Language, Space and Identity in Migration

G. Liebscher, J. Dailey-O'Cain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230291010
• eBook ISBN: 9781137316431
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores both theoretical and practical issues of language use in a migration context, using data from a German urban immigrant community in Canada. Through this transcontinental perspective, the book makes a new contribution to the literature on both language and identity and language and globalization.

1

Introduction

During the middle of the twentieth century, Frauke’s German-speaking family fled her birthplace of Hungary when she was a child, going first to Austria and then to Germany. They came to Canada when she was still a teenager, and Frauke has been living there ever since. She has had a full life, getting advanced career training, working in various office jobs and eventually reaching management level. Now nearing retirement age, she sometimes complains about not knowing the German word for ‘retired’ and finds herself inserting the English phrases ‘head office’ and ‘investment company’ into her German sentences when she talks about her life in Canada, but she still speaks the language of her childhood well, and she is proud of that. She met her husband in a German ethnic club, and she meets up with a group of friends from her old workplace at least once a month in a German café, where they always snack on German pastries together, drink coffee, and catch up on life in their shared native tongue. ‘We’re all German,’ she explains in an accent and with a grammar that only ever so slightly betrays where she has spent her entire adult life. ‘That Germanness is what keeps us together. I’m a Canadian citizen, but my heart is German.’

Back in Germany, Claudia once had a successful career as a midwife, but since immigrating to Canada earlier this year to settle down with her Canadian husband and their German-born son, she has worked part-time as a German teacher in a language school for descendants of German-speaking immigrants. She finds her life in Canada faster and more stressful than her life in Germany was – there is not even a single day when all the shops are closed and you can just relax and be with family! – but she is looking forward to buying a house of their own and starting a real Canadian family life. She laughs when the interviewer asks her if she has joined any of the German ethnic clubs – they are much too full of old people for Claudia’s taste – but she is still afraid of losing her German language and culture as she integrates further into Canadian society. And that integration is happening quickly; in many ways too quickly, Claudia thinks. ‘I’m so happy to have this job at the school,’ she says. ‘This way I at least get the chance to speak German twice a week. I’m always extra happy to go to work, because I know I’m going to get to hear German music, I’ll get to go in and say Guten Morgen to people, everybody’s speaking German. I’m not nearly so homesick then, because I’m kind of back in my country, so to speak.’

How do immigrants reconcile the pressure on the one hand to maintain the linguistic and cultural practices that they grew up with – practices that accompany them to their new country – and the pressure on the other hand to become a part of their new surroundings? What are the social consequences of immigrants’ attempts to comply with the demands of each of these two forces in their lives? How do the particular paths they take and the ways in which they work through these matters affect their individual identities as immigrants, and how do those different paths in turn affect the spaces they carve out in those new surroundings for themselves and for other people of similar backgrounds? What role does the use of language – whether that be the language the immigrants brought with them, the new language of their surroundings, or a combination of the two – play in all of this? This book is about precisely these kinds of questions.

Our attempt to address these issues leads us to bring together the constructivist approach to language and identity that has spread so widely throughout sociolinguistics in recent decades (e.g. Antaki and Widdicombe 1998, Bucholtz and Hall 2005, Benwell and Stokoe 2009, Llamas and Watt 2010) and the concept of social space as it has emerged within other social sciences such as human geography and sociology (e.g. Lefebvre 1991, Harvey 1993, Gieryn 2000). The arena in which we apply this combination of theories and methodologies is an analysis of the language use among German immigrants to Canada and their descendants in two urban areas: Kitchener-Waterloo in central Canada and Edmonton in western Canada. We find that the ways these immigrants conceive of their own identities as Germans and as Canadians have repercussions not just for them as individuals, but also for the group as a whole and perhaps more importantly for the spaces this group can carve out for itself. Our goal in this book is on the one hand to provide a snapshot of the relationship between language, identity, and space in this particular immigrant community, and on the other hand to propose a theoretical framework and a methodology that can in turn be applied to other situations of migration. We are calling this space German-Canadian space or Canadian German space interchangeably. In cases where we want to stress the contrast to the German space in Europe, we are using Canadian German space vs European German space.

German speakers in Canada

The ‘Germans’ have been counted by census takers in Canada as one of the country’s largest immigrant groups, and the unifying characteristics of this group have been well documented (Bassler 1998: 86), encompassing shared behaviour patterns such as patterns of settlement, adaptation, and interaction. As a group, however, they are no more homogeneous than other immigrant groups in Canada (cf. Giampapa 2004), since they, too, differ with respect to the amount of German they use in everyday life, with respect to their relationships to German cultural institutions both in their local communities and in Europe, and also with respect to characteristics of the immigrant experience such as length of time in Canada and their age of immigration. In this section, we will outline some of the historical aspects of German-speaking immigration to Canada that still influence German-speaking immigrants and their descendants in Canada today, influences that can in turn have a broader influence on the German spaces that they construct within present-day Canadian cities.

German-speaking immigration to Canada

Since as far back as the seventeenth century there has been immigration to Canada from German-speaking Europe (Bassler 1991: 4), and according to the 2006 Canadian census, about 9 percent of Canada’s population (just over 3 million people) is of German descent. The central Canadian province of Ontario in particular has historically served as the destination for the largest percentage of these immigrants: from the first large group of immigrants who came to Canada in order to fight in the War of 1812 (Prokop and Bassler 2004: 233) to the immigrants who came during the two world wars and beyond. Through the years, the city of Kitchener – which was known as Berlin between 1833 and 1916 (Bongart 1977: 25, Liebbrandt 1980: 11) – became a focal point for these immigrants, and even came to be known as New Germany or Deutschländle (Prokop and Bassler 2004: 240). The rural area surrounding Kitchener in Waterloo County was also largely settled by German-speaking Mennonites (Prokop and Bassler 2004: 236). Settlement began much later across the country in the western Canadian province of Alberta, but beginning in the late nineteenth century, the first German colonies sprang up near the southern Alberta villages of Pincher Creek and Medicine Hat (Bassler 1991: 80) and eventually spread out toward the north, where the land was more suitable for farming. While German-speaking settlements were formed in many places in the province, the Edmonton area grew to be the largest concentration of German-speaking immigrants in the region (Lehmann 1986: 251), and over time, a distinct German-speaking neighbourhood known as Strathcona emerged (Bassler 1991: 80).

When the threat from Nazi Germany became clear, however, the government restricted immigration to Canada from Germany (Prokop 1990: 23–4). As a result, a large percentage of the German speakers who migrated to both Kitchener-Waterloo and Edmonton throughout the middle of the twentieth century came not from Germany itself, but from German-speaking enclaves in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, Romania, Hungary, and Poland (Prokop and Bassler 2004: 8–9). These people have historically been referred to as Volksdeutsche, a term that was used during the Nazi period to denote people from outside of the German Reich who did not have German citizenship but who were still categorized as linguistically and culturally German, and the corresponding term Reichsdeutsche was used by analogy to distinguish those Germans who did live within the formal boundaries of the German Reich and did have German citizenship. While this distinction originated with Adolf Hitler and his government’s policies vis-à-vis German-speaking Europe (Bergen 1994), it took on somewhat less fraught connotations in the Canadian context. In deference to the years of hurt caused by the context of these terms’ origins, however, we will refer to the so-called Reichsdeutsche as Germans from Germany and to the so-called Volksdeutsche as Germans from speech islands. We will discuss the reasons for and the implications of these terms further in Chapter 7.

While much has changed since the early days, and many of the descendants of early German immigration to Kitchener-Waterloo and Edmonton no longer maintain the German language or even German cultural practices, it is clear that the German-speaking heritage in these areas has left its mark in a way that persists to this day. The Kitchener-Waterloo area is still known for its yearly Oktoberfest celebration as well as the Christkindlmarkt (Christmas market) that is held at Christmastime, and there are also many German-specific businesses, clubs, dances, concerts, picnics, and parades (Prokop and Bassler 2004: 240). The area also boasts several German-language newspapers, small-scale radio and tele vision programs, and German-language schools (Bongart 1977: 31–2). The impact of this immigration history can also be felt in Edmonton, where there are many German-specific social clubs, organized activities such as German concerts, picnics, theatres, parades, German-language schools (both full-time bilingual programs and smaller after-school programs) and two German-language newspapers (Bassler 1991: 82), as well as other heritage celebrations.

While immigration from German-speaking Europe to Kitchener-Waterloo and Edmonton still persists to this day, it has been found that the German language is much more likely to be maintained as a home language in the rural areas than it is in urban areas like these (Prokop and Bassler 2004: 434–5). The greater external pressure for immigrants to conform linguistically to their English-speaking surroundings in these urban areas may well only create more internal pressure on immigrants to carve out spaces of their own within those regions, however, whether those spaces turn out to be based mainly on language, mainly on other cultural practices, or on a combination of the two. This makes urban areas – where the sole task of preserving the language and culture seems no longer to lie within families – a particularly fruitful potential arena in which to observe the construction of immigrant social spaces in contexts of migration.

In this book, as elsewhere (cf. Rumbaut 2002: 47–9), we will distinguish between the first generation of immigrants (people born and raised somewhere in German-speaking Europe who immigrated to Canada as adults), the second generation (the immigrants’ direct descendants who were born and raised in Canada) and the third generation (the immigrants’ grandchildren), etc. In addition, in order to acknowledge the special ‘in between’ status of immigrants who left German-speaking Europe when they were only a child and therefore completed their socialization in Canada, we will further distinguish an additional subcategory of first-generation immigrants that we will call the 1.5 generation (Rumbaut 2002: 49), i.e. those who immigrated to Canada before they had reached the age of 18. In a discussion of these matters, it is important to remember that immigrant generation is a distinguishing factor that can be quite different from either age or the length of time that the immigrants have spent in their new country. A 70-year-old first-generation immigrant, for example, might be someone who has already spent 40 years in Canada, or someone who arrived 5 years prior when he or she retired. Still another first-generation immigrant could be a 24-year-old new immigrant who came to Canada for a job or a relationship. We will therefore speak of all three of these distinguishing factors separately, and consider them to be potential separate influences on the ways in which current-day urban German speakers might carve out sociolinguistic spaces in Canada.

The Canadian context

Of course, when German speakers come to Canada, the spaces they become a part of already ‘belonged’ to someone else before they arrived. As Blommaert (2010: 5) puts it, the ‘movement of people across space is therefore never a move across empty spaces. The spaces are always someone’s space, and they are filled with norms, expectations, conceptions of what counts as proper and normal (indexical) language use and what does not count as such.’ In the case of both Kitchener-Waterloo and Edmonton, these spaces – or more specifically places, as we will discuss further in Chapter 2 – are primarily English-speaking and distinctly Canadian, and these linguistic and cultural characteristics have repercussions for not just language use but also for identity. Some discussion of the new places of living for these German-speaking immigrants and their descendants therefore seems in order.

Canada is the second largest country in the world in terms of geographic area, but it contains approximately the same population as the US state of California or the Japanese city of Tokyo. Furthermore, due to harsh weather conditions in many of its northern regions, the great majority of those people are concentrated into large and medium-sized cities in the southern parts of the country. While Canada is an officially bilingual country (English and French), with both Parliament and all official government functions required to be available in both languages, it is in fact characterized by enormous linguistic diversity beyond those two official languages, with more than 50 indigenous languages and dozens of immigrant languages (Patrick 2010: 286). While English is clearly the majority language in Canada, both French as the second official language and to a lesser extent the indigenous and immigrant languages have also had strong state support. The laws supporting these languages include the Official Languages Act of 1969 (which recognized French and English as coexistent and equal official languages of Canada), the Multiculturalism Policy of 1971 (which made room for immigrants to maintain their own distinct languages and cultures after moving to Canada), and the patriation of the Constitution in the form of the Constitution Act in 1982 (which included rights for both the French and the English languages, as well as certain aboriginal rights, cf. Patrick 2010: 286–7).

While it would be an exaggeration to paint a completely rosy picture of a Canadian multiculturalism unaffected by worldwide spread of English, it would not be going too far to state that these laws have had a dramatic diversifying effect on the linguascape of a country that might otherwise have been completely dominated by a language that is rapidly coming to be seen as the world’s lingua franca. Perhaps most importantly, a widespread ideology of multiculturalism has emerged in Canada as a result of these policies that might best be formulated in these terms: that immigrants should integrate both culturally and linguistically into Canada (for example by acquiring Canadian cultural practices and learning to speak English or French well), but they should not have to give up their own cultural practices and languages in order to do so. This two-sided coin of an ideology is not just referenced in official policy discussions, but also spread to Canadian youth in schools where they learn to think of Canada as a ‘cultural mosaic’ set in opposition to the United States’ ‘melting pot’ (cf. Gibbon 1938, Porter 1965) and overtly taught to new immigrants in the materials they are required to study for their citizenship exams. The repercussions of this ideology in a study of identity and space are not inconsequential, since the dominant discourse on Canadian multiculturalism encourages immigrants to simultaneously become a part of the local place where they have settled and maintain spaces of their own in which they can continue their own group’s specific cultural practices.

The two urban areas chosen for this study, Kitchener-Waterloo and Edmonton, have much in common, as they are both primarily English-speaking rather than French-speaking, they ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Theorizing Language, Space, and Identity
• 3  Perceptions of the Linguascape
• 4  Multiple Languages as Resources
• 5  Forms of Address
• 6  Non-Language Resources
• 7  The Role of Historicity
• 8  Language, Space, and Identity in Migration: from the Local to the Global
• Appendix A Topics for Conversation
• Appendix B English Version of the Questionnaire
• Bibliography
• Index