The aim of this project is to explore what L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) users of Japanese on a university campus in Tōkyō say about language structure, use, and communicative competence in conversations held in Japanese. Japan is experiencing a continuous influx of foreign labourers, professionals, and international students which contributes to a more diverse and multilingual demographics. Most incomers study Japanese in order to adjust themselves to the environment, establish contacts with other Japanese speakers, and to be able to communicate with locals. Therefore, acquiring Japanese language skills seems to be necessary to participate in the Japanese society. Research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology has shown that language is not a mere tool for communication, but inherently a means of social action. Language is imbued with social norms about the appropriate way of pronouncing words, using certain expressions, and how to communicate effectively. These language ideologies are transmitted to novices in a community, but may also be partly challenged or resisted by learners or even native speakers, giving rise to the negotiation of norms in interaction. This awareness of language surfaces in metapragmatic discourse, i.e. talk about language (structure, use, or competence) in interaction. Explicit metapragmatic discourse in intercultural interaction in the Japanese context is understudied and therefore deserves further attention, due to the steadily growing diversification of Japanese language users. In order to investigate these interactions, I will examine how L1 and L2 users of Japanese take stance toward language structure, use, and communicative competence in interactions. I want to explore (1) what topics emerge in narratives about language and communication in a broad sense in these conversations, (2) what kind of linguistic resources (such as contextualization cues, stances markers, and other indexical expressions) social actors employ to position themselves toward these topics, and (3) what factors and experiences influence social actors’ perception of certain linguistic forms, registers, and communication strategies.

Multilingual biographies in the context of forced displacement raise specific issues regarding the relation of language and media use. Central to this study is the generation who fled with their parents as children and grew up in Austria due to the breakout of war in Ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This project is situated within sociolinguistics of globalisation and media sociolinguistics. The key analytic concept of the linguistic repertoire (Busch 2012) is employed with regard to three different dimensions: the dimension of embodiment alludes to the concept of Spracherleben (the lived experience of language; Busch 2017), a phenomenological approach centring around how the speaking subject relates to languages through a bodily and emotional perspective. The emplaced dimension of the repertoire discusses the way that language regimes and ideologies engender a relevant spatial dimension on different scales (Kroskrity 2000). Finally, the mediated dimension deals with the materiality of the linguistic sign and how this materiality is made relevant in communication according to the three dimensions of mediality (Spitzmüller 2014).

This project examines representations of space and borders in Austrian public discourses on asylum and in narratives of displaced persons in Vienna. The interdisciplinary study combines theoretical approaches to space, borders and boundaries, and migration studies with a critical sociolinguistic and narrative stance. It integrates various perspectives and methods: (1) media discourse analysis, (2) ethnographic study of a shelter for asylum seekers, and (3) participatory photo interviews and semi-structured interviews with residents (asylum seekers) and social workers at the institution. Preliminary results reveal the asylum seekers’ heterogeneous experiences of borders and boundaries, including geopolitical borders, complex infrastructures of border regimes during their escapes, and symbolic boundary experiences during their asylum procedures and current living conditions in Austria. As enduring experiences, boundaries affect their current lives, agency, and spatial behavior in Vienna.

This project deals with one of the most crucial questions of current social work: the professionalization of assistance to refugees. The project sets out to explore ethnographically, in the context of a Viennese counselling center, what professional(ism), regarded here as an interpretive phenomenon, means to the actors in the field, how they try to establish or maintain it by communicative means, how it is perceived by the diverse persons involved, and where the actors locate (particularly linguistic or communicative) problems and/or conflicts.
The pilot study basically attempts to systematize and problematize empirical data that are elicited in the context of a participatory observation over the course of several months, and derives detailed research questions from that. Thus, the study shall pave ground to future, more in-depth research projects.