Book review of “Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955-2005”. 588 pages, University of California Press, 2007, by Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling and Anton Kaes (eds.)

Though migration is an age-old feature of human activity, driven by various circumstances, its current place in the midst of global dynamics and the phenomenon of globalization is becoming increasingly critical. International immigration and its regulation have been largely shaped by the policies in the receiving countries, often determining preferences for nationality cohorts and work skills to satisfy their labor and human capital requirements. When immigration has been necessitated by political strife, host countries have displayed immense magnanimity as well. However, the growing realization of resource limitations and the strange quirks of cultural pluralism are in turn creating waves of dissonance. Literature and the media are now replete with an in depth look into the immigration debate in various nations of the world in trying to seek new directions and satisfactory solutions.

Geographical Dialectology

This chapter examines how linguists have investigated the very obvious fact that different places house different dialects. We will not look at the results of such work nor how they have been used to answer linguistic and sociolinguistic questions (see Britain 2009, in press). Here we simply examine the steps dialectologists take and have taken to conduct multi-locality research on language variation. In order to do so, five studies from different time periods are presented and critiqued, examining a number of key methodological elements in each: 1. The aim of geographical dialectology is to examine variation across space, in different places. How do dialectologists then decide which places in that space to analyse? Why choose one village and not its neighbour? Why avoid that city? This question goes to the very heart of the geographical motivation of the research. 2. What sorts of speakers will be sampled from these locations? 3. What type of data is to be collected from these speakers? 4. In what circumstances is that data to be recorded? Who will collect it, in what setting and how will the voices of the speakers be captured for later analysis? As we will see, dialectological methodologies always involve compromises, no approach is ever flawless. Ultimately, a good number of difficult practical decisions have to be taken – how long can this research take, and what are the financial restrictions on the project? As we will see geographical dialectology is probably the most expensive and the most time consuming of all forms of language variation research.