This tweet says: “CSU issues correction: its proposal was translated into German incorrectly”

Germany is currently witnessing a delightful language ideological farce. It all started when the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) party proposed last Friday that migrants needed to speak German not only in public but also at home. By way of background: the conservative CSU only operates in the southern state of Bavaria, where it has been the sole party in government for most of the time since 1945. On the federal level, the CSU is in a permanent coalition with its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CSU thus currently forms the Bavarian state government and is a member of the coalition that forms the current federal government. Generally, the national perception is that of these two conservative parties, the CSU is the one that is more conservative, more provincial, more parochial and less modern.

One immediate reaction to the CSU proposal that migrants should speak German at home was that the language of the home is clearly none of the business of the state. The Secretary General of the CDU, for instance, tweeted: whether people speak Latin, Klingon or Hessian at home is no one’s business but their own.

Ich finde ja, es geht die Politik nichts an, ob ich zu Hause lateinisch, klingonisch oder hessisch rede.

— Peter Tauber (@petertauber) December 5, 2014

By choosing a dead language, an invented language, and a dialect as examples, Peter Tauber draws attention to a far more complex linguistic situation than the CSU must have had in mind. One of these complexities that immediately hit the comments and responses on social media is related to the fact that Bavarian identity is strongly connected to the Bavarian dialect, which is well-maintained and not always easy to understand by other Germans. Being a dialect speaker has typically been a prerequisite for a successful political career in Bavaria (i.e. in the CSU). Consequently, many social media commentators have been drawing attention to the fact that CSU politicians and the citizens they represent are unlikely to speak German at home. In a typical example, a tweeter asks whether Bavarian can even be considered German:

The party of the only part of Germany where people don't speak German wants to force Immigrants to do so at home! http://t.co/Fp8DtWRni4

— Dirk Matten (@dirkmatten) December 7, 2014

The social media debate has also been used as an opportunity to tweet in Bavarian. In the following example a tweeter writes in Bavarian and asks in a pretend-stupid manner (a characteristic of Bavarian humour) whether he still has permission to speak Bavarian:

Derf i jetz dahoam noh bairisch redn oda wos? #csu #weltfremd

— The Jöcker (@chrisjoecker) December 8, 2014

Irrespective of whether politicians speak dialect or the standard, they frequently can be caught saying things that make no sense whatsoever and links to videos of CSU politicians stumbling through speeches that seem to lack all grammar, coherence or sense have also been making the rounds:

Jetzt mit Hashtag: Man hatte es schon fast vergessen, das exzellente Deutsch der CSU. #YallaCSU. https://t.co/bTeIV19KV3

— Deniz Yücel (@Besser_Deniz) December 7, 2014

Another layer of absurdity is added by the fact that the CSU sees itself as being representative not only of Bavaria but also of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, who have settled in Bavaria since 1945 and are sometimes referred to by CSU politicians as “the fourth Bavarian tribe.” The claim of these ethnic Germans to German citizenship rests on the fact that they have maintained the German language and culture outside the German-speaking countries, often in the face of adversity, over centuries. So, obviously, when it comes to ethnic Germans, speaking a language other than the national language at home has been considered a good thing.

The modern complexities of a diverse globalized society are even more striking. Commentators have been pointing to these in all kinds of ways; for instance, by drawing attention to hipster Berlin families who speak English at home in order to raise their children bilingually:

Prenzlauer-Berg-Eltern in Aufregung: Dürfen sie mit ihren Kindern zuhause kein Englisch mehr sprechen? #YallaCSU

— Philip Meinhold (@Philip_Meinhold) December 6, 2014

Others have raised the practice of watching foreign-language movies on TV as one that would be inconsistent with the proposal:

Kommt schon mal vor dass ich fremdsprachige filme gucke usw, hoffentlich bekommt die csu davon nichts mit! #YallaCSU

— Laura (@awwwkid) December 9, 2014

The complexity of what it means to “be German” and to “speak German” today is best expressed by the Twitter hashtag #yallaCSU. The hybrid based on Arabic yalla (“let’s go!”) has been trending on German Twitter:

"Trending Germany:05:26 AM CET"
1. #halligalli
2. #DagiVSTimo
3. #askBrudis
4. #Bibibeitaff
5. #YallaCSU
6. Weihnachten

— TrendieDE – Trends (@TrendieDE) December 9, 2014

#yallaCSU brings together tweets that are critical of the CSU proposal and most express their views in an ironic fashion. The overall point is that Germany is a modern multicultural society where it is not linguistic diversity that is out of place but old-fashioned ideas about linguistic and ethnic uniformity such as those expressed by the CSU:

Danke CSU! Wir haben wirklich ein Integrationsproblem: aber wie integrieren wir Euch nur in unser modernes, buntes Deutschland?!? #YallaCSU

— Karimatun (@KarimaELO) December 9, 2014

By now the CSU proposal has hit the international media – it has been covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Lebanese An Nahar and others. What has drawn this attention is not so much the retrograde proposal of a relatively obscure and – in the global scheme of things – minor political party but the response of a mature multilingual and multicultural society. I found following the #yallaCSU tweets not only immensely entertaining and informative about language ideologies in contemporary Germany but, above all, heartening: in Germany, at least, monolingualism and monoculturalism are fighting a rear-guard battle.

(1)  Language shift: When I left, I knew how to read and write German but I couldn’t speak the national language. In that I would have been a typical representative of my generation. This has changed dramatically since then and most people I meet are now bilingual and switch between German and Bavarian with various degrees of comfort. Additionally, there are now young parents who have made German the language of the home and speak only German to their children (again, with various levels of proficiency). In sum, this rural and relatively remote area of South-East Germany has experienced rapid and extensive language shift over the past quarter of a century.

(2)  Commercial sex: When I left, the availability of commercial sex was invisible. For all I know, it didn’t exist. Now, as you travel east from Munich on the autobahn, there are numerous billboards signaling the presence of the sex industry, including a huge structure saying “Sex shop” somewhere close to Landshut that is visible from miles away. With the commercials in the papers and the fliers advertising for the sex industry, the semiotic landscape is similar to the one I described for Switzerland in this article. Furthermore, tales of the exploits of men who visit prostitutes just behind the border in the Czech Republic and the marriages that have fallen apart as a result of all this are now a ubiquitous part of village gossip.

Until my most recent visit for the 2011 Christmas holidays, it had never dawned on me that the language shift and the sexualization I had been observing were in any way connected. That changed when my mother and sister took me to the cinema to watch Eine ganz heisse Nummer, a German blockbuster that was released in October 2011 and that has attracted the kinds of viewer numbers usually reserved for Hollywood movies. The title translates as “A really hot number” and features the story of three women in a small Bavarian village who run the village grocery store. Facing bankruptcy because of competition from the supermarket chains in the nearby market town and cities and because of the overall economic crisis besetting the region, they decide to become phone sex providers to turn their fortunes around.

The economic crisis depicted in the movie is real enough and has entailed a fundamental change from an agricultural and industrial production economy to a mixed service-welfare economy. In the 1970s and 1980s most people in the village were peasant farmers living on 40-50 smallhold farms and in multi-generation households, with the male head of the household supplementing the family income with some seasonal factory work, as my father did. Additionally, the village supported an elementary school, a church with a parish priest, three saw mills, two general stores, two butchers, a communally-owned slaughterhouse, a baker, two banks, two mechanics/car dealers, a black smith/hardware store, a carpenter, two or three builders, three inns and a few other businesses. That’s all a thing of the past: now there are only 3 farms operating; there are so few children that the school has closed and the remaining ones are bused elsewhere; the last parish priest has passed away and the Catholic Church has decided that the parish is too small to import a priest from Poland or India, as has happened in nearby larger villages; the businesses except one saw mill, two inns, the baker and one car dealer have disappeared. The only new businesses that have been operating successfully for any length of time are a small recycling operation, a hair salon and a massage parlor.

So, how do people support themselves? Farming and factory work have become minority occupations although a few men (and even fewer women) do hold production jobs within a 100-km radius. They thus commute along with the somewhat larger number of service workers in the retail and tourism sectors that still call the village home. Many more people have moved away, as I have, and most of those who have stayed, particularly the elderly, depend heavily on pensions, welfare payments and other state subsidies.

The change in the economic base directly relates to language shift. The locally integrated village in which I grew up had relatively weak ties to the national level and even weaker ties to the transnational world (the Czech border is only a few kilometers away but was closed off by the Iron Curtain back then). Speaking the local language was closely tied to this locally integrated economy. People have always been emigrating from the region, and emigration is part of the cultural imagery of the Bavarian Forest (e.g., songs such as this one) but language shift did not facilitate traditional emigration because emigration ‘only’ led to farming and production jobs elsewhere. Language was not a necessary skill enabling those moves: a passive competence in German was enough to work as a farm hand, bricklayer or logger in other parts of Germany and possibly even further afield, including the US (as, for instance, Lucht, Frey & Salmons (2011) show).

With the disappearance of a locally integrated village economy based on agriculture and industrial production, Bavarian has now become a drag on people’s ability to support themselves. They now operate in a service economy that is almost exclusively based outside the local and where economic participation is explicitly based on linguistic performance: in order to engage in trans-local service work (and that’s not only phone sex services …), it’s essential to speak in ways that are trans-locally recognizable.

Lucht, F., Frey, B., & Salmons, J. (2011). A Tale of Three Cities: Urban-Rural Asymmetries in Language Shift? Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 23 (04), 347-374 DOI: 10.1017/S1470542711000195
Piller, I. (2010). Sex in the city: on making space and identity in travel spaces. Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow. London, Continuum: 123-136.

Persian version of my blog post about English as the non-language of globalization.
Translated by Niloufar Behrooz (نیلوفر بهروز)

(نوشتار شماره ٢ در مجموعه نوشتار های کوتاه درباره ی نشانه های چند زبانه)

اغلب تابلوهایی كه در مكان هایِ عمومیِ حالِ حاضر يافت می شوند جنبه ی تجاری دارند. اين نوعی روشِ تبليغات است و انتخابِ لغات در تابلوهایِ تجاری از جمله اسامیِ مغازه ها و فروشگاه ها به خوبی بيانگر ارزشهایِ مرتبط با يك زبان خاص مي باشد. هدف اصلی اين است كه معنایِ ضمنیِ نامِ فروشگاه به گونه ای باشد كه مشتری های زيادی را جذب كند. از يك چشم اندازِ چند زبانه، نشانه هایِ جالب آن هایی هستند که در آن ها از زبانی غير از زبانِ پیش فرض – زبانِ رسمي يك مكانِ خاص – استفاده شده باشد. در بيشتر دنيایِ غيرِ انگليسی زبان علامت هایِ انگليسی البته باعث مباهاتِ آن مكان شده وانگليسی به طور گسترده ای با مفاهيمی چون نوين گری، پيشرفت، جهانی سازی و مصرف گرايی پيوند خورده است. در حالی كه زبانهای غير انگليسی غالبا نشانگر كليشه های قومی هستند، انگليسی نشانگر يك كليشه یِ اجتماعی است (همان طور كه با شرح جزئيات در اين مقاله به آن پرداخته ام). اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی قرار نيست همان طور كه  فرانسوی یا ايتاليايی برای آغشتنِ یک داد وستدِ اقتصادی به رنگ و بویِ فرانسوی و ايتاليايی مورد استفاده قرار می گیرد، يكسری كيفيتِ بريتانيايی و آمريكايیِ کلیشه ای را تبليغ كند.

ارتباط زبان انگليسی با مصرف گرايی به طور كامل در تابلویِ اين فروشگاه در فرودگاهِ مونيخ مشخص شده است. مونيخ پايتختِ باواريا يكي از ايالات ساختار فدرال آلمان است. لغتِ آلمانیِ موردِ استفاده برای باواريا بايرن (Bayern) است و بخش اول Bay-ern دقيقا مثل كلمه یِ انگليسیِ Buy (خريدن) تلفظ مي شود. اسم ِ فروشگاه نوعی معمایِ لفظی ِ به تمامِ معناست. رنگ ملی باواريا، يعني آبي، در پس زمينه یِ لوزی شکلِ تابلو روابط ملی (گرایانه) را تقویت می کند. به عنوان كسی كه در باواريا بزرگ شده، با پيش فرضی از نماد ملی كه در بچگی به من القا شده بود، عكس العملِ ناخودآگاهِ من اما نسبت به اين تابلو از نوع وحشت و رنجش بود.

زبان انگليسی در اين تابلو به وضوح هيچ گونه ارتباطی با هيچ كشور انگليسی زبانی ندارد، بلكه انگليسی را به نمادِ ملیِ ناحیه ای غيرِ انگليسی زبان، يعنی باواريا، پيوند مي دهد و مردمِ آن ناحیه را به عنوان يك هدف مصرفی عرضه مي كند. کالاهایِ موجود در اين فروشگاه از انواعِ سوغات به شمار مي آيند، سوغاتِ باواريايي، آلمانی، اروپايی، فرودگاهی، كريسمسی ( من اين عكس را نوامبر سال پيش گرفتم) و چيزهای ديگری كه تنها برایِ خريده شدن آن جا هستند. بخريد!

مثل بسياری از فرودگاه های ديگر، انگليسی اين مكان را به نا-فضایی برای مصرف ِ مفرط، گردشِ مفرط و نماد هایِ ملیِ مفرط تبديل می سازد. انگليسی زبانِ جهانی سازی است؛ در این شکی نیست اما جهاني سازیِ هيچ-چيز، همان طور که جورج ریتزر به ما می گوید! آيا اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی زبانِ هيچ-چيز است؟ نا-افرادی در نا-مکانی سرگرم ِ خریدنِ نا-چیزهایی در نا-برخوردهایِ تجاری و با استفاده از یک نا-زبان؟

References

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage.

Much of the signage that can be found in contemporary public spaces is commercial. It is a form of advertising, and language choice in commercial signage such as shop names is a good indicator of the values associated with a particular language. The basic idea is that the connotations of the shop name are such that they will attract potential customers. From a multilingual perspective, the interesting signs are those where a language other than the default choice – the official language of a particular place – is used. In much of the non-English-speaking world, English signs, of course, hold pride of place and English has come to be widely associated with modernity, progress, globalization and consumption. Whereas languages other than English mostly index ethnic stereotypes, English indexes a social stereotype (as I discussed in detail in this review article). What that means is that English is not used to conjure up some archetypal American or British quality in the same way that French or Italian are used to imbue a business with some stereotypical French-ness or Italian-ness.

The association of English with consumerism is perfectly encapsulated in this shop sign at Munich airport. Munich is the capital of Bavaria, one of the states in Germany’s federal structure. The German word for “Bavaria” is “Bayern” and the first syllable of “Bay-ern” is pronounced just like English “buy.” The shop name “Buyern” is thus a neat word play. Bavaria’s national color blue against the background of the national rhombus pattern reinforce the national association. As someone who grew up in Bavaria and had a certain reference for the national symbolism instilled in my childhood, my gut reaction to this sign was one of dismay and offense.

English in this sign clearly bears no relationship whatsoever to any English-speaking country. Rather, it associates English with the national symbolism of a non-English-speaking country, Bavaria, and presents that nation as an object of consumption. The products for sale in this shop are all kinds of souvenirs: Bavarian souvenirs, German souvenirs, European souvenirs, airport souvenirs, Christmas souvenirs (I took the picture in November last year) and other stuff whose only purpose it is to be bought. Buy!

English makes this place – just like pretty much any other airport – a non-space of gratuitous consumption, gratuitous travel, and gratuitous national imagery. English is the language of globalization, that’s for sure; but it’s the globalization of nothing, as George Ritzer tells us. Does that make English the language of nothing? Non-people in non-places buying non-things in non-service encounters and using a non-language?!

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage