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Contemporary Urban Turkey-Turkish in the German-Turkish Classroom
Abstract
Drawing on a larger linguistic ethnographic project (Erduyan, 2019), this chap- ter focuses on the incorporation of urban, Turkey-Turkish speech style into the Turkish heritage language classroom discourse in the context of Germany. Adopting a microethnographic framework through scalar lenses, the analyses center on naturally occurring word search sessions in two different Turkish classes. The foci of analyses are on two adjectives that have gone through seman- tic widening in Turkey-Turkish in recent years (komik, arızalı) and are incorporated into teacher-led classroom discussions. Findings demonstrate that the newly attributed meanings of these adjectives in context are not equally trans- parent to the teachers and students alike; and the Turkish-German transnational scale that gets constructed in a diversity of ways across the students and the teachers seems to play a role in this difference.
Keywords: semantic widening, Turkish discourse, urban linguistic repertoires, scales
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Discourse and identity practices in heritage language contexts have received significant attention in applied linguistics in recent years. One line of research in this realm has sought to adopt scales, the spatiotemporal niches within which social identification and learning take place. This paper problematizes modernity as a scale of its own and investigates it in the context of the heritage language classroom discourse at a German high-school in Berlin. Microethnographic analyses of 10th-grade classroom interactional data reveal how Turkish heritage language students appropriate Turkish modernity and debate identity models around it while at the same time bring to the table German/Western modernity and its contents. The article sheds light on the multiplicity of heritage language identities and situates scales as an important determinant in their construction.
In the context of an increasingly expanding body of literature on scalar analyses of linguistic practices, this paper turns the gaze to a highly advanced level Turkish heritage language classroom at a Gymnasium in central Berlin and focuses on a 10th grade student in his linguistic identity construction. Based on the findings from linguistic ethnographic analyses of in-depth interviews and recordings of classroom interactions, the paper discusses two different scales that seem to play prominent roles in the student’s construction of linguistic identity: the neo-conservative transnational scale and the contemporary urban middle-class Turkey-Turkish scale. The analysis depicts how these scales are constructed in interactions through various linguistic resources.
In bilingualism studies, comparing the competence of mono- and bilingual speakers is common, but it comes with certain limitations. In immigration contexts, many studies concentrate on the skills of immigrant pupils in the mainstream language. In order to account for educational underachievement of minority children, gaps in their language development are often documented by comparing mainstream pupils with immigrant children. Competence in the first language (L1), on the other hand, receives very little attention, despite the fact that it is often assumed that L1 competence has an impact on second language acquisition. Here, we present the findings of an empirical study that compared bilingual Turkish immigrant children (n = 30) in the Netherlands with monolingual Turkish peers (n = 30) in Turkey. Contrary to most other such studies, we focus on the development of socio-pragmatic skills. The evidence shows that, from the viewpoint of monolingual conventions, the immigrant children lag behind in their command of these skills. Also after controlling for socioeconomic status, bilingual Turkish immigrant children display much lower knowledge of the socio-pragmatic skills than monolingual Turkish children. The causes of this difference can be attributed to the limited Turkish input in the immigration context.
Turkish instruction has entered the school system in Berlin in the 1980s as a response to the increase in the school-age children within the Turkish community. In neighborhoods with a high population of Turkish residents, schools at various levels have come to offer Turkish as an elective foreign language. Moreover, Turkish is offered as one of the subjects on the secondary school finishing exams (MSA) and beyond that, the university prep programs (Abitur) in some high schools. My focus in this paper is one such school in the district of Kreuzberg, with an overwhelming majority of its student body Turkish in descent. Reporting on classroom ethnography in a 9th grade Turkish class, I focus on two major discourses in circulation: the standard Turkish discourse and the Ottoman Turkish discourse. Through microethnographic analysis, I demonstrate how these discourses are constructed, enacted, and received in the Turkish classroom.
Recent developments in the study of language in society have moved the field increasingly away from linear models towards complex models. The complexity of timespace as an aspect of what is called “context” is of key importance in this development, and this article engages with two possibly useful concepts in view of this: chronotope and scale. Chronotope can be seen as invokable chunks of history that organizeing the indexical order of discourse; scale, in turn, can be seen as the scope of communicability of such invocations. Thus, whenever we see chronotopes, we see them mediated by scales. The cultural stuff of chronotopes is conditioned by the sociolinguistic conditions of scale. This nuanced approach to timescale contextualization offers new directions for complexity-oriented research in our fields.
While Turkish immigrants in Western Europe orient themselves to the norms of Standard Turkish, their Turkish is constantly being influenced by the European language they also speak. As a result of language contact, slowly but surely, new varieties of Turkish seem to be evolving, exhibiting loss of certain features and/or borrowing of words and structures taken from European languages. In this article, the focus is on Immigrant Turkish in the Netherlands, particularly on how it forms subordinate clauses. We compare data from the Netherlands and Turkey, with the data coming from two sources: spontaneous conversation and a sentence recall task. The main finding that both data sources converge on is that Dutch Turkish speakers clearly prefer to use finite subordinate clauses, especially in reported speech structures, and that this is a clear influence from Dutch. In Turkey, subordination is predominantly non-finite. The findings are interpreted in a usage-based perspective on contact-induced change.
Drawing on contemporary transgressive theoretical approaches, this paper examines how modern urban youth populations perform new identities by manipulating 'global?local' cultural and linguistic resources available to them such as popular culture flows. In its search for a post-Socialist identity, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, urban settings in Mongolia have been largely caught between the emerging transcultural flows. Young urban Mongolians have been participating in these current dynamic global interactions in multiple ways, while locating and styling their new identities within fluid spaces such as popular music. The linguistic practice of popular music in this regard is the main site for the exploration of the new identities performed by the urban youth population both as producers and consumers. It is the most dynamic and expressive space for urban youth to play, perform and negotiate within their identities.
In this article I explore epistemological diversity in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) from the perspective that obtains if we examine the moral ends of research, and we ask: In what ways does epistemological diversity relate to enhancing the social value and educational relevance of the research generated by the instructed SLA research community? Is epistemological diversity sufficient in order to produce high-quality SLA research that positively impacts on society and education? Through several illustrations, I show that epistemological diversity is a disciplinary reality that is here to stay and, furthermore, that it is a good thing. At the same time, I argue that it is insufficient in and of itself. Instead, I propose that it is crucial to interrogate the moral ends of our research and to probe the social value and educational relevance of what we choose to investigate and of the knowledge we generate.
Globalization compels disciplines such as sociolinguistics to unthink their theoretical fundamentals. In this paper, the notion of scale is introduced and its potential purchase for sociolinguistic analysis is discussed. Scale is a theoretical notion in geography and World Systems Analysis, and it has two crucial dimension: (a) it merges time and space into one complex unit; (b) it offers a vertical spatial (or spatiotemporal) metaphor in which stratification - the non-equivalence of scales - is central. The latter is a critical dimension: it introduces power and inequality as key ingredients of social semiotic processes and so integrates these dimensions (now often seen as a theoretical add-on) into the core of sociolinguistic thinking. Several theoretical dimensions of scales are explored, focusing specifically on how scale can be seen as an indexical phenomenon strongly connected to indexicalities of normativity and normalcy. This discussion is followed by a number of illustrative vignettes that show how notions of scale, scaling phenomena, outscaling and scale-jumping can reformulate several types of sociolinguistic phenomena.
In this paper, I examine the teaching of language and culture and in particular the use of songs as curriculum in two London Turkish complementary schools. Drawing on a series of interconnected classroom vignettes, I look at how children weave together their semiotic resources to negotiate and transform two songs and the talk and action around them during Turkish literacy teaching. I situate these negotiations in the emergent classroom interactional order, the official curriculum and the recurring pedagogical practices of the complementary schools which in turn I link to widely circulating understandings of Turkish language and culture valued in Turkey and among Turkish-speaking transnational communities in London. I explore how through these transformations, children introduce localized understandings of Turkish language and culture into classroom discourse, negotiate an agentive self and bridge complementary school curricular objectives with their own lives. I show how these localized understandings are filtered through the children's personal, family, peer, and transnational experiences and aesthetic preferences and reflect the different ways the children, produce nuanced and sophisticated understandings of Turkish language and culture “as something that is used in the present or that can be projected in the future” as opposed to “something one holds onto to vaguely as one's remembrances” (Garcia, 2005, p. 601). The data illustrate the interplay between pupil agency and social structure involved in “bringing the outside in” classroom discourse.Research highlights► This paper examines teaching language and culture in Turkish complementary schools. ► Pupils draw on a range of semiotic resources in talk and action during lessons. ► They produce localised understandings of language and culture. ► They negotiate agency and bridge curricular objectives.
Linguistic forms are shaped by forces operating on vastly different time scales. Some of these forces operate directly at the moment of speaking, whereas others accumulate over time in personal and social memory. Our challenge is to understand how forces with very different time scales mesh together in the current moment to determine the emergence of linguistic form.
This important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. There has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on data taken out of context. This book is a detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy.
What has strained the relations between the fields of world Englishes and Second Language Acquisition (SLA), denounced by Sridhar and Sridhar (1986; Sridhar, 1994) and felt by many others during these past 30 years? I first characterize a number of the differences in disciplinary goals and orientations that have contributed to the tensions. I then argue that it is ultimately differences in the ontologies of language that are the largest hurdle to establishing synergies between the two fields. I weigh what has been gained and lost in SLA by the unquestioned adoption of essentialist ontologies and argue that it has locked SLA research into a monolingual worldview that the field can no longer afford. I also call for the continuation of research that illuminates multilingual success but also addresses the phenomenological and emic reality of the ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’ dichotomy, as many multilinguals experience their ‘nonnativeness’ as oppression that they must constantly manage and negotiate under the hegemony of monolingual ideologies. I close with four recommendations for changes in SLA that might help a new future where WE and SLA mutually benefit from their disciplinary achievements.
In this article, we begin by delineating the background to and motivations behind Firth and Wagner (1997), wherein we called for a reconceptualization of second language acquisition (SLA) research. We then outline and comment upon some of our critics' reactions to the article. Next we review and discuss the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological impact the article has had on the SLA field. Thereafter, we re-engage and develop some of the themes raised but left undeveloped in the 1997 article. These themes cluster around the notions of and interrelationships between language use, language learning, and language acquisition. Although we devote space to forwarding the position that the dichotomy of language use and acquisition cannot defensibly be maintained (and in this we take up a contrary position to that held in mainstream SLA), our treatment of the issues is essentially methodological. We focus on describing a variety of aspects of learning-inaction , captured in transcripts of recordings of naturally occurring foreign, second, or other language interactions. Through transcript analyses, we explore the possibilities of describing learning-inaction devoid of cognitivistic notions of language and learning. In so doing, we advance moves to formulate and establish a reconceptualized SLA.
Polylingual languaging has become a typical phenomenon in the global contact zone of migratory space. It is embedded in transnational and transcultural flows of languages. The empirical data of this paper are situated and mediated peer group performances of adolescents of ‘German-Turkish background’ which will be analyzed within a hybridity approach of interactional sociolinguistics and the sociolinguistics of globalization, demonstrating how the adolescents’ polylingual performances can only be understood socio-historically as a transcultural interface. Their performances are attempts to appropriate semantic space where their language is no longer the object of dominant discourse but constitutes an autonomous form of (counter-)discourse in its own right.
The ten volumes of the Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker’s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at explaining variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models.
This volume sets out to foreground the issues of youth identity in the context of current sociolinguistic and discourse research on identity construction. Based on detailed empirical analyses, the twelve chapters offer examinations of how youth identities from late childhood up to early twenties are locally constructed in text and talk. The settings and types of social organization investigated range from private letters to graffiti, from peer group talk to video clips, from schoolyard to prison. Comparably, a wide range of languages is brought into focus, including Danish, German, Greek, Japanese, and Turkish. Drawing on various discourse analytic paradigms (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis), the contributions examine and question notions with currency in the field, such as young people's linguistic creativity and resistance to mainstream norms. At the same time, they demonstrate the embeddedness of constructions of youth identities in local activities and communities of practice where they interact with other social identities and factors, in particular gender and ethnicity.
This volume sets out to foreground the issues of youth identity in the context of current sociolinguistic and discourse research on identity construction. Based on detailed empirical analyses, the twelve chapters offer examinations of how youth identities from late childhood up to early twenties are locally constructed in text and talk. The settings and types of social organization investigated range from private letters to graffiti, from peer group talk to video clips, from schoolyard to prison. Comparably, a wide range of languages is brought into focus, including Danish, German, Greek, Japanese, and Turkish. Drawing on various discourse analytic paradigms (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis), the contributions examine and question notions with currency in the field, such as young people's linguistic creativity and resistance to mainstream norms. At the same time, they demonstrate the embeddedness of constructions of youth identities in local activities and communities of practice where they interact with other social identities and factors, in particular gender and ethnicity.
The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out in an inner-city high school. Through his vivid analysis of classroom talk, he offers answers to some important questions: does social class still count for young people, or is it in demise? Are traditional authority relationships in schools being undermined? How is this affected by popular media culture? His study, which provides numerous transcripts and three extensive case studies, introduces a way of perceiving established ideas in sociolinguistics, such as identity, insecurity, the orderliness of classroom talk, and the experience of learning at school. In doing so, Rampton shows how work in sociolinguistics can contribute to some major debates in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and education.
Today, long‐term effects of migration into Germany are shown most notably in the emergence of linguistic practices of young people, many of them second or third generation migrants, in urban areas. Turkish German describes a way of speaking that first emerged in young people's speech in multi‐ethnic urban areas and was first associated with Turkish adolescents. Later, it became widely known through its appearance in films, comedies and rap songs. In contrast to earlier studies on immigrants' language in Germany (see section ), Turkish German is not associated with imperfect acquisition but with the manner in which speakers actively construct and perform ethnic identities and other social meanings via language. Turkish German is conceptualised either as an ethnolect, or an ethnic style, implying different research traditions with focus on different aspects of linguistic descriptions. Other studies choose the term ‘Kiezdeutsch’ over Turkish German to emphasise the ways of speaking multiethnolectal dimension.
It is the aim of this article to present different linguistic approaches to Turkish German, with a critical discussion of some of the key concepts, and to give an overview over its linguistic features and functions on the basis of relevant empirical studies on the linguistic practices among Turkish–German bilinguals.
List of figures Preface and acknowledgements Conventions List of abbreviations 1. The framework 2. Prior and current work on semantic change 3. The development of modal verbs 4. The development of adverbials with discourse marker function 5. The development of performative verbs and constructions 6. The development of social deictics 7. Conclusion Primary references Secondary references Index of languages Index of names Index of subjects.
The goals of this article are to appraise second language acquisition's (SLA) disciplinary progress over the last 15 years and to reflect on transdisciplinary relevance as the field has completed 40 years of existence and moves forward into the 21st century. I first identify four trends that demonstrate vibrant disciplinary progress in SLA. I then turn to the notion of transdisciplinarity, or the proclivity to pursue and generate SLA knowledge that can be of use outside the confines of the field and contribute to overall knowledge about the human capacity for language. I propose an understanding of transdisciplinary relevance for SLA that results from the ability: (a) to place one's field in a wider landscape of disciplines that share an overarching common goal and (b) to develop critical awareness of one's disciplinary framings of object of inquiry and goals and others’ likely reception of them. Finally, I argue that it is by reframing SLA as the study of late bi/multilingualism that the remarkable progress witnessed in the last 15 years will help the field reach new levels of transdisciplinary relevance as a contributor to the study of the ontogeny of human language and a source of knowledge in support of language education in the 21st century.
Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). We claim that this is due to structural contact-induced change that is, however, located within specific lexically complex units copied from Dutch. This article investigates structural change in NL-Turkish through analyses of spoken corpora collected in the bilingual Turkish community in the Netherlands and in a monolingual community in Turkey. The analyses reveal that at the current stage of contact, NL-Turkish is not copying Dutch syntax as such, but rather translates lexically complex individual units into Turkish. Perceived semantic equivalence between Dutch units and their Turkish equivalents plays a crucial role in this translation process. Counter to expectations, the TR-Turkish data also contained unconventional units, though they differed in type, and were much less frequent than those in NL-Turkish. We conclude that synchronic variation in individual NL-Turkish units can contain the seeds of future syntactic change, which will only be visible after an increase in the type and token frequency of the changing units.
Research on crossing and stylisation among young people in multi-ethnic urban areas of Britain during the 1980s and 1990s pointed to the emergence of new ethnicities with social class underpinnings, and these mixed language practices have now been a feature of the urban landscape for at least 30years. But how far are they confined to youth? Are they really only transient age-specific phenomena, as terms like ‘youth language’ imply? Focusing on post-adolescent and middle-aged informants during 2008 and 2009, this paper points to their enduring significance, considers their place in individual repertoires, and attempts to settle some of the terminological dispute, using Agha’s theory of ‘register’ to reposition the notion of ‘vernacular’.
Three issues arise in sociolinguistic studies of the relationship between Danish and other languages, the first of which is the acquisition and development of Danish by the linguistic minorities. The second issue concerns bilingualism, including the maintenance of the minority languages, and the third issue involves more powerful languages, primarily English. These themes have all been hotly debated in the public political and educational discourse in Denmark during the 1990s. I describe the Danish sociopolitical debate about languages in general, and with particular reference to status differences between languages and ways of being a language user. Against this background I review sociolinguistic research into bilingualism and minority languages in Denmark with the purpose of summarizing the general results in this field.
This article adopts a Bakhtinian analysis to understand the complexities of discourse in language-learning classrooms. Drawing on empirical data from two of four linked case studies in a larger, ESRC-funded project, we argue that students learning in complementary (also known as community language, supplementary, or heritage language) schools create “second lives” in the classroom. They do this through the use of carnivalesque language, introducing new voices into classroom discourse, using mockery and parody to subvert tradition and authority, and engaging in the language of “grotesque realism.” Students use varieties of parodic language to mock their teacher, to mock each other, to mock notional students as second-language learners, and to mock their school's attempts to transmit reified versions of “cultural heritage.” These creative discourse strategies enable the students to create carnival lives in the classroom that provide alternatives to the official worlds of their teachers. In doing so the students are able to move in and out of official and carnival worlds, making meaning in discourse that is dialogic, as they represent themselves and others in voices that cut across boundaries in complex, creative, sophisticated ways.
The paper looks at the process of online-languaging of adolescents with a migratory and ethnic Turkish background in a diasporic chat room. The multiple resources and voices used are analysed. One particular example is looked at more thoroughly to illustrate the process of languaging and how it is legitimised by the chatters themselves. Finally, it is briefly looked at the commitment involved in the languaging and why this process is rather one-sided German-inclined.
This paper is a study of mixed language use within the frame of interactional sociolinguistics. Adolescents of Turkish background in Germany have developed their own patterns of bilingualism, in particular mixed varieties of German and Turkish. By the analysis of some transcribed examples of Turkish–German mixed speech (code-switching, code-mixing, code-oscillation, stylised forms of 'Immigrant German') it is shown that the switching and mixing oscillates between local sequential functions and a more global 'We-group'-function. The particular role assigned to 'speaking mixed' can only be appreciated against the specific background of the German migratory discourse. The adolescents' use of hybrid language is an attempt at appropriating semantic space where their language is no longer the object of the migratory discourse as defined by majority society but constitutes an autonomous and exclusive form of (counter-) discourse in its own right.
The paper presents the findings of two studies of Copenhagen multiethnolect. The first study depicts a set of linguistic features that constitutes the linguistic variety which is termed multiethnolect. This study was by and large carried out from a perspective which in the paper is called a variety perspective. The second study was carried out from a stylistic practice perspective where multiethnolect is analyzed in more holistic terms as part of a broad range of stylistic repertoires in a local community of practice. The two studies serve in this article as illustrations of different approaches to studying language use and variation in multiethnic urban areas.
This paper deals with linguistic diversity as it occurs in a conversation over dinner between three young Turkish–Danish men living in Denmark. I argue that terms like bilingual or multilingual are inappropriate in order to describe this verbal interaction because these terms presuppose that linguistic production is divided in categories in advance. Instead I suggest the term polylingual as more sufficient in describing the fluent use of linguistic features which are locally constructed as categories of linguistic features, regardless of how linguistic features are categorised in society at large. Using sequentially based micro analysis I show how polylingual behaviour is used for a range of linguistic purposes. I focus on the interplay between polylingual behaviour and other linguistic resources used in e.g. performance in order to negotiate local identity and power relations.
This paper approaches the linguistic setting of a European inner-city, an area with a long history of migration from a sociological and linguistic perspective. After a qualitative-heuristical research and (ethnomethodological) conversation analysis, we are able to present a description of sociolingual conditions and the process of their transformation. In the first part we focus on the relationship between language, culture, identity and social structure. We argue that old structures are breaking up, and that new patterns of speech-communities are developing. We shall come out against common ideas about lingual transformation in the Federal Republic of Germany: against the 'assimilatonist view' (the language of origin disappears with the third generation of migrants) and the 'view of difference', this is connected with the concept of 'ethnic revival' and observes the revitalisation of the languages of origin). Our argument will be put forward in an exploration of phenomenon of 'mixed language' (that's what the interviewees called their way of speaking) in the world of inner-city juveniles. By embedding these linguistic practices in the ethnographical concept of 'liminality', we tried to understand the loosening process of the relationship between linguistic practices, identity through nationality and social structure. The usage of language appears as a means of constructing their social position among adolescents in the location of research where social structure is embodied.
The uniquely human capacity of using arbitrary signs to transfer concept and experience over great distances in time and place is what we call language. We use language with a purpose, and we use whatever features are at our disposal to achieve our ends, regardless of the fact that some speakers think that certain features should be held together and not used in combination with certain other features. The phenomenon of language is not necessarily a construction, and while all individual languages are constructed, it is not possible to clearly delimit them from each other. The crucial phenomenon is language, not any specific language. While some Some speakers think languages should be kept apart, others combine three, four, or more different sets of features (i.e. so-called ‘languages’) in their linguistic production. This is characteristic of polylingualism (where multilingualism is characterised by the knowledge of several separate languages). These speakers do not choose their features randomly. Particularly in late-modern urban youth groups the simultaneous use of features from many different sources is frequent.
From an ethnographic and interaction analytical approach this paper examines how polylingual languaging is used by a group of young male Taekwondo fighters to construct an integrated streetwise and ‘schoolwise’ persona as well as negotiate regional identities. The data discussed were collected in a Taekwondo club in a multicultural area of Copenhagen stereotypically associated with socially underprivileged youth. The analysis focuses on parts of a particular conversation where the boys are engaged in a linguistic competition. They claim linguistic competence by explicitly referring to school success and demonstrate linguistic competence through a creative mixture of playful linguistic activities (among them a spelling competition) in which several different languages and styles are involved. The analysis is discussed in relation to broader discourses about leisure sport as socially integrating, and it is concluded that in the boys’ interaction the stereotypes invoked by these discourses are indeed creatively brought about and renegotiated.
Turkish–Danish grade school students use not only their L1 and their L2 in group conversation. A number of additional varieties are represented by token one-word loans or by whole utterances. Among these varieties are English, French, and German at the high-prestige school-subject end of the range, and a stylized, stereotypical immigrant Danish reflecting the accented Danish of Middle East immigrants at the low-prestige end of the range. In their conversations, the adolescents not only use these varieties in keeping with the evaluations ascribed to them in school and in society in general, but also to signal ironic distance to certain varieties and, by implication, to adult norms of language use. The present paper uses group conversations from the Køge Project to illustrate how the young Turkish–Danish bilinguals draw on shared knowledge of societal evaluations in their plurilingual practice and also how they distance themselves from these evaluations. Such activity involves not only ‘crossing’ in Rampton's terms and ‘double voicing’ in Bakhtin's, but also explicit references and discussions. The paper concludes that it makes little sense to distinguish between ‘monolinguals’ and ‘bilinguals’ or, for that matter, ‘multilinguals’ in this context, as the patterns of language use with reference to general norms and evaluations are the same for all language users.