Georgetown University Roundtable, Washington DC:

mit dem Soziolinguisten Bill Labov 

Neuerscheinung:

Baumgarten, Nicole and Du Bois, Inke "Code-switching as appraisal resource in talking about third parties" in Linguistic Online (51: 1/2012), Special Issue: Respect and the 3rd Person in a Multilingual Perspective (edited by Susanne Jekat und Christiane Hohenstein).

MULTILINGUAL IDENTITIES

Our book Multilingual Identities in Migration Contexts has been accepted by the De Gruyter In-house conference and series editors and is now in the final revision process.

SUBJECTIVITY IN DISCOURSE

Our manuscript

Baumgarten, Nicole, Inke Du Bois und Juliane House (eds.). Subjectivity in Discourse: Unity in Diversity has been accepted by the reviewers. Thanks to all contributors.

KANAK SPRAK

 I investigate new grammatical, semantic and lexical and sociolinguistic features of so-called "Kanak Sprak," a migrant youth variety of German spoken in larger cities. In Germany and the US, controversial studies on the educational success of different minority groups showed that African Americans in the US and students with a migration background in Germany exhibited lower academic performances than mainstream students (Ogbu, 1983, IGLU 2006). This article introduces the sociolinguistic features of African American English and Kanak Sprak, a migrant youth variety spoken in Germany and compares their linguistic and social identity functions. Resources for multiliteracy teaching are discussed, which help to foster positive identities of students and empower teachers and schools to implement minority students’ L1 languages and cultures in teaching within in a standard curriculum.

Du Bois, I. “Teaching the Standard Language to Speakers of Minority Varieties: the Case of African American Vernacular and Kanak Sprak” In: Elsner, D. & Wildemann, A. (Hrsg.) Sprachen lehren-Sprachen lernen. Perspektiven für die Lehrerbildung in Europa. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang (2011).

LINGUISTIC PROFILING

I currently work on the teaching research project "Linguistic Profiling." This project replicates John Baugh's study which investigates housing discrimination towards people with African American and Chicano accents. Based on the Gardner and Lambert's matched guise technique, the Bremen study tests Turkish, American and German accents to investigate discrimination towards these accents in different parts of town. Both qualitative and quantitative data is investigated in regard to structural patterns of such conversations and statistical significant outcomes. The data is generated by my Empirical Methods in Linguistics students from Bremen University. The results represent statistically relevant differences among different accent groups that will be published soon. 

Baugh, John. Linguistic Contributions to the Advancement

of Racial Justice Within and Beyond the

African Diaspora. Language and Linguistics Compass

1/4 (2007): 331–349.

URBAN SPACE -MEMBERSHIP -PLACE NAMES

Another project I am currently working on is concerned with space and time expressions. They always co-occur since speakers contextualize their embodied being within spatial and temporal dimensions. Bakhtin (1989) identifies the spatiotemporal dimension as “chronotopos” - which means that time and space fuse together. People generate, share and sustain contexts as they constitute enculturated bodies in talk. In narratives, we speak of the "multiscale nesting of contexts" in which a narrating person has embedded and sustained him- or herself (Streeck& Jordan, 2009). The physical body is hence a heterochronic semiotic device and self-sustaining embodiment of contexts. I currently look at the collective and individual meaning of spatial temporal expressions in immigrant narratives.

Bakhtin, Mikael. 1989. Formen der Zeit im Roman. Untersuchungen zur historischen Poetik. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer.

Levinson, Stephen C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

J. Streeck & J.S. Jordan. 2009. Communication as a dynamical self-sustaining system: The importance of time-scales and nested contexts. Communication Theory, 19, 448–467.

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