Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 734

Part of Session 158: Language biographies and migration experiences in urban contexts (Other abstracts in this session)

‘Becoming multilingual in urban contexts’ seen through Language Biography lenses

Authors: Franceschini, Rita
Submitted by: Franceschini, Rita (Free University of Bozen, Italy)

Biographical approaches grant a detailed insight into people’s subjective experiences, but this truism reveals methodological difficulties when it comes to biographical narrations.

This contribution is based on a corpus of language biographies collected in different parts of Europe. It will focus on aspects of the process of ‘becoming multilingual’ in urban contexts, i.e. how the surrounding multilingualism in cities has been exploited for language acquisition and has boosted the development of a finely-tuned language awareness.

The narratives examined are valuable not only in giving accounts of a lifetime’s language contact: the analysis of the mode, type and choice of language of narration is in itself a challenge. The narrations are not regarded as essentialist: the expression of attitudes, for example, has to be taken as an interactional achievement; in the same way the relationship to the urban context is an interactional work, ‘making plausible’ to the interviewer the own experiences.

Since our data are based on in-depth narrative interviews (following F. Schütze’s framework 1987) we have to deal mostly with intertwined perspectives:

1) the interactional relationship between narrator and interviewer: the narrator is the expert, the interviewer is mainly back-chanelling;

2) the narrator perceives the content of his/her story as almost completely subjective, whereas an external person can tend to see the individual narration as a prototype;

3) the type of narration is culturally sensitive: telling one’s own story is wrapped up in different styles and is dependent on who the story is being told to;

4) in going back and forth through a transcript, the analysis itself offers a time-independent, permitting detailed insight;

5) the analysis of a large quantity of interviews allows to see inter-individual regularities, which the individual narrator cannot be aware of.

These methodological considerations require an increased awareness of the high sensitivity involved in the careful handling of such intimate narrations.

Our contribution will first focus briefly on methodology, then discuss the role of urban contexts: the narrations of these highly multilingual contexts will be taken as one example of how people make sense of their multivariate experiences. We will then indicate that the shaping forces and social embeddedness of these narratives can be seen through the lenses of a language biography.

Finally, we will question the extent to which these narrations are individually constructed, and how much they reflect and/or contribute to collective representations; in our specific case: the collective representation of multilingual urban areas.

References:

Busch, B./Busch, T.: „Die Sprache davor. Zur Imagination eines Sprechens jenseits gesellschaftlich-nationaler Zuordnungen“, in: Bürger-Koftis, M./ Schweiger, H./ Vlasta, S. (Hg.): Polyphonie. Mehrsprachigkeit und literarische Kreativität. Wien 2010.

Franceschini, R./Miecznikowski, J. (Hg.), Leben mit mehreren Sprachen. Vivre avec plusieurs langues. Sprachbiographien – Biographies langagières, Bern 2004.

— (Hg.), Sprache und Biographie, LiLi-Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 40/160 (2010).

Schütze, F., Das narrative Interview in Interaktionsfeldstudien.Hagen 1987.

Stevenson P. / Jenny C., Language and social change in Central Europe: discourses on policy, identity and the German language, Edinburgh 2010.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

‘Becoming multilingual in urban contexts’ seen through Language Biography lenses