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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 865

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Berlin, Belonging, and Language: What Space Tells Us

Authors: Erduyan, Isil
Submitted by: Erduyan, Isil (University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States of America)

In his analyses of modernity and urban life, Lefebvre (1974) argues that social space is a social product and it serves as a means of control and domination of power. The problematization of space as such has also been adopted up in sociolinguistics (e.g. Li, 2011; Blommaert, et al. 2005), such that multilingualism should not be seen as something acquired, but something the space enables or disables through interactions, linguistic and semiotic. For Blommaert, once ‘space can be filled with all kinds of social, cultural, epistemic, and affective attributes’ it becomes  ‘place’ and people speak from a place, ‘on which senses of belonging, property rights and authority can be projected (2005, p. 222). Seen in this way, analyzing space has a lot to offer in analyzing the complex multilingual practices of urban immigrants, for whom language plays an ideological role. Language classrooms in urban schools with high immigrant populations are important venues for such analyses through their microcosmic character and the symbiosis they create within.

In this paper, I look into the meaning, confrontation, and negotiation of space and belonging in the experiences of multilingual Turkish students in their language classes at a high school in the center of Berlin. In addition to being an iconic destination of Turkish immigration to Europe, Berlin today is one of the most complex transnational cities, with one seventh of its population non-German in origin. My research school is based in the Kreuzberg district, known as the Turkish quarter in local terms; and enrolls more than 90 % Turkish students. In the critical ethnographic study that I have conducted for 1,5 years, involving German, Turkish, and English classroom observations; audio-recordings; and interviews with students and teachers, I pose the following questions:

How do space and belonging play out in the language classes? What sorts of linguistic practices are involved in this process?

Findings from a critical analysis of classroom discourse reveal that multilingual practices in each class serve for confrontation with an array of spaces, imagined and experienced, which help build multilingual identities. In interacting with the spaces they encounter, or create for themselves, students tend to deconstruct conventional terms of belonging, and rather exploit the cosmopolitan resources they acquire by living in Kreuzberg, Berlin, and Europe. Doing so, they speak from different spaces, locally, nationally, and transnationally, than the discourse of Turkish migration history in Germany suggests. This includes, among other things, internalizing the mobility and transparency of their lives against the regimes of marginalization and discrimination; as much as rejecting dualities, such as German/non-German, or European/non-European, and replacing them with more de-centered linguistic identity affiliations.

Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Blommaert, J; Collins, J. & Slembrouck, S. (2005) Spaces of multilingualism. Language & Communication. 25: 197–216.  

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Translated by Donald N. Smith. Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

Li Wei, (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by mutlilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics. 43: 1222–1235.