and negotiating relationships in social media environments. The study combines ethnography with multimodal conversation analysis, examining multilingual boys’ (i) chat-communication and (ii) co-present interactions around the screen. The analysis demonstrates how the boys use a hybrid mixture of (i) textspeak (abbreviations, typos, emoticons), blended with (ii) urban youth style, (ii) heritage language forms, and (iii) monolingual standard orthography for achieving status and peer group sociality. At other moments group members enact voices of adult authority staging corrective practices around Swedish orthography and online rules for proper language use to display expertise and elicit laughter. The findings highlight multilingual children’s playful juxtaposition of diverse voices, styles and ways of speaking/writing indexical of normative tensions between (i) diversity and heteroglossic forms and (ii) standardization and monolingual norms , for negotiating belonging in transcultural peer cultures.

This study applies Conversation Analysis to examine heritage language maintenance among Central Asian Kazakh families in the United States. The study analyzes naturally occurring conversations between a parent and toddler drawn from two Kazakh immigrant families from China and Kazakhstan. While both parents aspire to teach their children Taza Qazaqsha (“pure/clean Kazakh language”), both integrate translanguaging into their daily interactions, designing them around children’s interests and linguistic competencies to elicit children’s orientation toward learning Kazakh. Children exert agency in derailing the mothers’ Kazakh-learning communicative project, both implicitly, through responding almost entirely in English despite exhibiting understanding, as well as explicitly, through derailing the project of “saying” things in Kazakh when the mothers explicitly orient to this. Results point to children’s agency and the realities of maintaining Indigenous heritage languages in transnational settings.

The article explores children’s creative use of language in the classroom and the teacher’s subsequent response. The study draws from video-ethnographic research in two primary schools in Italy and adopts an ethnographic approach combined with the analytical instruments of Conversation Analysis. As the analysis illustrates, children publicly perform wordplay to co-construct a shared humorous sequence with their peers. This practice emerges both in the peer group and in whole-class interactions that involve the teacher. In the latter case, the teacher aptly exploits children’s wordplay to pursue specific social and didactic aims. It is argued that children’s creative use of language is germane to children’s negotiation of their peer relationships and potentially relevant to their gradual process of socialization into the classroom community.

The study examines young children’s peer group interactions characterized by creative language use. We operationalize the concept of everyday poetics to explore the forms, heteroglossic resources, and the social and aesthetic purposes of children’s peer encounters. The data consists of video ethnography conduced in a bilingual Swedish-English preschool for children aged 1–5 in Sweden. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the study shows that e veryday poetics involved young bilinguals engaging in aesthetic, exploratory talk through sound and meaning associations, category explorations, and cross-speaker sound and word play in both institutional languages. Children’s language play served multiple purposes beyond the social relationality of the peer group. Children employed heteroglossia in aesthetic performances and language teaching, which became integral parts of social episodes that began as language play. The study argues that analytical attention to aesthetic and playful features of everyday interaction can contribute to our deeper understanding of human sociality.

This study explores how young bilingual (Swedish-Chinese) children (ages 3–5) exercise their agency in heritage language learning. The study draws on a multimodal interactional approach to video-ethnographic data from classroom interactions at a Chinese weekend school in Sweden, and the analysis combines Goffman’s concept of footing with Bakhtin’s approach to heteroglossia and multivoicedness. Particular focus is on how the children use reported speech, along with code-switching and embodied actions, to incorporate voices of absent parties (family members) in classroom discourse in order to assert epistemic and moral authority while strengthening peer alignments. Such multivocal, multilingual, and multimodal practices imply shifts in footing and participation frameworks from teacher-led to child-oriented. Simultaneously, the children’s heteroglossic practices orient to monolingual norms of Chinese as the preferred classroom language. The findings contribute to an understanding of young children’s collective agency in transforming heritage language learning situations into dialogically co-constructed heteroglossic practices.

This paper explores how a self-proclaimed narcissist narrates experiences of inattention – moments when others appear indifferent toward him. Drawing on narrative discourse analysis, we examine three segments from a collection of narratives that concern social encounters categorized as complete ignorance, blunt disregard, and uneven recognition. The narrator describes the experiences by utilizing the interpretative repertoires of downplaying and amplifying, both of which obscure vulnerability. In the downplaying repertoire, the significance of the event is minimized. In the amplifying repertoire, the situation is framed as morally wrong and in need of intervention. We argue that such patterns are not exclusive to narcissistic individuals but reflect broader cultural norms to avoid vulnerability in everyday discourse, aligning with neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency. The study contributes to theoretical understandings of recognition, narrative identity, and discursive negotiation of accounts for problematic experiences, highlighting the need for communicative spaces where vulnerability can be expressed without stigma.

This paper explores bilingual peer interaction during classroom activity transitions —defined as unstructured temporal and spatial configurations between scheduled lessons or other activities. Drawing on audiovisual recordings from a first-grade (Grade 1) “English-only” classroom in Japan, the study employs multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to examine how children mobilize two languages (Japanese and English) along with a range of multimodal resources to engage in (i) improvised performances and (ii) imaginary play with objects. The analysis shows that these transitional moments serve as a vehicle through which children perform heteroglossia and create a “translanguaging space.” In doing so, they display their bilingual competence, challenge the “English-only” language policy, reproduce and transform the classroom’s moral order, and socialize peers—thereby constituting the bilingual peer group. Data are in Japanese and English.