Transition space medium repair: Language shift talked into being

By maintaining that, for RLS (reversing language shift) to be possible, “…face-to-face, small-scale social life must be pursued in its own right and focused upon directly”, Fishman (1991:4) calls on researchers to focus on actual interactional practices through which language shift is accomplished by way of contributing to language maintenance. This paper is a step in this direction. It investigates a language choice practice, referred to as transition space medium repair, I have observed in the Rwandan community in Belgium. In this community, language shift is currently underway from Kinyarwanda–French bilingualism to monolingualism in French. The specific practice this paper investigates consists of the fact that, in interaction with children, adult members of the community switch from Kinyarwanda to French at transition relevance places (TRP) in first pair parts (FPP) of adjacency pair sequences, this switch systematically leading to the adoption of French as the medium for the ensuing sequence. In the paper, I describe transition space medium repair as an interactional object and argue that, through it, members of the Rwandan community in Belgium accomplish language shift, talk it into being.