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3 - Sociolinguistic Aspects of Children’s Welsh

from Part I - The Socio-educational Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2025

Vicky Chondrogianni
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Ciara O'Toole
Affiliation:
University College Cork
Enlli Thomas
Affiliation:
Bangor University
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Summary

This chapter examines the acquisition of Welsh in its social and cultural context, with a particular focus on how Welsh being a minority language influences how children speak it. The primary perspective taken will be sociolinguistic, that is variation in children’s Welsh. We review the literature on the linguistic effects of language contact between English as the dominant language on Welsh in the speech of children as well as adults, including discussions of code-switching and diachronic grammatical change. Next, we turn to examining the social factors that have been found to affect children’s acquisition of Welsh, especially language exposure and how this can vary considerably from child to child. The next section reviews one of the main methodological approaches that has been used to collect data in Welsh linguistics, namely corpus data, and considers some of the benefits and challenges that such a method provides for researching child language as well as directing readers to relevant corpora and making some recommendations on considerations for future corpora of children’s Welsh. The chapter concludes with ideas for research directions in this field that the reader may find useful.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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