Bilingual Input to Children from a Qom Community in Chaco (Argentina)

OJEA, G.; ROSEMBERG, C.; AUDISIO, C.; CÚNEO, P.

Estocolmo

Simposio; Fifth Intergenerational Transmission of Minority Languages Symposium: Language, Culture and Ethnicity in Indigenous and Migrant Languages (ITML5); 2019

Stockholm University, Sweden and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Attitudes towards minority languages may influence intergenerational transmission -key to language maintenance and loss - by affecting language use by caregivers in their daily interactions with children. As language acquisition is shaped by the language children hear in these interactions (Hoff, 2006), studying the input to indigenous children may help design quality educational programs to foster linguistic development among indigenous communities. Few studies have undertaken this task (e.g., Brown, 1998; Ferguson, 1964) and even less have considered the additional sources of variation in bilingual environments (e.g., Hoff et al., 2014). In this study we aim to contribute to this purpose.The Qom is one of the biggest ethnic groups in Argentina. Qom language is being replaced by Spanish (ECPI, 2004-2005). We audio-recorded the at-home input to 4 children (M=1;9, 1 female) in a rural Qom community in Pampa del Indio (Chaco, Argentina) along four-hour sessions (Autor et al., 2015-2016). Utterances were coded for addressee and speaker. The quantity and complexity of the input in each language was assessed.Our findings show that 60% of the total utterances and of the utterances directed to the target-child are in Qom while 40% are in Spanish. Overall adults and children produce a similar amount of utterances in Qom, but adults use Spanish less than children. In child-directed speech the opposite was found: 64% of the speech directed to the target-child in Spanish is produced by adults (see Figure 1). These preliminary results display a scenery were Spanish is advancing over the minority language.