Vom Glück der Mehrsprachigkeit: Ein polnischer Linguist über seinen Spracherwerb des Deutschen, Englischen und Russischen

Abstract

The explorative study focuses on a Polish linguist whose academic stay abroad at the University of Vienna was deeply affected by the Solidarność movement in his home country. His involvement with a Solidarność foreign committee in Austria led to the revocation of his Polish citizenship and resulting statelessness. The hereby forced reorientation required mastery of German as a working language at the university (in addition to English), which he had not learned during his educational phases in Poland. The data were elicited through the introspection of the interviewee using the narrative interview. In the analysis of the transcribed interview excerpts, the stages of the life course and self-constructed acquisition strategies of German as a second language within the political committee for Solidarność are traced.

Keywords

• language biography
• second language acquisition
• foreign language learning
• narrative interview