Language Choice as Contextualisation Cue in a Sámi Kindergarten in Norway

Abstract

Language choice indicate - or create - different contexts in a Sámi kindergarten. Three interactions from the daily routine of the Sámi kindergarten illustrate contextualisation and language variation: 1) Teacher-child interaction in the main room after breakfast, where monolingual conversation between bilinguals creates the meso-context “Sámi kindergarten.” 2) Outsider/researcher-child-teacher interaction in the main room, bringing the larger community, a macro-context, into the kindergarten. 3) Child-child interaction, a micro-context, during unsupervised roleplay is a space where language alternation signals the context play. This research is within the field of interactional sociolinguistics and micro sociolinguistics. John J. Gumperz developed the notion of contextualisation cue as any feature of linguistic form that contributes to the signalling of contextual presuppositions. Signalling and the decoding of it, draws on the participants’ socio-cultural knowledge.