Bilingualismus / Mehrsprachigkeit
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Aims and objectives:
Language debates in Latvia often focus on the role of Latvian as official and main societal language. Yet, Latvian society is highly multilingual, and families with home languages other than Latvian have to choose between different educational trajectories for their children. In this context, this paper discusses the results of two studies which addressed the question of why families with Russian as a home language choose (pre)schools with languages other than Russian as medium of instruction (MOI). The first study analyses family narratives which provide insight into attitudes and practices which lead to the decision to send children to Latvian-MOI institutions. The second study investigates language attitudes and practices by families in the international community of Riga German School.
Methodology:
The paper discusses data gathered during two studies: for the first, semi-structed interviews were conducted with Russian-speaking families who choose Latvian-medium schools for their children. For the second study, a survey was carried out in the community of an international school in Riga, sided by ethnographic observations and interviews with teachers and the school leadership.
Data and analysis:
Interviews and ethnographic observations were subjected to a discourse analysis with a focus on critical events and structures of life trajectory narratives. Survey data were processed following simple statistical analysis and qualitative content analysis.
Findings/conclusions:
Our data reveal that families highly embrace multilingualism and see the development of individual plurilingualism as important for integration into Latvian society as well as for educational and professional opportunities in the multilingual societies of Latvia and Europe. At the same time, multilingualism and multiculturalism, including Russian, are seen as a value in itself. In addition, our studies reflect the bidirectionality of family language policies in interplay with practices in educational institutions: family decisions influence children’s language acquisition at school, but the school also has an impact on the families’ language practices at home. In sum, we argue that educational policies should therefore pay justice to the wishes of families in Latvia to incorporate different language aspects into individual educational trajectories.
Originality:
Language policy is a frequent topic of investigation in the Baltic states. However, there has been a lack in research on family language policy and school choices. In this vein, our paper adds to the understanding of educational choices and language policy processes among Russian-speaking families and the international community in Latvia.
Our paper discusses family language policies among multilingual families in Latvia with Russian as home language. The presentation is based on three case studies, i.e. interviews conducted with Russophones who have chosen to send their children to Latvian-medium pre-schools and schools. The main aim is to understand practices and regards among such families “from below,” i.e. which family-internal and family-external factors influenced the choice of Latvian-medium education and what impact this choice has on linguistic practices.
The paper shows that there have been critical events which both encouraged and discouraged the choice of Latvian-medium education. The wish to integrate into mainstream society has been met by obstacles both from ethnic Russians and Latvians. Yet, the three families consider their choices to be the right ones for the future development of their children in a multiethnic Latvia in which Latvian serves as the unifying language of society.
“Linguistic Landscapes” (LL) is a research method which has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this paper, we will first explain the method itself and discuss some of its fundamental assumptions. We will then recall the basic traits of multilingualism in the Baltic States, before presenting results from our project carried out together with a group of Master students of Philology in several medium-sized towns in the Baltic States, focussing on our home town of Rēzekne in the highly multilingual region of Latgale in Eastern Latvia. In the discussion of some of the results, we will introduce the concept of “Legal Hypercorrection” as a term for the stricter compliance of language laws than necessary. The last part will report on advantages of LL for educational purposes of multilingualism, and for developing discussions on multilingualism among the general public.
Our current era of globalization is characterized above all by increased mobility, namely by the increasing mobility of people and the development of new communication technologies, including the mobility of linguistic signs and resources. This process raises new theoretical and methodological questions in linguistics, which results in the development of a new sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) in recent years. One of the most obvious ways to trace this new and dynamic development is to analyze individual language repertoires, especially those of migrants. In this essay, I examine aspects of the communicative repertoire of a refugee who fled to Germany in 2015 to escape the civil war in Syria. I draw on two interviews I conducted with him (in the following I refer to him by the pseudonym „Baran“). The first interview with Baran was recorded in 2016, a few months after his arrival in Germany. The second interview is from 2023, seven years later. In both recordings, German was the dominant language of interaction. I will analyze and show the characteristics of his German at the beginning of his immigration, how he resorts to practices of language mixing between German, Turkish and English (which has recently also been referred to as translanguaging) and how his German has developed over the course of the past seven years.
In long-standing language contact situations, SLA mechanisms can account for changes in LI. While it is obvious that LI influence on L2 can be accounted for as a transfer effect, I postulate that SLA effects are responsible for certain aspects of L2 influence on LI as well. This is transparent if early stages of SLA are compared to early stages of language contact: what is affected most in both cases is the lexicon. Examples are drawn from Pennsylvania German, a German-based language spoken in the USA and in contact with American English (AE) for c. 300 years. The data imply that the conceptual matrix of the Speakers’ minds has shifted from German to AE, resulting in constructions that can be traced to AE, while the conscious language choice is still German. This conceptual shift relates to a stage in SLA, when the learner begins to get a grasp of the internal systematicity of the L2 and reduces the transfer of structural LI material to L2, i.e. the beginning of a structuralization process in the learner’s interlanguage. The quality and sequence of the “invading” material in language contact is strikingly similar to the sequence of the material composed in the process of SLA, implying a close relationship
between the two processes.
Opening/Eröffnung/Aperture
(2012)
This chapter introduces readers to the context and concept of this volume. It starts by providing an historical overview of languages and multilingualism in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, highlighting the 100th anniversary of statehood which the three Baltic states are celebrating in 2018. Then, the chapter briefly presents important strands of research on multilingualism in the region throughout the past decades; in particular, questions about language policies and the status of the national languages (Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian) and Russian. It also touches on debates about languages in education and the roles of other languages such as the regional languages of Latgalian and Võro and the changing roles of international languages such as English and German. The chapter concludes by providing short summaries of the contributions to this book.
The authors are pleased to present to the readers of the Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft a Special Issue in honor of Rosemarie Tracy.
Contents:
0. Frontmatter
1. Petra Schulz, Ira Gawlitzek, Angelika Wöllstein: Introduction, S. 1
2. Natascha Müller: Different sources of delay and acceleration in early child bilingualism, S. 7
3. Hubert Haider, Christina Schörghofer-Essl, Karin Seethaler: Quantifying kids prefer intersecting sets - a pilot study, S. 31
4. Petra Schulz, Rabea Schwarze: How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI, S. 51
5. Monika Rothweiler, Manuela Schönenberger, Franziska Sterner: Subject-verb agreement in German in bilingual children with and without SLI, S. 79
6. Holger Hopp: The processing of English which-questions in adult L2 learners: Effects of L1 transfer and proficiency, S. 107
7. Oksana Laleko, Maria Polinsky: Silence is difficult: On missing elements in bilingual grammars, S. 135
8. Artemis Alexiadou: Building verbs in language mixing varieties, S. 165