From language portraits to language playlists: Exploring sonic possibilities for language autobiographical research

Abstract Inspired by the rich body of research that has used language portraits as a means to invite reflection on people’s lived experiences of language in relation to the body, this study asked: What happens when we ask multilinguals to bring music to an interview about their lived experiences of language? In this paper, I analyze excerpts from two interviews with one couple, Mira and Andrej, to examine how the autobiographical narratives they produced about their language portraits or while sharing their language playlists differed in terms of content, amount of detail, and affective descriptions. I drew on (Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harvard University Press) concept of frame to examine the possibilities that sonic texts (songs) engendered within the Spracherleben (Busch, B. (2017) ‘Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic Repertoire: On the Concept of Spracherleben—the Lived Experience of Language’, Applied Linguistics, 38: 340–58) interviews. Overall, I found that language playlists had unique affordances in terms of the amount of narrative detail they seemed to prompt, affective engagement, and interpersonal connection. I conclude by presenting implications of this work, and invitations for future researchers in this area.