Over the last decades, a number of sociolinguistic methods have been considered to be particularly suitable for uncovering patterns of language ideologies. These methods cover interviews, language biographies, questionnaires, or corpus-assisted discourse studies. However, linguistic structure is hardly ever recognized as a source that can provide insights into ideological patterns.
In this paper, I present a corpus study on the German of multilingual and monolingual speakers in formal communicative contexts and show that productions of these speaker groups indeed reflect underlying linguistic ideologies. To this end, I discuss differences in the language use of these speaker groups, focussing on morphological, phonological, and discourse pragmatic features. The empirical basis of the investigation is the German sub-corpus of the RUEG corpus (Wiese et al. 2020). The corpus comprises data from adult and adolescent monolingual and multilingual speakers with different heritage languages (Greek, Russian, and Turkish). The data were elicited using the language situation method (Wiese 2020) and thus led to linguistic productions in four communicative situations for each speaker: formal-spoken, formal-written, informal-spoken, and informal-written.
The data imply that multilingual speakers use more formal language markers and fewer informal language markers in formal registers than monolingual speakers. I argue that this is due to linguistic pressure caused by monolingual habitus (Gogolin 2002) and standard language ideology (Mattheier 1991) in Germany, which has a particularly strong impact on multilingual speakers. These ideological patterns might lead to majority language anxiety in multilingual speakers, a phenomenon similar to heritage language anxiety (Sevinç & Dewaele 2016). As additional evidence, I provide first results from four semi-structured pilot interviews that indicate a constant need for multilingual speakers to prove themselves as legitimate members of the German society through the use of standard German. Furthermore, the interviews bring to light that societal practices such as othering and racism contribute to the emergence of majority language anxiety.
References
Davies, Winifred V. 2012. "Myths we live and speak by". In Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl & Oliver Moliner (eds.), Standard languages and multilingualism in European history, 45 – 69.
Gogolin, Ingrid. 2002. "Linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe: a challenge for educational research and practice". European Education and Research Journal 1(1): 123–138.
Sevinç, Yeşim & Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 2018. "Heritage language anxiety and majority language anxiety among Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands". International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(2), 159-179.
Wiese, Heike. 2020. "Language Situations: A method for capturing variation within speakers' repertoires". In Yoshiyuki Asahi (ed.), Methods in Dialectology XVI. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang [Bamberg Studies in English Linguistics], 105-117.
Wiese, Heike, Alexiadou, Artemis, Allen, Shanley, Bunk, Oliver, Gagarina, Natalia, Iefremenko, Kateryna, Jahns, Esther, Klotz, Martin, Krause, Thomas, Labrenz, Annika, Lüdeling, Anke, Martynova, Maria, Neuhaus, Katrin, Pashkova, Tatiana, Rizou, Vicky, Tracy, Rosemarie, Schroeder, Christoph, Szucsich, Luka, Tsehaye, Wintai, Zerbian, Sabine, Zuban, Yulia. (2020): "RUEG Corpus (0.3.0) [Data set]". Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3765218.
