Bilingual child acquisition through the lens of sociolinguistic approaches

This paper entails a perspective on bilingual child acquisition through the lens of sociolinguistic approaches. A discussion of the concepts of monolingual language ideology and power dynamics is undertaken in order to reveal their important consequences on studying bilingual child acquisition, in particular, which (parts of) language(s) and children are important to study with which kinds of methodologies, concepts, and analyses. This paper discusses ethnographic fieldwork as a methodology to dive deeper into the whole envelope of bilingual child use in situated interactions with parents/care-takers, teachers and other children at home and in the classroom. The emphasis on language ideologies and power dynamics has helped sociolinguistic enquiry to move away from existing monolingual bias in bilingual child acquisition research