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Part of
Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation
Edited by Gunther De Vogelaer and Matthias Katerbow
[Studies in Language Variation 20] 2017
► pp. 65–89

Chapter 3
How do social networks influence children’s stylistic practices?

Social mixing, macro/micro analysis and methodological questions

| Université Grenoble Alpes

Studying children’s ability to construct themselves as pluristyle speakers goes hand-in-hand with studying their socialisation. Children’s conversational experiences are one of the key factors that allow them to integrate and participate in social life. This article will therefore present studies conducted in a school setting with the aim of better understanding the links between children’s stylistic usage and the social diversity of their social networks. The network approach has been widely used in adults but rarely with children and it allows the acquisition of variation to be considered in context, taking into account children’s horizontal socialisation beyond parental influences.

The present analysis will begin by looking briefly at existing work drawing on the notion of social networks in adults and teenagers in order to outline a number of related key research questions in terms of first-language acquisition. Some results obtained from a study conducted in Grenoble (France) with 10-11-year-old children will then be described (Buson 2009a, b). Finally, micro-sociolinguistic analysis will be used to return to some of the methodological issues that remain to be resolved in order to reach a more detailed understanding of the links between the acquisition of variation and the influence of peer networks.

Keywords: style, socialisation, social network, variation, methodology, acquisition of discourse markers
Article outline
  • 1.Social networks and linguistic practices in adults and adolescents: State of the art in sociolinguistics
  • 2.Social networks and linguistic practices in children: The importance of horizontal socialisation
  • 3.A study of the effect of social mixing on children’s stylistic practices in the French context: Research hypotheses and data collection methodology
    • The sample
      • The four girls from the mixed school
      • The four girls from the non-mixed school
    • The stylistic repertoires
  • 4.Analysis of stylistic variation through two discourse markers: hein and oh
  • 5.A few illustrations of the difficulty in analysing the corpora on a global level: Methodological issues linked to studying stylistic variation in children
  • 6.Is the specific influence of the school class at the heart of the network effect?
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.20.03bus
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