Anglophone Practices in Berlin: From Historical Evidence to Transnational Communities

Abstract

In this chapter, we attempt to gain some insight into the multiple presences of English in the German capital. Questioning nation-states as the most relevant category of community in understanding language use and taking one city rather than a country as focus of our analysis, we hope to gain an understanding of the role of English in the sociolinguistic composition of contemporary and globally interconnected cultural contexts. The diverse histories, symbolic meanings and communicative functions of English in Berlin show us some of the epistemological problems related to conceptualising languages in relation to communities . Languages are typically understood as systemic entities that historically have emerged from groups imagined as culturally homogeneous and are usually understood as tied to particular territorial spaces. The empirical examples we give illustrate that such conceptualisations may be incongruous in some of today’s settings. We ground our analysis in different data, collected in offline and online environments. Historical documents, linguistic landscape data, language use and discourses in media and institutions as documented in observation and qualitative interviews are included in the data inspected. Given our interest in the general conceptualisation of shared or overlapping speech repertoires, this chapter embraces a macro perspective on the sociology of language and linguistic repertoires. Instead of focusing on speech data in order to analyse assumed patterns of variation, it aims to open theoretical perspectives on how to grasp and study language use as strategic employment of symbolic resources. In order to illustrate this on empirical grounds, we give two examples of how we conceive of the interaction of global and local repertoires in the case of English used in German contexts, here in the form of lexical integration, in Sections 8.4.1 and 8.4.2 respectively.

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