The entanglement of language and place in early childhood: a review of the literature

In this paper, the authors report the findings of a narrative review of extant international research literature to propose a conceptual model for how young children’s language is entangled with place. Educational policy, curriculum documents, and speech and language therapy assessments in England tend to frame children as placeless and treat the place where language happens as either irrelevant or a hindrance to the quality of their speech. Conducting a narrative review, with a particular attention to the role of affect in what they read, the authors identify and explore three emerging themes in the extant literature that resist this framing: (1) how children’s language emerges through place, (2) how place is re-signified and re-made through children’s language, and (3) how place reconfigures how children are heard. Across these themes, we consider how place implicates identity, power, and hierarchies of language and embodiment. The authors argue that educators, researchers, and others need to attend more carefully to how children’s language emerges where they talk, and to the politics of how language and place reproduce whiteness in relation to what is valued and what counts as language.