Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how language and linguistic difference emerge in interaction. Analyzing everyday playful interactions of Aché children it examines the twin processes of constituting language as an object of consciousness and distinguishing between languages as separate entities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes how language emerges as an object in playful interactions of children in an Aché community in eastern Paraguay. The Aché are a recently settled hunter-gatherer collective, currently experiencing language shift from their heritage language, Aché, to the national language, Guaraní. The currently dominant medium of communication in the communities is a mixed code, in which language distinctions between these two are not relevant. However, children have begun to attend to such distinctions in everyday interactions and play. In these interactions they demonstrate a heightened metalinguistic awareness. In everyday practice, language is mostly a transparent interface through which we experience the world. Yet it can occasionally emerge as phenomenological object in interaction, a process that is intertwined with the emergence of linguistic difference. As distinctions between languages are made, language appears as communicative form and medium, distinct from message, speaker, and context. I argue that language and different languages should not be taken for granted as self-evident analytical objects, but as the results of specific interactional strategies. They emerge through the socialization of speakers into conceiving of and attending to particular communicative practices as languages. For the Aché children, this attention is informed by a communicative environment that includes frequent discussions about language endangerment, ongoing revitalization activities, and the experience of multiple languages. Within such a context, they have now begun to encounter different languages in the words they are using.