2021 - 2024: Transfer Project Families and their Linguistic Dynamics - Strengthening Speakers of Majority Languages and Languages of Origin

Language is an essential issue for multilingual families and those who are in close contact with them - especially educational professionals and teachers, whether multilingual themselves or not. It is not only about how to best support children and young people in the acquisition of majority languages, but also about how to pass on and preserve heritage languages to future generations. A concern familiar to most immigrant parents also stems from the fact that they experience the change in their languages of origin through their own language use.
We participate in a research project which is part of the research group RUEG, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). RUEG investigate dynamic changes in minority languages, especially so-called "languages of origin", in the context of a majority language. The new transfer project aims to communicate research findings and their relevance to everyday life, especially concerning the tension between majority languages and languages of origin.
Everyday observations on Turkish, Russian, Greek and German will be combined with research on the further development of these languages in Germany and the USA. How does oral and written language use change, and where is innovation potential? What influence does the communicative situation have, and what role do written language skills play in several languages?

2020 - ongoing: Family language policies in foster care - language issues in precarious circumstances

How are multilingualism and the languages of children in out-of-home care legally regulated? How is this dealt with in practice in Germany, Austria and Norway? How are language decisions in youth welfare influenced by broader societal discourses on monolingualism and multilingualism? What happens in the negotiation of national and European understandings of child welfare and social responsibility?  The first phase will focus on the analysis of legal framework texts and implementation guidelines in social work. In a further step, surveys with actors in the field will be implemented.

2016 - 2020: Families' heteroglossic 'safe spaces': Constructing social spaces for multilingual competence and practices (funded by the Research Council of Norway: MultiFam at the University of Oslo, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan)

Research was conducted across 18 months with families who are in contact with German and Norwegian (among other languages) in everyday life. Important topics were language experience, linguistic expectations for oneself and the family, ideas of normality and distinctiveness, and experiences of migration and exclusion. The project is not finished yet, but the first publications (see column on the right: Obojska & Purkarthofer 2018, Purkarthofer 2019b and Purkarthofer & Steien 2019) have appeared.

2009 - ongoing: Building Expectations
Long-term project on expectations of multilingual parents in Vienna/Austria (first publication Purkarthofer 2019a)