Polyphonie
Mehrsprachigkeit_Kreativität_Schreiben

The aim of this interview database is to make available – in the form of audio files, and later perhaps even video files – language biography interviews with writers (from literature, the media and science) who have a plurilingual background. This project involves a special kind of biographical work, the requirements for which need to be defined in minute detail in advance. It is important to clarify whether one wishes to conduct narrative interviews or segmented interviews, or both. At all events, the list or lists of questions to be worked out must be structured in such a way that the linguistic-cultural biographies are actually "language learning biographies".  This should produce a general picture of the language socialization of writers, starting from "motherese" (Mutterisch) , the acquisition of the first language through caregivers, as against the acquisition of one or further first languages by means of social contact or education, passing through the later learning of second or foreign languages, right up to the writer’s ongoing learning processes in the foreign language in its written form. To ensure the comparability of the data, we will make every effort to standardise the segmented interviews. In this way those who then wish to draw on the data for a comparative study will be able to find writers’ statements on specific issues quickly and easily using the search feature. With the interview database, we also want to use the productive potential of “collective intelligence”. Anyone can upload onto the database audio or video files of interviews conducted according to our models. To make this language biography work meaningful, the interviews must also be transcribed. This too can be done with the help of the community. Interviews can be freely downloaded and then the transcript of the database made available, so that it can be published as a research contribution. Of course, in addition the interviews can serve as a corpus for further linguistic studies in the fields of phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, while also being used to explore questions in the field of language variety research and applied linguistics as well as for literary and cultural studies research.