Abstract
How do individual speakers living in a multilingual area view and experience languages and language learning? How do they position themselves, via the stories they tell, with respect to language identity and affiliation? And how do they make sense of their own language biography against the background of the larger, societal context which surrounds them? Based on such questions, the paper examines the discourse of eight Italian speakers living in South Tyrol, an area characterized by the presence of three speech communities (German, Italian and Ladin). Through the qualitative analysis of their language biographies, collected by means of narrative interviews, it is shown how standard languages (Italian, German) and language varieties (Romance-Italian dialects, German dialects) are represented by means of epilinguistic reflections, metaphors and other symbolic processes. Speakers’ conceptualizations of German as L2 and learning experiences during and after education are then explored, letting a complex picture emerge, where personal trajectories between representations and practices are described, commented and reasoned upon.