STUDIENRÄTIN IM HOCHSCHULDIENST

Institute for German Studies, Department of Linguistics, University of Münster

Vietnamese „at Home“ – Language Ideologies of Multilingualism in Narrated Biographies with People of Vietnamese Origin in Germany

In this paper, I want to focus on “home” as a central locus for language ideologies of people of Vietnamese origin living in Germany. The analyses will be based on 14 narrated language biographies with people of Vietnamese origin living in Germany which I recorded for my dissertation (cf. König, 2014). In a conversation-analytic approach, I will first give a short overview of recurrent “motives” in these narrative reconstructions of the interviewees’ experiences with their multilingual upbringing in Germany as well as in Vietnam.

By taking a closer look at the construction of “home” as a specific place which is closely tied to the Vietnamese language, I then want to analyse and discuss how different language ideologies (cf. Kroskrity 2010) of different social actors come into play in selected excerpts from my corpus. All in all, I hope to convey insights into the qualitative interview method of multilingualism research as well as into the language ideological field that influences German-Vietnamese multilinguals.