Busch, B. (2017). Mehrsprachigkeit, second edition. Facultas, Vienna, Austria.
Busch, B. (2021). The body image and taking an evaluative stance towards semiotic resources. International Journal of Multilingualism, 18(2), 190-205.
Ndhlovu, F. and Makalela, L. (2021). Decolonising multilingualism in Africa: Recentering silenced voices from the global south. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Ndhlovu and Makalela argue that “academic experts and educators need to speak less and listen more to the stories, views, opinions and wisdom of real people, speaking their real everyday languages, about their real multilingual and literary practices” (Ndhlovu and Makalela, 2021, p.38). Their call for broader sources of knowledge production was made in the context of decolonising linguistics, but their critique is also relevant beyond post-colonial contexts. A speaker’s lived emotional experience of interactions, discourses, spaces and language policies, their Spracherleben, can be the key to understanding how accessible their linguistic repertoire is to them (Busch, 2021).
This paper presents research on the Spracherleben of people whose linguistic repertoires include a dialect, Sandergemerisch, spoken in St Georgen im Schwarzwald, Germany, a town of 12,000 people. In St Georgen, it is not unusual for multi-party conversations to involve both active and receptive multilingualism. For example, at a Christmas lunch, Sandergemerisch, Schwäbisch, Badisch and Standard German have all been observed in the one family grouping. Such situations suggest that communities such as St Georgen are useful sites to explore questions about how speakers manage repertoires that include non-standardised dialects. To that end, this paper discusses findings of recent research exploring how the residents of St Georgen feel, experience, think about and draw upon their linguistic repertoires.
The research utilised a mixed methods approach, with the result that complementary information was forthcoming from each method. In the first method, a survey asked residents about their linguistic repertoires and the spaces, activities, and emotions that they associated with the dialect. Many respondents’ repertoires included Sandergemerisch, other dialects, Standard German and other languages. The results showed that many respondents associated the dialect with warm thoughts and feelings and community activities. Respondents provided examples where it had been an advantage to speak the dialect and contexts where it had been useful to suppress the dialect.
A second method, language portraits (Busch, 2017), enabled some St Georgen residents to explain how they drew upon their repertoires in communications with others and how they felt, thought about and experienced their repertoires. For example, Frau S drew a red, heart-shaped symbol on the language portrait at the location of the heart. She explained that it symbolised the “mixed language” that she and her husband had developed. She described the language as a mixture of her first language, Sandergemerisch, his first language, Schwäbisch, and Standard German. Participants described their agency in actively shaping their linguistic repertoires. The language portraits showed that Sandergemerisch was often associated with emotional attachment, whereas Standard German was associated with education, work, science, literature, or travel.
This research contributes to linguistic knowledge about the Spracherleben of people whose linguistic repertoires include non-standardised dialects spoken by small communities and standardised languages that are international lingua franca. This research shows that really listening to people’s own accounts of their Spracherleben can reveal how speakers’ feelings, thoughts and experiences have shaped their access to their linguistic repertoires.