“Can you teach me some Pakistani?” – Ethnolinguistic cornering among Copenhagen youth

Abstract In this article I present the notion of ethnolinguistic cornering as an outcome of the Everyday Languaging project and argue for its relevance in ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics. The Everyday Languaging project is a long-term cooperation with a Copenhagen school where a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen has conducted language-centered ethnographic fieldwork involving different student groups. The school is situated in a linguistically heterogeneous area of Copenhagen and the students represent a high variety of different linguistic family backgrounds. The data presented in the paper involve a student group who were followed from their first year in the public school system in 2010 through nine years until 2019. Ethnolinguistic cornering denotes moments in interaction where people ascribe each other identities based on assumptions about language and social life, and these ascribed identities are rejected or in other ways treated as negatively charged. I argue that instances of ethnolinguistic cornering deserve particular attention in sociolinguistics because they provide a lens for investigating how the paradox of monolingual standard regimes within multilingual societies is constructed, reproduced and challenged in ongoing interaction.