Researching language and place: What is the evidence base?

This chapter reports the findings of a narrative review of literature on how young children’s language is entangled with place. The authors identify and explore three emerging themes in the extant literature: (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. 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.