Narratives of Multilingual Becoming: The Co-Construction of Solidarity as a Language Ideology

This paper explores linguistic life-histories from five participants in a larger interview study with U.S.-based adults. These five interviewees were middle-class White women from monolingual English-speaking families who pursued multilingual learning trajectories in young adulthood. Having previously attained proficiency in one language through academic study, all five recounted similar pivotal decisions to deprioritize that language, and instead invest in another language that they now saw as more socially relevant. Through discursive analysis of the emotionality and (lack of) agency in their narratives of linguistic decision-making, the paper demonstrates how all five women, in dialogue with the interviewer, co-constructed ideologies of linguistic solidarity across lines of social difference. Drawing on Bakhtinian theory to analyze identity development as ideological becoming, the research explores elite contestation of dominant language ideologies within interview dialogues.