Socializing Heteroglossia among Miskitu children on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua

This article adapts Bakhtin’s term “heteroglossia” as a framework for analyzing Miskitu children’s multilingual speech on Corn Island, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Analysis of naturally occurring speech in this context illustrates the utility of partial competencies and hybridized speech, supporting a view of language not as a bounded system, but as a diverse pool of communicative resources that socialize children into multiple modes of...