Kinship, seniority, and rights to know in Datooga children's everyday interaction

This paper explores the epistemics of social relations among Datooga-speaking children of rural Tanzania. It describes two linguistic resources for epistemic management in the Datooga language, namely, questions and an epistemic particle néadá. The paper then investigates children's use of these two resources in a 3.5 h sample of children's spontaneous interaction, taken from a video corpus. Questions often establish epistemic asymmetries by positioning addressees as more knowledgeable, while use of the particle néadá projects speech participants' equal rights to know, typically in emphatic contrast to the epistemic implications of an earlier turn. Of special interest is how children's negotiation of rights to know reveals sensitivity to social relations, particularly those defined by kinship and age. Though by no means ever-present, concepts of kinship and seniority are made relevant in these children's interactions. Children oriented to kinship relations when deferring to other people's rights to know about their own kin, and they positioned speech participants in junior–senior relationships when requesting generalizable knowledge. The paper contributes to empirical research on children's everyday language use with insights from a rural African community. •The Datooga epistemic particle néadá indexes equal access to knowledge.•In the children's speech sample, questions played only a minor role and néadá rarely occurred.•Children direct general knowledge questions to their seniors.•Children's linguistic negotiation of knowledge reveals sensitivity to kinship relations.