This thesis focuses on the lived multilingualism of a group of young Russian-German adults who as children migrated together with their families from post-Soviet states to the Federal Republic of Germany during the 1990s. Today these adults live in a ‘Plattenbau’ housing estate in a small town in one of the new federal states of Germany. The large pre-fabricated concrete-slab system-built housing estates that were built during the GDR-era are today generally considered as deprived areas due a combination of decreasing population and high unemployment.

This thesis shows how young Russian-Germans create a multilingual community of practice and use various aspects of language and non-linguistic resources for identity construction. The data analysed in this thesis comes from ethnographic studies conducted during three phases of fieldwork between Spring 2011 and Spring 2012. The data was collected at a youth centre where the group of young Russian-German adults regularly met.

Combining intensive participant observation, field notes, photos, and narrative interviews the thesis is a mixed-method investigation. Underpinning the analysis of the research data are theoretical models of the relationship between language, identity, and space. Methodologically this study combines linguistic ethnography, narrative analysis, and membership categorization analysis.

The thesis argues that an ethnographical-narrative approach is a powerful tool that is able to highlight the role of language(s) and non-linguistic resources for identity construction in social spaces, illustrates how young Russian-Germans construct a web of multilingual identities by using social categories to position themselves and others, and shows how the lived multilingualism of  young Russian-German adults influences all aspects of their social lives. For example, the thesis shows the maintenance of Russian as a heritage language within Russian-German families, yet and an avoidance of visible signs of the Russian-German heritage in public spaces.

Young members of minoritized linguistic communities often face a situation of double marginalization. On one hand, many communities have struggled to maintain their languages due to oppression and assimilation politics, which often leads to a language shift. On the other hand, many uoung members also experience a language purism within the community, mostly from older generations, criticizing the young members' linguistic practices and language skills. This paper explores how young Tornedalians, Kvens and Lantalaiset use social media as an arena for metapragmatic reflexions on minority language learning and Meänkieli maintenance. Drawing on data from the social media platform Instagram, this paper examines the role of Meänkieli in young peoples' life and identity. The paper also explores how social media can contribute to create community among young Tornedalians, Kvens and Lantalaiset.

Young members of minoritized linguistic communities often face a situation of double marginalization. On one hand, many communities have struggled to maintain their languages due to oppression and assimilation politics, which often leads to a language shift. On the other hand, many young members also experience a language purism within the community, mostly from older generations, criticizing the young members’ linguistic practices and language skills. This paper explores how young Tornedalians, Kvens and Lantalaiset use social media as an arena for metapragmatic reflexions on minority language learning and Meänkieli maintenance. Drawing on data from the social media platform Instagram, this paper examines the role of Meänkieli in young peoples’ life and identity. The paper also explores how social media can contribute to create community among young Tornedalians, Kvens and Lantalaiset.

For many minoritized languages, there is little or no formal languagelearning due to overarching dominant language ideologies and the resulting poli-cies, which then limit the domains in which those languages can be acquired andused. Therefore, it is necessary to have informal language (learning) spaceswhere these languages can thrive. This chapter explores how members of minoritized language communities use social media platforms for language learning andcommunity building. Through a netnographic approach (Kozinets 2010), we examine two examples of digital practice in minoritized language communities, specifically that of Meänkieli on Instagram and Irish on Twitter. While these languages appear to be on contrastive ends of the endangerment scale, they have undergone similar processes of speaker decline due to historical colonial oppression. We discuss how access to social media connects community members of all ages and transforms the focus from basic informal intergenerational language learning (as per Fishman 1991) toward transgenerational learning experiences through language socialization (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). We demonstrate that social media functions as virtual “breathing spaces” (Belmar and Glass 2019; Glass 2021) that enable participants to learn not only the language but also to gain wider knowledge about culture and provides access to geographically diverse communities.Social media allows members of the speech community to comment on their language learning process, using various linguistic resources to build their communi-ties, and finally, by examining how translingual posts can inform communicative competence.

The Norwegian company Hurtigruten operates ships cruising along the Norwegian coast and has played an important role in tourism for over a century. This article provides a multimodal discourse analysis of the website advertising Hurtigruten’s most popular journey, drawing on a critical tourism studies approach. It aims to answer the question as to what central themes emerge in tourism discourse on Norway, targeted at an international audience. Central characteristics of tourism discourse (Dann 1996), i.e., strangerhood, conflict, authenticity, and playfulness, are shown to be crucial in the analysed material. The paper discusses the notion of authenticity as a performative strategy in the promotion of Norwegian cruise tourism. One central aim of this paper is finding out what and how the notion of “authentically Norwegian” is advertised. The results imply that these topics, and especially the notion of authenticity, are aligned with general tourism imaginaries, which are similar globally.

In the Swedish school system, mother tongue education has been available, under certain regulations, as an elective subject, since the Home Language Reform of 1977 (Reath Warren, 2017). Since its introduction, the subject has been the subject of debate and contestation (Salö et al., 2018) but nonetheless, researchers have found that mother tongue instruction offers opportunities for development of literacies in the mother tongue and other languages as well as supporting learning in general (see Utbildningsdepartementet, 2019, for an overview of research). Among the structural challenges the subject faces, is that there are no specific qualifications required to become a mother tongue teacher, nor regulated educational pathways in Sweden, although several universities in Sweden do offer courses and programmes on different aspects of mother tongue instruction.In this presentation, an online resource for professional development for mother tongue teachers in Sweden will be presented, and analysed. This resource is the result of an initiative and funding from the Swedish National Agency for Education, and collaborations between researchers, mother tongue teachers and The National Agency for Education over one academic year. The online resource comprises seven units which each include a theoretical text exploring didactic or pedagogical perspectives relevant for mother tongue teachers, discussion questions addressing central concerns in the theoretical text and a classroom activity which mother tongue teachers are then invited to discuss, test and evaluate together with colleagues. The theoretical texts and activities were produced by a team that included both researchers and mother tongue teachers. In each of the seven units, perspectives from Sweden’s five national minority languages are also provided, given the very particular conditions under which students and teachers of these languages work.In the presentation, we argue that the ideological space created by policies that provide the opportunity to study mother tongues at school in Sweden stimulated the creation of this online resource, which opens up an implementational space for the development of mother tongue education (Hornberger 2005). The professional development programmes are moreover, created through collaboration across the scales of context, anchoring them in both20research and best practice, as well as providing a valuable space for interaction and learning for mother tongue teachers.