Brave New Lifeworlds

Abstract

This chapter argues that language learners cannot only construct new figured identities for themselves, but that these may be inscribed in intensely self-manufactured worlds. I describe the sphere the language learner inhabits through the phenomenological concept of lifeworld, which captures the understanding of the language learner’s sense of self as a conscious and unconscious ownership of a multilingual world. In such an understanding, language learners’ lived experiences are not only seen as direct experiences of the world but also as deterritorialised, autonomous and unpredictable. Linguistic and cultural lives are emancipated from essentialised and idealised notions of cultures and instead become nomadic and contingent on the locality and the terrains on which the learner treads. In order to explore how these worlds develop, I draw on the notion of Spracherleben (the lived experience of language) and its emphasis on direct sensation and perception. The illustration of lifeworlds and Spracherleben of learners of Serbian/Croatian, Catalan and Arabic will provide vivid accounts of the forms these appropriations and interpretations of cultural experiences take, and the resulting self-assembled cartographies of the world.