In September 2019, Nora arrived in a small village on the West Coast of Norway—as a Congolese UN resettlement refugee from Kyangwali refugee settlement in Uganda. Nora is a single mother, she had four children when she arrived Norway and was pregnant with her fifth. She had been offered resettlement as a “women at risk,” a refugee group prioritized by the Norwegian government. In this paper, we report on an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork where we have been following Nora and thirteen other refugees during their first years in Norway. Our focus is on their experiences with learning Norwegian, through the Norwegian Introduction programme.

In this paper, we take Nora’s story as a departure point to discuss how precarity (Bourdieu 1963) might interplay with language learning. Precarity comes into play when we consider how forced migrants arrive in host countries and are expected to rapidly adapt to unfamiliar societal norms and surmount practical challenges—all while navigating the experiences that forced them to become refugees. We argue that structures within the introduction programme serves to further precarization (Lorey 2015) of refugees such as Nora, through evoking processes of self-governing that does not serve the individuals’ agency in language learning. We further argue that the design of language training programs for forced migrants in their host societies need to a larger extent to be informed by participants’ experiences and needs. This becomes especially salient in the case of those with limited formal schooling and/or demanding life-conditions.