The paper presents the local, global and sociolinguistic contexts of an international HERAproject (IDII4MES; the Humanities in the European Research Area, 2010-2012). Its main aims are summarized as follows; to:
- investigate the range of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people and how these practices are used to negotiate inheritance and identities,
- explore the cultural and social significance of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people,
- develop innovative multi-site, ethnographic team methodologies using interlocking case studies across national, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts
- contribute to policy and practice in the inclusion of non-national minority languages in the wider European educational agenda.
The four research sites, Birmingham (U.K.; coordinator), Copenhagen (Denmark), Stockholm (Sweden), and Tilburg (Netherlands), followed similar routes for data creation, but concentrated on school-age children of different language-backgrounds: Punjabi (Birmingham), Finnish and Spanish (Stockholm), Chinese (Tilburg, Eindhoven, Utrecht), and mainstream context (Danish) for various language-background children (Copenhagen). The methods involve ethnographic fieldwork in- and out-of-school, interviews, discussions, linguistic landscaping and ‘nethnographic’ studies of multilingual adolescents’ social media and internet communication. Analyses and reports based on the qualitative data from the diverse, multilingual contexts have been discussed and produced. Following these, new datadriven and comparative-theoretical studies of the project are being produced.