Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-)standard German spoken by young and older educated adults and to identify and locate regional features. To this end, we compile an areally extensive corpus of read and spontaneous German speech. Secondary school students and 50-to-60-year-old locals are recorded in 160 cities throughout the German speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and a word list, name pictures, translate words and sentences from English, answer questions in a sociobiographic interview, and take part in a map task experiment. The resulting corpus comprises over 1000 hours of speech, which is transcribed orthographically. Automatically derived broad phonetic transcriptions, selective manual narrow phonetic transcriptions, and variationalist annotations are added. Focussing on phonetic variation we aim to show to what extent national or regional standards exist in spoken German. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus enables us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in spoken (near-)standard German.
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.
Europe is a continent of many languages. We all know that, but normally when we think about this fact, we focus on national languages, the type of language that shapes our political and our linguistic geography. But as natural as it may seem today, the idea of a language closely being interrelated with one's identity does not have a very long tradition. In fact it is only since the late 18th century that we think there is some type of intimate connection between the language spoken and the identity of a person as belonging to a nation. And even if the stabilization of European nation states was closely connected with this type of reasoning, European language communities differ considerably in their way of dealing with natural variation within their national language. For some of them, it is only the standardized national language that is relevant in this respect; for others, a certain amount of variation is a central part of their linguistic identity.