“ <i>Nosotros participamos de todos los trabajos de la iglesia</i> ”: Venezuelan young migrants’ linguistic investment and language socialisation within a religious community in Brazil

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the role of religious participation in language acquisition by analyzing the experiences of two young Venezuelan refugees in Brazil. Utilizing an ethnographic approach, we examine how their involvement in a religious community facilitates linguistic socialization beyond the school environment. The corpus of data includes field notes, classroom interactions, worksheets, and multimedia shared over WhatsApp. Following a grounded theory methodological approach, we reconstruct the narrative of the arrival and settlement of the two participants in Brazil, and their efforts at expanding their circles of socialisation. We conclude that their engagement with the church is not only due to the two young people’s refugee situation and economic and social vulnerability, but an agentive response to the lack of opportunities for linguistic socialisation available to them at school. In addition, our study suggests that schools and secular institutions could learn valuable lessons from religious communities, particularly in terms of providing spaces and resources to foster creativity and expression for refugee students. We advocate for further research to investigate how religious institutions can promote migrant integration policies and linguistic practices, especially in the context of the recent phenomenon of Venezuelan diaspora in Brazil and broader South-South migration trends.