Based on the language biographic data of speakers of Albanian heritage language in two different settings, Switzerland and Germany, this paper will demonstrate how speakers’ strategies of language-choice relate to individual experiences of inclusion and exclusion as well as self-positioning and positioning by others in institutional and private spaces.
One of the crucial factors responsible for the use and maintenance of what is commonly called heritage languages are language attitudes. To date, however, we know little of how this factor is influenced by the ways in which multilingual persons experience and practice their languages in different social spaces.
The entry point of our contribution is spatiality, as we ask how speakers of Albanian and Swiss-/German in Switzerland & Germany practice and interpret their languages in different every day socio-spatial contexts, how they position themselves in terms of spatialized belonging and what the correlations are between these positionings and their spatialized patterns of language practices and attitudes.
We work out how individuals experience themselves and their languages as belonging, respectively not belonging to various spatial contexts, looking at both their self-positionings as well as at the ways in which they are positioned by others. We focus on the categories of private and public in particular, as crucial for multilingual speakers' language-choices and the meanings they associate with both space and language. We find that the negotiation of belonging is roughly following a binary opposition of ascriptions (such as Albanian being the language of the private space vs. German that of the public).
To arrive at a more detailed insight into the relation between discursive negotiations and people's language use, we combine a language biographical approach with data gained from authentic recordings.
We argue that this combined methodological approach allows to grasp not only the dominant dichotomizing spatialized discourse at play, but also to highlight the twofold contestation of its legitimacy: Through nuanced and relational positioning and sense-making strategies in the in-depth language biographies on the one hand, and the authentic data on the other, clearly pointing to the fact that speakers' everyday language practices are far from aligned with these discursive assumptions.
