Louward Allen Zubiri - "Emergent Multilingualism Among Bikolano Children"
Early exposure to multiple languages is common in multilingual multicultural Philippines, where two official languages and over 170 vernaculars coexist. Children grow up surrounded by this diverse linguistic input, yet they typically develop dominance only in the languages actively maintained within their immediate environments. Drawing on key findings from a longitudinal study of Child Bikol (Zubiri, 2024; Zubiri, 2021–), this talk presents case studies of Bikolano children’s language development within their typical multilingual repertoires. By combining methods from language documentation and language acquisition research, I show how we can better understand the processes of early multilingual development. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for heritage language maintenance, language pedagogy, and efforts to decolonize Southeast Asian linguistics.
Louward Allen Zubiri is Lector in Filipino at Yale University. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Multilingual Multicultural Professional Practice. His research focuses on the documentation, acquisition, and revitalization of Austronesian languages and writing systems, particularly in endangered and heritage contexts.