Introduction

In this chapter, we navigate away from the ‘big picture’ of policy discourses and towards the more intimate domain of individual experience. Both here and in the following chapter we shall draw on the same corpus of personal interviews but in rather different ways and for different purposes. The language biographies that constitute part of these interviews represent a particular kind of discourse on language in social life. In Chapter 6, we will try to show how such interviews provide a source of data on ways in which individuals select from a range of social and linguistic categories made available by wider discourses on the social world they inhabit in order to position themselves in relation to others, to represent themselves as social beings. Before we can do that, we need first to look closely at ways in which these individuals, as narrators, make experiences with language an organising or structural element in their life stories: what is it about ‘my’ encounters with German and other languages – their evaluations, the times and places associated with their use, their possibilities and limitations or constraints – that have made my ‘life’ what it is or has become? In this chapter, therefore, the focus is on the creation of a sense of ‘self’, and the narrative is the data (Bamberg et al. 2007: 1–8).

Our concern here, then, is with what we referred to in Chapter 2 as the transformation of (often fragmented) experience into stories with their own structural logic and shape.