«So-Reden und Anders-Reden»

In collaboration with student researchers from the QUIMS school in Stettbach (secondary school; QUIMS = quality in multicultural schools) – i.e. students who actively contribute to the project work – the project, led by Prof. Dr. Marie-Luis Merten and Prof. Dr. Barbara Sonnenhauser, investigates the everyday multilingualism of young people in characteristic school, youth language and family contexts.

The core objectives of the project are

1. to enrich existing statistical surveys on multilingualism in Switzerland by adding an emic dimension – i.e. an internal perspective – and to fill them with life, so to speak,
2. to gain a detailed insight into the multimodal diversity of multilingual everyday life of young people, and
3. to set questions and approaches of multilingual actors and their multidimensional perspective on multilingual spaces relevant. 

The project thus aims to gain insights into lived multilingualism from the perspective of the young actors. The focus is less on questions of language competence, but rather on the perception of, the view on and the handling of language(s), i.e. the subjective experience of written as well as spoken languages in context. The central research questions therefore refer to the researching students’ concept of multilingualism: What do they understand by multilingualism? What contexts, forms and functions of multilingualism do they make relevant? Actors thus become researchers, shaping and reflecting – under scientific supervision – the research process, which in turn yields insights into how multilingualism is dealt with and indications of attitudes towards language(s). In previous research, attitudes are predominantly investigated in a survey-based and quantitatively oriented way, rather rarely derived from linguistic behavior and linked back to the lifeworld of the social actors. In particular, the questions to what extent a context defined as monolingual/multilingual by linguists is also perceived as such by language users and which concrete strategies are used to orient oneself in an environment perceived as multilingual have not yet been answered. Another research gap is the extent to which the attitudes of the social environment towards "multilinguals" – especially the weighting of languages of origin vs. school languages – influences these perceptions and strategies.