Research methods that are inspired by the arts have recently become subject to increasing attention for language researchers working in migration contexts. There are several examples that show how arts-based methods can be used in socially-engaged research in order to better understand language practices and ideologies. Drawing on a longitudinal study of lived experience of language use in Sweden, the present article demonstrates how language portraits and poetic transcriptions have the potential to generate alternative narratives and creative forms of representation. Moreover, the article illustrates how participatory action research can prompt migrants to reflect on their experiences and emotions together with others in the creation of drama performances. These kind of visual-, textual-, and performativerepresentations have a connotative force that invites the receiver to emotionally engage with migrants. Such representations can thus function as a trigger for reflection and enable people to react to un-equal sociolinguistic orders.

This thesis consists of two separate yet connected studies which investigate how some adult second language speakers of Swedish with various backgrounds reflect on their experiences of language use. The studies are based on the same empirical data, which consists of questionnaires, diaries, essays and observations, but primarily of conversations conducted with a time interval of six years. This data is analysed from a theoretical framework based on Paul Ricœur’s ideas of interpretation, narrative analysis and identity creation, which recur as a leitmotif throughout the thesis.

In the first study, data from three second language speakers are analysed by means of the concept of narrative identity, shedding light on the interplay between a static and a dynamic identity. The result is presented in the form of life narratives, which are commented on in relation to those strategies the participants express in relation to their second language use. The analysis shows a development over time moving from defiance to acceptance, from avoidance to flexibility and from planning to simplification. Adult language learning stands out as an arduous and time-consuming process with major consequences for the learner’s ego, a conclusion confirmed and clarified in the metaphor analysis of the second study in which language learning is related to hard work, a constant struggle and a long and strenuous journey. Here it also becomes evident that the participants equate language learning and language use to physical exertion and challenge as well as to individual achievement. This becomes particularly clear in the linked chains of metaphors in which language use is compared with skiing down the steepest slopes or appearing on stage.

The participants in both studies are quoted by means of an ethnopoetic method which aims to bring out the creative aspects of their language use and to give second language speakers a voice – a voice which does not need to be corrected and gives the narratives a new dimension.

This article proposes an alternative and reflexive practice for representing migration narratives, referred to as a process of writing nearby. It is informed by ethnography of communication and performance-based theory (i.e. ethnopoetics and poetic inquiry) and provides a theoretically grounded approach, using mimetic configuration, so as to challenge more conventional methods of ethnographical writing. The outcome is presented in the form of poetic narrative suites; the example included here is based on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnography. The article argues for the use of poetics as a way of calling for the activation of the reader's imagination, represent multisensorial experiences, illuminate linguistic resourcefulness and illustrate alternative models of speakerhood. Thus, it contributes to the developing field of arts-based research in sociolinguistics by critically engaging with the notion of voice, and by outlining a creative method for handling the limitations of textual representation.

This article highlights and discusses a young woman’s experience of language use and language development. The woman’s story, which spans a period of fifteen years, starts with her escape from Afghanistan and illustrates her socialisation into Swedish society. The analysis is based on Paul Ricœur’s theoretical framework that is grounded in hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions. Ricœur tries to capture our experiencesof being the same person though we are constantly changing, making his thoughts onstorytelling and identity creation interesting to apply to the experiences of migration. Drawing on the concept of narrative identity, the article points to how narration connects time, how it expresses ethical dimensions and how the woman, little by little, develops an increasingly transnational and inclusive identity. The value of studying new arrivals in a longitudinal perspective also becomes clear as the analysis includes crucial turning points in terms of attitudes and strategies in relation to second language use.

Cet article est basé sur une étude ethnographique de longue durée (2001-2018) et adopte une perspective sociolinguistique sur l’acquisition langagière dans un contexte de migration. L’objectif est d’examiner les expressions métaphoriques qu’utilisent les nouveaux locuteurs pour décrire le processus d’apprentissage du suédois. L’analyse vise à mieux comprendre le phénomène de mudes linguistiques, c’est-à-dire les moments décisifs de la vie d’un individu qui provoquent un changement de langue. En examinant une trajectoire linguistique, nous montrons qu’une langue s’approprie dans la durée, à travers un long processus relationnel et émotionnel. Nous observons également que les mudes se réalisent en plusieurs temps et qu’elles peuvent avoir des qualités distinctes. Il nous paraît donc utile d’élargir la notion de mudes et de parler de mudes fonctionnelles pour désigner le côté pratique de la langue comme moyen de communication dans des domaines langagiers différents, et de mudes existentielles par rapport à la conception et à l’acceptation de soi-même en tant que nouveau locuteur.

This special issue explores the use of metaphor in education from a multilingual perspective in two Scandinavian countries, Norway and Sweden. Inthis introduction, we include a brief overview of earlier research in thedomain and identify common factors noteworthy to discuss in relation tothe multilingual context, for instance, the notion of creativity and speakerlegitimacy in a second language context. The issue includes six articles comprising multilingual school children, youth, university students, adultmigrants, and indigenous minorities. Several of the articles focus on secondlanguage acquisition, use and assessment, while others deal more withsocial issues, including unequal power relations and prejudices that newcomers encounter in everyday life.

This article investigates the use of friendship metaphors in texts by adult second language writers, in relation to the occurrence and function of metaphor and the writers’ discursive constructions of identity. The texts come from the final assessment in Swedish for Immigrants (SFI), a language program in basic Swedish. The analysis confirmed the initial assumption that the emotional and existentially loaded theme of friendship allows for the use of metaphor. The results also showed that the experience of writers as newcomers in Sweden played out in the metaphors that were used and their contexts.

In order to categorize the found metaphors, a model was developed to show how systematic metaphors reflect functions and values related to three thematic categories: guidance and help, belonging and inclusion, and sharing and solidarity. For several metaphors, the metaphoricity was created through novel and unidiomatic wording, i.e. a kind of neologism that can be considered a communication strategy.

The importance of using universal and abstract themes in language testing is emphasized, to enable second language writers to express different facets of experience and knowledge through existential thoughts and attitudes – not only as language learners and newcomers but also as social agents who create and keep transnational relations through friends.

During the confinement due to COVID-19, our research group (MIRCo) gathered together to share our views on the pandemic. Like Klemperer (2001), we developed a 'quarantine diary' of the 'keywords' (Williams, 2015) and expressions circulating in Spain and abroad during the lockdown. In this article, we reflect on how events are (re)constructed in discourse and how different understandings emerge and turn into social practices with transforming potential (Foucault, 2002; Martin Rojo, 2001). Our analysis of these keywords reveals two tendencies, associated with neoliberal governmentality that reinforce the disciplinary component of security: (i) the reinforcement of social discipline, which in the Spanish case was call upon individual responsibility and, for the most part, was efficiently self-imposed by citizens; (ii) the multiplication of devices and nodes of social surveillance, which took place with the engagement of the population in controlling others, and the proliferation of cyber surveillance. The struggles over the signification (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) of various keywords, such as solidarity or freedom, reveal several social tensions at different moments and places that are addressed in the article. In this article, we also turn to discourses that reflect the care practices initiated by neighbourhood and activist groups in order to address the particular ways in which the pandemic has affected their communities. Exemplified by the repopularized slogan: 'solo el pueblo salva al pueblo' ('only the people can save the people'), here we explore how networks of mutual aid and care at the local level challenge assumptions of the State as the primary actor for finding a way out of the crisis. Our discussion questions how 'commoning' (Bollier, 2014) practices for resistance and survival might transcend the pandemic and provide keys to unlocking solutions to new (and old) social struggles.

This chapter presents a narrative analysis of interviews with seven parents whose children attend community language schools teaching Swedish and Vietnamese. There are few studies exploring parent perceptions of the community language school, the languages taught there and the reasons parents describe for enrolling their children. This study fills this gap. The analysis shows that parents place importance on passing on language, culture and an understanding of diasporic identity to their children. Both dynamic and more static understandings of language and language development underlie parents’ utterances; they do not express an expectation that their children will develop or use the languages they study in the same way as themselves. However, all parents stress that they do not want their language or culture to be lost in their new diasporic context. The schools are also described as places where parents with similar languages and backgrounds can meet. Community language schools in this study can thus be understood as vehicles for transferring the Swedish and Vietnamese language and cultural identity to the next generation as well as a meeting place for adults sharing similar backgrounds.

This article aims to explore continuity and change in adult migrants’ experiences of Swedish for immigrants (SFI), a state-subsidised language programme for basic Swedish. The study has a longitudinal and comparative design, drawing on discourse analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with language learners in 2001/2002 and 2015/2016. This period was characterized by important societal shifts, defined by increased migration, growing tension between discourses on rights and obligations of adult migrants living in Sweden, and an intensified marketisation of the Swedish education system derived from neoliberal principles. The study describes how these changes affected SFI as well as the conceivable impact that restructuring the language programme had on the learners. Ultimately, the study highlights tensions between various state initiatives that impacted the language programme and the SFI participants’ experiences of being adult language learners.

This presentation aims to highlight and discuss the dialogical relationship between poetic transcriptions (Ahlgren, 2021) and analysis of narrative interviews. The data comprises interviews with two teachers of Vietnamese in a community language (CL) school in Australia conducted in a larger linguistic ethnographic project (Reath Warren, 2017). Qualitative content and positioning analysis of interviews offer compelling insights into the teachers' migration journeys and linguistic repertoires. Moreover, the analysis reveals their reasons for teaching Vietnamese, and how their professional teacher identities are expressed in different contexts. However, representing and analyzing the teachers' thoughtful, sometimes non-standard, and emotional utterances, also involves methodological challenges (Reath Warren & Ahlgren, forthcoming). In this case, decisions made in the process of transcription relate directly to the researchers' epistemological assumptions about language and reflect and shape the theories and purposes of the research project in question. In this presentation, we will illustrate how poetic transcriptions can create a space for representing existential experience and emotion, as well as highlighting the resourcefulness of language use rather than deviance from a monolingual norm (Ahlgren, 2021). In a relation to an ideological environment, where monolingual norms emerge as a powerful factor impacting on CL teacher identity, the use of poetic transcriptions can be a way to not only highlight the seldom-heard perspectives of CL teachers but also to validate and even valorize their voices – reflecting struggle as well as proudness and hope for the future.

Una reflexión sobre aquellas expresiones que circulan estos días para documentar los cambios en nuestras vidas y los riesgos e incertidumbres a los que nos enfrentamos, pero también para imaginar otros mundos posibles