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This is a revised and translated version of my article "Die doppelte Wende - Zur Verbindung von Sprache, Sprachwissenschaft und zeitgebundener politischer Bewertung am Beispiel deutsch-deutscher Sprachdifferenzierung" which appeared in Politische Semantik - Bedeutungsanalytische und sprachkritische Beiträge zur politischen Sprachverwendung, ed. Josef Klein (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989), pp. 297-326. I am indepted to Colin Good, Norwich, England, for having translated the text into English.
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.
Germany's (single) national official language is German. The dominance of German in schools, politics, the legal system, administration and the entire written public domain is so great that for a long time the lack of a coherent language policy was not seen as a problem. State restraint in this area is due, on the one hand, to historical reasons; on the other hand, it has been promoted by the federal system in Germany, which grants the federal states far-reaching responsibilities in the fields of education and culture. More recently, multilingualism among the population has increased and has resulted in a growing interest in understanding the language situation in Germany and (in particular) taking a closer look at the different minority languages. In 2017, for the first time in about 80 years, there is a question on the language of the population in the German micro census. The Institute for the German Language has also carried out various representative surveys; in the winter of 2017/201, a large representative survey with questions on the language repertoire and language attitudes is in the field.
The German Historical Institute Washington (GHI) is in the development phase of German History Digital (GH-D), a transatlantic digital initiative to meet the scholarly needs of historians and their students facing new historiographical and technological challenges. In the proposed paper we will discuss the research goals, methodology, prototyping, and development strategy of GH-D as infrastructure to facilitate transnational historical knowledge co-creation for the large community of researchers and students already relying on digital resources of the GHI and for the growing constituency of citizen scholars.
During the brief era of German colonialism in the Pacific (1884-1914), German was in contact with a large number of languages, autochthonous as well as colonial ones. This setting led to language contact in which German influenced and was influenced by various languages. In 1900, Western Samoa came under German colonial rule. The German language held a certain prestige there which is mirrored by the numbers of voluntary Samoan learners of German. On the other hand, the preferred use of English, rather than German, by native speakers of German was frequently noted. This paper examines linguistic and metalinguistic data that suggest the historical existence of (the precursor of) a colonial variety of German as spoken in Samoa. This variety seems to have been marked mainly by lexical borrowing from English and Samoan and was, because of these borrowings, not fully comprehensible to Germans who had never encountered the variety or the colonial setting in Samoa. It is discussed whether this variety can be considered a separate variety of German on linguistic grounds.
In spring 2002, we celebrated the inauguration of the first German-Russian-Jewish kindergarten in Berlin. Nowadays, there are seven bilingual German-Russian kindergartens with 4 60 places and 78 bilingual kindergartens with other combinations of languages [SENBWF]. Maybe it is not enough, taking into account the large proportion o f immigrants in the population of Berlin1. And yet, much progress has been achieved, endorsing the fact that German society has begun to change its attitude towards other languages on its territory. The initial request for German monolingualism first changed into societal tolerance of multilingualism and eventually to the recognition o f the value of multilingualism. This process is a very slow one, and it is not yet complete. In my article, I would like to look at the development in the last few years of the political framework that has made possible, on the one hand, the opening of bilingual kindergartens in Berlin, and on the other hand, to consider what has hampered this process until now. I would like to emphasise three most important political spheres: linguistic, educational and integrational.