Plurilingual conversations among bilingual adolescents

Turkish-Danish grade school students use not only their L1 and their L2 in group conversation. A number of additional varieties are represented by token one-word loans or by whole utterances. Among these varieties are English, French, and German at the high-prestige school-subject end of the range, and a stylized, stereotypical immigrant Danish reflecting the accented Danish of Middle East immigrants at the low-prestige end of the range. In their conversations, the adolescents not only use these varieties in keeping with the evaluations ascribed to them in school and in society in general, but also to signal ironic distance to certain varieties and, by implication, to adult norms of language use. The present paper uses group conversations from the Køge Project to illustrate how the young Turkish-Danish bilinguals draw on shared knowledge of societal evaluations in their plurilingual practice and also how they distance themselves from these evaluations. Such activity involves not only 'crossing' in Rampton's terms and 'double voicing' in Bakhtin's, but also explicit references and discussions. The paper concludes that it makes little sense to distinguish between 'monolinguals' and 'bilinguals' or, for that matter, 'multilinguals' in this context, as the patterns of language use with reference to general norms and evaluations are the same for all language users.