Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 838
Part of Session 158: Language biographies and migration experiences in urban contexts (Other abstracts in this session)
“My German is not as good as theirs”: proficiency, attitudes and sense of place in Canadian German language biographies
Authors: Liebscher, Grit (1); Dailey-O'Cain, Jennifer (2)
Submitted by: Liebscher, Grit (University of Waterloo, Canada)
This paper investigates the relationship between language biographies and the construction of sociolinguistic spaces by Canadian German immigrants. Language biographies in this context are their narrated experiences of first and additional language socialization. Sociolinguistic space is a notion that has only recently been introduced into sociolinguistics by e.g. Baynham (2003), Blommaert (2005), and Stevenson and Carl (2010). It relies on the distinction between place and space as conceptualized in cultural geography and sociology (e.g. Harvey 1990, de Certeau 1998). Sociolinguistic space comes into being through meaningful practices by individuals, which include language use, positioning, attitudes, but also language biographies.
The data on which our work is based stem from the urban German-speaking immigrant community in Canada. The data set is made up of 77 conversational interviews with 91 participants of different ages and immigrant generations, and whose immigrant backgrounds include Germany and German-speaking speech islands in Europe. These interviews were conducted in two Canadian urban centers, Edmonton and Kitchener-Waterloo, by two German-speaking research assistants who discussed questions of immigration and language experiences with the participants.
For this present paper, we selected stretches of talk from these data, in which participants narrate aspects of their own and others’ language biographies. We then analyzed these metalinguistic reflections on experiences with languages using a discourse analysis that combines content with interactional sociolinguistic analysis as outlined in Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain (2011). In this presentation, we will focus in particular on narrated aspects of language proficiency (i.e. how “well” the language is spoken), language varieties, and senses of place. We find that these aspects become linked to the construction of multilingual subjectivities (Kramsch 2009), in which agency over particular linguistic forms is tied up with symbolic processes of language use and socialization. Language biographies can then be analyzed as ways of constructing as well as rationalizing these subjectivities as part of the construction of larger sociolinguistic spaces.
Our analysis essentially focuses on drawing out the vertical dimensions of the space, i.e. ways in which participants construct hierarchies and their own positions in relation to those. This speaks to the workshop’s goal to go beyond the homogenization of urban contexts and to investigate local diversity.
References:
Baynham, Mike. (2003). Narratives in space and time: beyond “backdrop” accounts of narrative orientation. Narrative Inquiry, 13, 2, 347–366.
Blommaert, Jan. (2005). Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Certeau, Michel. (1998). The Practice of Everyday Life. volume 2, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Harvey, David. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kramsch, Claire. The Multilingual Subject. What Foreign Language Learners Say About Their Experience and Why It Matters. 2009. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liebscher, Grit and Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain. (2009). Language attitudes in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 13, 2: 195-222.
Stevenson, Patrick & Carl, Jenny. (2010). Language and Social Change in Central Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.