Heritage Language Socialization Practices in Secular Yiddish Educational Contexts
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Heritage Language Socialization Practices in Secular Yiddish Educational Contexts: The Creation of a Metalinguistic Community A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Linguistics by Netta Rose Avineri 2012 © Copyright by Netta Rose Avineri 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Heritage Language Socialization Practices in Secular Yiddish Educational Contexts: The Creation of a Metalinguistic Community by Netta Rose Avineri Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Charles Goodwin, Chair This dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical framework for the model of metalinguistic community, a community of positioned social actors engaged primarily in discourse about language and cultural symbols tied to language. Building upon the notions of speech community (Duranti, 1997; Gumperz, 1968; Morgan, 2006), linguistic community (Silverstein, 1998), local community (Grenoble & Whaley, 2006), and discourse community (Watts, 1999), metalinguistic community provides a novel practice-based (Bourdieu, 1991) framework for diverse participants who experience a strong connection to a language and its speakers but may lack familiarity with them due to historical, personal, and/or communal circumstances. This research identifies five dimensions of metalinguistic community: socialization into language ideologies is a priority over socialization into language competence and use, conflation of language and culture, age and corresponding knowledge as highly salient features, use and discussion of the code are primarily pedagogical, and use of code in specific interactional and textual contexts (e.g., greeting/closings, assessments, response cries, lexical items related to religion and culture, mock language). ii As a case study of metalinguistic community, this dissertation provides an in-depth ethnographic analysis of contemporary secular engagement with Yiddish language and culture in the United States.
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