Multilingualism among children, age 7–12, typological representation and language use pattern in a medium-sized town in Norway

Abstract

This article examines multilingual language use in two groups of children, one group at a state school, and one at a private IB school. The IB school has earlier been assumed to reflect an ‘elite’ multilingualism. Three research questions are posed: to what extent is the children’s language use multilingual, what are their typological profiles, and are there any differences between the two groups in the language use patterns. The agency of the speaker is captured by self-reporting questionnaires. We use a method of circles in which the participant fills in the names and domains of the languages in use. The answers are registered according to three main dimensions: family, social interaction and media use. The study is exploratory and descriptive, and the results demonstrate that a large majority of the children at both schools used more than one language. The study is innovative in combining a sociolinguistic approach with language typology. Our results shed light on children’s dynamic and flexible language use, using languages from all of the world’s language families. We found similarities in the multilingualism of the two groups, and there was little to indicate that the IB pupils could be characterised as having an ‘elite’ multilingualism.