Digital interaction and multilingualism at work and in school: The case of Lithuanians in rural Eastern Norway

This project examines digital communication between Lithuanian migrants and Norwegians in the work and school sectors focusing on Inland Norway. What tools and what linguistic resources are in use for what purposes? How does this interaction affect the feeling of social equality and inclusion? Human interaction increasingly takes place digitally, also at work and in school. This opens a range of possibilities for interlocutors who speak different languages. During the last 10 years, Lithuanian migrants, who tend to settle outside Oslo, have become important in rural Eastern Norway, through adding both to the work force and to the number of children in schools and pre-schools. There is however still little research on these migrants. This study embraces the perspectives of both Lithuanian employees and parents and Norwegian employers and teachers through interviews, visualization tools and collection of digital conversations. The aim is to contribute to knowledge on digital interaction as a key channel for inclusion in rural Norway.

Shifts in the global economic order during the two past decades have modified interactions within multilingual and multicultural environments. While the free movement of workers within the EU offers new options of professional mobility, the affordances of digital tools open new possibilities in the interaction between the migrant workers and their host community. In order to investigate this interaction, the DigiMulti project will study digital communication as a key channel in the relationship between labour migrants and Norwegians and, therefore, for social integration. How does digital communication with employers, with school and with other parents affects inclusion/exclusion and social equality/inequality of work migrants in Norway? For this purpose, Lithuanian migrants’ digital interaction will be studied. The choice of this group is based on the fact that their migration to Norway is fairly recent: they only started arriving in important numbers in 2004, it is based on their quantitative importance: within a short time-span, they have become the second largest group of migrants in Norway, and: unlike other migrant groups in Norway, they settle outside the urban centres. While most studies looks at multilingualism in the cities, this project focuses on rural Norway, and DigiMulti hence relates to the work on multilingualism in the periphery. The project is divided into two sub-projects in order to qualitatively study interaction in two key contexts for integration: 1) the work setting: employer-employee (sub-project a, PI) 2) the school setting: school-parent, parent-parent (sub-project b, PhD fellow). Through its focus on digital language practices as part of everyday communication, and the use of participatory mediagram methodology, DigiMulti operates at the cutting edge of research on multilingualism and digital interaction and responds to the important task of research to follow the technological changes and development from a humanities perspective.