Language, discourse and identity in Central Europe : the German language in a multilingual space

Central Europe has always been a highly multilingual region but how has this been affected by the social and political transformations of the last 20 years? The German language in particular has long played a key role in processes of identification here: but what role is the relationship between German and other languages playing today in the reshaping of societies and communities in this rapidly changing region? How is this relationship articulated in discourses on language and language ideologies? How is it manifested in individual repertoires and social practices? How is it determined by social and cultural policies? How is it exploited in the construction of European identities? These are just some of the questions addressed in this book, in which individual studies explore language practices in the multilingual contact zones of central Europe and the impact of both past and present migrations. Analysing a wide range of sources from media texts to language biographies and from business meetings to salsa classes, the authors demonstrate the local effects of global processes and some of the many ways in which language figures in contemporary social change. Front Matter....Pages i-xv Introduction: Central Europe as a Multilingual Space....Pages 1-20 Front Matter....Pages 21-21 Discourses about Enlarged and Multilingual Europe: Perspectives from German and Polish National Public Spheres....Pages 23-47 Front Matter....Pages 49-49 The German Language in Poland: the Eternal Foe and the Wars on Words....Pages 51-72 ‘Die härteste Sprachgrenze Europas?’ Negotiating the Linguistic Divide in Theatres on the German-Polish Border....Pages 73-95 Czech-German Relationships and Identity in a Cross-border Region....Pages 96-121 Czech, German and English: Finding Their Place in Multinational Companies in the Czech Republic....Pages 122-146 Front Matter....Pages 147-147 Changes in the Linguistic Marketplace: The Case of German in Hungary....Pages 149-164 Central European Time: Memories of Language — Lost and Found — in the Life Stories of German-speakers....Pages 165-184 Dialect Use and Discursive Identities of Migrants from the West in Eastern Germany....Pages 185-202 ¿Hablemos el mismo idioma? Salsa, Multilingualism and National Monolingual Ideology....Pages 203-223 Towards a Multinational Concept of Culture: Romanian German Literature in Romanian and Hungarian Literature....Pages 224-238 Front Matter....Pages 239-239 Revisiting History: The 2007 European Capital of Culture and the Integration of Fractal Europe....Pages 241-260 Back Matter....Pages 261-268 Focusing on contact between German and other languages, the contributors analyze the ways in which language practices and discourses on language have changed since the end of the Cold War