Individual and societal multilingualism are officially accepted and celebrated at a European level. While European citizens are expected to become at least trilingual, research shows that not all languages of people who live in European countries are officially acknowledged and taught at educational institutions and that not every language is similarly prized (Mar-Molinero/Stevenson 2006). In Higher Education, language(s), especially English, the respective national language and/or language of instruction, play a crucial role, not only for the individual success of students, but also for the internationalization of the institutions. Besides being settings for linguistic encounters, educational institutions represent spaces where language ideologies are taken up, modified or transformed (Heller 2011, Thoma 2018). In addition, the monolingual orientation of most educational institutions does not only (re)construct inequalities between languages, but also between individuals and groups perceived as ‘native speakers’ and others labeled as ‘non-natives’ – regardless of the effective linguistic command of individual speakers (Bonfiglio 2010; Flores 2015). The native-speaker ideology represents, among other language ideologies (see Mar-Molinero/Stevenson 2006), a challenge for international students, as they tend not to be accepted as legitimate speakers. The paper will focus on the experiences of linguistically marginalised soon-to-be academics from different countries who are enrolled in German Studies programmes in Austria and aspire a career as teachers of the dominant language. Empirically, the study is based on a data set of twelve biographical narrative interviews (Schütze 1983; Dausien 2000) with students of German Studies of different linguistic, national, and cultural backgrounds, who are enrolled in teacher training programmes for German teachers. The analysis was achieved by contrastive comparisons between different cases (Charmaz 2014). As a result, different variations of the meaning of language(s) were highlighted in three biographical relevant phases: the biographical phase of childhood before school enrolment, the biographical phase of school, and the biographical phase of Higher Education which includes prospects regarding the future. The planned paper will focus on the meaning of languages in Higher Education and address the following questions: • How do students experience their transnational transition into institutions of Higher Education? • Which experiences of inclusion and exclusion do they make, and which role do the social actors they interact with (e.g. peers, teachers) play? • Which conclusions can be drawn for the role of language(s) in internationalization of Higher Education?

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