Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain

Dialect Use and Discursive Identities of Migrants from the West in Eastern Germany

This chapter1 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 Germany2 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 (Gee [1999] 2005; see also Cerna, Carl and Stevenson, Horner, this volume).

The Why: Ideology, Positioning, and Attitudes toward English

This chapter uses a conversation analysis-based approach to language attitudes in interaction to analyze interviews with members of both communities about their language practices. The patterns that emerge suggest that the Germans are more likely to question whether transidiomatic practices are appropriate and whether the ubiquity of English in an internationalized world is a good thing. The Dutch, on the other hand, tend to regard English as a normal part of their local environment. Because the Dutch position English as an international language that may be used by anyone rather than a foreign language that is mostly useful in interactions with foreigners, the participants in the Dutch community are much more likely than the Germans to incorporate it as a part of their casual interactions.

Language Ideologies, Multilingualism, and Social Media

This chapter introduces the three areas of sociolinguistic research that form the foundation of this book: language ideologies and language policy, language use in social media, and multilingual language use in interaction. It begins by giving a summary of each of these areas of research in turn and its relevance for the book, and then moves on to point out where these bodies of research intersect and explain the implications these linkages have for the analysis in the subsequent chapters.

The How: Interactional Functions of English

This chapter consists of a qualitative analysis of the interactional functions of language alternation within the two communities that takes a conversation analysis-based approach to language alternation. The analysis reveals a series of common discourse-related functions of English in the data (i.e. those in which contrasts in language choice contribute to the structural organization of interactions), such as marking an off-topic aside, marking a transition, and marking a closing. It also reveals participant-related functions (i.e. those in which participants index the social meanings of different languages within the interactional context) such as providing information about gesture, facial expression, or tone of voice, lightening or mitigating an evaluative comment, and indexing a general sense of transnationalism.

The Who and the What: Amounts and Types of English

This chapter begins with an introduction to the different kinds of language alternation found in the data, which is illustrated by a qualitative analysis of a series of representative excerpts from both the German and Dutch communities. The second half of the chapter is a quantitative analysis of the amount of English used by each of the two communities: first overall, then with respect to the four analytical categories that have emerged from the qualitative analysis, and finally with regard to the respective amounts of “flagging,” or the marking of an instance of language alternation as unusual in some way. This analysis reveals striking differences between the two communities.

English as a Trans-National Language

This chapter begins with a summary of the findings from each of the three analysis chapters, showing how each chapter’s findings builds on the last. In the end, what emerges is a cohesive picture of the language alternation in these two communities. Next, the chapter returns to the three strands of research that form the theoretical foundation of this book—language ideologies and language policy, language use in social media, and multilingual language use in interaction—and abstracts from the findings the general contributions that this book makes to each of them, as well as to the study of language and globalization overall. Finally, the chapter takes a closer look at the implications of these findings for language policy and language planning.

Perceptions of the Linguascape

While the two chapters that follow this one will focus on the role of particular linguistic features in the construction of identity and space (Chapter 4 will look at the alternating use of German and English, and Chapter 5 will look at the use of forms of address), we will begin the analysis section of the book in this chapter with a look at the role played by perceptions of language use in constructing identity and space. Here, we will analyze participants’ ideas and opinions about the important languages and varieties that make up what we will refer to as their linguascape, or the repertoire of languages that are available to our participants in their daily lives and which exist as a part of their current surroundings and/or in the memories of their past. By that definition, a linguascape is not itself a space, but it encompasses all of the various codes that are of communicative and cultural relevance within a space. The spatial metaphor is deliberate, and by using it we mean to underscore the way the languages of a space form part of that space’s environment, and are as ever-present a part of that space as its physical landscape.

Language, Space, and Identity in Migration: from the Local to the Global

We started this book with two portraits of our immigrant participants, Frauke and Claudia, who are representative of the diversity of our participants. Frauke’s migration path started in a German settlement in Hungary, and brought her to Germany before she eventually moved to Canada as a teenager. She now lives in Kitchener-Waterloo and is constructing a space in which this migration path is still present, consciously or not, and in which she actively reconstructs and transplants elements of it. In doing so, she makes use of local resources such as German cafes, German ethnic clubs, and other German speakers, though they may not all speak the same German variety that she does. Now near retirement age, her adjustment to Canada can be seen in the ways she creates spaces through a mixed code, the local references she makes, and the ways in which her language attitudes and ideologies correspond to those of German speakers living in Canada rather than European Germans. She has made a choice for Canadian citizenship but ‘my heart is German,’ she says, which indicates the deep emotional traces connected to the languages she has encountered in her life.

Non-Language Resources

This chapter focuses on the role of non-language resources in the construction of identities and spaces. More specifically, the analysis discussed in this chapter relies on Sacks’ (1972, 1992) membership categorization device (MCD) to demonstrate how the participants draw on activities such as going to local German clubs, German schools, and eating and preparing certain kinds of food in the construction of a particular German-Canadian space and for positioning themselves in relation to it (cf. Chapter 2). In our analysis, we then focus on the ways in which participants use language to index and negotiate these activities.

Multiple Languages as Resources

It would be surprising if a book about the language use of Canadian Germans did not include a chapter on the use of multiple languages as resources in the construction of identities and spaces. For most of our participants, both English and German varieties are important resources in their daily lives. These languages are also resources for them in the conversational interviews, on which a large part of the analysis for this book is based. Almost none of these conversational interviews are in English only, and even in the cases of the few which are, all of the participants nonetheless have experience with German or one of its varieties, and this is nearly always expressed in the interviews in some way or another. Even in the cases of those participants who do not themselves speak a German variety, the impact can be seen through the link between language and culture (cf. Chapter 6 on non-language resources) and are alluded to in other ways in this book and in this chapter.