Il plurilinguismo in un corso di tedesco per immigrati italiani ultrasettantenni a Berna

In diesem Artikel möchten wir einen Blick in die Sprachenvielfalt eines besonderen Deutschkurses werfen. Es handelt sich dabei um einen Kurs für pensionierte italienische Migrantinnen in Bern. Die Teilnehmerinnen, alle älter als 70 Jahre, mit meist geringer Schulbildung, haben sich dazu entschlossen, nach der Pensionierung die Sprache des Gastlandes zu erlernen oder ihre Kompetenzen zu verbessern. Wie frühere Studien zeigen konnten, hatten viele Immigranten der 60er Jahre in der Schweiz auf Grund der Diglossie (Werlen 2007) Probleme die deutsche Standardsprache zu erlernen oder sie haben keine der Varietäten gelernt weil Zeit, Motivation und Angebot fehlten. Ein weiteres Resultat dieser diglossischen Situation, mit welcher die Migranten konfrontiert sind, ist ihre Sprachkompetenz, welche als Varietätenkontinuum zwischen einem Deutschschweizer Dialekt und der Standardsprache betrachtet werden kann. Daher werden wir anhand einiger Unterrichtssequenztranskriptionen die sprachlichen Varietäten von vier Kursteilnehmerinnen analysieren und die Funktion der verschiedenen Sprachen und Sprachvarietäten innerhalb des Kurses bestimmen.

A Word. Palaver and Its Transferal Residues

The word 'palaver' is colloquially associated with useless verbiage and the nuisance of a tediously long, aimless and superfluous debate. At the same time, it insinuates an uncivilized culture of discourse beyond reason. Thus it appears to be of vaguely exotic origin but still firmly set in the European lexicon. Yet behind this contemporary meaning there lies a long history of linguistic and cultural transfers which is encased in a context of different usages of language and their intersections. By tracing the usage and semantics of 'palaver' in various encyclopaedias, glossaries and dictionaries of English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, the following article explores the rich history of this word. Moreover, it also regards the travelling semantics of the term 'palaver' as a process of cultural transfer that can be likened to the microcellular workings of a (retro)virus. Viral reproduction and evolution work through processes of transfer that enable the alteration of the host to adjust it to the replication and reproduction of the virus. In some cases, these processes also allow for the mutation or modification of the virus, making it suitable for transfer from one host to another. The virus is thus offered here as a vital model for cultural transfer: It not only encompasses the necessary adoption and adaption of contents or objects of cultural transfer in different contexts. It contributes to a conceptual understanding of the transferal residue that the transferred content is endowed with by its diversifying contexts. This model thereby surpasses an understanding of cultural transfer as literal translation or transmission: it conceptualizes cultural transfer as an agent of evolutionary processes, allowing for mutational effects of transfer as endowment.

The Political Candidacy of EU Migrants in their European Countries of Residence. The Case of British and Romanians Standing in Spanish Local Elections

What explains the variation in how European citizens of diverse origins are politically incorporated in the member states of residence? This paper argues that immigrant groups’ status in the host society plays an important role in political party responses to immigrants’ political participation. Drawing on the case of Romanian and British candidacies in the Spanish local elections from 2011, the paper finds that the level of competition between parties is the key mechanism for incorporating candidates from a positively/neutrally perceived group. Instead, a greater level of ethnic diversity encourages the incorporation of candidates from the negatively perceived group. To demonstrate this, the paper uses an original data-set with the Romanian and British candidates in a large number of Spanish localities.