Language in Motion

A rapidly changing media landscape raises the question of how existing and new media have been used and reassessed in the course of a life. Everyday objects of communication and information trigger memories of the past and of other places: a gameboy, a Yugoslav TV series of the 1970s, a children`s book in Cyrillic script, a telephone booth, the first computer that the family owned. Multilingual biographies in the context of forced displacement raise specific issues regarding the relation of language and media use: what role do media play in the new linguistic environment in order to maintain communication with trans-local social networks, to establish new ones and to keep a sense of continuity, memory and emplacement? Central to this study is the generation who fled as children with their parents and grew up in Austria due to the breakout of war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This generation was characteristically compelled to national and linguistic commitments, both in the country of residence as well as the newly emerging national states on the territory of former Yugoslavia. Considering the pressure that representatives of this target group were exposed to when appropriating linguistic resources, how do they retrospectively reassess media in the course of their lives? In what situations did they experience media as opening up opportunities or as a restriction of agency? Multilingualism is conceived as linguistic repertoire, understood as the entirety of communicative resources at one`s disposal. As these linguistic resources are associated to certain situations, places and people, they evoke affective attitudes. Furthermore, the perspective of media draws our attention to the material that language is bound to, i.e. how we expect a certain materiality to affect that what we want to say: sound waves, paper, skin, stone, a display etc. Most of the time, we do not reflect much on our media choices and take them for granted. The materiality of language however comes to speakers` attention in cases of conflict or when they reassess a medium in the course of life. The aim of this project is to explore a dimension of the linguistic repertoire that has up to now received little attention: how media affect the lived experience of language. To this end, language and media biographies are going to be collected in the form of in-depth interviews, elicited with the aid of media artefacts.

A rapidly changing media landscape raises the question of how existing and new media have been used and reassessed in the course of a life. Everyday objects of communication and information trigger memories of the past and of other places: a fairy tale book in Serbo-Croatian, childhood letters, a Yugoslav TV show, or a class photo from the time before the flight. Multilingual biographies in the context of forced displacement raise specific issues regarding the relation of language and media use: what role do media play in the new linguistic environment in order to maintain communication with trans-local social networks, to establish new ones and to keep a sense of continuity, memory and emplacement? Central to this study is the generation who fled the breakout of war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as children and grew up in Austria. With this project, language and media biographies were explored: how are media retrospectively reassessed in the course of their lives as opening up opportunities or as a restriction of agency? To this end, biographic interviews were conducted with representatives of this group. Part of the research design was a time period when interview partners would define and explore topics and themes of their biographies on their own. Additionally, artefacts that have been used for communicative purposes were elicited in these interviews. The first result concerns the role of media in relation to the lived experience of language. Media practice has been a crucial component for processes of (linguistic) socialisation. For example, media practices with friends fostered the playful aspect of language and, in the experience of my interview partners, were important to appropriate a language that was very regulated and restrictive in other aspects of their lives (in school subjects, at authorities etc.). Due to these playful media practices, they could develop a positive relation to German and perceive themselves as agentive speakers. Secondly, interview partners experienced a change in language ideologies in the new successor states of Yugoslavia. Each of these successor states introduced a new standard language, e.g. Croatia chose a standard that is as divergent from Serbian as possible. Some of my interview partners reported that their way of speaking, formerly seen as dialects of (Serbo-)Croatian, were suddenly understood as incorrect or even hostile according to the the new standard. The third group of results encompasses objects that come up during research. In the interviews, they were used as a means to express certain aspects of a biographic past. Retrospectively, these artefacts had changed their communicative function and affordance as mediational means throughout their lives.