Multilingualism in minority literatures from a Finno‐Ugric linguist’s point of view Paper presented at the intersection of the conferences Multilingualism in Baltic Sea Europe (https://www.sneb.uni‐mainz.de/conference‐2015/) and Research Agendas in Literary Linguistics (https://www.english‐and‐linguistics.uni‐mainz.de/files/2014/04/Conference‐Programme‐Literary‐ Linguistics‐2015_neu.pdf) at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, April 15, 2015 Johanna Laakso, Universität Wien johanna.laakso@univie.ac.at Abstract. Multilingualism is an elusive concept, and attempting to define it also highlights the in‐built paradox: celebrating the reality and omnipresence of multilingualism often implies questioning language borders, but language borders are essential for defining multilingualism in any of its forms. This question is particularly acute in the case of minority languages, many of which are poorly or only recently standardized, so that definition and demarcation issues play a central role in language planning. Minority languages are often regarded as ethnic attributes rather than tools of communication, and connected to purported ethnocultural features in a vulgar‐relativist way. Perhaps for this reason, their presence in literary contexts is often understood as a realistic, authentic representation of “other” languages and their use. On the other hand, the planning of the Finno‐Ugric minority languages, typically taking place within monolingualist and prescriptivist Eastern European linguistic cultures, is characterized by monolingual purism, which may trigger reactions to the perceived “artificial” character of the literary language. These two tendencies, authenticity and purism, also affect the interpretation and reception of literary multilingualism. Understanding the relationship between linguistic reality and its literary representations is crucial for the understanding of literary multilingualism. For this, in turn, the tools of both literature research (multilingual mimesis) and linguistics (the actual forms and uses of the “other” languages) are needed. The elusive multilingualism Multilingualism in our days is omnipresent. Only a few major nation‐state languages such as English are strong enough to maintain the illusion of an intact, completely monolingual world at least in certain environments, for certain groups of people, and even these monolingual worlds are continually challenged by the presence of migrants and minorities and also by the new diversity and mobility of linguistic resources, the often‐mentioned “superdiversity” (Vertovec 2007, Blommaert & Rampton 2011). Multilingualism is glorified as a goal of educational policies and at the same time, especially in political discourses around immigration and the integration of migrants, portrayed as a handicap for minorities and migrants, for the society a problem to be solved (cf. e.g. Busch 2011). Yet, multilingualism itself characteristically escapes definitions, for a number of reasons. First, lay people often understand “multilingual” as denoting a person who masters two or more languages on the so‐called native‐speaker level (an idea already strongly contested in research, see e.g. Ardila & Neville 2003). This would mean that there is a clear distinction between language acquisition (preferably or exclusively in early childhood, leading to so‐called native‐speaker competence) and language learning later in life (which, as most of us who have studied languages can confirm, is often experienced as problematic and may never lead to native‐like competence). This distinction corresponds to the intuitions of many lay people, and also to the classical Chomskyan ideas of parameter setting and the critical age hypothesis. However, this