Lili - Heft 148
Thema: Im Dickicht der Städte I: Sprache und Semiotik
Herausgeber dieses Heftes:
Rita Franceschini
Inhalt
Wolfgang Klein und Christiane von Stutterheim
Einleitung
Introduction 
Frans Hinskens and Pieter Muysken
The Talk of the Town: Languages in Amsterdam 1507-2007
Wolfgang Wildgen
Wege in die Stadt oder das Lesen der Stadt als Zeichen
The Ways into/through a City or the Semiotic Reading of
Urban Structures
Arnulf Deppermann
Stilisiertes Türkendeutsch in Gesprächen deutscher Jugendlicher
Stylized Turkish-German in Conversations among German
Adolescents
Norbert Dittmar und Daniel Steckbauer
Urbane Linguotope: am Puls der Polyphonie
Urban Polyphony in Berlin after the Fall of the Wall: a
Sociolinguistic Challenge
Inken Keim
Formen und Funktionen von Ethnolekten in multilingualen
Lebenswelten – am Beispiel von Mannheim
Forms and Functions of Multilingual Migrant Life Worlds –
the Example Mannheim
ISilvia Dal Negro, Wilco Lensink, Christian Upmeier,
Paolo Volonté
Visual Communication in a Multilingual Context
Georges Lüdi
Basel: einsprachig und heteroglossisch
Basel: Monolingual and Heteroglossic
Frank Jablonka
Kommunikative Sozialstile und Codeswitching im Raï.
Transkulturelle Passagen
Communicative Social Styles and Code Switching in Raï.
Transcultural Passages
Labor
Hilke Elsen
Die Wortbildung der Eigennamen in fiktionalen Texten
Word Formation of Names in Fictitious Texts
Rita Franceschini
Einleitung
Der metaphorische Titel „Im Dickicht der Städte“ steht für die Intention, den urbanen Raum als ein Kommunikationsnetz zu sehen, das in seiner je eigenen Kombinatorik eine Stadt charakterisiert. Fast schon im Sinne von Georg Simmels Überlegungen zu Anfang des letzten Jahrhunderts, wonach die soziale Bedeutung einer Stadt nicht allein über deren physische Gestalt, Größe und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung, sondern viel mehr über rasche und stete Abfolge von Sinneseindrücken zu erfassen sei, eröffnet sich auch heute noch ein Beschäftigungsfeld für verschiedene Wissensdisziplinen, die sich mit Kommunikation und speziell mit Sprachkontakten befassen: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Kommunikationsdesign und Semiologie allgemein sowie Medienwissenschaft widmen sich neuen Kommunikationsformen in Städten.
Das Heft „Im Dickicht der Städte I“ nimmt im weitesten Sinne sprach- und kommunikationswissenschaftliche Beiträge auf, das nachfolgende Heft II literatur- und medienwissenschaftliche Themen. Die hier nun versammelten Beiträge widmen sich Normverschiebungen und der Mehrstimmigkeit von Codes, also jener spezifischen Multimodalität und Diversität, die die urbane Kultur als ihre Ausdrucksweise herausgebildet hat. Damit kommen mehrsprachige Phänomene, die oft von Peripherien ausgehen, innerhalb von Migrantenkulturen und durch multikulturellen Kontakt entstehen, ins Blickfeld. Bei alledem interessiert, was urbane Codes zur sozialen und sprachlichen Dynamik beitragen und wie allgemein mit Pluralität im urbanen Raum umgegangen wird. Der städtische Raum – allen voran derjenige der Metropolen – wird (immer mehr: wurde) oft als Inkubator von Entwicklungen, als Ikone der Modernität gesehen. Eine kritische Masse an gleich Gesinnten kann in ihm physisch zusammenkommen, sich austauschen, Ideen entwickeln. Immer mehr richtet sich jedoch der Blick weg von Metropolen und Zentren hin zu suburbanen Räumen und Kleinstädten, wenn es darum geht, Innovationsschübe zu beschreiben. Periphere Zonen setzen Kreativität frei, die Kombinatorik und Qualität der kritischen Masse scheint ausschlaggebend zu sein, nicht die Potenzialität der Quantität. Randphänomene finden im urbanen Raum eine Verbreitung, und es ist deshalb von Interesse zu fragen, wie Codes entstehen und sich durchsetzen, wie die Dynamik zwischen ‚Peripherie’ und ‚Zentrum’ zu fassen ist. Letztlich: stimmt die Annahme der ‚kreativen Peripherien’, die den eher zum Bewahren neigenden Zentren die nötige Entwicklungsdynamik verpassen?
Im urbanen Raum bewegen sich Akteure (seien sie als Individuen konstituiert, oder als Gruppen und Institutionen) in einem dichten Netz von unterschiedlichen Ausdrucksweisen akustischer, symbolischer, grafischer und physischer Natur, die es zu ordnen und filtern gilt. Ordnen kann bedeuten: selektiv wahrnehmen, beschreiben, einen Sinn geben. Bei allen potenziellen Kontakten, die im urbanen Raum zur Disposition stehen, gilt es, einen Teil zu vermeiden und andere (hoch-)selektiv herzustellen, und dies alles immer mehr auch über technische Mittel und Medien zu regulieren und zu kanalisieren. Bei der Beschreibung und Analyse dieser Kommunikationsprozesse ist nicht nur die Interaktion zwischen den Akteuren konstitutiv, sondern konstitutiv ist – wo nicht? – ebenso der Beobachterstandpunkt inner- und außerhalb des spezifischen urbanen Raums, eingeschlossen der des Autors in seinem ‚Textraum’: Für wen sind Kommunikationen gedacht? Wer beobachtet diese Phänomene in welcher Weise? Welche Lektüre kommt durch den kulturellen Hintergrund des Beobachters allein zustande?
Kulturell ‚gemischte Codes’ sind solche nicht für alle: Es stellt sich die Frage, ob die primären Akteure nicht ein Selbstverständnis dafür entwickelt haben, das dem Außenstehenden (der Autor oder Leser in der Rolle eines Touristen?) lange verschlossen bleibt. Ethnografen gleich verirrt man sich zwar nicht so sehr im Dschungel, wohl aber im Dickicht der Städte und dessen Lesarten.
Gerade der hohen Komplexität wegen kann der urbane Raum dem Beobachter ein opakes Bild bieten, das ihn auf die eigene Perspektive reduziert: Man sieht nur noch dasselbe, man geht dieselben Wege, man bemerkt nur noch Bekanntes. Der urbane Raum kann überfordern, ermüden, zum Rückzug bewegen. Doch behält der urbane Raum seinen ungebrochenen Reiz als Ort der Befragung und Infragestellung eigener Annahmen, als kommunikative Herausforderung. Die Stadt als Ort des perspektivischen Lernens, als Ort der konstanten Irritation, bleibt deshalb ein Raum, den es seines spezifischen Zusammenspiels der Codes wegen zu verstehen gilt. Die hier versammelten Beiträge widmen sich der Geschichte der Mehrsprachigkeit Amsterdams vom 16. Jahrhundert an, es folgen historisch-semiotische Überlegungen zum Stadtbild Bremens und Darstellungen von linguistic landscapes am Beispiel der Städte Bozen und Basel. Es finden sich Beiträge zu Identitätscodes von jungen türkischen Jugendlichen in Deutschland, mit Beispielen aus Berlin und Mannheim, und ein Beitrag zu der Verbreitung der sprachlich-musikalischen Ausdrucksform des Raï auf seinem Weg der Migration aus dem Maghreb bis hin in die französischen banlieue von Paris und anderer französischer Städte.
Frans Hinskens and Pieter Muysken
The talk of the town: Languages in Amsterdam 1507-2007
This paper is an impressionistic sketch of the language history of Amsterdam in the past five hundred years. To this end we discuss some of the main economic and demographic developments of the city and the political units that it has formed a part of, notably the County of Holland, the Republic of the United Netherlands and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Departing from the past and present dialect situation and processes such as dialect levelling, we also study the language contact effects of migration movements of several types, immigration from abroad and from different regions in the Netherlands. Religious refugees played an important role; this holds for e.g. Brabant Protestants from the Antwerp area around 1585, German religious refugees during the Thirty years War (1618-1648), and Huguenots (i.e. French Protestants) from 1685 onwards. Particular attention is paid to Sephardic (from 1593) and Ashkenazic Jewry (from 1618); especially the Ashkenazim and their main vernacular, Yiddish had an important role and was the source for Jewish Dutch. It had long-lasting lexical (on Amsterdam dialects and modern colloquial Dutch) and phonetic effects (on the Amsterdam dialects).
More recently, economic considerations played the main role in the immigration, as in the case of the Chinese (as of 1911), Italians, Yugoslavs and the Spaniards (after World War II). Large scale migration from Surinam started in the 1960s. The main groups among the latest arrivals include Turkish migrants (now 5.1 % of the Amsterdam population) and Moroccans (8.7 %). We end this paper with a brief sketch of a research project which concentrates on the relatively young ethnolects of Dutch spoken by second generation migrants of Turkish and Moroccan descent in Amsterdam as well in the city of Nijmegen (in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands).
Wolfgang Wildgen
The ways into/through a city or the semiotic reading of urban structures
The town, its streets and buildings are analysed from a dynamic point of view, which is a multiple one. It may consider the factors which led to the birth, growth and complexification of the town (the morphogenetic perspective). In this case the “meaning” of the town is reduced to basic environmental and social factors (forces, attractors). In the heart of a town relevant concentrations of urban meanings occur and are made visible in the architecture of the cathedral, the town-hall and so on. These demonstrate personal and political intentions (the cultural perspective). These constellations and forces are exemplified by the semiotic analysis of the Hanseatic City of Bremen. In a final part the destruction of a historical quarter is analysed as a negative semiosis, which has strange side effects. One can observe a later renaissance of destroyed sign-structures and conflictual interpretations of more recent urban developments. In general it can be shown that beyond individual sign users a town has its own collective "meaning" space. It reflects the affordances that places, buildings, and streets have for human users (their potential for actions, reactions, and interpretations) and contains intended messages exchanged in different periods between social groups in the city.
Arnulf Deppermann
Stylized Turkish-German in conversations among German adolescents
Phenomena of language crossing are common in Western multi-cultural societies. This paper reports on conversational crossing practices among German adolescents who use stylizations of Turkish-German, a German variety attributed to 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from Turkey and other South European and Arabian countries. Based on an ethnographic and conversation analytic approach, linguistic features, sequential organization and interactional functions of stylized Turkish-German are analyzed, with a special emphasis on how social identities of self and other are projected. The study discerns three practices of stylized Turkish-German: quotations, category-animations and playful assessments. Stylized Turkish-German is mainly used as a fun-code which serves to define the key of interaction and is used as a resource for poetic performances which are marked by playful competition and the display of youth cultural capital acquired from the media. This positive valuation, however, rests on the derogatory identity-stereotype of the aggressive and dull Turkish-German-speaker.
Norbert Dittmar and Daniel Steckbauer
Urban polyphony in Berlin after the fall of the wall: a sociolinguistic challenge
This article focuses on the evolution of mixed native and hybrid native /non-native varieties of German in Berlin after the fall of the wall in 1989.
In the last 15 years, new languages and cultures have entered Berlin as the former/current capital of Germany with its own creative cultural and social dynamics. We came up with the idea of a sociolinguistic profile of the city and have attempted to give an initial insight into the complex sociolinguistic scenario of the city.
Two local sociolinguistic settings are then described in detail: the differences between the eastern and the western part of the city with respect to the depth of urban vernacular and the emergence of ethnolectal varieties in four districts where immigrants and Germans live closely together.
In the first case, it becomes evident that the conservative use of the urban dialect is associated with habits and social norms still going back to the values of the former GDR society. The “non-simultaneity of the simultaneous” means that Berlin citizens live with contradictory norms of social life and language.
The emergence of a new German ethnolect challenges sociolinguistics. There are multi-modal inputs for a variety which follows other phonetic, prosodical and grammatical regularities such as the Berlin vernacular. It is shown that this variety has a sociolinguistic impact even on young native German adolescents.
Inken Keim
Forms and functions of multilingual migrant life worlds – the example Mannheim
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.
Silvia Dal Negro, Wilco Lensink, Christian Upmeier, Paolo Volonté
Visual communication in a multilingual context
Visual communication strives to transmit mediated messages from iconic and symbolic elements to a large audience and thereby modifies urban linguistic space significantly. Artefacts (signs, posters, etc.) do not necessarily result in communication, however. In fact, to communicate does not mean to transmit messages, but to transform the reality around us, so that others are able to produce acts of significance similar to those that we desire. In a multilingual context like the bus station of Bozen, where an initial session of fieldwork was carried out, the linguistic and communicative complexity is even higher than usual. The quantity and dissemination of notices and languages in use there allow us to analyse the characteristics of its ‘linguistic landscape’. While the institutional notices there are mostly bilingual, according to the guidelines of local linguistic policy, the so-called ‘bottom-up’ types of messages, which are almost exclusively linked to commercial activities, show a clear prevalence of monolingual signs in Italian. In addition, a further analysis revealed that in most bilingual signs encountered, readability is obstructed by a lack of distinction between the languages. Examples show how typographic differentiation in visual communication would enhance multilingual communication by separating the languages visually. This article gives an initial outline of an ongoing interdisciplinary study at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
Georges Lüdi
Visual communication in a multilingual context
Situated in the officially monolingual German part of Switzerland, the city of Basle is, in reality, very heteroglossic. Almost 30 per cent of its inhabitants are not Swiss citizens, and most of these are not native German speakers. In some of the city’s primary schools, more than 60 per cent of the students are non-native German speakers. Does the linguistic landscape (as defined by Landry/Bourhis 1997) reflect these demographic facts? Our analysis is based on comprehensive photo documentation of a representative sample of shopping streets in demographically different parts of the city. We tried to understand the process of linguistic landscaping (that is, landscaping focusing on by whom, for whom and with what?). As one would expect, German is almost exclusively used in official signs (on public roads and government buildings) and also dominates in commercial and private signs, even without regulation by linguistic laws. Sometimes, German is replaced by Swiss German dialect to further shape a local identity. English is very visible in the linguistic landscape, particularly in the city centre. However, except for in brief commercial signs, it is mixed with German. These bilingual signs do not address native English speakers; indeed, any detailed information is written in German. It seems that English words or names are used to give shops and companies products international panache. The other official languages of Switzerland, even French, as the language of neighbouring France, appear much less often. On the contrary, languages of immigration, in particular Turkish, are very visible, especially where immigrants live. There, one finds monolingual signs in different languages, mostly with cultural or private content, but again bilingual signs (Turkish-German, Portuguese-German, etc.) dominate. These document the fact that multilingual authors utilize their repertoire to earn maximum economic and symbolic benefit. We conclude that German is the lingua franca among speakers of other languages, and that substantial presence of German in signs produced by immigrants is proof of, but also an instrument for, their integration. On the other hand, the presence of various languages in the semiosphere raises the awareness of the world’s linguistic diversity to the local majority and can even produce an incipient plurilingualism.
Frank Jablonka
Communicative social styles and code switching in Raï. Transcultural passages
The approach of "communicative social styles" in urban sociolinguistics has turned out to be fruitful in analyzing the language choice of mulltilingual subjects, in order to identify their attitudes towards languages and the groups of speakers and cultures with which/whom they are in contact, including the relations between migrants’ homelands and the host country in urban or suburban quarters. One major interest is the investigation of code switching phenomena in both everyday communication and aesthetic cultural productions, such as HipHop. These phenomena show strategies related to the affirmation of interstitial identities.
In this paper, we attempt to apply this approach to the analysis of Algerian, Moroccan and French Raï productions by Rachid Taha, Faudel, Cheb Mami and Cheb Rezki. The plurilingual stylistic procedures reflect and articulate a culture characterized by transition and passage. In these processes, between the Maghreb region and France, or on a wider scale, between the modernizing Arabo-Islamic Orient and (post) modern Western civilization, a linking role seems to be assigned to migrant groups. That is why we are interested in the transcultural dimensions of this complex problem.
Hilke Elsen
Word formation of names in fictitious texts
Text books on word formation usually concentrate on regular morphology. In this article one particular part of the German lexicon is investigated to look for irregularities – names in fictitious texts. It will be shown that many names in stories with imaginary plots and characters show unusual morphological patterns.
Prof. Dr. Rita Franceschini, Freie Universität Bozen/Libera Università di Bolzano, Piazza Sernesi, 1/Sernesiplatz 1, I-39100 Bolzano/Bozen, E-Mail: r.franceschini@unibz.it
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Haubrichs, Universität des Saarlandes, Fachrichtung 4.1. – Germanistik, Postfach 11 50, D-66041 Saarbrücken, E-mail: w.haubrichs@mx.uni-saarland.de
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Klein, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Postbus 310, NL-6500 AH Nijmegen, E-mail: wolfgang.klein@mpi.nl
Prof. Dr. Ralf Schnell, Universität Siegen, Fachbereich Sprach-, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft, Postfach 10 12 40, D-57068 Siegen, E-mail: schnell@germanistik.uni-siegen.de
Prof. Arnulf Deppermann, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Postfach 10 16 21, D-68016 Mannheim, E-mail: deppermann@ids-mannheim.de
Prof. Dr. Norbert Dittmar, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, D-14195 Berlin, E-mail: nordit@zedat.fu-berlin.de
PD Dr. phil. habil. Hilke Elsen M.A., Chrombachstr. 10, D-86551 Aichach, E-mail: Hilkee@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Prof. Dr. Frans Hinskens, Main building VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands und Meertens Instituut, Postbus 94264, 1099 GG Amsterdam, E-mail: frans.hinskens@meertens.knaw.nl
Prof. Dr. Frank Jablonka, 9, rue Fontaine Bellerie, F-60000 Beauvais, E-mail: fjab@gmx.net
Dr. Inken Keim, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Postfach 10 16 21, D-68016 Mannheim, E-mail: keim@ids-mannheim.de
Prof. Wilco Lensink, Freie Universität Bozen, Via Sernesi 1, I-39100 Bozen, E-mail: wlensink@unibz.it
Prof. Dr. Silvia Dal Negro, Forschungszentrum Sprachen, Freie Universität Bozen, via Dante 9, I-39100 Bozen, E-mail: sdalnegro@unibz.it
Prof. Dr. Georges Lüdi, Institut für Französische Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaft – Institut d'Etudes françaises et francophones, Maiengasse 51, CH-4056 Basel, E-mail: Georges.Luedi@unibas.ch
Prof. Dr. Pieter Muysken, Radboud University, 6500 HC Nijmegen, The Netherlands, E-mail: P.Muysken@let.ru.nl
Daniel Steckbauer, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, D-14195 Berlin, E-mail: stecka78@aol.com
Prof. Dr. Christian Upmeier, Freie Universität Bozen, Via Sernesi 1, I-39100 Bozen, E-mail: cupmeier@unibz.it
Prof. Dr. Paolo Volontè, Freie Universität Bozen, Via Sernesi 1, I-39100 Bozen, E-mail: pvolonte@unibz.it
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wildgen, Fachbereich 10: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften, Universität Bremen, Postfach 33 04 40, D-28334 Bremen, E-mail: wildgen@uni-bremen.de