Language in Motion

Wider research context/ theoretical framework
Multilingual biographies in the context of forced displacement raise specific issues regarding the relation of language and media use. Central to this study is the generation who fled with their parents as children and grew up in Austria due to the breakout of war in Ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This project is situated within sociolinguistics of globalisation and media sociolinguistics. The key analytic concept of the linguistic repertoire (Busch 2012) is employed with regard to three different dimensions: the dimension of embodiment alludes to the concept of Spracherleben (the lived experience of language; Busch 2017), a phenomenological approach centring around how the speaking subject relates to languages through a bodily and emotional perspective. The emplaced dimension of the repertoire discusses the way that language regimes and ideologies engender a relevant spatial dimension on different scales (Kroskrity 2000). Finally, the mediated dimension deals with the materiality of the linguistic sign and how this materiality is made relevant in communication according to the three dimensions of mediality (Spitzmüller 2014).

Hypotheses/ research questions/ objectives
In the situation of war, flight, and the new environment in the host country, it is vital for refugees to maintain communication with trans-local social networks in order to keep a sense of continuity, memory, and emplacedness (Halilovic 2013). In communicating with these networks, families adapt and adopt both established and emerging media technologies for their needs. The research centres around the question of how representatives of the “post-Yugoslav generation” (Palmberger 2016) retrospectively assess their linguistic and media repertoires in the course of their lives.

Approach/methods
Methodologically, communicative resources of multilingual speakers will be investigated from a speakercentred perspective with the method of language and media biographies. The focus on biographic methods will be complemented with ethnographically-oriented field work and the exploration of relevant media that come up in the interviews.

Level of originality/ innovation
The originality of this project concerns the connection of the linguistic repertoire and media biographies through the theoretical lens of embodiment, mediality and language regimes in a biographic perspective. Most often, what media are is predetermined by the researcher and in many cases, this determination is a technological one. Rarely is the question posed from the other side: what speakers actually perceive to be media and how the materiality of a medium is regarded to shape what is being said. This approach adds a new perspective to the exploration of the linguistic repertoire of multilingual speakers by connecting heteroglossia and media through the theoretical lens of embodiment, mediality and language regimes.

Primary researchers involved
Julia Sonnleitner, Jürgen Spitzmüller