Learning Language, Transforming Knowledge investigates the relationships among language shift, urbanization, and social change in the lives of Amdo Tibetan children. Amdo, the easternmost region of greater Tibet, is today incorporated into the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu. The homeland of a Tibetic language, also known as Amdo, this region has historically seen extensive language contact spurred by population movement. Since the 1990s, however, rapid urbanization has changed the ideological scale through which language contact is positioned from local to national, leading to the widespread use of Mandarin. The adoption of Mandarin has been facilitated by political and economic changes that destabilize long-standing Amdo modes of identification through language, homeland, and kinship. This host of changes has therefore provoked an ideological shift, redefining the contours of belonging among Amdo people by reformatting place-based ethnolinguistic identities. This dissertation is based on fifteen months of ethnographic and linguistic research that documented the language acquisition and socialization of young Amdo children ages one through four, growing up in this period of social change. This research involved recording, transcribing, and analyzing young Amdo children's everyday interactions with family members and peers, in both rural and urban settings. This joint ethnographic and linguistic analysis first locates the links among language shift to Mandarin, urbanization, and social change within everyday family interactions. In so doing, it attends to children's everyday uses of language as a form of cultural knowledge. By examining children's emergent knowledge through language use, this analysis traces the interactive mechanisms that contribute to the transmission or loss of Amdo linguistic structures. In examining how children, themselves, form new place-based identities through interaction, it advances understanding of the relationship between linguistic structure and social change. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]