Language socialization and making sense of place

From the time we are small, senses of place organize and give meaning to our everyday activities. Little is known, however, about the role language plays in how people come to inhabit or lose a sense of place. Using the theoretical paradigm of language socialization to examine these processes (inclusion and emplacement, and exclusion and displacement), this chapter uses ethnographic and linguistic data from Bosavi (Papua New Guinea) to demonstrate how young children's everyday verbal activities include place-naming, identification, and representation to index on-going activities and relationships, establishing strong affective connections to place. In contrast, Christian missionization, with its sense of space, changed local meanings of place, and the ways in which Bosavi speakers talked about it and each other.