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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton August 24, 2016

Learning to live with “Languages”

  • Janus Spindler Møller

    Janus Spindler Møller is associate professor at the Department of Nordic Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is part of the LANCHART center (Language Change in Real Time) where he specialized in longitudinal studies combining different types of sociolinguistic methods. Currently he is co-leading the project “Everyday Languaging” where a cohort of informants is followed throughout their ten year long school career. His main fields of interests are languaging, polylingualism, enregisterment, reflexivity, and language ideology. He has published in, e.g., International Journal of Multilingualism, Acta Linguistica, Linguistics and Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Discourse, Context & Media, Diversities, and Language in Society.

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Abstract

In this paper I describe how a group of speakers participating in a longitudinal study develop patterns of linguistic practices as well as norms for their use over time. The group at issue consists of speakers with a Turkish minority background living in Denmark. Data were collected from this group during their nine years of compulsory school and again in their mid-twenties. From a very early age this group of speakers acquires linguistic repertoires which involve features associated with several “languages”, of which the most influential are Turkish and Danish. I will show how they develop ways of employing large parts of those repertoires in their languaging practices and how at the same time they increasingly express an awareness of the fact that they are living in languagised world. I will do so by analysing instances where the participants explicitly refer to languages in peer group interactions, discuss observations concerning patterns of languaging in the same types of interactions, and consider the development of both phenomena.

About the author

Janus Spindler Møller

Janus Spindler Møller is associate professor at the Department of Nordic Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is part of the LANCHART center (Language Change in Real Time) where he specialized in longitudinal studies combining different types of sociolinguistic methods. Currently he is co-leading the project “Everyday Languaging” where a cohort of informants is followed throughout their ten year long school career. His main fields of interests are languaging, polylingualism, enregisterment, reflexivity, and language ideology. He has published in, e.g., International Journal of Multilingualism, Acta Linguistica, Linguistics and Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Discourse, Context & Media, Diversities, and Language in Society.

Transcription key:

<…>

Overlapping speech

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Pause of less than 0.5 second

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Inaudible word(s)

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Translation to English

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Comments and explanations

recte

Linguistic features associated (by the author) with Turkish

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Linguistic features associated (by the author) with Danish

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Linguistic features associated (by the author) with English

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Published Online: 2016-8-24
Published in Print: 2016-9-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

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