Drawing on language-biographical interviews conducted with the use of language portraits with secondary school students in South Tyrol, Italy, I will show how the latter position themselves to ideologies that link ‘having’ a specific ‘mother tongue’ to nationality and ethnicity, using them as interactional resources and at times re-negotiating them.
A speaker’s linguistic repertoire can be regarded “as a space of potentialities linked to life trajectories” (Busch, 2017:53), and as such is intricately linked to the lived experience of language and to language ideologies circulating in specific social spaces. One set of such ideologies are those of a “personal and national possession and insulation of the national language” (Bonfiglio, 2010:221) that link a named language to nationality and ethnicity and assign linguistic authority to some subjects while negating it to others. Drawing on language-biographical interviews conducted with the use of language portraits (Busch, 2017) with 24 secondary school students (age 12-18) in South Tyrol, Italy, I will elaborate on the ways in which students position themselves to such mother tongue ideologies. In my paper, I will show how the latter can function as an interactional resource when students employ the term ‘mother tongue’ to construct themselves as competent first and second language speakers. I will also analyse how students negotiate these ideologies when the status ‘mother tongue’ cannot be assigned unambiguously to a variety in their linguistic repertoire. Finally, I will link my analysis of students’ experience to particularities of the trilingual Italian province and argue that mother tongue ideologies operate as a structuring principle in different aspects of social life in South Tyrol, including the education system (Baur, Mezzalira, & Pichler, 2009). References Baur, S., Mezzalira, G., & Pichler, W. (2009). Die Sprache der Anderen: Aspekte der Sprachen- und Schulpolitik in Südtirol von 1945 bis heute. Meran: edizioni Alpha&Beta Verlag. Bonfiglio, T. P. (2010). Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker. New York: De Gruyter Mouton. Busch, B. (2017). Biographical approaches to research in multilingual settings: Exploring linguistic repertoires. In M. Martin-Jones & D. Martin (Eds.), Researching multilingualism: Critical and ethnographic approaches (pp. 46–59). London: Routledge.
