230678 Exploring Bi- and Multilingualism in the Home Context (S) (SoSe 2026)

In this class we’ll look in more detail at how parents use their languages (two, three, or more) in their home environment to raise their children to become bi- or multilingual speakers.

You will read background texts on both bi- and multilingualism as well as on theories on how to raise children with more than one language. I will in addition supply you with studies that look into this topic. With this background you will then develop questionnaires which you’ll take into families in which more than one language is spoken and investigate the strategies used by the parents and/or caregivers. In addition, you will try to establish categories classifying the different “language-in-family” situations in which each of the languages is used to see whether there are situations/lexical fields that are more often used with one language rather than another (e.g. home vs. societal language).