Visual silence in the language portrait: analysing young people’s representations of their linguistic repertoires

Abstract

While the language portrait (LP) is a visual research method that can make visible speakers’ multilingualism, this article considers how and why speakers may use the LP to make elements of their linguistic repertoire invisible. Analysing the portraits created by three primary school students in Luxembourg, I explore why these young people omitted different linguistic resources in the visual representation of their linguistic repertoire. Combining subject-based perspectives on multilingualism grounded in the lived experience of language with scholarship on silence and visual silence, instances of such erasures are explored in light of their formal, content and functional dimensions. More specifically, I analyse how visual silence can function as a strategy to align the LP with how speakers understand their linguistic repertoire and sense of self, and explore visual silence as a subversive act of resistance against curricular languages at school. The conclusion highlights the affordances of the LP as a visual, creative method that can support subject-based approaches to multilingualism and offers speakers a potentially empowering way to visually and discursively affirm their linguistic repertoire, with visual silence constituting an intentional strategy within this process of representation.

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