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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1353

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

Linguistic diversity in the unilingual courtroom. Exploring an urban contradiction from a biographical point of view.

Authors: Slezak, Gabriele
Submitted by: Slezak, Gabriele (University of Vienna, Austria)

Transcultural courtroom interaction is clearly asymmetric in character and usually associated with complex language practices. Due to diversified socio-cultural backgrounds, familiar frames of reference may turn dysfunctional and need re-evaluation (Eades 2008). In this highly demanding setting, mutual recognition of the participants’ linguistic resources and competences can be seen as a prerequisite for meaningful communication (Maryns 2006).

My contribution will draw on empirical data from a transdisciplinary research project in Vienna, Austria, which focuses on courtroom interaction between migrants of a complex translocal linguistic background and judges as representatives of a unilingual judiciary. This project is based on a biographical approach. By means of drawing language portraits and carrying out narrative interviews its aim is to establish the participants’ individual language biographies and thus bringing the applicable linguistic repertoires to the fore (Busch 2010). In my talk I will bring together and juxtapose selected biographical features as well as underlying assumptions, beliefs and attitudes towards language use of both migrants and judges.

The overall results show that courtroom talk in a linguistically diverse urban context is highly influenced by the individual agents’ own long-term experience (socialization) with language regimes and power relations regulating language use. From this follows that repeated feelings of rejection, communication failure or speechlessness, for example, directly affect the mobilization of one’s own repertoire as well as the recognition of one’s counterpart’s resources.

The results also show that the applicable repertoires contrast starkly with the strong constraints which are predominant in Austrian courtroom talk. In these circumstances the decision makers often added further to already existing constraints by a simple act of non-recognition or unnaming, i.e. declassifying migrants’ language resources as „vernaculars“ or „non standard varieties“ and thus making them virtually irrelevant. The involved migrants also frequently underestimated the consequences of adapting to the dominant unilingual language ideology deployed by the courts. Making the participants’ communicative resources mutually visible may be seen as a first step towards the recognition and mobilization of heteroglossic repertoires, leading eventually to more equality in Austrian courts.

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

Eades, D. 2008. Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control, Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Maryns, K. 2006. The Asylum Speaker, Manchester et al.: St Jerome Publishing.