Language portraits drawn and discussed during workshops in schools offer an insight into how children present their multilingual repertoires. Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing and Langer’s concept of visual representation that distinguishes between discursive and presentational forms of meaning making can be helpful in developing further this multimodal approach.
Art based, creative and visual approaches are increasingly employed in multilingualism research as they are considered to have the potential to undermine set categories and to give a voice to research participants when reflecting on their communicative repertoires or salient moments of lived experience of language. When adopting such approaches, we need to consider what they can offer beyond more traditional methods, based e.g. on interviews or observation, and how we can get a fuller understanding of the artifacts produced e.g. in drawing or free writing activities. Therefore, I will briefly introduce Wittgenstein’s (1997) distinction between saying and showing and Langer’s (1948) concept that distinguishes between discursive and presentational forms of meaning making. In my presentation I will draw on language portrait workshops in two primary schools in which great linguistic diversity is not only present but also valued. In the visual and verbal presentations of participants’ communicative repertoires traces of ideologically forged categories and power relations became visible, but children generally abstained from identifying themselves as so-and-so-speakers. Rather they associated particular languages or ways of communicating with persons, places, biographical moments, lifestyles or activities, thus understanding language first of all as a bodily and emotional gesture towards the other and the world (Merleau-Ponty 1962). It is striking how much importance the children attributed to secret languages, language games, ludlings, languages with animals or fantasy languages which allowed them to explore also the metalinguistic, poetic and incantatory functions of language (Jakobson 1960). With Winnicott (1971), these language games can be interpreted as a process of creative appropriation of found linguistic/semiotic material, that is transformed into self-created material and imbued with own meanings – a process similar to the development from play to shared play and from this to creative living and cultural experiences.
