Voices of linguistic outrage: standard language constructs and the discourse on new urban dialects (original) (raw)
Related papers
Language in Society, 2015
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whetherKiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language ‘High German’, a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of ‘German’ speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane. (Standard language ideology, Kiezdeutsch, dia...
Language in Society, 2015
This paper investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether “Kiezdeutsch”, a new way of speaking from multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language “High German”, a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of “German” speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
This migrants' babble is not a German dialect!
Postprints der Universität Potsdam: Philosophische Reihe, 2018
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
Sociolinguistic perspectives on emerging multilingualism in urban Europe
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2000
In this article, sociolinguistic perspectives on the status and use of immigrant minority (henceforward IM) languages are presented. After a general introduction to the theme we focus on multilingualism and European identity, paying special attention to the European discourse on IM groups and integration. Next, we present information on the rationale, design, and core results of large scale home language surveys in six major multicultural cities across Europe. The data were collected and analyzed as part of the Multilingual Cities Project, carried out under the auspices of the European Cultural Foundation, established in Amsterdam. Against this background, we deal with the need for changing language regimes at school as a consequence of processes of migration and minorization across European nation states.
Double-edged valorizations of urban heteroglossia
Teachers' opinions about pupils' home languages are often in tune with official language policy. Also in Flanders (Belgium), survey and case-study research frequently demonstrates teachers' negative attitudes towards pupils' non-standard and non-Dutch home languages. This chapter however reports on ethnographic research at an ethnically mixed Brussels secondary school where at least one teacher could be observed valorizing his pupils' home languages in and out of class. These valorizations facilitated a positive classroom climate, but they were also indebted to longer-standing representations of language and thus embedded in larger stratification patterns. Pending structural changes, I suggest this is the fate of much behaviour at school that negotiates the current language political status quo. Careful attention to these negotiations is vital for understanding contemporary education.
Heike Wiese is Professor of Contemporary German Language at the University of Potsdam, Germany and Speaker at the university’s Centre for Language, Variation, and Migration. She has research interests in linguistic variation, grammar, lexicon, and linguistic architecture, and her most recent work has investigated the urban vernacular Kiezdeutsch (lit. '(neighbour-)hood German'), spoken informally by young people living in linguistically and ethnically diverse urban areas. While the general public has tended to see Kiezdeutsch as 'broken German' and as evidence for a 'double semilingualism', Heike approaches it from a dialect perspective, showing that Kiezdeutsch phenomena are systematic, innovative and primarily motivated by internal dynamics of the German linguistic system rather than heritage language interference. This has provoked a veritable firestorm – an intense and often aggressive language ideological debate in the media, on the internet and in hate mail. She has described the conceptual contours of this in an earlier working paper, and in this very wide-ranging interview with Louise Eley and Ben Rampton, she talks about her personal experience of being at the centre of this uproar, the strategies she developed to handle it, the other ways in which she engages the public with her research on Kiezdeutsch, the responses from other linguists, and approaches to public and practical intervention in German academic life.
Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City
Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City. Postmodern Individuals in Urban Communicative Settings, 2022
Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City focuses on how individuals navigate conversation in highly diversified contexts and provides a broad overview of state of the art research in urban sociolinguistics across the globe. Bearing in mind the impact of international travel and migration, the book accounts for the shifting contemporary studies to the workings of language choices in places where people with many different backgrounds meet and exchange ideas. It specifically addresses how people handle language use challenges in a broad range of settings to present themselves positively and meet their information and identity goals. While a speaker's experience runs like a thread through this volume, the linguistic, cultural and situational focus is as broad as possible. It runs from the language choices of Chinese immigrants to Beijing and Finnish immigrants to Japan to the use of the local lingua franca by motor taxi drivers in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, and how Hungarian students in their dorm rooms express views on political correctness uninhibitedly. As it turns out, language play, improvisation, humour, lies, as well as highly marked subconscious pronunciation choices, are natural parts of the discourses, and this volume provides numerous and extensive examples of these techniques. For each of the settings discussed, the perspective is taken of personalised linguistic and extra-linguistic styles in tackling communicative challenges. This way, a picture is drawn of how postmodern individuals in extremely different cultural and situational circumstances turn out to have strikingly similar human behaviours and intentions. Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City is of interest to all those who follow theoretical and methodological developments in this field. It will be of use for upper level students in the fields of Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Linguistic Anthropology and related fields in which urban communicative settings are the focus.
From 'multi-ethnic urban heteroglossia'to 'contemporary urban vernaculars.' 2011
Language and Communication, 2011
Research on crossing and stylisation in the everyday practice of young people in multi-ethnic urban areas of Britain during the 1980s and 1990s pointed to the destabilisation of inherited ethnicities, to a good deal of ground-level anti-racism, and to the emergence of new ethnicities. Recent reassessment of these data has brought out the social class underpinnings of these heteroglossic/polylingual processes, and this is also in line with the findings of a growing body of sociolinguistic research in European cities. Indeed, there is compelling evidence that these kind of mixed language practices have been a stable feature of the urban working class sociolinguistic landscape for at least 30 years.
Dialect Use and Discursive Identities of Migrants from the West in Eastern Germany
Language, Discourse, and Identity in Central Europe: The German Language in a Multilingual Space, 2009
This paper investigates the connection between dialect use, identity and migration in the German context. In particular, we are concerned with the ways in which individuals from western Germany who moved to the eastern German region of Saxony after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 use the Saxon dialect – which they hear on a daily basis in their everyday surroundings – to make various aspects of their selves and others relevant in the interaction. The process of doing this is also one of relating their individual identities to social categories that are present in their environment. In our analysis, we look specifically at the ways in which these people use the local dialect of their new surroundings – often with other linguistic material – in order to draw attention to the relationship between existing social categories and identities. In contrast with many of the other chapters in this volume, this approach can be characterized as a focus on the ‘lower-case d discourse’ analysis of the German language in interaction, rather than an analysis of the ‘capital D discourses’ which are concerned with the social and political processes that shape the production of German texts.