Speakers
Description
South Tyrol represents an interesting case of institutionalised multilingualism, structured around the coexistence of German, Italian, and Ladin as minority and official languages. In recent decades, this minority context has increasingly intersected with new dynamics of migration, transforming the region into a multilingual migration society. The presence of additional heritage languages in families and schools, raises new questions about language maintenance and the negotiation of linguistic hierarchies.
This paper explores how families and educational institutions orient to heritage languages and which language ideologies guide these orientations by drawing on a year-long multi-sited ethnographic study (Marcus, 1995) conducted with families and a local primary school. The ethnography focuses on the transition period from kindergarten to primary school as a critical institutional moment in which expectations about language and future trajectories of multilingualism are articulated and negotiated. This transition constitutes a key site where families’ linguistic resources encounter school-based norms (Gogolin, 2008) and ideologies, with concrete consequence for everyday language practices.
Theoretically, the study is grounded in third-wave sociolinguistics and speaker-centred approaches (Eckert, 2019; Busch, 2017), conceptualising multilingualism as dynamic and socially situated (Schnitzer, 2018). Raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) are shown to play a central role in shaping which linguistic resources are perceived as legitimate, desirable, or “problematic” within educational settings, influencing how children’s repertoires are evaluated, how parents assess the risks and benefits of heritage language maintenance, and how schools position linguistic diversity.
By foregrounding heritage language maintenance in a migratory minority context, this paper contributes to debates on multilingualism and linguistic hierarchies in border regions. The guiding research question is: How do language ideologies shape the positioning and maintenance of migrant heritage languages in South Tyrol’s multilingual context?
Literature
Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben – the lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics, 38(3), 340–358. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv030
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149
Gogolin, I. (2008). Der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule. Waxmann.
Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117.
Schnitzer, A. (2017). Mehrsprachigkeit als soziale Praxis: (Re-)Konstruktionen von Differenz und Zugehörigkeit unter Jugendlichen im mehrsprachigen Kontext.Beltz Juventa.