• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 251

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Transnational Youth Language in Berlin: German and English in the Construction of Identity

Authors: Fuller, Janet M.
Submitted by: Fuller`, Janet M. (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, United States of America)

This study looks data from a year-long ethnographic project at two German-English bilingual public schools in Berlin, Germany to address the relationships between language, identity and language ideologies for transnational youths in this urban setting.

In this analysis, I focus on four children in one bilingual classroom and how they use German and English to construct various aspects of their identities.  These children are classified as ‘German Mother Tongue’ in this classroom, and while they speak German as their dominant language, all four come from immigrant backgrounds and at least one language other than German is spoken in the home. Despite their status as multilinguals, much of the identity work they do in the analyzed conversations revolves around solidifying their position as German speakers. In the data examined for this paper, which were collected in the English classroom, the children speak a great deal of English, but the self-conscious nature of their English use, including  the repair of their own and each other’s ‘slips’ into German, only serves to underline that they are German speakers. 

My ethnographic work in this context supports the interpretation that the use of German in this context serves primarily to construct the identity of a participant in youth culture and is not an index of German national belonging. In this multicultural setting, German is the lingua franca and a means of delimiting the peer group boundary, while English serves primarily as a tool to construct identity as a member of the educated middle class and international elite.  Both German and English have thus been bleached of meaning as ethnolinguistic or national identity markers among these urban, transnational, multilingual youths.

These findings are particularly interesting in light of recent discourses in German society which focus on linguistic assimilation as part of ‘being German’.  The identification of these youths as German-speaking but not necessarily German challenges ideological links of language and cultural belonging and may reflect the maintenance of ethno-national ideologies.