Superdiverse and multilingual, but still languageless

It is widely emphasized that there are existing gaps between parents who understand themselves as residents and parents who are positioned as immigrants or even ‘perpetual foreigners’. This qualitative study illustrates how unconscious and unintended raciolinguistic attitudes position some groups of parents and keep them excluded despite the programmatic idea of school-based parent cafés, legitimized by governmental strategies of better inclusion. The theories of raciolinguicism and monolingual habitus are further explored to understand intertwined mechanisms of creating groups. The analysis was planned and carried out using the Grounded Theory based on interviews. As the main findings, it is argued that German is understood as the language that leaves parents with another first language languageless with no or just limited communication skills. In certain school-related contexts, the monolingual habitus of German can be replaced by another dominant language. The study also showcases the phenomenon of (self)othering that can occur unintendedly in parent cafés.