Children’s language creativity, emergent performativity, and heteroglossia in multilingual educational settings

The number of children spending their time in multilingual educational environments where a cultural variety of languages are used has been rapidly growing in recent decades. By offering spaces for children to socialize with other children, educational settings in particular are crucial social arenas for children to develop social relations across ethnic and linguistic boundaries and where adult authorities provide learning spaces for children to develop language, particularly majority languages. The eight papers in this special issue build on and add to recent research that proposes Bakhtin’s notions of heteroglossia and multivoicedness as gateways into exploring the dynamic, culturally contingent dimensions of children’s language creativity, language use, and language socialization in culturally and linguistically diverse settings.