“I’m Bigger!”

Abstract

Pre-school age children in European contexts are known to use labels like ‘big’ and ‘small’ to orient to age differences, very often to highlight differences in physical and social competence (Häll 2022). This research report explores Datooga-speaking Tanzanian children’s use of a set of polysemous words that can refer to physical size, age, and kinship-based seniority: háw ‘big, old, senior’, mánàng’ ‘small, young, junior’, and deen ‘be equal to in size or age’. Based on a video corpus of everyday interaction, the paper singles out these size-related terms to assess the extent to which children engage with lexicalized concepts relating to size and seniority. Results show that while young Datooga children pay a lot of attention to physical size, in my data children’s only orientations to age and seniority using these terms occurred in conversations with adults. Unlike Datooga adults and Swedish preschoolers, Datooga children in early to middle childhood were not observed using size-based terms as a resource for negotiating (and leveraging) age difference.

Keywords

• age
• language socialization
• Tanzania
• social relations
• Africa