Introduction: Multilingual Behavior in Youth Groups

This introduction reviews some of the major work on bilingual and multilingual children and adolescents in Scandinavia, from Kotsinas (1985) and Boyd (1985) to the present. The introduction was originally published in J. N. Jørgensen (ed.) 2001: Multilingual behavior in Youth Groups, Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, The Køge Series, Volume K11, Danish University of Education

Multi-Variety Code-Switching in Conversation 903 of the Køge Project

This article documents some of the ways in which the languages, or varieties, are taken into possession by the young speakers and made their own. It is illustrated how they play with language, in particular switches between codes, both as contributions to social negotiations and as pure performance. The material comes from a group conversation between four male bilingual students in the last grade of the Danish public school system. The young people have Turkish as their mother tongue, and Danish is their L2. By grade 9, they have had several years of experience with English, and almost all of the students have had two years of German. The conversation is a part of the Køge material (see Turan 1999). The four boys were asked to create a collage or a picture series with free post cards and glue them on a large piece of cardboard. The theme of the collage was to be “My worst nightmare”. The conversation lasts about half an hour, and all four boys participate actively in the conversation. The conversation has been transcribed according to the CHILDES conventions (MacWhinney 1995), but have been simplified slightly for the excerpts given in the article. In the excerpts, Turkish is italicized. The lines beginning with %eng give translations into English. Lines beginning with %com give background information or comments to the transcript

Norms and practices of polylingual behaviour: a sociolinguistic model

This paper discusses the notion of language in relation to the notion of a language. We argue that the concept of languages as neatly separated, countable units is an ideological construction. This ideological construction served the European nation states well during the Romantic period and later, for instance during Colonialism (e.g. Heller 2007, Makoni and Penny cook 2006). With growing internationalization, however, this concept of languages has become increasingly at odds with the linguistic experience of speakers throughout Europe. In fact the notion of languages, for instance as separable from dialects, has never been accepted by sociolinguistics. Any specific notion of a language, say Dutch, is a sociocultural construction, and it is only real at the level of norms. At the level of language use we can not maintain these concepts of languages. As an alternative idea of language we propose that descriptions and analyses of language use must be based, not on “languages”, but on features, and the focus must be in the individual (Hudson 1996)