Monikieliset ikääntyvät ihmiset ja monimuotoiset kielten repertuaarit: miten kielivalintoja ja suhdetta kieliin kuvataan kielellistä elämäkertaa valaisevassa haastattelussa?
Keywords:
multilingualism, elderly people, language choice, language identityAbstract
The aim of this article is to examine the linguistic biographies of two elderly multilingual informants, Ingrian Finnish Iivari and Hungarian Finnish Miska. A semi-structured interview was carried out with these men concerning their use of different language resources in their everyday life and their relationship to different languages in the past and present. Iivari and Miska described their linguistic repertoires as diverse: in addition to Finnish, Iivari and Miska used Russian and Hungarian respectively on an everyday basis, along with different varieties of these languages. The concepts of multilingualism and mother tongue were discussed and both informants described themselves as multilingual with a fluid use of their linguistic repertoires, but despite their excellent knowledge and emotional connections to at least two of the named languages, they think that they have only one mother tongue; it is Finnish to Iivari and Hungarian to Miska. In addition, age seems to be a central dimension in their linguistic self-image.
