Multilingualism is 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 addition, while internationalization is one of the dominant policy discourses in the field of higher education, very little is known about the perspectives of multilingual migrant students (Morley et al. 2018). This paper will examine how university students construct their language biographies against the background of nationalism and language ideologies (Mar-Molinero & Stevenson 2006), what experiences they made in different educational institutions in regard to language(s), and how they changed their positions concerning language(s) in their biographies. It will focus on the experiences of linguistically minoritized soon-to-be academics who – at the time of data collection – were enrolled in teacher training programmes in Austria and aspire a career as German teachers. It also examines if and how critical perspectives on linguistic heterogeneity at the university have the ability to (re)connect linguistic heterogeneous communities in education. The following questions will be addressed: • How do linguistically minoritized professionals’ biographies relate to re-nationalization and nationally narrowed perspectives on multilingualism? • How does academic knowledge about language(s) and language ideologies interact with the biographical knowledge of the students? • What power relations do minoritized students experience in institutions of education and which professional perspectives do they develop? Empirically, the study is based on a data set of twelve biographical narrative interviews (Schütze 1983) with university students of different linguistic backgrounds. The analysis was achieved by contrastive comparisons between different cases (Charmaz 2011). The findings show that research on the question how teachers’ language biographies relate to professionalization in migration societies must take into consideration the transnational linguistic spaces which have been relevant for the subjects or their family members during their migration (Thoma 2018). The paper will conclude with suggestions that situate the positioning of minoritized students in educational institutions within broader societal and political contexts.

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