Northern and Southern Somali on the outskirts of Aarhus – a linguistic ethnographic analysis of language and belonging across time and space

In this paper, I present a linguistic ethnographic analysis of how children make meaning of language and belonging across time and space. The empirical starting point is ‘mother tongue teaching’ in Somali in a primary school on the outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark. ‘Mother tongue teaching’ is the official Danish term for teaching of languages such as Somali or Arabic, taking place within public primary and lower secondary schools and targeted at pupils believed to have these languages as their ’mother tongue’. At the same time a profoundly national construction and an inherently transnational phenomenon, mother tongue teaching provides a privileged site for the exploration of multilingual children’s investment in languages, places and national identities.In the linguistic ethnographic analysis presented in the paper, I draw on Laursen and Mogensen’s conceptualization of ‘timespacing competence’ (Laursen & Mogensen 2016) and Blackledge and Creese’s description of ‘inventing and disinventing the national’ in British complementary schools (Blackledge & Creese 2010) to explore how 9-10 year old children display, negotiate and contest their senses of belonging to languages and nations in multi-layered and ambivalent ways. The paper is based on a linguistic ethnographic study of language teaching across the curriculum in a Year 2 class in a public primary school in Denmark (Daugaard 2015). Using fieldwork as overarching research strategy, I followed obligatory teaching in Danish and English as well as ‘mother tongue teaching’ in Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Somali. The empirical material consists of fieldnotes, photographs, video and audio recordings and texts collected during participant observation in the language classroom, supplemented by interviews with children, mother tongue teachers and school management.