Multilingual Robinson: Imagining Modern Communities for Middle-Class Children

Drawing on sociocultural approaches to language learning, this article investigates how the new linguistic practices of the European Enlightenment shaped the identity of the emerging middle-class. Using the example of Joachim Heinrich Campe's Robinson the Younger (1779), I will show how this archetypal tale of the self-made man helped imagine new communities and linguistic identities for German middle-class children at the beginning of the modern era.