Formen und Funktionen von Ethnolekten in multilingualen Lebenswelten — am Beispiel von Mannheim

Summary

In the course of an expanding labour migration, complex multilingual life worlds emerged in many European countries. New linguistic and communicative practices evolved. In the literature, these are commonly referred to as code-switching or mixing and as ethnolectal forms of standard varieties. Practices of code-switching or mixing can be observed in bilingual migrant groups where speakers have sufficient knowledge in the same languages; however, the formation of ethnolectal forms is characteristic of multilingual groups where speakers of different native languages use ethnolectal forms of the standard varieties of the resident country as a kind of lingua franca.

In my paper, I focus on ethnolects and their forms and functions in a multilingual migrant life world in Mannheim, Germany. The main issue of my paper is to demonstrate how young migrants use the differences between ethnolectal and standard forms of German as a communicative resource. Based on natural conversational data from various migrant children and youth groups, I characterize the speakers’ linguistic repertoire, analyse the variability of their linguistic practices, and reconstruct the discursive and socio-symbolic functions of ethnolectal forms.