Introduction
In the classrooms of the Slowenisches Gymnasium ‘Slovenian secondary school’ in Klagenfurt, Austria, the students—almost all of whom are members of the constitutionally recognized autochthonous minority of Carinthian Slovenes—dutifully speak in the official language of the school, Slovenian. Between periods, however, these same students laugh, joke, tease, and shout in the regional varieties of German. Parents, teachers, and administrators are at a loss at how to encourage the students to also cultivate ‘their’ language for communication among friends. They need not have feared though, since those students who leave Carinthia for Vienna to study at the universities there, find themselves every Friday evening at the Klub slovenskih študentk in študentov na Dunaju/Klub Slowenischer StudentInnen in Wien ‘Slovenian Students Club in Vienna’ gladly chatting with their friends and relatives in Slovenian while having a drink and enjoying the Slavic-language cultural programming.
How come these young Slovenians, despite all of their parents' efforts to maintain the awareness of and identification with the Slovenian minority through education and language training, do not speak their ‘mother tongue’ with friends in Carinthia while they are more than eager to do so in Vienna? Why is this change in place significant and how do the young members of the minority experience it? What is at stake in investigating the transformation of a community's linguistic practices across different locations within a nation-state? What can this case tell us about the scalar effects of language ideologies on a community of speakers?
In this article, I argue that as young Slovenians move from their rural hometowns in Carinthia to Vienna, they experience a reindexicalization of their linguistic practice and also social personae. Through this experience of incommensurable language ideologies, these individuals are transformed from a stigmatized minority into cosmopolitan polyglots. Further, this reindexicalization and alignment with a multilingual language ideology contributes to how young Slovenians construct contrasting cultural chronotopes about Carinthia and Vienna, the former as a backwater and the latter as cosmopolitan capital. Finally, the orientation toward the multilingual language ideology enables the erasure of certain contradictions entailed by such ideologies – such as persistent language hierarchies and social differences among ‘Europeans’ despite language ideological claims to the contrary (Gal Reference Gal2006a) – but may also call attention to the inconsistencies of European language ideologies.
More broadly, I want to contribute to work on how speakers engage dominant or incommensurate language ideologies and indexical orders (Agha Reference Agha2003; Eisenlohr Reference Eisenlohr2004; Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck Reference Blommaert, Collins; and Slembrouck2005; Woolard Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008; Cavanaugh Reference Cavanaugh2009; Dick Reference Dick2011; Koven Reference Koven2013). In the European context, incommensurate language ideologies can, in part, be traced to European Union engagement with multilingualism shifting away from a monolingual standard ideal to an ideal of multilingualism (Moore Reference Moore2011; Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012). On this European level, monolingualism comes to be chronotopically associated with a past and backward type of narrow-minded nationalism, while multilingualism becomes an index of a desirable future-oriented European cosmopolitanism, espoused not only in EU Commission reports but also held up as an aspirational ideal by scholars (Beck & Grande Reference Beck and Grande2007).
The article is organized as follows. I begin with a discussion of shifting language ideologies in Europe, specifically situating these transformations in Austria. This is followed by an overview of the historical and ethnographic context of Carinthian Slovenes in Carinthia and Vienna. I then show examples of how Carinthian Slovenes experience the reindexicalization of their minority language practice as they move from Carinthia to Vienna. These materials were collected in the spring of 2007 through (i) interviews with fourteen members of the Slovenian Student Club in Vienna, and (ii) notes from observations of a variety of Club events and activities. I focus on how they articulate the differences between the two places and how they project distinct cultural chronotopic imaginaries onto them. I conclude with a discussion of the contradictions that become evident in European language ideologies when one considers them from the viewpoint of these young minority speakers.
Language ideologies in Europe and Austria: From imagined monolingual pasts to multilingual futures
The curious transformation of linguistic practices among young Carinthian Slovenes can be investigated by considering how language is regimented and indexicalized at different places within the nation-state (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003a; Gal Reference Gal2005), in other words, by looking at which language ideologies are at play and where. Language ideologies are ‘the ideas with which participants frame their understanding of linguistic varieties and the differences among them, and map those understandings onto people, events, and activities that are significant to them’ (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000:36). The regimentation of linguistic practice through language ideologies and the ordering of different types of speech into a socially meaningful and stratified cultural system of indexicals have been shown to change over time and place (Inoue Reference Inoue2002; Agha Reference Agha2003), and individuals must orient towards the different social personae created by often incommensurate orders of indexicality (Blommaert et al. Reference Blommaert, Collins; and Slembrouck2005:200; Dick Reference Dick2011:229). Competing and incommensurate language ideologies are clearly in effect across the EU at different scales. EU language policy has put new emphasis on multilingualism, putting forth the desirability of fluency in multiple languages—described by scholars as multistandardism—as a European ideal (Gal Reference Gal2011; Moore Reference Moore2011). But empirical research has shown this ideal to be constrained by a territorial focus on national standards, leading to the neglect of immigrant languages and nonstandard varieties (LINEE 2010; Rindler Schjerve & Vetter Reference Rindler Schjerve and Vetter2012).
This article presents one example of how the experience of different language ideologies (from monolingualism to multistandardism) through local indexical orders entails changes in the linguistic practice of a minority language group and in how the members align themselves with or against chronotopically imagined urban and rural speech worlds (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1998). Agha's concept of ‘cultural chronotopes’ concretizes how chronotopes are made culturally relevant in interaction when he describes them as ‘depictions of place-time-and-personhood to which social interactants orient when they engage each other through discursive signs of any kind’ (Agha Reference Agha2007:320). These discursive signs are regimented by language ideologies. As I show, different and incommensurate language ideologies structure the indexical orders through which mobile citizens experience language use and social differentiation throughout Austria.
Monolingualism as a language ideology achieved its hard-won dominance only about 100 years ago in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but up to 150 years ago in Western Europe (Gal Reference Gal, Mar-Molinero and Stevenson2006b:14). The standard language ideology derives its authority from positing a distinction between authenticity and universality along an axis of differentiation. Standard languages are at once the authentic mode of expression for a particular nation of speakers in contrast with other nations and their citizen-speakers, as well as the universal register by which national ideals of public discourse and democracy are made possible.
The contradiction between particular and universal, a function of the scale or scope of perspective on standardization, is productively maintained in the European context. ‘Standards are a universal form from the narrower state-perspective, yet indexical of place, authenticity, and tradition from a more encompassing one’ (Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012:30). The standard is usually imbued with superior value as the ‘good’ language that can be attributed as much to its nationwide universality as to its authenticity. The standard's privilege as the universal mode of expression comes at the expense of nonstandard variants (regional, minority, or migrant), which are tolerated as the authentic mode of expression of a particular place or group. Yet, the ‘authentic’ sounding nonstandard variety can also be celebrated and produce authority precisely because of its particularity (Woolard Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008).
Whether a variety is celebrated as standard universal or as authentic particular always depends on the perspective from which standardization is viewed. In Austria, the semiotic function of fractal recursion illustrates the reproduction of relations of linguistic domination at each scale (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000). Among German speakers in Europe, the Austrian standard (much like Swiss German) is viewed as the ‘authentic’ hickish variety next to the ‘Federal German’ (Bundesdeutsch) spoken in Germany. Meanwhile, within Austria, speakers of regional Austrian-German varieties in the provinces defer to the ‘High German’ (Hochdeutsch) spoken by university-goers in Vienna while taking pride in the ‘authenticity’ of their local varieties. At the provincial level, certain towns and regions enjoy the reputation of producing the ‘worst’ kind of the regional variant, an exemplar of backward linguistic practice or remnant from the past (Gal Reference Gal2006a), whereas others speak ‘beautifully’, expressing local authenticity.
The EU's early efforts to protect regional and ‘lesser used’ languages assigned these languages to the authenticity pole of this axis of differentiation. The efforts over the last twenty years to grapple with what is perceived to be increasing multilingualism within Europe has resulted in an apparent shift in the standard language ideologies of the EU toward a new valorization of all forms of multilingualism and all languages with an emphasis on multistandardism, that is, competence in multiple standard languages. In a recent article, Gal cites various European Commission reports in which advisers offer recommendations for the development and cultivation of cosmopolitan European speakers. They propose a new ideal triad of languages for every EU citizen: a ‘lingua franca, a mother tongue, plus a freely chosen language of affinity’ (Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012:33). This is a standardization process that has as its goal not the standardization of a single national language but rather the standardization of diversity, producing an ideology of multistandardism.
However, as Gal points out, this shift reproduces the same distinctions (authentic/universal) and the same value hierarchy, while assigning them to a set of languages rather than a single one (2012). The most highly prized languages are the standards associated with the European cultural and economic elite; languages such as French, German, and English carry the most purchase in the shared European zone of exchange. Moore (Reference Moore2011:9) argues that the kind of multilingualism European policymakers have in mind tends to be of the elite sort practiced by jet-setting cosmopolitans rather than the remedial—ultimately eradicative—bi- or multilingualism of the EU's immigrants. Indeed, most EU countries impose language-learning requirements on non-EU citizens who seek to immigrate (van Avermaet Reference van Avermaet, Hogan-Brun, Mar-Molinero and Stevenson2009:22), and recent Austrian ‘integration’ policy requires immigrants to make a unilateral effort to learn the state language (Stevenson Reference Stevenson, Mar-Molinero and Stevenson2006).
As a result of this elite ‘standardization of diversity’ (Moore Reference Moore2011:15), minority or minoritized languages may only index ‘authenticity’ and local traditions; as such they are bound to a place and are not seen to be part of a repertoire for socioeconomic mobility. They can be a ‘kitchen language’, a mother tongue in which speakers express their emotions, but not a language of governance or of the economy. I address below how Carinthian Slovenes appropriate their local ‘authentic’ language as an index of a desirable multilingual competence in spite of the above described language hierarchies.
Ethnographic and historical context: Carinthian Slovenes in Austria
In order to situate how young Carinthian Slovenes experience the relationship between nation, language, and territory, I outline some of the social and political processes within the particular historical context that have framed understandings of language use and minority groupness in Austria.
From Vielvölkerstaat to Volksgruppe: Nationalism and self-determination in central Europe
The Carinthian Slovenes of Austria, whose presence in Carinthia can be traced back to the Migration Period from 400–700AD, are a ‘traditional’ linguistic minority in the sense that they have since 1955 been legally identified as an autochthonous Volksgruppe—a constitutionally protected national minority the members of which are citizens of the Austrian state (Haas & Stuhlpfarrer Reference Haas and Stuhlpfarrer1977; Barker & Moritsch Reference Barker and Moritsch1984; Moritsch & Domej Reference Moritsch and Domej1996; Knight Reference Knight, Breuning, Lewis and Pritchard2005; Klemenčič & Klemenčič Reference Klemenčič and Klemenčič2010). The legal framework around Austrian national minorities in the 1955 constitution is, in part, a recognition of Austria's history as Vielvölkerstaat Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg's ‘multinational empire’ stretched across much of today's eastern and southeastern Europe. Its eight official and five unofficial languages were widely heard in the capital of Vienna, which experienced its demographic peak at just over two million inhabitants in 1910. Traces of this multilingual empire are found all across Vienna as lexical items in the local register, street names, and neighborhoods. The end of World War I brought about the breakup of the Habsburg Empire, and ideologies of self-determination contributed to the formation of numerous supposedly linguistically homogenous nation-states especially in central, east, and southeastern Europe (Greenberg Reference Greenberg2004).
These processes of national linguistic standardization and differentiation also touched Carinthian Slovenes. Following the end of World War I, troops from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia occupied parts of the Slovenian speaking territory of Carinthia. An armed conflict between the Kingdom's troops and confederations of the provisional Carinthian government ensued, which is now commemorated as the Kärntner Abwehrkampf ‘Carinthian defensive battle’. The Carinthian militia won back some of the occupied territories when the Treaty of Saint-Germain called for a referendum to resolve the territorial issue. On October 10, 1920, Southern Carinthians voted to remain with Austria instead of to join the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Today, the symbolic significance of the Abwehrkampf and the plebiscite is occupied by right-wing members of the German population in Carinthia through commemorative events that promote the members of the militia as nationalist ‘freedom fighters’. The contentious history of the region is thus annually refreshed.
Numerical decline and social mobility
The historical intimidation of Carinthian Slovenes led to a vast decline of the group's membership,Footnote 1 which is supposed to be curtailed by the rights guaranteed to the minority in the constitution. This decline, however, has also been described as ‘differential assimilation’ by Albert Reiterer (Reference Reiterer1996)Footnote 2 whose study shows a correlation between upward social and geographic mobility among Carinthian Slovenes. This mobility is due to the minority's educational commitments and opportunities within rural Carinthia (Zupančič Reference Zupančič1993). The children of politically committed Carinthian Slovene parents will almost always attend the Slovene-language Gymnasium (secondary school) in Klagenfurt, the capital of the province and the ‘capital’ of the Carinthian Slovenes (Reiterer Reference Reiterer1996:216). This usually entails significant travel time from rural enclaves, but also prepares students for entrance into tertiary education in other provincial capitals or up the conical hierarchy of place within the nation-state to the top-and-center of Vienna (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003b:535). Thus, politically active Carinthian Slovenes are more educated and more mobile than their assimilated counterparts because educational opportunities are seen as a key strategy for group maintenance.
Ortstafelstreit and Carinthian political opposition to visual bilingualism
The shrinking of the Carinthian Slovene minority in Austria is sometimes linked to the failure of the Carinthian provincial government (and by extension the Austrian state) to enforce and effectively ensure the enjoyment of rights guaranteed by the Austrian constitution. One of these rights, which has long been the subject of great controversy in Carinthia, is the placement of bilingual road signs in the bilingual regions. The Ortstafelstreit ‘place-name sign conflict’ flared up in the 1970s when the Social Democratic Chancellor at the time, Bruno Kreisky, ordered the installation of bilingual street signs. German monolingual residents resisted by tearing down the signs and the conflict escalated into violence (Karner Reference Karner2006).
Again in the mid 2000s, Carinthian politicians made the news by trying to sabotage the erection of Slovenian street signs (ORF 2006). The Carinthian governor at the time was extreme right-wing party leader Jörg Haider whose party ran ads in the regional newspapers announcing that ‘Carinthia will become monolingual’ (WZ Online & Austria Presse Agentur 2006). Resistance among German monolinguals to the visual presence of Slovenian in Carinthian public space can be read as an indication of the pervasiveness of the local monolingual ideology that sees languages other than German as a threat. Only recently has a resolution been achieved regarding the number and location of bilingual road signs (APA 2011). The fight about street signs and the linguistic occupation of public space is to this day seen as an extension of earlier struggles around territory including the Abwehrkampf after World War I. Speaking Slovenian thus carries a lot of historical and political baggage in Carinthia.
The reindexicalization of Slovenian
Carinthian Slovene linguistic practice is regimented through the above described historically shaped local language ideologies. By reacting and responding to these regimentations, speakers align themselves with or against the social valuations of these orders (Davidson Reference Davidson2007; Dick Reference Dick2011). My informants' metadiscursive commentary on their own language practices and experiences of speaking publicly shows how these experiences are construed within the indexical orders that sanction or approve certain ways of speaking.
After some field work at the Slovenian middle and high school in Carinthia, I contacted the Club of Slovenian Students in Vienna (Klub slovenskih študentk in študentov na Dunaju - Klub slowenischer StudentInnen in Wien) in order to gather this metadiscursive commentary, by observing some of their events, spending time in their library, and conducting interviews. The Club president at the time invited me to join their weekly Club evening where he introduced me to Club officers and regular attendees. The Club members were no strangers to attention from the media and other academics since the status of their minority rights was then a well-publicized issue, and thus, they were used to requests for interviews. I conducted interviews in German with a dozen club officers and members, all of whom grew up in small to medium-sized bilingual towns in provincial Carinthia, asking them about their educational trajectories and linguistic practices.Footnote 3 In particular, I asked how they ended up in Vienna, how they experienced Vienna and Carinthia, whether they missed Carinthia, and how often they went back home. Throughout the interviews, certain explanatory patterns emerged in which the role of language and place always played a central role. From these patterns, I have constructed the argument in this article.
Speaking Slovenian in Carinthia
The traditional settlement region of Carinthian Slovenes is in the southern part of Carinthia, stretching from Klagenfurt as the northernmost point, east and west southward to the Slovenian border (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Map of Austria.
According to the census of 2001, there are twelve bilingual towns in this region where the concentration of Slovenian speakers is over 10% of the town's population. Only one town, Zell, has 90% Slovenian speakers. All other communities have less than 50% Slovenian speakers (Statistik Austria Reference Austria2003:18). Thus, most Carinthian Slovenes experience life as minority speakers in larger German-speaking communities. One informant described his experience, given below in (1).
(1) While I was at primary school I rejected Slovenian… I remember that with my mother, I didn't want her to speak Slovenian with me on the street, because I noticed the atmosphere. For example, old people, but it already happened on the way to kindergarten that, if I spoke Slovenian, somebody would give me a dirty look. For example, I remember I was playing in the courtyard of our building when the grandmother of one of my neighbors, Thomas, with whom I was playing, came up to me, I must have been around 6 or 7 and Thomas was 3 or 4, and she said something like “if you teach Thomas even one word in Slovenian, you'll get a slap in the face!” And well, she like threatened me, a child! That kind of thing happened from time to time. (Bojan)
The German monolingual language ideology that is dominant throughout the majority population within Carinthia considers Slovenian an illegitimate variety, and all of my informants have experienced being interpellated as a member of the Slovenian minority as a result of speaking Slovenian in public in Carinthia. Similar to the US ‘White public space’, which is produced through practices that ‘monitor and sanction the use of “nonstandard” forms in spaces constituted as “public”’ (Dick Reference Dick2011:230), there could be said to exist a monolingual German public space in Carinthia that sanctions ‘nonstandard’ forms used in ‘public’. Carinthian Slovenes have all experienced such sanction and remarks that mark them as ‘other’, as unfit to participate in Carinthian public life. These sanctions occur most frequently in and around the city of Klagenfurt, and always in public spaces such as on streets but also in public transportation. Beginning at the age of ten, young Slovenians commuting to Klagenfurt (to attend the Slovenian Gymnasium) are regularly the targets of xenophobic comments and the occasional threat of physical violence on the bus, on the train, or on the street.
While the use of Slovenian is not unproblematic within the regional context of Carinthia, it is nevertheless required as an active marker of group membership in order to maintain ‘consciousness’—an active choice of identification and alignment with the group. ‘Conscious’ Slovenians are part of an ideologically committed and politically mobilized community concerned with the group's endurance. This commitment and concern for endurance leads parents to adopt common strategies of language acquisition and maintenance that are in part made possible by the requirements of the Austrian constitution to provide minority-language schooling in areas of sufficient minority language density. Parents devote significant resources to the development of their child's linguistic competence and thus the valorization of group belonging. These social and educational strategies must be seen in the context of the regionally dominant monolingual German language and rural German-national culture of the Carinthian province. In the face of the dominant German language and culture, schooling and community activities intend to maximize the usage of and exposure to the Slovene language as well as social contact within the language group.
These strategies of language-group maintenance manifest in the adoption of a standard language ideology for Slovenian with its cultural and institutional processes of maintenance. Standard Slovene is the most highly prized variety to the extent that the regional Carinthian Slovenian varieties are sometimes not transmitted in favor of the standard. All of my informants come from politically committed families: most of them spoke and still speak Slovenian at home, the vast majority of them attended only Slovenian language schools, and all of them participated in aspects of Slovenian cultural life. These practices were sometimes experienced as burdensome obligations and also subjected my informants to punitive attention from the majority population in the region. Situations in which informants were publicly sanctioned by German monolinguals have contributed to how Carinthia is perceived by my informants.
The indexical order that evaluates linguistic practice in Carinthian public space sanctions the use of Slovenian. My informants have described the experience of speaking Slovenian in Carinthia as difficult and shameful. My oldest informant, twenty-eight-year-old Bojan,Footnote 4 quoted above in (1), stated that negative public responses to Slovenian were in part the reason why he refused to speak Slovenian during primary school.Footnote 5
In Bojan's anecdote, the majority German standard language ideology designates Slovenian as an illegitimate variety and declares its speakers as a threat. Subtle and not so subtle messages make clear to Bojan that Slovenian is unwelcome in the public sphere and he responds by submitting to the dominant ideology's sanction. The fact that Bojan rejected speaking Slovenian in public when he was a child can be partly attributed to his experience of the regionally prevalent language ideology, hostile towards his mother tongue.
(2) Except for that time in kindergarten and primary school, when I, when it bothered me that my mother spoke Slovenian to me in public because I noticed, in one way or another, that people disapproved.
Even Slovenians whose participation in the Slovenian community is immersive can experience moments when their group belonging becomes a source of anxiety. Cvetko, an officer of the Slovenian Student Club, grew up in a small village with around fifty inhabitants where ‘Slovenian was spoken on the street’.Footnote 6 Surrounded by a large Carinthian Slovene family, his childhood was relatively free of xenophobic hostility until he entered the Slovenian high school at the age of ten. After four years of commuting to Klagenfurt, Cvetko had experienced enough negative comments that he became hesitant to indicate his mother tongue as Slovenian on the application for admission to a prestigious (German-language) technical high school.
(3) OK, so the application form: mother tongue, OK, what to write? I put down Slovenian with a bit of an uncomfortable feeling and it started slowly, crap, Slovenian, I can't, I'll be discriminated against because of that. I was really afraid. I got very anxious. I terrorized my mother endlessly. My dad, I knew he wouldn't like it, my dad [wouldn't approve of his behavior and would say]: “Shut up, it's Slovenian and that's it!” He's not as emotional as my mom [laughs.] Anyways, I wouldn't stop and my mother finally called the secretary of the school to say that she wanted to change the entry for mother tongue on the form—because I was flipping out and I was scared—and the secretary said, listen, [Slovenian] is no problem at all, etc. and I don't even know—actually! I have to ask her if she even called! This just occurs to me now but I have to ask her if she even called. Anyways, she told me that she called and that there was no issue with filling out Slovenian, that it was perfectly fine, that there was no discrimination. Anyways, I bought it and said OK. And then there was no problem. [A: Was this the first time that you had to deal with this?] Deal with it? I came into an environment where I was afraid of being discriminated against because of it, because I had obviously felt it before, like in the train. (Cvetko)
Faced with a situation of official identification in a German-speaking environment, Cvetko was anxious. The accumulation of sanctions he had experienced led him to be wary of this form of administrative and thus symbolic identification with the minority. In the end, only the reassurance (even if perhaps fictional) from the school's secretary assuages his concern.
The impact of the indexical order that sanctions the use of languages other than German in Carinthian public space contributes to young Carinthian Slovenes being reluctant to speak Slovenian, even among each other. Interviews with the principal of the school as well as with former and current students of the Slovenian Gymnasium in Klagenfurt reveal that while the language of instruction is Slovenian, students almost exclusively speak the regional variety of German with each other outside of class. Some of my informants attribute this to the students' variable Slovenian abilities and the differences perceived among the regional dialects that make communication ‘awkward’, while others explain that they then considered German ‘cool’. Given that the informants later do not hesitate to socialize in Slovenian (across different regional dialects) at the Club in Vienna, it seems that the dominance of a German standard language ideology effectively proscribes Slovenian as an acceptable language of socialization among cool-conscious youth in Carinthia. While the minority language represents the authentic pole of the axis of differentiation, the ideological context of the high school in Klagenfurt skews linguistic practice toward the dominant national standard language, even in the authentic form of the regional variety of German. This practice is reversed in Vienna where indexing authenticity with Slovenian becomes a way of aligning with an idea of the cosmopolitan multilingual citizen.
Speaking Slovenian in Vienna
The authentic and stigmatized minority language becomes the universal and valorized index of multilingualism, the new standard. Speaking Slovenian in Vienna is not a marked political act as in Carinthia but rather the exercise of a linguistic competence that is experienced as shared with other speakers of Slavic languages (in particular Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian—BCS). The number of citizens from countries of the former Yugoslavian republic residing in Vienna has increased gently from 115,580 in 2002 to 120,886 in 2013 (Statistik Austria Reference Austria2013b). It is not uncommon to hear Slavic languages spoken in public (along with many other languages) and young Carinthian Slovenes in Vienna appreciate this soundscape that they tie to their perception of the city as a cosmopolitan, happening place.
(4) In Vienna, you have a lot more opportunities, you can do something different every day and it's a lot more pleasant. What I like especially is that there are a lot of Slavs in Vienna and I feel more connected. In the street, in shops, you hear people speaking Serbo-Croatian, no matter where and that's cool, I really like that. There's a different kind of charm to this city. (Radmila)
The presence and acceptance of Slavic speakers in Vienna imbues Radmila's normally sanctioned language practice with a positive valence. The acoustic presence of BCS in the Viennese public sphere indicates that there is a different indexical order and, by extension, language ideology, in place here. This is at once described by the general multilingualism of its many residents and the presence of ‘Yugoslav culture’, and it importantly becomes a point of contrast between Vienna and Carinthia.
(5) There's a lot of Yugoslav culture in Vienna and to speak another language in Vienna, it's like a joke, people speak five languages! In Carinthia, when you speak another language it's like “what's your problem?” In any case, you feel at ease here, you don't feel like something exceptional, like I was saying, you just feel better, in part, here than in Carinthia. In Vienna there's no question, in Vienna you never have the Slovenian problem, when you say Carinthian Slovene people say “oh yeah, well, you guys have problems with those people stuck in the past and those street signs” and they laugh, you see? (Cvetko)
For Cvetko, the presence of Yugoslav culture in Vienna and the multitude of languages heard in the Viennese public sphere produce an entirely different embodied experience. This multilingually regimented indexical order approves of his language practice and, by extension, of his person. In addition, Viennese people are even sympathetic to what they know about his position as an outsider in Vienna and blame the Carinthian German-speakers for their own backwardness. Cvetko can clearly align with this perspective.
My informants' experience of contrasting valuations of their linguistic practice in Carinthia and Vienna indicates that different language ideologies regiment the social interactions and speech situations in these two places. The data shows that in Carinthia, the local monolingual German ideology produces an indexical order in which non-German speakers are sanctioned in public. In Vienna, the everydayness of a multilingual public soundscape reveals an indexical order structured by a ‘European’ multilingual language ideology. These contrasting experiences also lead to the projection of contrasting chronotopic imaginaries laminated onto the two places.
Contrasting chronotopic imaginaries
In analyzing the metadiscursive commentary of my informants, what begins to take shape is the complex ways in which language ideologies and their historical contexts come to produce specific local indexical orders, which then structure the cultural chronotopes that individuals project back onto the different places. The Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope as the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ that is ‘always colored by emotions and values’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1998:84, 243) can be deployed to explain how ways of speaking become iconic of spatiotemporal positions and concomitant moral claims. How young Carinthian Slovenes experience their and others' speech practices and the contrasting indexical valuations of these practices in the two places produces a contrast between Carinthia and Vienna. This contrast is projected onto juxtaposed chronotopes to which are attributed two sets of distinct and opposing moral characteristics.
The evaluative production of contrasting chronotopes to describe Carinthia and Vienna are a way for young Slovenian speakers in Vienna to position themselves as certain kinds of citizens. Chronotopes entail ‘different evaluative/emotional responses toward the object of reference’ (Davidson Reference Davidson2007:213) and these responses thus enable a critique. The metadiscursive commentary of my informants weaves together the qualities they attribute to the two places with the kinds of speech practices that seem acceptable. The public prevalence of multilingualism in Vienna becomes an index of Vienna chronotopically imagined as a multicultural, cosmopolitan place. German monolingual sanctions on Slovenian in Carinthia become indexical of Carinthia as a backward, disconnected enclave.
Talk about the language situation in Carinthia brings up metadiscursive commentary on the qualities of Carinthia as a place and the kinds of possibilities and practices it enables or restricts. This kind of talk projects a cultural chronotope onto Carinthia that is indexed by linguistic and social practices. Carinthia is described as a rural wasteland that contributes to the mental degradation of its inhabitants.
(6) I can only stand Carinthia, and [my town] for a couple days, just cause there's nothing there. (Mario)
(7) Klagenfurt, that's out of the question, it's a hick town. There's nothing to do there. You grow dumb. It's impossible. (Cvetko)
These inhabitants behave according to traditionalist social practice, marrying and starting families much earlier than my informants. The conservative political perspectives and social trajectories of inhabitants (friends, cousins) are attributed to a rural morality that ‘lacks outlook’.
(8) In Klagenfurt there's a lot happening family-wise! They're all having kids, getting married, settling down. (Vera)
(9) In Klagenfurt, you're stuck, you've got no outlook, nothing happens in Klagenfurt. (Jana)
This outlook is seen to be attainable only through individual mobility and the exposure to different ways of life; these elements are a signature of contemporary and even scholarly ideologies of cosmopolitanism as a desired state (Beck & Grande Reference Beck and Grande2007).
The characterization of the Carinthian cultural chronotope as backward and politically conservative is confirmed for my informants and other progressives in what they see happening in the Carinthian political sphere as well as the purported ignorance of the German-speaking citizenry. As described above, Carinthia is widely seen in Vienna as a place where extreme-right-wing politics thrive, and is thus closer to a Nazi past than is comfortable for most. This kind of politics (led by Governor Haider until his death in 2008) participates in glorifying German-Carinthian traditions and in perpetuating xenophobic rhetoric against ‘immigrants’ (whether they are recent or historical). No distinction is made between the Volksgruppe and noncitizen immigrants. This misrecognition of the autochthonous minority is seen by Carinthian Slovenes as an example of the majority population's ignorance. Despite the minority's work to shed light on the situation of Carinthian Slovenes in the region, the majority of the monolingual German-speaking Carinthian population is unaware of the historical existence of the group. My informants often need to explain where they come from, what their ‘origins’ are.
(10) I've got a problem with my first name, because it's Serbian. Radmila. It's pretty rare and because of that I often have problems because nobody knows how to pronounce it, nobody knows why, why I should have a name like that. People in Carinthia are so badly informed, they sometimes don't even know that there's a minority in the region. They ask whether I'm from Slovenia, and if I'm not from Slovenia then surely my parents are from Slovenia, or my grandparents or somebody in my family must be from Slovenia because I'm surely an immigrant. There's no way that there could be an autochthon minority here, etc. [A: Have you had discussions like that?] Constantly! Also now in Vienna, when I meet Carinthians, German-speaking Carinthians, when I say I'm a Carinthian Slovene, they ask me “What? What's that?” Until now, I've very rarely met Carinthians that have the slightest clue about the Slovenian minority in Carinthia. Actually, the Viennese are more informed, I've noticed. They're more educated. (Radmila)
Radmila finds the Carinthian ignorance vis-à-vis the situation of Carinthian Slovenes in the province extremely frustrating. She is annoyed that the regional population is not aware of the minority's existence (especially taking into account the significant media attention given to the bilingual place-name sign conflict). The political and mental inflexibility of ‘thinking’ of the possibility of an autochthonous minority in the nation-state is linked to the limited political education in the region. What Radmila characterizes as the Carinthians' lack of knowledge about the situation of the minority in the region contributes for her to a chronotope of Carinthia as a political and education backwater. In this chronotope of rural ignorance it is not possible for an Austrian citizen to have a Slavic name. The Viennese, by contrast, do not need to be educated about the minority; they already know. Radmila perceives an education-gap between Carinthians and Viennese. My informants map openness, discovery, and possibility onto the Viennese chronotope, which they describe as manifested in the individual mobility, political attitudes, and state of mind characteristic of the urban context. Vienna represents an opposite of Carinthia; here, being Slovenian is no longer problematic but suddenly easy.
The cultural chronotope projected onto Vienna is endowed with many qualities that are contrastively opposed to how Carinthia is described by my informants. Vienna is described as ‘open’, a ‘bigger’, more tolerant place with ‘many opportunities’ where one can hear ‘different languages’ in public. Here, an individual's trajectory is not hampered by conservative mores as in Carinthia. The capital's dense infrastructure and especially its transportation network enable a greater mobility that contributes to the feeling of freedom my informants experience in the city. As Mario says, ‘Vienna is a bigger city, there's lots to do, there are many opportunities, many more opportunities to do stuff, many more than in Klagenfurt’. The capital has more to offer than the province and the variety of cultural activities becomes the prime example of this difference. Contrary to the countryside where former classmates—for lack of Perspektive ‘outlook’—are already pursuing the usual professions and constructing their lives based on traditional domestic models, the city seems to offer limitless opportunities.
This concept of Perspektive—an ‘outlook’ that one needs a ‘view of the future’ and a plan for it—is something my informants shared; they often contrasted themselves against their peers who stayed in Carinthia and who were thought not to have such a Perspektive. As such, the notion of Perspektive is one that fits with the cosmopolitan standpoint. Instead of falling into life trajectories which they see as lacking outlook, as limited (in which reaching adulthood means having a job and starting a family), young Carinthian Slovenes in Vienna have acquired a Perspektive in the capital that allows them to consider other life paths, first and foremost rejecting early domesticity and professionalization. It is the city itself that inherently possesses qualities that enable the individual living there to acquire a Perspektive. By taking advantage of the variety of cultural programming, people may expand their horizons. As such, my informants argue that the freedom of movement and choice leads to greater freedom of thought, which is evidenced by city people themselves, who are more educated and more politically aware than Carinthians.
(11) In Vienna you can go out every night, you can go to a conference, to the movies, to the theatre, you've really got a lot more cultural possibilities and that's how your outlook onto the world is really expanded. (Jana)
The young Slovenes report that political opinions in the city are more welcoming towards the minority than in Carinthia. People in Vienna do not treat the subject of Carinthian Slovenes with the same kind of contentiousness with which it is met in the province. They actually show enthusiasm and understanding towards the group; at worst, they are uninterested.
(12) First of all, in Vienna, I think you've got the benefit that everything's a lot more open. I really think that, everything is bigger and people don't care if you're Slovenian or Kurd or… (Cvetko)
In the capital, the perceived ‘multicultural’ context constructs a different scale of meaning for Carinthian Slovenes. This urban space has long experienced significant population change and migration. According to the 2011 census, nonnationals make up 21.2% of the general Viennese population compared to 7% in Carinthia (Statistik Austria Reference Austria2013a,Reference Austriab). Vienna is home to a heterogeneous mix of nonnationals and migration to the capital by Austrians from the provinces further adds to the perceived diversity. In Vienna, speaking multiple languages (even regional variants) and claiming belonging to multiple groups is not extraordinary.
(13) [A: Is it different to speak Slovenian in public in Vienna compared with Carinthia?] Yes, absolutely, because here people don't care. There's a significant number of foreigners here and you're always hearing different languages. Vienna is rather international, it's not at all a problem. From time to time, people will ask me what language I'm speaking because nobody can identify it but that's it. Nobody grumbles or looks at you funny. That's more likely to happen in Carinthia than here. (Radmila)
Clearly, my informants have mapped opposing qualities onto Carinthia and Vienna. One is characterized as a busy, international, metropolitan area with a laid-back population flattered or even simply unimpressed by cultural and linguistic diversity, whereas the other is described as a backward, rabidly conservative nest of ignorant xenophobes.
We have seen that interactional experience and the evaluation of linguistic practice shapes the ways that my informants chronotopically imagine Carinthia and Vienna. In addition, these chronotopes also include contrasting representations of the two places' different historical trajectories that are shared among members of the linguistic minority.
Chronotopic pasts in the present
The chronotopic contrast projected onto Carinthia and Vienna in the present is also supported by the minority's shared understandings of the past, which is brought to bear on their political engagement on behalf of their linguistic minority rights. In this opposition, Carinthia has perpetually been a place of battle for the Slovene minority (for their rights to speak and learn Slovenian), whereas Vienna is conceived as the Slavic ur-home for politicized activists within the group. This collective imaginary plays itself out in the perception of Vienna as a place with a particularly Slavic history, the linguistic traces of which, as mentioned above, are to be found everywhere in the present. Furthermore, the conflict about bilingual street signs that flared up in the 1970s and again in the early 2000s also contributes to a shared historical mapping in which Vienna and Carinthia are contrastively figurated. Finally, the ongoing instrumentalizations of history and accompanying politics of commemoration (of German nationalist and anti-Fascist struggles) continue to color historical perceptions of place. The two sides could be seen as engaging in a battle about occupying places linguistically.
My informants understand Vienna as being a particularly Slavic place within Austria; this they accurately attribute to the above mentioned historical presence of Slavic-speaking populations in Vienna during the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that included Slavic-speaking territories. This Slavic presence extends into the present-day in historical form (in place names, local registers) but is also reaffirmed by immigration from the Balkans and South Eastern Europe over the past few decades.Footnote 7 My informants view Vienna as a cultural melting pot in which the Slavs have left a particularly indelible mark. This perception is part of the construction of Vienna's chronotope within a deep history and contributes to the way young Carinthian Slovenes experience and understand their belonging to the minority. ‘Slavic Vienna’ is a place where one may hear many different Slavic languages spoken in public, where one may feel more ‘at home’ than in Carinthia.
Yet at the same time, it is only in Vienna that my informants experience the kind of stranger intimacy with Southern Slavic speakers that Anderson (Reference Anderson2006) described as one of the features of an imagined community. When my informants hear Southern Slavic languages spoken in public they feel ‘at home’. This notion is informed by imaginaries of a shared language and groupness that index the universality of this belonging, and override the differences between the Southern Slavic languages.Footnote 8 The stigma of the usually devalorized authentic particular is sidelined by the perception of a historical Slavic cultural presence in Vienna within the generational memory of my informants. In contrast to the politically fraught historical memory of Slavs in Carinthia, the historical status of Vienna as a collecting point for the Austro-Hungarian Empire's many language groups positively inflects the city's chronotope. One of my informants describes the role Vienna has played for the more mobile members of the language group.
(14) My uncle was [Club] president and I often talk to him about Vienna. At the time [in the 1970s], the fight about the bilingual street signs was a lot harsher; people were a lot more hardened in their opinions. Back then, almost all of them came to Vienna and felt at home! Vienna has a lot of Slavs; there are some geologists who say that the Balkans start on Schwarzenbergplatz, that's the beginning of the Balkan Mountains. That's the myth, anyways, … (Cvetko)
This informant is clearly reflexive about recognizing the constructedness of claims to origins. But nevertheless, while the historical settlement region of Austrian Slovenes is in Carinthia, the concentration of Balkan culture (and even its supposed geographic foundation) in Vienna is perceived as enabling unfettered and unstigmatized minority linguistic and cultural practices. In opposition to Carinthia, where people are ‘stuck in the past’ fighting endlessly about bilingual street signs, Vienna is progressive because its polyglot inhabitants are dismissive of a narrow-minded political ideology and evaluate multilingualism as a social good. Here, the multilingual standard that has been championed in EU reports is the order of the day. Slavic cultural activities, while certainly part of a nationalized and nationalizing discourse of cultural conservation, do not take place in the same kind of fraught context between ethnic groups, as is the case in Carinthia. The ideology of standard multilingualism valorizes the authenticity pole of the axis of differentiation along with the universal.
In contrast, the shared historical memory of Carinthia includes most prominently the previously discussed ‘place-name sign conflict’ of the 1970s as well as ‘defensive struggle’ in the 1920s. Both of these moments are alluded to by Cvetko in (14). He describes Carinthians as being ‘stuck in the past’, occupied with something as silly as bilingual street signs (‘People speak five languages [in Vienna]!’). Yet, not only the Right commemorates its heroes. Carinthian Slovenes, too, regularly pay homage to the partisans—the Slavic armed resistance against national socialist rule in Carinthia of which they see themselves as being the inheritors. It thus presents an example of the historical significance of the fight against the nationalist authoritarianism for which the province of Carinthia is known in the rest of Austria. This historical understanding of the past and shared memory mentioned above continue to inflect the chronotopes of Carinthia and Vienna in the present (Malle Reference Malle, Entner, Malle and Sima2011). In this historical perspective, Carinthia remains a place in which the Slovenian minority continues to be contested, whereas Vienna represents the deep historical inheritance for Slavs and thus can serve as more of a ‘home’ to Carinthian Slovenes than their own historical settlement region in Carinthia.
As we have seen, the qualities projected onto the Viennese chronotope include openness, multiculturalism, and polyglot publics. The chronotopic imaginary is also supplemented by shared understandings of a common past, the struggles of which continue into the present. By imagining Vienna as a progressive, multicultural place that welcomes them, my informants align themselves with a cosmopolitan understanding of citizenship and participation and against what is perceived as an outmoded form of monolingual nationalism.
EU language ideologies of multistandardism resonate with people who understand themselves as multilingual Europeans. As Gal (Reference Gal2006a) describes, this ideology of multistandardism applies most neatly to multilingual speakers of the most valuable combinations of languages (English, German, and French) and creates contradictions for other speakers of lesser languages and of unrecognized varieties, as I discuss below. Furthermore, this ideology challenges monolingual speakers: their monolingualism becomes an index of speaker backwardness and lack of education or intelligence. In this view, young Carinthian Slovenes have risen above their monolingual Carinthian neighbors in the sociocultural hierarchy when they move up and center to Vienna. It has become clear then that these same students, who would only communicate in German during their school years in Carinthia, now relish every opportunity to perform their multilingual competence and the cosmopolitan prestige that it indexes.
Young Carinthian Slovenes display a historically grounded understanding of a changing European cultural-ideological order in which multilingualism circulates as cosmopolitan cachet. The chronotopes discursively maintained by the speakers as a response to geographically distinct indexical orders are carefully calibrated to diffuse the various contradictions that arise from the incommensurability of these orders with the messiness of local alignments and allegiances. Under the calibration produced by these young Carinthian Slovenes, Vienna is cosmopolitan in both an old (Habsburg) and a new (global European) way.
Contradictions of European language ideologies
In their move from Carinthia to Vienna, young Carinthian Slovenes become aware that their language ability—heretofore denigrated under the indexical order structured by a German monolingual ideology—has suddenly become a positive index and valuable resource. The burgeoning EU ideology of multilingual standards described by Gal resonates with the cosmopolitan ideologies of cultural prestige to which the young Carinthian Slovenes align. My informants (most of whom speak English or another foreign language in addition to German and Slovenian) see themselves as part of a multilingual citizenry of Europe, or even the world, which leaves behind outdated nationalist monolingual ideas and practices. They map their experiences with different local indexical orders structured by incommensurate language ideologies onto contrasting chronotopes of Vienna and Carinthia; the former represents the forward looking metropolis, while the latter stands for a regressive backwater. Nevertheless, as Gal (Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012), Moore (Reference Moore2011), and Stevenson (Reference Stevenson, Mar-Molinero and Stevenson2006) have argued, this new, seemingly more tolerant and postnationalist multilingual standard ideology creates erasures and contradictions for speakers who do not necessarily fulfill all the (often unspoken) requirements of the ideology. Here, I briefly point out these contradictions and erasures with respect to my informants' situation.
The first erasure that results from the multilingual standard ideology downplays the fact that the Slovenian register that my informants command is not the standard Slovenian variety but rather a regional nonstandard seen as ‘backward’ even by Carinthian Slovenes themselves. Ability varies among them: some boast of their competence in it and the compliments they receive from Slovenian nationals for their speaking skills while others fail the University of Vienna's language exam in Slovenian. Most of them do not command a fully functional repertoire of Slovenian and state that while they like speaking Slovenian to talk about emotions, they still prefer to speak German to discuss politics. In this way, Slovenian is marked as the authentic register (the ‘kitchen language’) and German is marked as the universal ‘voice-from-nowhere’ register. The two languages thus occupy opposite poles along a classic axis of differentiation. This technically makes these individuals doubly dominated in different indexical orders for speaking a minority language in monolingual German Carinthia, as well as an illegitimate variety of the less prestigious national standard, Slovenian.
This fact is easily downplayed, however, in the valorization of the multilingual capital. How well they speak a language and which variety of it is not at issue when Carinthian Slovenes claim their multilingual competence in Vienna. Silverstein (Reference Silverstein2003b) describes how linguistic and cultural recognition takes place within a reticulated system of hierarchically organized global spacetime. He argues that ‘a group's visibility and recognition at any tier need not translate into such at higher levels’ and that ‘conversely, anybody wishing to be nonlocal, to escape locality in a trajectory of self-mobilization, can achieve this by degrees over tiers’ (2003b:549–50). For example, minorities or indigenous groups will not learn the national standard but English, effectively ‘skipping’ a level of legitimacy to achieve the more highly valued register and its entailed socioeconomic benefits. In the case of Carinthian Slovenes, the group's visibility and recognition improves throughout their trajectory of self-mobilization across tiers from backwater Carinthia to multicultural capital Vienna. The production of Slovenian as a status emblem (Agha Reference Agha2003) indicating multilingual cosmopolitanism allows the language and its speakers to move up in the sociocultural hierarchy as they simultaneously move up the tiers of global space-time to Vienna. Outside of Carinthia and Slovenia, Carinthian Slovenes' language competence makes them unquestionably multilingual.
Another key erasure of multilingual standard ideology flattens the structural differences between them and Southern Slavic speakers they might hear in Vienna. What is glossed as a feeling of connectedness is a dynamic affinity in which differences that would be significant in other situations become negligible when other, more significant differences loom around. The relative valence of difference is nicely illustrated when a Slovenian speaker feels ‘connected’ to a Southern Slavic speaker in Vienna. This may not be the case in Novi Sad where the difference between the two speakers may be more salient than their similarity. Local indexical orders produce these different valuations.
Further, as citizens of countries that are not (yet) members of the European Union, recent immigrants from Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro must complete 100 hours of a government-mandated German language course in order to be able to apply for permanent residence and social services. In this way, they are effectively designated as second-class immigrants who must jump additional hoops and hurdles in order to achieve ‘integration’. Immigrants from European Union and EEC countries are not subject to these language-learning requirements. Further, in the implicit EU hierarchy of languages, BCS is not as ‘valuable’ as fluency in a Western European language, preferably English or French. EU multistandardism is hierarchical in that it implicitly designates some languages as more worthy of attention than others (Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012).
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages includes ‘those traditionally used by part of the population in a state, but which are not official state language dialects, migrant languages or artificially created languages’. Slovenian spoken in Carinthia is included in the charter but migrant languages are not. This produces a clear structural difference in the positions of Carinthian Slovenes and citizens of the former Yugoslav republics (excluding Slovenia) in Vienna. While the Carinthian Slovenes' minority language is considered worthy of preservation and support, non-Austrian BCS-speakers in Austria are required to learn German.
Stevenson (Reference Stevenson, Mar-Molinero and Stevenson2006:159) argues that the Austrian legislation's silence on migrant language maintenance is ‘an implication by omission that this kind of language loyalty is of no importance and may even be suspect’. He further argues that the imposition by national governments of language requirements in the context of changing social relations in Europe ‘presents an attempt to preserve (rather than construct) a public (Gal & Woolard Reference Gal and Ann Woolard2001) that will remain strong and intact only so long as it is conceived as inherently monoglot’ (2006:160). These state-level policies are thus resonant with an imaginary of the EU as a union of uniquely individual nation-states, each with its own national heritage, language, and history, in which each country has a right to maintain its cultural and linguistic integrity that includes historical minority and regional languages. European languages are privileged and languages originating outside of this complex are not subject to the same kinds of protections. Speakers of these languages are first of all expected to adhere to the monolingual standard of their choice of residence, thus reinforcing a hierarchy of value.
Within this context, Carinthian Slovenes can benefit from their minority language because they already possess other social and cultural capitalFootnote 9 such as competence in German (and often English) as well as citizenship in an EU country. Furthermore, the recent accession of Slovenia to the EU has symbolically heightened its position in the geographically hierarchical reticulated network of nodes. The multilingual standard ideology, and the way it is taken up by ordinary citizens, erases and overlooks the contradictions between politically progressive multiculturalism, official EU discourse about multilingualism, and Austrian immigration laws. Multilingual Carinthian Slovenes in Vienna can claim membership in a cosmopolitan elite while at the same time professing solidarity with what are in Europe multilingual speakers of devalorized languages, the ‘wrong’ kinds of immigrants, multilingual ‘others’.
Conclusion
In this article, I have investigated the situation of a traditional linguistic minority in the context of the transformation of European language ideologies. There has been a shift in Europe from a valorization of monolingual national standards to a promotion of multilingual European speakers (of the ‘right’ kind, of course; Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012). This shift has local and scalar effects for mobile citizens whose linguistic practices are reindexicalized as they circulate within the nation-state. Young Carinthian Slovenes that have moved to Vienna suddenly find their previously sanctioned linguistic practice a considerable asset for aspiring cosmopolitan European citizens. Both monolingual and multilingual language ideologies, though, construct an axis of differentiation that maps types of speech onto types of speakers and situations and produces different forms of erasure (Gal & Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine1995; Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000; Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012). In the case of Carinthian Slovenes, the monolingual standard ideology erases (or sanctions) the presence of other and minority languages in the public sphere. The multilingual language ideology appears to promote an equality of languages but rather erases that there still exist language hierarchies.
The difference between local language ideologies experienced interactionally through indexical orders is expressed by informants through metadiscursive commentary about the two places. The Bakhtinian chronotope is one vehicle by which the contrasting experience of different local indexical orders is projected onto the two places. Metadiscursive commentary about linguistic practice reveals the incommensurate language ideologies and their modes of differentiation. Young Carinthian Slovenes' response to different language ideological regimes and their attendant indexical ordering of language practice and persons can be seen in the way they characterize Carinthia and Vienna as familiarly distinct and opposite chronotopes; the former is backward, politically conservative, and anachronistic while the latter is open, politically progressive, and future-oriented. In this way, their chronotopic projections align multistandardism with a Perspektive on the future and monolingualism with an undesirable past. The linguistic competence and associated personhood, which in Carinthia was borne under public disapprobation, is transformed into an index of multicultural cosmopolitanism in Vienna. The sanctions of Slovene in Carinthia are seen as an index of that region's backwardness. Vice versa, the felt appreciation of multilinguals in Vienna is read as an indication of the capital's modernity.
Confronted with ideologies of monolingual German and EU multistandardism, which seem to oppose each other but nevertheless similarly reproduce a hierarchy of languages, the young Carinthian Slovenes embrace a multilingual standard ideology. This language ideology erases their own lack of functional multistandardism as well as the social differences between Carinthian Slovenes who are Austrian citizens, and immigrants from Southern Slavic-speaking countries required to learn German in order to fulfill ‘integration’ requirements. Nevertheless, the embrace of this multistandard language ideology might also, via the above-described erasures, call attention to the inconsistencies of EU multistandardism and national monolingual ideologies, especially as more countries join the European Union, calling into question fundamental definitions of Europe.
