ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how young people with linguistic minority backgrounds in Denmark develop their linguistic practices as well as ideas about languages and norms for language use. It argues that the idea of someone ‘speaking in a language’ is best understood as a reflexive model of behavior (Agha 2007). The argument is based on two different sets of data. The primary data consist of a longitudinal study of speakers of Turkish minority background in a suburban area during their nine years of compulsory school and again in their mid-twenties. These data are complemented by a two-year long ethnographic study of a heterogeneous group of students in a public school in the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen. Both groups of speakers acquire linguistic repertoires, which involve features associated with several ‘languages’ and develop ways of employing large parts of those repertoires in their languaging practices. At the same time, the participants’ explicit references to languages and ways of speaking display their awareness concerning the fact that they live in a languagized world.
