Migration in Metropolises: Language use and language attitudes in the Ruhr Area

The aim of this interdisciplinary research proposal is to analyze the linguistic means and communicative strategies as well as the language attitudes of speakers living in the metropolitan Ruhr area. Three sociological and linguistic perspectives will be combined: First, Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis (W. Imo), second, sociolinguistics and research in language attitudes (E. Ziegler) and, third, migration and integration research (H. Uslucan). The project intends to investigate current linguistic and attitudinal tendencies in everyday, informal spoken interactions of different speaker communities within the Ruhr area as well as phenomena regarding language contact between regional, colloquial and ethnic varieties. A second research question concerns the dynamics of the social perception and mutual assessments of different speaker communities. A comparative analysis of the language use of speakers with German, Turkish and Arab as their mother tongues is planned, first on the basis of a corpus of authentic everyday spoken interactions (module I), second, the language attitudes are further investigated using the methodic approach of narrative interviews (module II) and, third, the data will be collected diachronically with a second turn of data collection scheduled after six years. The data will be transcribed, annotated and presented within a linguistic audio database (module III) in order to ensure a sustainable use of the project resources and enable other researchers to use the data for their own research questions.

Funding will be used

(a)  to build a test corpus with data from speakers with Turkish and Arab as their mother tongues. This corpus will be used for hypotheses generating analyses.

(b)  to invite colleagues for a workshop on October 26, 2015 to discuss the project proposal.

The scientists

Prof. Dr. Evelyn Ziegler is professor of german linguistics with focus on sociolinguistics at University Duisburg-Essen. > mehr

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Imo is professor of german linguistics with focus on syntax at University Duisburg-Essen. > mehr

Prof. Dr. Haci-Halil Uslucan is professor of modern turkeystudies and research on integration at University Duisburg-Essen. > mehr