Multilingualism Among Poles in Norway: Trilingual Repertoires, Multifaceted Experiences
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Multilingualism among Poles in Norway: Trilingual repertoires, multifaceted experiences Abstract: This article examines multilingual repertoires of adult and adolescent Poles living in Norway. The study draws on language portraits and interviews conducted with 14 adults and 12 adolescents living in and around Oslo. The article first discusses multilingualism of the research participants through an analysis of the 26 portraits and then zooms in on the drawings and interview data provided by one family in order to shed light on the ways the participants experience and construct the roles of their different linguistic resources. The study demonstrates that, in general, the research participants are multilingual and that three languages in particular – Polish, English and Norwegian – form an important part of their repertoires. The findings suggest that these linguistic resources and the roles they take on in the individual repertoires, however, might be experienced very differently by the participants. Furthermore, the analysis points to the existence of competing language ideologies among the researched cohort. Keywords: Multlingualism, Polish transnationals, language portrait, linguistic repertoires, language ideologies Word count: 8284 1 1. Introduction The recent socio-political changes in central and Eastern Europe resulted in an intensification of both short and long-term migration from Poland. Many Polish transnationals choose Norway as the country of destination due to its geographical proximity and favourable working conditions. Since 2008 the Poles have been the biggest minority in the country and, according to recent statistics, there are around 100 000 Polish transnationals currently living in Norway (SSB 2017). Despite the big numbers, the Polish community in Norway remains largely under-researched from a sociolinguistic perspective (cf. Bygdås, 2016; Friberg & Golden, 2014; Kraft, 2016). The aim of this article is to provide knowledge on multilingual repertoires of adult and teenage Polish transnationals living in Norway and to shed light on how the participants experience and relate to their multilingualism, focusing in particular on the ideological dimension of their accounts. To this end, the article first provides general findings of the analysis of 26 language portraits drawn by Polish transnationals living in Norway and then moves on to discussing portraits and their descriptions as constructed by one transnational family in an interview situation. 2. Linguistic repertoires and language ideologies Recent sociolinguistic research tends to understand personal multilingualism as a collection of different linguistic and semiotic resources rather than a high level of competence in several ‘languages’ (Blommaert, 2010; Bristowe et al., 2014). This line of thinking brings to the fore the notion of linguistic repertoire, originating in the ideas of Hymes (1966) and Gumperz (1964), and recently developed by e.g. Blommaert (2010), Blommaert & Backus (2013) and Busch (2012). Employing the notion of linguistic repertoire, sociolinguistics moves away from focusing on languages as abstract, idealized entities and explores instead the actual communicative resources which people employ in their daily lives. 2 The individual’s linguistic repertoire is tightly connected to their biography and reflects the dynamics of one’s life trajectories and peculiarities of experience – that is, linguistic resources enter one’s repertoire at different stages of life, for different purposes and to different degrees. However, as noted by Busch (2012), linguistic repertoires do not only encompass the past and the present but also denote the future through imagination and desire related to language. According to Blommaert (2010:102), the resources in one’s repertoire may belong to various ‘languages’ and include varieties, registers, accents, genres, modalities (writing, speaking, etc.) and pragmatic skills but also traces of hegemonic discourses and language ideologies (cf. Busch 2012). Kroskrity (2010: 192) defines language ideologies as sets of ‘beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language structure and use which often index the political economic interests of individual speakers, ethnic and other interest groups and nation states’. This definition stresses the social dimension of language ideologies and points to the fact that language ideologies are in fact not solely about ‘language’ but have a very rich indexical potential and, being socially and politically embedded, are closely tied to questions of identity, power and hierarchies (Blackledge, 2000; Gal & Irvine, 2000; Woolard, 1998). As the underlying force of linguistic categorization, language ideologies prompt speakers to differentiate linguistic varieties, attach (contrasting) indexical values to them and create essentialising links between varieties spoken and typical activities associated with them, as well as the social identities of the speakers (cf. Blackledge, 2000; Gal & Irvine, 2000; Woolard, 1998). As such they are crucial for understanding the ways speakers perceive, experience, construct and express their linguistic repertoires and thus are essential for this study. 3. Participants, method and data The data for this study were generated during interviews with 26 Poles living in Norway: 14 adults aged 35 – 50 and 12 adolescents aged 13-19. All participants were born in Poland and 3 had lived there at least 4 years prior to migration. They all had been living in Norway between 1-12 years at the time when the research was conducted and thus could be classified as representatives of the most recent Polish migration wave to Norway (cf. Friberg & Golden, 2014). The participants were recruited for a larger project investigating multilingualism in Polish families in Norway through snowball sampling (Hoffman, 2013), whereby an initial contact in the community helped recruit other participants. The participants were members of 9 families and representatives of two generations. All participants were living in/around the capital, Oslo, and were either working or pursuing secondary education in public schools. All participants claimed high levels of proficiency in Polish and reported it to be the main language used at home. The data set consists of 26 language portraits and ca. 21 hours recorded semi-structured interviews. At the beginning of each interview the participants were given a blank silhouette of a body (figure 1) and a set of colourful pens. The instruction was to reflect on the languages and ways of speaking which are relevant in their lives, which were relevant for them in the past, which they see as relevant for their future and to represent them on the body silhouette provided. Thereafter, the participants were asked to explain the drawing to the researcher. The interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 2.5 hours and were conducted at the convenience of the participants. This meant that some of them took place at home with all family members present, while others were conducted at cafés and cafeterias with individual family members. The interview topics included multilingualism in the participants’ families and lives, as well as their migration experiences. Figure 1 The data analysis involved several steps. Firstly, the drawings were analysed as a separate data set in order to capture general trends in the ways the researched cohort represented 4 their multilingualism. The analysis of the portraits was inspired by Rose, (2016) compositional interpretation of pictures adapted to the needs of the research and was guided by the questions: what languages and ways of speaking do the participants represent in their portraits? How are the languages and ways of speaking represented in the drawings (colours, symbols, etc.)? How are the drawings organised spatially? Secondly, the individual portraits were scrutinised against the backdrop of the verbal descriptions in order to verify the researcher’s understanding of the visual data. The third step involved a detailed interpretive analysis of interview excerpts describing the language portraits produced by one family, whom I introduce in detail in section 5. It needs to be noted that neither the interview data nor the language portraits can be treated as factual representations of participants’ linguistic repertoires and language practices. As noted by de Bres (2017), the accounts which we are able to access thanks to the drawing tasks are subjective and situational but nevertheless shed light on the relationships of the multilingual individuals towards their languages. Here, they are understood as co-constructions achieved between the researcher and the interviewees in the concrete interview situation (Busch, 2012a, 2016; de Bres, 2017; Purkarthofer Judith, 2017). 4. Participants’ multilingualism and its representations The analysis of the language portraits showed that the participants are and/or aspire to be very multilingual. Altogether, 20 different languages were represented in the portraits, while individual participants mentioned between three and eleven languages as relevant in their lives. It needs to be stressed that the participants did not necessarily have competence in the different languages they named but that they, for one reason or another, found them important (e.g. a given language was the first language of a partner or a friend, or simply a language they would like to learn in the future). That said, most of the participants used two or three languages daily and all of the 26 drawings included Polish,