Acceso usuarios
Ingrid Rodrick Beiler, Johanna Ennser Kananen
The notion of place has been addressed in decolonial orientations to language, both through critique of modernist territorialisation of language, and through place-making that seeks to recover connections between language and land. Bringing together these strands, this article considers how language and place are connected in educational contexts with multilingual adolescents and adults, respectively in Norway and Finland, and what tensions these connections entail for sustaining multilingual identities and communities. Ethnographic data from two cases are used to trace discourses of language and place across a variety of student and teacher positionalities. In the first case, students expressed tensions in maintaining Indigenous and heritage multilingualism due to a sense of dislocation, while emplacing English both in their local language ecologies and across the world. In the second case, both English and Finnish were constructed as omnipresent, but while English was not tied to students’ local communities or localities, Finnish tended to seep into many areas of students’ lives. We discuss how educational spaces can foster multiple forms of multilingual place-making, which respect the specificities of language histories and epistemologies.
