Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse (review)

Blum-Kulka accomplishes an impressively thorough analysis of one rich speech event—the family dinner—in three distinct yet intersecting communities: Jewish American, native-born Israeli, and American immigrants to Israel. Twenty-four middle-to upper-middle-class, nonobservant families with university-educated parents and at least two children welcomed a participant researcher to videotape their family dinners. This book is a model of comparative analysis, focusing on cultural differences, on enculturation of immigrants, and on pragmatic socialization, defined as ‘the ways in which children are socialized to use language in context in socially and culturally appropriate ways’ (3). B-K understands family dinners to be a site for both socialization and sociability. Using discourse analysis of the dinner talk, contextualized with family histories and demographic profiles, and supplemented by interviews with the families about their attitudes and beliefs related to pragmatic socialization through talk, B-K is able to identify the common characteristics of the speech event as well as demonstrate cultural differences.

Sociability is demonstrated in talk at dinner through introducing topics, developing themes, and telling stories. While children are active participants in all three cultural settings, native and American Israeli mothers dominate adult turns at talk while it is fathers at Jewish American tables who talk more. Cultural differences emerge in the comparison of conversational narratives. Jewish Americans emphasize ‘today stories’ (109) and manifest ownership rights to stories through monologue delivery of both personal and shared events. In contrast, native-born Israelis construct both personal and shared narratives polyphonically and tell more stories about the past.

Socialization is demonstrated through politeness and metapragmatic discourse. Polite speech is held as an important aspect of pragmatic socialization in all three groups, but values for politeness vary according to different values associated with power, solidarity, face, convention, and the Israeli value of dugri, or straightforward way of speaking. B-K finds that the American Jewish parents tend toward the use of conventional politeness and negotiation of children’s requests while native Israeli parents frequently refuse their children’s requests outright and use solidarity politeness, where direct speech is mitigated through the use of nicknames.

The immigrant American Israelis are uniquely successful in maintaining bilingualism in the Israeli setting where the prestige of speaking English mitigates the effects of national pressure toward Hebrew. English is the home language, and dinner talk in immigrant households demonstrates interesting bidirectional language socialization as the children tend to be better speakers of Hebrew than their parents. The codeswitching that takes place at these family dinners also engenders a great deal of metapragmatic communication.

Throughout her presentation and analysis, B-K is unfailingly clear and brings in an appropriately wide array of theoretical modes to interpret her rich data. She grounds her interpretations in both qualitative and quantitative presentations of her data and is especially careful in accounting for the multiple aspects of the observer effect. The result is a strong and convincing book which is a wonderful model for what crosscultural and crosslinguistic work can accomplish.