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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 926

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

When speakers of translocal heteroglossic repertoires encounter monolingual environments

Authors: Busch, Brigitta
Submitted by: Busch, Brigitta (Universität Wien, Austria)

Biographical migration-related narratives often refer to an indispensable adaptation to unfamiliar language regimes. This usually includes a re-evalutation of available communicative resources which make up an individual’s linguistic repertoire. Such a process has often been described as stressful, especially when migration is linked to traumatic experience. Under these circumstances, language ideologies which emphasize the importance of a single unitary language can aggravate feelings of displacement and powerlessness.

My contribution draws on empirical data from a transdisciplinary research project in Vienna, Austria. It focuses on how speakers with complex translocal repertoires experience encounters with public institutions that mainly deploy a monolingual habitus. In this project, we have taken a biographical approach which includes multimodal language portraits – i. e., representations of an individual’s linguistic repertoire through creative drawings and metalinguistic commentary (Busch 2010) – as well as extensive biographical interviews.

In the first part of my contribution I will focus on the notion of linguistic repertoire which is one of the key concepts in language biography research. This concept was originally developed by Gumperz (1960) within an interactional framework. Re-examining this concept from a poststructuralist point of view, allows to account for the fluidity of linguistic practices in contemporary urban environments as well as for the power of languages as discursively or ideologically constructed categories.

The second part of my contribution will deal with specific aspects of the representation of linguistic repertoires in biographical narratives of displacement: How can we link particular ways of speaking to stressful or traumatising experience? How can the non-recognition of translocal heteroglossic repertoires by monolingually oriented public institutions cause additional stress and feelings of powerlessness? How can individual linguistic resources be mobilized as a source of resilience? 

Busch, B. 2010. Die Macht präbabylonischer Phantasien. Ressourcenorientiertes sprachbiographisches Arbeiten. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik  40(160), 58-82.

Gumperz, J. J. 1960. Formal and Informal Standards in Hindi Regional Language Area (with C. M. Naim). In C. A. Ferguson & J. J. Gumperz (eds.), Linguistic diversity in South Asia, Vol. III, 92-118. Bloomington: RCAPF-P, International Journal of American Linguistics 26(3).