‘You don’t know how to say cow in Polish’. – Co-creating and navigating language ideological assemblages in a linguistically diverse kindergarten in Germany

ABSTRACT

This study examines how language ideologies are negotiated and navigated in a linguistically diverse kindergarten group in Germany, focusing on the multilingual language practices of teachers and children. Drawing on data generated during 3months of focused linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse situations in which children and teachers actively include languages other than German into the kindergarten discourse through, e.g. translation requests, switches to family languages, and references to family languages. An ethnomethodological approach is adopted to trace how participants locally assign meanings to different languages and language use in interaction. The findings show that teachers and children express various, at times opposing language ideologies, leading to the dynamic formation of language ideological assemblages. Children position themselves in these assemblages by reworking them and/or foregrounding different aspects of their own multilingual identifications.

KEYWORDS:

• Language Ideologies
• Early Childhood Education and Care
• Child Interaction
• Language Education
• Multilingualism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Leonie Cornips and Gunther De Vogelaer as well as three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Many thanks to the guest editors, Verena Platzgummer and Nadja Thoma, for their helpful guidance and their dedication to this Special Issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since data generation was focused on one specific group in the kindergarten where consent had been established, no exact numbers for the whole kindergarten are known.

2 The programme ‘Sprach-KiTas: Weil Sprache der Schlüssel zur Welt ist’ (‘Language kindergartens: because language is the key to the world’, own translation) ran between January 2016 and June 2023 until the Federal Ministry for Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth cut their subsidies for this important domain.

3 All names of participants and the group name have been pseudonomysed.

4 German is translated to English. The Russian resource ‘arbuz’ is left in the original.

5 Tom’s family languages include Polish, so that it is possible that he is familiar with the lexical item arbuz, probably in contrast to his friend Emil.

6 Speech that originally occurred in English is bolded.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovationprogramme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847596.