Doing ‘being sociolinguists’: Students’ envisagement of languages, varieties and uses

Growing up sharing two cultures can be a source of richness for children of immigrant origin, as they can develop their sociolinguistic competence by establishing parallelisms between the languages in their repertoire and the cultures they can relate to. Yet it can also create conflicting views regarding how they envisage and categorise language diversity. This chapter analyses how two small groups of Catalan-born children of Moroccan ancestry describe some of the languages they know and contexts of use. We can observe that categorisation is a socially-built procedure that relies on how children construct their social identity and affiliations during talk-in-interaction. Our data also reveal that children display great metalinguistic and sociolinguistic competences in recognising language features and in categorising those languages and their use. Yet, such abilities do not prevent them from assigning ‘positive’ valued categories to certain languages or varieties as opposed to others. To conclude, we would argue plurilingual education plays a key role in reversing this situation.