Labov, William. 2006. The social stratification of English in New York City. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matras, Yaron. 2020. Language Contact. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Silverstein, Michael. 2009. Pragmatic indexing. In Jacob L. Mey (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, 756–759. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

When foreign linguistic material is used in a speech community as a consequence of language and culture contact, this material is often adapted to the receiving system: For example, foreign sounds, letters, and morphemes may be replaced (gradually or abruptly) by native ones (see, e.g., Matras 2020: 188–203). In my presentation, I will focus on linguistic units in which variation and change caused by such processes is highly relevant from a sociolinguistic perspective, namely the writing of personal names. More specifically, I will analyse the use of Turkish names in German texts.

The Turkish alphabet contains four capital letters (Ç, Ğ, İ, Ş) and four lower-case letters (ç, ğ, ı, ş) that are not part of the German alphabet. These letters are replaced by German ones in many contexts (e.g., İlkay Gündoğan > Ilkay Gündogan), resulting in variation in the writing of the names of a significant proportion of Germany’s citizens. This phenomenon will be analysed using three different types of data: newspaper texts accessed via the German Reference Corpus, metalinguistic comments retrieved from online forums, and focus group interviews conducted with German students whose names show the variation illustrated above.

The newspaper texts are analysed quantitatively: A regression model shows that the Turkish variants are increasingly used – which is remarkable considering that foreign variants are usually replaced by native ones. Furthermore, the likelihood of a Turkish variant to be used varies both between letters and between the selected newspapers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and taz). Interestingly, the newspapers’ style guidelines seem to be of limited importance. Instead, relevant factors in the explanation of the differences include the familiarity of German authors with some of the foreign letters (e.g., due to knowledge of French), technical aspects, and the general political orientation of the newspapers.

The metalinguistic comments retrieved from online forums make it possible to analyse the motivations for the use of the respective variants and they substantiate the latter’s enormous indexical potential (in the sense of, e.g., Silverstein 2009): The display of (multilingual) knowledge by using the Turkish variants is particularly relevant in this context, but the expression of political attitudes is also important (ranging from respecting otherness to nationalistic motives).

Finally, these results are complemented by the analysis of the focus group interviews: What do the name bearers think about the variants? The participants’ views clearly underline the socio-political relevance of the topic, which is based on the indexical potential of the variants, their relevance for identity construction, etc.

Taken together, what first appears as a rather unexpected kind of reversed linguistic integration in newspaper texts reflects conscious decisions of language users. This change from above (in the narrow sense defined by Labov 2006) becomes understandable when one takes into account the indexicalities of the variants. As such, the investigated phenomenon is a prime example of the interplay between society and language variation/change and it illustrates how fruitful the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches can be.