UC Berkeley

This study characterizes the role of English in multilingual/-ethnic speech communities in urban Germany. Drawing on both existing corpus data and new data from a multimodal fieldwork study, this dissertation demonstrates that English plays a far greater role in these speech communities than has previously been recognized. I argue that this is especially true with respect to the Kiezdeutsch speech community, exploring how the social meanings and formal linguistic features of English are reflected in Kiezdeutsch (and vice-versa).

Furthermore, I explore the role of English in contact between the current wave of refugees, many of whom speak better English than German upon arrival in Germany, and pre-existing multilingual speech communities. As the older, largely Turkish-speaking population of Germans with migrant backgrounds absorbs the new refugees, many of whom speak unrelated languages and non-mutually intelligible dialects of Arabic, English has become a lingua franca both for daily communication and as a shared second language in German classrooms. Drawing on my fieldwork data collected in refugee language classrooms, I argue that understanding and navigating this new contact situation will require taking seriously the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in urban Germany. Furthermore, I argue that this contact between new migrant communities and established speakers of Kiezdeutsch necessitates rethinking assumptions about Kiezdeutsch as a “native dialect” of German.

Following an overview of the study in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 summarizes the existing literature on ethnolects in Germany. I give a historical overview of the field and, ultimately, illustrate possible reasons that English has largely been ignored in this work. Chapter 3 demonstrates that English does indeed play a role in the existing data by analyzing the influence of English on data from the Kiezdeutsch corpus (KiDKo). Chapters 4 and 5 present new data from my ethnographic-linguistic fieldwork study. Chapter 4 characterizes the influence of English on the repertoires of post-migrant youth associated with the Kiezdeutsch speech community. Chapter 5, on the other hand, examines the role of English among refugee youth, arguing that English constitutes an important point of connection between post-migrant and migrant speech communities. Chapters 4 and 5, taken together, suggest the emergence of a new German-English hybrid repertoire which I term “Kiezenglish.” Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the study by offering implications of the increasing presence of English for descriptive linguistic study of ethnolects such as Kiezdeutsch, as well as for language acquisition, pedagogy and language policy.