ABSTRACT
Language socialization is understood to be a lifelong process and is an apt prism for illuminating the continuity and discontinuity of individuals’ interactional practices across cultural communities, life stages, and social settings. In this chapter, we examine the language practices of speakers from two contrasting multilingual contexts: in French-and-Italian-speaking immigrant families in France and French-and-English-speaking youth in Montréal, Canada. Drawing from ethnographic and discursive data collected using a language socialization framework and methodology, we compare a range of translinguistic engagements that illustrate how new discourse practices, ideologies, and identities emerge similarly out of ordinary practices even in distinctly different sociocultural and political economic contexts. In both contexts, the heteroglossic practices observed appear eclectic by ‘purist’ standards and yet make sense as a consequence of specific transformational mudes in the geographic and socially mobile socialization trajectories of each speaker.
