In the post-war period from 1947 to 1956, the German-French border region of Saarland was an autonomous political entity with a strong orientation towards France. The government implemented measures to promote learning French from an early age onwards and to encourage adults to acquire or enhance their knowledge of the language. Since 2014, the regional government of Saarland has been intensifying efforts to promote multilingualism with a privileged position for French as part of its 'France strategy'. In current public debate, critics often refer back to the 1950s, drawing parallels to what they describe as 'forced Frenchification' (Krämer 2019, 59-65).
This paper investigates the population's language ideologies and views of language policy and multilingualism during this period of time, not merely from written historical sources but from first-hand experience (see Milroy 2012 for foundations of historical research on language ideologies): How did students perceive the teaching and learning of French at the time? How do they recall the development of their own multilingual repertoire in their youth and the political framework of educational policy? Did the political background influence their attitudes towards French? In order to retrace language ideologies in retrospect, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten informants who went to school in Saarland in the early 1950s (today aged 80 years and over).
Along with findings and selected examples from the interview data, the paper addresses methodological issues related to an interview-based approach in this project: To what extent do language ideologies in the present reshape the interviewee's recollection of their metalinguistic experience several decades ago? (A question relevant to any historical work with contemporary witnesses, see Thießen 2011, and which deserves more discussion in sociolinguistics.) Are there any ethical limitations to this approach, for instance when the interview situation takes informants back to memories from their youth in a period of political or social conflicts and uncertainty? Most of the interviews were conducted via video call during the pandemic, the project therefore also lends itself to reflections about this type of fieldwork with informants at an advanced age.
As a conclusion, the paper highlights potentials and limitations of interview data and fieldwork with contemporary witnesses for perspectives from recent history as an emerging aspect within the well-established framework of historical sociolinguistics ('zeithistorische Soziolinguistik', see e.g. Säily et al. 2017 for recent developments in the field).
References
Krämer, Philipp (2019): Französisch im Saarland – Einstellungen zu Mehrsprachigkeit und Sprachpolitik im Rahmen der Frankreichstrategie. Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 129, 31-71.
Milroy, James (2012): Sociolinguistics and Ideologies in Language History. In Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel et al. (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, 571–584. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell.
Säily, Tanja, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin & Anita Auer (2017): The future of histor-ical sociolinguistics? In Säily, Tanja et al. (eds.), Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics, 1–19. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Thießen, Malte (2011): Zeitgeschichte als Zumutung und Zugabe: Praxis, Probleme und Po-tenziale einer besonderen Epoche (Oldenburger Universitätsreden 199), Oldenburg: BIS. Online: http://oops.uni-oldenburg.de/1320/1/ur199.pdf.
