Childly Language

Childly Language explores how cultural assumptions about children and childhood are expressed in contemporary English - drawing on a wide range of sources, including newspapers, children's fiction, radio discussions, public notices and the British National Corpus. Alison Sealey also investigates the extent to which children can be thought of as a linguistically distinct group by reviewing the major traditions in research on children and language, and exploring how the social status of being a child is represented in children's talk. By using a combination of data about children and data produced by children, Childly Language demonstrates the connections between the distribution of power in the social world, children's own use of language, and the language we use about children.