Trilingual repertoires, multifaceted experiences: multilingualism among Poles in Norway

ABSTRACT

This article examines the 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

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Family X for sharing their time and thoughts with me. I am also very grateful to Bente Ailin Svendsen, Ana Deumert and Crispin Thurlow for close reading and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme (project number 223265), and MultiFam (project number 240725).