Abstract
The paper presents some preliminary findings from our ongoing fieldwork on language socialization in Romani families in the Czech Republic. Recent sociolinguistic research on the situation of Romani in the Czech Republic (Kubaník et al. 2013) revealed that about one third of Czech Rom children (8-15 years old) are able to speak Romani.
However, it seems that Romani is often not acquired at an early age and its acquisition has become a longer process than the acquisition of Czech. Since the above mentioned research focused especially on quantitative analysis of sociolinguistic situation of Romani in the Czech Republic, some important questions have not been asked.
How are languages used (within child directed communication) in Rom families? Which (language) ideologies influence language change? What does a changing language situation mean in the context of socialization and enculturation? Inspired by the paradigm of language socialization (Duranti, Ochs, Schieffelin, 2012) - where acquisition of language(s) is viewed as a part of socialization (and socialization as a process based to a great extent on language interactions) - and particularly by its revealing insights into the process of language shift (Kulick 1992, Paugh 2012), we have started a research on language socialization of children in three different Czech Romani families. In these families we are doing videorecordings of common interaction with children, make further interviews and observations, focusing on "socialization through the use of language and socialization to use language".