Linguistic Autobiographies: Towards the Creation of a Multilingual Resource Family

Abstract

This paper describes a project aimed at creating a new resource family of multilingual and multimodal resources centered around the concept of “Linguistics of self”, that is personal re-flections on the role of languages in shaping one’s identity. Language portrait silhouettes, drawing bilingualism, and linguistic autobiographies are different types of resources that share this common feature. We describe the resources and the criteria for their metadata annotation, focusing in particular on linguistic autobiographies, where the writer explicitly reflects on the relationship between him/herself and language. These genres are fruitfully used in different educational settings, and research has shown that they help to uncover the social, affective, and psychological dimensions of language learning. The potential of a multilingual and mul-timodal collection is discussed starting from data collected in Italy and Norway.