‘You don’t know how to say cow in Polish’.–Co-creating and navigating language ideological assemblages in a linguistically diverse kindergarten in Germany

Abstract

This study examines how language ideologies are negotiated and navigated in a linguistically diverse kindergarten group in Germany, focusing on the multilingual language practices of teachers and children. Drawing on data generated during 3months of focused linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse situations in which children and teachers actively include languages other than German into the kindergarten discourse through, e.g. translation requests, switches to family languages, and references to family languages. An ethnomethodological approach is adopted to trace how participants locally assign meanings to different languages and language use in interaction. The findings show that teachers and children express various, at times opposing language ideologies, leading to the dynamic formation of language ideological assemblages. Children position themselves in these assemblages by reworking them and/or foregrounding different aspects of their own multilingual identifications.