Organizations of language among adolescents in superdiverse Copenhagen
Keywords:
Meta-linguistic awareness, Language ideology, Enregisterment, LanguagingAbstract
In this paper we analyze how adolescents in a Copenhagen school classify and systematically
organize the different types of language they come across in their linguistic everyday.
Furthermore, we analyse descriptions of how this metapragmatic system affect the adolescents’
language use in their daily life. Our primary data consist of 74 essays on language and norms
for its use made by a group of pupils at the age of 14-15. Our analyses show that the
participants outline systematic metapragmatic organizations that generally can be described by
using three parameters that roughly can be labelled as categorizations, style continua and
personal attachment or detachment. Traditional accounts of “languages” as countable and
coherent entities play a role in the system but cannot account for all the aspects. Therefore we
suggest viewing the data through the lens of the languaging theory. We conclude that the
adolescents’ ways of organizing language reflect (and comment) the societal condition of
superdiversity. At the same time the specific competences developed among the adolescents
are not accepted or respected by mainstream society and the educational system and we
discuss possible consequences of this discrepancy.
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