Mapping perceptions and knowledge of language: Societal multilingualism and its sociopragmatic grounding

Abstract

This chapter outlines different methodological approaches to the visualization of perceptions and their socio-pragmatic grounding, ranging from traditional draw-a-map tasks to white-canvas tasks, language-portrait tasks, and pile-sort tasks. While the methods presented are traditionally used in sociolinguistics, this chapter illustrates their validity for pragmatic research by means of a case study conducted in Luxembourg and Switzerland. There, participants were asked to visualize multilingualism in their respective country, both individually, as well as in a collaborative task. On the one hand, the analysis of their drawings shows several recurring motifs in the individual participant groups, such as a geographical language distribution in Switzerland, or situations of daily routines in Luxembourg. On the other hand, the group tasks furthermore represent rich data, with each individual negotiation presenting a mirror of social practices as a whole.