Language biographies

AbstractThe various collections of language biographies starting in the 1990s have given rise to a new field of investigation in sociolinguistics. The interest in the very individual, autobiographical viewpoint on languages in speakers’ own repertoires offers new insights for macrosociolinguistic research. These detailed corpora also provide data for microanalytical investigations into the specificity of autobiographical narrations, i.e. how speakers construe their language repertoires in the narrative interview setting. This contribution seeks to depict how the interest in LB emerged and subsequently describes the most important developments in LB research, which to date is still limited to the European arena. Since the field is still growing and is in need of formalization, this overview must remain incomplete. Finally, the contribution warns of pitfalls and highlights some fields where LB has provided important input, from language didactics to neurolinguistic studies.