Refine
Document Type
- Article (7)
- Part of a Book (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (10)
Keywords
- language attitudes (10) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (5)
- Postprint (4)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (4)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (7)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (3)
Publisher
- Budrich (1)
- Centre for Applied Language Studies (1)
- Equinox Publishing (1)
- Jagiellonian University Press (1)
- MDPI (1)
- SAGE (1)
- Sage (1)
- Springer (1)
- V&R unipress (1)
- de Gruyter (1)
Bislang gibt es keine akkuraten, repräsentativen Statistiken dazu, welche Sprachen in Deutschland gesprochen werden. Zwar wird in verschiedenen Erhebungen nach Muttersprachen oder nach zuhause gesprochenen Sprachen gefragt; aufgrund einiger Mängel im Erhebungsdesign bilden die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Erhebungen jedoch die sprachliche Realität der in Deutschland lebenden Bevölkerung nicht angemessen ab. Im Beitrag wird anhand von drei Erhebungen gezeigt, dass bereits die Instrumente zur Erhebung von Sprache von Spracheinstellungen geprägt sind und dass dadurch die Gültigkeit der Ergebnisse stark eingeschränkt wird. Diese Mängel gelten für Sprachstatistiken im Hinblick auf die gesamte Bevölkerung Deutschlands – Kinder und Jugendliche eingeschlossen.
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
This paper analyzes the LL in the city of Bautzen / Budyšin in Germany, a town which is frequently considered the “capital” of the Slavonic minority of the Sorbs. It focuses on the societal role of Sorbian in relation to practices and ideologies of mainstream German society. The vast majority of signs in Bautzen / Budyšin are in German only. Sorbian is essentially restricted to explicitly Sorbian institutions and to local and regional administration. Interviews conducted in shops and on the streets reveal that paternalistic attitudes common to perceptions of language policies and minority languages in Germany dominate; practices maintain the common monolingual habitus in German society. Members of the majority population show little awareness of Sorbian issues, and Sorbian signage is seen as a generous gesture but considered essentially unnecessary. Only in most recent times, a reaction by the Sorbian community has challenged these practices and attitudes.
This chapter investigates policies which shape the role of the German language in contemporary Estonia. Whereas German played for many centuries an important role as the language of the economic and cultural elite in Estonia, it severely declined in importance throughout the twentieth century. Mirrored on this historical background, the paper provides an overview of the current functions of German and attitudes towards it and it discusses how these functions and attitudes are influenced by policies of various actors from inside and outside Estonia. The paper argues that German continues to play a significant role: while German is no longer a lingua franca, it still enjoys a number of functions and prestige in clearly defined niches involving communication within German-speaking circles or between Estonians and Germans. The interplay of language policies of the Estonian and the German-speaking states as well as by semi-state and private institutions succeed in maintaining German as an additional language in contemporary Estonia.
Öffentliche Sprachdiskurse, wie sie beispielsweise in den Medien stattfinden, werden typischerweise aus einer sprachkritischen Haltung heraus geführt. Inwieweit diese veröffentlichte Meinung tatsächlich die Mehrheitsmeinung der Sprecherinnen und Sprecher widerspiegelt, ist durchaus eine offene Frage. In diesem Beitrag berichten wir aus einer rezenten Erhebung über Spracheinstellungen in Deutschland. Wir zeigen, dass die Art der Frageformulierung einen starken Einfluss auf die Ergebnisse hat, und berichten, welche sprachlichen Veränderungen die Befragten in jüngerer Zeit angeben, wahrgenommen zu haben.
This paper explores how attitudes affect the seemingly objective process of counting speakers of varieties using the example of Low German, Germany’s sole regional language. The initial focus is on the basic taxonomy of classifying a variety as a language or a dialect. Three representative surveys then provide data for the analysis: the Germany Survey 2008, the Northern Germany Survey 2016, and the Germany Survey 2017. The results of these surveys indicate that there is no consensus concerning the evaluation of Low German’s status and that attitudes towards Low German are related to, for example, proficiency in the language. These attitudes are shown to matter when counting speakers of Low German and investigating the status it has been accorded.
This article examines the language contact situation as well as the language attitudes of the Caucasian Germans, descendants of German-born inhabitants of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union who emigrated in 1816/17 to areas of Transcaucasia. After deportations and migrations, the group of Caucasian Germans now consists of those who have since emigrated to Germany and those who still live in the South Caucasus. It’s the first time that sociolinguistic methods have been used to record data from the generation who experienced living in the South Caucasus and in Germany as well as from two succeeding generations. Initial results will be presented below with a focus on the language contact constellations of German varieties as well as on consequences of language contact and language repression, which both affect language attitudes.
Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.
Aversion to loanwords may express itself in various ways: deliberate and motivated by ideology of linguistic purism or more implicit and motivated by the strength of one’s national identification and ethnolinguistic vitality. A study of Polish philology students assessed their tendency to choose loanwords versus synonymous native words. The results supported a two-path model of linguistic purism. Social identity (strength of identification) directly predicted avoidance of loanwords, whereas ideological concerns (conservative political views) predicted it indirectly, through purist ideology.
Since the eighties of the last century, the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German Language) explored in various ways the attitudes of the German population towards the national language in Germany. After limited studies without statistical relevance, two representative surveys were conducted in 1997/98 and 2008/09. The questions asked concerned attitudes toward recent developments of the language, the regional variance of German, especially the East- and West-German variants, and towards foreign languages inside and outside of the country. The major statistical results are presented and discussed.