Language and Social Change in Central Europe: Discourses on Policy, Identity and the German Language 9780748635993

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Language and Social Change in Central Europe

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To Sue Gal, for her inspiration and encouragement, and in memory of Stephen Barbour, a much missed colleague and friend

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Language and Social Change in Central Europe Discourses on Policy, Identity and the German Language P AT RI C K ST E V EN SO N AN D J E N N Y C A R L

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Patrick Stevenson and Jenny Carl, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12 Times New Roman by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3598 6 (hardback) The right of Patrick Stevenson and Jenny Carl to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Tables Transcription Conventions Map of Central Europe 1

Introduction

2

Discourses on Language in Social Life: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Discourses on language 2.3 Theorising discourses on language as language ideologies 2.4 Questions of scale and the interconnectedness of discourses on language: methodological implications 2.5 Summary and conclusions

3

4

Sociolinguistic Histories and the Footprint of German in Eastern Central Europe 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The present situation 3.3 A look back into history 3.4 The long nineteenth century: the emergence of ‘modern’ linguistic nationalisms 3.5 New nation-states after the First World War 3.6 After the Second World War: linguistic nationalisms and the German language during the communist era 3.7 Back in the present day: the situation after 1989 3.8 Legal frameworks of language and cultural policy: national and ethnic minorities in the Czech Republic and Hungary 3.9 Conclusions Language Policy Discourses: Interventions and Intersections 4.1 Introduction

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viii ix x xi 1 10 10 11 14 34 39 43 43 45 50 53 57 61 66 68 79 82 82

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vi

Contents 4.2 European level discourses 86 4.3 Discourses at national level I: foreign cultural policy in Austria and Germany 98 4.4 Discourses at national level II: internal language policy in the Czech Republic and Hungary 107 4.5 Conclusions 124

5

Language (Auto)biographies: Narrating Multilingual Selves 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Narrative organisation and the creation of coherence 5.3 Creating senses of self and identity in life stories 5.4 Language biographies: on being a German-speaker 5.5 Conclusions

127 127 129 137 139 158

6

Language Ideologies: Negotiating Linguistic Identities 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Categorisation and contextualisation 6.3 Categorisation and representation 6.4 Positioning and identification 6.5 Agency, time and place 6.6 Conclusions

161 161 162 168 181 191 199

7

Conclusions

202

Appendices Appendix A: Appendix B: Appendix C: Appendix D:

Appendix E: Appendix F: Appendix G: Appendix H: Appendix I: Appendix J: Appendix K: Appendix L:

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European Institutions and Documents Concerning Language Policy Preamble to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages Introduction to the 2005 Commission Communication ‘A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism’ Introduction to the 2008 Commission Communication ‘Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment’ German and Austrian agents and institutions in foreign cultural policy Extract from ‘Auswärtige Kulturpolitik – Konzeption 2000’ Central focus – ‘Leitbild’ – of the Goethe-Institut Austria’s Auslandskulturkonzept NEU Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa – Platform Culture Central Europe Extract from Austria kulturint – Tätigkeitsbericht 2002 Czech 2001 White Paper on Education Czech 2004 Education Act

208 212 214

216 218 222 225 227 230 231 234 237

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Contents Appendix M: Appendix N: Appendix O: Appendix P:

References Index

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vii Extract from Czech Follow-up of Action Plan on Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity Hungarian 1997 Directive Concerning the Education for National and Ethnic Minorities Extract from 2007 Hungarian National Core Curriculum Extract from Hungarian Follow-up of Action Plan for Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity

241 243 246 253 255 273

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Acknowledgements

The research on which this book is based was conducted primarily in the context of a project funded by a major Research Grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and we would like to acknowledge this vital support. An earlier, pilot project was carried out on a shoestring budget in 1994–5; some of the language biographies collected at that time were added to our corpus and are referred to in the book. The researcher on the earlier project, for whose valiant efforts we are very grateful, was Katharina Hall. As anyone who has attempted fieldwork of the kind undertaken during our research will know, the cooperation and advice of local ‘gatekeepers’ is indispensable. Many people gave generously of their time in providing guidance and opening doors for us, are we are indebted to all of them, but we would particularly like to record our gratitude to Csaba Földes, Zsuzsanna Gerner, Dorit Hekel, Milan Jeřabek, Volker Menke, Kerstin Mohrdiek, Jiří Nekvapil, Attila Németh, Lukaš Nowotný, Vaclav Poštolka, István Schneider, Julia Schweiger and Tamah Sherman. We would also like to thank the many people in national and local government departments, cultural agencies and minority representative organisations who agreed to be interviewed for their expertise in language and cultural policy. We would also like to express our gratitude to Angela Steinwedel, Bettina Köhler and Hilke Engfer for their help with the bibliography and transcription. At Edinburgh University Press, Esmé Watson has been the perfect author’s editor: enthusiastic, reassuring and extraordinarily patient: thank you! Finally, we want to express our appreciation for the support – moral, practical and intellectual – of many friends and colleagues, with whom we have discussed our ideas and who have commented on parts of the book at various stages of its development. In particular, we thank Annette Byford, Vasiliki Georgiou, Péter Maitz, Dick Vigers, and above all Clare Mar-Molinero, who has, as ever, been an unflagging source of encouragement and who created the space to allow the book to get written. Southampton, August 2009

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List of Tables

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

Numbers of learners of English and German in the Czech Republic Numbers of learners of English and German in Hungary Numbers of learners of other foreign languages in the Czech Republic Numbers of learners of other foreign languages in Hungary National minorities in Czechoslovakia after the First World War The composition of the population of Hungary by nationality in 1949 The population of Czechoslovakia by nationality in 1950

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47 47 47 47 59 62 65

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Transcription Conventions

UPPER CASE ... (getan) (xx) ((lacht)) / ? [explanation] italic

emphatic stress passage omitted unclear word or phrase incomprehensible word or phrase laughter or other non-linguistic feature end of tone group or chunk of talk rising intonation interpreted as indicating question explanatory note added for clarification word or phrase highlighted for comment

In our discussion, German words quoted from interview extracts are in italics and lower case (e.g., ‘die lehrerinnen waren alle ungarndeutsche’). Where German nouns are referred to in relation to the interviews but not directly quoted, their first letter is in upper case in accordance with normal orthographic conventions (e.g., ‘many people use the category Ungarndeutsche’).

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Map of Central Europe M2187 - STEVENSON PRINT.indd xi

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1

Introduction

Why Switzerland? Jonathan Steinberg poses this beguilingly simple and provocative question in the title of his popular social history of the small alpine nation (Steinberg 1976, 1996). The choice of title was justified by the book’s project, which was to explain two – later three – key questions: ‘why a place as idiosyncratic as Switzerland existed, and why non-Swiss should care’ (the third question, added in the second edition, was ‘why Switzerland should continue to exist’; Steinberg 1996: xi). Curiously though, in his preliminary discussion of these issues, the author places Switzerland ‘at the geographical centre of Europe’ (xii). While a case can be made for including the country in some conception of ‘central Europe’, the geographical centre of the continent surely lies significantly further east – although, as Stanisław Mucha’s idiosyncratic search for this mythical place in the documentary film Die Mitte (2004) shows, there are many competing locations that lay claim to the title (Stevenson and Carl 2009: 1). We raise these questions here because we were asked – and asked ourselves – similar questions in the course of the research on which this book is based. Why write about such a contentious and ill-defined space as central Europe? Why focus on the German language and its speakers? And why should anyone else care? We are, respectively, a British sociolinguist specialising in language ideologies and the politics of language in Germany, and a German social scientist with expertise in discourses on national and regional identity in the UK, so in exploring relationships between language and social change in what we should perhaps more properly call eastern central Europe we have both moved outside our familiar terrains.1 However, like Steinberg the historian of modern Europe specialising in Germany and Italy, we have taken our theoretical and methodological apparatus with us on our journey off-piste, not in the mistaken or deluded belief that we could travel virgin territory but in the hope of bringing a fresh perspective on what is indeed well-trodden ground. We are, for example, well aware of Tomasz Kamusella’s monumental and magisterial history of the politics of language and nationalism in modern central Europe (2008) and of the comprehensive survey of German linguistic minorities in this region provided by Eichinger et al. (2008), authoritative

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Language and Social Change in Central Europe

and perhaps definitive recent additions to two of the fields into which we are venturing here. However, we hope that our approach will complement such studies by drawing on different disciplinary traditions and by telling a story that will reach both experts in the area and those whose interests lie elsewhere. In place of a more conventional introduction, therefore, we would like to devote these opening pages to a brief account of our own motivation in conducting this study and of what we hope to achieve. Thirty years ago, American linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal published a study of a small speech community in eastern Austria, close to the Hungarian border (and as good a candidate as any for the location of the geographical centre of Europe), that was to have a major impact on research into patterns of language use in bilingual populations. In Language Shift (1979), Gal sought to trace the intervening processes by which radical changes in the political economy and the social arrangements of territorially organised groups or populations result in changes in language use. A key premise of her study is that while the language choices of individuals remain fairly stable throughout their lives (in the absence of external pressures or changes in the structure of their social networks), each generation ‘reinterprets the relationship between linguistic forms and social groups and consequently re-evaluates the prestige and meaning of linguistic forms’ (Gal 1979: 154). The most important empirical findings from the study were that the population of Oberwart (or Felsőőr in Hungarian) was in the process of abandoning its traditional bilingualism in Hungarian and German in favour of German monolingualism, and that this language shift was progressing in a more or less orderly fashion from domain to domain (for example, doctor’s surgery, family or church), with younger speakers in the vanguard of change. What remained to be explained was why this should be so: it had long been axiomatic in sociolinguistics that changes in language use and linguistic practices were often (although not exclusively) initiated by the young (Chambers 1995), but why should this particular change occur at that particular time? For generations, Hungarian had been the ‘local’ language, while German had been the language of ‘outsiders’, so that in terms of the prevailing linguistic ecology a functional explanation was sufficient to account for the distribution of language choices: Hungarian was the default selection for purely local interactions, German was available to facilitate non-local transactions. However, the economic and demographic changes that characterised the restructuring of European societies in the course of the twentieth century, and which accelerated after the Second World War, set in train a set of social processes that transformed the relationships between individuals and the language forms in their speech repertoires. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in this predominantly rural region, with its traditionally agrarian economy, created opportunities for more secure employment in the German-speaking environments of neighbouring towns. However, this in

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Introduction

3

itself is not a sufficient explanation for the growing preference for German and the shift away from Hungarian in Oberwart. Gal argues that by commuting between two social worlds, young villagers whose primary employment required the use of German and whose family life (and in some cases secondary employment in family smallholdings) was still conducted mainly in Hungarian brought the two languages into the same ‘conceptual system’, in which each could be accorded values in relation to the other (Gal 1979: 16–17, 161–2). In this new sociolinguistic constellation the traditional associations with ethnicity and place were challenged by new associations with status and social mobility: Hungarian and German were no longer indicative merely of ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ respectively, but of conservative, rural ‘peasantness’ and of modern urbanity. This evaluative shift from the functional equivalence of the two languages to their symbolic segregation is, then, the crucial step that mediated between social change and linguistic change, and the investment of languages and linguistic practices with social, cultural and (in some cases) moral values is the foundation of the concept of ‘language ideologies’, which we shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 2 and which informs much of the subsequent analysis in later parts of this book. Gal’s small-scale ethnographic study and its subsequent refinements (see, for example, Gal 1987, 1993, 1995), located precisely on the adjacent peripheries of eastern and western European space – or what one of us has referred to as the ‘central margins of Europe’, in an attempt to capture the paradoxical nature of this political, ideological and linguistic contact zone (Stevenson 1997) – reveal in microcosm some of the ways in which language was implicated in social change and ideological confrontations in late twentiethcentury Europe. The German language occupies a particular position in this sociolinguistic history, of course, since it uniquely inhabited territories which, for the duration of the socialist project in the eastern half of the continent, lay on either side of the central fault line, and the repercussions of this dislocation continue to be felt today. On the one hand, the idea of the German language as an emblem or icon was embroiled in both academic and public debates on representation in the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany, and traces of the sociolinguistic rupture of everyday life in Germany remained long after 1990 in the dissonance of the unified ‘language (rather than speech) community’ (Stevenson 2002; Hellmann and Schröder 2008). On the other hand, contact between speakers of German and other languages has had its own role to play in the recent social transformations that have reconstituted or re-shaped central Europe, in terms both of reflections on the past and of re-arrangements in the present (Meinhof and Galasiński 2005; Carl and Stevenson 2009; Galasińska and Krzyżanowski 2009). At the same time, the German language has a special status in this region as it is both a ‘majority’ and a ‘minority language’ (May 2001: 4). It is the dominant, ‘national’ language in Germany and Austria, and one of the official and

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Language and Social Change in Central Europe

national languages in Switzerland, but also has a complex history in eastern central Europe: as a regional lingua franca in diglossic relationships with other indigenous languages in the Habsburg empire (Rindler Schjerve 2003), as a language of occupation and oppression in the mid twentieth century, and subsequently as the heritage language of residual ethnolinguistic populations and – albeit now trailing behind English – a major foreign language for education, tourism and commerce. Gal’s research inspired a pilot project for the present study, focusing specifically on linguistic minorities in central European border areas (see Stevenson 1997, 2000a, b), and this in turn led to our investigation of the complex web of relations between German and other languages in this region. At one level, this story is simply told. A hundred years ago, there were several million speakers of German in eastern central Europe (that is, outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and German enjoyed high prestige and widespread influence (see, for example, Kontra 1996; Kamusella 2008; Maitz and Sándor 2009; Povejšil 1996; Wiktorowicz 1996). Today, in the wake of two devastating global conflicts and the subsequent mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from the post-1945 states in this part of the continent, the numbers of German native-speakers are dwindling, although the German language is clinging on to its position as the second most widely spoken foreign language after English, thanks in part to the foreign cultural policies of successive German and Austrian governments and their agencies (see Chapter 4). However, our aim is neither to explain this change in status nor to offer an analysis of the current position and future prospects of German in the region (see, for example, Ammon 1991, 1995, 1998, 2003, 2007a, b, c, and Földes 2001a, b, 2002, 2004a, b, for exhaustive research on these questions). We focus on the trajectory of the German language and its roles in individual and collective experience more as a prism through which to explore in a more general way the relationships between different discourses on language in social life and to uncover some of the complexity of experience and human agency involved in the historical processes resulting in changing patterns of language evaluation and language use. Our story is therefore a partial contemporary (hi)story of the German language and its speakers in central Europe, told by two outsiders but as far as possible through the words of those directly involved (whether civil servants and other government officials, representatives of minority associations or ‘ordinary people’). However, it is neither a paean to the past glories of Germanophone cultural traditions nor a lament over the declining standing of the language and its doomed struggles with English for the largest share of the regional language market (see some of the contributions to Gardt and Hüppauf 2004). Rather, it is a story of the tensions between competing political discourses on the one hand and individual responses to these forces on the other, a story which we hope will not only illuminate the specificity of linguistic and social relations in this particular context but also shed light on ways

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5

in which different factors interact with each other in the evolution of sociolinguistic ecologies more generally. To achieve this, we will chart the changes in the ‘linguascape’ (Coupland 2003) deriving from the shifts in alignment of territories, states and nations that first divided Europe after 1945 in such a way that ‘central Europe’ was more readily conceived as a cleavage than as a region, and then led to its reconstitution as a geographical and economic space straddling the east–west fault line. These changes throw up simultaneously questions about the future and about the past. On the one hand, what opportunities and what constraints are emerging for the occupation of this space in terms of individual languages, or language varieties, and the relationships between them? In particular, how is German positioned in discourses on language policy at international, national and local levels? Whose interests are at stake in the recontextualisation of linguistic relations, and what kinds of strategies are being developed by what kinds of agency? On the other hand, what can we learn from individual experiences of language use and language choice under the radically different social conditions before and after the transformations of 1989–90, the experiences of German-speaking families that have lived through the turbulence brought first by German fascism, then by state socialism and then by liberal democracy and exposure to the market and to the forces of globalisation? The story we want to tell, then, concerns the relationships between different ways of making language and language use relevant in the shaping and reshaping of social relations and political organisation under changing historical conditions. It will entail an analysis of strategies and policies as well as of behaviours and practices, but our perspective will be on how these sets of activities or forms of engagement with language are articulated contemporaneously in different discourses on language in social life. Our emphasis will therefore be less on what these strategies and policies consist in, or on what people do linguistically, than on what ideas about language seem to underlie these different kinds of action. Language policy is of interest here not so much as a set of objectives, measures and procedures for regulating language use and defining frameworks for implementing them, but as a discourse on the rights, obligations and opportunities of individuals and groups in terms of personal and social development. Similarly, we focus on language use not in the context of a sociolinguistic study of actual practices, such as code-switching or language choice, but as a central topic of individual biographies which are discourses on language as a formative element in the creation of a sense of self and of individual and collective identities. We want to show not only that ideological orientations towards particular language varieties and their uses determine policies and condition practices, but also that the articulation of policy is itself a form of practice and that linguistic practices, and talk about them, may constitute the enactment of a strategy or policy. From this perspective, policy and practice are not entirely discrete categories and may have a reciprocal relationship.

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Language and Social Change in Central Europe

The interconnectedness of these different discourses on language and of different ‘levels and scales of sociolinguistic phenomena’ is one of the hallmarks of an emerging ‘sociolinguistics of globalisation’ (see the special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7:4 [2003], especially the commentary article by Jan Blommaert). This field of study is not restricted to, or even primarily concerned with, so-called global languages (such as English, Chinese or Spanish) and their competition for influence; rather, it should reveal and explain the effects of social, political, economic and cultural processes on the functions and values associated with language forms of all kinds as these effects reverberate across national boundaries. Thus, for example, Hüppauf (2004: 5) proposes a reconceptualisation of ‘the rise of English and the complementary fall of [other] European languages’ not simply as a confrontation between rival linguistic forms but rather as ‘a struggle between globalisation and identity’ (emphasis in original), while warning that a narrow understanding of globalisation as equivalent to homogenisation risks distracting us from the historical and social specificity of the particular locations in which we study its effects and denying the role of human agency: even if we are all subject to broadly the ‘same’ global processes, pressures and influences, their consequences are neither inevitable nor necessarily the same. As Hüppauf (2004: 14) goes on to argue, ‘whereas globalisation appears to know no borders and creates an infinite and homogenising flow of everything and anything around the globe, it also seems to be giving rise to a new awareness of specificity, the particular and the difference of regions’. Fundamental to this awareness is the association of particular languages with particular places in people’s experience of life, for while multilingual repertoires facilitate mobility across physical and social space, specific linguistic forms and practices may be constitutive of a sense of place. At the same time, one of the effects of non-local social change can be, as we shall see and as Gal has argued in different terms,2 what Blommaert (2003: 609) refers to as the ‘reordering of locally available repertoires’ and the ‘re-organisation of the sociolinguistic stratigraphy’. It is no doubt too ambitious to cast this book as a contribution to the sociolinguistics of globalisation, but some of the arguments proposed by Blommaert and others reformulate Gal’s ideas in a way that creates a context and a motivation for a new study of language and social change in central Europe (as she has recently suggested herself in Gal 2006). On the one hand, the meanings of discourses on language policy can best be understood by tracing connections and contradictions across the multiple layers of policymaking instances from European through national to regional and local levels. On the other hand, the effects of social changes both within and across national boundaries can be seen in the re-arrangement of individual and collective linguistic repertoires and in the ways people describe the impact of this on their lives. So: why central Europe and why German? Few parts of the world have witnessed such profound social transformation during the period

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of global change over the last twenty years as central Europe, which alongside the overarching effects of globalisation has experienced most acutely the end of the Cold War and the eastern expansion of the EU; and while German has a uniquely complex and problematic history in its entanglement with other languages in this region, the different dimensions of its involvement in social change have the potential to generate insights that are relevant in other contexts too. We begin our discussion in Chapter 2 with an attempt to develop what we see as the unifying concept of discourses on language in social life. We have drawn inspiration from a wide and eclectic range of theoretical sources, which we believe provide the conceptual apparatus that we need in order to make sense of the rather disparate forms of data in a coherent way. The central plank of this apparatus is the approach to the evaluation of linguistic forms and language behaviour that is now generally referred to as the study of language ideologies and that seems to us to offer an appropriate framework within which to explain the motivations and the effects of linguistic and social change, especially in terms of the relationships between language forms and processes of individual and social identification. Allied to this are analytical concepts and interpretive procedures from research on language policy and from studies in discourse and narrative theory. We also explain here the kinds of data we have compiled and the methods we have used to gather and analyse them. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6 we develop this theoretical and methodological discussion by exploring in different ways how discourses on language are constructed: through the analysis of language policy discourses, individual narratives as life stories and the negotiation of identities in narratives. First, however, we attempt to create in Chapter 3 a historical context for the study of language(s) in central Europe, emphasising its multilingual and multiethnic nature and the tension between the emergence of ‘national’ languages and the persistence of linguistic minorities. Our main argument here is that by focusing on the changing position of, and experiences with, one language – German – across the region we can explore the complex ways in which language is implicated in social change at local, national and supra-national levels. Our study concentrates on the relationship between (external and internal) policies and experiences with language in two states – Hungary and what is now the Czech Republic (as multi- and as monolingual spaces) – and so this chapter provides historical profiles of language use, language contact, language learning, language spread and language decline in these two countries (and their previous manifestations), drawing on documentary and secondary sources. At the same time, we emphasise the partial and inadequate nature of such profiles in that they both detach the individual states from the larger European frame of policy-making and ‘elide’ the lived experience of individuals – issues to be addressed in subsequent chapters. The chapter also takes account of the master narratives or dominant discourses

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Language and Social Change in Central Europe

on ‘Germans’ or ‘German-speakers’ in central Europe, foreshadowing contrasts with the more differentiated personal narratives discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. Questions of scale and space are addressed in a number of ways in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. The focus in Chapter 4 is on the complex ‘layering’ of language policy – an exploration of the diverse levels at which language policies are formulated and the conflicts between them, from supra-national EU strategies promoting multilingualism in various forms to national domestic and foreign cultural policies continuing to foster the idea of ‘national’ languages – and on the ways in which these policies and policy discourses impact on individual and collective lives by creating particular kinds of space. The emphasis here is on language policy as a discourse on language: what does the articulation of language policy tell us about values attributed to different linguistic varieties and practices, about what language policy-making in this context is for, and how is this refracted through different layers of formulation? How does language policy-making operate in the highly stratified political and cultural space of contemporary Europe? How do different (past and present) influences on policy lead to what Blommaert (2005: 234) calls ‘layered simultaneity’ in discourse? We therefore also take account here of the fact that policy is made in the here-and-now to direct future actions but is shaped by local, national and supra-national effects of past actions. This entails asking questions such as: Why is multilingualism at the core of current European strategies on language? What is the particular conception of multilingualism that is preferred in the prevailing EU discourse on language? Why are national strategies and policies ambivalent or contradictory in this respect? How do national strategies and policies that are internally oriented relate to those that are aspects of foreign policy? What linguistic varieties are the object of policy at different levels and how are they conceptualised (for example, standard/non-standard, mother tongue, national language, minority/heritage language, foreign language, autochthonous/allochthonous language)? Who are the social actors engaged in language policy-making at different levels? In whose interests is policy formulated and what are the intended effects? And how does policy discourse relate to the experiences of individuals? Chapters 5 and 6 develop this final point, drawing on a common corpus of material (individual ‘language biographies’ narrated in interviews) but in different ways and for different purposes. In Chapter 5, we explore ways in which narrators make experiences with language an organising element in their life stories: what is it about ‘my’ encounters with different languages – their evaluations, the times and places associated with their use, their possibilities and limitations or constraints – that have made my ‘life’ what it (in my estimation) is or has become, as opposed to what it might have been? We treat these biographies as travelogues, as journeys through time and space, focusing on the effects of key transformative moments (the end of the Second

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Introduction

9

World War and the Cold War, the creation of new political regimes) in terms of creating or denying possibilities and options. How do people narrate their journeys within and between different ‘life worlds’: from the socio-political space on the post-war margins of central Europe, defined by the legacy of the immediate fascist past and the constraints of the communist political economy, to the reconfigured space of central Europe post-1989 that is a new contact zone in which German-speaking states represent the western grouping as the immediate neighbours of eastern European states and societies? In Chapter 6, we again investigate ways in which individuals navigate their passage through the changing and sometimes turbulent circumstances of their lives by analysing the accounts they give of their personal experiences with language but from a different angle and focusing more on processes of group identification. Our starting point will be the recontextualisation of the relationship between linguistic varieties before and after 1989, between traditional German dialects, standard German and Hungarian and Czech (Gal 1995). How does this recontextualisation of ideas about language in relation to particular social conditions index linguistic forms and varieties of language in specific ways, especially in terms of time and place, and how does this contribute to processes by which people locate themselves within a transformed social space? How do individuals position themselves and others (and resist or contest their own positioning by others) in relation to these linguistic varieties as part of a process of identification? The focus here is therefore on the narratives as discourses on language and identity and on how individuals respond to changing linguistic regimes. Finally, in Chapter 7, we retrace the course of our argument in order to show first how our approach necessarily relates discourses on language policy to individual narratives on linguistic practices and experiences with language; second, how the analysis of the different representations of a particular language (German) in these discourses and narratives can provide a coherent perspective on a complex sociolinguistic environment; and third, how this kind of study can contribute, beyond its specific concerns, more broadly to the study of language and social change in Europe and beyond.

Notes 1. For ease of reference, we will take the liberty of using the term ‘central Europe’ as a short form to refer to those countries located in what we may loosely call the geographical centre of continental Europe (Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, the last four of which we shall refer to as ‘eastern central Europe’). For a critical discussion of these terms, see Kamusella (2008: 11–14). 2. In many publications over the last thirty years: see, for example, Gal (1979, 1987, 1993, 1995, 2001, 2006).

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Discourses on language in social life: theoretical and methodological orientations

2.1 Introduction In our attempt to understand the complex and multiple functions of language in the highly diversified sociolinguistic space (or ‘linguascape’: Coupland 2003) of central Europe, combining diachronic and synchronic perspectives, we will necessarily draw on a wide range of information sources and theoretical influences. However, at the heart of our discussion will be an investigation not so much of language contact or multilingual practices, of the relationships between languages and their speakers, as of different ways in which people engage with ideas about language at many different levels. Our principal object of study will be what we shall refer to as discourses on language in social life, and our aim will be to show how an understanding of the web of linguistic functions depends on an analysis of the interconnectedness of discourses on language and on a recognition that these operate simultaneously on different scales (from the most macro to the most micro), on different planes (from the most public to the most private) and in different spheres of behaviour (from policy to practice) (see Blommaert 2003, 2005). We will also try to show how this multi-dimensional discursive process creates, expands and contracts the space(s) available for people to develop a sense of self and to enact, negotiate and defend individual and social identities. We use the term discourse throughout the book in the now widely accepted sense of language-in-use and of language as situated social practice, but also above all as ‘language use relative to social, political and cultural formations . . ., language reflecting social order but also language shaping social order, and shaping individuals’ interaction with society’ (Jaworski and Coupland 1999b: 3; see also Blommaert 2005: 1–5; Cameron 2001: Chapter 1). In emphasising its use as a countable noun (like ‘box’ or ‘tradition’), rather than as an uncountable noun (such as ‘water’ or ‘beauty’), we are drawing attention in particular to this latter perspective on discourse as a conventionalised means of making meaning in relation to specific aspects of social life: thus, while ‘advertising discourse’ may be a portmanteau term for all

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those linguistic features that are held to be characteristic of and specially adapted to advertising texts, ‘discourses on advertising’ refer to sets of – both complementary and competing – ways in which ideas about advertising are organised, evaluated and circulated (casting advertising, for example, as a core economic activity, as a means of manipulating patterns of consumption, or as a form of cultural production). In order to make this clear, we begin this chapter (in 2.2) with some brief illustrations of what we mean by discourses on language. We then go on (in 2.3) to outline our main theoretical orientations, discussing how ‘language ideologies’ drive and become inscribed in language policies that shape, constrain or facilitate individual linguistic practices, and how these ideologies are bound up with experiences with and memories of language that constitute formative elements in individual and collective processes of identification. In 2.4, we give an account of the methodologies we have used in the collection and processing of the material on which our study is based, describing the different kinds of textual data (documentary and oral), the relationships between us as researchers and the individuals we consulted in the course of our research, and the analytical focus on ways in which policies and individual narratives are articulated. We then conclude the chapter (2.5) with a short summary of the theoretical and methodological approaches which frame our study of discourses on language in central Europe.

2.2 Discourses on language We have said that our concern here is not (primarily) with ‘languages’ or even with their speakers but rather with discourses on language. By this we do not mean a narrow focus on academic treatises but, on the contrary, a broad and inclusive perspective on ways in which ideas and beliefs about language permeate the social life of groups, communities and societies and how such ideas and beliefs are called upon to justify and legitimise actions that have consequences for people’s opportunities and for their relationships with each other. A fundamental premise of our study, therefore, is that discourses on language are always part of a process of social evaluation and, at least potentially, of discrimination. However, they are not merely expressions of individual preferences or prejudices; they are the cumulative amalgamation, the multiple iteration, across time, of particular positions on language that are shared and passed on either through direct interaction or through some form of mediation. They are all, in some sense, an intervention, a comment, on the nature of linguistic forms, practices or behaviours. Any list of topics, issues and processes on which such discourses focus is inevitably arbitrary and partial, but an illustrative set (with indicative references to relevant readings in each case) might include the following.

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• The conception of ‘languages’ as reified, discrete and therefore countable entities (for example, ‘English’, ‘German’, ‘Shona’ or Bengali’), which entails an array of other notions such as ‘native speaker’, ‘mother tongue’ and ‘second, foreign, heritage or community language’ and on which much of the enterprise of sociolinguistic research is built: for example, bilingualism and multilingualism, code-switching, language maintenance and shift, language loss and death. (Duchêne and Heller 2007; Heller 2006; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Mills 2004; Ricento 2006a) • Different definitions of individual multilingualism: based on linguistic proficiency (the knowledge of, and ability to use, forms and structures of different ‘languages’); on sociolinguistic competence (the knowledge of, and ability to behave according to, social norms and conventions associated with different languages); or on multi-competence (the capacity to operate flexibly and effectively in a dynamic multilingual environment). (Auer and Li 2007; Blackledge and Creese 2009; Edwards 2004; Heller 2007) • Language and globalisation: how have global economic, social and cultural processes impacted on patterns of language use and language learning at regional, national and local levels? What are ‘global languages’ and how is the balance of power between them evolving? In what ways have new technologies affected communicative practices across linguistic and spatial boundaries? (Block and Cameron 2001; Coupland 2003, forthcoming; Danet and Herring 2007; Fairclough 2006; Gardt and Hüppauf 2004; Jenkins 2007; Mac Giolla Chríost 2007; Mar-Molinero and Stewart 2006; Pennycook 2007) • Different ‘orders of multilingualism’: for example, the everyday, takenfor-granted multilingualism of the Kurdish child in a school in inner-city Berlin, or of a German-speaking Czech working in a multinational corporation in Prague; the celebratory but politically constrained multilingualism of European citizenship ideals; the ‘subversive’ multilingualism that ‘impedes social integration’ and ‘promotes social disorder’ in northern English towns or Parisian suburbs; or the resurgent multilingualism of ethnic/national renaissance in Wales or Brittany. (Blackledge 2005; Block 2006; Extra et al. 2009; Nic Craith 2006) • Language policies: what is deemed good, desirable or appropriate for whom under what conditions and for what purposes, and who has the authority to determine this? Policies may be formulated and debated at many different levels: not only most evidently through national/state governments and their agencies (such as the Goethe-Institut or the Instituto Cervantes), but also through institutions that operate above the level of the state (whether political and economic organisations, such as the EU, or commercial and industrial ones, such as Siemens or Volkswagen) and below the level of the state (regional and local government, institutions of civil society such as NGOs and interest groups, communities

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or neighbourhoods, and families); and these discourses are then widely circulated through media debates on, for example, orthographic reform, bilingual signage or school curricula. (Canagarajah 2005a; Mar-Molinero 2006; Pennycook 1998; Phillipson 1992; Ricento 2006a; Shohamy 2006; Spolsky 2004; Wright 2004) Language education: in so-called mother-tongue teaching and learning there may be debates over the privileging of ‘standard’ varieties and the acceptability of non-standard forms, or over the priority to be attached to literacy and oracy skills; in societies increasingly characterised by different patterns of migration there are debates over the place of different languages in the curriculum in terms of the distribution of resources but also of morality and social justice; and as global economic conditions change there may be (calls for) different hierarchies of value amongst ‘foreign languages’. (Canagarajah 1999; Crowley 2003; García et al. 2006; Heller and Martin-Jones 2001; May and Hornberger 2008) Language rights: is it appropriate to apply the concept of rights to language, and, if so, should it relate to individual or collective rights? How can an appropriate balance be struck between the rights and obligations of linguistic minorities (for example, in relation to citizenship, employment, education or healthcare) and who should have the authority to determine this? (Kontra et al. 1999; Kymlicka and Patten 2003; May 2001; Pertot et al. 2008; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994; Williams 2009) Languages as commodities with different and shifting market values: what are the conditions that favour (the use of) one language rather than another, and how is the relationship between economic conditions and the ‘worth’ of a language determined? (Cameron 2000; Coulmas 1991; Grin 2003, 2006; Heller 2003) Linguistic purism and other manifestations of ‘verbal hygiene’: what do we mean by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (or ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’) language? Do such judgements apply to language form or language use or both? Does this kind of activity belong in the realm of folk linguistics and deserve the disdain of ‘serious’ linguists or is it a legitimate social practice? (Ager 1999; Cameron 1995; Langer and Davies 2006; Thomas 1991) Language and belonging: ways in which we use ideas about language and our relationship with particular language forms to anchor ourselves as social beings in terms of nationality, ethnicity, gender, citizenship, community, network, neighbourhood, or modes of cultural production (music, art, multimedia performance). (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003; Joseph 2004; Meinhof and Galasiński 2005; Modan 2007)

We will return to some of these discourses on language throughout the book. In the next section, we turn to the consideration of ways in which the broad conception of discourses on language in social life can be theorised and of their realisation in particular contexts.

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2.3 Theorising discourses on language as language ideologies As well as their evaluative orientation, what these discourses on language have in common is that they are historically and culturally contingent: they are products, and contributory elements, of social practices of representation, categorisation and identification developed and debated at particular times, in particular places, under particular conditions. Canagarajah (2005b: xxv), for example, argues that the need for learners of English to acquire new competencies in order to handle the changing requirements of communicative interaction in increasingly globalised contexts has led to changing priorities in ELT (English Language Teaching) (see Fig. 2.1). More importantly, these changing priorities in pedagogical practice are forcing a challenge to conventional Western assumptions about language acquisition and communicative norms and a shift towards assumptions that were already established in other parts of the world in pre-colonial times (for example, in Brazil and in India: see De Souza 2005 and Canagarajah 2005c). However, while in some cases the specificity and contestability of certain discursive activities may be transparent – typically by virtue of contemporary debates, such as over orthographic reforms or the teaching of grammar (Johnson 2005; Cameron 1995, Wardhaugh 1999) – the claims made on behalf of other arguments may be so persuasive that they congeal over time into a consensus and acquire the status of orthodoxies or even axioms, such that to question them seems bizarre and perverse. Yet linguistic scholars have a tradition of fouling their own nest in just this way by casting doubt on the core concepts of their discipline, and the assault from within on enduringly stable notions has become increasingly radical in recent years. First, for

From ‘target language’ text and language as homogeneous joining a community focus on rules and conventions correctness language and discourse as static language as context-bound mastery of grammar rules text and language as transparent and instrumental L1 (first language) as problem

To repertoire text and language as hybrid shuttling between communities focus on strategies negotiation language and discourse as changing language as context-transforming metalinguistic awareness text and language as representational L1 as resource

Fig. 2.1 Shifts in pedagogic practice in English Language Teaching (from Canagarajah 2005b: xxv, slightly modified)

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example, the drawing of boundaries between ‘languages’ and ‘dialects’ was referred to a process of arbitration on the basis of political arrangements rather than linguistic criteria (such as linguistic relatedness, or mutual comprehensibility; see Millar 2005: Chapter 3 for discussion). Within the narrow confines of sociolinguistic debates, this may be seen as a strictly academic demarcation dispute. But when this principle of definition is adopted in the context of political conflicts it has potentially far-reaching consequences: [W]hen FRELIMO labelled the Mozambican Bantu languages ‘dialects’, and so aligned itself with colonial discourses on African versus European languages, a whole ideological, metaphorical and associative machinery was set in motion by means of which the language, its speakers, its culture, its social structure, its ideals and aspirations were all branded as inferior to those carried by the ‘language’ Portuguese. (Blommaert 1999c: 431) More recently, the very existence of ‘languages’ as fixed and systematically organised sets of linguistic forms with clearly defined boundaries that distinguish them from other, similarly bounded, sets has increasingly come under challenge. For example, Woolard (1998: 20) argues that ‘the existence of a language as a discrete entity is always a discursive project, rather than an established fact’, and Gal and Woolard (2001b: 1) describe languages (as well as other linguistic varieties) as artefacts of discursive activity, as not natural but ‘naturalised representations of spoken interaction, products of linguistic ideologies’ (our emphasis). More polemically, Pennycook (2006: 66–7), drawing on arguments by Errington (2001) and Harris (1990), refers to the ‘pernicious myth that languages exist’ (see also Blommaert 2005, 2006; Gal 2006; and especially Makoni and Pennycook 2007). In this sense, therefore, discourses on language are not simply different perceptions of linguistic phenomena, they are rooted in different ideological positions. Language ideologies Both the traditional conceptions of notions such as ‘language’ (and their cultivation and perpetuation in academic and lay discourse alike) and the challenges to them entail ideological work on the part of their respective proponents, as both sets of discourses represent interest-laden accounts of social relations (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994: 58), although the aim (and often the effect) of such ideological work is precisely to conceal this fact. As Woolard (1998: 10) points out: ‘A naturalising move that drains the conceptual of its contingent historical content, making it seem universal or timeless, is often cited as key to ideological process.’ In its most inclusive specification, the study of ‘language ideologies’ is concerned with ‘representations, whether explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of language and human

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beings in a social world’ (Woolard 1998: 3), while Kroskrity (2000b: 2–3) introduces the crucial notion of scale: the project of language ideology studies, he argues, involves ‘exploring the linkage of microcultural worlds of language and discourse to macrosocial forces’, and in particular ‘relating the models and practices shared by members of a speech community to their politicaleconomic positions and interests’. For possible definitions of language ideologies, Kroskrity (2000b: 5) cites Silverstein (1979: 193): ‘sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure or use’, and Irvine (1989: 255): ‘the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests’. But the real focus and challenge of language ideology research is on function, process and agency: where are language ideologies articulated and by whom, how are they circulated, how do they become embedded in everyday discourse, and what effects do they have? To some extent, the definitions of language ideologies outlined above suggest an overlap with the study of language attitudes, a branch of social psychology with a rather longer history than its counterpart in linguistic anthropology (see, for example, Baker 1992, Garrett et al. 2003; Giles and St Clair 1979; Giles et al. 1991; for historical accounts of language ideology research, see Woolard 1998 and Kroskrity 2004). However, the development over the last twenty-five years of the concept of language ideology represents a kind of politicised and historicised makeover of the concept of attitudes, and is distinct from it in at least three ways. First, language attitudes are typically understood as an acquired property of the individual, which may be shared with other individuals and is then considered to be constitutive of a social group (‘people who find Parisian French attractive’ or ‘people who associate Received Pronunciation with intelligence’), whereas language ideologies are not seen as either individual or group attributes but rather as beliefs or ways of thinking that are realised in a continuous process of ‘entextualisation’ (Blommaert 2005; Silverstein and Urban 1996b), travelling from one text (newspaper article, parliamentary speech, advertisement, formal interview, casual conversation, etc.) to another. Second, as a methodological consequence of the first difference, language attitudes are normally accessed experimentally (for example, through questionnaires, observation of behaviour, or test activities of various kinds: see Garrett 2005), while language ideologies are retrieved through the analysis of discourses articulated in texts (which may be, but are often not, elicited for this purpose). Third, language attitude research is largely independent of the socially and historically contextualising conditions that are fundamental to the genesis, reproduction and processing of language ideologies; and while research into language attitudes may have political consequences (for example, for the training of teachers), language ideologies themselves, and therefore also research on them, always have political origins and effects: ‘There is no “view from nowhere”, no gaze that is not positioned’ (Irvine and Gal 2000: 36).

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Managing linguistic difference in discourse What language ideologies are, however, is perhaps less important than what they do (or what is done with them). Whether explicit or implicit, their migration across texts binds together the individuals who produce these texts (at the bus stop, in the office, on the editorial page, or wherever), if not into anything as cohesive or uniform as a ‘speech community’, then at least as members of (or participants in) a common ‘discourse world’; this does not necessarily mean that they share the same views but that they act in relation to the same discursive repertoire and draw from the same set of ideological resources, which serve to distinguish and sustain competing interests. The essence of language ideological work is therefore the discursive representation and ‘management’ of linguistic and hence of social difference. Irvine and Gal (2000) argue that this work is achieved to a large extent through three semiotic processes: iconisation, erasure and fractal recursivity, all of which (as we shall see in Chapters 4, 5 and 6) have a role to play in shaping, sustaining or curtailing the sociolinguistic space in which individuals can interact. Iconisation is a process by which an indexical relationship between a particular linguistic feature or variety and its users is transformed so that the linguistic form is perceived as an ‘iconic representation’ of the social group that uses it. For example, the Saxon dialect, Sächsisch, came to be for many Germans before 1989 not merely indexical of certain east German citizens but an iconic representation of social conditions and political relations in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Erasure involves ‘simplifying the sociolinguistic field’ so that particular people or (socio)linguistic features or practices are rendered invisible: ‘Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away. So, for example, a social group or a language may be imagined as homogeneous, its internal variation disregarded’ (Irvine and Gal 2000: 38). For instance, the existence of linguistic varieties that could be considered as forms of the same ‘language’ (say, German) may be elided in discourses in which the establishment of (and competition between) different languages is emphasised. Fractal recursivity entails the repeated ‘projection’ of a (social and/or linguistic) contrast that is significant at one level or scale of social activity onto another. Gal (2005) illustrates this with reference to the contrast between public and private in relation to the ‘bourgeois house’, with the distinction between street and house replicated within the house in the distinction between living room and bedroom. It also applies, for example, in language policy processes in Europe: the dichotomy between multilingualism and monolingualism on which the language strategies of the European Commission are predicated recurs (albeit in different ways: see Chapter 4) at national, regional and local levels (including, as we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6, the family). All of these semiotic processes will be relevant to our discussion of policy and practice; however, four further key concepts are crucial to our understanding of the

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role of language (and especially of language ideologies) in social life: the materiality, relativity, historicity and indexicality of language forms. Defining characteristics of a discourse view of language forms By the materiality of language forms we mean that they do not have some kind of independent existence outside the material world in which human subjects live and interact. It is, of course, possible and defensible to study, for example, acoustic or articulatory aspects of sound production or the regularity of morphological processes in isolation from their contexts of use. However, contrary to this clinical observation of linguistic forms in the analytical ‘clean room’, the study of discourses on language and of language in use is about, as Kroskrity (2000b: 5) puts it, undoing the ‘surgical removal of language from context’ that produces ‘an amputated “language”’. Moreover, this in turn does not simply imply the restoration of language forms to the textual and social setting in which they occur; rather, language itself is seen to contribute to the creation of contexts, to the process of contextualisation (Duranti and Goodwin 1992). From this perspective, language forms are interesting, relevant and important to the extent that they are seen to constitute a major part of the ways in which ‘real historical actors’ (Blommaert 1999b: 7) situate themselves in relation to others, develop, promote and defend both individual and shared interests, and exercise or strive for influence and power (and deny these to others). Language forms not only build the discourses around which our lives are organised and orientated, they are also the object of ‘metadiscourses’ in which we name, talk about and evaluate them. What we continue to refer to as ‘languages’ or as ‘language varieties’ are therefore both material and symbolic resources that may be distributed and allocated by those with the authority to do so in ways that favour some and disfavour others, and ownership of, or even access to, these resources can be granted or withheld as part of larger processes of cultural patronage or political power (see Joseph 1987). This struggle over resources points to a further aspect of the materiality of language forms, which is their relativity in as much as some must be (perceived to be) more prestigious, more valuable and therefore more desirable than others. The ability to include particular linguistic varieties in your portfolio or repertoire may be a key factor in the accumulation and realisation of economic, cultural or transcultural capital (Meinhof and Triandafyllidou 2006), especially in a highly mobile and multilingual labour market. However, the estimation of a language variety’s value is not only a complex and inexact computation, dependent on a wide range of factors, it is also subject to fluctuations due to the instability of these factors and is often easier to establish retrospectively than to predict (see, for example, Coulmas 1991, Grin 2003 and Heller 2003 on the commodification of language). For example, Ammon (1991, 2003) traces a consistently downward trajectory in

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the international standing of ‘the German language’ (measured in terms of numbers of learners and of scientific publications, of its use in international organisations and businesses, in tourism and the media) since the first quarter of the twentieth century, and it seems likely that this global trend will continue, yet the volatility of social and political relations specifically in Europe over the last twenty years makes it more difficult to be sure about future developments in this region (we will come back to this in Chapter 3). What this means in more general terms is that the value of what is perceived as ‘the same language (form)’ may vary in different places and at different times: a form that is prestigious here may be stigmatised there, and one that was once highly valued here may now be heavily discounted in the same location. Gal (2006: 18–19), for instance, shows how the use of particular varieties of Hungarian and German may be subject to radically divergent evaluations. On the one hand, bilingual residents of a small town in eastern Austria typically preferred to use German rather than Hungarian on visits across the border, since the variety of Hungarian they spoke was considered archaic and redolent of an undesirable and parochial past. On the other hand, Hungarian-Germans who returned to Hungary after a period of migration to Germany were both envied by fellow Ungarndeutsche for the desirable consumer goods they brought back with them and denigrated for the linguistic practices (using ‘modern’ German) they had also acquired along the way. As Blommaert (2005: 72–3) argues, under such circumstances mobility may be a communicative problem, rather than a benefit, since it is ‘an itinerary across normative spaces, and these spaces are always somebody’s space’. Observations such as these suggest that time, space and place go hand in hand in their relationships with language. Indeed, defining her notion of ‘culturally coded temporality’ Gal (2006: 14) argues specifically that: ‘Not only do linguistic practices occur in time, linguistic forms and geographical regions come to index cultural categories of time: some point to modernity and the future; others become indexes of tradition and the past.’ As an illustration of this argument, she interprets the behaviour of the Hungarian-speaking Austrians referred to above as a strategy for avoiding ridicule as their geographical and political separation from mainstream Hungarian society meant that their variety of Hungarian had not kept pace with ‘modern’ developments and therefore trapped them in a stigmatised rural past, so that ‘the results of spatial and political distance were heard as temporal distance’ (Gal 2006: 18). Blommaert (2005: 126) echoes Gal’s claim, arguing that ‘people speak from a particular point in history, and they always speak on history’. The implication of this is that texts (and the language forms with or in which they are constructed) are not only necessarily situated in the moment (and, we might add, the location) of their production but also bear in them the trace of their historicity. In other words, texts are produced under particular historical conditions from which they cannot be released. This is important for the reading of (meta)discourses on language and language use,

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as it constructs particular meanings: for example, what it means to ‘speak German’ or to ‘be a German-speaker’ is different in central Europe today than what it meant fifty years ago not only because of contemporary political, cultural and economic conditions but also, and more importantly, because of what has been said in and about ‘German’ in the intervening period and the layers of meaning that have accrued as a result (we shall discuss this in detail in Chapters 5 and 6). This layering of meaning (or of meaning potential) that builds up over time is further complicated by the fact that our experience of time is not uniform or consistent, but is itself multi-layered. For example, Blommaert (2005: 127–8) refers to the work of the French historian Fernand Braudel (1958), who distinguishes between different time-scales, each of which necessarily contributes to our understanding and interpretation of the past: Braudel distinguished between three such layered time-scales: slow time or structural time (the ‘longue durée’); intermediate time, or conjunctural time (the time of long cyclical patterns, e.g. the time of particular political regimes or the cycle of growth and crisis in capitalism); and the événement, event-time. . . . Single events, such as the Battle of Waterloo or the French Revolution, evolved in ‘event’ time, but also needed to be explained with reference to both the conjuncture (deep economic and political transformations . . .) and the structure (the slow unfolding of the system) in which they occurred. Experiences with, and consequently discourses on, language are similarly imbued with the effects of these multiple temporalities. The infamous census of 1941 in Hungary, for example, was a single event but its meaning for individuals and for social relations between people with different ethnic or national affiliations is embedded in the long and complex development of a Hungarian nation that preceded it and it subsequently continued to resonate in the memories of people who lived through those times and of their families (see Chapter 6). In this census, people were required for the first time to declare not only their ‘mother tongue’ but also their ‘nationality’, so that ‘not only the counting itself, but also the political activity preceding it, had the effect of forcing a change in respondents’ understanding of what it meant to be speaking a language. . . . Language choice was no longer a local matter, but one with much broader political significance’ (Gal 1993: 345). This broader significance became particularly evident following the social and political transformations in the years immediately after the war, when the census data was used as the basis for drawing up deportation lists of those considered to have been Nazi sympathisers or collaborators (see also Maitz and Sándor 2009). Even fifty years later, and following the further political changes of the early 1990s, the effects of this politicisation of the relationship between language and ethnicity were still present in the minds even of people

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who were born during the war and therefore had not witnessed or participated in the census itself. The historical contextualisation of language experiences, specifically drawing attention to the inherent historicity of (discourses on) language forms and patterns of language use, is therefore important because it makes explicit what Gal and Woolard (2001b: 4) refer to as particular ‘regimes of representation’ which can be used to authorise political programmes. But to fully understand this we need to trace the effects of interlocking layers of time, to unpick what Blommaert (2005: 134) calls the ‘nexus of layered simultaneity’, through which we discursively ‘synchronise’ aspects of experience or patterns of change (whether in the present or in the past), merging or collapsing them together as if they were synchronous, contemporaneous occurrences. This practice has the effect of smoothing out discontinuities and creating a sense of coherence, and it is particularly evident (as we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6) in narratives, both large and small. One grand narrative in our context attributes the ‘decline’ of ‘the German language’ in central Europe to the direct and indirect effects of catastrophic events (world wars, fascism, the Holocaust, mass and elite migration). From the present perspective, we can identify the long-term change in the status of German from a prestigious and widely used regional lingua franca (that is, outside the ‘German-speaking countries’ of Germany, Austria and Switzerland) to that of a vestigial heritage language, a regional language of communication in tourism and commerce, and a ‘niche’ foreign language in secondary and higher education. But there are layers of change in between that are less evident (if at all) in the here-and-now, and these other layers are important because they have shaped perceptions on which policies have been and continue to be built, and are inscribed in the attitudes and experiences of whole societies. They tend to be shrunk into time capsules expressed in iconicising temporal references (‘after the war’, ‘during Communism’, ‘before/after the Wende/1989’) and are echoed in (discussions of) statistical trends (for example, numbers of German-speakers reported in surveys and censuses, or of German-learners in schools: see Chapter 3). However, these references mask complex and non-uniform changes in individual perceptions and experiences, as well as political changes both in German-speaking countries (internally in relation to conceptions of citizenship and social cohesion, externally in terms of foreign cultural policy) and in their eastern neighbours (in the context of their social and educational policies). We shall return to this in Chapter 4. Underpinning the notions of materiality, relativity and historicity outlined here is the concept of indexicality, developed by Michael Silverstein (1993, 1996, 1998) and now widely used as the lynchpin in the analysis of language ideologies. Most simply, indexicality is ‘the semiotic operation of juxtaposition, whereby one entity or event points to another’ and the repetition of this juxtaposition fixes the relationship between the two, so that for example ‘smoke is an index of fire, clouds of rain’ (Bucholtz and Hall 2004: 378). The

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application of this concept in the field of language ideologies is important particularly in its establishment of historically contingent and indirect, rather than direct, associations between linguistic forms or patterns, on the one hand, and social and cultural categories and meanings, on the other. The example we used earlier to illustrate the concept of iconisation – a process that relies on indexicality – demonstrates this: the (use of the) Saxon dialect directly connects the speaker with a particular geographical location in eastern Germany but indirectly conjures associations with – ‘indexes’ – particular social characteristics and, at least until the early 1990s, the political system of the GDR. Similarly, the powerful effect of the Hungarian census question in 1941 rested on the indirect indexical relationship between ‘speaking German’ (that is, ‘being a German-speaker’) and ‘being a Nazi-sympathiser’, and the use of an archaic Hungarian dialect by residents of the borderlands in eastern Austria is indexical of an unsophisticated, rural lifestyle. As these examples show, indexicality also has the effect of discursively tying together conceptions of language, time, place and space (see also Georgakopolou (2007: 12–14) and these linkages will play an important part in our analysis of discourses and narratives on language contact in Chapters 5 and 6. Language and identity work However, important though it is in showing the enduring power of meanings derived from conventionalised associations between linguistic and nonlinguistic categories (‘indexical orders’, in the terms of Silverstein 2003 – see also Blommaert 2005: 73), an uncritical application of the concept can have the unintended consequence of implying the immutability of indexical links and denying or excessively restricting the possibility of human agency. Unlike the physical relationships between natural phenomena such as smoke and fire or clouds and rain, the associations between linguistic forms or actions and social meanings are not objectively fixed but are the expression of a social consensus, and so the assertion of an indexical link between a linguistic form and a social category has nothing to do with the truth value of the relations concerned: for example, we can assert that there was – for certain people at a certain time and in a certain place – an indexical relationship between ‘being a German-speaker’ and ‘being a Nazi-sympathiser’ without suggesting that this was necessarily true in any particular case. An over-determined and mechanical conception of indexicality therefore sits uncomfortably with the premise that language ideologies function through the interventions of social actors in the discursive management of linguistic resources. One function of a language ideology is to stake out the scope of the identification potential of the set of individuals who orientate towards it: what identity options does a particular language ideology make available, and which ones does it impede or preclude? The ideology or doctrine (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998 refer to it as a dogma) of linguistic homogeneism rests

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precisely on the isomorphic mapping, or in other words the exclusive (and in this case, direct) indexicality, of language and ethnic or national group: to ‘be Czech/Portuguese/Greek’ you must ‘speak Czech/Portuguese/Greek’. (And, of course, this ideology in turn requires the prior acceptance of the discourse that segments human linguistic activity into bounded categories – ‘languages’ – and assigns unequivocal and non-negotiable labels to them: see above.) However, while this ethnolinguistic ideology – espoused and promoted both to shore up the interests of dominant ‘national’ groups who perceive their integrity as threatened by the effects of global economic and social forces beyond their control and by minority groups who see it as fundamental to their struggle against cultural assimilation – has held sway especially in Europe over the last 200 years, it can be and has been resisted and challenged by alternative conceptions. Part of its enduring appeal to dominant and minority groups alike is no doubt its seductive simplicity and seeming transparency. Yet its simplicity is a powerful tool in the hands of those in a position to use it as a means of controlling access to social and political rights and economic opportunities, and its transparency ignores the often complex, hybrid relationships between individuals, the language forms in their repertoires, and their sense of self. To salvage the notion of indexicality in this context we therefore need to be careful not to see it as a given but rather as a meaning relation, determined or negotiated by participants in constantly evolving discourses on language. This means, among other things, rejecting essential links, established a priori, between language and ethnicity or nationality, and downgrading these relationships, as it were, to one of many possibilities open to individuals. But the key question remains: what identity options are available at any particular time and in any particular place (see Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004b: 14)? On the one hand, this allows us to assert the possibility of individual agency in that it recognises that we are not inevitably bound to a singular and prescribed identity, that we may inhabit various identities simultaneously and move through different ones in the course of our lives; on the other hand, it also acknowledges that the range of options from which we can select is not necessarily endless and is subject to constraints imposed by the social and political conditions under which we live and specifically by prevailing language ideologies.1 This in turn raises further questions: what kinds of identity option may be available, and by what means are identities selected and realised? Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004b: 21) propose three types of identity: ‘imposed identities (which are not negotiable in a particular time and place), assumed identities (which are accepted and not negotiated), and negotiable identities (which are contested by groups and individuals)’.2 Identities may be imposed under circumstances in which a particular group or body has sufficient power and authority to allocate individuals to categories regardless of their own preferences and where the individuals are not in a position

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to resist. This was the case, for example, with people classified as ‘German’ in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other central and eastern European states after 1945. Identities may be assumed without any attempt at negotiation when they are considered desirable and bring tangible benefits, as is generally (but not necessarily) the case with German citizens in contemporary Germany or Austrians in Austria. Where identities are open to negotiation, this typically means that among different options which are available particular ones may be ascribed to individuals or groups that they themselves choose to resist and seek to reject in favour of other alternatives. Here, too, we can point to the situation of people in central European states who now see the possibility of claiming a positively evaluated identity as Germanspeaker that was previously (during the communist period) not available to them. This last case makes clear what in fact applies in all three: that both the nature and the availability of particular identity options are not fixed or absolute but rather contingent on social and political conditions, for (as we argued earlier) what is desirable and beneficial at one time and in one place may not be in another, and, as we shall see in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, these different types of identity help to shape the accounts of the various social actors engaged in identification processes in central Europe over the last fifty years. If we accept these possible types of identity, it is evident that their realisation must be a discursive process: whether our identities are imposed, assumed or negotiated, the outcome depends in part on an engagement with particular discourses on language. Where identities are imposed, interaction and opposition may be attempted but it will be to no avail as the imbalance in the distribution of discursive resources between those allocating identity positions and those who are subject to the process is so extreme that resistance is futile. However, where individuals do have room to manoeuvre – and even within totalitarian regimes people by no means necessarily act as sociolinguistic automata (Stevenson 2002) – it is now commonplace to consider identities as ‘forged in action rather than fixed in categories’ (Bucholtz and Hall 2004: 376), as performed or enacted rather than (merely) possessed. But while an emphasis on performativity reinvests the individual with a degree of self-determination and insists on the dynamic nature of identity-making, it seems clear that identification cannot be confined to the process and moment of enactment, since ideas about what constitutes these categories are brought with us into the event, and both these ideas and the outcomes of individual events are carried forward into subsequent ones. The meaning of ‘speaking German’ or of ‘being German’, for example, will then depend in part on the store of knowledge that individuals bring along into a speech event and in part on how they draw on these resources in the course of the event, and this in turn may modify the set of features available for selection on future occasions (see Auer and Di Luzio 2000; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Duranti and Goodwin 1992).3

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Voice and positioning theory The ideas of identity-making as performance and the discursive negotiation of identity are predicated on the possibility, at least, of individual and collective agency and point towards the centrality of another key concept (‘voice’) and of an important interactional or discursive strategy (‘positioning’), both of which provide links between the micro-level of the individual speech event and the macro-level of the discourses and ideologies that are ‘echoed’ in it (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 46) and will figure prominently in our analysis of policy discourses and personal narratives. Voice is understood here as the ability to make oneself heard, to participate in and contribute to public discourses (Blommaert 2005: 4–5, 70ff; Hymes 1996). It is therefore another relative concept, as the ability to be heard is dependent not only on individual capacities but also on particular socio-historical conditions such as access to audiences and social relations of power. Positioning is a discursive process, through which participants situate themselves and others in relation to particular ‘subject positions’ which are ‘made available’ within specific discourses. Davies and Harré distinguish between roles and subject positions, understanding the former as fixed categories that leave little room for individual agency (we learn ‘how to take up a particular role through observation of others in that role’), while the latter entail a personal act of locating our self in terms of our own ‘subjective lived histories’. In the course of conversational interaction, individuals adopt a subject position and see the world ‘in terms of the particular images, metaphors, story lines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned’ (Davies and Harré 1999: 41–2, 35). However, as Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004b: 20–1) argue, positioning (whether of the self or of others) may be subject to contestation or negotiation, either between or ‘within’ individuals, and like other discursive actions it is always contingent on the social and historical conditions in which it occurs. In Chapter 6 especially, we will show how different positioning strategies are used, or implicitly oriented towards, in individual narratives, focusing on ways in which individuals use linguistic categories (whether applied to linguistic forms, such as Deutsch, Muttersprache, Schwäbisch, or to their users, as in Ungarndeutsche(r) or ‘Schwob’) discursively or conversationally to position themselves and others but also to contest or reject ways in which others position them and to deny ways in which others position themselves. The focus of our attention will therefore be on the (auto)biographical location of speakers’ selves in the context of social and historical conditions that make various (ethnic) identifications possible through the (self-)allocation to a group on the basis of language knowledge or use, but where this may or may not be considered desirable. The issue, then, is not simply whether a person ‘is’ or ‘is not’ a ‘German-speaker’, but rather whether or not they are positioned or position themselves as such and, furthermore, whether or not

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this (self-)attribution is contingent on the perceived validity of specific ethnic categories. Language (auto)biographies and the narrative construction of self We have argued that identity-formation is a discursive process that takes place in the course of social interactions in which individuals use positioning strategies to articulate or negotiate a sense of self in relation to some kind of other. These strategies are typically enacted in more or less symmetrical social contexts such as everyday conversation, a dialogical form of interaction which affords the participants reciprocal opportunities to occupy or resist particular positions and in doing so to claim, impose, accept or contest particular identities. However, a similar process may also take place in less symmetrical interactions such as interviews, in which one participant, facilitated and supported by the other, has privileged access to the floor and is encouraged to use the opportunity to build an account of a particular aspect of their life: to ‘weave a complex subjectivity from the warp of informative answers to [our] interview questions and the weft of narratives of personal experience’ (Lefkowitz 2004: 23). This kind of interview is used widely in different academic disciplines (see 2.4 below) to elicit a particular type of narrative variously referred to as life stories or life histories: Life stories express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way. They are also one very important means by which we communicate this sense of self and negotiate it with others. Further, we use these stories to claim or negotiate group membership and to demonstrate that we are in fact worthy members of those groups, understanding and properly following their moral standards. Finally, life stories touch on the widest of social constructions, since they make presuppositions about what can be taken as expected, what the norms are, and what common or special belief systems can be used to establish coherence. (Linde 1993: 3) The language (auto)biographies on which Chapters 5 and 6 will focus are, in turn, a particular kind of life story, constructed principally by individual interviewees but in collaboration with a researcher, in which the narrators reflect on their experiences with language in the course of their lifetimes and use this reflection as a focused way of organising their personal history (see Franceschini and Mieczinokowski 2004) . These language biographies are therefore also a special kind of discourse on language in two senses, which we shall explore in turn in Chapters 5 and 6. First, as a personal travelogue through space and time they create a diachronic dimension of language use by drawing on individual and collective resources of memory and projecting past experiences onto present circumstances (and

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in some cases into the future). They give voice to individuals affected by social change and allow them to transform their experience into stories that build ‘story worlds’, or ‘storied worlds’, (Schiffrin 1996, 2002) within which they can assemble disparate fragments of memory into a more or less coherent and continuous account or version of their lives and construct a sense of self (see Chapter 5). In this way, Bamberg et al. (2007: 5) argue, narrative functions as the glue that enables human life to transcend the natural incoherence and discontinuity of the unruly everyday . . . by imposing a point of origin and an orientation toward closure, and thereby structuring the otherwise meaningless into a meaningful life. It is ‘a way of using language . . . to imbue life events with a temporal and logical order, to demystify them and establish coherence across past, present, and as yet unrealised experience’ (Ochs and Capps 2001: 2). Such ‘memory narratives’ are therefore an opportunity to reinterpret the past from the perspective of the present, but they may also, as we shall see in Chapter 5, offer an opportunity to revisit the past in order to recreate or reclaim something that has been lost or removed. A life story is thus ‘more than a recital of events’ (Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992: 8–9), a simple chronicle, for although temporal ordering is an essential element of composing a story (De Fina 2003: 11) achieving coherence and continuity entails a substantial editorial process in which ‘events are selected, compressed, shaped, recreated and reconstructed for the occasion of the telling’ (Cortazzi 2001: 388–9), so that every story is an interpretation of experience. Secondly, it follows from this first point that these language biographies are a ‘privileged locus for the negotiation of identities’ (De Fina et al. 2006: 16), and a form of ‘situated discursive practice’ (De Fina 2003: 5) which gives individuals an opportunity to process and develop personal identities ‘online’ (Georgakopolou 2007), from a contemporary perspective in which the relationships between different language forms – in our case, (varieties of) German on the one hand and Hungarian and Czech on the other – have been recontextualised in relation to changed social, political and economic conditions (see Chapter 6). Telling these stories is, then, a form of writing history ‘from below’ (Finnegan 1997: 74–5); however, through reading them we acquire not a cumulative history of a particular language or languages but rather a set of reflective accounts of how people choose to make language relevant in their construction of their place in the world. Our narratives provide support for a developmental view of self- or identity-formation that is articulated in part in the course of biographical composition, but our analysis will combine features that are brought about in the narrative texts themselves and features that are drawn into the texts from a wider range of discourses. For although life stories are a site in which identity work can be done, the processes of creating coherence and

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of identity-formation are not entirely ‘locally managed’ within the telling of the story but depend to some extent on the knowledge of ideas, beliefs and conventions that exist outside the speech event and so ‘envelope’ it (De Fina 2006: 353–4; Linde 1993: 19). While our attention will be focused on these highly personalised narratives, therefore, we will also have to take account of the fact that both the events which are narrated and the telling of these events in the narratives themselves are embedded in a broader matrix of social and political processes and of other discourses which leave their trace on individual stories, creating intertextual relationships and thereby marking the historicity of each text (De Fina 2003: 28–30, 42–4; De Fina et al. 2006: 11). This contextualising corpus includes at least two other kinds of narrative. On the one hand, there are what Baynham (2006: 382) refers to as ‘generic narratives’, stories of repeated events or habitual actions affecting a whole social group, which are typically told by people who can claim a ‘publicspeaking position’ as a voice representing others (for example, officials in the Cultural Association of Germans in the Czech Republic or the Office for National and Ethnic Minorities in Hungary). On the other hand, there are the ‘grand’ or ‘master’ narratives, the ‘larger public narratives and collective memories’ (Armbruster and Meinhof 2005: 44) of the history of ‘Germans’ and their experiences in central Europe, which are established in the canon of national stories in the region and act as a reference point in the construction of individual stories. The individual narratives are therefore not completely unique because they draw on a ‘general store of stories’ (Finnegan 1997: 92–3) about the community or society in which they are set and, directly or indirectly, they relate to and depend on the wider scale narratives towards which narrators position themselves and the discourses in which these are rooted (De Fina and Baynham 2005b: 4). One pervasive set of discourses that feeds into and conditions individual responses to encounters with language has to do with language policy, to which we now turn. Language policy discourses and the performance of identity Policy decisions, in whatever field of social activity, are typically considered to be (properly) performed on a higher plane than that on which individual actions occur. We all undertake particular actions every day, with or without authorisation from another source, but only some of us are in a position to devise policies, and these are intended either to enable or to constrain the individual actions of others. Policies are therefore directive, in that they are designed to influence behaviour, and directional, in that they flow from a body with more authority to one with less. The extent to which the intended effects of policies are actually achieved is, of course, very variable: they may or may not be implemented effectively, and they may or may not be translated into the forms of behaviour foreseen by their authors (see, for example, Wright 2004 on the limits of the power of governments and other agencies to

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control the spread of English as a lingua franca). Nevertheless, the enactment of policy is seen as dependent on the power of an agency or organisation – whether voluntarily ceded by the majority of a society or seized without general consent – to condition or even determine the way the rest of us lead our lives. However, the emphasis on a one-way flow in the relationship between policy and action neglects the capacity and the desire of individuals to make their own arrangements in terms of the conduct of their lives, and the emphasis on the outcomes rather than the process of policy-making overlooks both the involvement of particular individuals or groups and the discursive nature of the enterprise. On the one hand, therefore, we need to take account of ways in which language policy operates on many different scales and not exclusively in a linear fashion from the level most distant from the local down to the individual (a case made eloquently and convincingly by the contributors to Canagarajah 2005a). On the other hand, we need to recognise the interconnectedness of these levels, which is brought about by the continuous development of both complementary and conflicting discourses on language, which in turn are constituents of wider discourses on the organisation of social life both within and across national/state boundaries, as well as of the local politics of identity-formation. Our argument here will therefore be based on the premise that language policies cannot be considered in isolation from the discourses in which they are embedded or from the interests of the different groups and individuals who have a stake in the outcome, whether these interests are in the form of political or economic power or of the power to express or situate your self in relation to others (Ricento 2006b: 21). Even where few, if any, external constraints are imposed on our ability to perform identity work in the sense of being at liberty to select one language (variety) rather than another from our available repertoire, this action will have the potential to create meaning only if its performance is recognised as a deliberate and non-arbitrary choice. In other words, if my choice of Welsh rather than English on any particular occasion is perceived as random and not dictated or influenced by the circumstances, then the action will have no indexical effect: it will not be ‘read’ as a positioning move in terms of, for example, a claim to a particular national or ethnic identity. However, where normative conditions apply, such that Welsh is the prescribed or preferred – or indeed dis-preferred – language in a given setting, then my choice is likely to be seen as an ‘act of identity’ (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). When they are repeated or become habitual, individual choices that are conditioned in this way by knowledge of distinctive non-linguistic associations with different language forms may be considered as social practices: actions that are not idiosyncratic or capricious but rather conform to a convention of some kind and are understood as such. At the same time, the performance of these practices may then be considered the outcome of a personal policy decision: I have chosen to act in a

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certain way in order to achieve a certain effect or aim. Policy-making in this case is therefore an individual matter, and to the extent that I am free to act in this way I am able to show that I am not at the mercy of other policy-makers, even if my actions contravene or conflict with policy decisions arrived at and promulgated by some higher, public authority. Of course, flouting authoritatively sanctioned linguistic conventions or rules may have more serious consequences in some situations than in others: for example, the use of French inscriptions on gravestones in Alsace during the German occupation in the Second World War was a punishable offence, as was speaking German in the street in Czechoslovakia in the early post-war years, whereas the use of a non-standard German variety in a university lecture in Germany today might merely be considered as a solecism or curious personal quirk. However, regardless of their outcomes, policy decisions – whether at the level of the individual or of an agency invested with official authority – are made in relation to situations in which more than one option is at least theoretically available; and where the alternative options are associated with competing (social) interests, language policy decisions can be construed as language ideological acts. If this is the case, then policy texts should be seen not merely as sets of measures or proposals for handling language problems but, as Canagarajah (2006: 155, citing Moore 1996) argues, as ideological discourses, or in our terms as discourses on language. From this perspective, the content of policy texts cannot be separated from the web of discourses in which the texts are embedded or be read in isolation from the historical, social and political conditions in which they are drafted, debated and developed (Spolsky 2004: 6–7, 14–15). Nor, however, should an emphasis on discursive practices and effects distract us from the role of policy-makers as ‘ideology brokers’ (Blommaert 1999b: 9): policies, after all, do not write themselves or emerge of their own accord from a vortex of discursive activity. Language policies at the macro-level are often proposed as practical solutions to practical problems in the organisation of public affairs and framed in terms of the efficient management of resources, that is, as an aspect of governance. But while this may be the overt or explicit justification for public language policies, they are also – if in general only implicitly – directed towards the regulation or regimentation of public behaviour at the microlevel, that is, as an aspect of what Foucault (1991) refers to as governmentality (see Pennycook 2006: 64–5). The question, then, is not simply about the distribution of languages across domains of use (Spolsky 2004: 42–56) – who uses which language to whom, when and why? – but about the conditions for determining this distribution – who is permitted or required to speak which language where and when, and who has the authority to decide? – and about its consequences. Complementary discourses of rights and obligations, and the policies to which they give rise, have increasingly become interwoven in recent years (see, for example, May 2001; Nic Craith 2006; Ricento 2006a; Spolsky 2004), as debates around linguistic imperialism and the politicisation

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of language spread from powerful western states have collided with debates on sociolinguistic effects of migration into and through these same states. Proponents of linguistic (human) rights seek to extend the limits of what is permissible in terms of language use in public contexts, demanding both freedom from the imposition of prescribed language norms and freedom to exercise choice in linguistic interaction (see, for example, Wright 2004: 189 ff; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994). Their opponents contend precisely that tighter limits must be set on the diversity of language options in public life (some would even say in private life too) to promote social integration and cohesion through communion in a single ‘common’ language (for a discussion of these issues, see May 2001). Both sets of discourses – on rights and on obligations – clearly touch on questions of identity and belonging, as they compete with each other for influence in staking out the scope for negotiation available for individuals and groups, but both are therefore also forms of intervention in the sociolinguistic ordering of societies (see again Spolsky 2004: 8, and also Hornberger 2006). The question, then, is at which social levels language rights and obligations are determined. Some would argue that the effects – whatever their origin or mechanisms – of globalised patterns of production and consumption on the one hand, and of the concentration of power in international financial and political organisations on the other, have resulted in the eliding of the power of individual states to determine their own political and economic course, and that this in turn has restricted their independent capacity to fix social policy, including therefore language policy (see Coupland, forthcoming). However, while language policy in the European context has been developed in complex and extensive ways in the course of the last thirty years – through legislation and strategic planning of the Council of Europe, the Commission and Parliament of the European Union, and the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) (see Wright 2004: 191–200) – the framing and enactment of policy is still very much at the level of, or in relation to, the state; the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, for example, sets out wide-ranging principles on minority linguistic rights but depends for its effectiveness on acceptance, ratification and implementation by and within individual states (Grin 2003). Thus, strategies have been developed at supra-state level within the EU for the promotion of linguistic diversity or, more recently, of multilingualism4 but the responsibility for the translation of these strategies into policies is delegated or ceded to the member states. Member states, in turn, generate their own responses to these European initiatives and to rapidly shifting social and demographic patterns in different ways. On the one hand, for example, German and Austrian domestic social and educational policies heavily emphasise the use of German by regulating language use in public institutions (especially in schools) and stipulating requirements for linguistic proficiency in conditions for naturalisation and citizenship (see Stevenson

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2006; Stevenson and Schanze 2009), while their foreign policies, on the other hand, incorporate strategies for the promotion of German alongside other languages in the context of the overall framework of European multilingualism, and these in turn intersect in various ways with domestic and foreign policies of neighbouring states. Our discussion of language policy in Chapter 4 will therefore focus on the ‘layered simultaneity’ (see above) that is characteristic of European language policy discourses, operating at the same time but at different levels and connecting with other discourses, both on language and on other aspects of social life (Ricento 2006b: 15). One outcome of the principle of subsidiarity in the EU has, then, in many cases been a clash between incompatible ideologies of diversity at the suprastate level and homogeneity at the state level. Linguistic nationalism, in its strongest and most virulent form an equation of language, people and territory (Mar-Molinero 2000; May 2001; Millar 2005), may have become untenable for moral and political reasons in the late twentieth century, but monolingual ideologies that erase the prevalence of multilingual practices have continued to sustain discourses of national identity that have resisted the tides of social change sweeping across Europe, as elsewhere in the world, with complex surges and currents of migration (Mar-Molinero and Stevenson 2006b). While politicians and media commentators agonise forlornly over ways of (re)discovering the mythical essence of, say, Britishness or Germanness in the face of what is often perceived as an assault on ‘national values’ or a dilution of a ‘traditional way of life’, national language ideologies have been subtly reconfigured to shift the emphasis from defining the ethnos to defining the demos (see Sandford 2000), so that ‘speaking English/German’ is no longer (merely) emblematic of ‘being British/German’ but a key means of performing ‘active British/German citizenship’. So as the primary site for creating linguistic regimes, the nation has been undermined and destabilised by recent demographic trends but the state – in a complex matrix with suprastate organisations and civil society at the sub-state level – has taken over this role (for detailed discussions of this shift, see, for example, Blommaert 2003, 2005, 2006; Hüppauf 2004; Maurais 2003; Nic Craith 2006; Wright 2004). Place, space and time We have already referred repeatedly to notions of place, space and time in relation to other concepts, categories and variables, and we return to them now in the final part of this section in order to highlight their importance in binding together our analyses of the different discourses on language that will be the subject of Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Between them, these three terms represent the two inseparable dimensions of spatiality and temporality that create the conditions in which meanings can be made through the (re)production and dissemination of discourses on language. Place is important both in discourses on language policy and in language biographies: on the one hand,

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policies are conceived, designed and implemented in relation to geographically and politically demarcated locations or territories, and on the other hand, memories of linguistic practices and encounters with language are rooted in indexical associations with particular places (Georgakopolou 2007: 14). Space is understood here not as the gaps or interstices between places but rather as the transformation of place from a static physical location into a dynamic social scene of (potential) action. This is the distinction drawn by De Certeau (1988, cited by Baynham 2006 [2003]: 180), in which place refers to the physical distribution of objects, and space to a sphere of activity conducted by historical subjects; thus, ‘space is a practiced place’ (emphasis in the original) and so, for example, ‘the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers’.5 In this sense, space is not simply ‘there’; it is created through the actions and interactions of social actors and forms an arena in which social meanings are negotiated: [E]veryday life . . . involves a negotiation of meaning in ‘space’ from the structures and practices of ‘place’. People structure spaces through their symbolic practices, and spaces structure people’s sense of identity by insisting upon a particular frame within which symbolic practice unfolds. Such recursive narratives of space-making accumulate over time, generating dialogic webs of reference and comprising a community’s historical memory. (Lefkowitz 2004: 32) Finally, time is important not only as a means of tracing the sequence of events but also as the principal tool for structuring accounts of events: temporal ordering is what makes an assemblage of happenings into a story (see above, p. 27). But time is crucial, too, together with place and space, for our understanding and interpretation of events: as Baynham (2006 [2003]: 188) again argues, our task is to develop an approach that captures ‘the intricate relationships between space, time and agency, through which historical time and social space create opportunities, moments where certain kinds of agency become possible’ or, we might add, impossible. Such an approach would construe central Europe not simply as an historically volatile geo-political region but, as Gal (2006: 24) proposes in relation to Europe as a whole, in terms of Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the ‘chronotope’: ‘a socio-symbolically and culturally mediated, active synthesis of time and space’ (Georgakopolou 2007: 127) that defines and shapes what we have called the discourse world within which both language policies and language biographies are devised. Using language can be regarded as one form of social behaviour with the capacity to create spaces at particular historical moments, and language policy can be a tool for opening up such spaces for some people and closing them for others by prescribing which languages can be used in particular circumstances and which ones cannot be practised openly. These spaces then represent the parameters within which people can seek to enact their

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identities. Alternatively, a space may be created through the act of assuming or negotiating an identity by adopting particular linguistic practices. As we shall see, language policies promoting or proscribing the German language have at various times created, expanded and diminished spaces in eastern central Europe for using (forms of) German as part of a repertoire of linguistic resources available for identity construction. We shall also see that while the historical trajectory of change has shown a general decline in the number of German-speakers in this region, the nature and quality of the public space available for the use of German has been sustained through changes in the political economy. In the following chapters, we shall therefore try to map out the itinerary of developments in ‘space-time’ of language policies in central Europe with regard to the German language, and explore how (some) people locate themselves within that itinerary and how they narrate their own life stories in relation to it.

2.4 Questions of scale and the interconnectedness of discourses on language: methodological implications The theoretical discussion in the previous section leads inevitably to questions of scale and of methodology: scale because the complexity and interconnectedness of the different conceptualisations of linguistic forms and activities or behaviours render a simple micro/macro dichotomy inoperable and redundant other than as a heuristic device (and even then only if understood as defining the poles of a continuum: see, for example, Blommaert et al. 2005; Collins and Slembrouck 2005); methodology because no single approach seems adequate to the task of understanding the functions of language in individual and social life with which we are concerned here. We therefore adopt a predominantly qualitative approach because we believe this is necessary to penetrate and re-separate the homogenised mixture of intentions, effects and actions that emerge from quantitative analyses of language policy outcomes and other – some more, some less, directed – social processes. For example, the measurement of ‘ethnolinguistic vitality’ relies heavily on extrapolation from data as disparate as language policy legislation, statistics on language learning, on the production and consumption of cultural artefacts such as media products and folk festivals, and on internet usage as well as self-reported language use (Stevenson 1997). Evidence such as this is not difficult to assemble and on this kind of basis, as will become clear in Chapter 3, the contemporary story of German in central Europe can be told quite economically in terms of language shift. But as will also become clear, this story is complicated on the one hand by the unique position of German in the wider region as simultaneously the dominant language of three influential states, including the major economic power Germany, with the largest number of ‘native speakers’6 in the EU (see Eurobarometer 2005),

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a language of wider communication across the region and the heritage language of dispersed ethnolinguistic communities, and on the other hand by the tensions between the hegemonic and iconic standard variety and the doubly marginalised local non-standard varieties (see Chapters 4 and 6; also May 2006: 260, and more generally May 2001). This does not mean, however, that quantitative studies are irrelevant to the questions we are seeking to address here, but rather that they are prone to uncertainty because of problems of definition and of inconsistent methods (for example, different kinds of question are asked in different surveys: see Spolsky 2004) and because they are incomplete and provisional in terms of their contribution to explanation and understanding. They may reveal part of the story of what has happened to the German language and its speakers but not all of it, they leave the reasons for what has happened largely open to conjecture, and they lack the subtlety of qualitative research conducted from an emic, or insider’s, perspective on the experience of social change. So we will review the evidence from quantitative studies and then ask what kinds of question it answers and what kinds of question it poses. We will then go on to explore some of these unanswered questions through the study of textual data of various kinds, which inevitably will still do no more than cast some light where there would otherwise be shade, but we hope this will suffice to justify the approach and encourage further research. The nature of the data The story we aim to tell in the following chapters inevitably owes much to the work of other researchers, and we acknowledge that debt collectively here and specifically at particular points in the subsequent discussion. However, our account is based predominantly on the material we have gathered ourselves in the course of researching the topic, a process which took place in two phases: first, in a small-scale study in 1994–5, and second in a more extensive project conducted ten years later between 2004 and 2007. The data that was collected in the course of these projects and on which the present study draws consists broadly of two categories of material: policy-related data and personal interviews.7 The policy-related data, in turn, is derived from three principal types of material: first, documentary sources, including statistical data, policy statements and strategies published by supra-national bodies (such as the European Commission and the Council of Europe), by departments of national governments and their agencies (such as the German Foreign Ministry, the Hungarian Office for National and Ethnic Minorities, and the Goethe-Institut), and by non-governmental organisations (such as the National Association of Germans in Bohemia and Moravia); second, texts published by individual policy-makers, such as media articles and speeches; and third, semi-structured interviews with policy-makers. In our discussion,

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we will draw mainly on the first two types of material, most of which is in the public domain and therefore generally accessible. The policy-makers whom we interviewed gave freely of their time and provided us with numerous insights into the complex and often conflicting issues involved in their work, but given the sensitive nature of their positions they were not always willing to be identified or quoted, and so we have drawn on this third type of source more indirectly in terms of ideas and questions to explore in relation to published policy-related material and to personal biographical interviews. Collecting the narrative data The personal interviews were conducted in two phases. In the first, exploratory, phase in 1994–5 twenty-five interviews were carried out in four locations (Prague and Liberec in the Czech Republic, and Budapest and Pécs in Hungary); discussion and preliminary evaluation of this research can be found in Stevenson (1997, 2000a, 2000b). In the second phase, fifty-seven interviews were carried out with over seventy participants in eight locations (Prague, Liberec, Ústí nad Labem and Plzeň in the Czech Republic, and Budapest, Sopron, Veszprém and Pécs in Hungary). The selection of locations, all of which are in the western half of the respective countries, was made largely on the basis of the distribution of German-speakers (see the map on p. xi and the discussion of demographic distribution in Chapter 3). Within each location, participants were identified on a conventional basis for this kind of study: individuals were contacted through personal connections of the researchers and asked to act as gate-keepers to provide access and introductions to potential interview partners in their local community.8 We recorded interviews with all such individuals who were willing to take part, and although some had a great deal more to say than others in relation to our particular topic, the material we gathered provided a very substantial amount of data. As is inevitably the case with qualitative studies of this kind, no claims can be made as to the representative nature of the set of participants who were chosen in this way, but we took great care to monitor the balance in terms of key variables such as gender, age and occupation. There were approximately equal numbers of male and female participants, and numbers were fairly evenly spread across age ranges between twenty and seventy-five, although our discussion will draw more heavily on those in the middle and older generations as they have the greatest breadth of experience through the time-span across the fulcrum of 1989. Their occupations were highly diverse, representing – in a non-statistical sense, of course – a reasonable crosssection of the local communities, including, for example: wine-grower, local historian, factory worker, priest/cleric, journalist, community representative, lawyer, librarian, technician, industrial chemist, tour guide, vet, school and

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university student, teacher, small-business owner, NGO employee, engineer, clerical worker, manager of cultural organisation, community centre employee. Most of the participants were born and brought up in the country in which they now live (often in the same town), but a few had spent some time abroad in neighbouring states such as the GDR and Austria, and others had migrated from these countries. The majority of the interviews were conducted on a one-to-one basis with the researcher, but some were in self-selected pairs or small groups (for example, a married couple, father and daughter, close friends or colleagues) and in several cases small focus-group discussions were recorded (with teachers and students in a school, members of a community centre, a group of university students). All of them knew that we were interested in the experience of people who would categorise themselves as German-speakers and/ or ethnic Germans and we asked them simply to talk about their lives. All at some point introduced or alluded to questions of ethnicity, which gave us the opportunity to ask about language use. The particular topics on which we wanted to focus were therefore ‘locally situated’ (Schiffrin 1996: 191–2) within more general discourses in the overall flow of their narratives, and their language biographies were embedded within broader stories covering a sometimes extraordinary wealth of topics and experiences. The interviews were all conducted entirely in German, but while the researchers (both the native speaker and the two non-native speakers) spoke standard German, the other participants used a mixture of local dialect forms and standard German (the latter most often learned at school rather than acquired under natural, untutored conditions). One consequence of this in some interviews was a kind of ‘communicative ballet’, in which the researcher and the other participant(s) had to find ways of keeping in step with each other. Contrasting linguistic behaviours were therefore a feature not only of the narratives produced by the participants but also of the interviews in which they were composed. However, our interest in the interviews in the present context is not as data for the analysis of actual sociolinguistic behaviour: while they do provide material for the study of sociolinguistic practices in interviews (such as code-choice and -switching), we treat the interviews here as co-constructed narratives (see Meinhof and Galasiński 2005) and are interested in them in terms of the events and experiences the participants choose to relate, the ways they tell them and how they use them to (re)present an image of their selves in relation to others and to the changing conditions under which they have lived their lives. In this sense, our orientation is primarily towards what Denzin (1989) refers to as ‘text reality’ (ways in which events are narrated by the participants), rather than as ‘subject reality’ (how events were experienced by the participants) or as ‘life reality’ (how events were), although it is not always possible to maintain a firm distinction between these three objects of research (see also Nekvapil 2004; Pavlenko 2007).

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All three researchers involved in the interviews were outsiders in the sense of having no personal connections with the specific locations or with the countries in which the participants lived. Most of the participants were curious about our motivation for studying the topic we were researching and often puzzled about why researchers from a British university should be interested in their stories. To some extent, therefore, we as researchers were included in the category of ‘others’ who were positioned in particular ways by the participants in their narratives (for example, in their references to places and in their assumptions about knowledge that might or might not be shared) and towards whom they positioned themselves (see Baynham 2006: 385–6; Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2005: 62–3). There is no reliable way of determining the effects of this process on the ways in which their stories were told but we clearly need to be aware of this and of the fact that individual participants may have used their story-telling moment ‘strategically’ in order to present a favourable image of themselves to a wider audience (see De Fina 2003: 26; Lefkowitz 2004: 121). In virtually all cases, the participants spoke very freely, in a few instances apparently eager to air specific grievances (such as a hotel owner in Liberec who talked at length about his claims of having been expropriated under the communist regime), but for the most part appreciating the rare opportunity to be invited to talk about their lives as a legitimate topic and a story worth telling. In some interviews, especially with older people, where the stories touched on painful memories the telling became an openly emotional experience. Interpreting the narrative data All of these observations on the circumstances and the nature of the elicitation of life stories in interviews make it clear that great care is required in interpreting them. Interpretation of narrative content is always a doubly selective process (Cortazzi 2001: 387–8; Treichel 2004: 49) and this applies at two levels: first with the narrators, whose stories represent a choice of what to tell and what not to tell, and whose organisation of selected events and experiences offers a particular reading of their lives (see also Mishler 2006: 37); second with the researchers, whose discussion and analysis are based on decisions about which passages of which interviews to include and about how to arrange them in relation to each other, which again presents a possible reading of these lives, which may or may not coincide with that preferred by the narrators. Interpreting life stories is therefore a process fraught with uncertainty, and is also a process ‘imbued with deep ethical significance, . . . an act drenched in the possibility of power, abuse and exploitation’ (Plummer 2001: 403). So even though we have taken great care not only to anonymise the participants in this research but to make it impossible to identify them through indirect evidence in the content of the passages we reproduce from their interviews, we must recognise that we are exercising a

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significant responsibility in delivering for public consumption a highly processed, recontextualised and – through its publication – enduring version of something that was said spontaneously and in the privacy and intimacy of a conversation. Analysing the data Our research was not conceived as an exercise in the application of a particular methodology or model. The nature of our research questions dictates a more eclectic approach that draws on a number of different traditions and seeks to combine them in ways that will illuminate the issues and bring out the interconnectedness of the different aspects of our theme (see Blommaert 2005: 5–16 on ‘principled eclecticism’). Exploring discourses on language in central Europe – focusing, on the one hand, on policy discourses that condition patterns of language use and, on the other hand, on narratives of experience with language conditioned by changing social and political regimes – calls for an approach that can accommodate different kinds of data and is sensitive both to the local features of textual production – what is ‘going on’ within the texts? – and to the wider contexts of discursive activity within which texts are produced – what are the historical and contemporary factors that constrain and determine how we think and talk about language? The theoretical orientations outlined in this chapter provide a framework for a critical analysis of discourses on language as manifested in texts dealing with language policy (Chapter 4), and for an interpretive analysis of discourses on language in (auto)biographical narratives as life stories, in which individuals create a sense of self (resigned, resistant, renascent) in relation to particular language ecologies or regimes (Chapter 5) and in which they negotiate social identities in terms of different possibilities of belonging (Chapter 6). In order to realise these complementary analyses, we will draw selectively on concepts and procedures from a range of disciplines, in particular from critical traditions in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, narrative theory and positioning theory; some of these have been discussed in this chapter, others will be introduced and elaborated in the course of the analytical discussion.

2.5 Summary and conclusions We have set out in this chapter to assemble a range of theoretical ideas, conceptual frameworks and methodological procedures that we believe are particularly well suited to the task we have set ourselves in the analysis of what we are calling discourses on language in social life in the context of contemporary central Europe. While our indebtedness to several scholars in particular – above all, Jan Blommaert, Susan Gal and Anna De Fina – is

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already clear in the preceding pages, we acknowledge here and throughout the rest of the book the influence of many others whose work has shaped our thinking. We are not seeking to propose a new theoretical model or to design an innovative methodology. However, by blending a range of wellestablished approaches whose importance and usefulness have been attested in countless previous studies, we hope to make an original contribution both to our particular research topic and to the constantly expanding and increasingly complex field of research in which it is situated. In the chapters that follow, we shall draw on the ideas outlined here to tell our story of language contact and the politics of language in central Europe. Fundamental to our discussion will be three related premises. The first premise is that any form of explicitly articulated engagement with language use – whether in the formulation of strategic objectives and policies or in the expression of reflections on personal experience – constitutes a participation in a discursive process that extends far beyond the here-and-now of the particular utterance or act. The second premise is that, whatever form such contributions make and at whatever level or scale of social organisation, they constitute actions that are both individual and social in their production and their import. The third premise is that such actions are never taken in vacuo but rather are contingent on the social conditions in which they are carried out and on the historical conditions that precede their enactment and are motivated by particular sets of beliefs and values. Recall Woolard’s broad definition of the study of language ideologies (cited above, pp. 15–16) as being concerned with ‘representations, whether explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of language and human beings in a social world’: in this sense, all of the social actors who populate the pages of the following chapters are engaged, in one way or another, in language ideological work. It is worth reiterating here also the four key characteristics of language forms that we have isolated in justification of a language ideological framework: their materiality, relativity, historicity and indexicality. In our analysis of discourses on language policy and of personal narratives on experiences with language we will try to show in some detail how the differential evaluation of particular language varieties as both material and symbolic resources is inextricably rooted in the political and communicative environment in which they are used and observed. We will also explore how the different ways in which these language varieties index (or are taken to index) social, ethnic and national categories contribute to processes of individual and social identity-formation, both in language policy discourses and in language (auto)biographies. Underpinning these explorations will be the interconnectedness of language, time, place and space: in each of the next four chapters we will consider ways in which different kinds of space have been created at particular times and in particular places to enable or constrain the appeal to particular language forms in the building of senses of self and community.

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Notes 1. For critical surveys on the current consensus on identities as non-essential, multiple and semantically ‘open’ categories, see, for example, Benwell and Stokoe 2006: Chapter 1; Block 2006a, b; Blommaert 2005; De Fina 2003: 15–26. 2. There is a similar emphasis on action and process in Blommaert’s (2005: 205–6) distinction between ‘ascribed, categorical identities’ and ‘achieved, inhabitable identities’. 3. Discussing this point, Lefkowitz (2004: 88) argues for the importance of distinguishing between identity and discourses of identity: Identity itself is abstract, provisional, internal, and individual. Discourses of identity, on the other hand, are concrete, durable, overt, and public. What being Palestinian in Israel means to an individual is a very different matter than what ‘Palestinian’ stands for in Israeli discourse. Identity is a process; discourses of identity are projects. This is a conceptually important and analytically useful distinction, to which we would also subscribe, but it must be recognised that the durability of discourses of identity is determined by the degree of stability over time of the social conditions in which they are articulated. On the one hand, the persistence of what ‘Palestinian’ stands for in Israeli discourses of identity is attributable to the unchanging nature of social relations between Palestinians and Israelis and of political conditions in the Middle East. On the other hand, a central premise of our argument is that discourses of (language and) identity in central Europe have been subject to change due to the social and political transformations of the last sixty years in this region. 4. See, for example, the succession of ‘communications’ from the European Commission on Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity (2003), http://ec.europa.eu/education/doc/official/keydoc/actlang/act_ lang_en.pdf; A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism (2005), http:// europa.eu/languages/servlets/Doc?id=913; Multilingualism: An Asset for Europe and a Shared Commitment (2008), http://ec.europa.eu/education/ languages/pdf/com/2008_0566_en.pdf; and the Final Report of the High Level Group on Multilingualism (2007), http://ec.europa.eu/education/ policies/lang/doc/multireport_en.pdf. 5. We cite De Certeau’s definitions here because they accord well with our own conceptions and with the ways we use the terms in this book. There are, of course, other ways of understanding place and space; for example, Blommaert (2005: 222) takes the converse position: ‘Space can be filled with all kinds of social, cultural, epistemic, and affective attributes. It then

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becomes “place”, a particular space on which senses of belonging, property rights, and authority can be projected.’ 6. Whatever that may mean: the concept of the ‘native speaker’ has long been contested in applied linguistics and we will not rehearse the arguments here (see Davies 2003 for a critical discussion). The importance of the statistical claim reported here is the credence attached to it in the political discourse of the EU and therefore the value ascribed to the language and its speakers, not the academic judgement of linguists on the validity of the term. 7. Patrick Stevenson directed both projects; Katharina Hall conducted fieldwork on the first study, Jenny Carl was co-researcher on the second study and carried out most of the fieldwork. 8. We would like to acknowledge with gratitude the help of many friends and colleagues in our search for participants, especially Csaba Földes, Zsuzsanna Gerner, Dorit Hekel, Milan Jeřabek, Volker Menke, Kerstin Mohrdiek, Jiří Nekvapil, Attila Németh, Lukas Nowotny, Vaclav Poštolka, István Schneider, Julia Schweiger, Tamah Sherman.

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Sociolinguistic histories and the footprint of German in eastern central Europe

3.1 Introduction In this chapter we will construct a historical context for the study of language contact and multilingualism in eastern central Europe, with a particular focus on Hungary and the Czech Republic. Our aim is to show what social and cultural spaces language policies and ideologies in Hungary and in what is now the Czech Republic have created in the past and for whom, and how their histories relate to the wider context of historic developments in the central European region. The key questions here are: which languages were important at what time and why, and what was the position of the German language within the multilingual and multiethnic context of the wider region? By focusing on the changing position of, and experiences with, the German language we can map out the changing relationships between the German language and language ideologies relating to Czech and Hungarian that emerged in the region in the nineteenth century, as well as the key developments that defined crucial points in history, which in turn would inform future policies. Examples of these developments include the collapse of Communism and its influence on foreign language learning, the impact of National Socialism and the Second World War, the aftermath of the First World War, as well as the emergence of independent nation-states and the break-up of multinational and multilingual empires. These developments will eventually form a trajectory across social and cultural spaces that were ‘inhabited’ by the German language and its speakers and which can be traced back through history. Our aim here is not to present a case of retrospective determinism in the sense that we believe that any of these developments were ‘natural’ or inevitable. Rather we will attempt to show the interconnectedness of these developments and how they helped prepare the ground for the present situation with regard to language policies in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Moreover, we will map out the historical topoi with reference to the German language in general and German-speakers in particular, which will serve as a grounding for our discussion both of policy discourses in Chapter 4 and of narratives of individual interviewees in Chapters 5 and 6.

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For this purpose, we use the different layers of time-scales according to Blommaert and Braudel (see Chapter 2) as a heuristic tool. The key stages in the designation of spaces for different languages or their respective varieties develop as changes in conjunctural time; the changes in systems of governance after the end of the First and Second World Wars are good examples of this. However, these transformations are often triggered by changes in event time that can contribute to the unravelling of the existing socio-political and economic order. The 1941 language census in Hungary and its disastrous consequences for German-speakers (again, see Chapter 2) as well as the so-called ‘velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia in 1989 are cases in point, whereby the latter ended decades of restrictions on what languages could be spoken or learnt and by whom and helped bring about a system where people could opt to learn and speak an almost unprecedented variety of languages. The ultimate purpose of this survey is to achieve an overview of long-term developments – the longue durée – which will help us demonstrate the magnitude of historical changes in language use that happened roughly speaking since the mid-nineteenth century. The significance of this demonstration lies in the fact that during this time the order of what languages are normally spoken by people in eastern central Europe has been completely reversed. In the midto late nineteenth century it was normal for many people, especially ethnic German populations, to have German as their first language – this includes both standard German and their respective local or regional Germanic dialect – and then acquire a knowledge of Czech or Hungarian later in life depending on their social background and where they lived. Today it is the norm to grow up with the respective national language as your first language, with possible vestiges of local dialects if they are still spoken by older members of the family, and to learn standard German later in life, if at all, at school or university. These sea changes happened while – or possibly because – all the different systems of governance since the mid-nineteenth century were characterised by a special, political relationship between the concept of nation and the respective national language, an ideology which emerged during the eighteenth century enlightenment but was most notably represented and publicised by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, and which came to influence national ideologies all over Europe, not just in the German lands (for more detail on Herder’s philosophy in this respect, see Herder 1770/1966 and Gardt 2000a: 192–4; on Herder’s impact on Hungarian language ideology, see Maitz 2005: 78–9). We begin our discussion with a brief description of the current situation of German language contact and language learning in Hungary and the Czech Republic, before tracing the historical developments that led to this situation. Rather than giving an exhaustive historical account, we will show certain patterns in the contact between different linguistic groups, when they emerged and why some of them have proven to be very persistent, before giving a detailed account of contemporary policies, legal and institutional

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frameworks and corresponding statistics. We will include in the historical descriptions both an overview of the situation in the wider central eastern European region and an exploration of the conditions in Hungary and the Czech lands in more detail.

3.2 The present situation In both Hungary and the Czech Republic today the German language is both an important foreign language and a language of a resident national minority. This is also the case in other central European states, especially Poland, Slovakia and Romania, and we will include references to their cases where appropriate. However, even people who declare themselves to be of ethnic German origin in these countries nowadays do not grow up with German, i.e. their local or regional dialect, as their first language, but rather with Hungarian, Czech, etc., and any education they receive in German will take place in standard German (a point we return to in Chapter 4). As a foreign language, German experienced a boom of popularity after the collapse of communism in 1989, when Russian had found ill favour as the language of the former hegemonic power (for Hungary see Hessky 1995: 69 and Földes 2004a: 114; for Czechia see Nekvapil 1997: 1647; for Poland see Galasińska and Krzyżanowski 2009; Jaworska 2009). In the 1990s, it was said that ‘the new political climate and the availability of German satellite TV programs are rapidly transforming German from a language to be forgotten to one that is symbolically perceived as more powerful than the state language, Hungarian’ (Kontra 1996: 1718), and a similar argument could be made about the popularity of German in the Czech Republic. During the communist period, German had been a ‘legitimate’ foreign language in these countries, as it was the official language of a socialist sister state, the GDR, despite the associations with imperialist Germany as well as the experiences with the Habsburg empire and National Socialism. After 1989 it was able to pick up from this status, and the numbers of learners increased dramatically. At the time, many teachers of Russian who were threatened with the loss of their jobs were also retrained as teachers of German, which increased the institutional push for German in the education systems of former Soviet satellite states in central Europe (Eichinger 1995: 57; Hessky 1995: 69). The Russian language had (almost) exclusively filled the space available to foreign languages in eastern central European communist regimes, and after 1989 the rather radical push against Russian left a vacuum that needed to be filled. Due to the historical legacy, German was well placed to occupy this space and, supported by major promotional campaigns by the German and Austrian governments, numbers of learners and teachers rose significantly (as compared to the pre-1989 figures: see Fenyvesi 1998: 153; Nekvapil and Nekula 2006: 314; Jaworska 2009).

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Medgyes and Miklósy (2000), for example, have shown how the numbers of learners of German and English in Hungary filled the vacuum left by the ‘abandoned’ Russian language. In 2000, German was the most popular foreign language in primary schools, due to the educational choices of members of the German minority and because of good relations with Germany and Austria. Whereas in 1989–90 only about 8 per cent of the children learned German and about 5 per cent learned English, already in 1990–1 learners of German exceeded 20 per cent and learners of English reached about 18 per cent. Numbers of learners stabilised in 1993–4, at about 50 per cent for German and 45 per cent for English. The situation at secondary school level, however, is rather different. English has been more popular than German since 1989– 90, with numbers having stabilised at about 48 per cent for English and 38 per cent for German (Medgyes and Miklósy 2000: 190–1). In recent years, the numbers of learners of German have stagnated and in some cases even declined, and the German language has been ousted by English as the most popular foreign language. German is still strong in types of education where at least two foreign languages are compulsory, but English is virtually always the first choice, especially when only one foreign language is required. Table 3.1 shows figures for the Czech Republic, whereas Table 3.2 shows recent figures for Hungary. German is also popular in areas close to the borders with Germany and Austria, where the geographic proximity and increased economic and social contacts seem to provide an incentive, because it is perceived that the knowledge of German would increase opportunities on the labour market (Medgyes and Miklósy 2000: 190; Földes 2003a: 93; Kamusella 2009: 799; on the effect of Euroregions specifically in the Czech Republic see Tišerová 2008: 190; and Černá 2009), which is also the case for Slovakia (Földes 2003b: 17) and Poland (Jaworska 2009). In general, though, German is increasingly competing with French, Spanish and Italian – and recently even Russian – as the ‘first choice of second foreign language’ (Hessky 1995: 69; Povejšil 1996: 1658; Nekvapil and Nekula 2006: 314; Tišerová 2008: 196–7). Table 3.3 shows the increase in numbers of learners of French, Russian and Spanish in Czech secondary schools, which virtually doubled between 2001–2 and 2006–7 compared to the dropping numbers of learners of German shown in Table 3.1. Table 3.4 shows the change of the numbers of learners of French, Russian and other languages in Hungarian secondary schools. Compared with the Czech Republic, the Hungarian trends are not as clear. While the trend in favour of English is obvious the numbers of learners of French are rising only slightly. However, the numbers of learners of German have not dropped as significantly as they have in the Czech Republic, and the numbers of learners of other languages at secondary schools, including Russian, have also fallen in the last decade. This is especially the case in vocational secondary schools where, except English, every foreign language has declined in the same period.

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Table 3.1 Numbers of learners of English and German in the Czech Republic (Figures supplied in 2008 by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic)

2001–2 2006–7

German learnt in primary schools

English learnt in primary schools

German learnt in secondary schools

English learnt in secondary schools

274,522 148,187

456,265 577,936

313,791 276,823

345,752 413,621

Table 3.2 Numbers of learners of English and German in Hungary (Figures supplied in 2009 by the Ministry of Education of Hungary)

2001–2 2006–7

German learnt in primary schools

English learnt in primary schools

German learnt in secondary schools

English learnt in secondary schools

275,652 201,008

26,565 39,792

225,756 207,899

281,510 321,725

Table 3.3 Numbers of learners of other foreign languages in the Czech Republic (Figures supplied in 2008 by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic)

2001–2 2006–7

French

Russian

Spanish

29,908 42,977

7,813 16,191

8,093 17,297

Table 3.4 Numbers of learners of other foreign languages in Hungary (Figures supplied in 2009 by the Ministry of Education in Hungary)

2001–2 2006–7

French

Russian

Other

27,716 27,994

3,839 2,658

37,176 36,550

Today, the cultural space available to foreign languages is much more contested than in the immediate post-1989 years as there is demand for more, different languages and this demand can be met with teaching resources for many more foreign languages than in the past. The English language is the most notable beneficiary of these opportunities and is now the most widely learnt foreign language in eastern central Europe, but the market opportunities also allowed other languages to thrive. The German language remains a

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major player in this market but it is no longer an unquestioned or principal choice for people who choose to learn languages (Maier 1995: 81; Phillipson 2003: 63–7; Phillipson 2007: 67–72; Csizér and Kormos 2008). Nevertheless, the space that is created by – or perhaps for – the practice of the German language is a space for an outside force or agent in the sense that it is a foreign language that is made available and practised by both native people and migrant populations in order to take advantage of labour markets outside Hungary and the Czech Republic as well as opportunities that are created by direct investment by German and Austrian businesses, or by custom arising from tourism from the German-speaking countries (Neustupný and Nekvapil 2003: 211). In the early 1990s, the liberalisation of regulations concerning foreign direct investment allowed, for example, the German company Volkswagen to acquire the Czech car manufacturer Škoda, and Germany became the most important export market for Czech products since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its market (Tišerová 2008: 190). Other joint ventures included collaborations with Siemens and the car manufacturer BMW, not to mention many more smaller cooperations (Nekvapil and Nekula 2006; Nekvapil and Sherman 2009) With German as a minority language, things are slightly different. Again, after 1989 there was a significant expansion of education geared towards members of national minorities, which aims at creating a space for people who are native to this particular geographical and cultural area in eastern central Europe, but who declare themselves as having a different cultural identity from the mainstream national culture of the state in which they live. The legislation concerns all the recognised national minorities in several countries in eastern central Europe, but we shall focus on the German language as an example. As far as teaching German as a minority language in Hungary is concerned, tuition ranges from slightly extended teaching in German as a foreign language to virtually bilingual education with German as a medium of instruction in several subjects as well as lessons in minority history (as an alternative national history) and customs. According to information provided by representatives of the Ministry of Education as well as the Association of Germans in Hungary, members of the minorities are meant to be enabled to obtain an understanding of their particular place in the country’s histories and to have the knowledge and means to express and live their identities, and the aim is to create a space ‘within’ the mainstream national culture for minorities to occupy and also to contribute to the ‘wealth’ of the national culture (for more detail and further references see section 3.8 as well as Chapter 4.4) (Medgyes and Miklósy 2000: 202). The national minorities’ constitutional position therefore is very permissive. It could even be said that declaring a different national identity and seeking education in minority languages is actively promoted among members of national minorities, although there is a difference between the official rhetoric and people’s lived experiences, which

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are subject to noticeable geographic variation (Kontra 1996: 1717). More detail on criticisms voiced by the representatives of German cultural associations in Hungary and Czechia will be given in the discussion of current legal frameworks in section 3.8. However, this space is subverted in two ways. First, the linguistic variety that is used for instruction in German minority education is standard German, which is precisely not the basis of the heritage of German minorities in eastern central Europe. These minorities were historically anchored in their specific local dialects, variants of southern German and/or Austrian dialects, but those varieties that remain as vestiges of earlier forms of German are not represented in education. Secondly, because the tuition takes place in standard German, the extended kind of minority education with bilingual tuition is also very popular among members of the mainstream national cultures in Hungary and Czechia. It is perceived as providing children with a particularly advanced knowledge of the language that is considered to be an extra asset on the labour markets. Yet this is precisely the ‘outside/externalised space’ that German occupies as a foreign language in central Europe. Another problem, or ambiguity, is the actual experience with this branch of education, which is criticised by individuals as well as minority associations because of the restrictions on availability of minority education on the ground both in the Czech Republic and in Hungary. According to interviews with teachers as well as members of the Association of Germans in Hungary, the biggest problem in Hungary is the variable quality of teaching and the availability of qualified teachers and adequate resources to meet the demands for (virtually) bilingual education. While the legislation creates a very open space for national minorities in general, and the German minority in particular, the funds of local education authorities to realise these provisions are often very limited, especially in smaller towns and communities. There are only a few schools in Hungary which are recognised as providers of excellent bilingual education in German, whereas many other schools are unable to offer the same kind of standards. Hence, even though theoretically every child of ethnic German origin has access to this kind of minority education, in real terms access is geographically limited. In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, the issue of access to education in minority languages is a much more fundamental one. Whilst legislation in principle opens this space to children from national minorities, including the German minority (Neustupný and Nekvapil 2003: 224), it also imposes restrictions in the form of minimum numbers of children for classes or even schools with minority education. On a practical level this is understandable as it avoids disproportionate costs for this kind of extended teaching for very small numbers of children and thus relieves the budgets of local education authorities. From the viewpoint of members of the German minority, however, this policy might seem cynical as it effectively prevents them from accessing minority education. The reason for this is that unlike in Hungary,

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where the ethnic German community is – to some extent – still concentrated in particular villages and regions, the residual German minority in the Czech Republic is much smaller and much more geographically dispersed, so that in most locations there are not enough children to form classes in minority education. Moreover, due to the comparatively small numbers and the high degree of geographical dispersion, members of the German minority in the Czech Republic are (perceived to be) more assimilated than their counterparts in Hungary, who have managed to retain a degree of cultural integrity because of their geographical concentration and the relative stability of their social and family relationships. Families who might have a German family history, but who regard themselves as Czechs, however, were much less likely to demand minority education and extended tuition in German for their children, which contributed to the low numbers of potential recipients of these provisions. The only national minority in the Czech Republic whose members have consistently been able to benefit from this kind of education are the Silesians in the Český Těšín area in the north east of the country, on the border with Poland, who are very much concentrated in one particular area and much more confident of their cultural identity and therefore more ready to demand specific educational provision for their children.

3.3 A look back into history We will now briefly sketch out which historical ‘stations’ we will describe in more detail, and how far we will go back in history and why, before retracing our steps back to the present day in order to show how each development built upon another. More specifically, we look at five distinct periods in conjunctural time during which language policies and attitudes towards the German language changed (as compared to the preceding period in each case). These periods are: the present-day situation, the communist era, the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the interwar period, and the late nineteenth century and the years prior to the First World War. Our aim is to create an overview over long-term changes and developments with regard to language issues in eastern central Europe that will enable us to pinpoint where and to what extent changes have taken place, and which factors have remained relatively stable. With regard to national minorities in Hungary, the communist era is said to have been a period of ‘mild assimilation’, in which membership of national minorities was not forbidden, but government policies did not grant substantial public spaces for national minorities (Kontra 1996: 1713). This meant that – unlike nowadays – opportunities for membership of minority associations and education in minority languages was restricted and could only happen within government-approved organisations. Foreign language learning was also restricted as the first and compulsory foreign language

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was Russian, and other languages, such as German, were available only as a second or third foreign language option. Hence, minority cultures in general, and German minority culture in particular, had to exist in small, often private niches without access to a public space ‘within’. It has to be said, though, that the communist era was not consistent in terms of cultural openness, but was characterised by different phases, depending on leading personalities in government as well as on the growing international involvement of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak governments. The position of individual members of the German minorities in Hungary and Czechoslovakia was problematic, because virtually all remaining members of the German minority in both countries had relatives in Austria and ‘imperialist’ West Germany, which is why they were often classified as ‘politically unreliable’ and which made them more likely to be targets of measures for suppressing perceived dissent (for references to individual experiences, see Chapters 5 and 6). The reason for the – to say the least – problematic relations between mainstream Czech(oslovak) and Hungarian cultures and German minorities in particular lies in the experiences during the Second World War and its aftermath. The National Socialist annexation of the Czech lands and endorsement of the fascist government in Hungary had brought a new dimension of negative experiences with the German language that came to be associated with Nazi terror. Consequently, German-speakers and the German language were subjected to an unprecedented level of discrimination and a whole new dimension of ‘otherness’, and many German-speakers were expelled from their local communities in eastern central Europe and deported to Germany and Austria. In Hungary, 213,000 ethnic Germans were evicted after 1945 (Kontra 1996: 1711), while in Czechoslovakia more than 3 million people were evicted or fled in the same period, and their proportion of the country’s total population dropped from more than 30 per cent in the 1930s to less than 2 per cent in 1950 (Nekvapil and Neustupný 1998: 123). The post-war level of exclusion of German-speakers from all areas of public life was indeed unprecedented. In contrast, during the interwar period the politics of language favoured the national languages over standard German in the public cultural, political and economic sphere, but on the whole German-speakers, especially speakers of the local dialects, could continue to live their cultural lives more or less undisturbed. We will focus on the (re)emergence of independent states between the two world wars, as those states were the materialisation of nationalist aspirations across the region. Not only Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but also Poland and Romania gained independence from the Habsburg, the German and the Russian empires and thus for the first time in centuries those states had the opportunity to formulate their ‘own’ politics of language. The key questions will be: what role was there for ‘language’ in general, and which languages played significant roles?

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The newly gained independence of these states after the First World War was made significant by the ‘long nineteenth century’ and the experiences with imperial hegemony in the Habsburg, German and Russian empires. In the Habsburg and German empires in particular, there existed classes of German-speaking intellectuals and professionals who were native to Hungary, Poland and the Czech lands, but their language was standard German, not a (rural) dialect. The imperial language, that is, the language of the political, administrative and cultural classes in the Habsburg and German empires, was also standard German, which for the most part was the only official language until the beginning of the First World War, except in Hungary where Hungarian was made the official national language in 1844 and reaffirmed in 1868 (Kontra 1996: 1709). Thus there existed a dominant public space ‘within’ for standard (and written) German, whereas the local dialects with their predominantly oral traditions were mostly relevant only in the smaller, especially rural communities of ethnic Germans. Because of the political and socio-economic dominance of speakers of standard German, it was this language variety that came into conflict with emerging Polish, Hungarian and Czech linguistic nationalisms. The late nineteenth century also saw the first incarnation of modern linguistic nationalisms as emerging popular mass-movements in the region, which aimed at mobilising the non-German-speaking native populations especially in Hungary, Poland and the Czech lands against the socioeconomic dominance of German-speakers (Maitz 2008; Knipf-Komlósi 2008; Törnquist-Plewa 2000). The effects of these nationalist movements on public policies continue to inform the politics of language to the present day, which constitutes a qualitative shift from the proto-nationalisms during previous eras. These ideologies held that mother tongue and national identity are inextricably linked, and this belief led to the mass evictions after 1945 – based on the census data of 1941 – because it was alleged that German-speakers had automatically been supporters of National Socialism. The effects of these evictions – the loss of families and properties for ethnic German people in Hungary – continue to affect people’s lives until today. In 2007, on the sixtieth anniversary of the expulsions, the Hungarian Parliament admitted responsibility and issued an apology for the political decisions that formed the basis for the deportations (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 November 2007, at http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/464/314364/text/). Yet, the 1941 census is not an isolated or random event; rather, it is the culmination of a longterm process of defining national in-groups and out-groups on the basis of language. The language question was first used in 1861 in the German lands and served as a basis for claims to national unification (not achieved until 1871), and it was first used in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1880. What had been intended as a means of ‘measuring’ nations became a criterion for the creation of nation-states and formed the basis of independence movements in eastern central Europe in the later part of the century (Kamusella

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2009: 49). Therefore we will make this period our starting point for exploring the characteristics of the new linguistic nationalisms and the conditions of their emergence in more detail, and from there we will work our way forward in time in order to see how these linguistic nationalisms are still shaping the policies and linguistic practices in today’s eastern central Europe.

3.4 The long nineteenth century: the emergence of ‘modern’ linguistic nationalisms What made these linguistic nationalisms new and unprecedented was the fact that they were mass popular movements rather than the preserve of exclusive groups of members of the gentry or the clergy of a given country, as had been the case with the Hungarian, Polish and also Czech proto-nationalisms between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries (Törnquist-Plewa 2000; Tišerová 2008; Knipf-Komlósi 2008; Kamusella 2009). German-speaking settlers moved to eastern central Europe in several waves between the Middle Ages and the late seventeenth century, usually invited by the ruling monarchs in order to make particular geographical areas arable and to increase population numbers. In the Czech lands, the three waves of settlements brought German-speakers especially to the mountainous areas in the west and north of what is today the Czech Republic (the so-called Sudetengebirge, including Altvater-, Adler- and Riesengebirge) as well as in the Carpathian mountains in what is today the Slovak Republic. Those German-speaking immigrants were invited to populate these mountain areas first between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, then during the Reformation in the sixteenth century in order to increase the number of people sharing the ‘right’ (i.e. Protestant) religious denomination, and during the seventeenth century to repopulate the country after the devastations during the Thirty Years War. The settlements in the west and north, in the Sudeten mountains, also gave those immigrants their name or ethnic label as Sudeten Germans or Sudetendeutsche, which came to include Germanspeakers in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, as opposed to the Carpathian Germans or Karpatendeutsche, who settled in the Carpathian mountains. However, these German-speaking settlers were not German citizens, but citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire and therefore considered to be Austrian citizens (Tišerová 2008: 175–6). With regard to German-speaking settlers in Hungary, the most important migration took place during the eighteenth century after the Turkish invaders had been expelled from the country and vast areas of land needed resettling and cultivating. People from German lands were invited by Habsburg emperors Karl IV (1711–40), Maria-Theresa (1740–80) and Josef II (1782–90). The term Donauschwabe (Danube Swabian) derives from the fact that the majority, though by no means all, of the German-speaking settlers during

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the eighteenth century came from the Swabian area of south-west Germany via the Danube. However, the more common, or general, term nowadays is Ungarndeutsche, denoting people of German origins living in Hungary (Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 268, 271–2; see Chapter 6). In the nineteenth century, language became the one uniting factor that appealed to the mass public, as it brought together speakers of one particular language, such as Polish, Czech or Hungarian, in one nationality. Language as an identity marker was sometimes combined with a notion of ethnic origin, for example in Poland (see, for example, Galasińska and Krzyżanowski 2009) or Hungary, but the crucial point was that both language and ethnicity transcended the distinction in terms of socio-economic positions – that is, between the nobility on the one hand and the peasantry and the emerging industrial proletariat on the other – and helped mobilise members of all social strata. This was very important in Poland and in Hungary, where the nobility had preserved the memories of a former independent state. However, after centuries of being incorporated into the Habsburg Empire and Prussia, these memories and concepts of an independent monarchy were no longer sufficient for mobilising their populations. This, together with the effects of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which challenged the dominance of the aristocracy and defined nations as the whole people or populace (the Volk), created the need to find a new focus for their national identities, which was eventually found in language and ethnicity (Kamusella 2009: 104–5). In the Czech lands, the situation was more complicated. The Hussite wars (1419–36) initially created a space for Czech culture to flourish as they ended the co-existence of Czech and German cultures and indeed destroyed or at least disrupted many German-speaking settlements (Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 208). However, even though the cultural memory of an independent Bohemian kingdom was able to be sustained, most of the (largely) protestant Bohemian gentry fled the area after the Counter-Reformation, which culminated in the Battle of the White Mountain (Bíla Hora) in 1620, where the Bohemian nobility was defeated. Their land titles were subsequently given to the aristocracy from German and Habsburg lands who had declared their loyalty to the Habsburg emperor (Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 208), and thus the idea of Bohemian independence – or at least autonomy – had no influence on the day-to-day business of the Habsburg monarchy, because unlike in Hungary the aristocracy could not, or was not prepared to, make the Habsburg politics work for this ideal (Kamusella 2009: 715). Under these circumstances, language was an even more important unifying element for collective identity in the Czech lands, but it took longer to develop, due to internal rivalries between the Bohemian and Moravian aristocracies (Kamusella 2009: 715). As was the case in Hungary and Poland, the overarching appeal of linguistic nationalisms was that they were pitched against the presence and symbolic status of the German language. Important ideologues such as František Palacký later instrumentalised the memory of the Hussite

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wars as the first organised anti-German movement ‘and showed the Germanspeakers as a permanent alien element’ (Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 210). While those nationalist ideologies transcended the socio-economic distinctions between the indigenous nobilities and ‘lower class’ populations (such as peasants, domestic labourers and industrial workers), it opened, or rather accentuated and exploited, the ethno-linguistic rifts between German-speakers, especially the (emerging) bourgeoisie and ruling political-administrative elites, on the one hand, and speakers of ‘national’ languages on the other. The basis of these linguistic nationalisms was, among others, Herder’s concept of a nation as made up of speakers of one language, as well as the consequent claim that each nation should have its own nation-state. This notion came to define German nationalism in the German lands during the nineteenth century, when there was as yet no unified German state (Gardt 2000b; Kamusella 2009: 46–7). The nationalist movements in eastern central Europe took up the notion and turned it against the German-speaking political classes of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire (Phillipson 2003: 41–3; Kamusella 2009: 105; Maitz 2008). They favoured education in their national languages and were opposed to the dominance of the German language in most areas of public life, especially administration, education and trade. In Hungary, the level of administrative autonomy was the most advanced as compared to other countries in the region (Maitz 2005). In 1844, Magyar replaced Latin as the official language but due to the country’s multiethnic composition it could not replace German as a widespread lingua franca. However, the Hungarian authorities had the opportunity to put in place a policy of ‘Magyarisation’ – that is, the systematic promotion of the public use of Hungarian over other languages – of the administration and the education system, among other areas, which began a process of gradual exclusion of the German language from public life (Kamusella 2009: 130, 139, 441–2). One strand of those linguistic nationalisms was the notion of the purity of languages, which had to be rid of foreign influences, especially of borrowings from German, in order to preserve the perceived national character (for more detail on how the same process affected language ideology in the German lands during the nineteenth century see Gardt 2000c: 263–8; Langer and Davies 2005; Wells 1985). The public discourses at the time, for example in newspapers, literary publications and especially educational texts, praised the beauty and aptness of the local languages Hungarian, Polish and Czech and at the same time denounced the German language for its perceived harshness, its unsuitability for literary and poetic writing and the fact that it contained many borrowings especially from French and Latin (Povejšil 1996: 1659; Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 189, 211; Maitz 2008). The situation concerning political claims was more mixed: the Polish, Czech and Hungarian proto-nationalisms before the nineteenth century were all based on the historical legacy of previously independent states/monarchies that had been conquered by or subsumed under Prussia and the Habsburg and

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Russian empires respectively. In Hungary, the claims to political autonomy within the Habsburg Empire were relatively advanced, even though it was defeated in the War of Independence in 1848–9. In 1867 partial administrative autonomy was granted under the so-called Ausgleich, or Compromise, which was one of the outcomes of the collapse of the Deutscher Bund (a political union of German lands, including most notably the territories of Habsburg, Hohenzollern/Prussia and Wittelsbach/Bavaria) after Habsburg lost the ‘war of seven weeks’– the Austro-Prussian War or Bruderkrieg – against Prussia in 1866. As a result, the Austrian territory/state (Gesamtstaat) was converted into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, consisting of two independent nations which only shared certain areas of government such as the army and foreign relations1 (Kontra 1996: 1709; Wiesinger 2000: 537; Kamusella 2009: 456–7). This allowed for the creation of a Hungarian-speaking education and administrative system. Hungarian was thus de facto the official language in Hungary. In 1867, with the Ausgleich, the use of other languages, such as German, was permitted at lower administrative levels (Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 190–1) but already in 1870 a process started that systematically revoked these language rights, for example in the courts and the state school system. Thus, it was increasingly impossible to advance in education without knowledge of Hungarian (Fenyvesi 1998: 142). By contrast, in the Czech lands and Poland the situation was very different. In the first place, Poland was partitioned and not a united territory, and therefore there could not be a centralising administrative and educational policy to strengthen the Polish language. In Bohemia the nationalist movement under František Palacký, which was inspired by the successes of the Hungarian nationalists and the German National Assembly in Frankfurt, convened the Slav Congress in June 1848 (Kamusella 2009: 453). After the 1867 Ausgleich Czech nationalists demanded a similar status of educational and administrative autonomy but were only partially successful (Kamusella 2009: 457). German and Czech were recognised as languages with equal rights, but both Poland and the Czech lands remained under centralised influence from Vienna and Prussia respectively, and their nationalist movements continued to struggle for a consolidation of their national languages in public life, and for a strengthening of their cultural institutions (Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 196, 212; Kamusella 2009: 507; Tišerová 2008: 182). But as was the case in Hungary, the Czech and Polish nations were formed in the struggle for their languages and subsequent political mobilisation for their national cultures (Kamusella 2009: 508–10, 517–18). The nations thus emerged from a contestation of the public and cultural space, where the German language had hitherto been dominant, and their appeal lay in the fact that they transcended socio-economic divisions within their national, or ethnic, group, whereas the German language accentuated socio-economic and political divisions between different ethnic/linguistic groups (for the Polish case, see Kamusella 2009: 389–92, 459).

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The relationships between the Polish, Hungarian and Czech nationalist movements and the national/linguistic/ethnic minorities in their respective territories became increasingly uneasy as the linguistic nationalisms gained political momentum – even though the actual political system was only overthrown after the end of the First World War in 1918. The Hungarian nationality law of 1868 was liberal with regard to the public use of different languages, but it did not recognise the existence of separate nationalities (Kontra 1996: 1711; Kamusella 2009: 458, 460–5). Moreover, the concentration on ethnic origins and language either excluded members of minorities from the emerging nations or, in other cases, produced demands for their assimilation. Even though there were more liberal movements in Hungary, Poland and also the Czech lands, which argued for a democratic notion of nationalism, i.e. individual equality before the law and the concept of a nation based on civic rights, it was the more essentialist movements that gained the upper hand. To some extent this might be explained by the fact that the more intransigent nationalisms were better suited to delimiting the emerging nations from German-speaking hegemony and thus better able to mobilise enough popular support. This was particularly evident after the First World War, when the newly independent states were able to establish their own politics of language, which were of course based on their respective nationalist ideologies.

3.5 New nation-states after the First World War In the nineteenth century, less than half the population of Hungary was actually Hungarian-speaking, and apart from the German-speaking people the other nationalities had no nobility or ruling political class of their own to lobby for their cause. As a result of the lack of recognition, respect and protection, national minorities were vulnerable to discrimination and easily alienated by the increasing Magyar dominance. During the 1848 uprising, members of the Serb, Croat and Romanian minorities actually helped the Habsburg emperor to defeat the rebellion but the war was eventually lost to Hungary due to the intervention of Tsar Nicholas I (Kontra 1996: 1709; Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 188, 191). After the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the First World War, many members of national minorities supported the separation from Hungary and their inclusion into their neighbouring kin-states. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon therefore resulted in Hungary losing more than 60 per cent of its territory and 32 per cent of the Magyar population to the newly formed (nation-)states of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Austria, Italy and Poland. The total remaining population was only about 42 per cent of the numbers prior to the First World War and it was ethnically – and therefore linguistically – very homogeneous. The proportion of national minorities subsequently fell from 45.5 per cent in

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1910 to about 8 per cent in 1930, because most of their members lived in the territories that now belonged to the neighbouring states (Kontra 1996: 1709; Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 191–2; Kamusella 2009: 660–2). The actual language and identity politics in the new Hungarian state did, however, grant a significant space to ethnic Germans and other minorities. Prime Minister Bethlen, in particular, conducted a policy of total equality before the law for all national minorities in Hungary, under which Germanlanguage newspapers as well as other cultural associations, such as the Ungarländischer Deutscher Volksbildungsverein (‘German Association for National Education in the Hungarian Lands’ founded in 1924), were able to flourish. These measures, however, could not stop or even reverse the trend towards cultural assimilation and Magyarisation, and the official number of people of German nationality decreased by 13 per cent between 1920 and 1930 (Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 274). The policy of German cultural associations at that time was to achieve a balance between preservation of German culture in Hungary and loyalty to the Hungarian state. However, during the 1930s the irredentist stream of German nationalism won the upper hand, supported by the National Socialist regime in Germany. One such German nationalist association, the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn (National Association of Germans in Hungary) was founded in 1938, and it was supported by about one third of the German population at the height of its popularity in 1940–1 (Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 274). In contrast to Hungary, the new Czechoslovak state that was created at the end of the First World War in 1918 was a multiethnic state, not only because it now included the sizeable Slovak population and territory, but also since Czechs and Slovaks together made up only roughly two thirds of the whole population. Germans were by far the biggest national minority, whereas others, such as Hungarians, Ruthenians, Jews and Poles, formed much smaller groups (see Table 3.5). In fact, it has been argued that the unification with the Slovak population was felt to be necessary in order to create a more substantial Slavonic majority (Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 212; Tišerová 2008: 182). The 1920 constitution defined Czechoslovakia as a state of Czechs and Slovaks, and consequently, the dominant and state-bearing nations were the Czech and Slovak populations, based on their shared Slavonic ethnic kinship and linguistic identity. The Slovaks were granted a degree of cultural autonomy, as were the Ruthenians, but nonetheless their relationship with the Czech population was not easy. The other national minorities were not granted this privilege, and the Germans and Hungarians especially were alienated by this because they had been part of the leading nations during the Habsburg era, and the new Czechoslovak government sought to render the German minority in particular powerless and declared them to be mere ‘immigrants and colonists’ (Törnquist-Plewa 2000). Czech was the only official language and most widely used in the Czech lands, while Slovak was

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Table 3.5 National minorities in Czechoslovakia after the First World War (Figures taken from Kamusella 2009: 739)

Population in 1921 (in million) 1930

Czechs and Slovaks

Germans

Hungarians

Ruthenians

Jews

Poles

8.76; 65.5%

1.98; 15.2%

0.74; 5.6%

0.46; 3.4%

0.18; 1.3%

0.076; 0.6%

68.1%

28.8%

4.9%

3.8%

1.4%

0.9%

used in Slovakia and Russified Ruthenian in sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. At the same time, limits were imposed on the ethnic German education system in Czechoslovakia, and ethnic Germans could no longer work in the civil service as Czech became the dominant language in administration as well as secondary and tertiary education (Kamusella 2009: 746). Concessions to national minorities were made where they constituted at least 20 per cent of the population. In these cases, minority languages could be used as auxiliary languages in the administration of state- and self-government, or on public signage. Also, in cases where no traditional Czech name existed for a locality, the name in the minority language could be used for official purposes. Finally, education in minority languages was allowed in communities where there were at least forty children of the same age and from the same national minority in three consecutive year groups (Kamusella 2009: 748). At the time, the German population was sufficiently concentrated geographically in order to meet these criteria, so that it could benefit from this legislation. As their group was half as strong as the Czech group, they were in a much better position to make their voices heard than other, smaller minorities, such as the Magyars (Kamusella 2009: 749). In general though, the aim was to develop a unified Czechoslovak language in a Czechoslovak state, and German was no longer the (or even one of the) official language(s) (Tišerová 2008: 197). Furthermore, Czechoslovak economic policy favoured the development of industry and agriculture in areas of predominant Czech (and Slovak) settlements, whereas the highly industrialised areas of Northern and Western Bohemia were especially hard hit during the economic downturn of the 1920s and ’30s (Kamusella 2009: 740). According to 1921 figures, almost 47 per cent of industrial workers in Bohemia were ethnic Germans, as opposed to about 38 per cent Czechs (Tišerová 2008: 183). These tensions were exacerbated by the economic depression during the 1930s, and right-wing nationalist German parties gained increasing popular support. The situation culminated in the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938–9 when the National Socialist government of Germany forced the relinquishing of the Sudetenland – the 1938 Munich Agreement held that areas with a German population of at least 50 per cent had to be surrendered – and

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Poland annexed the Český Těšín region of Silesia. In 1939 the Hungarian government – with the support of both the Hitler and Mussolini governments – annexed parts of Slovakia and Ruthenia (nowadays western Ukraine) with substantial ethnic Hungarian populations. In the same year Slovakia declared its independence, supported, or tolerated, by the German government, and the German army occupied the remaining parts of the Czechoslovak state (Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 213–4; Kamusella 2009: 764–5; Tišerová 2008: 183–4). The reasons for this collapse of the Czechoslovak state are mostly to be found in annexations, but the construction of nationhood on a linguistic and ethnic basis left the Czechoslovak democracy prone to outside interferences, even though the country’s constitution was quite liberal and guaranteed individual human rights also to members of national minorities. However, the ethnolinguistic focus meant that there could not be a nation based on an historic community of peoples inhabiting the Czech lands, the ‘lands of the Crown of Saint Wenceslas’. Instead there was a high degree of inter-ethnic tension, which caused the state to collapse when the pressure from other irredentist nationalist forces grew (Törnquist-Plewa 2000). The focus on ethnic and linguistic nationalism was not exclusive to Czechoslovakia; it could also be found in Hungary and Poland, and in both countries the focus of tensions was the German minority, for the same historic reasons. However, the consequences of irredentist ethnolinguistic nationalisms that did not include the historic national minorities in their respective territories affected Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland at different times. While Hungary had been able to put in place a politics of Magyarisation during the Habsburg Empire, the backlash from minority nationalisms already came to the fore at the end of the First World War when Hungary lost large geographical areas with ethnic minority populations. In contrast, Czechoslovakia and Poland too were able to obtain nation-state status for the first time in 1918 but both states included large national minorities that did share the same historic territories but not the dominant nationalist narrative. In other words, those national minorities had been living in the same area and often had close ties with other minorities or indeed the majority population, but they did not share the same cultural heritage and sense of belonging, nor the national language (even if individual members were bilingual). Thus they could not be integrated into the dominant national culture, or rather they refused to be, and remained on the margins of the new national societies, where they were susceptible to nationalist propaganda from their national kin-states. This did not affect the respective German minorities exclusively, but they were among the largest minorities in each of those new nation-states, and Hungarian, Czech and Polish nationalists wanted to dissociate themselves from the German language, heritage and culture, which makes them a suitable example for studying the way the new nation-states dealt with national minorities.

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Again, as in the emergence of nationalist movements during the nineteenth century, the lives of German communities in eastern central Europe were conducted in more than one linguistic variety, and each variety was affected by the political circumstances in different ways. As in the nineteenth century, the national language policies of the 1920s and ’30s had the greatest impact on the official variety, standard German, which was used in academia, education, cultural production, trade and often in the administration. After the First World War, these domains became closed to standard German, especially education, the administration and economic activities, and people working in these sectors had to use Hungarian or Czech (or Slovak) respectively, which further decreased the status of standard German. By contrast, the local varieties of dialects were still not affected by these policies in that they had no official function, and people could continue using them amongst themselves in virtually the same way as before (Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 288; Tišerová 2008: 204–6). It has to be said, however, that the German minorities were able to maintain a tight network of nationality schools where the German language continued to be used also as a medium of tuition, especially in communities with significant numbers of German inhabitants. This included not only primary schools but, especially in Czechoslovakia, the full spectrum of primary and secondary schools as well as commercial colleges and other kinds of vocational schools. In the case of primary schools, tuition often happened in the local variety of German, whereas in secondary schools and other types of further education standard German was the norm. The German minorities thus still generally had good access to education in their language, but they also had to be able to speak the mainstream national languages in order to access certain occupations. This increasingly led some people, especially in the bigger cities, to move away from German as their first language (Nekvapil 1997: 1647; Medgyes and Miklósy 2000: 182; Kamusella 2009: 684–5). The situation only changed dramatically for all varieties of German after the Second World War, when the backlash against German nationalism hit all German-speakers across eastern central Europe.

3.6 After the Second World War: linguistic nationalisms and the German language during the communist era After the end of the Second World War, German minorities throughout eastern central Europe were blamed for the atrocities committed in the name of National Socialism during the war, especially in those countries that were directly occupied by German forces, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. In Hungary, as mentioned, 213,000 ethnic Germans were forcibly evicted from their homes between 1945 and 1947 (and 60,000 were deported to the Soviet Union by the Red Army), which was more than half the pre-war population of ethnic Germans in Hungary (Kamusella 2009: 690). This affected

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Table 3.6 The composition of the population of Hungary by nationality in 1949 (Figures taken from Kamusella 2009: 691) Magyar

Slovak

German

Croat

Romanian

Serbs

Slovenes

9.08 million; 98.6%

26,000; 0.3%

22,500; 0.2%

20,000; 0.2%

14,700; 0.17%

5000; 0.1%

4500; 0.1%

not only those who had been affiliated to the nationalist Volksbund, but more generally people who had declared their nationality and their first language to be German in the 1941 census discussed earlier. The people who were allowed to stay – many had to because they were deemed indispensable due to their occupation, such as engineers – were often evicted from their homes and lost most of their possessions and their social status. Moreover, ethnic Germans had lost their citizenship rights, and were only able to regain them in 1950 (Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 274–5). Many people recall that they were subject to sanctions and – sometimes violent – reprisals if they were overheard speaking German in public (see Chapter 6). As a result of the deportations – not only of Germans – and the (renewed) loss of territories that had been (re-)gained during the Second World War, Hungary was even more ethnically homogeneous after 1945 than it was after Trianon in 1920. Table 3.6 shows the composition of the population by nationalities in 1949. Ethnic German cultural practices in Hungary were also very much affected by the socio-economic changes after the Second World War. Increasing collectivisation of the agricultural and manufacturing and crafts sectors during the 1950s and ’60s (Kamusella 2009: 700) meant that the economic basis for ethnic German settlements and indeed their customs and ways of life was disrupted. From then on it was more difficult to maintain the communitybuilding activities and traditions that very often were part of the agricultural calendar. Moreover, the social and ethnic structure of villages began to change due to the expropriation of German properties for Magyars who had been evicted from Romanian Transylvania, Slovakia or Ukraine (Kontra 1996: 1711), and thus many communities had lost their ‘critical mass’ of ethnic Germans necessary to be able to maintain their traditional community social life (see also Riehl 2008: 12–13). This contributed to and exacerbated the effects of increasing geographical and social mobility that had taken place since the early twentieth century. Whereas in the nineteenth century about 85 per cent of ethnic Germans could be categorised as farmers or at least as working in the agricultural sector and only 15 per cent were craftsmen, from the early twentieth century the German minority’s social profile began to diversify and people moved away from the country in order to seek work in the crafts, the industrial and mining sectors and in white-collar jobs in

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the administration or education systems. The latter sectors were very much dominated by the Hungarian language and proficiency in Hungarian was a pre-requisite for employment. The diminished role of networks of ancient cultural traditions made the local German dialects decline as people’s first language, which was accelerated by the developments in social mobility after the Second World War (Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 276). This is despite the 1949 Constitution of the Hungarian People’s Republic, which stated that ‘discrimination according to sex, denomination, or nationality was punishable by law, and all citizens were guaranteed equal opportunity of education in their mother tongue and the fostering of their national culture’ (Kontra 1996: 1712). Between 1945 and 1960 national minorities had widespread access to schools teaching in nationality languages, and many Hungarian-language schools at least taught minority languages (Fenyvesi 1998: 148). In 1960, these schools were officially renamed or declared bilingual schools, thus creating an emphasis on tuition in Hungarian and ending the dominance of tuition in nationality languages (Kamusella 2009: 698–9). Training in German as a minority language for primary school teachers has been available since 1956, and was provided until 1989 by colleges in Szeged, Szombathely and at the University of Pécs. In 1960 German was reintroduced into the curriculum as an extra-curricular option that is now seen as ineffective due to the reduced hours of tuition in German that could be offered. Only in 1982 did a political initiative for the formation of both bilingual grammar schools for the German minority and Hungarian-German bilingual grammar schools2 ensure that the German language was part of the mainstream curriculum again. The 1985 Act I on education then enshrined the constitutional right to minority languages and stated that the language of education in kindergartens and schools shall be Hungarian and all national idioms spoken in the Hungarian People’s Republic (Art. 7, Para. I) (Kontra 1996: 1717–18; Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 280). The common assumption, however, was that communist nationalist ideology – or the so-called Leninist ‘principle of automatism’ – would eventually even out ethnic divisions and lead to a uniform society (Fenyvesi 1998: 147–8; Kamusella 2009: 691). Only in 1968 did the Kádár government begin to use national minorities as a ‘bridge’ to foster external relations to their kin-states and to create leverage to influence minority policies in neighbouring states that included large Magyar minorities, such as Romania or Czechoslovakia (Kamusella 2009: 708–9). National minorities were now to be helped to integrate into mainstream Hungarian – that is, Magyar – society but they were no longer required to assimilate (Kontra 1996: 1711, referring to Gal 1995; Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 275). Cultural organisations representing national minorities were allowed ‘back’ quite soon, in the late 1940s, although the first German cultural association did not officially come into existence until 1955 as the Kulturverband der Deutschen Werktätigen in Ungarn (‘Cultural Association of German Workers in

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Hungary’), and cultural journals and calendars such as the Deutscher Kalender (‘German Calendar’) became popular. The Cultural Association changed its name several times, first to Demokratischer Verband Ungarländischer Deutscher (‘Democratic Association of Germans in the Hungarian Lands’) in 1969, and in 1978 to Demokratischer Verband der Ungarndeutschen (‘Democratic Association of Germans in Hungary’), but it remained the only governmentapproved and legitimate association for the German minority until 1989 (Kontra 1996: 1713; Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 277–8). The situation for the German population in Czechoslovakia was similar. In April 1945 many lost their properties when the first wave of expulsions started that would later be sanctioned by the so-called Beneš decrees. These decrees also stripped them of their citizenship rights in 1946 and continued in effect until 1948. The expulsions reduced the German population from more than three million people, or more than 30 per cent of the population, in 1937, to 165,117 people, or less than 2 per cent, in 1950. The people who had to remain in Czechoslovakia, because their professional expertise was needed to maintain or rebuild industrial production and trade, were often subject to reprisals, and in some areas the use of the German language in public was officially forbidden. Other people of German origin were forced to move to different parts of the country in order to work in mining or agriculture, and to help rebuild the road and rail infrastructure so that the compact areas of German settlements were disrupted and the remaining minority was scattered across the country. Ethnic Germans who had remained in Czechoslovakia were decreed citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1953 and only then were there no more official sanctions against using the German language in public (Nekvapil 1997: 1645; Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 214; Kamusella 2009: 780; Tišerová 2008: 185–6, 196). The post-war Czechoslovak state was intended as an ethnically homogeneous entity, and it was constructed as a ‘Slavic nation-state of the Czechoslovak people’ (Kamusella 2009: 780). Table 3.7 shows the composition of Czechoslovakia by national minority in 1950. Despite regaining their citizenship rights, ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia were not recognised as a national minority under the 1960 constitution. As a consequence, their children were barred from receiving education in their minority language. Unlike in Hungary, where the politics of assimilation was based on the assumption that socio-economic changes would help to resolve the issue, the Czechoslovak government had the overt political goal of assimilating Germans completely. As late as 1968 a new constitutional law established the right to form cultural associations in order to promote and preserve their culture. However, due to the events of the Prague Spring in 1968, the formation of such an association was delayed until 1969, when the Kulturverband der Bürger der ČSSR deutscher Nationalität (in short Kulturverband – ‘Cultural Association of Citizens of the ČSSR of German Nationality’) came into being (Tišerová 2008: 188).

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Tab. 3.7 The population of Czechoslovakia by nationality in 1950 (Figures taken from Kamusella 2009: 782)

1950

Czech

Slovak

German

Polish

Ukrainian

Magyar

93.8%

2.9%

1.8%

0.8%

0.2%

0.1%

During the communist era this was the only officially approved German cultural organisation but since the 1950s there had been informal cultural activities, organised by individual people, which were closely observed by the Party. After the Kulturverband’s official formation, forty branches were set up across the country, but they were forbidden in Southern Bohemia, Moravia (except in Brno) and Silesia. Yet, from the 1970s the Kulturverband was used in order to observe people’s behaviour, and those who were deemed disloyal to the Communist Party were excluded from the association. Despite this, however, many people appreciated the cultural activities and the opportunities to communicate with others in their mother tongue (Tišerová 2008: 191). The 1968 constitution also gave the German minority the right to receive formal education in their minority language and to use their language in formal administrative and legal questions. However, there were no schools where German operated as a medium of tuition. The reason most commonly given for this was the perception that the German minority was too geographically dispersed to form viable classes or even schools, and that cultural assimilation had progressed to the extent that people no longer aspired to this kind of education (Nekvapil 1997: 1647; Kamusella 2009: 782; Tišerová 2008: 197). In 1971, the ministry of education created the possibility for Slovak, Polish and German pupils and apprentices to be educated in their mother tongues, if there were at least thirty applications by parents from the respective minority. However, at least for the German minority, this condition was not met, supposedly because of dispersal and assimilation and/or because people were afraid their children would be disadvantaged later on for declaring themselves as members of the German minority (Tišerová 2008: 198). In fact, to this day members of the German minority are far less likely to have received further education at all, and far more likely to have only basic levels of education. Until 1989 ethnic Germans – if they openly declared their German nationality – were barred from further education in order to accelerate the process of assimilation (Maier 1995: 78; Tišerová 2008: 199). It therefore seems safe to assume that many German parents did not ask for German minority education in order not to jeopardise their children’s education, which is why there were not enough children to form German nationality classes. Apart from this, however, since the 1960s German had become one of the most popular and widely taught foreign languages in Czechoslovakia – after

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Russian and together with English. It was popular in order to take part in educational and professional exchanges with the GDR and also benefited from the increasing availability of literature and TV and radio programmes from the GDR and later also from West Germany (Maier 1995: 76–7). Initially, tuition in German as a foreign language was available through the so-called Sprachzirkel, or language circles. These were extra-curricular activities and they were only available for children from the age of twelve, if enough parents applied for such tuition to the local national committee (Nationalausschuß) (Tišerová 2008: 197). Later on, however, it became much more widely available, especially in grammar schools (Nekvapil 1997: 1646–7; Tišerová 2008: 198). Thus, in general, there was no significant public space available for the German language in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the communist period. This is because national minorities were no longer an important factor in public policy, and because of the particular resentments that had become associated with the German language due to the Nazi policies of forced Germanisation and the events during the Second World War. Instead, it had to exist in private niches, or as a foreign language that served the cultural interests of people regardless of their ethnic background. Its status had dropped from being one of the national languages in both countries before 1945 to a language whose local and regional heritage function was to be forgotten after 1945. The cases where people managed to maintain a space for German in their private lives depended on a fair deal of courage and defiance against public pressures to assimilate, as we shall see in the individual narratives discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. The transformations of 1989 and the end of the communist regimes brought big changes to eastern central Europe, including the freedom to learn and speak any foreign language as well as the opportunity to speak minority languages and practise folk cultures in public.

3.7 Back in the present day: the situation after 1989 All these factors together led to a significant shift in language repertoires both in Hungary and Czechia. Generally speaking, before the Second World War, ethnic Germans in both countries first spoke their local dialects, and then (some) Hungarian or Czech respectively for official purposes or as a lingua franca with people from other villages or towns. With regard to the knowledge of standard German, the situation was slightly different in each country. In Hungary, standard German was common only in the cities, or among the educated classes more generally. The wider ethnic German population had at best only receptive knowledge of it, sufficient to cope with certain administrative requirements or for other specific purposes. In Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, knowledge of – a

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regionally ‘coloured’ – standard German was more widespread among ethnic Germans than in Hungary, and for them was more important – or at least more often used – than Czech. Until well into the 1960s, these linguistic relationships continued to apply in both countries, both for the older and middle generations. However, as assimilation progressed the internal ordering of language varieties in the repertoires of ethnic Germans was reversed. Since the 1980s it has been obvious that only the oldest generations in both countries still have an active knowledge of the local dialects, and even this is restricted to private domains, whereas in public – even when communicating with other members of the German minority – Czech or Hungarian respectively are used. The middle generations speak first and foremost Czech or Hungarian, with some receptive knowledge of the local dialect, and the youngest generations speak only Czech or Hungarian, because the German dialects were largely no longer passed on by the oldest generation for fear of stigmatisation and discrimination. However, some families with ethnic German backgrounds now aspire for their children to learn standard German, which is seen as a substitute for the disappearing local dialects, or as a way of connecting with their ancestors ‘who spoke like that’ (KnipfKomlósi 2008: 283; Nekvapil 1997: 1645; Povejšil 1996: 1658; Tišerová 2008: 203; for evidence from individual German-speakers, see Chapters 5 and 6). German has therefore shifted from being a local language that is part of local history in eastern central Europe to being a foreign language taught at schools and universities and promoted by foreign cultural policies and institutions from Germany and Austria (for more details on those institutions and their briefs, see Chapter 4.4). To some extent it could be argued that this is not unlike the situation prior to the First World War, when standard German was an important cultural factor in eastern central Europe, but back then it was also the first language of certain social strata and thus had an important role in the language space ‘within’. Nowadays, it is mostly a foreign language that is invested with significance by its learners, but its prestige is associated not with cultural production within Hungary or the Czech Republic but with the economic and cultural prestige first of the GDR (until 1989) and then of Germany and Austria. In this sense, it is no longer perceived as a language belonging within the social and cultural space of this region but a language migrating once again from ‘without’, that is from the west. The situation in terms of rights and spaces of national minorities in Hungary and Czechia has also changed significantly. Ethnically, both countries are now virtually homogeneous, the titular nations (Magyar and Czech respectively) making up more than 90 per cent of the total population in each case. Furthermore, in both countries, the national census now establishes minority identities on the basis of individual declaration, not in connection to people’s mother tongues. In the Czech Republic, the 2001 census figures show that the percentage of Czech, Moravian and Silesian nationalities together is 94.2 per cent. The

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official figure for the German minority has dropped to less than 40,000 people, or less than 0.4 per cent of the population. This is due in part to assimilation and to the fact that people no longer declare their German backgrounds in polls, but first and foremost it is due to the expulsion of Germans up to 1947 and subsequent voluntary emigration to West Germany since the 1950s, especially around the events of the Prague Spring in 1968 (Tišerová 2008: 177–8). In Hungary, the official figure for the German minority dropped from 475,491 people, or 5.2 per cent of the population, in 1941, to 33,774 people, or 0.3 per cent of the population, also because of expulsions and voluntary emigration since 1945 (Knipf-Komlósi 2008: 269–70). This means that in both countries, ethnic Germans are no longer a significant part of the population, capable of influencing policies and politics in the way they had been able to prior to the Second World War. Instead they are one national minority among several and their status is covered by the respective legislations concerning national and ethnic minorities, to which we now turn in the next section.

3.8 Legal frameworks of language and cultural policy: national and ethnic minorities in the Czech Republic and Hungary Czech Republic The Legal Framework The protection of language and cultural rights of national minorities in the Czech Republic is organised at two political levels, namely the international and the intra-national level. At the international level, the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities is most important for setting the standards and best practices for ensuring equal rights for national minorities in many areas such as education, housing and employment opportunities. In 1996, the Czech government submitted its application for membership of the EU, and as part of the conditionality requirements it had to sign the Framework Convention in order to prove its commitment to minority protection. The Convention was ratified in December 1997, and the treaty came into force in April 1998. In November 2000, the government of the Czech Republic also signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but it was only ratified (rendered into national law) in November 2006 and came into force on 1 March 2007 (see http://conventions.coe.int/ Treaty/Commun/ChercheSig.asp?NT = 148&CM = 8&DF = 20/08/2009&CL = ENG; accessed August 2009). These conventions set out the measures that have to be put into place in order to guarantee a minimum standard of minority protection as well as a significant ‘public space’ for minorities to actively express their cultural identities. We will discuss how the European

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Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) constructs concepts of national identity and multilingualism in Chapter 4.4. In addition to these measures, there are several bi-national agreements on the protection and support of national minorities living in the Czech Republic. In the case of the German minority these include, for example, the 1992 Czech-German Agreement on Good Neighbourliness and Peaceful Cooperation as well as the 1997 German-Czech Declaration on Mutual Relations and Their Future Development. These agreements are aimed at the German minority in particular, but they also include ways of improving and sustaining communication and cooperation between both governments in more general terms (see http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/diplo/ en/Laenderinformationen/01-Laender/TschechischeRepublik.html; accessed August 2009).3 At the national level, the specific legislation to accommodate national minorities is covered in particular by the Minorities Act of 1993, the Constitution of the Czech Republic and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1993, all of which define national minorities and their rights within Czech civil society. The Minorities Act specifies the terms ‘national minority’ and ‘member of a national minority’, which, according to the Government Council, had been addressed neither by the Framework Convention nor by the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The definitions are based on the Recommendation of the Council of Europe (N.102/1993) and on an additional protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights on the rights of minorities. According to the Minorities Act, a national minority is a community of citizens of the Czech Republic who live on the territory of the present Czech Republic and as a rule differ from other citizens by their common ethnic origin, language, culture and traditions; they represent a minority of citizens and at the same time they show their will to be considered a national minority for the purpose of common efforts to preserve and develop their own identity, language and culture and at the same time express and preserve interests of their community which have been formed during history. (2001 Act on Rights of Members of National Minorities: §2 [1]) A member of a national minority is a ‘citizen of the Czech Republic who professes other than Czech ethnic origin and wishes to be considered a member of a national minority in common with the others who profess the same ethnicity’ (2001 Act on Rights of Members of National Minorities: §2 [2]). In this respect, members of a national minority differ from other foreigners with long-term residence rights in the Czech Republic, who have a different legal status and are provided for by different legal regulations. More specifically, they are defined as indigenous people with a differing cultural identity and they are explicitly granted a space in the public sphere where

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they can actively express their cultural identities and congregate with other minority members. Moreover, the Minorities Act defines the option of membership of a national minority, the right to association and to participation in the resolution of problems relating to a national minority, as well as the use of minority languages in public, official business and in court proceedings. It specifies the right to disseminate and accept information in minority languages and the right to education in, and maintenance and development of, minority cultures (Report on the Situation of National Minorities in the Czech Republic 2001: 11–20). The Act on Rights of Members of National Minorities therefore implies that Czech national culture is not a homogeneous entity, but one that is made up of different cultural groups with their own distinctive histories and languages. This will be important to bear in mind in Chapter 4, where we illustrate how documents on education construct Czech national identity as the ‘norm’ national minorities and foreigners have to adhere to. Finally, the 2004 Education Act regulates the education of members of national minorities (Education Act, Sec. 14) and the language of instruction (Education Act, Sec. 13). It states that members of national minorities (as defined by the Minorities Act) have the right to obtain education in their respective minority language at all school levels (Education Act, Sec. 13, Art. 2), if they live in a municipality where a Committee for National Minorities has been established (Education Act, Sec. 14, Art. 1). To form special classes for minority language education, there has to be a minimum number of pupils (eight at nursery level, ten at primary, twelve at secondary level). In order to form a whole school teaching in the language of a national minority, there have to be at least twelve pupils per class at primary level, and fifteen pupils per class at secondary level (Education Act, Sec. 14, Arts 2, 3). However, several municipalities (or a municipality and a region) may also coordinate the organisation of minority education, in order to take into account the accessibility of these programmes (Education Act, Sec. 14, Art. 4). If this fails, the head teacher and founder of a particular school may also specify certain elements in the curriculum which may be taught bilingually (Education Act, Sec. 14, Art. 5). Therefore, according to the law, members of national minorities have the right to choose education in minority languages for their children, and there is also room for private initiatives to form classes or even schools in areas where there are no government provisions for minority education. On the surface, the legislation looks as if it was designed to recreate the conditions of bilingual and minority education that existed before the Second World War. However, in reality members of the German minority (and other minorities, too) find that these options do not exist, due to the combined effects of geographical dispersal of minority members as well as several decades of stigmatisation and discrimination of German-speakers and the resulting assimilation (for individual narratives, see Chapters 5 and 6). The bilingual

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education that exists in the Czech Republic is often the result of private initiatives from the more recent German and Austrian expatriate communities, and the appeal of these programmes is due to the high standards of language tuition, which also attract children from the ‘mainstream’ Czech majority. Thus, the space for cultural difference ‘within’ Czech society does not in fact exist, or at least it is limited by practical and bureaucratic constraints. Main Institutions and Actors The legislation introduced above is put into practice by several institutions and political actors across the political system. As we cannot discuss them all in detail, we will focus on the main institutions in matters relating to national minorities, which are the government, or the respective subject ministries, and parliament, where legislation is devised and passed. In parliament, the interests of national minorities are to be guaranteed by the Sub-committee for National Minorities, which is part of the Petition Committee of the Chamber of Deputies. In the upper house, the Senate, the Petition Committee and the Committee for Human Rights, Science, Education and Culture deal with issues of national minorities. During discussions on affairs of individual minorities, representatives of these minorities can attend the meetings as guests and monitor the development and possible decisions (Report on the Situation of National Minorities in the Czech Republic 2001: 21). In state administration, there are several specific bodies to monitor minority affairs. The Ministry of Culture and the Ministry for Education have Advisory Boards for National Culture and Minority Education respectively. These boards not only advise on specific legislation but also participate in decisions on allocating grants to projects that are conducted by associations of national minorities or by organisations that implement activities in favour of members of national minorities. Activities can range from cultural festivals, historical projects and exhibitions to publishing small newsletters or newspapers, and the grants are awarded from the National Budget. The relevant ministries can also establish committees and commissions to deal with specific matters relating to individual minorities. For example, the Ministry of Education has established a Polish Pedagogical Centre in Český Těšín in order to safeguard the needs of the Polish minority concentrated in the area of Sczecin Silesia. But the most important role for mainstreaming the interests and protection of national minorities is played by the Government Council for National Minorities, which is established and defined under the Minorities Act. It is made up of representatives of ministries concerned with minority issues, as well as representatives of the Office of the President and the Office of the Public Guardian of Rights, the Government Representative for Human Rights and up to three representatives of each of the twelve minorities. In total, the national minorities have eighteen seats in the Council, whereas representatives of government and administration have eleven seats

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between them. The Council must be headed by a member of government, who is to be nominated by the government on the basis of a proposal by the Prime Minister. The other members of the Council are nominated by Government Resolution (Report on the Situation of National Minorities in the Czech Republic 2001: 21–3). The purpose of the Council is to monitor legislation from all subject areas that might concern national minorities, for example in education or housing, and to make sure that the interests of national minorities are taken into consideration at all stages of the process of legislation and decision-making (see also http://www.vlada.cz/en/pracovnia-poradni-organy-vlady/rnm/historie-a-soucasnost-rady-en-16666; accessed August 2009). Apart from these institutions at national level, national minorities are also represented in local government committees, which have to reflect the percentage of members of national minorities in a given community. Since 2001 such committees have been set up in twenty-nine communities in Sczecin Silesia, four have been established at regional level in Moravia-Silesia, South Moravia, Liberec and Ústí nad Labem, and one with the metropolitan authority of Brno. If there is no such committee, local governments can also establish Commissions for National Minorities, as was done by the city of Prague, where members of active organisations of national minorities are represented. Similar commissions exist in Liberec and Most (Reports on the Situation of National Minorities in the Czech Republic 2001 and 2004). According to interviews with representatives of such commissions, the institutions at the local level are also well connected with representatives of national level institutions, in order to keep informed about plans for future legislation as well as other developments that might have an impact on their work. The members of national minorities also have the right to form their own independent organisations for the protection and pursuit of their interests. These operate as non-governmental and not-for-profit organisations and are referred to as ‘unincorporated’ organisations and include members of a national minority as well as members of the majority society. Until 1989, the German minority was represented exclusively by the Cultural Association of Citizens of the ČSSR of German Nationality (Kulturverband der Bürger der ČSSR deutscher Nationalität), which was the association that had the official approval of the Communist Party. However, after the formation of the Czech Republic in 1993, a new cultural association was formed, the Association of Germans in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia (Landesversammlung der Deutschen in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien), which is meant – and perceived – to represent Germans in the Czech Republic, untainted by involvement with the Communist Party prior to 1989. However, both cultural associations now co-exist (indeed many grassroots members participate in both groups) and both associations have one representative each in the Council for National and Ethnic Minorities (Tišerová 2008: 191–2).

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As a response to the legal arrangements and government reports on the current situation of the German minority in the Czech Republic the Association of Germans in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia has published its own report, stating that the Czech Republic does not meet its obligations for the protection of national minorities arising from the Framework Convention, the Minorities Act and the bilateral agreements with the German Government. One issue of dissent lies in the interpretation of figures for nationalities other than Czech. The Czech government attributes the falling numbers of people declaring a nationality other than Czech to a number of factors: a conflation of nationality and citizenship; increasing homogenisation of Czech society, especially after the break-up of the former ČSSR; the fact that it was not compulsory to fill the nationality column in the 2001 census; the unwillingness to declare differing nationalities; and the ‘integration or assimilation’ of members of national minorities into the majority society. The representatives of the German minority, however, stress that the main reason is the persistent reluctance to declare a nationality other than Czech, which they see as an indicator of the general ethnic climate in the Czech Republic. Only 0.4 per cent of the population (39,106 people) declared themselves to be of German nationality in 2001, which constitutes a drop of almost 21 per cent compared to the previous census, but according to the estimates published by the Association of Germans the actual number of Germans living in the Czech Republic is considerably higher. This reluctance has important consequences: few members of the German minority, only about 8,000 people, are willing to take part in organisations of national minorities, and young people in particular have virtually no interest in these associations (Informationsbericht zur gegenwärtigen Lage der deutschen Minderheit in der tschechischen Republik 2003: 3–4). It could also be argued that the unwillingness to declare and publicise German nationality – and perhaps other nationalities – leads people to leave the nationality column of the census open; and it might also lead to an increasing homogenisation of Czech society, because members of national minorities hesitate to pass their heritage on to their children. The reasons mentioned by the government report might therefore be connected to one another and not a random collection of motifs. Another point of criticism by the representatives of the German minority is that members of their minority are geographically dispersed, which makes it more difficult for them to join minority associations that may not be found in every town. The relatively low concentration of Germans in any single location also means that there are not enough Germans to qualify for a specific commission in the municipality. Similarly, the number of pupils of German origin means that there are not enough of them to form their own classes or even whole schools where German is not only taught as a subject but is also a medium of instruction. According to the government commentary

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on its fulfilment of the obligations imposed by the Framework Convention this issue ought to have been addressed by the new Education Act. The Act, however, still demands a minimum number of pupils per class in order to form individual classes or even a complete school. Whether the situation for the dispersed German minority has actually been improved by the new legislation therefore remains a moot point. The dispersion of the German minority is also not favourable for the erection of multilingual signs and inscriptions. A municipality can set up such signs in the language of a national minority only if at least 10 per cent of the population has declared themselves to be of that nationality in the previous census, and if at least 40 per cent of the municipality’s total population have voted in favour of multilingual signs. Apart from very small settlements, these thresholds seem a very high obstacle and it is doubtful whether many places are eligible to have such signs under this regulation (Commentary of the Czech Republic ACFC/OP/I [2001] 4: 13). Thus, again, the favourable legislation cannot be converted into conditions for actively developing and expressing cultural identities that do not conform with the mainstream of Czech culture. Hungary The Legal Framework As in the Czech Republic legislation on minority status and education in Hungary is mediated on several levels. International agreements, such as the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, structure the internal legislation passed by Hungarian governments and determine a framework that guides conceptions of minorities and their basic rights. Internally, Hungarian legislation on national and ethnic minorities is represented mainly by the Constitution, the 1993 Act on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities (Act n. e. m., No. LXXVII), legislation on local municipal governments (Act No. LXV) of 1990, the 1993 Act on General Education (Act gen. ed., No. LXXIX, amended 1996), as well as various directives on individual aspects of voting, local government and revisions of the National Base Curriculum (NBC) in 1998. The preamble to Act n. e. m. specifies the importance of language for identities of national minorities in Hungary, and defines the variety of national identities within Hungary as a positive asset. The language, material and intellectual culture, the historical traditions of national and ethnic minorities living in the area of the Republic of Hungary with a Hungarian citizenship, as well as all other particularities related to their minority existence are a part of the individual and communal identity.

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All these represent a special value and their protection, sustenance and enrichment is not only a basic right of national and ethnic minorities but represents a vested interest for the Hungarian nation and, ultimately, for the international community. (Ombudsman Report 1998: 1) An essential criterion of a national minority is, then, the lengthy historical coexistence with the majority Magyar population. Even though these populations have distinct cultural and linguistic traditions, they are thus categorised as indigenous to Hungarian culture and seen as a constituent part of the state, as laid out in the Constitution and in the Act n. e. m.: All groups of people who have lived in the territory of the Republic of Hungary for at least one century, who represent a numerical minority in the country’s population, whose members are Hungarian citizens, who are distinguished from the rest of the population by their own languages, cultures, and traditions, who demonstrate a sense of belonging together that is aimed at preserving all of these and at expressing and protecting the interests of their historical communities (as in Act LXXVII of 1993 n. e. m., Chapter 1, Section 1, Subsection 2) are national and ethnic minorities recognised as constituent components of the state. (National and Ethnic Minorities in Hungary 2005: 1) This status entitles them to collective participation in public life, the right to maintain their own culture and identity, widespread use of their native languages, including in education, and the right to use their names in their own languages (National and Ethnic Minorities in Hungary 2005: 3). The 1993 Act on Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities specifies and elaborates these basic rights. For example, it determines that in case of alleged direct or indirect discrimination the burden of proof is at least shared, if not reversed, so that the perpetrator has to prove his or her innocence and the victim has to prove that, and how, he or she has been wronged. It also specifies that minority opinions and positions have to be taken into account in the wording of legislation. In 2004, the Act n. e. m. was amended: now it is easier to transfer minority cultural and educational institutions under minority self-government competence and the process is more transparent, and there are now minority elections for representation at county (Komitat) level (National and Ethnic Minorities in Hungary 2005: 4). The Constitution guarantees that each member of a national minority has the right to education in his or her mother tongue (Euromosaic III – Hungary: 3.3). This right is elaborated in directives passed by the Ministry of Education concerning the education of national minorities in nursery, at school and at university (especially where teacher training is concerned). These directives regulate how children from minority backgrounds can access adequate minority education, what constitutes adequate education in this

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respect, and, crucially, how it can be organised in their own minority languages. The general aim is to ensure education in the respective language, not just as a subject but as a medium of instruction, as well as in the minority’s history and culture, whilst also ensuring that pupils meet the requirements of the National Base Curriculum standards. Moreover, minority education particularly aims at creating a consciousness of similarities and differences between majority and minority cultural traditions, and at enabling children to participate in and carry on the ‘treasure of their minority culture’ (Minderheitenkulturschatz) and to cherish cultural variety (Directive by the Ministry of Education 32/1997 [5.XI]). There is a special emphasis, however, on the regulations concerning three particular models of educational provision: ‘education predominantly in minority languages’, ‘bilingual education’ (in Hungarian and minority languages) and ‘minority education with extended language instruction’ (in minority languages). These give detailed prescriptions on how many hours per week can or must be taught in minority languages and which subjects can be taught in minority languages (it explicitly excludes the Hungarian language and literature). In addition, there is the possibility of intercultural education, which aims at introducing children from minority and majority backgrounds to national minority cultures, but this is possible only if it is not organised at the expense of the above mentioned minority education (Directive by the Ministry of Education 32/1997 [5.XI]). Another aspect of minority education concerns the content of education in minority cultures, defined as the ‘mother tongue’ and literature of a given minority, the relationship between Hungarian language and minority language, and civic and ethnic instruction concerning national minorities (Minderheiten-Volkskunde). The aim is to make children familiar not only with the language, but also with the literature in their minority language, especially also with the literature of their kin-states (Mutternation/ Mutterland), the minority’s history also in other countries (where relevant), rights and duties of minorities, institutions, and so forth, in order to provide a comprehensive grounding in all aspects of their culture. The purpose is to teach pupils that actively using their language is a means of communicating individual values and needs and of achieving social understanding (Directive by the Ministry of Education 32/1997 [5.XI]). Main Institutions and Actors Apart from the definitions of national minorities and how they are to be treated before the law as well as in the education system, the legal frameworks also define the institutions which are to be put in place in order to secure the minorities’ interests. These include the office of a Minority Ombudsman, a special Department for National and Ethnic Minorities as part of the Prime Minister’s Office at national level, as well as minority self-governments at local government level.

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The Constitution provides for the position of Parliamentary Commissioner for National and Ethnic Minority Rights or Minority Ombudsman. It is their duty to investigate racial or ethnic abuse and to initiate action to prevent this from recurring (for example, through amendments to legal frameworks). The details of these tasks are specified within the 1993 Act on Parliamentary Guarantee of Civil Rights (LIXX) (see Euromosaic III – Hungary: 3.6). Until 2007, the Office for National and Ethnic Minorities in Budapest acted as an autonomous agency of public administration with nationwide authority and supervised by the Minister of Justice. The President of the Office was appointed by the Prime Minister, based on proposals by the Minister of Justice; two Vice-Presidents were appointed by the Minister of Justice, based on proposals by the President of the Office. The Office was funded through an earmarked budget within the budget of the Ministry of Justice. However, since 1 January 2007 the office has been replaced by the Department for National and Ethnic Minorities in the Prime Minister’s Office. This, in theory, will take minority issues into the centre of government and streamline policies that affect national and ethnic minorities in Hungary (personal communication from Department for National and Ethnic Minorities, Budapest). This Department has three divisions. The first division, the Division of Minority Policy, has the task of maintaining direct contacts with the representatives of national and ethnic minorities as well as the relevant subject ministries and the minority media in order to support ‘a more effective and more successful governmental minority policy’. Secondly, the Division of Minority Self-Governments and Legal Affairs prepares and amends minority-related legislation, and provides legal aid to minority communities as well as commentaries on individual pieces of legislation to help with their interpretation. Moreover, this division is also meant to maintain contacts with minority selfgovernments and their representatives and to monitor, analyse and assess the election of those minority self-governments. Finally, the Division of Strategy, Development and State Subvention is in charge of coordinating the government’s minority-policy objectives with the needs of the minority communities as well as administering financial resources allocated for national and ethnic minorities (for example through financing projects on the basis of successful applications) (see http://www.nemzetpolitika.gov.hu/data/files/128814818. doc; accessed August 2009). The government ministries whose portfolios touch on minority matters usually have special departments dealing with minority matters in general, or even with specific national minorities. The Ministry of Education, for example, has a department dedicated to the German minority, whose task it is to oversee the wording, impact and implementation of relevant legislation and administration. Apart from central government, national and ethnic minorities can elect minority self-governments that operate both at national and at local government level. These self-governments were established by the Constitution and

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defined by the Minorities Act, They are elected to represent the local minority population in their settlement (at local level) or in the country (at national level). The aim is to ensure cultural autonomy: minority self-governments can take over and maintain educational or cultural institutions, but they do not have – and must not be given by local authorities – powers of regular administrative authorities; in other words, they cannot replace the regular local governments. In addition to this, minority self-governments have quite wideranging rights to be consulted on legislation related to minority issues, and they have to be consulted on decisions concerning minority education, including on the appointment of head teachers, on local media, local cultural heritage, and so forth (National and Ethnic Minorities in Hungary 2005: 5–7). According to the Association of Germans in Hungary the term ‘minority self-government’ (kisebbségi önkormányzat) was not chosen to express implicit claims to administrative or even legislative autonomy. ‘Self-government’ (önkormányzat) emerged during the phase of transformation from communist rule as a term, or label, for political authorities, especially at the local or municipal level. Before 1989 these authorities were called ‘councils’ (Rat/ Beirat in German, or tanács in Hungarian), and after the 1989 transformations concepts and expressions that had connotations with the old regime were avoided. ‘National Self-Government’ (or ‘nemzetiségi önkormanizát’ in Hungarian) is therefore only a logical extension of the same term (personal communication by the Association of Germans in Hungary). However, despite the opportunities that are stressed in the legal frameworks for national and ethnic minorities, there is substantial criticism of the implementation and workings of the provisions. In a report of 1998, the Ombudsman for National and Ethnic Minority Rights lists various shortcomings of the policy and the implementation process. One criticism refers to the geographical dispersion of settlements of the German minority, which make it very difficult and often impossible to meet the minimum number of children required to form special classes, let alone schools for minority education. The report also states that there is a lack of approved and specialised textbooks for minority education (Ombudsman Report 1998: 19). Furthermore, the report stresses that minority self-governments do not and cannot themselves make decisions regarding their own interests, but that they can only practise a right of consent and of expressing opinions in order to influence decisions that are made by others. This policy is most evident in education, where minority self-governments can practise their right of consent, for example, in matters concerning the recruitment of teaching staff for minority education. The General Education Act defines the right of minority self-governments to take over or found new educational institutions, but the report criticises the fact that the Act does not take into account the difficult financial situation of these self-government bodies, which cannot afford to run expensive schools (Ombudsman Report 1998: 6). This is exacerbated by the fact that the allowances for minority education are often not

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specifically earmarked in the budgets, so that municipal authorities are often unable to tell how much money there is available for minority education. In other cases, the municipal authorities reduced their allowances for minority education, claiming that they were no longer needed, due to the supplementary allowances provided by the government. Consequently, the Ombudsman demanded that the legal frameworks ought to be defined more clearly so as not to allow such ‘interpretations’, and that the budgetary regulations should be amended in order to create more transparency (Ombudsman Report 1998: 15). The Ombudsman report analysed not only issues concerning the running of minority self-government but also questions arising from the regulations concerning minority education. For example, it pointed out inconsistencies in the relationship between the teaching of Hungarian language and literature and instruction in minority languages. In 1998, it was found that these areas clashed in the curriculum so that children from minority backgrounds would not meet requirements of the National Base Curriculum if they opted for education in their minority language. The report concluded that this situation contributed to a decline in the numbers of children choosing education in minority languages and thus fostered cultural assimilation (Ombudsman Report 1998: 9). Similarly to the situation in the Czech Republic, these evaluations stand in stark contrast to the discourse in the texts of the laws in both countries. There is a great emphasis on the notions of opportunity and freedom created by the legal frameworks on minorities, and also, in the case of Hungary in particular, on the idea that the minorities (or their representatives) are to be consulted in the legislative process in order to take their interests into account. However, as has become evident, opportunities and consultation do not automatically, or even only rarely, result in actual participation and equality, especially if the conditions for participation cannot be met due to high thresholds and requirements. This is not only the case in education, where there are often not enough children in one settlement to form classes, but it is also evident, for example, in the case of bilingual street signs and inscriptions, which in the Czech Republic require ‘double’ consent, both by a majority of residents belonging to a national minority and by a majority of residents in general. (Ombudsman Report 1998: 12–14).

3.9 Conclusions In this chapter we have shown how the relationships between nation and language, and especially between nations in central Europe and the German language, have changed over the course of history since the late nineteenth century. Until the Second World War central Europe was a multilingual and multiethnic space where the borders of states and of languages did

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not coincide. Until the end of the First World War, German occupied two distinct spheres within that space: in the form of standard German it functioned as an administrative lingua franca associated with Habsburg and Prussian rule as well as with the intellectual and trading elites; in the form of Germanic dialects it was represented as the language marking the local cultures of German-speaking settlers who had migrated to eastern central European territories since the twelfth century. With the emergence of independent nation-states and the increasing emphasis on linguistic nationalism standard German increasingly lost its dominant function in favour of the ‘new’ national languages, while the dialects of German-speaking settlers could survive in their local niches relatively undisturbed until the end of the Second World War. Since the middle of the twentieth century, however, these roles have become increasingly reversed. Due to the backlash against the German language following the Second World War, even the local dialects were stigmatised as markers of potentially subversive local cultures that did not conform to the national mainstream, which increasingly led people to abandon them in favour of the respective national languages. At the same time, though, standard German returned as a foreign language that owed its popularity to the economic and cultural ties with Austria and the (then) two German states, and even though the initial post-1989 enthusiasm for it has since levelled off, it is still an important foreign language in the central European region. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War and the post-1989 transformation extensive legislation has been put in place in order to protect national and ethnic minorities and their languages. However, as we have seen, the effects of several decades of stigmatisation and assimilation cannot be reversed and the multilingual space that existed in the past cannot be recreated by law. The reality of minority politics therefore often falls short of the ideals formulated in the legal texts. In the following chapters we will look at how this view of the longue durée influences the constructions of national interests and identities in political discourses (Chapter 4) as well as individual constructions of social identities (Chapters 5 and 6).

Notes 1. Prussia’s victory over Habsburg also prepared the way for the formation of the first German nation-state in 1871, which also happened to be the first nation-state in central Europe (Kamusella 2009: 453). 2. This concerned two kinds of bilingual grammar schools, which differed inasmuch as the schools for the German minority also had tuition in minority history and folk culture, whereas the other type only had extended tuition in German and tuition of certain subjects in German as a foreign language.

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3. The 1997 Declaration includes, among other things, the Czech-German Future Fund (Deutsch-Tschechischer Zukunftsfonds), which was set up in order to support the victims of National Socialist crimes in the former Czechoslovakia as well as Czech–German projects for bi-national cooperation (for an example of a bi-national project, see Černá 2009). The process leading up to this declaration was long and complicated, as Czech–German relations had deteriorated between 1995 and 1997 over the question of the 1945 Beneš decrees (see 3.6 above). In 1995, the Czech parliament declared the decrees to be lawful and constitutional, and the resulting diplomatic row was not resolved until 1997 when the then Chancellor Kohl and President Klaus signed a declaration according to which Germany accepted responsibility for crimes committed under the National Socialist regime and the Czech government expressed regret over the discrimination and expulsion of Sudeten Germans. The Beneš decrees also caused rifts in Czech–Austrian relations, when Austria demanded that the Czech government revoke them as part of the conditions for EU accession. The issue was finally resolved when the EU decided in 2002 that the decrees were not part of the accession process and could not be used in European intergovernmental negotiations (Tišerová 2008: 188).

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4

Language policy discourses: interventions and intersections

4.1 Introduction In Chapter 3 we traced the past and the present of the politics of language and identity in Hungary and the Czech Republic. In order to demonstrate that the present-day policies on language, multilingualism and national identity at different political levels do not exist in isolation from one another, we will show in this chapter how they are linked vertically with discourses at the EU level as well as horizontally with the discourses on foreign cultural policy in Germany and Austria. Therefore, we focus here on the complex layering of language policies by exploring the multiple levels at which they are formulated as well as the tensions between them. All such policies represent interventions in the otherwise unregulated practice of language use, but our aim here is to show the points where the different interventions intersect one another in the context of the discourses in which they are formulated. In this sense, this chapter addresses the question of scale referred to in Chapter 2, and it is connected in this way to the following two chapters (5 and 6), which deal with individual experiences and the formation of social identities. We want to show in what sense these discourses are political: how do they define what is appropriate at EU or national level, and what is their impact on individuals who are negotiating their lives within and between these different political levels and discourses? We begin (in 4.2) by analysing the supra-national EU context and EU strategies for promoting multilingualism in various forms before moving on (in 4.3 and 4.4) to national domestic and foreign cultural policies, which continue to foster the idea of ‘national’ languages. However, our analysis will focus less on policies as such than on how key policy documents illustrate different discursive positions on language and social life in the respective societies. First, we will put the empirical analysis into a more specific context that will help to explain the importance of this part of the study, and set out the reasons for the decisions we have taken concerning the selection and analysis of the documents discussed in this chapter.

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The context In her conclusion to her assessment of the current state of language policy and planning, Wright (2004: 25) argues that the study of language policy at specific, isolated political levels is no longer appropriate due to the effects of globalisation. According to Wright, different political, social, cultural and economic levels are increasingly interdependent, not only vertically – as for example between the transnational, national, regional and local level – but also horizontally – that is, between different states or communities (Wright 2004: 13, 14). How policies are formulated and how they are put into practice at each of these different levels affects these processes at virtually all the other levels and makes independent isolated decisions impossible. Blommaert (2003) has argued in the same vein that the different scales, the macro, meso and micro levels of policies and how they interact, have to be investigated in a systematic way. In our context, ‘macro’ refers to the European level, national decision-making is situated at the meso level, and individual language practices can be considered as representing the micro-level politics of language. The dynamics of the relationship between discourses on language policy at different political levels and in different countries, as well as their connections with individual linguistic practices and repertoires, is a good example of the processes described by Wright and Blommaert. This concerns not only the effects of the spread of global languages, such as English or Spanish, but also the use of other languages with only regional status, such as German in central Europe. By tracing some of these connections and interdependencies in language policy discourses across different vertical levels and horizontally across state boundaries we aim to make a contribution to the mapping of a central European language space. Furthermore, by exploring the sociolinguistic stratigraphy in central Europe we shall establish the basis for exploring the relationship between language policy discourses on the one hand and the repertoires and choices of individuals on the other (Chapters 5 and 6). The different scales in European language policy lend themselves well to illustrating the horizontal and vertical connections between political institutions and levels of policy-making as a basis for our analysis. Political and cultural processes and practices that straddle different nation-states are the horizontal connections in our analysis, and we are particularly concerned with the connections between Germany and Austria on the one hand and Hungary and the Czech Republic on the other. The connections between different political levels – that is, the EU and the national policy level – form the vertical strand of our analysis. At the supra-national level language strategies promote multilingualism in national languages through extensive language education, which has repeatedly been declared one of the EU’s key integrationist aims. But different notions of multilingualism are articulated in the various strategic documents. On the one hand, for example, multilingualism is seen as an ability

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to communicate with people from different countries in their respective languages. Usually this also entails, albeit often only implicitly, the notion that these are the standard languages of different countries, such as French, Italian, Spanish or German, which – as we shall see later on – has been used as the prime motivation and justification for national foreign cultural policies. On the other hand, multilingualism is portrayed as a human right to choose which language to use in daily life, and crucially also for official purposes and in the public sphere. The former notion has an impact on conceptions of citizenship, national culture and belonging at the national level, where language policy typically still reinforces monolingual traditions by privileging national languages. Non-indigenous languages are therefore often disadvantaged and speakers of European non-indigenous languages (for example German in Hungary or the Czech Republic, or Hungarian in Romania) are often intent on preserving, or in some cases on reasserting, ties with national minorities in other member states, often in neighbouring countries, which challenges the perceived homogeneity of national cultures. An example of this is Hungarian foreign cultural policy, which actively supports and promotes Hungarian language and culture in countries such as Slovakia, Romania and the Ukraine, where there have been sizeable Magyar minorities since the breakup of Greater Hungary in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon (Medgyes and Miklósy 2000; Kontra 1996). In addition to this, national language policies are also designed to preserve national integrity and to counterbalance supra-national concessions and inward migration. As we shall see, this is an important issue in Czech language policy discourses, but it is also the case in other EU countries where there are, for example, new requirements for migrants to pass language proficiency tests when applying for permanent residence or citizenship (see, for example, Blackledge 2005; Stevenson 2006; Extra et al. 2009; and Hogan-Brun et al. 2009). At the local and regional level language varieties and practices often conflict with both national and supra-national policies. Non-standard varieties of national languages and non-European languages exist or even flourish within and across national boundaries. They do so in real and in virtual space but in an often marginalised way and with only limited legitimacy, in spite of all the European policy measures of the last fifteen years (see, for example, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages; Extra and Gorter 2001; and Nic Craith 2006). Because of these different facets, discourses on language and multilingualism are highly political in the sense that they have a direct impact on how language is used to define the relationships between different groups of people as well as between individuals and relevant public institutions. The notions of cultural diversity at EU level and national homogeneity are often perceived to be competing or even incompatible with one another. This then defines the continuum that people have to negotiate in order to position their individual language repertoires and linguistic practices. As we suggested in Chapter 2,

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those different discourses on multilingualism frame the relationship between language and social life in several ways. For example, the discourses open up the question of what it means to ‘speak properly’, which builds on the relationship between national languages and migrants’ languages as well as between the standard variety of a language and different non-standard forms. This question, however, is linked with the question of rights and obligations, that is with the question of who is entitled to define what the proper language is and what is appropriate to be spoken where and when. These questions have to be answered by all the participating actors in this process – the individuals who have to make choices concerning their language repertoires, the cultural agents of the state (cultural and educational institutions), governments who provide legal frameworks, and finally the EU institutions which (aim to) coordinate different national strategies for promoting languages and which set reference points by defining the human right to choose one’s languages in particular contexts. The focus in this chapter will be on how the EU and different national actors position themselves in this context, whereas the strategies of individual speakers will be dealt with in the following two chapters. Discourses under analysis and guiding questions The political discourses we are going to analyse are articulated primarily in official documents, such as white papers concerning policy strategies and government reports (although we also draw to a limited extent on interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders). These texts are derived from the EU level, and from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria at the national level. This will enable us to compare texts expressing different political discourses – vertically, from different policy levels, as well as horizontally between different countries. Our aim is to explore how the different participants in these discourses position themselves, and how the different acts of positioning at different political levels relate to one another. What images do they create, do they converge or not, and can we detect patterns of relationships between the different discourses? In particular, we are interested in how the EU strategies on language policy are reflected at the other political levels. Do they have any discernible influence on national discourses? Language policy, like all cultural matters, is part of the reserved policy areas, which means that the European level institutions have no direct authority in this regard. Any agreements form a general point of reference, but it is down to the individual member states to ratify and translate them into national law. However, as part of the conditions to be fulfilled for the accession process, Hungary and the Czech Republic were obliged (as indeed were the other eight candidate countries at the time) to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This conditionality should therefore be detectable in the Czech and Hungarian

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national discourses, but it remains to be seen how those concepts have been translated or incorporated into national frameworks. The central question here is whether we can detect a kind of ‘conservatism’ of cultural and social relationships, or whether the discourses show signs of change and transformation in those relationships. Are the images that are evoked by different languages and connected to speakers of different languages likely to change or not? Which languages are defined as ‘proper’ and for which purposes or circumstances? What is a ‘foreign language’ as opposed to a ‘minority language’, in particular with regard to German? What is the hierarchy of different languages or language varieties? And what impact does this hierarchical notion have on speakers of those languages, that is, on their social status and cultural capital? Our investigation of these questions develops an analysis drawing on the historical dimension of the discourses concerned and attempting to detect images of national identities that result from the depictions of multilingualism (see Wodak et al. 1998; 1999; Reisigl 2008; Wodak and Meyer 2009; Reisigl and Wodak 2009). The underlying questions are: what aspects of the past are invoked in order to support particular arguments and what spaces are opened for speakers of different languages, and why and how? At the same time, following Blommaert (2003), we try to unpick the ‘layered simultaneity’ in political discourses in order to see what temporal layers are merged or synchronised and to what end. In sum, we are concerned with how different languages are categorised, and how power is expressed or represented and whether these expressions show signs of stability and permanence or instability and change.

4.2 European level discourses European institutions, especially the EU Commission and the Council of Europe, do not have a direct policy competence in the area of languages and cultures. These areas belong to the reserved policy areas where the individual member states alone can take decisions, either domestically or within the Council of Ministers. However, both the Commission and the Council of Europe have an advisory function and coordinate more general programmes adopted by the Council of Ministers. Their strategies serve as a framework of reference for national policies, both legally and also discursively. In these strategies as they have evolved in recent years, linguistic diversity and multilingualism are regarded as positive European assets, which contribute to Europe’s distinct cultural identities and which also facilitate the movement of people, services and goods within the European Union. Moreover, multilingualism is believed to aid individual freedom if people are entitled to speak and write in their own languages. There are two strands to this policy area: one is the area of multilingualism in the sense of foreign language

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learning, the other is the area of protection of regional and minority (or lesser used) languages. Broadly speaking, multilingualism is the domain of the European Commission and its action plan, with some involvement of the Council of Europe. Minority and regional languages, on the other hand, are an important domain of the Council of Europe, which has the most important international agreements in this policy area (in the sense of being open to European states which are not [yet] members of the European Union). As the details of language policy activities of the Commission and the Council go beyond the scope of this chapter, we have included more information together with references to important documents in Appendix A. Key EU texts under analysis The three texts that we are going to analyse here represent particular discourses on multilingualism and cover both the area of protection of minority languages and the domain of multilingualism and foreign language learning. The older text is the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, the two more recent texts are the New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism of 2005 and the 2008 Commission Communication ‘Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment’. The relevant passages of the texts we quote from can be found in appendices B, C and D. These texts form an important framework of reference, both as international agreements – in the case of the protection of minorities and their languages – and as overarching strategies that influence intergovernmental decisions at European level as well as national laws in the ratification process. But regardless of whether they become incorporated into national law in EU member states, they provide relevant and necessary concepts and vocabulary for categorising language(s) and the objectives of state politics in the area of language planning. The analysis here is concerned with how these texts conceptualise language and its relationship with social life, that is what role or function language has in people’s social relationships with others and with the respective state’s agencies. The key questions are: who defines what multilingualism and linguistic diversity are and who has the agency or power to enforce a particular policy? Even though we have chosen only a few key documents, the discourses on multilingualism we have traced in our analysis – namely the human rights discourse on the one hand, and the economic or skill-oriented discourse on the other – can be found across a wide range of European publications, and are reinforced in the analysis of interviews with European policy-makers recently conducted by Studer et al. (2008). The Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is the key text representing multilingualism as a human right, attributing high symbolic value to the existence of indigenous cultural heritage in Europe. However, this idealistic programme is constrained by the resistance of nation-states who do not want to relinquish their

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right to define what ‘the proper language’ is in the national domain and what space should be granted to speakers of other languages. The Commission Communications, on the other hand, represent a seemingly utilitarian discourse which categorises multilingualism as a skill that enhances economic opportunities. However, the instrumental motivation cannot be entirely separated from the idealistic one and both strands of discourse support one another where the Commission positions itself as a driving agency, rather than a mere coordinator, in the development of language policy. Multilingualism as a source of cultural wealth and the right to choose: the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages One of the pre-eminent strands of discourse on multilingualism in Europe is the concept of multilingualism as the wealth that is derived from the various cultural and linguistic traditions that can be found in Europe. The Charter is the most important document representing this discourse and giving it political weight and it has been widely and extensively discussed and criticised. (For analyses of the policy content as well as the ratification requirements and process of the Charter, see Extra and Gorter 2001; Grin 2003; Extra and Yağmur 2004; and Nic Craith 2006: 76–9.) However, for the purposes of our study we want to isolate details of the discursive strategies that are employed in the document, which will serve as a basis for comparison with the other documents under analysis. The relevant extract from the text can be found in Appendix B. As we are interested in how language is conceptualised as a catalyst of relationships between people and political institutions, rather than the actual policy details, we focus our analysis on the first part of the Charter, since it describes relationships between different groups of people and idealistic values, and it flags up possible points of resistance on the part of ratifying member states. The preamble is composed as a solemn declaration in which the signatories to the Charter (the member states of the Council of Europe)1 demonstrate their ideals and the considerations they shared when signing up to this common course of action. The Charter begins by invoking the concept of multilingualism as a heritage resource, which the Council of Europe must help protect by pushing its members to protect the cultural heritage in their territories. This aim is reinforced by recalling the ideal of the Council of Europe, which aims at ‘achieving greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage’ (paragraph 2). This is a normative goal of working together in order to protect and make the best of a common cultural heritage. However, it also has a strong top-down tone where it refers to the Council of Europe as one single body which has to achieve this unity. The following paragraphs further define and qualify this concept of

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multilingualism by explicitly referring to the wealth of traditions that exist beyond the mainstream national cultures, which make up the collective cultural heritage, and which are in danger of being lost unless they are protected by the states. This is achieved by spelling out the Charter’s goal of achieving unity (among the signatory states) in order to safeguard the common cultural heritage. It states that ‘the protection of the historical regional or minority languages of Europe, some of which are in danger of eventual extinction, contributes to the maintenance and development of Europe’s cultural wealth and traditions’ (paragraph 3). Europe’s cultural wealth and traditions has taken over from the more abstract notion of ‘common cultural heritage’, and the cultural wealth is defined by the variety of different and also lesser used (minority) languages, thus alluding to the popular slogan of ‘unity in diversity’ which has come to represent the European project. However, this particular concept of ‘unity in diversity’ has the potential to be subversive, because it emphasises the sub-state cultures of regions and minorities instead of the diversity of mainstream national cultures. This is given further weight by the reference to the eventual extinction of some of the least used minority languages, which stresses the particular urgency of the Council of Europe’s mandate to safeguard them. Moreover, the Charter is placed in an honourable tradition of high-profile international agreements for the protection of human rights, such as the United Nations Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which see the right to speak regional or minority languages in public as an ‘inalienable right’ (paragraph 4). Thus, the Council of Europe positions itself as the guardian of universal human rights, not as acting out of arbitrary motives, which is designed to further enhance its mandate and strengthen the normative core of the Charter, and the heritage of minority cultures is constructed as a people’s right to choose their cultural allegiance as well as their preferred language of communication. The resulting tension, or conflict, with the state’s right to define and enforce its national language and culture becomes obvious in the following three paragraphs, where the normative ideals are reiterated. Here they are juxtaposed with references to the integrity of the nation-state, national languages and the specific traditions and historical traditions of each European state, which must not be harmed by any European policy measure. For example, paragraph 5 starts with the emphasis on ‘the value of interculturalism and multilingualism’ but in the same sentence it states that ‘the protection and encouragement of regional or minority languages should not be to the detriment of the official languages and the need to learn them’. Similarly, paragraph 6 begins with the recognition that language rights ‘represent an important contribution to the building of a Europe based on the principles of democracy and cultural diversity’ but also the insistence that they cannot be dissociated from the concept of national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

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In these juxtapositions, the European ideal of cultural diversity is placed next to the state’s ‘right’ to maintain its official language and territory in a natural and seemingly unproblematic way. Similarly, in paragraph 6 the protection of minority languages is characterised as an important contribution to European cultural diversity within the framework of national sovereignty. This is mirrored in the overall construction of the preamble, which is framed by the goals that the Council of Europe seeks to achieve in the beginning and the reminder of specific conditions and historical traditions that have to be taken into consideration at the end. Yet beyond the textual level, these demands can create tensions and conflicts of interests if they are to be pursued at the same time by different political actors. In the preamble these tensions are resolved textually by the statement that the signatories, almost despite their concerns, ‘have agreed as follows’, which leads over to the operational part of the Charter. There, however, these tensions surface again in various places. For example in Part III, Article 8 on education, the signatories agree to an unmistakeable commitment to provide wide-ranging infrastructure and resources for children from national minorities to be educated in their respective minority language, based on their individual wishes and choices. But their choices are very often reigned in by the constraining clause ‘whose number is considered sufficient’. Therefore, another entity is accorded the power to decide whether their choices are realised. The passive construction leaves open the question of who eventually is to take this decision, but it implies that the final right and agency lies with the state, and not the European institutions or the people’s choices. This leads to the conclusion that there are different strategies at work in this Charter: on the one hand, there is the Council of Europe’s ideal of securing minority language rights as inalienable rights of personal freedom which will contribute to a more democratic and culturally varied Europe; on the other hand, there is the nation-states’ insistence on their rights to determine what is legitimate within the framework of their legislation and historical traditions, even if this limits individual language choices or goes against the spirit of the Council of Europe’s strategy. Since the Charter is the outcome of an actual process of negotiation between different parties the different and even conflicting interests are thus represented in the structure of the text. This is the case with the ever-present tensions between the ideal of European integration and national self-interest which are visible at the textual level as conflicting ideas about the relationship between language and social life. The question that emerges from this document is who owns language and who is entitled to define which language, or language variety, is ‘proper’, important and legitimate, whether it is the state’s monopoly or whether it is fundamentally a question of individual freedom and choice. This issue is integral to all the documents analysed in this chapter, and it is also one of the central topoi in the individual narratives discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. Another question arising from this document is what the EU’s role is

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in this struggle: whether it enforces people’s entitlement to make language choices even if these may sometimes subvert the respective national language, whether it concentrates the power of definition at a new political level away from the state’s influence but also removed from individual freedoms, or whether indeed it leaves the nation-state’s power to define the ‘proper’ and appropriate language intact, despite the emphasis on people’s linguistic rights. As far as the Council of Europe is concerned, the document suggests that it is strengthening people’s own choices at the expense of the nation-state without assuming power for itself. This, however, is due to its structure as an intergovernmental body that exists in as much as its member states participate in it: that is, they participate in the negotiations and pass recommendations or sign international treaties. Unlike the European Commission it cannot assume power for itself and impose sanctions in the event that members do not fulfil their duties arising from international agreements. The ratification of the Charter has been made a binding requirement for EU accession not by the Council of Europe but by a decision by the Council of Ministers, and the judgement as to whether or not the condition is fulfilled by individual candidate countries also rests with the Council of Ministers, even though it bases its decision on a recommendation made by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. We have already mentioned the evident tension between the influence of the state and people’s right to choose their cultural allegiance. The question now is how these challenges are reflected in the documents that are produced by the European Commission, which has a very different status and competence from the Council of Europe. Multilingualism as a skill: the European Commission’s 2005 and 2008 Communications on Multilingualism The two Communications by the European Commission, ‘A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism’ (2005) (see Appendix C) and ‘Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment’ (2008) (see Appendix D), are very different from the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. They are not international and legally binding treaties but papers in which the European Commission lays out its strategic view of a particular policy area. This is the case especially with the 2005 Framework Strategy, which stands at the beginning of an EU action programme on promoting multilingualism in Europe, and which very much conveys a spirit of excitement at entering a new era of policy development. The 2008 document is more contemplative, reflecting on the findings and achievements of the first stages of consultations and policy implementation since 2005. However, both documents have to be seen in the light of the fact that language policy is a reserved policy area, where the European institutions can issue recommendations and coordinate strategies, but the Commission cannot issue directives concerning

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language policy regulations or issue sanctions in case of non-compliance on the part of the member states. Both Commission documents draw on the concept of multilingualism as the ability to speak several languages as well as on multilingualism as (foreign) language learning that enables people to participate in the common European market (of opportunities), and the idealistic concept of multilingualism as symbolic wealth is mentioned only secondarily. In its first paragraph the 2005 Framework Strategy explicitly positions itself as the first Commission Communication ‘to explore this policy area’. It then ‘reaffirms the Commission’s commitment to multilingualism in the European Union’ before moving on to the strategic framework for the promotion of multilingualism in various areas and what specific policies or actions could emanate from this strategic view. These policies, or actions, follow the main objectives of ‘encouraging language learning and promoting linguistic diversity in society’, ‘promoting a healthy multilingual economy’ and ‘giving citizens access’ to any piece of information and legislation ‘in their own languages’, which are set out in section I.2. Thus the Commission creates the concept of multilingualism as an asset for people who are able to speak various different languages. This can be achieved by language learning, and it opens up economic possibilities as well as access to information. The notion of ‘cultural wealth’ is in this sense literally based on the understanding that increased cultural competences – in this case from speaking several languages – also increase material success. Moreover, the Commission positions itself as a facilitator, not as an actually acting entity. This is reinforced by the following paragraph, in which the responsibility for direct actions is explicitly placed with the member states and their institutions acting at national, regional and local level, and the Commission’s role is defined as ‘raising awareness of multilingualism’ and ‘improving consistency of action taken at different levels’. On the one hand, this refers to the principle of subsidiarity, which must be obeyed in this policy area since it remains reserved for national legislation. On the other hand, this paragraph raises the possibility of ‘mainstreaming’ multilingualism by ensuring that the principles of linguistic diversity and equal rights are taken into consideration across different European and national policy areas, which would be a qualitative shift in European language policy, away from the ‘mere’ raising of issues for intergovernmental conferences. Thus, it positions the Commission as a force that actually drives the development of this policy area, not just as a facilitator and coordinator of national policies. In a second step, the Framework Strategy introduces the connection between multilingualism and the core European values of ‘unity in diversity’ (section I.1) and thus it brings in the concept that multilingualism in Europe entails the existence of a community that consists of speakers of many different languages. It also makes explicit reference not only to the (then) 20 official languages in the EU, but also to the ’60 or so indigenous languages’ spoken

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by national and ethnic minorities in the EU and the ‘scores of non-indigenous languages’ spoken by migrant communities. All of these are included in the ‘common home’ that is the European Union, ‘where diversity is celebrated’ and where different languages, ‘mother tongues’ – we have discussed the complexities of this concept in Chapter 2 – bring wealth and create bridges for mutual understanding. Language is defined as ‘the most direct expression of culture’ which makes people human and bestows a sense of identity in the first place. These statements are backed up by references to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of, among other things, linguistic difference, and which represents most clearly the discourse on linguistic rights as questions of individual freedom. However, the Framework Strategy also makes a connection between the community of speakers of different languages and individuals’ ability to speak several different languages. This is introduced with the Slovak proverb, which is cited both in Slovak and in English at the very beginning, right after the main title, and which holds that ‘the more languages you know, the more of a person you are’. It also relates to one of the footnotes to the text, where once more the emphasis is placed on language learning as an ability to put oneself in somebody else’s shoes by learning languages that ‘give expression to those cultures’ and by learning about the references and concepts that underpin other cultures. Thus, multilingualism is also defined as a means of and contribution to international understanding, which can help and be achieved by increasing people’s intercultural competences through foreign language learning. Multilingualism is thus given two dimensions, an instrumental/material one and an idealistic one, by being defined as underlying a community of practice in which people can participate in several ways: first – instrumentally – by being able to access economic opportunities, and second – idealistically – through being able to understand and communicate with speakers of other ‘mother tongues’ who also inhabit the ‘common European home’. The idealistic and utilitarian discourses thus cannot be separated (or can be only analytically) as they depend on one another and mutually support one another in the argument. Moreover, the emphasis in both dimensions is on people’s ability and opportunity to participate in a particular community, and thus the Framework Strategy creates a people-centred image of European multilingualism, where the institutions both of the EU and of the member states have to collaborate in order for people to be able to achieve this by providing the necessary resources and infrastructures. An important discursive strategy adopted in the text is the way it moves away from the normal generalising and abstract rhetoric about European values and citizens towards the personal pronouns ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. This happens at various points in the text, and it creates a much more personalised tone, a we-group that is quite different from the abstract concept of

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a European citizen and the ideals of European integration and democratic values. Examples can be found in paragraph 2 of section I.1 in the reference to ‘our mother tongues’ as well as in the following paragraph where language is said to ‘make us human’ and to give ‘each of us a sense of identity’. It can also be found in the short introductions to other sections of the text, on Multilingual Society and the Multilingual Economy, where the knowledge of other languages ‘encourages us to become more open to other people’s cultures’ (section II.1.1, paragraph 1) and knowing the languages of ‘our trading partners around the globe’ enables us to enhance our businesses (section III.1, paragraph 1). In these constructions, the Commission positions – or more likely defines – itself as being on a par with the European citizens it claims to represent. Thus, the text of the Communication creates the image of a new, more inclusive relationship between the European Commission on the one hand and the people on the other. But the same we-construction does not occur in the final section that covers the relationship between the European Commission and European citizens, where the focus is on providing information in the official languages of the European Union as well as on the cost-benefit calculations of the translation and interpreting services. Here, the style is very much that of an institution which writes about its citizens. More specifically, the emphasis is on the ‘European institutions’ in the plural (or more abstractly on the ‘European Union’), which are taking action in the form of ‘adopting legislation’ and ‘providing services’, but without actually describing the possible interaction between people, that is, between individual citizens on the one hand and the people working in the European institutions (who are ultimately acting in order to provide information, or interpreting or translating pieces of legislation) on the other. The actual active entity, the subject, is thus obscured, despite the active grammatical construction that relies on transitive verbs. Therefore this section counteracts the ‘new’ relationship between European institutions and citizens as one ‘we-group’ which was sketched out in the introductory section by returning to the – more predictable – abstract official rhetoric. This is even more important, because the relationship between the actual EU institutions and European citizens is not governed by the principle of subsidiarity, and therefore there is no reason to conceal prospective action in case it would be seen as impinging on member states’ sovereignty. The 2008 Communication on Multilingualism is composed in a very different style. Instead of being a bold positioning paper which aims at defining the Commission’s purpose in this policy area, it is much more reflective and puts the issues surrounding multilingualism into a wider perspective. It is thus very important for our interest in the positioning of multilingualism and the function this is given in social relations. The difference in style, or character, may also be due to the circumstances which motivated the writing of each Communication. The 2005 Framework Strategy arose from the Council of Ministers decision during the 2001 Barcelona summit to strengthen

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European policy in the area of language learning and multilingualism, and its programmatic nature is very evocative of a sense of excitement at opening up a new policy area. The concept of multilingualism that prevails in the 2008 document is – very much like in the 2005 Framework Strategy – the notion of an asset, a source of wealth that people can partake in (only) if they are able to speak different languages. The introduction establishes the important questions, which are then picked up again later in the document. It starts with a conventional reference to the core concept ‘unity in diversity’, which is presented as the key ‘aspiration’ or goal of the European project, and which depends on ‘the harmonious co-existence of many languages in Europe’ – interestingly, it refers to the co-existence of languages, not of their respective speakers. However, this co-existence is an asset only if there is a ‘successful multilingualism policy’ that promotes mutual understanding and thus social cohesion, that increases people’s employability, and that facilitates people’s access to ‘services and rights’ and also information through the ability to speak to more people in their respective languages. These opportunities represent the ‘asset’ in the title of the document, whereas the ‘successful multilingualism policy’ refers to the ‘shared commitment’ that is necessary in order to implement the policy and eventually benefit from it. The collocation of multilingualism policy and social and economic policy, which have to be coordinated in order to be successful, introduces the argument in favour of the Commission’s involvement in language policy, as an institution that is well placed to coordinate the national efforts and to synchronise a unified European response to these challenges. The reference to globalisation (paragraph 1, line 10) puts this necessity into a wider context: the policy is not only motivated by the romantic vision of a harmonious Europe that is united in diversity, but it also helps cope with the external pressures of economic globalisation and increased demands on people’s geographical mobility. In the second paragraph, the possible benefits of multilingualism are explicitly linked to the Commission’s social policy agenda, which seeks to address social disadvantages by providing adequate language training or infrastructures in order to overcome obstacles to communication. The three key words that form the basis of the social agenda are ‘opportunities’, ‘access’ and ‘solidarity’, which are then translated into multilingual policy as ‘everybody should have the opportunity to communicate appropriately’, ‘everybody should have access to appropriate language training’, and ‘in the spirit of solidarity, even those who may not be able to learn other languages should be provided with appropriate means of communication’. This link between social policy and multilingualism policy is important because it integrates multilingualism into one of the key areas of competence of the European Commission and justifies Commission action in the area of language policy. Finally, the last three paragraphs of the introduction show why it was necessary to define language policy as one of the Commission’s areas of

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competence. In the third to last paragraph, the member states are presented as the ‘key decision-makers in language policy’ and the Commission as committed to working with them and other stakeholders according to the principle of subsidiarity. The Commission cites as its main aim to ‘assist them in their efforts’ and to ‘ease the exchange of good practices’. This complies with the commonly held notions of what is appropriate for the Commission to claim in terms of competence and agency. However, in the last paragraph, the aim of integrating language policy within the ‘wider context set by the EU agenda for social cohesion and prosperity’ is reiterated, which is a departure from the usual structure of EU documents. The introductions of the 2005 Framework Strategy and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages both end on the notion of subsidiarity, which – in those documents – seems to serve to relativise the idealism of a common European policy on multilingualism. Yet in the case of the 2008 Communication this order is reversed, and instead the reiteration of the principle of subsidiarity seems to be relativised by the newly expressed goal of integrating language questions into all European policy areas. This could lead to the ‘mainstreaming’ of language policy in the same way that gender questions were integrated into all areas of common European policies, and it would not necessarily depend any more on intergovernmental decisions and approval. As was the case with gender policies, language questions could therefore become part of the conditions that are placed on obtaining EU subsidies, for example. The third to last paragraph may contain a hint as to which aspects could become conditional, when it mentions the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages as a ‘comprehensive framework’ of reference for decision-making on languages. While the Charter is conditional for new EU candidate countries, it is not binding for old member states and it has not even been ratified by all of them. Yet if the rules were to change, the protection of regional and minority languages could also become a binding requirement for old member states when applying for EU funds. Thus the 2008 Communication rhetorically transfers power in the area of language policy to the European institutions, most notably the Commission. This is significantly different from the 2005 Framework Strategy, which places the competence in the hands of the member states. While the 2008 document is also about increasing people’s opportunities to learn languages, and while the relevant legislation is still to be passed by national governments, the Commission seems to be set to take over as the coordinating power that defines the directions of language policy legislation in Europe. The boldness of these statements is attributable to the creation of the specific portfolio for multilingualism with a dedicated Commissioner in January 2007, which created a significant momentum in language policy at European level (see http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/orban/index_en.htm; accessed August 2009). It is too soon yet to see whether the discourses and, more importantly, processes of decision-making and conditionality are going to change as a result. As a rhetorical strategy, however, this is a

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significant shift, because it opens up unprecedented notions of agency for the Commission through a stronger involvement in language policies. However, with the restructuring of the European Commission in 2010, the portfolio for multilingualism was dissolved again and the competencies in that policy area have been incorporated into the new portfolio of the Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. It is therefore unlikely that there will be sea-changes in European language policy in the near future, even though some of the momentum gathered in the 2008 Communication might be transferred to the new portfolio. In this section, we have tried to show what different conceptions of multilingualism have been created at European level. We have seen that, on the one hand, multilingualism is conceived of as representing people’s right to choose their cultural identities (in the Charter), which are threatened in their existence and therefore have to be protected by the respective state governments. On the other hand, multilingualism is also conceived of as people’s ability to speak several different languages rather than the mere existence of different national, regional and minority languages across the European continent (in the Commission Communications). While the Charter puts emphasis on the states’ duties to protect people’s right to choose, the Commission documents stress individual abilities and language-learning, which merely have to be supported by infrastructure and resources at the national and European levels of policy-making. It therefore seems as if the Commission’s instrumental, utilitarian discourse on multilingualism has largely supplanted the Charter’s human rights discourse. In the following sections we investigate the discourses at national level, to see how they relate to those at the European level, which issues they pick up and how they use them for creating ‘spaces’ for particular languages and their speakers. First, we analyse official discourses in Germany and Austria, both of which countries contribute to the language learning sector in the Czech Republic and in Hungary by providing resources, staff and funding for German language courses in those countries (and others). Secondly, we discuss the discourses in the Czech Republic and in Hungary, in particular with regard to their formulation of internal language policy: what does it mean to learn foreign languages, why is it desirable, and what is the position of regional or minority languages? The questions here are: first, how do the German and Austrian governments formulate and position their respective foreign cultural policies, how do they seek to promote the German language in a region where German has been associated with authoritarianism and dictatorship, and how do they ‘employ’ the European-level discourses in their own discourses? Second, what do the national level discourses on multilingualism say about the relationship between utilitarian and idealistic conceptions, and can they be separated from one another in the first place? And third, can we detect any connections and/or contradictions between the

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various national-level discourses with regard to the ways in which they construct national interests and identities and their alignments with Europeanlevel discourses?

4.3 Discourses at national level I: foreign cultural policy in Austria and Germany As we have shown in Chapter 3, central Europe provides a particularly good example of how language policy discourses in different countries and/or in different ethnic groups relate to, or are in tension with, each other. Historically it has always been a highly multilingual space and language was often crucial for defining boundaries of national states and ethnic and national groups. After 1989, due to the political transformations and the preparations for EU accession new arrangements had to be found to accommodate ethnolinguistic differences within populations, and relations with other states and the EU had to be restructured. In addition to that, globalised economic demands and cultural systems exercised pressure on language policy in this region. This led to new conflicts over language issues but also to the accommodation of previous tensions within the area of language policy. We have also shown that the situation of the German language in this region is highly complex. Historically, it has had a widespread presence in the region due to the spheres of influence of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern empires (Rindler Schjerve 2003), but also because of the widespread settlements of ethnic Germans and extensive contacts through trade and cultural exchange (Földes 2002: 343–5). After a significant dip in popularity after the end of the Second World War, the transformations of 1989–90 brought about a distinct rise in interest in German, and despite a decline after the initial resurgence demand for German language skills are still significant (Földes 2004a; StADaF Report 2005). German now has three different functions in central Europe: • It is the national language of two sovereign EU member states, Germany and Austria, with extensive economic and cultural relations to their neighbours in eastern central Europe. • It is a heritage language of national minorities in several neighbouring new EU member states (for example, Hungary, the Slovak and Czech Republics, Poland and Romania), for whom German is a means of connecting with their history, cultural traditions and identity. • It is a foreign language that is enjoying continuing demand. Its market value derives from employment opportunities in Germany and Austria, business contacts across the borders, as well as from the presence of German and Austrian companies in neighbouring states to the east, and from tourism.

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These conditions have an impact on Germany’s and Austria’s policies for promoting the German language among EU member states as well as on how these policies are received in the host states and how they tie in with local approaches to language policy. Austria’s foreign policy in central Europe is concerned principally with rebuilding partnerships and cooperation based on the historical legacy of the Habsburg Empire. Germany’s foreign cultural policy is, of course, constrained by the legacy of National Socialism. Especially neighbouring countries in eastern central Europe, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, have had bitter experiences, which still influence both political contacts between governments and the interactions between people across borders (for the Polish experiences see Galasińska and Krzyżanowski 2009 and Jaworska 2009; for the Czech perspective see Černá 2009). Due to these circumstances the German government and its cultural organisations have to be careful to avoid creating any perceptions of supremacy, domination or interference with internal political decisions of the host states. For both Germany and Austria, the central European region is geo-politically and economically very important, and both countries are very active there promoting their respective culture and offering German language tuition. Moreover, for both countries the ability to speak German is a means of building friendships and increasing intercultural understanding, and thus they firmly place their foreign cultural policies within the EU discourse of multilingualism as an ability that can help bring people together and build intercultural relationships. The documents that we have chosen to represent the respective discourses in Austria and Germany cover both current foreign cultural policy itself and the representation of this policy by the governments’ cultural institutes. They are indicative both of the governments’ general aims and objectives in this area and of perspectives on the German language and its promotion in eastern central Europe. By analysing these documents we want to show how the discourses on (European) multilingualism and the German language in central Europe are connected to constructions of national identity and the way in which the respective national interests are pursued in their foreign cultural policies. More information on the relevant agents and institutions in German and Austrian foreign cultural policy can be found in Appendix E. German foreign cultural policy as part of European cultural policy The central connection between Germany’s foreign cultural policy and European culture is made in the strategy paper Auswärtige Kulturpolitik – Konzeption 2000 (Appendix F), the central policy document of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which positions German foreign cultural policy between European culture, the challenges of globalisation and organisational and budgetary challenges. The most important part of the document for our purposes is section I, which outlines the goals and principles. Within this section,

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the first four paragraphs are instrumental in constructing German national interest in foreign cultural policy and how it fits within a concept of European culture. The text starts with an assertion that German foreign cultural policy is an integral part of German foreign policy in general and that as such its purpose is to contribute to pursuing the same goals, namely securing peace, preventing conflicts, and promoting human rights as well as cooperation and partnership (paragraph 1). The second paragraph emphasises this again by stating that foreign cultural policy is not neutral with regard to the values it represents but that it explicitly represents values of democracy, promotion of human rights, sustainability of development and growth, participation in scientific and technological progress, alleviation of poverty and protection of natural resources (‘Demokratieförderung, Verwirklichung der Menschenrechte, Nachhaltigkeit des Wachstums, Teilhabe am wissenschaftlich-technologischen Fortschritt, Armutsbekämpfung oder Schutz der natürlichen Ressourcen’). This value orientation is then placed in the European context by the next paragraph (paragraph 3), which states that German foreign cultural policy ‘transmits culture from Germany as part of European culture’ (‘vermittelt Kultur aus Deutschland als Teil der europäischen Kultur’). Moreover, German foreign cultural policy is said to ‘mark Germany as a state which is rich in culture and engaged in dialogue with the international community of states’ (‘Sie kennzeichnet Deutschland als Kulturstaat im Dialog mit der internationalen Gemeinschaft der Staaten’). This is important because it justifies activities in German foreign cultural policy as part of European cultural policy and a wider framework of values such as intercultural understanding and cooperation. Thus, the third paragraph is important for the interpretation not only of the two preceding paragraphs, but also of the fourth one, which defines cultural policy as a ‘promotion of dialogue, exchange and cooperation between people and cultures’ (‘fördert Dialog, Austausch und Zusammenarbeit zwischen Menschen und Kulturen’). Through the emphasis on understanding between different people and different states, foreign cultural policy also contributes to creating ‘openness, cosmopolitanism, credibility, and reliability as well as indispensable networks of political and economic cooperation’ (setzt sich für Weltoffenheit und Weltläufigkeit ein und baut Glaubwürdigkeit, Verläßlichkeit und unverzichtbare Netzwerke für die politische und wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit auf). This is described as a vital, long-term German interest. However, as Germany’s foreign cultural policy is placed within European cultural policy these paragraphs also construct German foreign policy interests as European cultural policy interests. Thus, German foreign cultural policy is legitimised and any suspicions of supremacy can be dissipated. This point is also reflected in the statement on the central focus (‘Leitbild’) of the Goethe-Institut (GI) (see Appendix G), the principal broker of German foreign cultural policy. In this statement on its website, the GI asserts that one of its main purposes is to ‘promote global acceptance of

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Europe and to develop common European perspectives. Within Europe, multilingualism and a European civic identity are vital for a deepened European unity.’ (‘Wir fördern weltweit das Verständnis für Europa und entwickeln gemeinsame europäische Perspektiven. Innerhalb Europas sind für uns die Mehrsprachigkeit und ein europäisches Bürgerbewusstsein entscheidend für eine vertiefte Einheit.’) The promotion of European interests is thus represented here by the principal national representative organ of German foreign cultural policy as one of Germany’s main national interests. Pursuing the national interest is presented by the German brokers as a way of furthering the interests of the European Union, but in turn it also helps justify and pursue the interests of German foreign cultural policy. This is especially relevant where the promotion of the German language abroad is concerned, as language spread is a central pillar of foreign cultural policy. The reasons that are given for language promotion echo the general arguments outlined above. In Konzeption 2000, it is argued that Language promotion opens up routes into German culture, it encourages multilingualism and multiculturalism, it strengthens the German language’s position in the European institutions, it creates sympathy for and ties with Germany. In times of global competition promoting the German language abroad also helps secure Germany’s economic position in the world. Sprachförderung erschließt den Zugang zur deutschen Kultur, fördert Mehrsprachigkeit und Multikulturalität, festigt die Stellung der deutschen Sprache in den europäischen Institutionen, schafft Sympathie für und Bindungen an Deutschland. In Zeiten globaler Konkurrenz hilft die Förderung der deutschen Sprache im Ausland nicht zuletzt auch, die wirtschaftliche Position Deutschlands in der Welt zu sichern. (Konzeption 2000: 11 in the original; 224 in Appendix F) Thus, it is the German language which establishes the cultural, political and economic relations with German culture and people, which is why almost half the budget for German foreign cultural policy is directed towards language promotion (Konzeption 2000: 11 in the original; 224 in Appendix F). One of the most important regional foci of German language promotion globally is central and eastern Europe, and it is specifically mentioned first in the enumeration of target areas for promotional activities (Konzeption 2000: 12 in the original; 224 in Appendix F), before the (then) EU countries, northern America and threshold countries and regions in Asia and Latin America. The importance of the German language in central and eastern Europe is ‘due to the important role the German language had [in this area] in past times, as well as with regard to future EU accession’ (in 2000, the central and eastern European neighbours were not yet part of the EU), and the aim is to

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stabilise the position of the German language as the first choice for second foreign language learning, after English. The main addressees of this policy are – among educational staff, people in the cultural sector and the media as well as politics – members of the German minority in central and eastern Europe, for example through supporting bilingual education. These conceptions are echoed again in the statements by the GoetheInstitut, and its publication ‘Förderung der deutschen Sprache. Der Beitrag des Goethe-Instituts in Mittel- und Südosteuropa und in der Gemeinschaft Unabhängiger Staaten’ (‘The promotion of the German language. The Goethe-Institut’s contribution in central and south-eastern Europe and in the Commonwealth of Independent States) illustrates these ideas very well. In its introductory section, there is a heading ‘Setting out into a multilingual future – the Goethe-Institut’s language work’ (‘Aufbruch in eine mehrsprachige Zukunft – die Spracharbeit des Goethe-Instituts’), where multilingualism is categorised as a means to achieve intercultural understanding as well as offering instrumental benefits in terms of improved professional opportunities. More specifically, the GI wants to ‘support people in their ability to communicate with people from Germany, open up routes into the German culture and improve people’s professional opportunities’ (‘Menschen anderer Muttersprache die Verständigung mit Deutschen zu erleichtern, ihnen den Zugang zu Deutschland und der deutschen Kultur zu ermöglichen und ihre beruflichen Chancen zu verbessern’), and at the same time, the GI aims to ‘make a contribution to promoting multilingualism in the world’ (‘leistet das Goethe-Institut zugleich einen Beitrag zur Förderung der Mehrsprachigkeit in der Welt’) (Förderung der deutschen Sprache: 4). This policy is placed within the framework of European cultural policy ‘wherever possible’. The sequence of aims cited in this paragraph, where intercultural understanding is mentioned first, before the utilitarian, economic benefits of German language acquisition, is important. On the one hand, it emphasises the significance of the idealistic goal of intercultural understanding, and on the other hand, it shows that idealistic and economic motivations cannot be separated from one another. Moreover, these aims are placed in the context both of global aspirations for multilingualism and of concerted European efforts to promote multilingualism. Promoting German is thus firmly embedded in the concept of ‘mother tongue plus two foreign languages’ that has become a key plank in European strategy on multilingualism, which helps to legitimise the policies designed to spread the German language, but also to achieve the European goal set within the Framework Strategy for Multilingualism (see also Hoffmann 2000: 506). Any notions of arbitrary and unilateral German interests are thus dispelled and the promotion of the German language abroad is also constructed as part of and as benefiting a wider European cultural policy. In the same GI document, ‘Förderung der deutschen Sprache’, the introductory section also contains a heading on ‘Historic relations’ (‘Historische Beziehungen’), which deals with the relations between Germany and the

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countries in eastern central Europe. The relations are categorised as having historic roots that ‘go back a long way and continue to be influential up to the present day’ (‘historische Wurzeln, die weit zurückreichen und sich bis in die Gegenwart auswirken’), and then the different elements of these relations are enumerated: they are ‘mutually good and successful trade relations, the exchange of ideas, family relations between the ruling aristocracies of the past, but also of the farmers, craftsmen and the cultural and intellectual elites. German minorities in almost all the states, a common history and a mutually influenced system of values.’ (‘Wechselseitig gute und erfolgreiche Handelsbeziehungen, der Austausch von Ideen, verwandtschaftliche Beziehungen der vormaligen Herrscherhäuser, aber auch der Bauern, Handwerker, der kulturellen und intellektuellen Eliten. Deutsche Minderheiten in fast allen Staaten, gemeinsame Geschichte, ein wechselseitig beeinflußtes Wertesystem’) (Förderung der deutschen Sprache: 5). Thus, the paragraph creates a sense of continuity through the historic ties based on economics and kinship between members of many different groups of society – ethnic German minorities are mentioned only as one element – and common values that eclipse the horrors of the twentieth century by connecting the seemingly unproblematic past with the presentday situation, when the major difficulties have been or are being overcome. In this way, the longue durée is blended with the present, which adds a historical rationale for the export of the German language to the market-driven argument of the previous paragraph. This ‘layered simultaneity’ is echoed on the practical policy level in a statement by a representative of the cultural division of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who says that the legacy of the historic relations presents itself as an increased demand for learning German as a foreign language in areas where historically German minorities have settled. From his point of view, however, this is not a sign of vibrancy in the life of the minority population, but a trace of a ‘linguistic memory’, a way of connecting with the past, even though German as a mother tongue, or even as a heritage language, has ceased to be relevant for German foreign cultural policy in those areas. Linguistic memories and language policy 1 welche bedeutung haben die deutschen minderheiten – ich würde sagen keine/ [. . .] 2 es scheint aber etwas anderes zu geben/ es scheint so eine art linguistisches 3 gedächtnis zu geben in den regionen in denen deutsche minderheiten früher 4 gesiedelt haben/ es ist so dass wir ganz klar höhere zahlen für deutsch als 5 fremdsprache in den regionen beobachten wo es die tradition deutscher 6 minderheiten gibt/ [. . .] in jedem fall nutzen wir die dort bestehenden strukturen/ [. . .] 7 wir sehen das allerdings zunehmend als instrument für deutsch als fremdsprache 8 und weniger als (xxx) für deutsch als muttersprache/ 1 What is the relevance of the German minorities – I would say none. But there seems 2 to be something else. There seems to be some kind of linguistic memory in those

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Thus, the policies of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as the Goethe-Institut build on the present-day effects of the longue durée when they base their planning of language learning in those areas on the demand they perceive to stem in part from the historic and linguistic memory of previous ethnic German populations. Generally speaking, there are elements in these documents of both kinds of discourses on multilingualism and national and European identity, of the idealistic discourse linked to identities on the one hand, and of the utilitarian discourse relating to national interests and the technical ability to speak several languages on the other. However, they do not merely co-exist, but they influence one another. In particular, the utilitarian discourse of the politics of national interests depends on the idealistic discourse of European integration and identity for its justification. As far as the German language itself is concerned, it is only its function as a foreign language in the wider contemporary context of European multilingualism that forms the basis of language policy, not the heritage language or German as a mother tongue. The existence of ethnic German minorities is acknowledged, but they too are now seen as part of the market for German as a foreign language, and foreign cultural policy does not include special provisions for German as a heritage language in eastern central Europe. We will see later in this chapter how this policy is perceived by representatives of associations of German minorities, and how they appropriate it in their own politics of cultural identity. Austrian foreign cultural policy as part of European cultural policy Similar to the German discourses, the discourses around Austrian foreign cultural policy construct the country as a European actor that aims to spread European values such as democracy, civic society and stability, and that has positioned itself as one of the principal guiding partners in the eastern European enlargement process(es). The significant difference from the German discourses, however, is that there is not a strong discursive emphasis on the role of language policy, despite the fact that language courses, language diplomas and certificates and cooperation in the area of education are central pillars of the work on the ground conducted by the Austrian foreign cultural institutions, most notably the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Austria Institutes (Österreich-Institut; see Appendix E). The 2001 conception of foreign cultural policy (Auslandskulturkonzept

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NEU; see Appendix H) is the basis for a re-organisation, more consistent coordination, and re-branding of Austrian foreign cultural activities. In this document, both the geographical and content-oriented foci are laid out as well as the rationale for the policy conception. In the section entitled ‘Main emphases’ (Schwerpunkte), Europe and European values are mentioned first, before other subject areas such as ‘facing history’ (sic) or ‘culture for enlargement’ (sic) and ‘culture for stability’ focusing on providing guidance for eastern central European EU accession candidates and the stabilisation of the Balkan countries. The central and south-eastern European region is one of the central geographical foci, where the aim is to create networks of political cooperation and cultural exchange based on shared cultural histories and ‘traditionally close cultural ties’ (‘traditionell engen kulturellen Beziehungen’) with countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, but also Germany, Italy and others, including the Balkan states, Bulgaria and Turkey. These policy foci have been made possible and relevant by the 1989 transformations and Austria’s subsequent accession to the EU in 1995. These main emphases are interesting in part because of what they leave out, namely any reference to language-related activities. But they are also relevant in that, as in the German texts discussed above, they foreground historic ties based on cultural traditions between Austria and other countries in central and eastern Europe. In most cases, these ties go back to the common history of the Habsburg Empire, and the sense of commonality and cultural ties at the basis of present-day political and cultural cooperation eclipses the events of the twentieth century and the nationalist campaigns for independence from Habsburg in the late nineteenth century, for example in Hungary or the Czech lands. The present-day policy approach to act as a broker helping eastern central European accession candidates with the process of integrating into the EU is thus given a historical rationale that explains Austrian diplomatic and political engagement in this region. The focus on European integration and enhancing the cultural diversity and vitality of the European Union helps dissipate any imperialist connotations by providing a new framework which transcends the former nationalist or imperialist aspirations. This is also reflected in the rationale for the Platform Culture Central Europe (Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa; see Appendix I), which is a vehicle for regional political cooperation based on common interests and perceived cultural ties. The purpose of the platform is to ‘make visible the common cultural identity of central Europe within the context of European integration’ (‘die gemeinsame kulturelle Identität Mitteleuropas im Zusammenhang mit der europäischen Integration sichtbarer zu machen’), for example by organising and facilitating artistic, musical, literary or other projects, or supporting journalism in eastern European countries. The emphasis is on the sustainability and durability of the networks of cooperation, which are designed to

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contribute to the wider cultural dimension of European integration as well as to counteract any potential national egotisms. Therefore, the platform has become a central emphasis of Austrian foreign cultural policy in an enlarged Europe. The idea that forms the basis of the platform – to give information about central Europe as a cultural space and to initiate common projects – is thus an investment in the future of the enlarged EU. ein Beitrag zu einem kulturelleren Europa und ein Gegengewicht zu einer möglichen Erstarkung nationaler Egoismen. Die Plattform ist daher zu einem zentralen Schwerpunkt österreichischer Auslandskulturpolitik in einem erweiterten Europa geworden. Die Grundidee der Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa – Informationen über den Kulturraum Mitteleuropa zu geben und gemeinsame Projekte zu initiieren – stellt somit eine Investition in die Zukunft der erweiterten EU dar. (see http://www.bmeia.gv.at/aussenministerium/aussenpolitik/auslandskultur/plattform-kultur-mitteleuropa.html) Again, this shows the duality of the concept of a common cultural identity in central Europe, which can serve as a basis for fruitful political cooperation, and the common politics of European integration, in the sense that cooperating states try to form the European Union that will result from the (then anticipated) 2004 and subsequent rounds of enlargement. These ideas are repeated in the 2002 report on foreign cultural policy (‘Austria Kulturint. Tätigkeitsbericht 2002 Auslandskultur’; see Appendix J), which is important as it is the first such report to reflect on foreign cultural activities under the new concept, and a special section is dedicated to the platform, which repeats the rationale and remit almost verbatim, before introducing the various activities that were initiated between 2001 and 2002 (Austria Kulturint: 49–52 in the original; 232 in Appendix J). The other important feature in the 2002 report is the reference to the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilisations that goes back to the initiatives of the European council of foreign ministers in Barcelona in November 2001. The Austrian interpretation of this summit is to emphasise the dialogue of civilisations and, in particular, to foster and promote the dialogue between Christian and Muslim faiths, people and media, for example in various places in south-eastern Europe where the two religions traditionally co-exist (Austria Kulturint: 52, 53 in the original; 232–3 in Appendix J). This interpretation of the Barcelona process is important for our study, because it is another example of where the discourse on multilingualism is omitted. The 2001 Barcelona summit was an essential milestone in the process of initiating European policies for fostering multilingualism and devising strategies for encouraging the learning of foreign languages, and thus this summit gave an impetus for the two Commission Communications we have analysed above

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as well as providing a framework of reference for the multilingualism policies in individual member states. This shows again that the Austrian political discourses elide the language question, even though there is a strong language element in their actual cultural policy on the ground. However, in its 2001 reformulation of foreign cultural policy Austria does not position itself as an important language broker and instead fashions itself as a cultural and political mediator and facilitator at the European level. This silence on language policy may be an answer to criticisms of the lack of a clear policy conception and especially again the lack of a clear position concerning the language dimension of Austria’s foreign cultural policy (Muhr 1995: 86–7). The main criticisms applied to the fact that the linguistic element of foreign cultural policy was less well defined, if at all, especially with regard to how it was delimited from German foreign cultural policy and German language policy on the one hand and how Austrian foreign cultural brokers would integrate the German language and Austrian cultural and political identity in a coherent concept on the other. In the next section, we analyse Czech and Hungarian discourses on language policy, in order to see how these contribute to the contemporary formulation of ideas of national identity and how they react to European policies through their conceptions of multilingualism, multiculturalism and national culture and citizenship.

4.4 Discourses at national level II: internal language policy in the Czech Republic and Hungary In both countries, the Czech Republic and Hungary, language policy is formulated at the national level, and only questions of the implementation of policies, such as administration and education, are decentralised to the regional and local levels of government. Our interest here is not so much in the particular measures of language policies, or with the procedures through which policies are created.2 Rather we are concerned with how policies are formulated, how they are positioned in relation to the European Union and other EU member states externally on the one hand, and in relation to linguistic diversity ‘within’ on the other. What kind, or rather what scope, of agency does it grant to the different levels of government or the people? Does it employ images of past experiences in order to legitimise contemporary policy decisions, or does it use visions of future developments for this purpose? What are the rhetorical strategies that are applied in order to achieve these effects? And what are the similarities and differences between the policy discourses in these two countries?

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The Czech Republic As we have already mentioned, the purpose of our discussion here is not to give a definitive account of all available policy documents and their contents. Rather, we have chosen some key texts that capture important aspects of language policy. The documents we have chosen to illustrate Czech discourses on language are (a) the 2001 White Paper ‘National Programme for the Development of Education in the Czech Republic’ (Appendix K), which gives a strategic overview of the goals and objectives of language policy; (b) the 2004 Education Act (Appendix L), which regulates the relevant policy measures; and (c) the 2006 Czech ‘Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity. National Report Template’ (Appendix M), which is a direct response to European policy and the requirement to account for national policy measures taken in compliance with the European Action Plan for language learning and promoting linguistic diversity. (We have worked from the official English translations of these documents, and therefore all the quotations are in English only.) The two national policy documents are important because they offer insights into what the purpose of language policy is, why it is strategically important for the Czech nation, and how they categorise different languages, their variants and speakers of those languages in relation to the mainstream of society. The 2001 White Paper covers the strategic period from 2001 to 2005, even 2010 in some policy areas. The White Paper predates the Czech accession to the European Union, but it is already situated within the process of preparation for accession and thus it can be evaluated in relation to policy objectives and ideals formulated at the European level. The same can be said about the 2004 Education Act, which was formulated prior to accession and then came into force in the same year that the Czech Republic joined the EU. Both documents emphasise the importance of shared national culture for successful social cohesion and construct multilingualism as a phenomenon that arises from external pressures of migration and globalisation. In both documents, the state is defined as the agency with the authority and competence to provide policies to deal with these challenges. Finally, the recent response to the EU request for information is interesting, because the EU template is set up in a question-and-answer format which allows for, or invites, a kind of conversation between the European and the national policy level, but the authors of the response do not take up the invitation to participate in a dialogue with the European institutions, and the state’s power to define policies is closely guarded in this document. Externalising cultural difference: the 2001 White Paper The White Paper does not contain a specific sub-section for language education, but languages and cultural heritage appear as issues under several

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headings (Appendix K). The most important section for our analysis is section I on ‘Starting Points and Preconditions for the Development of the Education System’. It is a discussion of the general aims and purposes of education as well as of basic conceptions of human beings and social structures. This section consists of an enumeration of eight aims of the education system, three of which focus on questions of cultural identity and heritage, social cohesiveness under conditions of cultural diversity, and the need for tolerance towards other cultures. They set out the basic conceptions of and strategies for the ‘transmission of the historically evolved culture of the society’, ‘strengthening social cohesiveness’ and ‘education for partnership, cooperation and solidarity with European as well as globalising society’. All three of these aims deal with the connection between cultural identity and the concept of integration. The first paragraph, entitled ‘Transmission of the historically evolved culture of the society’, is concerned with creating and/ or maintaining a sense of ‘continuity of the past, present and future’ through the education system. In the last sentence, this is made more concrete by the reference to the role of education in the ‘preservation and development of national, linguistic and cultural identity, especially through the preservation of the cultural heritage’, which forms an ‘inseparable part’ of the fabric of society. The education system is thus meant to create an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) with a strong sense of a shared history and future. However, who or what makes up this imagined community only becomes clear later in the text. The paragraph on ‘Strengthening social cohesiveness’ again emphasises the role of the education system as ‘one of the most significant integrating forces’. But this time, the focus is on ‘equal access to education’, which is to be achieved by the ‘levelling out of social and cultural backgrounds, as well as all disadvantages caused by health, ethnic or specific regional conditions’. These principles, together with tolerance and democratic attitudes, underpin ‘education in human rights and multiculturalism’ and they are to be achieved by ‘providing factual information on all minorities, especially the Romany, Jewish and German ones, and their fates and cultures’ through ‘minority education, bilingual schools and education for foreigners and their children as a part of the integration of these groups into Czech society’. The latter reference to ‘Czech society’ is the key to the interpretation of the ‘levelling out of social and cultural backgrounds’ as well as the ‘preservation of the cultural heritage’ in the previous paragraph. It becomes clear that the education system is supposed to socialise individuals into the mainstream of Czech society, rather than opening up distinct social spaces for, for example, minority groups and their cultural identities. This aim is evident in the emphasis on ‘factual information’ to be provided by minority education and bilingual schooling, which does not categorise minority (and migrant) cultures as cultural practices that occupy and require public spaces. And it is reinforced by the counting of the Romany, Jewish and German minorities and foreigners

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and their children into ‘these groups’, which negates the minorities’ ownership of a distinct space in Czech history and territory by equating them with ‘foreigners’ who have (presumably) migrated to the Czech Republic in recent years for economic purposes. The paragraph ‘Education for partnership, cooperation and solidarity within European as well as globalising society’ emphasises tolerance towards people from ‘other nations, languages, minorities and cultures, [and] to be able to accept and respect even considerable differences between the people and cultures of today’s interconnected world’. In the light of the paragraphs above, with their categorisation of people from different cultural backgrounds, and their specification of spaces they should occupy, the ‘acceptance of differences in Europe and a globalised world’ in the official position appears to entail not so much the acceptance of differences ‘within’ the mainstream of Czech society, but rather an acceptance of differences that exist and emanate from ‘without’, that are external to Czech society and its perceived cultural heritage. Again, the different cultural and linguistic backgrounds are not conceived of as part of Czech society but as separate entities that might merely be tolerated. Multilingualism is thus not conceived as a form of multiculturalism, a heritage of different cultures that make up Czech society and that are marked out by different languages, but rather as a set of external differences in cultures and languages, whose speakers have contact with or have migrated to the Czech Republic. Their languages and cultures are thus considered foreign, as something that can be learnt and dealt with in the education system, but not as part of Czech heritage, even in the cases of minorities whose members have lived in the Czech lands for several centuries. According to this construction, the responsibility is thus on the members of different cultures to integrate, or rather to assimilate, to become part of Czech society as it is defined by the government institutions. This stands in contrast to the contents of the constitution and other pieces of legislation for minority protection that we have discussed in Chapter 3 (section 3.8), where minority cultures and their languages are clearly defined as indigenous and a natural part of Czech culture. This concept of what is ‘normal’ and desirable can also be traced in a statement by a representative of the Czech Ministry of Education, who evaluated the merits of bilingual education in comparison with mainstream Czech education in combination with an extracurricular German language diploma. Language learning and ‘creating the norm’ 1 [. . .] ja und ich denke das ist für die eh fuer den deutschen sprachunterricht da- für 2 die zukunft sehr wichtige aktivität/ und wissen sie es ist sehr wichtig und . meiner 3 meinung nach sehr kluge initiative/ es öffnet die möglichkeit ((sich)) deutsch zu 4 lernen/ es gibt die moeglichkeit an jeder universität in deutschland zu studieren 5 weil dieses zertifikat dieses diplom öffnet die tür ohne zusätzliche prüfung 6 oder sowas/ das ist perfekt/ und die beherrschung der deutschen sprache ist auf dem

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

C1-niveau/ also das ist wirklich super hohes niveau wenn jemand 19 jahre alt ist/ also meiner meinung ist es besser als ein bilinguales gymnasium weil an dem bilingualen gymnasium haben die studenten selbstverständlich das studienprogramm ein bisschen unterschiedlich wie in dem programm an einem normalen gymnasium/ wenn ich das programm an dem tschechischfranzösischen gymnasium angucke ist das schon unterschiedlich/ und hier kombiniert man meiner meinung nach die kompetenz in der deutschen sprache mit der vorbereitung für das studium an der tschechischen oder an der deutschen oder österreichischen universität/ das ist meiner meinung nach sehr gut/

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Well, and I think this an important initiative for German language teaching for the future. And you know it is a very important and, in my opinion a very smart initiative. It opens up the opportunity to learn German. It offers the opportunity to study at any university in Germany because this certificate, this diploma opens the doors without any additional exams or whatever. That is perfect. And the command of the German language is at C1-level. Well, this is really an extremely high level when somebody is 19 years old. Well, in my opinion it is better than a bilingual grammar school because the curriculum at a bilingual grammar school is of course a little bit different, compared to a normal grammar school. If I consider the programme at the Czech-French grammar school, the programme is indeed different. And here I think you combine the competence in the German language with the preparation for studying at a Czech or a German or an Austrian university. That is very good, in my opinion.

When asked whether he was aware of strategies to extend the bilingual curricula at Czech grammar schools, the representative of the Ministry of Culture spoke about the advantages of the German language diploma in comparison with bilingual education. In his opinion, the German language diploma offers excellent opportunities to study in a German-speaking country and an ‘extremely high level’ of competence in speaking German. But besides the factual opportunities that the diploma provides, it also does not interfere with the mainstream Czech grammar school curriculum. He states that when compared to a ‘normal grammar school’, the curriculum at a bilingual grammar school is ‘of course a little bit different’. The bilingual education is thus categorised as something outside the norm, and it is implied that this might have consequences for the pupils’ further education. In fact, the explicit purpose of bilingual schools is to open access to both higher education systems, Czech and German (based on bi-national agreements), but in addition to that they immerse the pupils in another culture through extensive learning in another language. This statement therefore illustrates the adherence to the concept of mainstream Czech education as the norm, in which the learning of foreign languages should only be one component. Language learning is thus something that opens doors to the outside world, and which does not, or is not intended to, open up spaces for other cultural and linguistic identities within

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Czech society. This construction can also be found in the current law governing language education in the Czech Republic, to which we now turn. Citizenship and difference ‘within’: the 2004 Education Act The sections that are of most relevance for our analysis are Part One – General Provisions and, in particular, Sections 1 and 2 concerning the ‘Subject and Scope of Application’ and the ‘Principles and Goals of Education’, as well as, perhaps even more importantly, Sections 13 and 14 governing the ‘Language of Instruction and Education of Members of National Minorities’ (Appendix L). Among the general goals of education, two are most relevant for our study. They concern ‘the formation of national and state citizenship awareness and respect for the ethnic, national, cultural, language and religious identity of every person’ (clause e) and the ‘knowledge of global and European cultural values and traditions, understanding and acquiring principles and rules arising from European integration as a basis for coexistence at national and international levels’ (clause f). It thus includes two dimensions of multilingualism and cultural identity: one is the concept that the shared cultural heritage ‘within’ is not homogeneous but has many different shapes; the other is that there are cultural and linguistic differences between people from different countries – in the EU and globally – which are represented in Czech society. Both these dimensions are contained within this concept of citizenship. Indeed, citizenship means participating in this diverse heritage and society. However, as we show below, the notion of mainstream Czech culture is also present in this text, and it sets limits to the public spaces for cultural and linguistic diversity. Section 13, concerning the language of instruction and education of members of national minorities, differentiates between ‘instruction in the language of the relevant national minority’ (clause 2) and ‘the teaching of some subjects in a foreign language’ (clause 3). This is obviously an acknowledgement of the existence of historic national and ethnic minorities on the one hand and groups of foreign migrants on the other. Furthermore, it may also be a concession to the wish of some people to be educated in another language, such as English for example, because of the symbolic value of such an education, but the text does not specify the position of English, German or any other language under these regulations. Section 14 then lays out in six paragraphs the conditions under which members of national minorities can receive education in their own languages. It stipulates the minimum numbers of pupils for each class in each type of education so that minority education can be granted, as well as other administrative requirements. However, it does not make any references to the content of this kind of education, or what the purpose and the benefits might be for those who may receive it. Therefore, it does not open any spaces for

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members of national minorities in the sense that it does not define or suggest in what way they are actually part of the national cultural heritage. The reference to the respect for ethnic, national, cultural, language and religious identity is thus not further incorporated into a more elaborated vision of a diverse Czech society. Instead, national minorities remain somehow apart from the cultural mainstream. As far as the incorporation of the principles and ideals expressed in the EUlevel documents are concerned, the translation into Czech law conforms with the necessary requirements, but they do not constitute a kind of intertextual dialogue. The terms (both literally and figuratively) and conditions are satisfied, but they are not – at least not to any great extent – taken up and used as part of the national rhetorical strategies. In this way, the Czech government positions itself as an independent agent, which represents a society that is culturally and historically understood to be homogeneous. Moreover, this concept of citizenship and multilingualism resists the influence of European notions of cultural and linguistic diversity, which do not become part of the definitions of national culture. This can also be observed in the ‘Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity’, in which member states are invited to set out their plans, experiences and corrections of strategies concerning their efforts to translate the European Action Plan into national law and narrative. Maintaining national integrity: the 2007 Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity In the relevant section (3.1 on ‘An inclusive approach to linguistic diversity’; see Appendix M) of Part 3 on ‘Building a language-friendly environment’ member states are asked to say, first, what concrete actions have been accomplished in this field since 2004; second, what obstacles to implementation have been identified; and, third, what the proposed initiatives to overcome these obstacles are. As a response to the first question, the authors of the Czech reply have inserted a verbatim quotation of Section 14 of the Education Act, where the conditions for education in minority languages are enumerated. Moreover, the space for responding to the following questions concerning possible obstacles and remedies has been left blank, and thus the dialogue with the European level of policy-making is declined in this document. The situation is similar in further sections on ‘Building language-friendly communities’ and the ‘Overall national language strategy’. In each case, the authors enumerate some of the initiatives set up under the European Action Plan, but they forgo any description of the process of implementation and adjustment. This is relevant here because this document is a template for collecting European best practice in the area of language policy, and it may also be an attempt to collaboratively elaborate notions of language, multilingualism and policy on cultural diversity. By resisting these requirements for

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elaboration, the authors decline to take part in this collaborative effort. The document itself does not give any clues as to whether this may be an interim response, or whether this particular report is one in a series of such reports that have to be completed over a longer period of time. On the other hand, when we look back at the general aims of education in the White Paper, the aims concerning cultural identity and heritage are set next to those that focus on employability, social cohesion and the development of human resources. This in some ways pre-empts the 2008 Commission Communication, where the link between languages, economic development and social cohesion indicates a new strategy of the Commission. Thus, the rhetorical strategies in the Czech White Paper keep the agency, the power to take decisions and implement them, within the boundaries of national decision-making and do not create the space for (a perceived) encroaching influence of European institutions. The same can be said about the dominant official discourse on language and linguistic diversity with regard to sub-state and minority policies. Summarising this section, it is evident that the dominant discourses on language, multilingualism and citizenship still maintain a grip on cultural identities and favour assimilation into mainstream Czech society, rather than encouraging members of national minorities to opt for differing cultural and linguistic identities. The ‘proper’ language and the ‘proper’ cultural identity are Czech, and education in minority languages is realised in the form of foreign language learning, which also means that German has the status and function of a foreign language and no longer that of a heritage language. How, then, do the official discourses on language, multilingualism and citizenship in the Czech Republic compare with those in Hungary? Hungary In order to be able to draw comparisons with the Czech discourses, we shall consider here texts from similar sources and categories. First, we focus on a 1997 directive from the Ministry of Education and Culture, concerning the education of national and ethnic minorities in nurseries and schools (Appendix N), which also gives insights into the purposes of minority education and the spaces the government is prepared to open for minorities. Secondly, we explore the broader picture of education in Hungary by considering the 2007 National Core Curriculum (Appendix O), as it outlines the contents and objectives of education in Hungary in general, not just with regard to foreign language learning or education in minority languages. Thirdly, we analyse the Hungarian response to the Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity (Appendix P), in order to compare how the Hungarian government structured its contribution to this debate and whether, and if so how, it engaged in some sort of dialogue with the European level. Again, we have worked with the official English translations, except in

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the case of the 1997 Directive, where the Ministry of Education and Culture provided us with a German version of the document. We will therefore work mostly with English quotations only, except for the German-language document where we will then provide English translations. Preserving the difference ‘within’: the 1997 Directive Concerning the Education of National and Ethnic Minorities (Directive 32/1997 [5.XI]) The Directive Concerning the Education of National and Ethnic Minorities (in the following: the Directive; Appendix N) is important with regard to the space that it opens up for the children from minority backgrounds. Two appendices (‘Beilagen’) to the document in particular introduce the objectives and purposes of minority education both at pre-school and at school, and both appendices consist of an introduction of the general aims and purposes and of operational sections which set out the organisation and design of minority education. In both cases, the general aims and objectives are the teaching and learning of the minority language, of specific customs and traditions, so that children acquire an understanding of their minority’s way of life and their shared history. Thus, the education system promotes, or aims to instil, a specific cultural identity. The definition of these aims in the context of nursery education remains vaguer, though, than those specified for education at school. In part 1, the most significant aim for nursery education is ‘the creation of an environment where children are exposed to their mother tongue’ (daß für die Kinder eine muttersprachliche Umgebung geschaffen wird). This is remarkable because it defines the minority language as the children’s mother tongue, even though nowadays it may well not be their first language. The conditions vary between different minorities, and also between members of the same minority, but in many cases their first language is Hungarian, the language of the mainstream or majority society. The state – through the education system and its professionals – thus assumes a position of care for the minority culture that is often no longer handed down within the family. The same text also specifies that the language immersion is to be ensured by the teaching staff, who are encouraged, or required, to create situations in which children can practise the minority language through imitation and repetition. Significantly, though, the text makes no reference to the language variety that is considered to be the children’s mother tongue. As we have discussed in Chapter 2, the distinction between the standard and non-standard varieties of a language is often crucial, and education systems usually privilege the standard varieties because of their focus on literacy, whereas non-standard forms such as traditional dialects are associated with oral traditions. In the case of minority education, this throws up the question of whether the standard variety is the appropriate vehicle, as minority traditions were always bound to the local dialects.

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This question is also addressed by a representative of the Ministry of Education, who set out in an interview the two different functions of the German language in the Hungarian education system – as a minority language and as a foreign language – and what the purpose of these different forms of education is. Two functions and aims of German language teaching in Hungary 1 Ich weiß nicht ob es- eh . eh . es ist in ungarn ein bisschen kompliziert was in 2 anderen ländern nicht gibt und zwar dass in ungarn ZWEI verschiedene deutsche 3 sprachunterrichttypen gibt . eins ist die minderheitensprache . anders ist die 4 fremdsprache/ - .hh und eh ja das das ist die- das verstehen die im allgemeinen eh 5 die ausländer nicht weil die sprache ja die GLEICHE ist/ eh . und der unterschied 6 ist- und ich glaube das müsste und sollte da ein bisschen .hh – eh – festgelegt SEIN 7 dass eh – bei den also – bilingualen unterricht gibts für den 8 MINDERHEITENunterricht und gibts für den FREMDSPRACHIGEN unterricht/ 9 bei den minderheitenunterricht müssen fünfzig prozent der wochenstunden in 10 minderheitensprache .hh eh gemacht werden/ bei den FREMDsprachigen 11 bilingualen unterricht nur FÜNFunddreißig prozent/ - .hh eh es hängt auch 12 damit zusammen dass minderheitenkultur also . minderheitenKUNDE 13 bei den minderheitenschulen verpflichtend als ein neues bildungsbereich da ist . 14 bei den FREMDSPRACHENunterricht NICHT/ .hh was noch- . eh . eh – ich 15 glaube- . unter- eh . unterschied ist dass- eh – ist dass fremdsprachiger 16 bilingualer unterricht ist förderung einer sprache durch SPRACHE – die in 17 ungarn eine FREMDsprache ist/ [. . .]. hh eh bei minderheitenunterricht IST – das 18 ziel die IDENTITÄTBEWAHRUNG durch die MINDERHEITENSPRACHE/ .hh 19 also – ZWEI formen ((ja nur)) das ZIEL – ist anders/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

I don’t know whether it, in Hungary it’s a bit complicated, it doesn’t exist in other countries, that in Hungary there are two different types of German language teaching. One is the minority language, the other is the foreign language, and that is, foreigners generally don’t understand that because the language is the same. And the difference is, and I think that ought to be made clear, with the bilingual classes there are minority classes and foreign language classes. [. . .] It’s partly to do with the fact that minority culture, I mean in minority schools the study of minority culture is compulsory as a new area in the curriculum, but not with the foreign language classes. I think the difference is that foreign language bilingual classes are for promoting a language through language, which in Hungary is a foreign language. [. . .] With the minority classes the aim is to maintain identity through the minority language. So two forms, but the aim is different.

The representative states that the same language variety (standard German) has two functions in language teaching (line 2), which are designed to achieve different aims (reiterated in line 12). One of these functions is ‘German as a foreign language’, which is promoted in foreign language classes for the

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purpose of promoting a language through the medium of (that) language (especially in bilingual classes) (lines 9, 10). The other function is ‘German as a minority language’, where minority identity is promoted through the same language variety, standard German, understood here though as ‘the minority language’ (lines 11, 12). So here, too, standard German is replacing the local dialects, and standard German, which is categorised as a foreign language in Hungary, is simultaneously constructed as the (new) minority language. This raises the question of whether or not it is only language education that is standardised through the state education system, or increasingly also the cultural identity of the German minority (and the same question can be raised for members of other national minorities in Hungary), as the traditions and customs that are worth transmitting are defined and organised by the national curriculum for minority education. In part 2 of the Directive, the introduction specifies the general aims of minority education as ‘the learning of the language of the minority, learning in this language, getting to know the history, the intellectual and material culture, the preservation of traditions, developing a sense of self (as a member of the minority), and the exercise and familiarity of minority rights’ (‘das Erlernen der Sprache der Minderheit, das Lernen in dieser Sprache, das Kennenlernen der Geschichte, der geistigen und materiellen Kultur, die Traditionspflege, die Entfaltung der Selbstkenntnis, die Übung und das Kennenlernen der Minderheitenrechte’). In the context of a document specifying the purposes of education, this list is perhaps not remarkable, and it remains rather abstract. The following sentence, however, puts these abstract objectives into a more concrete context. It stipulates that ‘the minority education supports the members of the minority in the process of finding, preserving and developing their identity, that they may accept being different, that they respect their values and openly show them in contact with other people, and that they may strengthen their relationships with the community’ (Der Minderheitenunterricht unterstützt den Angehörigen der Minderheit darin, dass er seine Identität findet, bewahrt und entwickelt, sein Anderssein akzeptiert, seine Werte anerkennt und auch anderen gegenüber zeigt, und seine Bindung an die Gemeinschaft stärkt). This entails two dimensions: first, it aims at finding a sense of identity, of self, an inner awareness of cultural difference that is meant to be cherished and promoted. But secondly, this also has an external dimension in that it encourages people to openly live their identities in their ethnic or cultural community. Thus this kind of education seeks to enable them to claim a space in the public sphere, which moves beyond the mere learning of minority languages, folk customs and history and rather becomes a form of civic education. It is more than permissiveness, merely allowing some people to feel different as long as they do not challenge the boundaries of the mainstream of the majority society, it actively invites people to express their cultural differences. In these texts, multilingualism is clearly a concept that goes beyond the

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mere technical ability to communicate in a language other than one’s first language. Instead, it encompasses also the ability to move between different cultural (and civic) identities that make up Hungarian society. This is an attitude towards difference that is not evident in Czech discourses, and one that was not always welcome in Hungarian society since the late nineteenth century, but especially during the Cold War, as we have shown in Chapter 3. And it is certainly very different from the situation described by the representative of the German minority in the Czech Republic, whose statement was quoted in the previous section. The directive conveys a concept of society in Hungary as made up of groups with different cultural identities, which have a natural right to exist and to support from the state. Moreover, it presumes the existence of a cultural identity that only needs to be found and adhered to by the individual, and it pre-assigns a difference to the children who are registered for this kind of education, and who need to accept and come to terms with this sense of difference. Even if we assume that some of these children are registered for minority education by their families, who may already have this sense of difference themselves and want their children to be supported in developing it further, it is clearly a concept of cultural diversity that relies on the agency of the state to assign identities and affirm their existence. We shall see later on in this section how this view is further elaborated by a representative of the Hungarian Ministry of Education, and crucially, in Chapters 5 and 6 we will show in detail how people have developed a sense of self as German-speakers, even under much more adverse conditions, and what role they assign to the German language in the development of their individual and social identities. In the following text, we will see how cultural identity and community are constructed in the National Core Curriculum, which sets the broader picture for education in Hungary. Constructing national identity as European identity: the 2007 National Core Curriculum The most striking feature of the 2007 National Core Curriculum is that it integrates European values and identity into the conception of Hungarian national identity (Appendix O). We focus here on parts II and III, the Common Values (II) and the Key Competences that are part of the Fundamental Goals (III), as these sections contain the idealistic overview as well as categorisations of what is desirable to achieve in education. Part II, ‘Common Values in School Education’, starts with a paragraph that cites the legal bases of the Core Curriculum, which are the Constitution of the Republic of Hungary and other laws, but more specifically also ‘international declarations and conventions concerning human rights, children’s rights, the rights of national and ethnic minorities, and gender equality’. The Core Curriculum is thus positioned within the context of important values

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that influence its contents and which the education system is required to disseminate among the younger generations. Among these are more abstract values such as democracy, freedom of conscience and respect for the individual, but it specifically also anchors the ‘progress towards cooperation between fundamental communities (family, nation, community of European nations, mankind)’ and the ‘equality between peoples, nations, national minority and ethnic groups’ among the fundamental educational principles. These references are important because they chime with the ‘international declarations and conventions concerning [. . .] the rights of national and ethnic minorities’ set out in the Directive concerning the education of national and ethnic minorities, and which are also a reference to (among other conventions) the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The Charter’s content is thus incorporated in the actual educational objectives and purposes. Further explanations as to how intercultural competences are acquired are set out later in the document among the key competences on foreign language learning and civic education. Indeed, ‘Communication in Foreign Languages’ is listed second among the Key Competences in part III, right after ‘Communication in the Mother Tongue’ and before mathematical and science skills, which suggests the importance that is attached to language skills in the Curriculum. Among technical skills, such as comprehension of spoken and written text, the Key Competences cite ‘mediation and intercultural understanding’ as well as ‘respect for cultural diversity and interest in and curiosity in languages and intercultural communication’, which are necessary for successful communication in foreign languages. The third paragraph is the most important one for our purposes in that it refers again to the Common Values in School Education, and it defines ‘common national values’ and what they incorporate. The paragraph starts with the statement that ‘[t]he NCC is national because it promotes common national values’. This looks like a truism, but in fact it serves to foreground the national character of the Core Curriculum, which becomes relevant in the following sentences where the national interest is defined as consisting not only of national geography and history but also of ‘helping to preserve and maintain the identity of the members of the country’s national and ethnic minorities’. Cultural diversity is thus defined as a core national value and part of the national identity of Hungary. Moreover, this is placed in the context of European values and European identity: ‘The NCC encourages students to get acquainted with the life and culture of the minorities that live in the country, and at the same time [. . .] it focuses on those European and humanistic values and contents that strengthen our sense of belonging to Europe.’ European and national identity are brought together in this statement through the insertion of the personal pronoun ‘our’. This is the only occurrence of this kind of pronoun in this section, and it evokes the national we-group and its shared sense ‘of belonging

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to Europe’. The following sentence then reinforces this connection by equating citizens of the state with citizens of the European Union: ‘By joining the European Union, each citizen of Hungary became a citizen of a larger social, political, economic and cultural community. Civic education therefore is as much the education of the citizens of the country as that of the European Union.’ Civic education is thus declared to be a tool not only for socialising children to be state citizens, but also for educating European citizens. As far as multilingualism is concerned, the Core Curriculum links with the Directive concerning the education of national and ethnic minorities in that it puts forward a concept of multilingualism that explicitly contains both the technical skills of writing in, as well as understanding and speaking, a foreign language and intercultural understanding and respect for cultural diversity, which are to be transmitted to all children. This is further supported by the construction of cultural diversity as a core national value and part of Hungarian national identity. However, the most significant aspect of the Core Curriculum is the way in which both sub-national cultural diversity and European identity are incorporated into national identity in Hungary. In the last text representing the Hungarian discourse, we will look at how the Hungarian government has responded to the Commission’s request for best practices and experiences in the area of language learning and creating a language-friendly environment. Creating a dialogue between the European and national level: the 2007 Followup on the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity The Hungarian response to the ‘Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity’ is quite different from the Czech document (Appendix P). It constructs a dialogue between two levels of policy-making – as was intended by the Commission, who composed the template in order to share experiences and examples of best practice between the different policy levels, and also between different countries. In section 3.1, ‘An inclusive approach to linguistic diversity’, it contains text that has been written specifically in response to the questions in the template. It summarises the basic objectives of the 1993 Act on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities as well as some of the commitments made by the Ministry of Education concerning the provision of minority education. In the two sections on perceived obstacles and proposed initiatives to overcome these obstacles, it gives an account of the experiences with the legal provisions outlined above and how and where they can be improved. The measures they cite are those also contained in the Directive for the education of national and ethnic minorities discussed above and they all concern the question of how education for children from a minority background is or can be organised, but it is important to analyse how they are justified in the Follow-up document.

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First, the text states that ‘the 1993 Act on National and Ethnic Minorities defines 13 national and ethnic minorities in Hungary, recognised by the state. These minorities have a community right to preserve their culture’ (section 3.1a) as they are defined as indigenous cultural groups who have a legitimate place in Hungarian society and who are therefore protected by law. But this also means that members of these groups are assigned an identity, which they are supposed to find and cherish, as we have seen above in the Directive. Moreover, this affirms again the strong agency of state institutions in protecting and promoting the cultural identities of national and ethnic minorities. This is also the case in the following section, which concerns obstacles to the implementation of the measures to foster linguistic diversity. Beside the geographical dispersion of the members of national minorities, the report refers to the fact that the main family language even in families with a minority background is Hungarian, that the dialects are being lost and that the education system now needs to help with the intergenerational transmission of the ‘native language’. The reason they give is that ‘the different dialects spoken by the minorities do not lend themselves to regular refreshment, and thus their role in social communication is decreasing. This makes the role of the school in passing on the native language all the more important’ (section 3.1b). Again, this passage affirms the power and agency of the state, through the education system, to maintain an important criterion of national minorities, their language. The reason the text gives for the breaking down of the chain of transmission of the native language is the increasing obsolescence of dialects that makes them unsuitable for the purposes of modern-day communication. The language of the education system that has to take over this role as a consequence is the standard variety. Therefore, this passage not only raises again the question of what is considered to be the mother tongue, but it also dismisses the respective local dialects as the appropriate national minority languages. Moreover, this passage attributes language change only to the contemporary suitability or communicative capacity of language varieties and says nothing about the history of language contact. In the case of the German minority, the language shift from German language varieties to Hungarian happened not because the dialects were obsolete, but because people were discouraged from speaking their German dialect in public after the Second World War, notably so in the education system (see Chapter 3, and also Chapters 5 and 6 for individual experiences of this process). It could be argued, of course, that the Follow-up document is not only about the German language in Hungary and therefore the argument is more general than this specific history of language contact, but by leaving out this historical reference the document also erases the history of negative evaluation of, even discrimination against, the German language in Hungary. The question of assimilation and the resulting shift away from dialects to standard German is an important topic for the Association of Germans

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in Hungary. The following extract from an interview with a representative of the Association is concerned with the reasons why it is strongly behind minority education at school as well as what the connection of standard German and the local, historic dialects in that context is. Mother tongue: real dialects and cultured high German 1 ((weil))-/ deutsch als muttersprache wird in den familien nicht mehr 2 WEItergegeben . mit wenigen ausnahmen/ eh und eh die ursprüngliche- also die 3 EIgentliche muttersprache- die deutschen dialekte- die ((xxx)) deutschen dialekte 4 die man- die noch auch meine elterngeneration- die MEINE elterngeneration noch 5 SPRICHT die verSCHWINden/ in zehn- fünfzehn jahren werden kaum noch 6 dialektsprecher da sein/ eh also muss man ein gepflegtes . eh . hochdeutsch . 7 erlernen/ wo kann man hier das erlernen? eh es- das geht nur über schule und 8 bildung/ also kindergarten schulbildung/ deshalb hat das hier bei uns vorrang/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

German as a mother tongue isn’t passed on any more in the family, with few exceptions. And the original, I mean the real mother tongue, the German dialects, the German dialects that my parents’ generation still, that MY parents’ generation still speaks, they’re disappearing. In ten, fifteen years there’ll be virtually no dialect speakers left. So you must learn cultured high German. Where can you learn that? You can only do that through school, education, I mean kindergarten, school education. That’s why that’s a priority for us.

As a result of decades of assimilation, ‘German as a mother tongue’ (line 1) is no longer passed on. The term ‘mother tongue’ is then defined as ‘the German dialects that [his] parents’ generation still speaks’ (lines 2–4). Through the speaker’s emphasis on ‘MY parents’ generation’ (line 3), ‘mother tongue’ not only refers to the unbroken transmission between different generations of one family in general (as in line 1) but also foregrounds his own linguistic ability and identity as a ‘real’ German speaker, which justifies his position as an elected representative of the German minority. Yet, the excerpt also creates a distinction between the authenticity of the old dialects, the languages of the home sphere, and the cultured-ness, or learned-ness of standard German, the language of the public sphere. As the language practices that sustained the dialects disappear (and with them also the dialects themselves), the vacuum must be filled with ‘cultured high German’, which has a high symbolic status due to the academic and economic opportunities it helps to open up. But it can only be learned at school, which is the reason why the Association of Germans in Hungary insists it must be active in education policy and the business of running schools and choosing head teachers, in order for their and their members’ interests to be secured. As a policy statement from an official representative of the Association of Germans in Hungary, the previous excerpt is not surprising as such. However, once the person behind the public persona comes through, the

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categorisations of German mother tongue and individual German identity on the one hand, and collective German minority identity on the other, become less clear-cut. In the following extract, the same representative traces the provenance of the connection between German mother tongue and ethnic German identity back to the nineteenth century. German mother tongue and German identity – transformations of identities 1 früher hat man diese- dieses eh – ehm – bild oder- üb- von identität von 2 minderheit überhaupt eh dieses- diese auffassung des 19. jahrhunderts gehabt dass 3 an also- du bist deutscher wenn du deutscher muttersprache bist/ . später kam dann 4 noch hinzu wenn du . dich zur deutschen . nationalität bekennst also zur 5 deutschen . ((xx)) zum bei- eh eigentlich obwohl . in den ungarischen 6 volkszählungen dieser begriff nationalität und die frage nach der nationalität 7 erst- erst 1943 . bis dahin gab’s nur die muttersprache/ – was soll einer machen . der 8 aus einer mischehe kommt – eh der – vielleicht eh nur von seinen großeltern . 9 deutsch gehört hat deutsch an der schule gelernt hat und wesentlich besser 10 ungarisch spricht als deutsch/ eh wie soll er dann- eh eh . darf er überhaupt von 11 sich behaupten er eh sei- sei deutsch muttersprache/ nich eh also es sind so 12 komplizierte fragen die jeder einzelne- denen sich jeder einzelne auch irgendwie 13 konfrontieren muss/ . deshalb sage ich es ist eh- . es ist vieles im wandel . 14 identität ist kein statischer eh kein statischer- über die identität ändert sich 15 auch der inhalt des ((xx)) also das- für mich ist der trend wichtig dass eh- dass 16 wir immerhin 2001 . eh e- etwa 120 000 menschen hatten in ungarn die . sich auf 17 irgendeine art und weise mit der ungarischen- mit der deutschen kultu- mit der 18 ungarndeutschen kultur identifiziert haben/ . eh das ist wesentlich mehr als 10 19 jahre vo- zuvor oder . noch mehr als 20 jahre . zuvor/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

In the olden days you used to have this notion of identity, of minority in general, you had this notion from the 19th century that you, well you are German if your mother tongue is German. Later there was also the fact if you declare yourself to be of German nationality; although in the Hungarian censuses the term nationality and asking for people’s nationality came only in 1943. Before that there was only the mother tongue. But what is someone supposed to do who comes from a mixed marriage, who may only have heard German from his grandparents, who may have learnt German at school and who speaks Hungarian significantly better than German? How is he supposed to, is he entitled at all to claim to have German as a mother tongue? Well, these are complicated questions that every single person must face. This is why I say that many things are changing. [. . .] For me, the trend is important that at least in 2001 we had about 120,000 people in Hungary who have identified in some way with the ethnic German culture in Hungary. That is significantly more than ten years ago, or even more than twenty years ago.

Even though he categorises this connection between German mother tongue and ethnic German identity as ‘old’ he shows that it is still affecting

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people’s individual identities until the present day by using the present tense for the rhetorical questions in lines 3–6: ‘what is he supposed to do?’ and: ‘is he entitled at all?’ Thus the ‘old’ notion is as present today as it was in the nineteenth century, when it first became politically relevant, almost regardless of the transformations during the hundred years in between. The dominant discourses articulated in official documents and communications from the Ministry of Education support this instance of layered simultaneity, if only in the way they stress that children who are declared to be of German nationality must be given ‘their mother tongue back’, thus restoring the concept of the necessity of mother tongue and nationality for minority identities. Moreover, the use of modal verbs such as ‘supposed to’ and ‘must’ mark these questions to the individual not as optional categorisations, or as individual lifestyle choices, but as imperative existential questions that people cannot avoid facing. Thus, he also positions the individual as an important agent in the process of creating and maintaining identities, albeit not in the sense that they can exercise their freedom rights but as a fundamental question they have to answer for themselves. We shall see in Chapters 5 and 6 how people struggle with exactly these questions and in what ways they are able to, or fail to, find answers to these issues.

4.5 Conclusions In this chapter, we set out to study the different layers of language policy discourses at European and national levels, focusing on ways in which ideas about language and multilingualism are articulated in relation to the development of the ‘European project’ on the one hand and to the accommodation of national and supra-national interests on the other and searching for intertextual and interdiscursive traces across the levels. In particular, we have tried to identify the significance of these policy discourses for the positioning of the German language and its speakers in the context of their historical legacy and contemporary social and political transformations. Our analysis of key policy documents from Germany and Austria has shown that these states place their foreign cultural policies firmly within the European context, but that they also support them by reverting to notions of unproblematic historical linguistic and political relationships with their central European neighbours. The discursive alignment with European multilingualism and cross-national political cooperation helps justify their respective national interests, both by providing an uncontentious framework of action and in the way their respective national policies are designed to further the ideals of European integration and multilingualism. In the case of the Czech and Hungarian discourses, language and multilingualism were shown to be connected instead with questions of national integrity and the ability or power of the nation-state to define national identity and

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culture. The Czech discourses in particular stressed the importance of national integrity, both ‘within’ with regard to national minorities and ‘without’ with respect to the influence from the European level. The Hungarian discourses, in contrast, grant much more space to national and ethnic minorities and explicitly define these minority cultures as part of the indigenous culture(s) of Hungary. Moreover, Hungarian citizens’ identity is equated with European identity, and the authors of official documents have taken great care to use the European discourses as frames of reference for their own texts. However, even in the Hungarian discourses, the principal agent is the state, and it is national institutions which define and assign cultural identities. This has implications with regard to the question of what the ‘proper’ language is for which purposes or circumstances. The documents we have analysed were focused in particular on the education sector, and here there are distinct contrasts between the two countries. In official Czech discourse, the Czech language is categorised as the sole appropriate language for education, whereas other languages are seen mainly as additional, foreign languages. In official Hungarian discourse, however, considerable space is granted to bilingual education in both Hungarian and minority languages, and instead of assimilation and the ‘norm’ of a national mainstream culture, members of national minorities are encouraged to actively express their identities. By implication this also has an impact on the hierarchy of different varieties of languages. Here, the focus was on German as a language with several complex functions both as a foreign language and a minority or heritage language, and it is clear that the standard variety has supplanted the nonstandard dialects in public domains and now fulfils both sets of functions. By casting language policy discourses as discourses on language in social life, we have sought to focus attention not on practical policy measures and their implementation but on ways in which language ideologies at the macro level of political action create a discursive environment within which individual people can orientate themselves socially in terms of their understanding of how particular languages are preferred or dispreferred under particular social conditions. Having established the historical dimensions of the development of language policy discourses in central Europe in Chapter 3, we considered this process in the present chapter from a contemporary perspective. In the next two chapters, we investigate the effects of language ideologies and the discourses they engender in terms of the ways individual people use their experiences with language in past and present to construct a sense of self and to explore the options for social identification available to them.

Notes 1. The Council of Europe currently has forty-seven member states, which include the member states of the European Union as well as European

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countries which are non-EU members (such as Norway, Switzerland, San Marino, Liechtenstein, etc.), countries which have expressed the wish to join the EU (such as the Balkan republics, Iceland, Turkey, etc.), the countries of the former Soviet bloc (such as Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc., except Byelorussia), and the Russian Federation. (For a list of all members of the Council of Europe see http://www.coe.int/aboutcoe/index.asp?page=47pays1europe&l=en; accessed July 2009.) 2. For more detail on legal frameworks concerning language learning and minority education, see section 3.8 in Chapter 3.

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Language (auto)biographies: narrating multilingual selves

5.1 Introduction In this chapter, we navigate away from the ‘big picture’ of policy discourses and towards the more intimate domain of individual experience. Both here and in the following chapter we shall draw on the same corpus of personal interviews but in rather different ways and for different purposes. The language biographies that constitute part of these interviews represent a particular kind of discourse on language in social life. In Chapter 6, we will try to show how such interviews provide a source of data on ways in which individuals select from a range of social and linguistic categories made available by wider discourses on the social world they inhabit in order to position themselves in relation to others, to represent themselves as social beings. Before we can do that, we need first to look closely at ways in which these individuals, as narrators, make experiences with language an organising or structural element in their life stories: what is it about ‘my’ encounters with German and other languages – their evaluations, the times and places associated with their use, their possibilities and limitations or constraints – that have made my ‘life’ what it is or has become? In this chapter, therefore, the focus is on the creation of a sense of ‘self’, and the narrative is the data (Bamberg et al. 2007: 1–8). Our concern here, then, is with what we referred to in Chapter 2 as the transformation of (often fragmented) experience into stories with their own structural logic and shape. The importance of this process of story-making lies in the (potentially) transformative effects of the story-telling itself, especially when it is oriented around key moments of personal or social change (such as returning home after the war, or the end of the communist period): in telling our stories we are translating ourselves from ‘ordinary people’ into historical actors. Some would even argue that ‘we are our stories’ (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 138), but we have to recognise that the apparent uniqueness and authorial power implied in this view are qualified in at least two ways. First, these individual, ‘local’ stories are intricately connected to the kinds of ‘wider cultural story’ that we discussed in Chapter 3 and whose

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textual traces can be detected in personal narratives (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 139; Tannen 1989: 100). Secondly, life stories are not like historically free-floating fables or Märchen: what is said, and what is not said, and how, is shaped by the cultural norms, social constraints and ideological conditions of the time in which the stories are told (Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992: 2, 4–5). So while our attention is focused here and in the next chapter on the smallscale discourses of personal narratives, connections with the larger-scale discourses of master and generic narratives (see Chapter 2, p. 28) on the history of Germans and German-speakers in central Europe will repeatedly be apparent, a relationship that is mediated above all by the indexicality of language varieties and categories of ethnicity and nationality, as well as by shifts in narrative stance (indicated, for example, by moves between first person singular I/ich to first person plural we/wir or the impersonal generic you/man). In this way, individual narratives are embedded in larger, more general discourses and social processes, so that their meaning derives not solely from the local context of production or interaction (that is, from within the narrative activity itself) but in part also from the ‘general store of stories’ (Finnegan 1997: 92–3) and collective memories about the German(-speaking) communities and from assumptions and preconceptions associated with ideological positions imported into the narrative (De Fina and Baynham 2005b: 4; Schiffrin 1996: 191–2; Armbruster and Meinhof 2005: 44). Therefore, just as individual stories draw intertextually on an existing inventory of widely circulated generic narratives (De Fina 2003: 28–30, 42–4), their analysis should also be related to these ‘macro-level interpretative resources’ (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 11, 43). For Ochs and Capps (2001: 2), the activity of narration is a ‘central proclivity of humankind’, a human universal; we are all, in Finnegan’s terms (1997: 70) ‘story-telling animals’. If this is so, then it is the task of analysts to seek common structural features of the story-telling process onto which individual narratives can be mapped. Rather than attempt to offer a comprehensive account of narrative theory, however, we shall identify certain aspects of the organisation and the nature of narratives that seem to us to provide an adequate conceptual framework for the analysis of our language biographies as sites for the creation of multilingual selves.1 First, we shall consider the roles and positions of the narrator and structural features of narratives, in particular the creation of coherence and continuity and the importance of time, place and space as organising principles (5.2). Next, we shall discuss the particular nature of life stories as memory narratives and the contingent nature of subjectivity, self and identity (5.3). Then we shall devote the main body of the chapter to the analysis of illustrative passages from individual language biographies (5.4), followed by a short summary and set of conclusions (5.5).

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5.2 Narrative organisation and the creation of coherence Whether spontaneously related in casual conversation or elicited in an interview, stories are told with a purpose. They may be told in order to entertain, amuse or shock the listener, to inform, explain or illustrate; in the case of a life (hi)story any or all of these purposes may apply, but the invitation to produce this kind of narrative offers the narrator above all an opportunity for reflection. It provides a platform for the presentation or performance of a persona that we wish to propose as a model of ourselves which we want to be taken seriously. It gives us the chance to project ourselves as both moral and social beings, to claim the right to esteem for performing good deeds or overcoming obstacles, to complain of injustice, to justify unconventional behaviour, to express regret at missed opportunities or inappropriate actions, to evaluate our relationships with others. The telling of a life story is therefore ‘strategic and embedded in politics’ (Lefkowitz 2004: 121), in the local-level politics of establishing a place for ourselves in a particular moral order and social world. In any form of narrative there is a tension between content and expression: the narrator has editorial freedom over the substance of the story but has to develop and articulate it within the conventions of the chosen genre – spoken or written, face to face or mediated, monologic or dialogic, for mass anonymous consumption or directed at a known interlocutor or audience. In an interview, such as those we conducted with our ‘consultants’, the narrator is to varying degrees constrained or facilitated by their interaction with the interviewer; in our case, we initiated a conversation on the general topic of people’s experience with language but then aimed to intervene only minimally in the speaker’s account. What they produce, though, is not just a curriculum vitae, an unembellished list of accomplishments or milestones, it is a story: not, we assume, a fictional but a factitious account, a preferred version of their experience, and therefore a creative act. However, the degree of autonomy that this affords them is not only limited by the norm or principle of truthfulness (never knowingly saying something they take to be false) but also circumscribed by the external forces and social structures that constitute the frame within which they construct their account. The narrator therefore has to strike a balance ‘between creativity and constraint’ (Finnegan 1997: 79). The narrator is also both liberated and constrained by the ambivalence of their own position: they are both producer and participant, performer of the story and protagonist in the story (Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2005: 63–4). This ambivalence creates a narrative space in which different ‘stances’ are available to the story-teller (Georgakopolou 2007: 16), positions within the narration that Goffman (1981) characterises as four discrete roles or ‘aspects of the self’. These are succinctly explained by De Fina et al. (2006: 10): ‘the author (the person who designs the utterance), the animator (the person who

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speaks the words that may have been designed by someone else), the principal (the person who takes responsibility for the sentiments underlying the words) and the figure (the character in a story or other text)’ (our italics). Several of these roles are often occupied by the narrator within the same episode, as extracts 5/1 and 5/2 show. István, who is in his forties and lives in the Hungarian town of Sopron on the Austrian border, told how his grandfather had been forced to move out of his home and hand it over to a Hungarian migrating from Slovakia. The man had insisted on holding onto a carved wooden press in the cellar, which István’s grandfather had not been able to remove in time. Extract 5/1 István 1 das gehörte von nun an ihm [the other man]/ natürlich kann man sich denken dass dann 2 ihm [the grandfather] der wut kam aber es war nichts zu machen und mein großvater 3 hat’s dann gesagt später das hätte er ihm noch verziehen dass er die holzpresse nicht 4 rausrückte/ ich bezweifle das natürlich aber das hat er so erzählt/ also DAS hätte er ihm 5 noch verziehen aber dass er so FAUL wär und im winter hat er diese geschnitzte 6 holzpresse VERBRANNT anstatt in den wald zu gehen und sich holz zu holen also 7 DAS nicht/ und von nun an hat er ihn nicht gegrüßt/. . . und einmal gingen wir 8 miteinander ich war so 10 oder 11 und der kam uns entgegen und der nur den kopf 9 runter mein großvater ist ihm vorbei gegangen und er hat auch nix gesagt/ und auf 10 einmal knallt’s ich hab ne ohrfeige gekriegt/ sag ich was IST denn?/ sagt er DU 11 HAST NICHT GEGRÜSST/ sag ich mein großvater aber DU AUCH NICHT/ das ist 12 erwachsenensache KINDER MÜSSEN aber die erwachsenen grüßen punkt/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

From then on that belonged to him [the other man]. Of course, you can imagine that he [the grandfather] then flew into a rage, but it couldn’t be helped and my grandfather then said later that he would still have forgiven him for not handing over the wooden winepress. Of course I have my doubts about that but that’s what he said. So, he would still have forgiven him for that, but for being so lazy and burning that carved winepress in the winter instead of going into the forest to fetch wood, that he couldn’t forgive. And since then he hasn’t said hello to him. [. . .] And once we were walking along together, I was about 10 or 11, and he came towards us keeping his head down, and my grandfather walked straight past him and he didn’t say a word either. And all of a sudden smack, I got a clip round the ear. I said ‘what was that for?’ and he said ‘you didn’t say hello’. ‘But you didn’t either’, I said to my grandfather. ‘That’s a matter for grown-ups, but children must greet adults, and that’s the end of it.’

In extract 5/1, István is the author of the passage, constructing the story from his own perspective and largely in his own words, but he is also one of three figures in the story and through ‘quotations’ acts as the animator for his grandfather and for himself-as-figure. In another passage (extract 5/2), István talks about how the majority of the ‘German’ inhabitants of Sopron (which he refers to using the town’s German name Ödenburg) had

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voted in the 1921 plebiscite to keep the town within Hungary, with the result that it had been awarded the official title of Hungary’s ‘most loyal town’. Extract 5/2 István 1 und wenn hier irgendwas mit deutsch anfängt jetzt nicht mehr aber so sehr also diese 2 zehn jahre haben schon was gebracht aber vorher also wenn hier jemand was mit 3 deutsch anfangen wollte dann hat man gedacht man will diesen titel da irgendwie 4 rückgängig machen und man will die stadt hier wieder ver- verdeutschen oder ungarn 5 wegnehmen/ und wenn man da die straßenschilder zweisprachig macht weil in der 6 innenstadt ist es der fall aber es kostete zwei jahre arbeit und was für kritiken wir da 7 alles einstecken mußten das kann man sich gar nicht vorstellen/ man dachte wenn man 8 hinschreibt unter sopron ödenburg dann ((lacht)) hat man die staatsgrenzen 9 verschoben/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

And whenever something starts off here in German, not so much anymore, I mean the last ten years have seen some progress, but before, I mean whenever somebody here wanted to start using German, then people thought that you somehow wanted to take that title away again and that you wanted to Germanise the town again or take it away from Hungary. And if you make the road signs bilingual, because that’s how it is in the town centre, but it took two years of work and the criticism we all had to take for it, you wouldn’t believe it. They thought if you wrote Ödenburg underneath Sopron you’d moved the state borders.

In extract 5/2, István is the author of the passage, telling the story in his own terms, but he is also a figure (a member of a group of people responsible for installing bilingual signage, referred to simply as ‘we/wir’) and functions as animator for an anonymous group of others who object to the bilingual signs. The impersonal generic pronoun man (‘one, you’) is used here with three different referents and thus serves to populate the episode with different figures: first, referring anaphorically to the ‘someone’ (jemand) who might use German in the public domain (‘you wanted to Germanise the town again’, man will die Stadt hier wieder verdeutschen), and therefore by implication to the narrator-as-figure; secondly, referring to the group of objectors (‘people thought’, dann hat man gedacht); and thirdly, as a genuinely impersonal term, that might also include the listener (‘you wouldn’t believe it’, das kann man sich gar nicht vorstellen). Similar shifts in narrative stance can be seen in extract 5/3, in which Georg, a retired man living in Ústí nad Labem, talks about attempts to recruit him as a teenager to the Communist Party after the war. Extract 5/3 Georg 1 . . . wurde ich am ende gefragt ob ich nicht in die kommunistische partei eintreten 2 möchte/ hab ich gesagt ich fühl mich nicht reif/ und da war das fast so dass ich hätte

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9

nicht studieren dürfen/ es finden sich aber immer anständige leute die haben gesagt lass ihn sein der kommt schon irgendwie noch dazu/ also ich durfte ja ohne ohne partei/ und dann in den 50er jahren hat sich die situation dafür bisl geöffnet und dann haben sie wieder gesagt wir brauchen leute die das irgendwie von innen reformieren oder so ne und ich bin eingetreten also war von 58 oder so in der partei/ 68 mit dem einmarsch der russen da waren wir natürlich alle dagegen und da bin ich ausgetreten/ also war ich aus der partei ausgeschlossen und das war VIEL schlimmer als ein deutscher zu sein/

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

[. . .] In the end I was asked if I wouldn’t like to join the Communist Party. I said I didn’t feel ready for it. And that almost meant that I wouldn’t have been allowed to study, but there are always some decent people and they said ‘leave him alone, he’ll get round to it eventually’. So I was allowed to, without the Party. And then in the 50s the situation became a bit more open and then they said again ‘we need people to kind of reform things from the inside’, or something like that, and I joined up, and so from ’58 or thereabouts I was in the Party. In ’68, when the Russians invaded, we were all against it of course, and that was when I left, and so I was expelled from the Party and that was much worse than being German.

In extract 5/3, Georg is the author as well as the central figure in the story but also acts as animator for two anonymous groups of others (members of the Communist Party, to whom he attributes directly ‘quoted’ remarks, and a group opposed to the Russian invasion in 1968, referred to simply as ‘we/ wir’). A further important constraint on authorial freedom is the requirement to make sense: in other words, not to recount events at random but to confer on what in all likelihood is a disjointed and discontinuous set of events or experiences a sense of order and coherence: ‘Personal narrative is a way of using language or another symbolic system to imbue life events with a temporal and logical order, to demystify them and establish coherence across past, present, and as yet unrealized experience’ (Ochs and Capps 2001: 2). We need to explain convincingly to ourselves and to our interlocutors how we came to be as we are, do what we do, and make the choices we make. This is a constraint that actually demands creativity: the transformation of experience into a story involves more than simply listing ‘one thing after another’ in an even-paced chronology. It entails selecting, editing and assembling particular events that the narrator identifies as relevant, salient and complementary in order to resolve the contradictions and smooth out the rough texture of the past (Cortazzi 2001: 388–9). Sequentiality is an important part of the narrative product that results from this process, but there is an important distinction to be made between time as lived (the narrated event) and time as narrated (the narrative event). Using the rhetorical image of the ‘double arrow of time’, Mishler (2006) characterises the contradictory ‘temporal orders’ of ‘clock or chronological time’ and ‘narrative or experiential time’. Mishler’s argument turns on its

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head the ‘common-sense view’ of a narrative as a ‘chronological sequence where events that precede others are independent, and potential causes or explanations of those that follow’ in favour of a teleological conception that takes account of the ways narrators select, organise and present experiences as an exercise in ‘reinterpreting the meaning of past events in terms of later consequences, through which they redefine who they are and revise the plots of their life stories’ (Mishler 2006: 33, 36). This process, succinctly characterised by Bruner (2001: 28) as a reversal of Wordsworth’s maxim – ‘[i]f initially the child was father to the man, now (in autobiography) the man reclaims the role of being father to the child’ – is what Brockmeier (2001) calls ‘retrospective teleology’. Our life stories typically begin at a point in the past and progress in a linear fashion (however haphazard or tortuous this narrative line may appear) to the present moment, the moment of narration. At this point, then, the narrated event merges with the narrative event, a seductively persuasive fusion that seems to suggest either a remarkable coincidence or an inevitable outcome; the components of the story are assembled in such a way that they appear, with hindsight, to have been leading towards the present conclusion all along: [O]ne’s life, once shaped and sequentially ordered as a narrative event, appears as a kind of development towards a certain goal – as if the end (that is, the present of the narrative event) were the destination of one’s journey, an objective which from the very beginning had to be reached like Odysseus’ Ithaca. Just as the here and now of the narrative event follows the narrated events of the past, the (temporary) end of the narrated life tends to appear as the telos of one’s life history – as if a sequential order in time becomes a causal or teleological order of events. (Brockmeier 2001: 251–2) And as Lefkowitz (2004: 124) argues, this ordering of events is constructed ‘according to desirability – an affective evaluation’: good examples of this are the stories of János and Walter, discussed in section 5.4, in which the challenges and tribulations of the past are represented as obstacles to be overcome on the way to achieving the personal goal of sustaining a positive German identity. Each life (hi)story therefore has its own temporal order, or temporality, but notions of place and space are also important as organising principles in narratives. The events narrated are located both in time and in place (Somers and Gibson 1994: 59), but temporal and spatial specifications are more than simply the historical and geographical coordinates of the story, they are often part of the story itself. This is particularly the case in situations of social change and in transitional moments in individuals’ lives, when ‘orientation/ disorientation/reorientation in space and time, far from being a simple contextual backdrop is the story’ (Baynham 2006 [2003]: 181). Baynham makes

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this argument in relation to migration narratives, but the same can apply in situations such as those of our consultants who were (relatively) settled in terms of place but living in transformed social spaces. A simple example is Mátyás, a retired man living in Veszprém, who in extract 5/4 talks about the constraints imposed on him and his four siblings by their mother. Extract 5/4 Mátyás 1 nur deutsch nur deutsch so lang bis sie geleben sind weil wir waren fünf geschwister 2 und ich bin der letzte was noch lebt die anderen sind schon ausgestorben/ ja aber wann 3 wir uns getroffen haben haben wir immer in der muttersprache gesprochen aber eh 4 außen haus nicht mehr/ nur jetzt geht das schon aber mit dem zweite weltkrieg da wird 5 meine mutter hat immer gesagt sprich in die straße nicht ungar nicht deutsch/ 1 2 3 4 5

Only German, only German, for as long as they were alive because there were five of us brothers and sisters and I’m the last survivor, the others have already died out. But whenever we met up we always spoke in our mother tongue, but no longer outside of the home. It’s ok now but with the Second World War, it was, my mother always said ‘don’t speak Hungar- German in the street’.

In this account, there are two time frames, one nested inside the other, and both are characterised by linguistic practices related to space. Mátyás says that he and his siblings spoke exclusively in German to each other throughout their lives, but then qualifies this categorical assertion by introducing an embedded time period beginning at some point in the Second World War and continuing until an unspecified time in the recent past (in other parts of the interview he refers a number of times to ‘die Veränderung’, the change, meaning the period following 1989, as a moment when it became possible to declare his sense of Germanness more openly again for the first time since his childhood). During this period, their mother forbade them to speak German ‘in the street’, so that this time was defined by a spatial segregation of private and public spaces in which different rules of linguistic behaviour applied (see also Chapter 6.5). Zdenĕk, now in his late seventies, constructs a similarly circumscribed account of language use in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. Extract 5/5 Zdenĕk 1 ich kam in die gaststätte und ich war erstaunt da haben sie nur deutsch geredet/ das 2 war im grenzgebiet da sind doch viele geblieben die also glashütten oder bergarbeiter 3 waren/ jedenfalls waren so viele deutsche da also/. . . da hab ich gefragt wie ist das 4 möglich dass ihr so öffentlich deutsch reden könnt?/ wir sind hier geboren und so 5 weiter/ aber wir dürfen das in x nicht nicht ein wort/ 1 I went to the pub and I was astonished, they were all just speaking German. This was in 2 the border region, of course lots of people stayed on there working in the glassworks or

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3 the mines. In any case, there were so many Germans there. [. . .] And so I asked them 4 ‘how are you able to speak so openly in German?’ ‘We were born here’, and so on. But 5 we’re not allowed to do that in X, not a word.

The story relates to a particular event that occurred one day when he was travelling on business near the German border, but it serves a double purpose in his narrative. First, it provides evidence of the marginality of being a German-speaker in Czechoslovakia at that time, and second, it enables him to emphasise the severity of the restriction on his own language use by contrasting the apparently liberal linguistic regime in the border village (or the special local conditions that permitted the flouting of general rules) with the prohibition on the public use of German in his own town. The border zone itself is constructed as an ambiguous space, an area on the periphery of the Czechoslovak state in which many ethnic Germans had been able to remain due to their occupations and who were able to assert what they saw as their territorial right to speak German in public. (We return to this episode in his story in Chapter 6 from a different perspective.) In other stories, this liminal space, in which the political tensions of the Cold War were acutely felt, especially in the early years, is sustained through discursive procedures such as naming practices. Walter, for example, constructs a narrative bond between past and present by using both Czech and German names – Liberec and Reichenberg – for the same Czech town close to the German border. In extract 5/6, he expresses strong views about the expulsion of Sudeten Germans, with whom his organisation of Germans in the Czech Republic maintain close relations, and talks of the cultural associations forged between his town and its German twin-town Augsburg. Extract 5/6 Walter 1 UND DANN NATÜRLICH DIE VERBINDUNG ZU UNSEREN LANDSLEUTEN 2 ZU UNSEREN SUDETENDEUTSCHEN vertriebenen/ eh eh die hat uns an und für 3 sich VIEL GEBRACHT und wahrscheinlich denen drüben AUCH/ ja wir ham HIER in 4 reichenberg haben wir ja schon neun eh deutsch-tschechische kulturtage gemacht die 5 immer eh mindestens eine woche liefen/ das haben wir alles ORGANISIERT ja?/ mit 6 künstlern aus der bundesrepublik deutschland und und so weiter/ und heuer haben wir 7 das erste mal eh diese kulturtage sind auch mit der stadt LIBEREC UND 8 AUGSBURG gelaufen/ weil augsburg ist wieder die PATENstadt der vertriebenen 9 reichenberger und jetzt ist sie an und für sich auch PARTNERSTADT für liberec/ 1 2 3 4 5 6

And then, of course, the contact with our fellow countrymen, with our Sudeten German expellees, this basically did a great deal for us and probably for them over there too. You see, here in Reichenberg, we’ve already organised nine German-Czech cultural events, which always go on for at least a week. And we organised everything, didn’t we? With artists from the Federal Republic of Germany and so on. And this year for the first time we have, these cultural events have been run together

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7 with the town councils in Liberec and Augsburg, because Augsburg is the 8 host town of the expellees from Reichenberg and is now actually also the twin 9 town of Liberec.

His explicit solidarity with ‘our Sudeten German expellees’, between ‘them over there’ and ‘us here’, is reinforced by the siting of German-Czech cultural events (organised by Walter’s association) ‘here in Reichenberg’ rather than in ‘Liberec’. The German town Augsburg is attributed a dual status, indicated not by alternative names but by the almost homophonous, almost synonymous terms Patenstadt and Partnerstadt: its informal role as ‘foster town’ or ‘home from home’ for ‘expellees from Reichenberg’ is juxtaposed with its formal relationship with ‘Liberec’ in the context of a twinning arrangement between municipalities in two states. The indexicality of place, the historical burden of associations between particular places and linguistic practices, is clear in such examples (see also Georgakopolou 2007: 14). These and other passages also show that while sequentiality in stories is normally articulated in temporal terms, narrative progression is often (also) expressed in spatial terms (Bruner 2006 [1987]: 109): transformative moments in many people’s lives are experienced and remembered in association with places and institutions, such as transferring from kindergarten to school or going to live in another country. This also applies metaphorically, when some form of life-changing event or action is construed as a movement from one place to another. A language variety is sometimes conceived as a dwelling place, somewhere where you feel either at home or unfamiliar. For example, Johanna, a primary school teacher in her late fifties from Veszprém, talks of a time in the 1950s and 1960s in Hungary when Ungarndeutsche felt a sense of hostility towards them from their Magyar compatriots, and although she was able to cope with this atmosphere her elder sister found it intolerable and she ‘abandoned [literally ‘left’] the German language’.2 Extract 5/7 Johanna 1 meine schwester die ist auch zehn jahre älter die hat auch ganz jung eh hat sie die 2 deutsche sprache verlassen/ sie ertrug diesen hass und diese feindlichkeit nicht und sie 3 wollte sie erklärte sich dann nicht zuhörig/ 1 My sister, she is also ten years older, she abandoned the German language when she 2 was quite young. She couldn’t bear the hatred and hostility, and she wanted to3 she refused to be a part of it.

These examples, and others that we will discuss in the following sections, also show the importance of a further component of narrative organisation: ‘the intricate relationships between space, time and agency, through which historical time and social space create opportunities, moments where certain

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kinds of agency become possible’ (Baynham 2006 [2003]: 188) – and, as is often the case in our stories, moments where agency precisely appears not to be possible.

5.3 Creating senses of self and identity in life stories What constitutes a life story and how it is achieved is determined both by substance and by structure. Linde (1993: 21–5), for example, develops her short definition of the life story (see Chapter 2, p. 26) by identifying three criteria that should be met for a text to qualify as this kind of narrative. First, it should ‘make some evaluative point about the speaker or about some event framed as relevant specifically because it happened to the speaker’. Second, it should have ‘extended reportability’ in that the events recounted have relevance beyond the moment of their occurrence and the specific instance of their narration. And third, it should not simply be a random collection of individual stories but rather the ‘life’ as a whole should be about the relationships between the component parts. A life story should therefore have individuality but also be generalisable, and it should be internally consistent. The achievement of coherence and continuity is an important goal not only in the structuring of stories, in the temporal and spatial organisation of episodes, but also in the creation of a sense of self or individual identities. Indeed, Linde (1993: 100–6) insists on the integrity of the self in the sense that its creation is not a random process but rather depends on narrative coherence, and she stipulates that the self should be continuous through time – ‘legato, not staccato’ – because ‘a proper self is not a pointillist self, consisting of isolated moments of experience that may be remembered but do not touch or influence each other’, although this of course does not preclude contradictions and discontinuities in the telling. Furthermore, the self should be particular, it should be distinguishable from others, and as a corollary of this it should possess ‘the property of reflexivity’ so that it is possible to observe the self as an other. This implies a conception of life stories as an interpretive process, a reading of what Schütze (1983, 1987, cited in Treichel 2004: 48–9) refers to as ‘the sedimentation of biographical experience’: the representation by the narrator of events lived through by the protagonists, the protagonists’ responses to these events, and the narrator’s conclusions or ‘state of understanding’ arising from the narration. Life stories are thus, as we argued in the previous section, (re)creations of the past from the present, memory narratives that develop (often repeatedly revised) reinterpretations of the past in which the narrator (as ‘author’ or as ‘animator’) situates (as ‘figure’ or protagonist) a ‘person who happens to share their name’ (Bruner 2001: 28) in relation to other figures, constructing a set of historical actors with varying degrees of agency (see Relaño-Pastor and De Fina 2005: 41–3 on the ‘sliding scale’ of

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agency in narratives). They are therefore simultaneously ‘about’ the past and ‘busily about the present as well’ (Bruner 2001: 29). As a sub-genre of life story, autobiographies are always about both past and present and their purpose is a particular kind of interpretive process, a process of ‘storying the self’ through doing memory work: [P]ractices of self-representation are also practices of memory: the narrators reflect on their past experience and reshape it at the same time. This is where the relationship between memory, narrative and identity becomes evident. We narrate who we are by making claims about where we have come from. (Armbruster and Meinhof 2005: 57) Making claims about how we have come to be the way we are (or about the way we wish to be seen) is not a verifiable process: it suggests the contingent nature of subjectivity (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 23–4) and that articulating our sense of self and identity is not an act of discovery but of composition – the self is not lurking ‘out there’, awaiting revelation, it is assembled in the course of autobiographical narration. But there are different views on the immanence of self and identity within the narrative process: how far are they, in fact, constructed in the telling of our story and how far do they derive from the experiences, images, beliefs and attitudes that we store independently of this activity and that we bring with us into it? On the one hand, for example, Somers and Gibson (1994: 38–9) tie the process of identity-formation firmly to the narrative process, arguing that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that ‘experience’ is constituted through narratives; that people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives. On the other hand, while Eakin (1999: 100) agrees that ‘to talk of “selfrepresentation” supposes there is a “self” that pre-exists its presentation in the depiction’, he is more cautious in contending that ‘the self of autobiographical discourse does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative’ (our emphasis) and therefore prefers to see the idea of ‘self’ ‘less as an entity and more as a kind of awareness in process’ (Eakin 1999: x). Similarly, Bauman (2000: 1) characterises identity as ‘an emergent construction’ that evolves in the course of linguistic performance or interaction. Our position is most closely aligned with that of De Fina (2003), who, although concerned

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primarily with social or group identities (our focus in Chapter 6) rather than with the articulation of selves or individual identities, argues for a middle way that places great importance on the accomplishments of the narrative process but also on the contextualisation of the individual narrative in relation to the life experience that the individual brings with them into the discursive event (in our case, the biographical interview). So while our emphasis here is on the ‘local context’ of the narrative event itself, on the ways in which the narrator projects a particular characteristic or stance, we cannot ignore the broader or ‘global’ context beyond this immediate story-world, the values, beliefs, assumptions and expectations circulating in the wider community, for it is in the connections between the two that the meanings of the individual narratives emerge (De Fina 2003: 26–8). This is especially so in the case of language biographies, since language use is a social activity and individual language biographies therefore intersect with others (Nekvapil 2004). In our discussion of illustrative ‘lives’ in the next section, we will try to demonstrate some ways in which a sense of self emerges in the course of the telling of life stories, paying attention both to their particular qualities and to their expression of different kinds of experience, as well as to their relation to each other and ways in which they reference the wider story-worlds of which they are a part. Moreover, while we will focus on particular aspects of the selves that emerge we should not lose sight of their multidimensional nature, incorporating different identities associated with social roles and relationships (such as ‘Hungarian’, ‘Ungarndeutsche’, ‘teacher’, ‘mother’ or ‘granddaughter’) as well as different stances (such as ‘loner’, ‘conformist’ or ‘resister’) (in this respect, see also Baynham 2006: 391–4). The common strand running through all these analyses will be an investigation of how individuals create particular kinds of selves by constructing a perspective on their lives oriented around their experience with language: discourses on language as it shapes individual lives.

5.4 Language biographies: on being a German-speaker3 In this section, we will not offer a detailed account of full life stories but rather illustrative analyses of episodes or ‘chapters’ of six language biographies, ‘storied layers’ in Armbruster and Meinhof’s terms (2005: 43) within longer biographical interviews. Our choice of individuals and our isolation of passages in their interviews are final steps in a sequence of selection that began with our identification of potential consultants and continued with their choice of events and experiences to talk about with us. We therefore cannot claim that they are in any strict sense representative, either of the experiences of ethnic Germans in central Europe or more narrowly of the language biographies in our collection. The principal criterion for our selection was the need to find stories that on the one hand reflected the diversity

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of responses to often similar experiences and on the other hand allowed us to show how the meaning of individual narratives emerges from and depends on their relationship with each other. In order to do this, we have chosen stories that all deal, directly or indirectly, with the common topos of loss, and we will try to show how the individual narrators organise their language biographies in relation to this theme to create a particular temporality – the ‘time of their lives’ (Brockmeier 2001: 248). The life events in these stories are generally recounted as a developmental sequence, but the narratives are episodic, discontinuous and oriented around recurring themes (such as family life, education, political struggle and social change). Typically incorporating the experience of several generations of a family, the narratives are framed in terms of long-term historical processes but punctuated and given their momentum by reference to moments of change in ‘event-time’ (or rather, perhaps, to change recalled as momentary, such as starting school or a new job, or the transition from one political order to another) (see Chapter 2, p. 20). Changes in language use and linguistic practices are charted against these reference points, and the experience of loss is a central theme, especially the loss of those speech varieties traditionally considered constitutive of German ethnicity. However, like time, loss is not a unitary phenomenon – it may, for example, be a result of censorship imposed by a hostile state authority, or a more or less voluntary relinquishing of a speech form seen as a concomitant of an undesirable lifestyle – and similarly experience of loss, and reactions to it, vary. Furthermore, while loss, in the sense of the displacement of a particular linguistic variety from the active speech repertoire of individuals, is more likely to be gradual than instantaneous, accounts of loss are generally framed in terms of outcomes, rather than processes, and as both consequences and evidence of social change. In our narratives, the theme of language loss functions as one means of structuring the individual life course, and other life events are made relevant to the extent that they contribute to the recollection of loss, or resistance to it, or in some cases to the regaining of what had been lost. This contingent relationship between time and language (loss) is captured in Gal’s concept of a ‘culturally coded temporality’ derived from the temporal indexicality of linguistic practices, linguistic forms and place (see Chapter 2, p. 19). To modify Gal’s terms, language loss (and the loss of those things that are put in jeopardy as a result) therefore not only occurs in time, but also constitutes a means of giving shape to the individual experience of time.4 The salience of ‘loss’ in our narratives is not surprising, since all our consultants share – either at first hand or through the recollections of older family members – the experience of assimilation into a society in which a previously defining feature of their sense of self (a linguistic variety) was not validated or legitimised. The ‘authenticity’ of traditional, local speech forms indexical of the past is outweighed by the ‘authority’ of standardised, national speech forms (both standard German and either Hungarian or Czech) indexical of

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the present and the future (see Gal 2006; Gal and Woolard 2001b). But what exactly has been lost, how is this loss felt, and what does it represent in people’s lives? Is it necessarily experienced as an irredeemable deficit, or may it sometimes be constructed – retrospectively – as a temporary suspension, or simply accepted as an absence of a former presence?5 Of course, changes in social conditions impose some form of adjustment on those affected but how do they incorporate this into their personal perspectives on their lives? How do they use the shifting constellations of their linguistic repertoires to structure their accounts of their experience of change? And how do these accounts serve to give meaning to the narrators’ lives? Our narratives suggest a range of different responses to the experience of loss: from mourning and regret, through acceptance and resignation, to resistance and rediscovery. In this section, then, we examine aspects of the stories of six individuals of ethnic German origin from Hungary and the Czech Republic in order to see how they narrate the loss of the German language in their families and wider communities. In particular, we will show what kinds of characteristic or stance the narrators project and how the threat of loss has been framed by stories of unexpected and chance circumstances, of a sometimes melancholic search for their identities, and of defiance, which they have chosen in order to represent their lives. Helga: the journey to Germanness Near the beginning of our interview with Helga, a sixty-eight-year-old woman from Plzeň (Czech Republic) (see also Chapter 6), she had told us that although her own mother was bilingual in Czech and German she spoke only German with Helga in her early childhood, but then spoke only Czech with her after the end of the Second World War in order to help her with her school work and also to make her life in the then Czechoslovakia easier. So Helga had virtually lost contact with the German language in her youth. However, since the early 1990s she has been heavily involved in running a German cultural organisation and much of her story revolves around these activities and her family. She describes herself as ‘a fighter’ (ein Kämpfer), determined to seize any opportunity to revive and sustain her sense of Germanness, and is clearly proud of her son’s achievements in settling in Germany: ‘He’s a real German’ (Das ist ein echter Deutscher). In extract 5/8, she talks about how she managed to reconnect with her first language, long before the events of 1989 and subsequent years removed the political obstacles, through her involvement in motor sport. Extract 5/8 Helga: Language and motorcycle maintenance 1 JA was mich bisher gehalten hat bei der deutsche sprache war sport/ mein mann ist 2 ein mechaniker für speedway und der hat mich immer mitgenommen von anfang 3 und als wir mir haben viel mit ddr damals ((xx)) gemacht/. . . und ich hab versucht

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4 5 6 7

gedolmetscht und ich hab gemerkt dass mir etwas doch in den kopf geblieben ist von der deutsche sprache und es war eh SEHR interessant mit denen zu machen mitmachen/ wegen dem dass ich eigentlich wieder die erinnerungen erwache und und dass ich wieder rede/

1 2 3 4 5 6

Well, what kept up my link with the German language until now was sport. My husband is a speedway mechanic and he always took me along from the start, and when we – we did a lot in the GDR in those days . . . and I tried, I interpreted, and I noticed that something of the German language had stuck in my mind after all, and it was very interesting to do things with them because I bring memories back to life and because I talk again.

In this short sequence, Helga conjoins references to a place (the GDR) and a time (‘in those days’) in connection with a specific activity (motor sport) to open up a social space in which she was able to regain a degree of control over her social actions, a space in which the use of an otherwise stigmatised and politically compromising language (in terms of its past associations) was legitimated through its role in facilitating working relationships with citizens of a sister socialist state. The double historical specification through both spatial and temporal deixis would have been tautological were it not for the fact that ‘in those days’ (i.e. before 1989) the public practice of speaking German would not have been sanctioned or positively evaluated for her other than in this particular context. However, the significance of this episode in her life story is not confined to a closed period in the past, but appears to extend into the present of the time of narration. The activity of interpreting provided the occasion for her to discover that she had, apparently unexpectedly, not completely lost her knowledge of German, but the shift from past to present tense in lines 5–66 extends the narrative trajectory beyond the temporal confines of the past events, and the two causal clauses (‘because I bring memories back to life’ and ‘because I talk again’) suggest that the revelation for her was not so much her surprising linguistic proficiency as her rediscovered ability to access closed-off parts of her life and re-finding a voice with which to articulate them. This episode appears to play a pivotal role in her story as it provides the element of continuity that allows her to create a coherent sense of a German self. Szilvia: struggles with the family legacy In contrast to Helga, Szilvia from Sopron (Hungary) constructs a very different story-world (De Fina et al. 2006). She is a forty-five-year-old teacher of German and thus has been able to convert the cultural capital of her family ‘legacy’, the knowledge of German, into economic capital. In extract 5/9, she even portrays her profession as a birthright that was handed down to her through her bloodline.

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Extract 5/9 Szilvia: Linguistic legacies 1 sie war WIENerin die oma/ und der großvater war eben ein soproner handwerker/ 2 und so haben sie hier ((räuspert sich)) hier gelebt/ und auch meine mutter entstammt 3 einer ruster familie/ rust ist am neusiedler see ((räuspert sich)) und jetzt 4 gehört rust zu österreich/ und und eh in diesen familien ist es absolut egal ob 5 deutsch oder ungarisch gesprochen wird/ soGAR die großmutter hat kein einziges 6 ungarisches wort gesprochen sondern nur deutsch/ und und so haben wir deut7 deutsch gelernt/ und wenn wir jungen wären ich hab auch eine SCHWESter dann 8 wären wir wahrscheinlich im handwerk tätig wie alle in der familie/ und und dass 9 wir eben das nicht weitergeführt haben dafür haben wir aber die SPRAche und so10 ich sag immer das diplom in die wiege gelegt bekommen/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

She was from Vienna, my grandma, and grandfather was a craftsman from Sopron. And so they lived here, and my mother came from a family in Rust. Rust is on the Neusiedler See, and Rust belongs to Austria now, and in these families it makes no difference at all whether you speak German or Hungarian. Even my grandmother didn’t speak a single word of Hungarian, only German. And that’s how we learnt German. And if we were boys, I also have a sister, we would be craftsmen like everyone else in the family. And because we didn’t carry that on, instead we have the language and so I always say we ‘inherited our diploma’ [were given our diploma at birth].

Her knowledge of German, handed down mainly from her monolingual grandmother from Vienna, is not only a birthright, but it is also her ‘craft’. It has become the basis of her profession and it is a form of compensation, because due to their gender she and her sister were not able to carry on the family tradition of (manual) craftsmanship. This elaboration makes her professional choice look very straightforward, but the reference to gender also makes it appear almost like a duty, or a mission, where she did not actually have a choice. However, beneath the surface of the seemingly natural language choice there is also a realisation that she did not have the natural bilingualism of previous generations, which became apparent when she faced the choice of how to bring up her own children. Extract 5/10 Szilvia: Bilingual dilemmas 1 und jetzt wo ich SELber eine familie HAbe jetzt hat mein MANN darauf eh 2 bestanden also dass dass ich mit den kindern zuhause deutsch sprechen soll/ aber bei 3 mir war das nicht mehr so naTÜRlich weil eh weil doch die zwei sprachen 4 vorHANden sind aber ungarisch domiNIERT/ und dann haben es die kinder 5 eigentlich meinem MANN zu verdanken dass sie deutsch können weil dann hab ich 6 beim DRITten kind hab ich gesagt gut dann muss ich das überWINden und bei der 7 ersten windel anfangen/ 1 And now that I have my own family, now my husband insisted that I speak German to 2 the children at home. But it wasn’t so natural for me any more, because both

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3 4 5 6

languages [German and Hungarian] are there but Hungarian is dominant. And then the children owe it to my husband that they can speak German because when I had my third child I said ‘well, I’ll just have to get over this and start [speaking German] with the first nappy’.

Entering this new life phase, Szilvia was confronted with the dilemma of whether or not to pass on her linguistic ‘inheritance’. Her own first encounter with German had been in the private, domestic domain but her use of German had subsequently been confined to the public, occupational domain of the classroom. Her monolingual Hungarian-speaking husband clearly identified the knowledge of German as an asset, one that only she could offer their children, but her recounting of this phase of her life is in terms of an emotional struggle that she only overcame with the birth of their third child. However, while she first speaks in the role of ‘animator’ (see section 5.2 above), articulating family language policy designed by her husband, she then re-asserts her own agency as both ‘author’ and ‘principal’. In lines 1–2, she uses reported speech to represent her husband’s action, but through her self-quotation in direct speech (lines 5–6) she intensifies the affective force of her own decision and retrospectively constructs a ‘moral stance’ (RelañoPastor and De Fina 2005: 46) as a ‘good mother’. Extract 5/10 introduces language loss as a theme, but the actual loss, the loss of the traditional dialect, is only made explicit in extract 5/11, where Szilvia reflects on what makes a language ‘genuine’. Extract 5/11 Szilvia: Genuine family language 1 in der familie dort das weiß das hör ich von meinem sohn dort wird nur 2 deutsch gesprochen/ also das ist eine echt also das ist das will ich nicht sagen also 3 ECHT aber bei UNS hat ECHT wahrscheinlich aufgehört mit mit meinen ELTern 4 also mit dieser generation/ o- obwohl ich auch sagen muss so lange war das war die 5 sprache in der familie lebendig solange die großmutter gelebt hat/ solange die oma 6 gelebt hat/ und eh ja und danach hat dann ungarisch dominiert nur wir waren dann 7 schon irgendwie mit deutsch als auf der es war schon die BAHN die/ 8 und ich hab zum beispiel den dialekt auch nicht gelernt/. . . da hat mich der herr 9 professor und der hat mich immer so gegeißelt und hat gesagt ja wenn die den 10 dialekt vom vater gelernt hätte/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

In that family, I know that from my son, they only speak German. That’s a genuine, well, that’s, I wouldn’t say, well, genuine, but in our case ‘genuine’ stopped with my parents, with their generation. Although I must say, until then the language was still alive in the family, as long as grandmother was alive, as long as grandma was alive. After that, Hungarian became dominant, only we were then somehow with German – that was the way . . . And for example I didn’t learn the dialect. . . . The ‘Herr Professor’, he always chastised me, he said ‘well, if she’d only learned the dialect from her father’.

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Prompted by the comparison with the family of a friend of her son, where all the members of the family speak only German at home, she reflects on when German ceased to be the ‘genuine’ language in her own family, and it emerges that it was only kept ‘alive’ by her Viennese grandmother, and only during her parents’ generation was it still used naturally. And she only then also concedes that she herself did not actively learn the local dialect – the distinction between dialect and standard German had not been made before this point in her narrative – which she seemingly came to identify as a deficit only when she was faced with the criticism of her university professor, whose authoritative voice she cites in lines 7–8. His criticism draws further attention to the loss of the ‘natural’ language that she became aware of when she had her children, and it adds another dimension to it by highlighting the loss of the local tradition through the dialect, which had been concealed until then – until this moment in the interview, but perhaps also until that moment in her life – by the seemingly natural presence of ‘German’. Her decision to take responsibility for actively passing on to the next generation the legacy that had been bestowed on her at birth therefore emerges in the course of her story as a restoration of cultural continuity but in an attenuated form. Katharina: when the language is not enough Katharina, a forty-five-year-old former teacher of German from Pécs, also presents a troubled relationship with the German language, but in a different way. Even though German has always played an important part in her life – although she is not now working as a teacher, she has always used her German language skills professionally – she has always struggled with it and does not want to be reduced to her Germanness. Extract 5/12 Katharina: Finding your own way 1 aber ich muss sagen dass eh eh die deutsche sprache und die deutsche kultur 2 nicht eh ganz also eh WIE SOLL ICH DAS SAGEN? ((lacht)) also ich ich finde ich 3 habe sehr viel müh viel mühe eh damit gehabt aber ich eh kann mich damit nicht eh 4 eh eh ganz identifizieren und deshalb habe ich andere wege gesucht/. . . man hat eh 5 eigene gedanken man eh eh wie man im leben weiter (schritt hält) sucht immer 6 was wofür ich da bin und was eh für ziele ich eh haben muss und was ich hier 7 SCHAFfen muss in diesem leben/ und eh und ich bin zwar eh so in eine deutsche 8 familie geboren aber eh ich eh ich bin überzeugt dass ich nicht da mein LEBen 9 finden muss aber also ich kann das schwer erklären/ also nicht die sprache und 10 und nicht die eltern sondern man findet andere WERte und man geht man 11 danach/ 1 I have to say that, well, the German language and the German culture is not so, how 2 shall I put it? Well, I find I struggled with it a lot but I really can’t identify

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with it and therefore I have looked for other ways . . . You have your own ideas, about how you keep going in life, you always look for – what I’m here for and what kind of aims I must have, and what I have to achieve in this life, and, well, I was born into a German family, it’s true, but I’m convinced that I don’t have to find my life there, I can’t, it’s hard to explain. I mean not the language and not the parents, but you find other values and you live according to them.

In extract 5/12, Katharina recounts how she struggles to define her own subjectivity, what her values and goals in life are, and how she has sought to make her own way. As in the previous extracts, narrative strategies are used here to weave together the warp of her personal story with the weft of a wider social narrative (Lefkowitz 2004: 23): shifts in tense (from past to present) and subject pronouns (from first person to third person) are part of a strategy of ‘referential defocusing’ (Barth 2004), through which the narrator constructs a stance at once individual and conventional. Her personal struggle in relation to ‘the German language and culture’ stems from the fact that she ‘was born into a German family’ but ‘can’t identify’ with this linguistic and cultural heritage and therefore ‘[has] looked for’ other sources of identificational potential (emphases added). Embedded within the narrator-I’s individual journey through time, however, is a general assertion of moral autonomy articulated through the shift to the present tense and to the generic personal pronoun ‘you’ and an equivalent non-specific ‘I’ (lines 3–5, 7–8): ‘you have your own ideas’, ‘what I’m here for and what kind of aims I must have’, ‘you find other values and you live according to them’. Her story is very much her story but these grammatical manoeuvres rationalise her choices and guard against the development of an entirely idiosyncratic self. Like Szilvia, Katharina is acutely conscious of her family heritage but although she has maintained the family language despite lack of external support this is not celebrated as an achievement in her story; rather, the inherited ‘language and culture’ are represented as an encumbrance and an obstacle to her personal development. A partial explanation for this may be found in her profound cultural pessimism about the sustainability of a ‘community ethos’, since cultural traditions, in her view, are no longer an organic part of family life but merely learned practices, a diminution and dilution of the heritage which she attributes to external forces that render individual or local-level agency impossible (see extract 5/13). Extract 5/13 Katharina: The loss of community 1 also die familien haben sehr große schwierigkeiten und diese isolierten eh also die die 2 geMEINschaft was früher war das eh das GIBT es nicht mehr/ also das sind eh das 3 LEBT nicht mehr/ also man kann (übergeben) und es gibt tanzgruppen und es gibt 4 singchöre aber eh das ist nicht mehr in der familie so DRIN sondern das erLERNen 5 nur die kinder und es ist nicht mehr dasselbe/ und es ist so mit eh wie mit diesem eh 6 wie heißt das em globalisation/ und eh also das macht alles zugrunde.

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Well, the families have great difficulties and these isolated, well, the community that used to be there, that isn’t there any more. I mean, it doesn’t exist any more. I mean, you can (hand over) and there are dance groups and there are choirs but it’s not really a part of the family, the children just learn it and that’s not the same. It’s like with that, what’s it called, globalisation, and it’s destroying everything.

János: constructing the model Ungarndeutsch family Katharina’s younger brother, János (see also Chapter 6), shares many of her experiences but evaluates them in an entirely different way and builds a very different story-world. In contrast to his sister, János seems very clear about what he wants to achieve in life and he is very categorical in his descriptions of his life choices. Extract 5/14 János: Using the mother tongue 1 also also bei mir eh war es eigentlich so also meine muttersprache ist deutsch 2 denn meine mutter hat mit mir bis zum kindergartenalter nur deutsch gesprochen/ 3 also ich habe erst im kindergarten ungarisch gelernt/ aber weil im also ich bin im 4 moment 42 jahre alt das heißt im in den 60er jahren (oder) da war’s da gab’s 5 hier noch kein guter deutschunterricht/ da war ja noch kommunismus und das 6 heißt in den in der SCHULzeit hab ich eh nur ungarisch gelernt/ also ich hatte 7 deutschstunden besucht aber die waren nicht so prägend/ also eh ich konnte 8 praktisch nicht eh so viel deutsch sprechen/ ich sprach DAMALS eine eine 9 ÖRTliche mundart/ eine eine SCHWÄbische eine schwäbische mundart/. . . eh 10 dann kam langsam die WENDE und dann hat man hier DRINGend deutschlehrer 11 gebraucht/ und bei MIR ist das dann gut zusammengefallen denn eh ich konnte mich 12 in DREI MONaten soVIEL vorbereiten dass ich auf die uni aufgenommen WURDe/ 13 und da hab ich deutschlehrerausbildung gemacht/ also eh in drei jahren 14 wurde ich dann deutschlehrer/ also hatte ich ein GROßes glück dass ich deutsch 15 konnte/ und eh schon VORher war das immer ein WUNSCH von mir so WIRKlich 16 gut deutsch zu sprechen wenn ich schon deutscher abstammung bin/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Well in my case, my mother tongue is German because until I went to kindergarten my mother only spoke German with me. So I only learnt Hungarian in kindergarten. But because during- I’m 42 years old, that means in the 1960s, well there were no good German classes here. This was still during communism and so in school I only learnt Hungarian. Well, I had some German lessons but they didn’t have much effect. So I couldn’t really speak a lot of German, I spoke a local dialect in those days, a schwäbisch dialect. [. . .] And then the Wende came along and they urgently needed German teachers. And that worked out well for me because within three months I was able to prepare so well that I was offered a place at university where I studied to be a German teacher. [. . .] It was very lucky for me that I spoke German, and even before that it had always been my wish to be able to speak German really well, as I’m of German origin, after all.

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In this first episode in his linguistic autobiography, János structures his account in relation to changes in external social and political conditions, which tie his personal story both to the wider ‘national’ story of post-war Hungary as well as to other personal narratives. The transformative impact on his life of the political turning point (the Wende) in 1989–90 is represented here as an opportunity to convert what had been a disadvantage during the communist period into a privilege: his ‘good fortune’ in being ‘of German origin’ and a German speaker enables him to move from a passive to an active stance. His self-categorisation as German at the end of this episode echoes the declaration of having German as a mother tongue at the beginning: these two assertions frame the account and construct a sense of the restoration of stability and normality. The shift to a more active narrative stance is taken further in extract 5/15, where he relates linguistic choices made in connection with his family life. Extract 5/15 János: Family language 1 und ((lacht)) mir war’s auch SEHR WICHtig wenn es auch so komisch klingen mag 2 dass eh meine FRAU deutsch spricht/ also ich habe eine frau die genauso gut deutsch 3 spricht wie ich/. . . und eh jetzt habe ich deswegen das glück dass meine GANZE 4 FAMILIE das heißt meine schwiegereltern AUCH ALLE deutsch sprechen/ und SO 5 sind wir eine AUSNAHme und zwar weil wir auch mit unseren EIGenen KINdern ich 6 habe drei kinder wir sprechen auch mit unseren eigenen kindern nur deutsch/ 7 das heißt WIEder eine örtliche mundart also kein zuhause spricht man nicht die 8 hochsprache/ 1 2 3 4 5 6

And it was very important for me, however funny it may sound, that my wife should speak German. So I have a wife who speaks German just as well as me. And so now I have the good fortune that my whole family, I mean my parents-in-law, all speak German, and so we’re an exception, because we also speak only German with our own children, I have three children, that’s to say a local dialect again, at home we don’t speak standard German.

Again, this is a very categorical account of his choices, which not only concern his own linguistic practices but also extend to the choice of his wife from a German background so that the language could be handed down to the next generation. Up to this point, the story is thus carefully assembled from selected moments in his past life and follows his progression from assimilated Hungarian speaker to exemplary dialect-speaking Ungarndeutscher and so to the realisation of his personal aspiration. It is a model of coherence and consistency. However, as his narrative develops inconsistencies begin to emerge. At first, in extract 5/15, János emphatically insists that the whole family, including his parents-in-law, speak German. When he widens his narrative scope and begins to talk more about the past, a more differentiated and contradictory picture develops. In extract 5/16 he begins with the common topos of linguistic

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censorship in post-war Hungary, to which he attributes his parents’ present higher level of proficiency in Hungarian than in German. He then contrasts this with his parents’ and grandparents’ determination to use German during his childhood, before conceding that Hungarian is now the ‘more natural’ choice. Extract 5/16 János: Language across the generations 1 aber die großeltern die haben nach dem krieg schlechte erfahrungen gehabt mit der 2 deutschen sprache und da war ja die deutsche sprache verBOten und alles und so kam 3 es dass meine eltern doch besser ungarisch sprechen können als deutsch/. . . meine zwei 4 schwestern . . . also meine beiden schwestern die sind auch in das x-gymnasium auf 5 den DEUTschen klassenzug gegangen/ also sie haben auch ein DEUTSches 6 gymnasium beSUCHT und abitur gemacht/ also für die eltern war’s wahrscheinlich 7 auch wichtig dass wir die deutsche sprache erlernen/. . . vor zwanzig jahren wo ich kind 8 war na ja vor dreißig jahren sagen wir mal da da haben MEINE eltern mit meinen 9 GROßeltern SEHR sehr VIEL deutsch gesprochen/ also ich weiß nicht ob sie 10 überhaupt ungarisch SEHR SEHR wenig haben sie ungarisch gesprochen/ SEHR 11 sehr viel deutsch/ und MIR haben MEINE eltern auch sehr viel deutsch gesprochen 12 aber vielleicht noch mehr ungarisch/ ich weiß es nicht mehr so ganz genau/ aber 13 deutsch war GENAUSO natürlich wie ungarisch/ und eh heute ist es natürlicher 14 ungarisch zu sprechen als deutsch/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

But after the war my grandparents had such bad experiences with the German language, the German language was banned then and so on, and that’s why my parents can speak Hungarian better than German. My two sisters, both my sisters also went to the X Gymnasium in the German stream, they went to a German Gymnasium and did Abitur, so for my parents it was probably important that we should learn German. [. . .] Twenty years ago, when I was a child, well let’s say thirty years ago, my parents really spoke a lot of German with my grandparents. Well, I don’t know whether they spoke any Hungarian, they spoke very very little Hungarian, a lot of German. And my parents spoke a lot of German to me too, but perhaps even more Hungarian. I’m really not sure any more. But German was just as natural as Hungarian. And today it’s more natural to speak Hungarian than German.

As the narrative progresses further from his childhood experiences, the earlier construction of his family as ‘German-speaking’ is qualified by the acknowledgement that German is now not the dominant language in the family, and that it is indeed used almost only with the children. Extract 5/17 János: The family language 1 weil eh die assimilation schon SO fortgeschritten ist dass eh dass man in der faMIlie 2 UNTereinander zum beispiel mit meinen SCHWIEgereltern sprech ich eh überwiegend 3 ungarisch und auch mit meiner frau sprech ich überwiegend ungarisch/ nur manchmal 4 deutsch/ aber mit den KINdern immer deutsch/ es ist ne interessante eh 5 SPRACHsituation innerhalb der familie aber das hat sich bei uns so entwickelt das ist

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6 SO naTÜRlich/ aber waRUM das so ist darüber spricht man eigentlich wenig/ das hat 7 sich so entWICKElt das ist so für uns ganz natürlich/ es ist so in ordnung und es ist die 8 FaMILiensprache fertig/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Assimilation is so far advanced that in the family amongst ourselves, for example with my parents-in-law, I speak overwhelmingly Hungarian and with my wife too I speak overwhelmingly Hungarian, just sometimes German, but with the children always German. It’s an interesting linguistic situation in the family but it just developed like this and so it’s natural. We don’t really talk much about why it’s like that, it just developed that way, it’s quite natural for us, and that’s fine, and it’s the family language and that’s that.

The ambiguity of his representation of his wife and parents-in-law as German speakers (extract 5/15, lines 3–5) becomes apparent in extract 5/17 (lines 1–3): they can speak German but normally speak Hungarian. This complex constellation of changing language use across time and across generations disrupts the image of the exceptional German-speaking family, which can only be restored by effecting some kind of repair. János appears to attempt this by stressing the ‘natural’ development of the ‘interesting linguistic situation’ within the family but concludes with a further ambiguous assertion that ‘it’s the family language and that’s that’ (lines 4–7). This may be a concession that despite concerted efforts German has not been sustained in the family or it may be that by ‘family language’ he means the evolved bilingual practice of routinely using Hungarian amongst adults and German with the children. Whichever interpretation is closer to János’s intention, his abrupt closure of this episode, articulated through the discourse marker ‘and that’s that’ and falling intonation, indicates that this ‘sideline’ (cf. Treichel 2004: 56 ff) is a distraction from the main plot line, to which he subsequently returns (and we return to János’s story in Chapter 6). Andreas: returning home to German Although it displays many similarities with János’s account, such as the positive identification with their respective ethnic Germanness and the awareness of the impact of political systems on their lives, Andreas, a thirty-seven-year-old man from Pécs, is much more reflective, especially as far as the different life stages that he constructs in his narrative are concerned, where the German language – or the absence of it – is accorded an important role. He has spent a number of years abroad (in the GDR and Austria), and images and metaphors of travel and displacement feature heavily in his life story. Extract 5/18 Andreas: Mother tongue and public language 1 bis zu meinem vierten lebensjahr da kam ich in den kindergarten war ich einsprachig/ 2 ich hab die mundart gesprochen/ ich konnte es mir auch kaum vorstellen oder oder in

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meinem eh WELTbild gab’s das nicht dass jemand deutsch nicht spricht/ ((lacht)) also das milIEU das ich noch bis also in dieser frühen kindheit erlebt habe eh das war deutsch/. . . na und dann im KINdergarten ((lacht)) ICH KANN MICH an diese eh konfrontaTION so LEICHT erinnern/ also es war eh erSTAUNlich für mich es war auch so eine eh GRENZsituation die ich erlebt habe weil dort hat man ungarisch gesprochen also die eh kindergärtnerinnen und die angestellten und und auch die MEHRzahl der kinder/ aber in dem alter passt man sich halt schnell an/ und man PASST sich nicht nur an sondern man will auch zur mehrheit geHÖren glaube ich/

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Until I was four when I went to kindergarten I was monolingual. I spoke the dialect. I also couldn’t imagine, or it didn’t exist in my image of the world that somebody couldn’t speak German. So the environment in my early childhood was German. [. . .] Well, and then in kindergarten I can easily remember the confrontation. I mean, for me it was amazing and it was also a borderline situation that I experienced there because they spoke Hungarian there, the teachers and the staff and most of the children. But at that age you just adapt quickly. And you don’t just adapt, you want to belong to the majority, I think.

Like János, Andreas perceives the transition from home to kindergarten as a transition from a monolingual, German-speaking, private space to a monolingual, Hungarian-speaking, public one. But whereas János represented the transition in a rather unemotional way, Andreas reconstructs this experience as an existential crisis, which he describes as a ‘confrontation’ (line 4) and also a ‘borderline’ experience that seems to have turned his image of the world upside-down. He concludes this short narrative episode by shifting from the narrator-I perspective to the generic ‘you’ (line 7), from author to principal, which provides a rationalisation for his compliant linguistic behaviour, a point that will become important later in his narrative. In extract 5/19, Andreas goes on to talk about how he ‘lost’ the German language, and how he ‘found’ it again. But, again unlike János, he talks about the process of becoming aware of the loss, and what he did to revive German in his family. Extract 5/19 Andreas: Family language, past and present 1 und dann eh hat das dazu geführt dass die deutsche sprache die mundart begann 2 in den hintergrund zu gelangen/ dann ist meine GROßmutter gestorben 3 eh die so ein starker träger der identität und der sprache geWEsen ist in der 4 familie/ und eh dann war ich so 15 16 jahre alt als es mir beWUSST wurde eh 5 dass die sprache bei uns in der familie ausgestorben ist quasi/ aber dann begann ich 6 es eh zu verbalisieren und eh anzustreben dass die mundart gebraucht wird in der 7 familie/ verLERNT haben wir sie ja nicht nur nicht gebraucht/ und seitdem ist es so 8 ein sprachengeMISCH/ also deutsch also jetzt die litera- HOCHdeutsch mundart 9 und ungarisch/ also die mundart ist ja so eine konSERve die in der entwicklung

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10 11 12 13 14

stehengeblieben ist irgendwann und natürlich vieles nicht AUSgedrückt werden kann so richtig/ und dann muss man halt eh begriffe aus dem HEUTigen deutsch oder aus dem ungarischen holen und ((lacht; beide lachen)) so exisTIERT aber die sprache bei uns/ und ich hab auch eine ungarndeutsche als frau/ so klappt’s auch in meiner heutigen familie mit der deutschen sprache/

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

And then as a result of that the German language, the dialect, began to move into the background. Then my grandmother died, she had maintained the identity and the language so strongly in the family. And then, I was 15, 16 years old when I became aware of the fact that the language had sort of died out in our family. But then I began to verbalise it and to try to get the dialect used in the family. I mean, we didn’t forget it, we just didn’t use it. And since then it’s been a kind of mixture of languages, I mean German, well, now standard German, dialect and Hungarian. I mean, the dialect is sort of preserved in aspic, its development stopped at some point and of course lots of things can’t be expressed properly, and so you have to take concepts from today’s German or from Hungarian. But that’s how language is here, and I have an ungarndeutsch wife, and so it works in my present family with the German language.

In this extract, Andreas moves from a local perspective relating to his family in the past through a generalised discussion of language development and use to a particular focus on his family in the present. He presents his adolescence as the time when he realised that he and his family had lost German as a family language and when he actively tried to reverse the situation. The ‘recovery’, however, did not happen through a full-scale reversal of linguistic practices from Hungarian to German, but (much like in János’s family) by adopting a mix of language varieties, of the ungarndeutsch dialect, standard German and Hungarian. Within this constellation he explicitly signifies both the dialect and standard German as indexical of time: in his view, the dialect is a relic, a ‘preserve’ from the past, which is linked to tradition but cannot express modern life, whereas standard German is called ‘today’s German’, which has a strong place also in his present family.7 This correspondence between linguistic form and life stage is marked lexically by his choice of the same epithet (heutig / today’s, present) in relation to both (lines 9–11: ‘das heutige Deutsch’ and ‘meine heutige Familie’; ‘today’s German’ and ‘my present family’). Having established the central plotline of his story, Andreas then goes on to elaborate on the details of his journey, articulating his increasing sense of alienation from the majority culture and how he sets himself apart from the monolingual Hungarian mainstream. Extract 5/20 Andreas: Journey back to the mother tongue 1 ja wie gesagt in meiner frühen kindheit war das normal dann eh haben die MEISten 2 meines jahrgangs im dorf nicht zurückgefunden zur deutschen sprache oder zum 3 dialekt/ bis heute wenn ich sie spreche sagen sie naja so reste klingen noch im ohr 4 aber sie sprechen die sprache nicht mehr und eh bemängeln sie meistens auch nicht/

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Well, as I said, in my early childhood it was normal [to be bilingual]. Later most of the people of my age in the village didn’t find their way back to the German language or to the dialect. Even today when I speak to them they say ‘well, tiny bits are still in my head’ but they don’t speak the language any more and for the most part they don’t find anything wrong with that either.

In extract 5/20, he recapitulates his contemporaries’ migration from the bilingual space of their childhood to a monolingual Hungarian one, a journey few of them have since made in reverse. According to him they have accepted this situation, but he sets himself apart by placing himself outside the majority, as separate from ‘most of the people of my age’. However, it is only in the next excerpt that he speaks about his sense of alienation proper, and the extent of it. Extract 5/21 Andreas: Living on the margins 1 da MUSS man dazugehören/ also wenn man wenn man eh BISSchen am rande ist 2 wird man rausgest- ausgestoßen/ man muss sehr am rand sein damit man eine eigene 3 einen eigenen standpunkt aufbauen kann wo dann die umGEbung das akzepTIERT/ 4 naja ich sag das vorsichtig ich weiß nicht ob die umgebung das akzeptiert aber a-aber 5 wo es einen nicht mehr intereSSIERT ob’s die umgebung akzeptiert/ DAS ((lacht)) 6 DAS hat bei mir AUCH gedauert/ sicherlich haben mich dara- darin auch die jahre im 7 ausland gestärkt/ wie als ich zurückgekommen bin war das ein völlig fremdes 8 land für mich/ DAS ist es bis HEUte/ also ich ich eh ich könnte nicht ande- ich 9 könnte SEHR SCHWER anderswo leben/ ich könnte anderswo leben aber SEHR 10 SCHWER/ aber HIER hier bin weitgehend nicht zuhause/ also es ist ein FREMdes 11 land so wie ich dem land auch fremd bin/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

You have to fit in. If you’re a bit on the margins you get rejected. You have to be right on the margins in order to develop your own position, so that your surroundings accept it. Well OK, I’ll put that more cautiously, I don’t know whether your surroundings accept it, but where you don’t care any more whether your surroundings accept it. That took a long time for me too. The years abroad certainly strengthened me in that respect. When I came back it was a completely foreign country to me. It still is now. I couldn’t live anywhere else, I’d find it very hard to live anywhere else, but I’m pretty much not at home here. I mean, it’s a foreign country to me just as I’m foreign to the country.

Here, like Katharina, Andreas uses the double voice of a rhetorical impersonal ‘you’ (‘you have to fit in’) and a personal ‘I’ (‘I couldn’t live anywhere else’), in this case apparently to rationalise his ambivalence towards his home. Adopting the defiant stance of an active bilingual risks marginalisation but it is only on the margins of the mainstream society that he is able to find a place that accommodates his conflicting feelings. Both his alienation and his defiance, as later passages in his interview confirm, seem to have been

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strengthened by the dislocation and subsequent relocation occasioned by his periods spent abroad, from which he brought back a reinforced attachment to the German language. Walter: defying authority Walter, a retired man in his seventies from Liberec (Czech Republic), shares Andreas’s resistance to hegemonic cultural norms but has a very different perspective in that he is a member of the older generation, who has first-hand experiences of the Second World War and the subsequent expulsion and marginalisation of Germans in the former Czechoslovakia (see also section 5.2 above, and Chapter 6). These experiences form the core of the first extract from his narrative. Extract 5/22 Walter: The suppression of the German language after the Second World War 1 die erFAHRUNG mit der deutschen sprache nach dem krieg war ja die dass man sie 2 nicht sprechen durfte/ also insofern ist die erfahrung natürlich für ALLE 3 deutschen in der damaligen zeit katastrophal gewesen sofern sie nicht die 4 staatssprache beherrschten/ und das das war das problem MEINER mutter und das war 5 das problem ihrer ((zeigt auf seine tochter)) großmutter mütterlicherseits/ und da 6 gab’s natürlich furchtbare szenen und und da hat man sich natürlich ärgern 7 müssen und man wurde auch pro- provoziert und und ich hab mir ja auch NIE was 8 gefallen lassen/ das war vielleicht mein NACHteil/ ich hatte insofern also mit mit mit 9 der SPRAche MEIner MEIner mutter oder meiner schwiegermutter gegenüber dann 10 immer schwierigkeiten weil ich weil ich dann (sein) ganz einfach mich 11 beRUFEn fühlte mich für diese alten herrschaften einzutreten ja?/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The experience with the German language after the war was that you weren’t allowed to speak it. So to that extent of course the experience for all Germans at that time was catastrophic, if they couldn’t speak the state language. And that was my mother’s problem, and that was her [his daughter’s] maternal grandmother’s problem, and of course there were terrible scenes, and of course you had to feel angry, and you were provoked, and I never put up with any of that. That was probably my disadvantage. So I always had difficulties over language with my mother and my mother-in-law, because I just felt I had an obligation to stand up for the old folks, you know?

Walter, a striking example of what Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992: 6) call a ‘self-historicising subject’, paints here a picture of discrimination and reprisals, and the general condition of the German community at that time has become very much engrained in his own experiences from which he constructs his sense of self. Although his narrative as a whole moves from a point in the past immediately after the war and concludes with reference to the present, the organisation of individual narrative episodes is thematically rather than temporally driven. In extract 5/22, the development

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is a movement not through historical time but from the construction of a ‘problem’ to its resolution through the narrator speaking not only as author of the story but also as principal and figure in the story-world. The episode is populated by a variety of figures – generic ‘you’, ‘all Germans’, ‘the old folks’, ‘my mother’, ‘my mother-in-law’ – who are subject to ‘catastrophic experiences’ and ‘terrible scenes’, while the narrator-protagonist alone is active in confronting the situation, a contrast emphasised by the shift from passive to active grammatical constructions (‘you weren’t allowed’, man durfte nicht; ‘you were provoked’, man wurde provoziert versus ‘I never put up with any of that’, ich hab mir ja auch nie was gefallen lassen). Extract 5/23 then gives a more specific characterisation of the defiant individual confronting the monolithic state apparatus. Extract 5/23 Walter: Defying the Party 1 ich hab auch die staatsprüfung in deutsch nach(getan) dann noch gemacht . . . und eh 2 ich hab’s anundfürsich nie gebraucht aber eh eh ich hab’s also (xxx) bloß aus trotz 3 gemacht weil ehhh bei diesen KADERüberprüfungen da musste man ja eh eh eh 4 aufSCHREIben welche FREMDsprachen sprichst du/ bei mir war ja immer 5 problematisch was ist für mich FREMDsprache/ für mich ist fremdsprache 6 tschechisch/ das war aber für die KEINE fremdsprache/ für die war das richtige 7 STAATSsprache sozusagen/ also hab ich dann immer fremdsprache deutsch 8 geschrieben/ da hat der wir hatten so einen trottel als als (xxx) der sagte naja aber 9 staatsprüfung hat er keine/ ((lacht laut)) das hat mich dann ich dachte ich dachte so 10 ein arschloch/ er kann kaum tschechisch selber ja? und da hab ich dann gesagt so 11 jetzt mach ich sie/ und da habe ich sie gemacht/ war für mich kein problem 12 natürlich/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

I did the state exam in German later . . . and I never really used it, but I just did it out of defiance, because in those official checks the Party ran you had to write down which foreign languages you spoke. For me it was always problematic: what is a foreign language for me? For me Czech is a foreign language, but for them it wasn’t, for them it was the proper language of the state, so to speak. So then I always wrote ‘foreign language: German’. We had this idiot, he said ‘but he hasn’t got a state exam’, so I thought what an arsehole, he can hardly speak Czech himself, so then I said, OK I’ll do it then, and so I did it, it was no problem for me of course.

The reference point of the story – the act of taking a state exam in German – opens and closes the episode, but the narrative function of the story – constructing the narrator as ‘bold resister’ and problematising conceptions of language within a particular ideological regime – is developed within this frame. The ‘tellability’ (Labov and Waletzky 1967) of his story depends on there being a reason for his selecting this aspect of his formal education as salient in his life story; the initial discounting of an instrumental motivation for taking the exam opens up a narrative gap (why tell us about the

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qualification if he didn’t use it?) and his declaration of a political motivation moves the story towards its justification. The ‘official checks’ (line 2) are not clearly specified but appear to have served as a form of control in recording and monitoring the political ‘reliability’ of individual citizens. This entailed acceptance of official categories, such as what constitutes a ‘foreign language’, and could or would not accommodate people whose biography led to their having a first language other than the ‘proper language of the state’, or indeed more than one ‘mother tongue’.8 Declaring Czech a foreign language was evidently politically unacceptable, and Walter reluctantly acceded to the constraints of the process. However, for the officials, knowledge of a foreign language had to be authenticated by evidence of proficiency as the outcome of a formal learning process: a native speaker of what was categorised as a foreign language appears not to have been compatible with the official conception of Czech citizenship. The function of the story, therefore, is to show how Walter resolved his linguistic quandary. From the habitual gesture of tactical compliance (writing ‘foreign language: German’ on official forms) the narrative progresses to a specific conflictual event reconstructed and foregrounded through the dialogic interaction between narrator-as-figure and the state official. In chronological terms, the temporal specification of the event (taking the exam) is not important; it is significant only as the moment of resolution, the moment at which the narrator-as-figure exerted control by choosing to take a particular action. Both his apparent compliance in declaring German ‘his’ foreign language and the act of defiance in obtaining the required qualification under his own terms – calling the state’s bluff, as it were – are constructed as a challenge to the hegemonic order and enable him, more emphatically than Helga or Andreas, to ‘claim a moral space’ (Relaño-Pastor and De Fina 2005: 55–6). This claim is reinforced by his positioning himself as a speaker of both German and Czech, and the superior degree to which he has mastered them both (see Chapter 6 and Nekvapil 2000). Even though Czech is a ‘foreign’ language to him, he clearly positions himself as an advanced Czech speaker, who is as fluent in it as, or even more so than, the party official, who ‘can hardly speak Czech himself’ (line 7). His fluency in his first language, German, is described indirectly, by virtue of the fact that the state exam was ‘no problem’ for him, ‘of course’. Justification for Walter’s construction of himself as a defender of his community and active resister of the communist state’s linguistic regime emerges towards the end of his interview when he talks of his grandson, who is brought up bilingually Czech-German in the family – by Walter and his daughter Steffi, who is in her mid-forties and is also bilingual Czech-German – as well as through his place in a kindergarten across the border in Germany, which has a great impact on the boy’s fluency in German.

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Extract 5/24 Walter and Steffi: Speaking without an accent Steffi 1 ja und das letzte dann ((räuspert sich)) ich hab natürlich versucht mit den 2 kindern deutsch zu reden . . . und jetzt das fünfte da hab ich’s irgendwie 3 durchgesetzt obwohl es mich viel nerven kostet manchmal/. . . und jetzt haben wir 4 einen platz im in zittau im kindergarten bekommen . . . er hat herVORragende 5 erfolge dort weil er auch wirklich deutsch redet deutsch antwortet/. . . Walter 6 naja aber der der junge ich hab [..] ihr mann der war SEHR interessiert 7 dass der junge eben deutsch lernt/ und hat auch MIR immer ans herz gelegt 8 spreche nur mit ihm deutsch/ das hab ich auch gemacht/ und er hat er hat immer 9 alles verstanden aber hat nie geantwortet/ aber seit er in den kindergarten geht 10 spricht der deutsch/. . . UND was mir natürlich auffällt er SPRICHT ja das deutsch 11 OHNE AKZENT / er spricht ein EINWANDFREIES DEUTSCH/. . . aber was mich 12 natürlich beGEISTert ist dass dass kein tschechischer akzent dabei ist/ Steffi 1 Well, the last one then, of course I tried to speak German with the children, . . . 2 and now with the fifth one I’ve managed it somehow, although I find it very 3 stressful sometimes. And now we’ve got a place at the kindergarten in Zittau. 4 He’s doing outstandingly well there, because he’s really speaking German, answers in 5 German. . . . Walter 6 Well yes, her husband was always very keen that the boy should learn German, 7 and he always really went on at me: ‘Only speak German with him’. And I did that, 8 and he always understood everything but never answered, but since he’s been 9 going to the kindergarten he’s been speaking German. And of course what really 10 strikes me is that he speaks German without an accent, he speaks perfect German. . . . 11 What I’m really delighted about of course is that there’s no Czech accent in there.

It becomes clear that Walter and Steffi perceive the boy’s success in German as a great accomplishment that rewards the efforts that the family has put into his upbringing. The gratification appears to be derived not only from the economic advantage the boy will gain from this asset, but also because the investment of Walter’s resistance against assimilation seems to have paid off. This is possible because the political transformations in central Europe have abolished the borders that would previously have made this sort of education impossible (see also Černá 2009): ironically, the kindergarten (albeit in the neighbouring state Germany) is now the location for developing rather than abandoning German, lending institutional support to the family policy that has regained legitimacy in the broader transnational context of

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the region. Furthermore, by quoting his son-in-law’s plea to ‘only speak German with him [his grandson]’ (line 7), Walter concedes authorship of the policy to another, indirectly validating the objectives of his own longer-term actions. Walter, however, seems to gain an additional gratification from this as he notes that the boy speaks German ‘without an accent’. This statement is reiterated twice, but each time it is qualified by a different, stronger epithet. In line 10, Walter says the boy speaks ‘perfect German’, which is enhanced in line 11 when he says that there is ‘no Czech accent’ in the boy’s speech. This is a significant statement, as it sets the boy apart from his Czech compatriots, who would not have achieved this degree of fluency, but it also resonates with Walter’s own resilience and his self-categorisation as German. His obvious pleasure at this family success story is, then, ultimately a vindication of his choice to frame his experiences not through the concept of loss but of resistance and his achievement in retaining his attachment to his first language.

5.5 Conclusions In this chapter, we asked how individuals give shape to their lives in the way they tell their own life stories and, in particular, how they use their experiences with language as elements in the construction of a sense of self. We argued that while such stories are uniquely personal in their constitution and composition, they are closely linked with each other and with wider narratives of language in social life, especially narratives of social change, and that it is through the combination of interdiscursive relationships and internal narrative management that the stories acquire or generate their meaning. To justify and illustrate this argument, we drew on six life stories that stretch back across the transformations of the early 1990s and in two cases beyond the communist era to the Second World War. We focused on ways in which each of these stories was oriented around the theme of loss and showed how the story-tellers used this theme to build a particular temporal structure to create a space within which to develop a sense of self, ordering past events and reinterpreting their meaning from the perspective of the present. Although the stories share a common theme – the experience of challenges posed to individual and collective linguistic practices under broadly similar social and historical conditions – the conceptualisation of this experience and the way it is used to represent or articulate the relationship between past and present in the narrators’ lives show marked differences. In some cases, the past is recalled in terms of discrete, decisive events, while in others it is reconstructed as a more diffuse process; and while all identify language loss as a motif in their biographies – even Katharina’s elegiac account of the inadequacy of her own intact linguistic inheritance in relation to her personal

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aspirations is relativised by the loss of a sense of community, based on the organic transmission of linguistic and cultural practices – they represent it and compensate for it in different ways. They recognise that linguistic assimilation represents an inevitable and irretrievable loss of the iconic language variety for most members of their respective German communities, but for these individuals, who have all sustained their knowledge and use of German into the present, it is negotiable, contestable and contingent on changing circumstances. This in turn raises questions of agency: there may have been no perceived alternative to accommodation and adaptation at particular historical moments under particular social conditions, but where defiance and resistance appeared to be available options they may in retrospect be constructed as a worthwhile emotional investment. The individuality of these emergent selves is important in our study of social change as it provides evidence of the complexity and the contingent nature of sociolinguistic patterns that remain hidden by broad-brush accounts of changing linguistic repertoires and language shift. However, we have stressed the importance of reading these individual lives in relation to the particular historical conditions in which they are created and have shown how they are dependent for their realisation on different forms of social interaction. While emphasising the individual and the personal, we have always been mindful of the social and the collective. In the next chapter, therefore, we develop our analysis of individual language biographies within a different conceptual framework in order to investigate ways in which people position themselves in relation to others and seek to negotiate social identities in times of change.

Notes 1. There are many good overviews of the study of narrative and identity: see, for example, the introductory chapters in Bamberg et al. 2007; De Fina 2003; De Fina et al. 2006; Thornborrow and Coates 2005; and also Benwell and Stokoe 2006: Chapter 4; Schiffrin 1996. 2. Cf. also extract 6/29 in Chapter 6, in which Anna, whose mother is German and father was Czech, describes how she ‘returned’ to her German identity through making friends with another German woman in the 1990s and began speaking German with her mother again. 3. A version of this section appeared as a chapter in Carl and Stevenson (2009). We are grateful to the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for their permission to reproduce the material here. 4. Cf. also extract 6/34 in Chapter 6, in which Andreas reflects on the loss of traditions of ‘politeness’ in communicative interaction. 5. We shall also return to these questions in Chapter 6. 6. Line references to the transcripts are to the English translations.

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7. Recall here the discussion in Chapter 4 of representative figures’ views on the appropriateness of standard German as an identity carrier for ethnic German minority groups. 8. Recall the discussion of this controversial concept in Chapter 2.

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Language ideologies: negotiating linguistic identities

6.1 Introduction In this chapter, we will again consider ways in which individuals navigate their passage through the changing and sometimes turbulent circumstances of their lives in the accounts they give of their personal experiences with language, but from a different perspective. While in Chapter 5 our principal concern was with the processes by which individuals as narrators construct a coherent image or interpretation of their past in the development and articulation of their life stories, we will focus here on the second function of language biographies discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 27) as a ‘privileged locus for the negotiation of identities’ (De Fina et al. 2006: 16). This will entail an analysis of the narratives not in terms of their organisation of personal experiences with language but as discourses on language and identity, an analysis through which we hope to tease out the relationships between language ideologies and individual practices that may help us to explain how and why people respond in different ways to changing linguistic regimes of representation (again, see Chapter 2: p. 21). More specifically, we shall try to explore some of the ways in which changes in social and political conditions are refracted through personal experience and emerge in individual narratives as expressions of personal (re)alignment with particular social groups in relation to particular times and places. Once again, therefore, we must emphasise the contingency of these narrated behaviours on the historical conditions of their enactment and of their telling: we have no means of knowing whether or not things happened in the way they were related to us in the interviews, but we can try to derive from these accounts some understanding of the relevance and salience that particular forms and uses of language seem to have, or to have had, for the narrators, and of how they prioritise them now in their (re)construction of the past. We shall begin, in 6.2, by discussing the processes through which people give shape or structure to the social world they inhabit in the form of categories relating to ethnicity and language, and the processes of contextualisation through which relationships between different language forms and between their users are interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of changing social

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conditions. In 6.3 we shall go on to isolate and analyse the particular social categories that emerge as central to the processes of representation and identification in which our consultants engage in formulating their biographical narratives. In the following two sections, we shall first (in 6.4) show how people use these categories to position themselves and others in different ways under different social conditions, and then (in 6.5) explore some of the contrasting ways in which people represent the tensions between external pressures and individual agency in terms of their linguistic behaviours. Finally, in 6.6, we shall briefly summarise how these discursive processes and practices demonstrate the workings of language ideologies in relation to the negotiation of linguistic identities.

6.2 Categorisation and contextualisation Although our narrators speak from a personal perspective, they typically orientate themselves towards one or more social or linguistic categories – Deutsche(r) or Schwob, for example, Tschechisch or Muttersprache – and this process of self- and other-categorisation may be either explicit or implicit. For example, while Georg declares openly ‘I have always declared myself to be German’ (ich habe mich immer als deutscher zu erkennen gegeben), Elisabeth characterises herself first as ‘a Donauschwäbin’ and then qualifies this by reference to another category – ‘proper German people’ (richtige deutsche leute) – from which she by implication excludes herself. Extract 6/1 Elisabeth 1 ich bin einfach eine donauschwäbin/. . . wenn ich gefragt werde von von richtigen 2 deutschen leuten woher ich so gut deutsch kann sage ich von haus aus nicht von diese 3 schule oder ich habs erlernt sondern von haus aus einfach/ 1 I am simply a Donauschwäbin. When I’m asked by proper Germans where I learnt to 2 speak such good German, I say it comes naturally, not from school or that I have learnt 3 it, it’s just natural.

Categories may therefore often be taken as givens but membership must be declared and justified. Categorisation, of self or others, is also frequently a process of negotiation within a conversation or interview. For example, in response to an earlier remark Andreas was offered a particular category for himself: ‘Are you of German descent?’ (sind sie deutscher abstammung?) In his reply, he first accepts this classification and then replaces it with another. Extract 6/2 Andreas 1 ja ich bin deutscher abstammung beiderseits also meine mutter wie auch der vater sind 2 eh ungarndeutscher herkunft/

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1 Yes, I’m of German descent, on both sides, so my mother and my father are both of 2 Hungarian-German origin.

The relevance of the distinction he chooses to make here cannot be fully determined without reference to the rest of his life story that develops from this initial statement, a story in which he constructs a detailed account of his personal attachment to the heritage of German ethnicity in rural Hungary (see our discussion of this in Chapter 5). While he does not reject the broader categorisation ‘of German descent’, the more precise specification ‘of Hungarian-German origin’ is the key to his whole biography. Categories depend on (perceptions of) sameness and difference and by their nature are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive: membership of the category ‘desperate housewife’, for example, requires features and characteristics that are (felt to be) shared with certain individuals but not with others. Through defining and deploying categories in these ways, individuals participate in discursive processes that are ‘central to the formation of social identities because these are often defined on the basis of an individual’s sense of belonging to groups’ (De Fina 2003: 139). The groups or clusters of individuals to which social categorisation can give rise and to which we may develop a ‘sense of belonging’ may themselves be classified in more generic terms (such as age, gender, sexuality, religion or ethnicity), which in turn are combinable in multiple permutations – young gay men, for example, or Black Christians. The conventional superordinate term for these generic categories is ‘community’, which like many such concepts has the attraction of appearing to offer a stable and clearly defined home for constituents with similar features (see Chapter 2) and therefore a convenient framework for the analysis of social behaviours. In the formative years of sociolinguistic research, roughly from the 1950s to the 1980s, the particular concept of ‘speech community’ (the origins of which go back to at least the nineteenth century) was widely accepted as representing the primary arena within which the most important social and linguistic interactions occurred and therefore as the key site for the observation and analysis of linguistic variation and change. While its definition (and its distinction from related concepts such as ‘language community’) was a source of ongoing contention, the validity of the concept itself was rarely questioned (for a critical review, see Patrick 2002). Debates on the notion of ‘community’, however, revealed similar problems to those encountered by identity theorists (see again Chapter 2). Whatever the preferred definition, the concept of community seemed to rest on questionable premises and assumptions. First, for example, there is a risk of circularity in defining a group of people in terms of a category that is itself in need of definition: a ‘German-speaking community’ may be defined as a group of people who speak German but this depends on our understanding of ‘German’ and of being a ‘German-speaker’ (see Barbour and Stevenson

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1990/1998: Chapter 1). Secondly, giving a name to a group seems to attribute to it a fixity and immutability that is intuitively improbable and an internal homogeneity and cohesion that privileges one shared characteristic over many that are not shared: not all ‘German-speakers’, for example, are manual workers, or football fans, or believe in (the same) god. Thirdly, the psychological reality of such a group must be in doubt when membership is achieved through ascription rather than through voluntary association, in other words if an individual is assigned to a particular group by the researcher rather than declaring their own affiliation. And finally, membership of one ‘community’ may appear to be permanent and exclusive, precluding the possibility of transferring from one to another or of belonging to several simultaneously. In our case, the categories made relevant by our consultants can be subsumed in the hypernyms of ethnicity (e.g., Hungarian-German, SudetenGerman, Czech) and language (e.g., Schwäbisch, German, mother tongue), although we shall see that these categories interact in important ways with those of gender and generation (especially when combined in the social ‘roles’ of mother and grandmother: see section 6.5 below). Whether or not these categories – alone or in combination – are sufficient to justify the assertion of named ‘communities’ based on shared understandings of the terms cannot be determined empirically but is rather a matter of interpretation, whether from the ‘inside’ or from ‘without’ or both. In his critique of conceptions of ethnicity, May (2001) argues that there is a middle way between individual choice and imposition, between achievement and ascription: ‘ethnic identities are neither ascribed nor achieved: they are both. They are wedged between situational selection and imperatives imposed from without’ (Eriksen 1993: 57, cited in May 2001: 32). Such categories are, then, neither entirely fixed nor entirely arbitrary – they can be adapted and (re)negotiated, but within limits. Furthermore, both the value attached to ethnic identities and the salience of particular cultural attributes, such as language, that are taken to underpin them tend to fluctuate according to social conditions: the importance of maintaining a strong and coherent sense of ethnicity is not necessarily constant, and (as we have seen in Chapter 4) it may or may not be anchored by particular cultural components such as a shared language. The representation of a particular language variety as iconic of a particular social group may be used discursively both to assert and to erase the existence of the group as a distinct entity, and this often results in contradictory stances even amongst those who share an interest in sustaining the presence of the group. For example, while a representative organisation may use an essentialised link between language and ethnicity as the basis of political demands for certain forms of educational provision, this may not seem opportune from the perspective of someone who perceives this link to have been irrevocably broken. So although we may resort to using the term community here, for much the same reasons of descriptive convenience that we persist in talking of ‘languages’ or ‘ethnic groups’, our level of analysis remains at that point

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where individuals engage with the social world they inhabit through their selection and articulation of social and linguistic categories that originate in discourses which are in wider circulation and to which they have access (see again Chapter 4). However, there is one particular sense in which it may be justifiable to propose an interpretation of shared or common beliefs about language on the basis of our interviews. Our object of analysis is not actual language use and our mode of investigation is not observation of linguistic interactions, so that we are not in a position to provide first-hand evidence of ‘communities of practice’ (Meyerhoff 2002, Wenger 1998) – although we know, for example, that people in the Czech towns we visited gather in Begegnungszentren (community centres) to converse and reminisce in German and thereby construct a sense of belonging through ‘communing’, and that speaking in German is an important feature of engaging in activities and events in ‘German’ cultural centres in Hungary. But the points at which our individual narratives intersect, in the recounting of particular experiences under a common political regime or process of social transformation, seem to reveal ways in which people make sense of their unique experiences, at least in part, in terms of what they have in common with the experiences of others. Assembling and articulating salient moments and periods in their past in relation to shared reference points, generalised perspectives (for example, ‘that was still during communism’, da war noch der kommunismus) and cultural traditions could therefore be construed as participating in a ‘community of memory’ (see, for example, Fix 1997 and Fix and Barth 2000 on Erinnerungsgemeinschaften among east Germans who had grown up in the GDR; and recall also our discussion of memory narratives in Chapter 5). The importance of tradition is a recurring topos in our narratives, and this includes not only practices and customs but also beliefs, values, myths, fears and aspirations, all of which are handed on (tradiert) from one generation to the next through stories of one kind or another. The (re)telling of myths in particular has an important function in discursively sustaining a sense of cultural continuity and communality that endures across periods of major social change, for common ‘memories’ do not simply represent ‘shared knowledge’ but are felt as ‘collective experiences’ (cf. Passerini 1990: 54, cited in Finnegan 1997, who shows how stories draw on ‘a shared imaginery’ of ‘common mythic themes’). In this sense, for example, young west Berliners interviewed by Jürgen Beneke shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did not merely ‘know about’ the privations of their parents’ generation in the post-war years, they shared the experience with them: ‘Wir mußten ja auch 40 Jahre hart arbeiten, bevor . . .’ meinte eine 22jährige Auszubildende. ‘Wir konnten 45 ja auch nicht überall hinreisen’ betonte ein Auszubildender mit seinen 19 Jahren. (Beneke 1993: 226)

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‘We had to work hard for 40 years too, before. . .’, a 22-year-old female trainee said. ‘In ’45, we couldn’t travel all over the place either’, emphasised a male trainee, all of 19 years old. The same applies to the middle-aged Czechs who responded to our questions about their German compatriots by saying: ‘Germans? What Germans? We got rid of them after the war’, or the Hungarian-Germans of all ages who ‘remember’ the 1941 census as ‘the unjust bureaucratic excuse for the deportations of the post-war years’ (Gal 1993: 348). As these examples suggest, this conceptualisation of community is bound to ideas of multidimensional space – historical, geographical and social – linking particular times, places and people in the act of ‘remembrance’. While political conditions within the state constitute the principal frame that constrains social behaviour, including language use, the concept of the ‘habitat’ (proposed by scholars in the ecology of language, such as Mühlhäusler 1996, following Haugen 1972) as the site of communicative action is useful in the interpretation of virtual communities of memory because it is a historical and dynamic construct signifying a space, both geographical and social, physical and imagined, in which various forms of interaction are contextualised and thus acquire meaning. Such spaces are subject to external and internal forces of stability and change that affect its extent and composition. In Mühlhäusler’s terms, central Europe could then be conceived as a ‘disrupted habitat’, characterised by the redrawing of external and internal boundaries, by large-scale population movements, by shifts in the demographic balance between different ethnic and national groups, and by transformations in political and economic organisation, all of which collectively constitute the formative conditions for changing language ideologies. The questions this raises for us are: what effects do such ruptures have on the language ideologies that draw on and contribute to particular social configurations and relations of power and authority, and what effects do changes in the communicative environment (the habitat) have on people’s perceptions of language and linguistic practices? More specifically, we want to explore here some of the ways in which individual and collective memories invoked in language biographies can be understood as representations both of responses, and of contributions, to social change. Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004b: 1, 4) argue that ‘in multilingual settings, language choice and attitudes are inseparable from political arrangements, relations of power, language ideologies, and interlocutors’ views of their own and others’ identities’ and that ‘languages may not only be “markers of identity” but also sites of resistance, empowerment, solidarity, or discrimination’. Gal (1995: 94) applies the same argument to sociolinguistic change in multilingual settings, emphasising the fact that ideas about language are embedded in particular cultural discourses and focusing on what she refers to as the recontextualisation of the opposition between the minority and

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majority languages (see also Gal 1987: 637–8 and Stevenson 1997). This is a process whereby individuals’ responses to geopolitical change include a reevaluation or reconfiguring of the relationship between the languages, which in turn results in changes in linguistic practices and forms of identification. This argument rests on the possibility of contesting the established relationship between dominant and minority languages, and of developing individual forms of resistance to linguistic hegemony. Moreover, what constitutes resistance in this sense is contingent on the individual actors’ perception of their position within the broader political and economic setting. Therefore, beyond seeking to discover and account for general trends towards either language maintenance or language shift, we should take a dynamic view of multiple and often conflicting responses to changes in the geopolitical context within which individuals form their allegiances or affiliations to others. Gal (1993, 1995) illustrates this approach by showing how individual evaluations of German and Hungarian amongst German-speakers in Hungary and the relationship between them depend very much on personal experiences of the previous fifty years: they range from powerful assertion to complete denial of a link between minority language and group identity. But where individuals do assert an allegiance to German, it is not necessarily on grounds of local, historical continuity. Rather, Gal interprets it first (pre1989) as a form of resistance to symbolic domination by the language of state authority, and secondly (post-1989) as an expression of wider cultural identification. For some speakers, at least, the relationship between the two languages has therefore been recontextualised twice in the post-war period: from being a marker of ethnicity within a multiethnic society, German became first a local symbol of internal resistance to the language of state authority, and then ‘a transnational resource’ within the global political economy of the new Europe. In the following sections, we will offer evidence from our own data that lends further weight to Gal’s argument but we will emphasise the importance of discovering what options were or are available at different points in people’s lives – since individuals can only choose from amongst the range of options available to them at a particular time and place (Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004b: 14) – and how these relate to the ways in which social identities are imposed, assumed or negotiated (see Chapter 2). In terms of the ways in which social categories are invoked and deployed, and in which social space has been reconfigured and the relationships between language forms recontextualised in the lifetimes of our interviewees (in the case of the oldest, from the 1930s to the present), the key questions to address here are: 1. What options were/are available in terms of social and linguistic categories and identities? 2. How did/do people position themselves in relation to these categories and identities?

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3. To what extent do people represent themselves as being active or as being ‘acted upon’? In the following sections, we shall consider each of these questions in turn on the basis of evidence from our interviews.

6.3 Categorisation and representation In the previous section, we said that the representation of the German ethnic groups in the populations we are concerned with here typically draws on two sets of categories: ethnicity and language. Each of these category sets subsumes a number of specific labels that constitute an informal taxonomy of possibilities for self and other representation, and therefore for patterns of identification, either singly or in various combinations. However, each of these signifiers has accrued layers of meaning across long periods of time, each has a shifting indexicality determined, at least in part, in relation to its context of use. To declare yourself, or to describe someone else, as ‘a German’ in rural Hungary today, for example, indexes a different array of associations than the same speech act did fifty or even twenty-five years ago. Furthermore, the room for manoeuvre – the degree of ‘play’, as Lefkowitz (2004: 74–6) characterises the space for negotiation that is available in the process of identification – is constrained to very varying degrees depending on the social conditions of interaction. One function of language biographies in this respect is to open up a space within which contrasts between the amount of play available in the moment of telling and at the time that is being ‘told about’ become, either explicitly or implicitly, the object of the story. Radek, for example, a twenty-one-yearold student interviewed in Prague in 1995, told how he had been unaware of his family’s ethnic German background until three years earlier when he had started to learn German at university (see extract 6/24 below), a story of denial and survival in an antagonistic social environment. In his father’s youth, the option of asserting a German identity was fraught with risk, but although Radek himself is now ostensibly free of such threats he still feels constrained by personal uncertainty and social insecurity. Concluding his story he articulates this ambivalence – am I German, am I Czech? – before finally resolving it through assuming a hybrid identity that qualifies ethnicity by reference to place. Extract 6/3 Radek 1 ich weiß selber nicht wie ich fühlen soll/ wenn mir jemand fragt ob ich deutscher oder 2 tscheche bin kann ich nicht genau antworten/. . . wenn man sagt ich fühle mich wie ein 3 deutscher dann würden die leute sagen dann kannst du gleich nach deutschland 4 gehen/. . . ich bin ein deutscher aus böhmen/

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1 I don’t know myself how I should feel. When somebody asks me if I’m German or 2 Czech, I can’t answer exactly. [. . .] If you say ‘I feel German’, then people would say 3 ‘then why don’t you just go to Germany then’. I’m a German from Bohemia.

Consultants in both Hungary and the Czech Republic (especially members of the older generation) interviewed in the mid-1990s frequently highlighted the impact of the hostile social conditions under which German-speakers lived in the post-war years as severely curtailing the available options. Liesl, for example, was born in Budapest during the war and recalls the political consequences of positioning oneself as an Ungarndeutsche(r). Extract 6/4 Liesl 1 durch die politischen ereignisse werden sich nie so viele bekanntgeben wie sie wirklich 2 da sind [d.h. Ungarndeutsche] auch heute nicht/ man kann ja hier in ungarn in 3 mitteleuropa nie wissen was morgen kommt/ eben diese schlimmen erfahrungen mit der 4 volkszählung 1941 hat so tiefe spuren hinterlassen dass die leute es nie wieder tun 5 werden sich bloßlegen/ 1 2 3 4 5

Due to those political events, there will never be as many of them declaring themselves [i.e. to be Hungarian-Germans] as are actually there, even today. Here in Hungary, in central Europe, you just never know what’s coming tomorrow. That awful experience with the 1941 census left such deep scars that people will never expose themselves like that again.

In the 1941 census, people were required for the first time not only to declare their ‘mother tongue’ but also their ‘nationality’ (see Chapter 2, p. 20). The census data was used as the basis for drawing up deportation lists after the war: not just those who were known to have been members of the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn (Association of Ethnic Germans in Hungary), many of whom had joined the SS, but also those who had declared German nationality in the census. For Liesl, this politicisation of the relationship between language and ethnicity entailed a form of imposed identity that members of this community accepted at their peril. Monika, another woman of the same generation in Budapest, constructs a similar double bind for HungarianGermans at that time. Extract 6/5 Monika 1 und eben die einstellung auch in den gemeinden früher waren sie ja in so einer kleinen 2 minderheit wie meine eltern im dorf und da mussten sie eben den mund halten weil ihr 3 seid ja die faschisten/ 1 And that attitude back then in the communities, if they/you were in a small minority 2 like that, like my parents in the village, and they/you just had to keep quiet because 3 ‘you’re the fascists, aren’t you’.

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According to her account, the options available to her family were either to maintain their German ethnicity and risk stigmatisation as ‘fascists’ or to deny this heritage and seek security through assimilation – by implication, through not speaking German (‘you had to keep your mouth shut’, da mussten sie eben den mund halten). However, Monika goes on to contrast the threatening potential of the German linguistic legacy at a vaguely specified time in the post-war past (‘in the past’, früher) with its evaluation as a soughtafter educational resource. Extract 6/6 Monika 1 davon ist man weit weggekommen und das gilt heute überhaupt nicht mehr/ im 2 gegenteil bei den deutschen klassen die wegen der minderheit gestartet werden stehen 3 lange schlangen auch von ungarischer seite weil sie wissen durch den 4 nationalitätenunterricht kann ein ungarisches kind genauso schön die deutsche sprache 5 erlernen/ 1 2 3 4

Things have moved on from that now and it doesn’t apply at all today. On the contrary, in German classes, which are being set up because of the minority, there are long queues even amongst the Hungarians because they know that through nationality classes1 a Hungarian child can learn the German language just as well.

At the same time, her use of the epithet ‘Hungarian’ (ungarisch) in implicit contrast to ‘the [German] minority’ – ‘a Hungarian child can learn the German language just as well [as minority group members for whom the classes were intended; our emphasis]’ – represents German minority members as a category set apart from the majority Magyar population. Moreover, a further crucial contrast, to which we shall return in the next section (and see also Chapter 5), is elided in this account, for the German that her family dared not speak ‘in the past’ was the local dialect that was iconic of the traditions and history of past German migrants and their descendants, while the German that is now in demand is the modern standard German that indexes attributes of affluence and urbanity associated with the western neighbours Austria and Germany. By attributing the availability of German-medium education to the presence of ‘the [German national] minority’ Monika realigns the minority with a cultural commodity deemed to be of substantial market value and thereby restores to this community a sense of esteem and worth which in fact derives from an asset linked by the new learners of German not with the indigenous but with a foreign German population. This move is made explicit in the Czech context by Marián from Prague (born in 1948 and interviewed in 1995). Extract 6/7 Marián 1 in tschechei lebt zur zeit 50 000 menschen der deutsche nationalität/ das sind vor allem 2 die ältere menschen/ aber jüngere generation jetzt diese direktoren von banken von

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3 verschieden . . . diese škoda-volkswagen group ja/ jüngere generation ohne kann man 4 sagen tradition aus den alten zeiten kommt und bringt die deutsche sprache ja/ und auch 5 den sinn dass jemand auch deutsch lernt/ 1 2 3 4 5

There are currently 50,000 people of German nationality living in the Czech Republic. These are mostly elderly people. But the younger generation now, these bank managers of various . . . this Skoda-Volkswagen Group, right. The younger generation without, let’s say, the traditions from the old days bring the German language with them, you see. And also the reason for learning German.

Marián acknowledges the presence of an indigenous German population but positions it by implication as one that is burdened with the baggage of the past (‘the traditions from the old days’, tradition aus den alten zeiten). He erases the notion of the German language as a property of this indigenous population as well as its affective or symbolic value as a marker of (local) German ethnicity, characterising it instead as a new import and a means of achieving social mobility through access to the professional world of finance and multinational enterprise. These examples show how key categories of ethnicity and language are represented discursively in both the populations we studied, in Hungary and in the Czech Republic, as options that were available to a greater or lesser extent – and in some cases, not at all – under different historical conditions. Forms of representation and identification in the interviews in the Czech Republic related almost exclusively to the two categories ‘Germans’ and ‘Czechs’, although one additional (sub-)category played an important role in some of the accounts of the post-war hostility towards the ethnic German population and of current attempts to re-establish or sustain links with exile groups in Germany. Helga, for example, who was born in a village near the Austrian border and now in her retirement runs a provincial German cultural centre (see also Chapter 5.4), talks of her sense of apartness as a monolingual German-speaker during her childhood just after the war. Extract 6/8 Helga 1 mir hatten keine deutsche schule und zwei mädchen waren mir deutsche mir haben kein 2 wort tschechisch verstanden so war es für uns sehr schwierig/ da hab ich schon gemerkt 3 als kind dass ich etwas anderes bin als die anderen/ mir waren immer das war immer 4 onkel tante onkel tante auf einmal waren das sudetendeutschen/ ich als kind hab immer 5 gesagt sudetendeutschen was heisst das mami?/ das ist doch tante das ist onkel das ist 6 meine cousine warum sudetendeutschen?/ 1 2 3 4

We didn’t have a German school and we were two girls, Germans. We didn’t understand a word of Czech so it was very difficult for us. I had already noticed as a child that I was different from the others. We were always, it was always ‘uncle auntie uncle auntie’, suddenly they were Sudeten Germans. As a child I always used to say

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5 ‘Sudeten Germans, what’s that Mummy?’ Surely that’s auntie, that’s uncle, that’s my 6 cousin, why are they Sudeten Germans?’

This episode is a part of a brief excursus embedded in a longer account of her involvement in setting up a small social centre for ethnic Germans in her town in the early 1990s, through which she subsequently established close connections with exiled Sudeten Germans in Bavaria. The interjected story begins as a rationale for the activities of the centre, a meeting place intended to recreate the childhood circumstances of the mainly elderly consultants as simply ‘Germans amongst Germans’, but then in this extract she introduces a moment from her distant past in which her sense of public otherness (as a German amongst Czechs) was complicated by the sudden, anonymously imposed reclassification of close family members with an unfamiliar political categorisation (‘suddenly they were Sudeten Germans’, auf einmal waren das sudetendeutschen). Although she goes on to talk of establishing friendships with Sudeten Germans in Germany after setting up the centre, it remains for her an extraneous category to which she refers in the third person. Walter, a retired legal clerk from Liberec (who was also introduced in Chapter 5), similarly assigns a positive connotation to what in dominant Czech discourse was a highly pejorative term. Discussing the activities of the German minority after the Wende, he establishes a solidary link between ‘Germans’ who remain in the Czech Republic and ‘our Sudeten Germans’, as well as the German state, through their financing of German cultural organisations and provision of ‘humanitarian aid’ (see extract 6/9). By contrast, ‘the Czechs’ (apparently referring to the Czech government) are criticised for refusing to acknowledge this support. Extract 6/9 Walter 1 wir haben für 60 millionen kronen haben wir hier humanitäre hilfe hierhergebracht aber 2 die tschechen waren ja so FEIGE die haben nie gesagt natürlich ist das geld nicht von 3 uns gekommen/ das geld haben deutsche organisationen oder die oder unsere 4 sudetendeutschen gespendet ja?/ aber uns haben sie NIE NIE angegeben dass wir die 5 initiatoren sind/ so eh der klaus eh dieser genius hier der jetzige präsident wenn der was 6 von den deutschen gehört hat da is er gleich ma wieder verschwunden ja?/ [Our 7 emphasis] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

For 60 million crowns we brought humanitarian aid over here but the Czechs were, you know, such cowards, they never said, ‘of course the money didn’t come from us’. The money was donated by German organisations or the or our Sudeten Germans, wasn’t it? But not once did they acknowledge to us that we were the initiators. So Klaus [Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic since 2003], that great genius, the current president, when he heard something about the Germans he immediately vanished again, didn’t he? [Our emphasis]

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Early in the interview he positions himself unequivocally as a German in the very specific sense of a ‘member of the German nation’ (‘I have always declared myself as belonging to the German nation’, ich hab mich immer zur deutschen nation bekannt). But in his account of his release from captivity in Germany after the war he also emphasises his attachment to his home in Liberec. Extract 6/10 Walter 1 in k hab ich nach der entlassung aus der gefangenschaft hab ich meine ersten 2 lebensmittelkarten bekommen und in k war mein großvater ausgesiedelt . . . dort hab ich 3 mich hin entlassen lassen weil mich die tschechen nicht reinließen also nicht nur die 4 deutsche Sprache aber deutscher zu sein war ja ein verbrechen an und für sich/. . . 5 deswegen bin ich dann ja auch im gefängnis/ ich bin verhaftet worden weil ich ohne 6 genehmigung eingereist bin von der amerikanischen besatzungszone in die sowjetische 7 besatzungszone hin nach zittau und in zittau bin ich in der nacht über die grenze 8 gegangen/ 1 2 3 4 5

In K., after my release from captivity, I got my first ration card and my grandfather had moved to K. I got myself released there because the Czechs didn’t let me in, so you see, not only speaking German but being German was, a crime in itself. . . . That’s also why I went to prison, you see. I was arrested for going from the American zone to the Soviet zone, to Zittau, without a permit, and in Zittau I crossed the border at night.

After his release, he went first to K., a small town in Germany, and says (earlier in the interview) that he could have stayed there ‘if I hadn’t come home’ (our emphasis; wär ich nicht nach hause gekommen) – which he did, and was arrested for illegal entry to the country. At this time, being a ‘German’ on Czech territory was maximally undesirable and he represents himself as categorically distinct from ‘the Czechs’. While this rejection of a Czech identity is maintained throughout the interview, an ambivalent relationship emerges towards the ‘Germans in Germany’ as generous supporters and as unhelpful bureaucrats. Extract 6/11 Walter and Steffi, his daughter (discussing making arrangements for her daughter to go to study in Germany) Steffi 1 damals als die Petra als wir die nach deutschland schickten zwei jahre lang grauenhaft 2 was die deutschen für schwierigkeiten gemacht haben/. . . Walter 3 also wenn die [i.e. the German government/state] dauernd davon reden die deutsche 4 minderheit unterstützen zu wollen dann müsste möglich sein dass man kinder 5 rüberschickt um sich dass sie sich sprachlich verbessert/ [Our emphasis]

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Steffi 1 At that time, when Petra, when we sent her to Germany for two years, terrible the sorts 2 of difficulties the Germans made. . . . Walter 3 So when they [i.e. the German government/state] constantly talk about wanting to 4 support the German minority, then surely it should be possible to send children over to 5 improve their language skills. [Our emphasis]

The one constant association for him seems to be the ‘German minority’: most of his contribution to the conversation at first focuses on his own activities and is expressed in the first person singular, but after establishing the category ‘we as a/the minority’ (wir als Minderheit) he uses the first person plural often without further specification but consistently with this reference. And this category is clearly distinct from ‘ordinary’ Germans in Germany; discussing contemporary changes in the German language (which they characterise as a post-Wende phenomenon) Walter and Steffi express their irritation at unfamiliar neologisms such as Azubis (for Auszubildende, trainees), which are unproblematic for ‘the Germans’, who feel ‘at home’ on this new linguistic territory, but not ‘for us’. Extract 6/12 Walter 1 es ist natürlich sprachlicher unsinn ja?/ azubi/ aber da gibts ja viele solche sachen in die 2 sich die die in denen sich die deutschen natürlich bewegen WIE ZUHAUSE und für 3 uns ist das a problem/ [Our emphasis] 1 It’s linguistic nonsense, of course, isn’t it? Azubi. But there are many things like that 2 which the Germans feel very much at home with, and for us that’s a problem. [Our emphasis]

The Hungarian consultants deployed a slightly larger range of categories consisting mainly of four terms: Deutsche, Ungarndeutsche, Schwaben and Donauschwaben. Sometimes they seem to be used more or less interchangeably (see extract 6/16 below) but there are differences in referential scope that emerge through contextualisation. For example, the semantic vagueness of the term Deutsche allows both a narrow specification (equivalent to Ungarndeutsche, ethnic Germans in Hungary) and a broader reference that situates Hungarian-Germans as members of a pan-European German Kulturnation. Thus while for Robert the condition of being a Hungarian German in the 1960s was tantamount to be being a ‘foreign body’, it is now a positive experience to be a ‘German in Hungary’. Extract 6/13 Robert 1 in diesem land so bis 1960 1965 ungarndeutscher zu sein wir waren so etwas wie 2 fremdkörper/. . . [jetzt ist] die sympathie in diesem land für die deutsche sprache und

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3 fürs deutschtum überhaupt ich meine jetzt generell fürs deutschtum fürs europäische 4 deutschtum ziemlich groß/. . . es ist heute muss ich sagen ein gutes gefühl in ungarn 5 deutscher zu sein/ 1 2 3 4 5

Being a Hungarian German in this country until about 1960, 1965, we were like foreign bodies. . . . [Now] people in this country are positive towards the German language and towards German culture in general. I mean generally now towards German culture, towards European German culture, it’s quite strong. . . . Today it is, I must say, a good feeling to be German in Hungary.

The term Ungarndeutsche(r), then, keeps the association with the nonterritorial category of ‘Germans’ explicit but specifies a sub-category associated with the state and the place that its members inhabit and that distinguishes them from other ‘Germans’. It is a formal classification representing, or positing, a ‘cultural community’ (the term is thus used in the names of organisations such as the National Association of HungarianGermans, Landesversammlung der Ungarndeutschen, and the Community of Young Hungarian-Germans, Gemeinschaft Junger Ungarndeutschen). Diachronically, the term Schwabe derives from historical migrations (see Chapter 3) and is used metonymically to represent the descendants of all migrants from German lands (including Swabia but also other territories); Donauschwaben is a more or less synonymous term but foregrounds the umbilical link of the River Danube. In contemporary usage, Schwabe is a cultural category adopted by both insiders and outsiders – it has been lexicalised in Hungarian as svób – but with an affective component that appears to be absent in the term Ungarndeutsche(r). Some of these relationships can be seen in the following three passages (our emphasis added in each case). Extract 6/14 István 1 ich komme aus einer gemeinde die bis zum zweiten weltkrieg fast hundertprozentig 2 deutsch war/ da gab es vielleicht fünf oder zehn familien die nicht deutsche waren/. . . 3 man kann sagen neunzig prozent hat die gemeinde verloren und diese zehn prozent die 4 da geblieben sind die wurden dann massiv eingeschüchtert weil ja nach dem krieg diese 5 ganz furchtbare atmosphäre da um sich griff wo die deutschen einfach als als 6 gestunkener schwabe da auf offener straße gescholten wurden und red ungarisch du 7 frisst ungarisches brot und so weiter/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I come from a community which, until the Second World War, was nearly 100 per cent German. There were perhaps five or ten families who were not German. . . . It’s safe to say that the community lost 90 per cent [killed in the war or deported after the war] and the remaining 10 per cent were then severely intimidated because, you know, after the war that really dreadful atmosphere spread, where the Germans were basically abused in broad daylight for being a ‘stinking Schwabe’, and ‘speak Hungarian, you eat2 Hungarian bread’, and so on.

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In extract 6/14, István characterises the population of his village as ‘Germans’ but quotes the abuse directed towards them in which Schwabe is used pejoratively and although no other group is mentioned explicitly the two remarks set up an opposition between Schwabe and Ungar as mutually exclusive categories. Extract 6/15 Elisabeth 1 das hab ich gehört das war eine zeit wo die alten leute die leute nicht gerne für die 2 kinder diese sprache [German dialect] beigebracht haben weil sie irgendwie schon 3 möchten damit dass sie keine schwaben sein sollen/. . . nach dem krieg wahrscheinlich 4 hatten sie eine negative gefühl überhaupt dafür weil sie rausgeschoben wurden damals 5 dass sie weg mussten diese schwaben/ 1 2 3 4 5

That’s what I heard, that was a time when the older people, they didn’t like teaching that language [German dialect] to the children because somehow they probably didn’t want them to be Schwaben. . . . After the war they probably had a negative feeling in general towards it because they were kicked out back then, so they had to leave, those Schwaben.

Elisabeth, too, articulates the derogatory tone in which ‘those Schwaben’ were referred to in the period after the war. She attributes to the ‘older people’ at that time a generalised belief that speaking German was a sufficient condition for being a Schwabe, because not teaching them German (dialect) was a way of protecting them from the negative consequences of being categorised as Schwaben. Extract 6/16 Peter 1 die menschen . . . sprechen nicht deutsch ((lacht)) die sprechen DARÜBER, dass wir 2 deutsche sind dass wir schwaben sind dass wir ungarndeutsche sind/. . . zumindest in 3 unserer gegend geht es noch hier im süden wo wir doch die meisten da sind wo wir 4 doch immer auf unsere leute treffen sei es ein amt sei es eine schule sei es ein dorf/ 5 schwieriger ist es bestimmt in anderen regionen wo die deutschen so sehr wenig sind 6 dass sie dann weniger ihre eigene leute finden/ wir finden noch unsere leute und wenn 7 ich jetzt zum beispiel was weiß ich in ein amt gehe und die ungarndeutschen fragen 8 dann ach du bist auch ein schwabe?/ wir sagen das auf ungarisch aber dadurch dass du 9 auch ein schwabe bist und ich auch ein schwabe bin haben wir schon eine festere 10 beziehung zueinander/ 1 2 3 4 5 6

The people . . . don’t speak German, they talk about the fact that we are German, that we are Schwaben, that we are Hungarian-Germans. . . . At least in our area, it’s still ok here in the South where most of us are, where we are always meeting our people, whether it’s in an office, at a school or in the village. It is certainly much harder in other regions where the Germans are so few that they then encounter their own people less often. We still encounter our people, and now whenever I, for example, I don’t

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7 know, go into an office and the Hungarian-Germans then ask ‘oh, are you a Schwabe 8 too?’ We say that in Hungarian but the fact that you are also a Schwabe and I am also a 9 Schwabe means that we do have a stronger connection with each other.

Peter concedes the advanced state of linguistic assimilation amongst his community but by contrast with the old people referred to by Elisabeth he asserts the possibility today of being a Schwabe without speaking German; the act of communing is given priority over the medium in which it occurs (extract 6/16). He talks initially of ‘our people’ (unsere leute) without specifying and contrasts this locally defined group with ‘Germans’ elsewhere in the country. The force of ‘our people’ becomes clear when he explains how Ungarndeutsche recognise each other as Schwaben: the more neutral category is translated into an affective category of solidarity and intimacy, for which language is not critical. A fifth category – Ungar(in) – should be added to this inventory, because it occurs frequently in the narratives with variable reference: sometimes as an inclusive term (meaning Hungarian citizen) with which the speaker identifies, sometimes as an exclusive term (synonymous with Hungarian, i.e. Magyar, ethnicity) from which the speaker distances herself. In the following passage, János (a university teacher in his forties: again, see Chapter 5) exploits all available options to take advantage of the now significant degree of ‘play’ that they allow in order to position himself in different ways in different social contexts (extract 6/17; italicised words indicate our emphasis). Extract 6/17 János 1 also mir ist es wichtig wenn ich in deutschland bin dann ist es mir immer wichtig dass 2 ich auch sage ich bin ich komme aus ungarn ich bin ein ungarndeutscher/ das ist was 3 anderes wie ein ungar ein ungar zu sein/ also das war für mich immer wichtig zu 4 sagen/ denn ungarn ist im ausland oft so ein ja nur ein ZIGEUNERland irgendwie/ also 5 ungarn das ist BALATON, BUDAPEST, die PUSZTA und ZIGEUNERmusik/ also wer 6 noch nie in ungarn war der sieht im fernseher nur DIESE dinge aus ungarn und dann 7 glauben manche in ungarn leben nur zigeuner/ also wenn ich sage ich bin 8 ungarndeutscher oder ich sage oft ich bin donauschwabe diesen begriff kennt man in 9 deutschland oder im westlichen sprachraum eher als den begriff ungarndeutscher/ und 10 wenn ich sage ich bin ungarnDEUTSCHER oder DONAUschwabe dann wissen die 11 leute dass ich wahrscheinlich deutsch sprechen kann dass ich zu DIESEM kulturkreis 12 gehöre dass ich vielleicht anders denke als die hier in ungarn/ Jenny 13 und ist das innerhalb ungarns anders?/ János 14 INNERHALB ungarns ist es anders/ ja weil HIER muss man schon sagen dass die 15 ungarn oft ein bisschen nationalistisch sind/ also sie mögen die schwaben nicht die

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

deutschen mögen sie nicht das muss sicher seine gründe haben/ die schwaben die waren hier immer FLEISSIG und oft ist es so dass die schwaben HAUS und HOF und so HAB und GUT also dass die deutschen mehr haben und einen SCHÖNEREN hof und ein SCHÖNERES haus haben als die ungarn/ und da sind die ungarn auch neidisch weil sie da nicht mitmachen können weil da fehlt der fleiß und das denken und also die deutschen können oft mehr erreichen als viele ungarn und vielleicht ist DAS ein grund dafür dass die ungarn die deutschen nicht so mögen/ also hier in ungarn ist es besser sie wissen nicht dass ich ein ein DEUTSCHER bin sondern da in ungarn ist es besser wenn ich ein ungar bin/

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Well, it’s important for me, when I’m in Germany it’s always important that I say I am from Hungary, I am a Hungarian German. That’s different to being Hungarian. Anyway, it was always important that I said that as Hungary is often seen abroad as kind of a land of gypsies. Hungary being Balaton, Budapest, Puszta and gypsy music. So if you’ve never been to Hungary these are the only things about Hungary you see on TV, and then many people believe that only gypsies live in Hungary. So, whenever I say I am a Hungarian German, or I often say I’m a Donauschwabe as people in Germany or in the western speech area recognise this term more than the term Hungarian German. And when I say I’m a Hungarian German or a Donauschwabe, then people know that I can probably speak German, that I belong to this cultural group and that perhaps I have a different way of thinking to people here in Hungary.

Jenny 12 And is it different within Hungary? János 13 Within Hungary it is different. Yes, because here it has to be said that the Hungarians 14 are often a bit nationalistic. So they don’t like the Schwaben, they don’t like the 15 Germans, there must surely be reasons for this. The Schwaben were always hard16 working here and often it’s the case that the Schwaben have a house and home and 17 worldly goods, that the Germans have more, and a nicer home and a nicer house than 18 the Hungarians. And the Hungarians are also envious of that because they’re not able 19 to keep up with us because they lack the industriousness and the mentality, and so the 20 Germans can often achieve more than many Hungarians, and perhaps that’s one 21 reason why the Hungarians don’t like the Germans very much. So here in Hungary 22 it’s better that they don’t know that I’m German but there, in Hungary, it’s better for 23 me to be Hungarian.

When asked how he would characterise himself, János draws on the full range of lexical resources in the now common repertoire as well as several additional categories, and he seeks to position himself differently depending on location (in Germany and in Hungary). Earlier in the interview he had placed great emphasis on his socialisation in the ‘German cultural group’ in his part of Hungary and referred frequently to his acquisition of a ‘German

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mentality’ as part of his ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ (Schicksal) (see also Carli et al. 2003: 868). When he is in Germany, he is at pains to distance himself from what he sees as a misleading stereotypical image of Hungary as a ‘land of gypsies’ (zigeunerland). He does this by representing himself as ‘from Hungary, a Hungarian German’ (aus ungarn, ein ungarndeutscher), a composite categorisation based on citizenship, or perhaps simply domicile, and ethnicity that sets him apart from the ethnic category ‘Hungarian’. His preferred choices of self-representation are either Ungarndeutscher or Donauschwabe, the latter, he believes, more familiar in Germany or more generally in ‘the western speech area’ (im westlichen sprachraum), and by stressing particular components in these terms (ungarnDEUTSCHER, DONAUschwabe) he signals on the one hand a convergence with his interlocutor as a German speaker and a member of the German ‘cultural group’, and on the other a divergence from ‘the Hungarians here’ who have a ‘different way of thinking’. However, when he is in Hungary (amongst non-German Hungarians), he selects a different option. He represents ‘the Hungarians’ (presumably again meaning ‘Magyars’) as being antagonistic towards ‘the Schwaben, the Germans’ and he attributes this to different cultural properties. The Schwaben are ‘hard-working’ (fleißig) and through their own diligence are able to achieve more and acquire more desirable material possessions, which is a source of ‘envy’ to the Hungarians, who lack the industriousness and the mentality (thinking, das denken) of ‘the Germans’. At first, he collocates ‘the Schwaben’ with both the quality of diligence and its fruits (in terms of the cliché expressions ‘house and home’, haus und hof and ‘worldly goods’, hab und gut), but then shifts to ‘the Germans’ when making an explicit contrast with ‘the Hungarians’ and introducing the different ‘way of thinking’ (dass ich vielleicht anders denke). While maintaining his stance, established earlier in the interview, as ‘a German’, he concludes that it is more opportune not to present himself as such in public but rather as being ‘a Hungarian’ (leaving the ambiguity of the term this time unresolved). For all of these individuals, both in Hungary and in the Czech Republic, language is a relevant variable in their representation both of those social categories to which they belong and of those from which they exclude themselves. As we have seen in Chapter 5, alongside the state languages, Hungarian or Czech, different varieties of German have played a formative role at various stages of their lives. Linguistically, each of these varieties can be classified formally into one of two generic categories: standard German or (traditional) dialect. Moreover, as well as distinctions in terms of form there are distinctions in terms of function or purpose: for example, in educational discourse standard German may be taught, and referred to, as Deutsch als Zweitsprache (German as a second language), Deutsch als Fremdsprache (German as a foreign language) or (in Hungarian schools catering for the interests of the German ‘national minority’) Minderheitendeutsch (minority German). However, our concern here is not with linguistic form nor with

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function or purpose in this sense, but rather with linguistic and discursive representations: how are language varieties named and classified, and above all how are they articulated with other categories in the process of identification? In his account of his own linguistic development, Peter (see also extract 6/25 below) talks about his relationship with the language varieties in his repertoire in the following terms. Extract 6/18 Peter 1 später also im gymnasium hatte ich dann deutsch als fremdsprache nicht deutsch als 2 fach . . . nur deutsche grammatik und deutsche sprache und literatur literatur auch nicht 3 nur sprache also wir hatten keine literatur auf deutsch es war alles auf ungarisch/ goethe 4 schiller haben wir auf ungarisch gelernt/. . . dann später habe ich hier in x germanistik 5 studiert und war auch ein zwei semester in deutschland auf stipendium und halt so habe 6 ich dann die deutsche sprache erlernt/ aber die basis ist unbedingt die schwäbische 7 mundart/. . . wenn mir etwas nicht eingefallen ist an der universität oder am gymnasium 8 dann habe ich gedacht wie soge mer des dahamm? und dann ist es mir gekommen wie 9 man das auf hochdeutsch sagen würde/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Later on, at secondary school, I had German as a foreign language, not German as a normal subject . . . only German grammar and German language and literature, actually not even literature, only language. So we had no literature in German, everything was in Hungarian. We learnt Goethe and Schiller in Hungarian. . . . Then later on I did German Studies here in X and also spent two semesters in Germany on a scholarship, and so that’s how I learnt the German language properly. But the foundation is definitely the Swabian dialect. . . . Whenever I couldn’t think of something at university or at school, I thought ‘how do we say that at home?’, and then it came to me how you would say it in High German.

In this short exposition several linguistic categories collide. He talks here of language learning in institutional contexts – first at high school, then at university – and differentiates between the language varieties he encountered in terms of their institutional status. At school, ‘German’ was taught as a foreign language; it was displaced by Hungarian in every part of the curriculum, even in the study of classical German literature. In spite of those years at school and subsequent study at university in Hungary, he says he really only learnt ‘the German language’ properly (‘erlernen’ implies a more thorough learning process than the simple verb ‘lernen’) as a visiting student in Germany. However, his whole learning development remained rooted in his knowledge of the dialect (die schwäbische mundart), the non-institutional variety or way of speaking ‘from back home’ to which he would have recourse in case of doubt when searching for an appropriate expression in ‘high’, or standard, German (auf hochdeutsch). He reinforces this point by ‘quoting’ himself in dialect: ‘wie soge mer des dahamm?’ (How do we say that at home?).

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The distinction between different forms of what are perceived to be the ‘same’ language (see Chapter 2) becomes relevant only under certain conditions: for example, when a state government wants to count the number of, say, ‘German speakers’ in relation to the number of ‘Hungarian speakers’, it is likely to offer only the most generic category (‘German’) as an option on census forms. In many cases, this also applies in language biographies, where the speaker is tracing the relationships between two competing sources of identification rather than unpicking the individual strands of which they are composed. It is common, therefore, for us to find either ‘German’ or ‘the German language’ used in a way that subsumes both standard and nonstandard forms on the one hand, or that refers to one particular form on the other. Where standard German is specifically intended, the term Hochdeutsch is almost invariably used; conversely, where a local dialect is referred to, the term Mundart is commonly used (or also Schwäbisch in Hungary). An alternative to Mundart, however, is the locally synonymous term die Muttersprache (the mother tongue), and as we shall see in the next two sections of this chapter (and see again also Chapter 5) this is a key category in individual and collective representations of continuity and change in the relationship between language, time and place.

6.4 Positioning and identification In this section, we will analyse in more detail how individuals use ethnic and linguistic categories discursively or conversationally to position themselves and others but also to contest or reject ways in which others position them. The focus of our attention will therefore be on patterns of identification in the context of social and historical conditions that make various (ethnic) identifications possible through the (self-)allocation to a group on the basis of language knowledge or use, but where this may or may not be considered desirable. The issue, then, is not simply whether a person ‘is’ or ‘is not’ a ‘German (speaker)’, but rather whether or not they position themselves as such and, furthermore, whether or not this (self-)attribution is contingent on the perceived validity of specific ethnic categories (see also Giampapa 2004). Milena was born in Prague in 1933 to a Czech-German father and a halfCzech and half-Austrian mother; her parents were divorced in 1938 and she did not see her father again. Her mother had always spoken German with her and continued to do so for a time after the war, but gradually switched to speaking Czech, a decision which Milena explains in the following way. Extract 6/19 Milena 1 wissen sie meine mutter hatte solche panische angst gehabt es kann einen augenblick 2 kommen wo jemand kommen kann und kann sie in ein lager nehmen/ es war 3 schreckliche zeit/. . . ich durfte nicht matura machen nicht nur weil ich deutsche war

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4 sondern weil wir wohnten in eigenem zinshaus und eine hausmeisterin hat geschrieben 5 in meine schule dass wir bourgeoisie sind dass wir arbeiterklassefeindlich sind und ich 6 durfte nicht matura machen/ 1 2 3 4 5

You see, my mother had been so desperately afraid that one day someone might come and take her to a camp. It was an awful time. . . . I wasn’t allowed to study for the Matura [school-leaving exam], not only because I was German but because we lived in our own apartment, and a caretaker wrote to my school that we were bourgeois, that we were anti-working class and I wasn’t allowed to study for the Matura.

Since the subject position ‘German-speaking Czech’ appears not to have been available in the prevailing political discourse in post-war Czechoslovakia, her mother’s strategy of self-censorship in no longer speaking German to Milena seems to have been an attempt to resist being positioned as an undesirable other and to position herself instead as a Czech through speaking Czech. This seems to have been a common assimilatory strategy that relied on a belief in the axiomatic link between language and ethnicity or nationality: Germans speak German and Czechs speak Czech. As Jiří Nekvapil (2000; see also Nekvapil 1997, 2003) shows, under the political conditions at that time the salience attached to this essentialised relationship could also have serious consequences for those who challenged it. (The following two extracts are adapted from the English versions of passages from interviews cited in Nekvapil [2000]. The original interviews were mostly in Czech.) Extract 6/20 Mr S., Liberec 1 And after the war, when they were searching who collaborated, they found that my 2 father wrote into the census documents ‘Czech nationality’ and ‘German mother 3 tongue’, and this was a hundred per cent truth, but with those after-the-war 4 supercommunists that was a fault indeed, because how could a Czech have the German 5 mother tongue, you know?

Mr S.’s declaration was clearly seen as a violation of a non-negotiable, imposed form of identification and therefore as a subversive act (see also Walter, extract 5/23 in Chapter 5). For many people a safer option was to acquiesce in the erasure of the aberrant social category ‘German-speaking Czechs’, either strategically through adopting a policy of language shift within the family (as with Milena’s mother in extract 6/19 above, and also Radek’s grandmother in extract 6/24 below) or tactically through self-censorship in politically sensitive public contexts. For example, for a short time after the war Germans in Czechoslovakia were required to wear armbands bearing the letter N (for Nĕmec, the Czech word for German), and so the only option for German-speakers who wanted to avoid the public stigma of this material sign was simultaneously to avoid the shibboleth of the German language and seek anonymity in silence.

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Extract 6/21 Mrs H., Krkonose Mountain region Interviewer 1 How did it work with those bands, when did you have to wear them? Mrs H. 2 We should have worn them all the time, but when we were running around at home you 3 wouldn’t wear them. But when you went out shopping, then we simply had to put them 4 on, if you didn’t you got a fine. You see, you must understand, just as the Jews had to 5 wear stars during the war, you see, so we wore bands after the war. Everyone knew, 6 and well but we took it off sometimes too, when we much wanted to for the cinema, 7 because if you’re 14, 15 then you might feel like going to the cinema, don’t 8 you, so we took it off sometimes too, and we just wouldn’t talk and went to the cinema. (Our emphasis added)

Similarly, Zdenĕk, now in his late seventies, talks of his astonishment at hearing German spoken in a pub near the German border at a time (in the 1950s) when it was not possible to speak German in public in his own town, and this prompts him to recall the drastic measures his family had felt obliged to take to remain ‘invisible’ after the war (see also our discussion of this passage from a different perspective in Chapter 5). Extract 6/22 Zdenĕk 1 ich kam in die gaststätte und ich war erstaunt da haben sie nur deutsch geredet/ das war 2 im grenzgebiet da sind doch viele geblieben die also glashütten oder bergarbeiter 3 waren/ jedenfalls waren so viele deutsche da also/. . . da hab ich gefragt wie ist das 4 möglich dass ihr so öffentlich deutsch reden könnt?/ wir sind hier geboren und so 5 weiter/ aber wir dürfen das in x nicht nicht ein wort/ meine schwester die hat lange 6 schwarzhaare jetzt ungefähr wie sie haare und zöpfe das musste meine mutter gleich 7 nach dem umsturz [i.e. after 1945] abschneiden ja?/ weil die tschechen wenn sie das 8 gesehen haben da haben sie immer gleich gerufen also helga [a common German 9 name that was used generically to refer to German girls/women] und noch einen 10 deutschen namen/. . . also da musste meine mutter die haare die zöpfe abschneiden und 11 jahrelang waren sie zu hause aufgehoben oder so ja?/ zum andenken ne?/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I went to the pub and I was astonished, they were all just speaking German. This was in the border region, of course lots of people stayed on there working in the glassworks or the mines. In any case, there were so many Germans there. . . . And so I asked them ‘how are you able to speak so openly in German?’ ‘We were born here’, and so on. But we’re not allowed to do that in X, not a word. My sister has long, black hair now, a bit like yours, my mother had to cut off her hair and pigtails straight after the overthrow [i.e. 1945], didn’t she? Because whenever the Czechs saw it, they always immediately shouted ‘Helga’ [A common German name that was used generically to refer to German girls/women] and other German names. . . . Therefore, my mother had to cut off

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10 her hair and pigtails and for years they were kept at home, you know? As a souvenir, 11 you know?

Even in bilingual families that maintained both languages in the private sphere (see also section 6.5 below), it was often opportune to position yourself less equivocally in public and fall into line with the monolingual ideology, a practice that Blommaert (2005: 169, citing Scott 1990) refers to as ‘orthopraxy’: ‘doing as if one shares beliefs and ideas, performing hegemonic acts [such as using a dominant language as prescribed] without subscribing to the ideology that gives meaning to them’ (emphasis in original). Such an occasion, over forty years earlier, was still part of Walter’s family’s collective memory. Extract 6/23 Walter and his daughter Steffi Steffi 1 noch eine kannst du erzählen als ich vier jahre alt war und du mit mir zur polizei 2 gegangen bist/ Walter 3 ja . . . einundsechzig hatten die die mauer gebaut und da hab ich mir gedacht ich mach 4 eine auslandsreise und es ging ja bloß für mich vor allen dingen nur in der ddr und da 5 brauchte man ein ausreisevisum/. . . und da war die steffi vier jahre alt und da bin ich 6 auf die polizei gegangen und hab sie mitgenommen/ und dann hab ich vor der polizei 7 gestanden and hab ihr gesagt steffi wenn wir jetzt darinne sind dann darfst du nur 8 tschechisch sprechen du darfst nicht deutsch sprechen/. . . da hab ich gefragt weißt du 9 wann du da deutsch sprichst?/ da hatse gesagt ja ja das weiß ich/ hab ich gesagt ja dann 10 ist alles in ordnung/ geh ma rein saß da saß da am tisch so ein alter oberleutnant ich 11 hab sie auf die knie gesetzt und jetzt fing der mit mir da tschechsich an personalien 12 aufzunehmen und so weiter/ und da meinte die steffi vati was ist das eigentlich 13 deutsch?/ ((lacht)) ich sagte das ist jetzt so wie du jetzt gesprochen hast das ist 14 deutsch/ Steffi 1 You can tell another one about when I was 4 and you went with me to the police 2 station. Walter 3 Yes . . . in ’61 they built the wall and I thought to myself I’ll take a trip abroad and it was 4 only possible for myself, especially to the GDR, and you needed an exit visa. . . . And 5 she Steffi was 4 years old then and I went to the police station and took her with me. 6 And then I stood outside the police station and said to her ‘Steffi, as soon as we’re 7 inside, you can only speak Czech, you mustn’t speak German’. . . . And I asked ‘Do you 8 know when you’re speaking German?’ And she said ‘Yes, of course I know.’ I said 9 ‘Fine, then everything’s ok.’ Went inside, this old officer was sitting there at the table, I

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10 put her on my knee and then he began to take down in Czech my personal details and 11 so on. And then Steffi said ‘Dad, what actually is German?’ I said ‘It’s what you’ve 12 just spoken, that’s German.’

The more radical move of other Czech-Germans of that generation, like Milena’s mother (extract 6/19 above), was to speak only Czech with their children and make no reference to their German background (see also extract 6/15 above about the strategy of some Hungarian-Germans ‘protecting’ their children from ‘becoming’ Schwaben by not teaching them German dialect). Radek, for example, was born in Prague in 1974 and began to learn German only when he started university in 1992 (see also extract 6/3 above). Interviewed three years later, he said: Extract 6/24 Radek 1 mein vater hat mir erst vor drei jahren gesagt dass ich deutschstämmig bin weil er 2 wollte nicht dass ich die probleme habe/ weil er selbst konnte nicht z.b. an der 3 hochschule studieren weil er deutscher war/. . . mein großvater ist im konzentrationslager 4 gestorben aber als deutscher/ meine großmutter konnte hier bleiben und sie hasste die 5 deutschen/ Interviewer 6 war sie tschechin?/ Radek 7 nein auch deutsche/ und sie wollte nicht meinen vater deutsch zu lernen weil hier waren 8 schlechte bedingungen für leute und sie war nicht sicher wollte mein vater schon 9 emigrieren/. . . ich wohne in einem sehr kommunistischen dorf und mein vater hat vor 10 zehn jahren eine sehr schöne (xx) gebaut und da kamen viele anonyme briefe dass er 11 in hitler-jugend war aber er war 4 jahre alt nach dem weltkrieg/ 1 2 3 4

My father only told me 3 years ago that I am of German origin because he didn’t want me to have any problems. Because he himself wasn’t able to study at college, for example, because he was German. . . . My grandfather died in a concentration camp, but as a German. My grandmother was able to stay here and she hated the Germans.

Interviewer 5 Was she Czech? Radek 6 No, she was German too. And she didn’t want my father to learn German because 7 conditions were bad here for people and she wasn’t sure if my father might want to 8 emigrate. . . . I live in a very communist village and 10 years ago my father built a very 9 beautiful (xx), and then lots of anonymous letters arrived saying that he was in the 10 Hitler Youth, but he was 4 years old after the war.

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The use (or avoidance) of German in Radek’s family seems to be strongly associated with particular places and institutions. Being ‘German’ had debarred his father from studying at university and in order to protect his son from similar ‘problems’ he not only brought him up monolingually but even concealed his German ethnicity. Radek’s grandmother had also seen a threat in the possibility of her son (Radek’s father) learning German, but in this case apparently because it might have given him the opportunity to leave the country in search of a better life (presumably in the GDR). However, although the family stayed in Czechoslovakia, even their radical efforts at assimilatory denial of their Germanness appear not to have been sufficient to shield them, in their ‘very communist village’, from accusations of having a fascist past. In the more recent interviews, especially with younger informants, the iconic associations of German with the fascist past still appear but now more often in an attenuated form. Peter, for example, is in his late thirties and explains how he grew up in Pécs in southern Hungary, first as a monolingual German dialect speaker, before being required to learn Hungarian at kindergarten. Extract 6/25 Peter 1 also ich zuhause schwäbisch bis zum kindergarten habe ich nur deutsch gekannt 2 ((lacht)) also mundart und dann im kindergarten dadurch dass man im DAS WAR 3 NOCH DER KOMMUNISMUS ((lacht)) dass man da nicht deutsch sprechen durfte 4 obwohl alle kindergärtnerinnen ungarndeutsche waren aber offiziell durften sie das 5 nicht machen/ da habe ich in zwei wochen ungarisch gelernt ((lacht)) und bin nach 6 hause gekommen und habe gesagt reden wir ordentlich zu meinen eltern und großeltern 7 weil wir lebten zusammen und ordentlich hieß auf ungarisch/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

So at home I spoke Schwäbisch, until kindergarten I knew only German, I mean dialect, and then at kindergarten, because we were in – it was still during communism – because we weren’t allowed to speak German there, although all the teachers were Hungarian German, but officially they weren’t allowed to do that. And I learnt to speak Hungarian in two weeks and went home and said to my parents and grandparents, because we were living together, ‘we should speak properly’, and ‘properly’ meant in Hungarian.

His rather jocular manner, indicated by the frequent (self-)ironic laughter, and the straightforwardly explanatory (almost didactic) narrative mitigate the severity of the image constructed of the young child returning from his nursery school, where his teachers were all Ungarndeutsche, to his parents and grandparents, who habitually spoke German dialect in the home, and declaring that they should ‘speak properly’ (reden wir ordentlich), by which he meant not in standard German (a common enough occurrence even today in, say, rural southern Germany) but in Hungarian. The self-consciously

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‘quoted’ cliché ‘it was still during communism’ (das war noch der kommunismus) provides a formulaic historical rationalisation of the erasure of German from the classroom, and as we have seen earlier (extract 6/16 above), Peter concedes elsewhere in his narrative that linguistic assimilation is now widespread amongst the Hungarian German population, the use of German dialect in itself no longer solely indexical of German ethnicity. However, this episode reveals not a transformational moment in the life of his family, which remains bilingual, but a child’s first encounter with institutional mechanisms which position individuals and groups as conforming, or not, to prescribed and therefore legitimate behaviours, and through which identities (as ‘proper’ Hungarians or as marginal minorities) are imposed. Even when external constraints on language use within the family permit a significant degree of choice, other factors frequently intrude to restrict the actual room for manoeuvre, the degree of play. Accounts of language choice within families often reveal a process of negotiation that was fraught with tension and feelings of embarrassment and estrangement induced by differing levels of linguistic competence. Eszter, a young woman in her early twenties interviewed in Pécs in 1995, spent most of her pre-school years with her maternal grandparents, who at that time spoke only German dialect in the home; her mother is bilingual in German dialect and Hungarian, but her father speaks only Hungarian. Extract 6/26 Eszter 1 das führte zu komplikationen in der familie und deshalb hat sich meine mutter 2 entschlossen dass wir zu hause ungarisch lernen/. . . [Now speaks only Hungarian with 3 her mother] weil sie sich vor mir schämt seitdem ich die hochsprache lerne weil sie 4 einfach angst hat/ sie redet mich in der mundart an aber dann kann ich in der mundart 5 nicht mehr antworten und das stört sie dann wechselt sie sofort auf hochdeutsch/ sie 6 kann’s zwar sie versucht es aber sie bleibt nicht bei der mundart/ meine großeltern 7 sprechen jetzt auch untereinander nicht mehr die mundart weil eben die ungarische 8 sprache viel leichter ist für sie weil sie im öffentlichen leben nur die ungarische sprache 9 verwenden/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

That led to complications within the family and, therefore, my mother decided that we were to learn Hungarian at home. . . . [Now speaks only Hungarian with her mother] Because she has felt ashamed in front of me since I’ve learnt the standard language, because she is simply afraid. She talks to me in dialect but now I can no longer reply in dialect and that bothers her, then she changes straight away to High German. Although she can do it and gives it a go, she doesn’t stick with dialect. My grandparents, too, now no longer speak with each other in dialect because Hungarian is simply much easier for them because in public life they only use Hungarian.

The linguistic ecology of this extended family incorporates three varieties, but the choices individuals make are neither entirely random nor completely

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consistent. Eszter’s younger sister never spoke German dialect with her grandparents, but was now learning (standard) German. Extract 6/27 Eszter 1 sie bemüht sich jetzt weil sie eben nach deutschland will/ sie versteht zwar sehr viel 2 aber nicht weil meine großeltern mit ihr deutsch gesprochen haben sondern durch 3 fernsehen/ sie sieht sehr oft die satelliten-programme also das hat mit der minderheit 4 nichts mehr zu tun/ 1 2 3 4

She’s making an effort now that she wants to go to Germany. She does understand a lot, not because my grandparents spoke German with her though, but because of television. She watches the satellite channels quite a lot, so I mean that’s got nothing to do with the minority any more.

While Eszter’s own socialisation was coloured by linguistic patterns that she associates with a Hungarian German ethnicity, she positions her sister as a member of a different, transitional category of young Hungarians not learning local German dialect through traditional means of transmission within the family, but rather learning standard German through modern, non-local technologies. Her parents, too, now ‘want to learn German’ (i.e. standard German – her mother has always been a dialect speaker) and they are now encouraging her to use standard German with them. Extract 6/28 Eszter 1 ich werde angespornt deutsch zu sprechen auch mit meinen eltern weil sie eben deutsch 2 lernen möchten/ mein vater ist jetzt 50 jahre alt aber er beginnt jetzt so die deutsche 3 sprache zu lernen und er macht das wirklich streng/ 1 I am encouraged to speak German, even with my parents because they want to learn 2 German. My father is now 50 years old but he’s starting to learn German now, and he’s 3 being very rigorous about it.

Other consultants also show how different options have become available through the changing social and political conditions of the more recent past. Anna, for example, was born in Berlin in 1962 but moved to Prague as a baby. Her mother is German, her father (who had died before the interview) was Czech, and she had become accustomed to speaking Czech with her mother. By the mid-1990s though, in her early thirties, she had begun to speak German with her again. Extract 6/29 Anna 1 anlass dazu war eigentlich diese neue freundin die aus berlin stammt und dass ich 2 sozusagen wieder mehr zu meiner deutschen identität zurückgekehrt bin/ das hat mich 3 so beeinflusst dass ich jetzt mit meiner mutter auch fast ausschließlich deutsch spreche/

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1 What brought it about was actually this new friend from Berlin and the fact that I had, 2 as it were, returned more to my German identity again. That influenced me so much 3 that I now also speak almost exclusively in German with my mother.

She attributes her changed conversational practice to a particular new personal relationship with a woman from Berlin, which seems to have (re-) activated a dormant sense of Germanness that she conceptualises in spatial terms, as a ‘place’ where she had once been and to which she has now ‘returned’ (zurückgekehrt). Through this experience she reflexively repositions herself (see Moghaddam 1999) as someone with – amongst other forms of identification – a ‘German identity’, and adopting this position in turn permits (or even encourages) her to resume speaking German with her mother and thereby to restyle their relationship. After many years of living within an ‘assumed identity’ as a Czech-speaker, she is now able to negotiate alternatives for herself, and recalibrating the components of her linguistic repertoire is part of this process: for her, German is now upgraded as a valued variety – albeit not for instrumental purposes nor for local affective reasons related to the German minority, but primarily as a re-affirmation of a sense of self. Asserting the positive value of ties with the past is also often a motivation for policy decisions within families that take them in the opposite direction from those who sought shelter in assimilatory monolingualism. Elisabeth, for example, a lawyer from Pécs (see extracts 6/1 and 6/15 above), says she and her husband (who is also a German-speaker), both now in their mid-forties, decided to bring their children up bilingually. Extract 6/30 Elisabeth 1 und unsere kinder als sie zur welt gekommen sind haben wir gleich besprochen dass 2 wir möchten dass sie auch zweisprachig sind/ wir möchten diese ganze unser 3 geschichte nicht ver ver vergessen/ ich denke soviel bin ich meine großeltern schuldig 4 irgendwo/. . . und wenn sie manchmal sagen das ist zu schwer weil sie muss das auf eine 5 andere sprache lernen und das ist manchmal wirklich nicht leicht dann sage ich ihnen 6 immer sie sollen das nicht vergessen dass einmal meine urgroßmutter die sie auch 7 gekannt haben so gesprochen hat damals und zweitens dass das sehr wichtig ist 8 heutzutage überhaupt dass wir in die eu gekommen sind denke ich ist das überhaupt 9 wichtig solche sprachen zu kennen wo da in mitteleuropa leute sehr viele leute reden 10 und unsere vergangenheit. . . 1 2 3 4 5 6

And when our children were born, we talked immediately about how we wanted them to be bilingual too. We don’t want to forget our entire history. I think I owe that much to my grandparents, somehow. . . . And when they sometimes say it’s too difficult because they have to learn it in another language, and it really isn’t easy sometimes, then I always say to them that they should never forget that, firstly, my greatgrandmother, whom they, too, knew, used to speak like that in those days; and,

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7 secondly, that it’s very important these days, particularly as we’ve joined the EU, I 8 think that it’s generally important to know the sorts of languages that people in central 9 Europe, very many people speak, and our past. . .

In Elisabeth’s narrative, the pragmatic value of bilingualism for her children as citizens of an EU member state is emphatically acknowledged but is only of secondary importance. She identifies and legitimates her parental decision first on personal and moral grounds in terms of a debt owed to her grandparents, and only subsequently as a generalised responsibility towards her children. She recognises that this imposes a burden on her children but this is outweighed by her sense of bearing a duty to maintain a knowledge of German in the family as a means to secure continuity across the generations. At first, she expresses this desire as a somewhat unfocused wish ‘not to forget our history’ (unser [sic] geschichte nicht vergessen), but she then refines this by referring specifically to language and saying how she exhorted her children not to forget that her (she may mean their) great grandmother ‘used to speak like that in those days’ (so gesprochen hat damals). This non-specific reference to a ‘way of speaking’ rather than to a ‘language’ is also symptomatic of ambiguities and contradictions in our consultants’ individual discourses about language. The variety of German that Elisabeth’s children learned in school is of course the standard form, while the variety spoken by her great grandmother was the local traditional dialect. It is evident, therefore, that the children were not learning to speak the way their forebears ‘used to speak’. However, the apparent lack of coherence in her story can be understood (if not resolved) in the context of her internal struggle, earlier in the interview, to negotiate her own relationship with the linguistic varieties in her repertoire. Extract 6/31 Elisabeth 1 normalerweise wäre meine muttersprache ich denke die deutsche sprache/ schwäbische 2 sprache gibt’s nicht als sprache also muss es die deutsche sprache sein/ weil es ist ganz 3 interessant das haben sie oft von mir gefragt in meinem leben schon als kind her wie ist 4 welche ist deine muttersprache?/ ich eh bis fünf jahre konnte ich nicht ungarisch ich bin 5 in ungarn gelebt aber ich konnte nicht ungarisch/. . . dann haben sie gefragt welche habe 6 ich am ersten gesprochen/ am ersten habe ich schwäbisch gesprochen also ist meine 7 muttersprache deutsch/ 1 2 3 4 5 6

Normally my mother tongue would be, I think, German. There’s no such language as Schwäbisch so it must be German. Because it’s very interesting, I have often been asked throughout my life, since childhood, what is, which is my mother tongue? Until the age of 5 I couldn’t speak Hungarian, I lived in Hungary but couldn’t speak Hungarian. . . . Then I was asked which one I spoke first. First I spoke Schwäbisch, therefore my mother tongue is German.

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Like Peter (see above), Elisabeth grew up monolingual in her local German dialect until she went to kindergarten. But when confronted with the need to categorise the components of her linguistic repertoire, she wrestles with uncomfortable terminology. Her discussion in the interview has a symmetrical pattern, suggesting that this ‘struggle’ is something she has encountered before: the same assertion marks the beginning and end, encompassing a narrative episode in which she recounts how the recurring question ‘what is your mother tongue?’ has been a motif running through her life. It is not clear who posed the question, but it evidently constituted a challenge to her that required her to conduct an internal interrogation. The term ‘mother tongue’ is a notoriously intransigent concept (see, for example, Mills 2004, and section 6.5 below), but this is only one part of her difficulty. A more fundamental problem for her lies in determining which linguistic varieties can be accorded the status of ‘a language’ (see again Chapter 2). She seems to have internalised the ideology that only certain varieties meet the criteria required for ‘language’ status, although she does not articulate what these might be. At all events, Schwäbisch is ‘what she spoke first’, the way she spoke as a young child, but it is not ‘a language’. However, she does see this variety in a dependent relationship with ‘the German language’, because she is able to conclude that ‘first I spoke Schwäbisch, therefore my mother tongue is German’ (am ersten habe ich schwäbisch gesprochen also ist meine muttersprache deutsch). Elisabeth’s story shows both how relationships with particular linguistic varieties form a key element in individuals’ negotiations of their social identities and how strongly some people seek to take advantage of options that previous generations felt they had to deny themselves (contrast Elisabeth’s representation of her own position with that of the ‘older people’ she refers to in extract 6/15 above). This will be the focus of the next section.

6.5 Agency, time and place To differing and variable extents the habitat of all our consultants has always been multilingual in the sense of being characterised for much if not all of their lives by the (potential) contact or encounter between language varieties. Many of those in the middle generation began their lives monolingual in a local German dialect, their early socialisation in many cases involving extensive close contact with grandparents, who often remained monolingual, acquiring little if any knowledge of Hungarian or Czech. János’s and Walter’s families are typical in this respect. Extract 6/32 János 1 also meine großeltern wohnten mit uns in einem haushalt und eh die großeltern also 2 meine zwei großmütter die haben mit mir immer nur deutsch gesprochen/

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1 Well, my grandparents lived with us at home, and my grandparents, I mean my two 2 grandmothers, they always spoke to me only in German. Extract 6/33 Walter 1 meine frau war lehrerin in einer musikschule . . . also die hat bis abends um sieben 2 unterrichtet ja?/. . . und ich war damals auch oft unterwegs dienstlich/ und da ist es also 3 so gewesen dass sie [Steffi, his daughter] mehr natürlich bei der oma war als bei uns zu 4 hause/ und deswegen gings auch gar nicht anders als wie deutsch mit ihr zu 5 sprechen/. . . meine mutter hat sich sehr darum bemüht die hatte stoßweise hatte sie 6 lehrbücher der tschechischen sprache und hats aber nicht behalten hat nur gelernt also 7 dreißig vierzig jahre nur gelernt bis sie starb und ihre tschechischkenntnisse waren 8 gleich null/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

My wife was a teacher in a music school . . . so she taught until 7 in the evening, you see? . . . And back then I was also often away on business. And so basically the situation was that she [Steffi, his daughter] was with her grandma more than she was at home with us. And so there was no alternative but to speak German with her. . . . My mother tried really hard, she had piles of textbooks on the Czech language but she didn’t keep it in her head. She just kept on learning it, 30, 40 years of just learning it until she died and her knowledge of Czech was precisely zero.

But even in linguistically more or less homogeneous ‘German’ villages or districts, there was an awareness of other language forms as constitutive elements of the linguistic environment. Andreas, for example, talks of his childhood in a ‘German’ village in Hungary. Extract 6/34 Andreas 1 das dorf und die nachbarortschaften waren ja kann man sagen geschlossen deutsch/ hier 2 und da gab es ein paar andere familien vor allem dann nicht ungarn sondern so wie das 3 dorf x aus dem meine urgroßeltern stammen dort lebten kroaten und deutsche . . . und in 4 den gemischten ortschaften war es sitte und brauch dass man die sprache des anderen 5 auch gesprochen hat/ also meine urgroßmutter die hat auch kroatisch gesprochen und 6 wenn sie kroatinnen oder kroaten getroffen hat dann war es höflich dass man einen satz 7 oder einen teil des gesprächs auf kroatisch und dann hat man gewechselt auf deutsch 8 oder auf die mundart und man hat so kommuniziert und das gehörte zur höflichkeit/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The village and the surrounding areas were, you could say, solidly German. There were a few other families here and there, but then not Hungarians, but rather like in village X, where my great-grandparents came from, there were Croats and Germans . . . and in the mixed villages it was traditional to speak the other people’s language too. So, my great-grandmother also spoke Croatian, and whenever she met Croatians it was polite to say a sentence or a part of the conversation in Croatian and then they switched to German or dialect, and that was how people communicated, it was a sign of politeness.

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This memory of a socially harmonious past, which the speaker may well not have witnessed directly, may be an example of what Carli et al. (2003: 874–5) refer to as the recurring myth of the ‘old multilingual generation’ which older speakers themselves contradict, but they concede that a knowledge of other languages sufficient for simple phatic exchanges such as those described here was common. Where individual and group linguistic repertoires encompassed more than one language variety, the extent to which language choice was available as a real option was also very variable, since, as we have seen, it was often highly constrained by particular social and political conditions. However, we are not concerned here with a description of the intricacies of linguistic practices of code choice or switching, complex and sociolinguistically revealing though these may be. As Woolard (1998: 18) argues, the mere use of language in particular ways is not sufficient to generate and sustain social groups and identities; it must be mediated through ideological interpretations to achieve an enduring purchase on the consciousness of individuals as a basis for group identification. Rather than observing language use, therefore, we have been listening to talk about language, to the representation of language choice in biographical accounts. Why do people make this a salient issue, how do they embed it into their life stories, what indexical value can be attributed to it? To what extent and in what way are language choices represented as political actions that can be understood only through ways in which relationships between linguistic varieties are politicised and (re)contextualised in particular times and places? And how far are choices made under conditions over which people feel they have little or no control, how far are they represented as a means of preserving or wresting some measure of control over people’s own lives? In this section, therefore, we return to a topic that we have touched on in previous sections and focus on it here in more detail: the notion of agency in relation to language choice, time and place in the creation of spaces within which social identities can be sustained and nurtured. Key to this analysis is a concept that occurs in almost every interview, the concept of Muttersprache (both in the sense of ‘language of the mother [and grandmother]’ and as a synonym for the traditional local dialect), which is central to a discourse of ‘mothering’ (see Mills 2004), frequently articulated in biographical accounts as a local-level politics of linguistic management, and echoed in contemporary policy discourses on cultural maintenance. Robert, for example, has been closely involved for many years in cultural and representative organisations of Ungarndeutschen and actively promotes ‘educational’ visits of ungarndeutsch girls to Germany not simply to enhance their linguistic skills but to develop their potential for cultural renewal and their preparation as ‘future ungarndeutsch mothers’. Extract 6/35 Robert 1 da haben wir eine große aktion gemacht bis zum heutigen tage/ . . . haben wir ein au2 pair mädchen system gemacht dass junge ungarndeutsche abiturientinnen für ein halbes

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3 4 5 6 7 8

jahr mal nach deutschland gegangen sind/ . . . nicht nur dass sie ihre deutsch[kenntnisse] besser eh weiter vervollkommnen sondern die zukünftigen mütter ungarndeutsch werden ein neues lebensmodell neues familienmodell ganz andere gesellschaftliche gepflogenheiten kennenzulernen wie wenn sie nach hause gekommen/ also wie gesagt noch mal muss ichs betonen als zukünftige mütter sicherlich in der familie und für ihre familie bestellt sein werden die zu verwirklichen/

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

We came up with an initiative that’s still going on . . . we set up an au pair scheme in which young ungarndeutsch college students spent 6 months in Germany . . . not only so that they could continue to perfect their [knowledge of] German, but also so that future ungarndeutsch mothers become familiar with a new model for life and for the family, with totally different social customs for when they go home. Like I said, again I must emphasise this, so that as future mothers they will be in a position to put these into practice in the family and for their family.

As we pointed out in Chapter 5 (p. 156) and earlier in this chapter, the notion of mother tongue is a highly problematic and contested concept but its frequent occurrence in individual biographies suggests it has a salience and a priority in people’s life stories that demands our attention. This is supported by the findings of Carli et al. (2003), whose research in the same region also revealed both a strong orientation towards the concept and a belief in grandmothers, in particular, as the holders of this cultural legacy. As we have seen in the previous section, Elisabeth invokes a sense of duty and family loyalty owed to the commitment of her grandmother, a common topos in the discourses of middle-generation parents, and the view was frequently expressed that where a knowledge of the dialect has survived in families this is due overwhelmingly to the persistence of mothers and grandmothers. Before, during and immediately after the Second World War, the Muttersprache – understood as the dialect, the heritage language of the ethnic German populations – became an iconic marker of politically unreliable individuals and groups, especially in the Czech Republic, and for many the retreat from this display of apparent disloyalty into the less conspicuous anonymity offered by linguistic conformity was an obvious choice. Like the older people who Elisabeth says sought to protect their children and grandchildren from acquiring a dangerous ethnicity as Schwaben by shielding them from contact with the dialect (see extract 6/15 above), Lenka (now in her seventies and living in Plzeň) tells of the intervention of her Germanspeaking grandmother to instruct her to learn Czech in response to external imperatives after the German occupation of Czechoslavakia in 1938, but for a different reason. Extract 6/36 Lenka 1 ich bin in einer deutschen familie geboren also mein vater war eh arzt . . . und meine 2 mutter die ist auch vom dorf gewesen und die war jüdin/ und bis zum jahre 38 hab ich

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kein also 30 bin ich geboren bis zum jahr 38 konnte ich kein wort tschechisch/ und dann musste aber meine mutter als jüdin weil dann der hitler kam mussten sie weg sie und ihre eltern/ ihre eltern waren ihre mutter war tschechin aber hat deutsch gesprochen natürlich als juden haben ja alle deutsch gekannt ja?/ und war aber tschechin und mein opa der konnte gar kein tschechisch nie und die mussten dann weg und mich haben sie mitgenommen/ jetzt kam ich nach x und musste dort an die schule meine oma hat gesagt jetzt lernst du tschechisch/

1 I was born in a German family, my father was a doctor . . . and my mother was also from 2 the village and she was Jewish. And up until 1938, I was born in 1930, and up until 3 1938 I couldn’t speak a word of Czech. But then as a Jew my mother had to, because 4 then Hitler came, she had to leave, she and her parents. Her parents were, her mother 5 was Czech but of course spoke German, as Jews all of them of course knew German, 6 didn’t they? But she was Czech and my grandpa couldn’t speak any Czech, never, and 7 they then had to leave and took me with them. Then I arrived at X and had to go to the 8 school there. My grandma said ‘now you’re going to learn Czech’.

In this part of her story, Lenka positions her German father – who was forced to divorce her mother during the fascist regime, then remarried and moved to Germany after the war – in relation to his occupation as a doctor, while her mother is positioned in terms of her ethnicity as a Jew. It is her mother’s family’s Jewishness that forces them to leave their village and move to the town X, but the family language, German, is associated with their Jewishness and therefore continues to make them conspicuous and vulnerable, so her grandmother directs her to learn Czech. In this case, therefore, the German-speaking, Czech, Jewish grandmother strategically terminates her granddaughter’s monolingual socialisation as a German speaker and makes her adapt linguistically to the majority Czech population. Learning Czech for her at that time was not about being Czech so much as about not being (‘heard’ to be) Jewish. In the post-war years, however, when the Muttersprache came under pressure in both countries from the state-centred ideology of linguistic homogeneity, to which many succumbed (see, for example, extracts 6/19 and 6/24 above), some members of the older generation, especially grandmothers, are represented as playing a key role in its restoration or maintenance. Lenka’s grandparents and her mother, for example, had been sent to concentration camps, but her mother survived and was reunited with Lenka; although they could have migrated to Germany after the war, they stayed in Czechoslovakia but resumed their relationship exclusively in German. However, where German was maintained or revived, it remained, in the early post-war years at least, largely a private language. Many individuals make the explicit contrast between the home or the (often extended) family and the ‘outside world’, or as István puts it ‘normal life’ (das normale Leben), at that time.

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Extract 6/37 István 1 ich bin eigentlich von meinen großeltern erzogen worden und die haben nicht ungarisch 2 gesprochen/ also ich bin so in einer familie sozusagen einsprachig aufgewachsen in der 3 FAMILIE einsprachig natürlich nicht im umfeld weil in der schule kindergarten schule 4 also das normale leben sozusagen das war ungarischsprachig/ 1 2 3 4

I was actually brought up by my grandparents and they didn’t speak Hungarian. So, I grew up like this in a family, as it were, monolingual, monolingual in the family, not in the surrounding area of course because in school, kindergarten, school, I mean in normal life, so to speak, that was Hungarian-speaking.

The distinction at this time between private and public domains created separate spaces in which different linguistic regimes applied and in which different social identities were enacted. In some cases, as with Walter’s story about the visa application (see extract 6/23 above), this distinction is explicitly politicised. Markéta, for example, a librarian in X in the Czech Republic, (re)constructs a discourse world in which an unregulated and potentially subversive private domain is distinguished emphatically from the normative environment ‘outside’ (draußen). Extract 6/38 Markéta 1 im jahre 76 glaube ich kam die entscheidung von der parteizentrale hier von der 2 bezirksparteileitung dass hier das studium der deutschen sprache an der pädagogischen 3 fakultät eingestellt werden muss weil sowieso HIER in DIESER gegend jeder deutsch 4 aus dem grunde studiert oder lernt um das deutsche fernsehen zu verfolgen . . . wirklich/ 5 ((lacht)) wir waren hier bis zur stadt x in einem gebiet wo wir ohne weiteres also ard 6 und zdf empfangen konnten und ich selbst lebte damals in der damaligen zeit ganz 7 schizophrenisch ja/ zu hause wusste ich oder war nur also ((lacht)) deutsches fernsehen 8 und draußen lebte ich in diesem sozialistischen milieu und dann wieder zurück/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

In 1976, I think it was, the party headquarters here, the regional party administration, decided that German language studies at the faculty of education had to cease because everyone here in the region only studied or learnt German in order to follow German television . . . really! In this region, as far as city X, we could easily pick up ARD and ZDF [West German TV channels] and I myself lived then, at that time, like a schizophrenic, you know? At home I knew, or there was only German television, and outside I lived in this socialist world and then back again.

The surreptitious watching of West German3 television was a common practice in the states bordering the Federal Republic (including the GDR). While she acknowledges that it was commonplace to be able to access these West German channels, Markéta goes on to say that this created a context in which, for a very particular period in the past – ‘then, at that time’ (damals, in der damaligen Zeit) – her life was categorically divided between two

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incompatible worlds. She shuttled or commuted back and forth between the world of German television at home and the socialist world outside, a representation in which ‘German’ is invested with political substance through the opposition with ‘socialist’. Similarly, the use or avoidance of the Muttersprache in relation to clearly specified places defines spaces of (inter)action. Herbert, for example, a seventy-five-year-old man living in Plzeň, is bilingual in Czech and German, as are his wife and son, but his mother spoke only German, which resulted in a very clearly circumscribed local regime. Extract 6/39 Herbert 1 die oma konnte leider kein tschechisch und . . . bei uns hat man auch die ganzen 40 2 jahre in haus nummer 119 hat man die ganzen 40 jahre der totalität kein einziges wort 3 tschechisch gesprochen im familienkreis/ 1 Unfortunately, my grandma couldn’t speak any Czech and . . . at home, for the whole 2 40 years, at house number 119 for the whole 40 years of the totalitarian period not 3 a single word of Czech was spoken within the family.

The exclusive use of German in Herbert’s family is initially attributed to the grandmother’s lack of knowledge of Czech, but since the other family members did speak Czech the avoidance of the state language takes on an additional dimension: the categorical exclusion of Czech not simply from the family group but specifically from ‘house number 119’ for the duration of the ‘totalitarian period’ transforms a pragmatic practice into a political act of small-scale defiance and the family home into a monument of resistance in which a strictly local linguistic regime is installed. The act of defiance and the location are given prominence in Herbert’s story by the impersonal passive construction of its representation (‘not a single word of Czech was spoken’, man hat kein einziges wort tschechisch gesprochen). Johanna begins her narrative with a similarly impersonal account that generalises the experiences of her family’s past before moving to a more personal position. Extract 6/40 Johanna 1 also früher kurz nach dem krieg oder in den fünfziger jahren oder in den sechzigern 2 gabs eine deutschfeindlichkeit/ das spürte man immer man wurde verspottet und 3 gehasst und man konnte sich kaum wehren dagegen aber es hat sich mit den zeiten sehr 4 sehr geändert und heutzutage ist also hier in der stadt fühle ich immer eine sehr 5 deutschfreundliche atmosphäre man wird geachtet dass man deutsch gut kann/ 1 Well, earlier, shortly after the war or in the ’50s or ’60s, there was hostility towards 2 Germans. You always felt it, you were mocked and hated and you couldn’t really fight 3 against it, but things changed drastically over time and nowadays I always sense, well,

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Language and Social Change in Central Europe 4 here in the city, a very German-friendly atmosphere. You are respected for speaking 5 German well.

Johanna draws a sharp contrast between past and present, which is reinforced by grammatical shifts, from passive and impersonal forms (the nominal expression ‘there was hostility’, [es gab] eine Deutschfeindlichkeit; the impersonal pronoun ‘you’, man; passive verbs) to the active construction in the first person (‘I sense’, ich fühle) and a use of ‘you’ (man) that now appears to have personal reference (to her own ability to speak German well). But later in her interview, Johanna tells a story about her mother which reinforces the image of the beleaguered isolation of German-speaking families in her childhood but contradicts the previous account of passivity in the face of hostility by constructing a dynamic picture of her mother’s public and private actions that sets them apart from other such families. She says that her siblings had grown up monolingual in German (dialect) in their ‘German village community’, but that she was born after the mass deportations in the late 1940s when the communicative environment was radically transformed. Extract 6/41 Johanna 1 ich hatte eine sehr mutige and sehr vernünftige sehr kluge mutter/ die leute die dachten 2 immer das ist verboten oder sie schämten sich oder die meisten sprachen mit ihren 3 kindern ungarisch obwohl sie gar nicht ungarisch richtig konnten weil sie die zukunft 4 ihrer kinder nicht verbauen wollten/ das war der wichtigste grund nach der vertreibung 5 vertreibung gabs 46 48 hier in der umgebung/ MEINE mutter sagte immer wenn ich tür 6 und fenster zumache da regiere ICH da hat KEINER das wort da hab ICH das wort und 7 hier wird deutsch gesprochen und wenns draußen geht kanns ungarisch natürlich/. . . in 8 UNSEREM dorf waren wir die einzige familie die unter sich also in der familie NUR 9 mit der deutschen sprache bedient hat ich weiß keine andere und wie gesagt es war so 10 klug und mutig von meiner mutter/ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

My mother was very brave, very level-headed and very clever. The [other] people always thought that’s not allowed, or they were ashamed, or most of them spoke Hungarian with their children, although they couldn’t speak proper Hungarian at all, because they didn’t want to spoil their children’s future. That was the most important reason after the expulsion, there were expulsions here in the surrounding areas in ’46 and ’48. My mother always used to say ‘when I shut the door and the window then I am in charge, nobody else, I say what goes and here we speak German, and outside, of course, it can be Hungarian’. . . . In our village we were the only family that managed to only speak German amongst ourselves, that is within the family, I don’t know of any others and, as I said, it was so brave and clever of my mother.

Here Johanna concedes that most ungarndeutsch families in her area abandoned the German language after the war and earlier in her interview she acknowledges that most children from these families now bring little, if any,

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knowledge of it with them into school. But as a primary school teacher of German over many years, and with a commitment to the cultural reproduction of the local ungarndeutsch community, Johanna attaches a moral value to the maintenance of her mother’s tongue. She frames her story with an image of her ‘brave and clever mother’, who not only insists on having the sole right to speak in the private world of her home but is also alone in being given the floor in the story. The more docile majority of ungarndeutsch families, who acquiesced in their marginalisation, are represented anonymously as ‘the [other] people’ (die Leute), to whom particular motives are attributed indirectly: ‘they were ashamed’ (sie schämten sich), ‘they didn’t want to spoil their children’s future’ (sie wollten die zukunft ihrer kinder nicht verbauen). By ‘quoting’ the words of her mother, however, Johanna embeds her mother’s voice in her narrative, ‘laminating’ (Gal 2005: 29) the emotional, affective tone or ‘key’ of the past event and time onto the here and now of the reflective interview and thereby bringing us right up close to the enduring moral strength of her mother, which is lifted away from the distant defeatism of the ‘others’. In these categorical contrasts between public and private behaviours we see most clearly the force of Irvine and Gal’s three semiotic processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity and erasure (see Chapter 2). The iconisation of the German language (specifically of the local dialect) as the linguistic variety that carries both the legacy of Hungarian-Germans’ cultural continuity and the heavy freight of past conflicts, projected onto the post-war past in the present time of an individual narrative, makes it an object of contention, simultaneously a source of pride and of loathing. This gives rise to a ‘language ideology of differentiation’ (Gal 2005: 24) whose effects recur at different levels, from the relationship between dominant and minority languages and their speakers to the relationships between members of the minority group: in this case, between those with the moral courage to assert their right to declare their private space is sacrosanct and exempt from the normative pressures and sanctions of the dominant social group and those who – as Johanna sees it – lack this moral courage and collude in the erasure of their own cultural heritage. Even her family, in turn, accepts a strict distinction between public and private, which concedes legitimacy in the outside world of interaction to the state’s monolingual ideology and erases the disfavoured linguistic variety from this sphere. But it does so in a way that invests the language of the private, domestic world with a particular, enhanced quality of moral worth, and at the same time the use of this private language endows the home with a sense of sanctuary.

6.6 Conclusions Our aim in this chapter was to explore ways in which individual relationships with language are affected by the experience of living through periods of

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social and political transformation and how these changing relationships are articulated in personal language biographies as discourses on group identities and belonging. Central to our attempts to understand these effects were the discursive processes of categorisation and contextualisation. We argued that despite their social and geographical dislocation and their demographic fragmentation, German minorities in Hungary and the Czech Republic can be considered to cohere, at least to some extent, as communities of memory on the basis of recurrent themes and topoi in their narratives relating to language and ethnicity. These recurring ideas are anchored in a small set of social and linguistic categories, but these categories are invoked and contextualised in complex, frequently ambivalent and sometimes contradictory ways when they are used by individuals to position themselves and others. Our analysis accords with Gal’s claim that relationships between language varieties have been recontextualised twice in the lifetimes of the oldest inhabitants of this region, but this argument needs to be relativised in the light of our discussion. Gal (1993, 1995) interprets the shift in the position of German as a change from a marker of ethnicity across the region before the Second World War to an expression first of resistance to the symbolic domination of ‘national’ languages of individual states after 1945, and then of wider cultural identification with the ‘German-speaking world’ following the 1989 Wende. There is evidence in our language biographies that supports this thesis, but we also need to recognise both the changing indexicality of different varieties of German – as Gal (2006), for example, acknowledges – and the fact that ideas about language are embedded not only in particular cultural discourses but also in the intricate web of individual circumstances. Furthermore, we have to take account of the availability of different options in terms of category selections and identification opportunities at particular times and in particular places, within the overall constellation of social, cultural and political forces that shape the communicative environment or habitat. So while, on the one hand, traditional German dialects were subject to iconisation in the communist period, especially in the earlier years, as emblems of political unreliability, they also became indexical amongst the German populations themselves both of valued cultural traditions in jeopardy and of a no longer desirable or sustainable way of life. On the other hand, standard German took over the heritage function of the dwindling dialects but also came to acquire increased transcultural capital as a resource potentially available to all Czechs and Hungarians (not only the German minorities) in the broader regional economy of the new European space. As we have seen in Chapter 4, there is overwhelming evidence that the linguistic assimilation of German minorities both in Hungary and in the Czech Republic is well advanced. However, the life stories of those German speakers that we have discussed here suggest that the homogenising representation of long-term language shift as a consistent and linear process is misleading, since it erases individual agency and neglects the uneven process of change

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across time. It also emphasises the functional role of linguistic varieties in individual and collective speech repertoires, disregarding the importance of ideas about, and memories of, language as a source of identification in the formation or telling of a life.

Notes 1. This refers to German classes intended primarily for children from ethnic German families and including lessons in German language but also on the history of the minority, folk customs and so forth. 2. The original uses a word for eating (fressen) that is normally used for animal subjects or colloquially for human subjects with a derogatory connotation. 3. We use West German, rather than west German, here, as we are referring to institutions within the pre-1990 Federal Republic.

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‘States draw boundaries in sand, but people make their boundaries with talk.’ (Lefkowitz 2004: 272) To understand ‘what language achieves in people’s lives’ (Blommaert 2003: 608), we need to understand the historical conditions that create the limits of what it is possible for language to achieve. This means, first, determining the sets of beliefs and values associated with particular languages and language varieties in the discourses prevailing in given societies at given times: what we have been referring to through the now established conception of language ideologies; second, identifying how these ideologies influence discourses on language policy, which not only generate specific policies but also contribute to what Townson (1992) calls the ‘communicative environment’ (that is, the scope of what can be talked about and how it can be said); and third, exploring ways in which these ideologies penetrate and permeate wider discourses on language in the social life of communities and individuals by listening to the life stories of people for whom experiences with language represent a means of signifying their ‘life worlds’ and of establishing options for identifying with others. Finally, it is the interconnectedness of these dimensions that allows us to see the reciprocal relationship between language and social change. Our aim in this book has been to investigate this relationship in the context of central Europe by identifying the different dimensions of language ideological work, past and present, that have fed into contemporary discourses on language. We have tried to trace the trajectory of political discourses on language in this region, focusing on the German language and its relations with other languages (past and present), to examine how policy discourses are articulated and translated (or not) across different levels of political action (European, cross-national, national), and to understand how people who have lived through periods of radical social change orientate their sense of self, and negotiate their social identities, around encounters with the strictures and constraints of language policy, experienced both directly (for example, in the form of normative and prescriptive educational models) and indirectly (for

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example, through confrontations with ideological currents that index particular language forms as signs of desirable or undesirable social categories). The link between dominant language ideologies, the policies that derive from them and the practices of individuals and social groups may sometimes seem transparent. The nineteenth-century ideology of linguistic nationalism, that was forged in eastern central Europe in part through opposition to the dominance of German (see Chapter 3), was sustained in the Cold War period, although now Czech and Hungarian, for example, were reconceptualised as ‘state’ rather than ‘national’ languages, in line with a more general shift from ethnic towards social homogeneism: from a conception of the people as ethnos to the people as demos (see Sandford 2000: 31 on the reverse process in the GDR during the Wende). The denigration of German after 1945 as directly indexical of state fascism, an idiom in whose materiality Hungarians and Czechs could hear and see the oppression, brutality and injustice of the recent past, motivated policies of social exclusion and linguistic erasure, which in turn led members of the minority populations into self-censorship and withdrawal into the safety of assimilation into a monolingual world, in which they were no longer seen or heard as ‘other’. This simple account explains in a generalised way the dramatic shift from German to Hungarian and Czech and the ‘lost generation’ of ethnic Germans who grew up in the Cold War period either genuinely monolingual in the official state language or with little more than receptive competence in the language of their heritage. In this sense, the interconnectedness of sociolinguistic phenomena, of discourses on language and individual linguistic practices, reveals itself as a powerful mechanism of social change. Yet this broad picture tells only part of the story of language contact and social change in central Europe over the last sixty years. The initial convulsions of the post-war years that resulted in the mass deportations of Germans and the internal dispersal and social marginalisation of those who remained gradually gave way to less draconian measures, and the indexicality of the German language became (or reverted to being) more ambivalent. Local speech forms, redolent of different cultural traditions and claims to a particular sense of place, might be considered to index political unreliability and social separation. But in its standard variety the historical resonance of German was mitigated by its contemporary association with important neighbours in Austria and the two German states, which offered access to a wider sphere of influence. Moreover, in the case of Hungary, the national interest in terms of optimising the conditions of Hungarian minorities in neighbouring states encouraged more permissive and supportive policies towards its own national and ethnic minorities, including the German one. At the same time, deep-seated anxieties persisted amongst the German population and the fear of repercussions made many people reluctant to position themselves as German, and so maintaining a place for the German language even in the private sphere of family life required both determination and

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considerable effort. The relationship between policy and practice is thus complex and mediated not only by awareness of sanctions and benefits but also by the circulation of (often competing) ideologies of language. A further complicating factor in this relationship is the multi-dimensional nature, or layering, of language policy and its inconsistency. Discourses on language policy in Europe are characterised by ambiguity and contradiction. There is, for example, a conflict between EU strategies promoting diversity and pluralism and the domestic policies of many member states, which sustain ideologies of linguistic nationalism under the guise of purportedly progressive discourses on integration and social cohesion, through the privileging of ‘national’ languages, and the marginalisation of other languages, in discourses on migration and citizenship. But in terms of foreign cultural policy, the European agenda that focuses on multilingualism (however vaguely defined this may be: see Studer et al. 2008 and our discussion in Chapter 4) creates a context that has enabled the German government and its cultural agencies to promote the German language abroad not primarily in the narrow national interest but at least ostensibly as a contribution to the achievement of the broader aims and aspirations of the European strategies on multilingual citizenship. At the same time, states such as Hungary and the Czech Republic have been subject to more stringent scrutiny than ‘old’ member states with regard to their policies on national and ethnic minorities and their languages, which (at least in principle) has offered benefits to the German minority populations in these states. Policy discourses on the German language tend to erase internal distinctions between standard and non-standard varieties by referring elliptically to the learning and use of ‘German’, but the combined effect of German (and to a lesser extent Austrian) foreign policy and of Hungarian and Czech domestic cultural and educational policy has been to revive the learning of standard German as a foreign language. German as a minority or heritage language figures only marginally in German foreign cultural policy discourses, as an important trace of past cultural influence but also as an element of a contemporary rationale for learning (standard) German. And while educational policy in Hungary (and less overtly in the Czech Republic) distinguishes between German as a foreign language and as the language of an indigenous national minority, the object of study in both cases is exclusively the standard variety. Since the education system is now the only means for transmitting the language within the German minority groups, this in turn has resulted in adjustments in the discourses of minority representative organisations, which now concede the displacement of the traditional ‘ways of speaking’ (the ‘mother tongue’, or localised traditional dialects) by the non-territorial standard variety as the sole means of reproducing the minority population as a ‘language community’. Thus, although both recent policies and the discourses surrounding them have created a more favourable climate for languages other than the official

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state languages and accorded a place to national and ethnic minority cultural traditions within the cultural history of the state, the German minorities have been repositioned by the shift in their source of linguistic legitimation from traditional speech forms to the standard German of the education systems. This in turn increases both the accessibility and the desirability of the language to the wider, non-German population, for whom it may represent a form of transcultural capital rather than a resource for identification or for securing affective bonds with, or membership of, a historical ethnocultural ‘community’. The market for foreign language learning is driven by commerce and tourism on the one hand and international educational and occupational opportunities on the other. The demand for German in this linguistic market derives from the complex interaction, amongst the population as a whole, of economic, political and cultural processes: for example, the liberalisation of commercial markets, the free movement of people across state boundaries and the virtually unlimited access to cultural exchange and consumption through new communication technologies. In this way, the German language has regained some of the currency it had lost in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the communist period, but it has not occupied a place in the public sphere in the sense of acquiring a substantial public presence – eine Öffentlichkeit – let alone the kind of role it enjoyed in the nineteenth century as a regional lingua franca. The elision of German in public discourses as the disfavoured language of a marginalised minority population led to its retreat into a kind of sociolinguistic limbo in the Cold War period from which it then tentatively emerged, blinking in the different light of the changed communicative environment. The language had not entirely vanished but remained in suspended animation within the German populations as it became relegated to a lower position in individual linguistic repertoires and restricted to more limited social and communicative functions. Its submersion over forty years was too protracted for it to be re-vitalised as a primary community language by a more permissive and dynamic linguistic regime. However, its contemporary relevance for members of those social groups in whose lived histories the German language has played a part lies not solely in the possibilities it may offer for social mobility and occupational advancement but also – and in some ways more importantly – in the opportunity it presents as a key to an understanding of the contribution language makes to the formation of a sense of self and of belonging. In this sense, it is not so much its present uses and functions that count as what it represents as a resource in the composition of narratives that link the present with the past. The life stories we have gathered show how reflections on experiences with language under particular historical conditions may be used to organise or arrange ideas about what constitute the self, in this case a bilingual self that by virtue of this linguistic capacity has participated in processes of social change in a different way from monoglot individuals (Chapter 5). This is

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apparent not only in what the narrators say about the past but also in the way they use references to language experiences to construct temporal and spatial frames to create coherence in and give shape to their ‘lives’. A key feature of this narrative strategy is the separation within individual ‘life worlds’ of public and private domains and of local and non-local contexts, the distinction between conformity with the state language ideology and an affirmation of belonging that may extend beyond language practices in the past to the invocation of traditional speech forms as an index of even deeper affinities with cultural practices of domesticity and privacy (as in Peter’s self-reflexive question ‘wie soge mer des dahamm?’, ‘how do we say that back home?’). What language has achieved in these people’s lives cannot, however, be reduced to a common formula, in spite of their exposure to shared social conditions and the same language-ideological environment. We see certain patterns emerging, such as ways of representing and compensating for loss, but we also see a complex blending of external conditions, pressures and constraints with individual trajectories, assumptions and expectations. At the same time, individual struggles to create a sense of self also entail endeavours to position this self in such a way that it is not isolated from others in a social void. The telling of a personal story therefore also provides an opportunity to negotiate through talk a stance that situates the narrator in relation to others (see Lefkowitz 2004: 264, Jaffe 2009, and our discussion in Chapter 6). The representation of others with whom you wish to associate or align yourself – or from whom you wish to dissociate yourself – through recourse to social categories in which particular linguistic practices are implicated turns out to be a potent means of achieving this. It is also an opportunity to establish your own part in this process of representation: the extent to which you see the social identities around which you orientate your account of your life as your own choice or as assigned to you by an external authority. The sociolinguistic history of German-speakers in this region is a special case of language contact, and we hope to have made a contribution to this particular question, but by focusing on methodological and conceptual issues we hope also to have indicated possibilities for the analysis of the politics of language in other contexts. Our conceptualisation of discourses on language in social life as encompassing questions of language policy, linguistic practices and language memories is our way of trying to make sense of the complex interaction between phenomena that occur on different levels of social action. In particular, we have been concerned with the embedding of individual experience in broader social processes and with ways of accounting for the relationship between these different dimensions that go beyond an understanding of social and political conditions as a kind of disconnected, two-dimensional backdrop to individual action. Both the seismic shifts in the political economy of central Europe in the latter part of the twentieth century and the sometimes less palpable global changes have had direct and

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indirect impacts on the ways people arrange their lives: directly through the loss of social stabilities and the dislocation and relocation of ‘communities’, indirectly through changing practices of social interaction and patterns of communicative behaviour. These larger social processes have recontextualised the relationships between (users of) different language forms and reconfigured social spaces, but individuals and social groups have been in various ways complicit in these changes, not always passive witnesses or subjects. Our discussion has therefore been directed towards different forms of agency at different levels of social organisation, from policy-makers through local communities to individuals. We set out to tell a particular kind of story about language in central Europe, a story that is highly selective not only in its geographical orientation and its concentration on the German language and its speakers but also in terms of its theoretical and methodological approach. It is a study not of the history of language (or of a language) but of language in history (Crowley 1996) or more precisely of language in the recent and contemporary history of German-speakers in eastern central Europe. There is, of course, much more that could be said – we have, for example, largely ignored the experience and influence of current German-speaking migrants from Germany and Austria, the effects of linguistic policies and interactions in multilingual corporations and the development of multilingual practices in new communication technologies – and we hope that further research will explore some of the avenues we have not (yet) travelled. We also hope, however, that our study has shown some of the possibilities of an approach that draws together discourses on language policy and narratives on language practices in a historically grounded analysis of language ideologies.

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Appendix A European institutions and documents concerning language policy

In addition to the information provided in the discussion of primary documents in Chapter 4, we will provide some more basic details here about the functioning of and relations between the main European institutions involved in the area of language policy.

European Commission In 2003 The European Commission devised an Action Plan for Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity spanning the period from 2004 till 2006, which was inspired by recommendations in the 2001 Resolution by the European Parliament concerning measures to promote linguistic diversity and language learning (see http://europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-// EP//TEXT=TA+P5-TA-2001-0719+0+DOC+XML+VO//EN). These recommendations emerged from the successful 2001 European Year of Languages. The Action Plan intends to set up strategies for extending opportunities to learn at least two foreign languages to all citizens, for improving quality of language teaching, and, ultimately, to create an environment that favours language learning. It includes supporting actions by local, regional and national authorities, while the main focus is on the European level to help endow as many citizens as possible with intercultural and language skills so that they can take advantage of the global market-place and so that EU policies can be pursued more effectively. The aim is to enable people to communicate effectively (reading, writing, listening, speaking in two foreign languages) and to create understanding of foreign cultures. The outcome depends on whether national governments can devise effective language education policies and whether governments can agree on indicators, benchmarks, and share good practices. The EU level supports and supplements these efforts by promoting cooperation and exchange in education and vocational training through funding programmes (such as Socrates

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and Leonardo da Vinci), and by ensuring that the goal of language learning and linguistic diversity is mainstreamed in subsequent programmes. The initiative is based on a 2001 resolution of the European Parliament recommending linguistic diversity and language learning (see http://euro-lex.europa.eu/ LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2002:050:0001:0002:EN:PDF), which was taken up by the Education and Youth Council, who asked the Commission to set up an Action Plan to pursue these goals. The Action Plan was finalised by the Commission in 2003 and can be accessed at http://eur-lex.europa. eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2003:0449:FIN:EN:PDF. The emphasis of Commission strategies is very much on language learning, and on programmes to promote this aim. Most of the institutions and official documents cover the issue (see the list of documents and websites concerning languages at http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies/lang/links/links_ en.html). The very concept of linguistic diversity on which the Commission’s actions are based is investigated Chapter 4 with regard to which groups of speakers of which languages it encompasses, what their relationship is with the cultural and educational institutions of both the state and the European Union, whether there are several notions of linguistic diversity competing for influence, and who supports and uses them. As part of the Action Plan, the Commission published its first ever Communication on the subject of multilingualism entitled ‘A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism’ in November 2005 (at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/ lexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2005:0596:FIN:EN:PDF). This document was meant to serve as a framework of reference for national policies. During the course of the Action Plan, public consultations and ministerial conferences were held in order to collect experiences with implementation of the policies at the national level. The outcome of this process over several years is the 2008 Communication on ‘Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment’ (at http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/pdf/ com/2008_0566_en.pdf), which covers not only language learning and teaching, but also the aim of including the consideration of multilingualism across EU policy areas. Linguistic diversity and minority languages are also the subject of a 2002 Final Report on Support for Minority Languages in Europe (at http://ec.europa. eu/education/languages/pdf/doc639_en.pdf) that evaluates the initiatives and activities in the field of regional and minority languages between 1998 and 2002. The issue is also covered by the 2003 report by the European Parliament (at http://europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-/EP//NONSGML+ REPORT=A5-2003-0271+0+DOC+PDF+VO//EN&language=EN), which includes recommendations to the Commission on European regional and lesser-used languages – the languages of minorities in the EU – in the context of enlargement and cultural diversity. One of the activities organised by the Commission is a study of regional and minority language communities in the EU, which is published in the

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Euromosaic report. It analyses the situation of small language communities as well as linguistic enclaves in different states, both of which are threatened in their linguistic vitality and heritage. The study has been extended to include the new Central and Eastern European member states in 2005, after the respective 1995 and 2004 rounds of EU enlargement. It analyses the situation of national and linguistic minorities in every EU member state, including the respective national legal frameworks for protection of minorities and their languages (see http://www.uoc.edu/euromosaic/).

Council of Europe The Council of Europe itself has no mandate to carry out language policy, but it commits the member states that sign the respective treaties to pass specific legislation to protect regional and minority languages, to protect national minorities as well as to promote foreign language learning. According to the Council’s language education policy, the main aims are to promote • Plurilingualism: all are entitled to develop a degree of communicative ability in a number of languages over their lifetime in accordance with their needs. • Linguistic Diversity: Europe is multilingual and all its languages are equally valuable modes of communication and expressions of identity; the right to use and to learn one’s language(s) is protected in Council of Europe Conventions. • Mutual Understanding: the opportunity to learn other languages is an essential condition for intercultural communication and acceptance of cultural differences. • Democratic Citizenship: participation in democratic and social processes in multilingual societies is facilitated by the plurilingual competence of individuals. • Social Cohesion: equality of opportunity for personal development, education, employment, mobility, access to information and cultural enrichment depends on access to language learning throughout life. See http:// www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/division_en.asp?toPrint=yes& It is important to mention here that the Council’s language policy differentiates between multilingualism as the presence of more than one (variety of) language in a given geographical area on the one hand, and plurilingualism as an individual’s repertoire of several (varieties of) languages. Two of the Council’s most important conventions are the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. The members of the Council agreed on the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 1992 (see http://

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www.coe.int / T / E / Legal_Affairs / Local_and_regional_Democracy/Regional_ or_Minority_languages/Charter/). The Charter amends the language-related rights that are included in the Charter of Human Rights, and it specifies regional and minority languages. It is a legally binding document, but the signing of the Charter remained a voluntary commitment for most EU member states, with one exception: as part of their bid to join the European Union new candidates have to ratify the Charter as a means to demonstrate their commitment to democracy and freedom rights. This was decided on at the 1996 Copenhagen summit, where among others the Czech Republic and Hungary submitted their applications to join the European Union. The Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities was signed in 1995 and is the first legally binding treaty for the protection of national minorities in general. Its aim is to protect national minorities within the respective territories of the signatory states by committing the states to pass legislation to help preserve and develop the minorities’ culture and identities. This includes, for example, rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of association, freedom of expression, thought, religion and conscience, access to education in the minority language, and so on. The text of the treaty can be accessed at http://www.conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Word/157. doc Other important European language policy documents include the 2007 Report on the implementation of the Action Plan ‘Promoting language learning and linguistic diversity 2004–2006’, to be found at http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/archive/policy/report_en.html; the 2007 High Level Group on Multilingualism, to be found at http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/ odf/doc1664_en.pdf; and the 2008 Council Conclusions on Multilingualism, to be found at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C :2008:140:0014:01:EN:HTML

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Appendix B Preamble to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages

The member States of the Council of Europe signatory hereto, Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is to achieve a greater unity between its members, particularly for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage; Considering that the protection of the historical regional or minority languages of Europe, some of which are in danger of eventual extinction, contributes to the maintenance and development of Europe’s cultural wealth and traditions; Considering that the right to use a regional or minority language in private and public life is an inalienable right conforming to the principles embodied in the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and according to the spirit of the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms; Having regard to the work carried out within the CSCE and in particular to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and the document of the Copenhagen Meeting of 1990; Stressing the value of interculturalism and multilingualism and considering that the protection and encouragement of regional or minority languages should not be to the detriment of the official languages and the need to learn them; Realising that the protection and promotion of regional or minority languages in the different countries and regions of Europe represent an important contribution to the building of a Europe based on the principles of democracy and cultural diversity within the framework of national sovereignty and territorial integrity;

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Taking into consideration the specific conditions and historical traditions in the different regions of the European States, Have agreed as follows: ...

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Appendix C Introduction to the 2005 Commission Communication ‘A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism’

Koľko jazykov vieš, toľkokrát si človekom. The more languages you know, the more of a person you are. (Slovak proverb)

I. Introduction For the first time, the portfolio of a European Commissioner explicitly includes responsibility for multilingualism. This document is the first Commission Communication to explore this policy area. It complements the Commission’s current initiative to improve communication between European citizens and the institutions that serve them. It also: • reaffirms the Commission’s commitment to multilingualism in the European Union; • sets out the Commission’s strategy for promoting multilingualism in European society, in the economy and in the Commission itself; and • proposes a number of specific actions stemming from this strategic framework.

I.1 Multilingualism and European values The European Union is founded on ‘unity in diversity’: diversity of cultures, customs and beliefs – and of languages. Besides the 201 official languages of the Union, there are 60 or so other indigenous languages and scores of nonindigenous languages spoken by migrant communities. It is this diversity that makes the European Union what it is: not a ‘melting pot’ in which differences are rendered down, but a common home in which

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diversity is celebrated, and where our many mother tongues are a source of wealth and a bridge to greater solidarity and mutual understanding. Language is the most direct expression of culture; it is what makes us human and what gives each of us a sense of identity. Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union states that the Union shall respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity. Article 21 prohibits discrimination based on a number of grounds, including language. Together with respect for the individual, openness towards other cultures, tolerance and acceptance of others, respect for linguistic diversity is a core value of the European Union. Action by the Union and the Member States to uphold multilingualism therefore has a direct impact on the life of every citizen.

I.2 What is multilingualism? Multilingualism refers to both a person’s ability to use several languages and the co-existence of different language communities in one geographical area. In this document, the term is used to describe the new field of Commission policy that promotes a climate that is conducive to the full expression of all languages, in which the teaching and learning of a variety of languages can flourish. The Commission’s multilingualism policy has three aims: • to encourage language learning and promoting linguistic diversity in society; • to promote a healthy multilingual economy, and • to give citizens access to European Union legislation, procedures and information in their own languages. Responsibility for making further progress mainly rests with Member States (be it at national, regional or local level), but the Commission will also do all within its remit to reinforce awareness of multilingualism and to improve the consistency of action taken at different levels.

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Appendix D Introduction to the 2008 Commission Communication ‘Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment’

Linguistic diversity is a challenge for Europe, but, in our view, a rewarding challenge. (Amin Maalouf, Group of Intellectuals for Intercultural Dialogue)

1. Introduction The harmonious co-existence of many languages in Europe is a powerful symbol of the European Union’s aspiration to be united in diversity, one of the cornerstones of the European project. Languages define personal identities, but are also part of a shared inheritance. They can serve as a bridge to other people and open access to other countries and cultures, promoting mutual understanding. A successful multilingualism policy can strengthen life chances of citizens: it may increase their employability, facilitate access to services and rights and contribute to solidarity through enhanced intercultural dialogue and social cohesion. Approached in this spirit, linguistic diversity can become a precious asset, increasingly so in today’s globalised world. The Commission’s renewed social Agenda, adopted on 2 July 2008, set out a new approach to managing change in our globalising world focusing on the key principles of opportunities, access and solidarity. In a multilingual European Union, this means that: i) everybody should have the opportunity to communicate appropriately in order to realise his or her potential and make the most of the opportunities offered by the modern and innovative EU; ii) everybody should have access to appropriate language training or to other means of facilitating communication so that there is no undue linguistic obstacle to living, working or communicating in the EU; iii) in the spirit of

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solidarity, even those who may not be able to learn other languages should be provided with appropriate means of communication, allowing them access to the multilingual environment. The 2005 Commission communication A new framework strategy for multilingualism reaffirmed the value of linguistic diversity and revealed the need for a broader policy to promote multilingualism, as recommended by the independent High Level Group on Multilingualism. This analysis was confirmed by a broad consultation in 2007–8 which included an online consultation attracting over 2,400 replies, and two advisory groups reporting on the contribution of multilingualism to intercultural dialogue and on the role played by languages in business. The Commission has also listened to other EU institutions. The European Parliament has produced several reports of great interest, and both the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions have been asked for opinions. The Council’s first ministerial conference on multilingualism took place on 15 February 2008 with a view to preparing the ground for a broader policy. Member States are the key decision-makers on language policy, including on regional and minority languages, for which the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages provides a comprehensive framework. Many other organisations take decisions on the ground on language issues: educational providers, regional and local authorities, social partners, media and services. The Commission works with Member States and stakeholders, in line with the principle of subsidiarity, to ensure that objectives are shared, and will assist them in their efforts, notably by easing the exchange of good practices. Within this context, the Commission has worked since 2002 with Member States towards the Barcelona objective of enabling citizens to communicate in two languages in addition to their mother tongue, in particular, by developing an indicator of language competence, by setting out strategic action and recommendations, and by including skills in foreign languages among the key competences for lifelong learning. Building on the progress of earlier years, this communication aims to achieve a qualitative shift, by presenting a policy that is widely shared and comprehensive, going beyond education to address languages in the wider context set by the EU Agenda for social cohesion and prosperity, the two central objectives of the Lisbon strategy.

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Appendix E German and Austrian agents and institutions in foreign cultural policy

Since there is not enough space in the discussion of documents in Chapter 4 to include more detailed information on the respective agents and institutions in German and Austrian foreign cultural policy, we have included a summary of the main actors and initiatives in this appendix.

Agents and institutions in German foreign cultural policy The promotion of the German language in foreign countries is identified as one of the most important tasks of foreign cultural policy, and it is coordinated and funded by the Foreign Ministry. About half of the budget for foreign cultural policy is used to this end (more than 200 million euros). The actual work is ‘contracted out’ to several independent – or quasi-independent – organisations that receive public funding (see http://www.auswaertigesamt.de/diplo/de/AAmt/Abteilungen/KulturUndKommunikation.html). The most important of these cultural brokers is the Goethe-Institut (GI), which offers a differentiated system of language courses, trains teachers of German and offers teaching and learning materials. It is an institution that is pro-forma independent but de facto exclusively works for the German government, and it is active at the global level to promote knowledge of the German language and international cultural cooperation. It collaborates with public and private cultural agencies, the federal state governments, municipalities and private enterprise. A large part of its 278 million euro budget comes from the Foreign Ministry and the Bundespresseamt, and the relationship between GI and the financing institutions are set out in a framework contract (Rahmenvertrag) (see http://www.goethe.de). The German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, or DAAD) sends lecturers abroad and promotes and supports partnerships with institutes of German studies. Apart from promoting academic exchange by sending lecturers or students abroad, the DAAD also

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offers studentships to foreign students to study in Germany. It collaborates with various funding and training organisations, offers various publications on its programmes, and reports on their success and development. It runs several specific programmes which focus on Central and Eastern Europe: Go East, Ostpartnerschaften, Stabilitätspakt Südosteuropa (see http://www. daad.de/en/index.html). The Central Bureau for Education Abroad (Zentralstelle für das Auslandsschulwesen) runs German schools abroad, supervises their teachers, seconds teachers from Germany to placements across the world, and offers German language diplomas (see http://www.auslandsschulwesen.de/cln_115/ sid_7A8FED4BE3A876227D32D80830BE1816/Auslandsschulwesen/Home/ home-node.html?__nnn=true). And finally, the Pedagogical Exchange Service of the Council of Ministers of Culture and Education (Pädagogischer Austauschdienst der Kultusministerkonferenz, or KMK) runs different exchange programmes, promotes training of teachers of German (see http://www.kmk-pad.org). The focus of German foreign cultural policy in general is on EU member states and other countries in Europe, North America and important threshold countries. Assistance in education and cultural support for German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe is coordinated by the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Bundesverwaltungsamt Zentralstelle für das Auslandsschulwesen. The executive organisations are the DAAD, the Goethe-Institut, the Institute for Foreign Relations or Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), the Stiftung Ostdeutscher Kulturrat (OKR), the Verein für Deutsche Kulturbeziehungen im Ausland e.V. (VDA) and the West-Ost-Kulturwerk e.V. (WOK) (see http://deutsche-kultur-international. de). Another non-profit organisation in the field is the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe, or Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa (http://www.kulturforum-ome.de/). It tries to raise awareness of Germany’s historic eastern territories, the shared culture and traditions in areas of German settlement in Central and Eastern Europe, in order to build ‘concordant relationships’, cognizance and acceptance, with the example of the German–French relationship. It works through international cooperation with cultural organisations, museums, educational institutions, universities, associations of writers, musicians and authors, and multi-media resources. It is a non-profit organisation that organises cultural events and forums, awards prizes and runs publication lists.

Agents and institutions in Austrian foreign cultural policy Foreign cultural policy in Austria is designed, coordinated and implemented by the Austrian Foreign Ministry. This is the main difference between

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Austrian and German foreign cultural policy. Whereas in Germany policy is coordinated by the Foreign Ministry, the actual policy work is contracted out to quasi-independent bodies. In Austria, by contrast, the main broker institution of foreign cultural policy, the Austrian Cultural Forum is part of the institutional structure of the Foreign Ministry, and the leading representatives are diplomats (see http://www.bmeia.gv.at/aussenministerium/ aussenpolitik/auslandskultur.html). One of its important projects is the Platform Culture Central Europe (Plattform Kultur-Mitteleuropa), which has been founded as a forum for cultural dialogue by foreign ministers of countries of the ‘regional partnership’ (Regionale Partnerschaft), such as Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. The aim is to support bi- and multilateral cultural project and common central European cultural interests. To this end, the platform will disseminate information and knowledge of the cultural life of participating states among these states, in the EU and on the global stages. Apart from cultural events (poetry or music festivals) there is an ongoing workshop to set up a Central European history book that shares materials from the participating states and is committed to reducing and avoiding prejudices. The workshop also aims at strengthening bilateral initiatives to establish common school books. Moreover, there are plans for a common memorandum of the six foreign ministers in order to organise their cultural policies abroad following EU enlargement in 2004. It is designed to incorporate statements such as that the linguistic and cultural plurality of the platform-countries will enrich the process of European integration and discussions on the future of Europe. Their close regional cooperation is meant to serve as an example for intensifying cooperation between old and new EU members in the future. Finally, there will also be an emphasis on the fact that the platform will work towards including art and culture in the process of European integration through its work on common Central European traditions and interests (http://www. bmaa.gv.at/view.php3?r_id=339&LNG=de&version). The main institutional actor in this policy area is the Austrian Cultural Forum, which represents Austrian culture abroad on behalf of the Austrian Foreign Ministry and other relevant subject ministries (such as the ministry for education, science and culture, BMBWK). It is part of the organisational structure of the Foreign Ministry and bound by its decisions. The ACF coordinates pedagogical measures for the educational policies of eastern central European states. This concerns planning and running projects on educational cooperation, promotion of multilateral contacts in education, training of Austrian teachers in Central and Eastern Europe, planning the organisation of a European Centre for Foreign Languages in Graz, etc. Since 1991, the Forum also organises cooperation with the Czech Republic on seminars on German as foreign language and also other issues (such as ecology), on

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vocational training issues, ongoing qualification and training for Czech teachers of German, promotion of cultural activities, promotion and support of cooperation between schools, exchange of experts and expertise, and the development and provision of relevant material. The main agent of Austria’s language policy abroad is the Austria Institute (Österreich Institut GmbH), which has been an independent institution since 1996. It provides language courses and maintains a network of language lecturers (Österreich Lektoren), similar to the lecturers seconded by the German DAAD (see http://www.bmeia.gv.at/aussenministerium/aussenpolitik/auslandskultur/oesterreich-institut-gmbh.html).

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Appendix F Extract from ‘Auswärtige Kulturpolitik – Konzeption 2000’

I. Ziele und Grundsätze der Auswärtigen Kulturpolitik Die Auswärtige Kulturpolitik der Bundesregierung (AKP) orientiert sich an folgenden Zielen und Grundsätzen: 1. Die Auswärtige Kulturpolitik ist integraler Teil unserer Außenpolitik. Sie ist an den allgemeinen Zielen und Interessen der deutschen Außenpolitik – Sicherung des Friedens, Konfliktverhütung, Verwirklichung der Menschenrechte, partnerschaftliche Zusammenarbeit – ausgerichtet und unterstützt sie. 2. Unsere Kulturarbeit im Ausland ist nicht einfach neutral, sondern orientiert sich an Werten. In Fragen der Demokratieförderung, Verwirklichung der Menschenrechte, Nachhaltigkeit des Wachstums, Teilhabe am wissenschaftlich-technologischen Fortschritt, Armutsbekämpfung oder Schutz der natürlichen Ressourcen bezieht sie eindeutig Position. 3. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik vermittelt Kultur aus Deutschland als Teil der europäischen Kultur. Sie kennzeichnet Deutschland als Kulturstaat im Dialog mit der internationalen Gemeinschaft der Staaten. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik entfaltet sich auf der Basis der innerstaatlichen Kultur- und Bildungspolitik, wie sie von Bund, Ländern und Gemeinden sowie den privaten Trägerorganisationen gestaltet wird. Sie kann daher nicht wirksamer sein als diese. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik bezieht private Initiativen von Körperschaften und Bürgern ein („public-private partnership“). 4. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik beschränkt sich jedoch nicht auf Kulturvermittlung, sondern fördert Dialog, Austausch und Zusammenarbeit zwischen Menschen und Kulturen. Sie dient der zwischenstaatlichen und zwischenmenschlichen Verständigung, setzt sich für Weltoffenheit und Weltläufigkeit ein und baut Glaubwürdigkeit, Verlässlichkeit und unverzichtbare Netzwerke für die

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politische und wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit auf- und zwar langfristig. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik gewinnt Partner und Freunde für Deutschland und fördert so unmittelbar vitale Interessen unseres Landes. 5. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik findet also in zwei Richtungen statt: Gleichberechtigt neben die Beteiligung Deutschlands am Kulturdialog im Ausland tritt – auch als Aufgabe aller für die Kultur- und Bildungspolitik im Innern Verantwortlichen – die Förderung des Kulturdialogs im Inland. Die Vorstellungen der Partnerländer, ihre Erwartungen und Konzeptionen sind dabei zu berücksichtigen. 6. Die politischen Leitlinien der Auswärtigen Kulturpolitik der Bundesregierung werden vom Auswärtigen Amt formuliert und koordiniert. Schwerpunkte sind die Zusammenarbeit in Bildung und Wissenschaft, der internationale Kulturdialog, der Kunst-, Kultur- und Personenaustausch, die Nutzung und Entwicklung der Medien in der internationalen Zusammenarbeit, die Erhaltung und Stärkung der deutschen Sprache als Schlüssel zur deutschen Kultur sowie das Auslandsschulwesen. 7. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik wirkt eng mit anderen Politikbereichen zusammen, insbesondere der Entwicklungs- und Außenwirtschaftspolitik sowie der internationalen Kooperation in den Bereichen Wissenschaft, Forschung, Technologie, Erziehung, Berufsbildung, Jugendaustausch und Sport. Dabei findet eine enge Abstimmung der beteiligten Bundesressorts, Länder und NichtRegierungsorganisationen mit dem Ziel eines konzertierten Vorgehens statt. 8. Mit der Umsetzung der Auswärtigen Kulturpolitik sind verschiedene privatrechtlich organisierte, in ihrer Programmgestaltung weitgehend freie Mittlerorganisationen mit unterschiedlichen Schwerpunkten und Zielsetzungen beauftragt. In Deutschland herrscht Kulturfreiheit; es gibt keine Staatskultur. Pluralismus und regierungsferne Organisation der Mittler garantieren Vielfalt und Unabhängigkeit der Kulturarbeit im Ausland. Die Mittler setzen die Leitlinien der Auswärtigen Kulturpolitik der Bundesregierung differenziert nach ihren jeweiligen Aufgabenprofilen und Programmstrukturen um. 9. In der Auswärtigen Kulturpolitik arbeiten Bund und Länder eng zusammen. Bei völkerrechtlichen Verträgen auf den Gebieten, für welche die Länder zuständig sind und eigene Verantwortung tragen, erfolgt eine gegenseitige Abstimmung auf der Basis der „Lindauer Absprache“; für die Abstimmung in internationalen kulturellen Angelegenheiten ist die Kultusministerkonferenz das Instrument der Länder. [. . .]

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Förderung der deutschen Sprache (pp. 11 and 12 of the original document) 1. Die Förderung der deutschen Sprache im Ausland ist eine Kernaufgabe der Auswärtigen Kulturpolitik. Viele ihrer Maßnahmen dienen diesem Ziel direkt durch Sprachunterricht und Aus- und Fortbildung von Deutschlehrern, aber auch indirekt durch deutschsprachige Wortveranstaltungen, Theateraufführungen und Filmvorführungen oder durch Stipendien an ausländische Studenten und Wissenschaftler zu Studienund Forschungsaufenthalten in Deutschland. Bezieht man die deutschen Auslandsschulen mit ein, so wird rd. die Hälfte des Kulturhaushalts für die Förderung der deutschen Sprache eingesetzt. 2. Sprachförderung erschließt den Zugang zur deutschen Kultur, fördert Mehrsprachigkeit und Multikulturalität, festigt die Stellung der deutschen Sprache in den europäischen Institutionen, schafft Sympathie für und Bindungen an Deutschland. In Zeiten globaler Konkurrenz hilft die Förderung der deutschen Sprache im Ausland nicht zuletzt auch, die wirtschaftliche Position Deutschlands in der Welt zu sichern. Die Gesamtzahl der DeutschMuttersprachler beträgt rd. 100 Mio. In der EU bilden die Deutschsprachigen mit Abstand die größte Muttersprachlergruppe. In Europa insgesamt befindet sich Deutsch als Fremdsprache nach Englisch auf dem zweiten Platz, mit Schwerpunkt in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Weltweit lernen etwa 16–17 Mio. Menschen Deutsch. Im Licht der einschlägigen Parameter (Anzahl der Muttersprachler, Verbreitung als Zweit- und Fremdsprache, Bedeutung in Wissenschaft, Technik und Wirtschaft usw.) gehört Deutsch zur Gruppe der sechs bis acht international wichtigsten Sprachen. Nach dem erfreulichem Aufschwung für die deutsche Sprache in der Folge des Umbruchs in Osteuropa flacht sich in den letzten Jahren in vielen Ländern diese Tendenz ab. Ausschlaggebend ist hierbei der Aufstieg des Englischen zur (nahezu) weltweiten lingua franca. Wegen der früher bedeutenden Stellung der deutschen Sprache und im Hinblick auf die Erweiterung der EU ist Mittel- und Osteuropa seit Anfang der 90er Jahre regionaler Schwerpunkt unserer Fördermaßnahmen. Deutsch hat sich dort als zweite Fremdsprache stabil etabliert. Wichtig bleiben der EU-Raum sowie Nordamerika, aber auch Schwellenländer und Wachstumsregionen in Asien und Lateinamerika.

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Appendix G Extract from the Goethe-Institut’s description on their website www.goethe-de: ‘Leitbild des GoetheInstituts’ (‘central focus of the GoetheInstitut’)

Unsere Vision Das Goethe-Institut trägt als Kulturinstitut der Bundesrepublik Deutschland das vielfältige Bild Deutschlands in die Welt. Es eröffnet den Zugang zur deutschen Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft und fördert die internationale kulturelle Zusammenarbeit. Wir, die Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter in aller Welt, stehen für ein offenes Deutschland. Über kulturelle und politische Grenzen hinweg bauen wir Brücken. Durch unsere Arbeit entsteht Neues und Außergewöhnliches, weil Menschen offen miteinander reden und phantasievoll zusammen arbeiten. Wir entwickeln die Fähigkeit, Eigen- und Fremdbilder zu hinterfragen und konstruktiv mit kultureller Vielfalt umzugehen. Wir öffnen Grenzen zwischen Kultur, Bildung, Wissenschaft und Entwicklung und vertrauen auf die Kraft der Kunst, die Fragen stellt und auch verstören darf. Wir suchen Antworten auf die Zukunftsfragen der globalisierten Welt.

Unsere Aufgaben Wir fördern und vermitteln die deutsche Sprache als Schlüsselqualifikation für Bildung, Beruf und Verständigung. Sie ist das Bindeglied vieler Menschen zu Deutschland. Wir bauen die Position der deutschen Sprache

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in der Fremdsprachenvielfalt aus und setzen Qualitätsstandards für den Deutschunterricht weltweit. Wir schaffen Zugang zu Wissen und Information über Deutschland und bringen kulturelle Phänomene, Positionen und Erfahrungen unseres Landes international zur Geltung. Umgekehrt nutzen wir die Chancen, die der interkulturelle Dialog bietet, um wichtige Entwicklungen aus anderen Weltregionen nach Deutschland zu vermitteln. Wir fördern weltweit das Verständnis für Europa und entwickeln gemeinsame europäische Perspektiven. Innerhalb Europas sind für uns die Mehrsprachigkeit und ein europäisches Bürgerbewusstsein entscheidend für eine vertiefte Einheit.

Unsere Arbeitsweise Wir verwirklichen in partnerschaftlicher Kooperation interdisziplinäre Projekte, die eine nachhaltige Wirkung hervorrufen. Unser weltweites Netzwerk steht für hohe Qualität und direkten Kontakt. Wir verbinden über 50 Jahre Kontinuität mit der Bereitschaft zu Veränderung und Innovation, um neue Herausforderungen bewältigen zu können. Nach innen wie nach außen pflegen wir das Prinzip respektvoller Zusammenarbeit. Dies bedeutet: Würdigung von Leistung und Engagement, Übernahme von Verantwortung, Sensibilität im Umgang miteinander, Offenheit und Kritikfähigkeit. Wir leben und arbeiten in Vielfalt und sind zugleich ein Institut: das Goethe-Institut.

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Appendix H Extract from the Austrian Foreign Cultural Policy Concept – Auslandskulturkonzept NEU

Schwerpunkte Kernaussagen: Der Auslandskulturpolitik liegt ein Konzept geographischer Schwerpunkte zugrunde: Globale Kulturzentren: New York, London, Paris, Rom, Tokio, Madrid, Moskau, Berlin Kulturelle Nachbarn (Staaten mit traditionell engen kulturellen Beziehungen, wie z.B. Ungarn, Tschechische Republik, Slowakei, Slowenien, Polen, Deutschland, Italien, Israel) unter Einschluss Südosteuropas (z.B. Kroatien, Bulgarien, Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien, Türkei) Entwicklungspartner (Schwerpunktländer EZA und Osthilfe, südlicher Kaukasus) Die Auslandskulturpolitik setzt inhaltliche Schwerpunkte: Europa und die europäischen Werte: Diskussion um Europa und die „europäischen Werte“ in Großveranstaltungen und Seminaren in europäischen Hauptstädten Innovation aus Traditionen: Respektierte Traditionen nicht als Klischees festschreiben, sondern als Ausgangspunkt für Innovation nützen Facing History: Auseinandersetzung mit der österreichischen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (z. B. Vertriebene Kunst, Exilliteratur, jüdisch-österreichische Traditionen, Habsburgermythos, Widerstand vor 38, Aufarbeitung nach 45)

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Culture for Enlargement: Österreich als Partner der mitteleuropäischen Nachbarn (z. B. gemeinsame Kunst- und Kulturprojekte, Diskussionen zu Abbau von nationalen Stereotypen und Vorurteilen) Culture for Stability: Der Beitrag der Kultur zur Stabilisierung des Balkans (z. B. Projekte zur Stärkung von Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft, neue Österreich-Bibliotheken in Serbien, Mazedonien und Moldawien), Culture for Development: Kulturkooperation im Dialog mit unseren Partnerländern in der Dritten Welt. Mit der Zeitenwende 1989, die ein Ende der geopolitischen Teilung Europas gebracht hat und in Europa Kultur zum Grundmuster internationaler Beziehungen gemacht hat, sowie dem österreichischen EU-Beitritt 1995 haben sich die Voraussetzungen und Möglichkeiten der Auslandskulturpolitik grundlegend geändert. Ohne Schwerpunktsetzungen mit einem klaren und nachvollziehbaren Profil kann österreichische Kulturarbeit im Ausland nicht zu einem nationalen Anliegen gemacht werden. Es werden daher für einen mehrjährigen Planungszeitraum inhaltlich, geographisch und strukturell Schwerpunkte formuliert und umgesetzt. Es geht um Projekte, die den mitteleuropäischen Standort Österreichs und die Eingebundenheit in die Vielfalt der europäischen Kultur vermitteln und damit einen Beitrag zur Qualität und zum Tempo europäischer Integration leisten. Die Erweiterung der Europäischen Union nach Mittel- und Osteuropa ist heute ein zentrales kulturelles Anliegen Österreichs in Europa. Europäisch denken verlangt klare Schwerpunktsetzungen: etwa Beiträge zur Stabilisierung Südosteuropas zu leisten, und innerhalb der Europäischen Union einen bürgergesellschaftlichen Diskurs über europäische Werte zu führen, der nicht von den Interessen von Regierungen oder vom Macht- und Marktpotential großer Staaten dominiert wird. Gleichzeitig müssen unsere kulturellen Kontakte mit jenen Entwicklungen, die in so unterschiedlichen Ländern wie den Vereinigten Staaten und Russland neu und innovativ sind, ausgebaut werden. Als Teil dieser mittelfristigen Schwerpunktsetzung wird eine Abstimmung mit den Aufgaben und den Strukturen der „Österreichischen Osthilfe“ und der „Entwicklungszusammenarbeit“ vorgenommen. Die zunehmende internationale Vernetzung in den Bereichen Bildung und Wissenschaft bietet die Möglichkeit, Österreich international noch stärker mit seinen kulturellen und wissenschaftlichen Kontakten zu positionieren.

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Voraussetzung dafür ist eine gezielte Koordinierung der Auslandskulturpolitik mit den Bildungs- und Wissenschaftseinrichtungen in Österreich und mit den Auslandsaktivitäten des Bundesministeriums für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kunst.

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Appendix I Extracts from the Presentation of the ‘Plattform Kultur-Mitteleuropa’ (Platform Culture Central Europe) at www.bmaa.gv.at

Im Rahmen der Regionalen Partnerschaft wurde 2001 die Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa ins Leben gerufen, die enge Auslandskulturaktivitäten mit den Ländern Polen, Slowakei, Slowenien, Tschechische Republik und Ungarn vorsieht. Die Plattform versteht sich als Forum zur Förderung des kulturellen Dialogs und zur Unterstützung bilateraler und multinationaler Kulturprojekte, die gemeinsame mitteleuropäische Kulturinteressen beinhalten. Konkret will die Plattform: – größere Breitenwirkung für Information erreichen und ein Bewusstsein für das kulturelle Leben der teilnehmenden Staaten innerhalb Mitteleuropas, innerhalb der Europäischen Union und darüber hinaus schaffen – die kreative Dichte und Ausdruckskraft unserer KünstlerInnen darstellen sowie – die gemeinsame kulturelle Identität Mitteleuropas im Zusammenhang mit der europäischen Integration sichtbarer machen. Die enge Zusammenarbeit der mitteleuropäischen Länder in einer gefestigten Partnerschaft ist ein Beitrag zu einem kulturelleren Europa und ein Gegengewicht zu einer möglichen Erstarkung nationaler Egoismen. Die Plattform ist daher zu einem zentralen Schwerpunkt österreichischer Auslandskulturpolitik in einem erweiterten Europa geworden. Die Grundidee der Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa – Informationen über den Kulturraum Mitteleuropa zu geben und gemeinsame Projekte zu initiieren – stellt somit eine Investition in die Zukunft der erweiterten EU dar.

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Appendix J Extract from the Austrian report on foreign cultural policy ‘Austria Kulturint Tätigkeitsbericht 2002 Auslandskultur’

AUSLANDSKULTURPOLITISCHE INITIATIVEN Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa Im Rahmen der „Regionalen Partnerschaft“, wurde 2001 die „Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa“ ins Leben gerufen, die eine enge Kooperation der Auslandskulturaktivitäten mit den EU-Beitrittskandidaten Polen, Slowakei, Slowenien, Tschechien und Ungarn vorsieht. Die Plattform versteht sich als Forum zur Förderung des kulturellen Dialogs und zur Unterstützung bilateraler und multilateraler Kulturprojekte, die gemeinsame mitteleuropäische Kulturinteressen beinhalten. Konkret will die Plattform: – größere Breitenwirkung für Information erreichen und ein Bewusstsein für das kulturelle Leben der teilnehmenden Staaten innerhalb Mitteleuropas, innerhalb der Europäischen Union und darüber hinaus schaffen – die kreative Dichte und Ausdruckskraft unserer Künstler darstellen sowie – die gemeinsame kulturelle Identität Mitteleuropas im Zusammenhang mit der europäischen Integration sichtbar machen. Durch die bevorstehende Erweiterung der Europäischen Union nimmt für Österreich die Bedeutung der mitteleuropäischen Dimension und die Vertretung gemeinsamer Interessen und Vorstellungen enorm zu. Die enge Zusammenarbeit der mitteleuropäischen Länder in einer gefestigten Partnerschaft ist ein Beitrag zu einem kulturelleren Europa und ein Gegengewicht zu einer möglichen Erstarkung nationaler Egoismen. Die Plattform ist daher zu einem zentralen Schwerpunkt österreichischer

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Auslandskulturpolitik in einem erweiterten Europa geworden. Die Grundidee der Plattform Kultur Mitteleuropa – Informationen über den Kulturraum Mitteleuropa zu geben und gemeinsame Projekte zu initiieren – stellt somit eine Investition in die Zukunft einer erweiterten Europäischen Union dar. Durch die weltweite Kooperation von Auslandskultureinrichtungen und Vertretungsbehörden der Partnerländer steht ein Netzwerk von Hunderten von professionellen Ansprechstellen zur Realisierung von gemeinsamen Projekten zum Thema Mitteleuropa zur Verfügung. Aus Anlass der dänischen EU-Präsidentschaft organisierte die Plattform in Kopenhagen am 19. Dezember 2002 eine Großveranstaltung unter dem Titel „Art of Dance from Central Europe“, die der Tanzkultur aus Mitteleuropa als inspirierende Kraft im neuen erweiterten Europa gewidmet war. Auf der Bühne bot ein „Café-Central-Europe“ den Rahmen für die einzelnen Beiträge aus den sechs Plattform-Ländern. [. . .]

Dialog der Kulturen und Zivilisationen Bei der Außenministerkonferenz im Rahmen des Barcelona-Prozesses in Brüssel am 5./6. November 2001 einigten sich die Minister darauf, dem „Dialog der Kulturen und Zivilisationen“ breiteren Raum zu geben und sich im besonderen auf die Bereiche Jugend, Erziehung und Bildung, sowie Medien zu konzentrieren. Zur Umsetzung dieser Vorhaben schlug Bundesministerin Benita Ferrero- Waldner die Abhaltung eines Seminars während der spanischen Präsidentschaft vor, das sich gesondert auf den Aspekt des „Dialoges der Zivilisationen“ und der Medienverantwortung konzentrieren sollte. Dabei wies sie auf die Erfahrungen Österreichs mit dem „Wiener ChristlichIslamischen Dialog“ hin. Bei dieser vom Bundesministerium für auswärtige Angelegenheiten seit 1993 organisierten Veranstaltungsreihe wurden bisher sieben Konferenzen abgehalten, bei denen christliche ebenso wie muslimische Persönlichkeiten vertreten waren. Ein wichtiges Kriterium für die Auswahl der muslimischen Konferenz-Teilnehmer war, dass sie in ihrer islamischen Heimat leben, in ihrer nationalen Kultur verankert und integriert sein mussten, gleichzeitig aber Dialogbereitschaft signalisieren sollten. Nur diese Persönlichkeiten sind tatsächlich in der Lage, die Ergebnisse des Dialogs in ihrer Gesellschaft wirksam werden zu lassen. Zielsetzung des österreichischen Vorschlages war es, die politische Bedeutung des Dialoges der Zivilisationen nicht allein auf die religiösen Eliten der jeweiligen Kulturkreise begrenzt zu lassen, sondern mit der aktiven Einbindung der Medien ein Durchdringen aller Gesellschaftsschichten in den Partnerländern des EUROMED- Prozesses (den 15 EU-Mitgliedsländern und den 12 Staaten des Mittelmeerraumes und des Nahen/Mittleren Ostens) zu erreichen.

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Die Ereignisse der vergangenen Jahre, und hier insbesondere die tragischen Ereignisse des 11. September, haben einmal mehr die besondere Notwendigkeit eines aktiven und breit angelegten Dialoges der Kulturen und Zivilisationen aufgezeigt. Um diesen wichtigen Dialog auf eine breitere Basis zu stellen und gleichzeitig in Zusammenarbeit mit den Medien eine größere Öffentlichkeit einzubeziehen, veranstaltete das Bundesministerium für auswärtige Angelegenheiten im Rahmen des vorgesehenen „Aktionsplanes betreffend den Dialog zwischen den Kulturen und Zivilisationen im Barcelona Prozess“ am 3. Juni 2002 ein Internationales Expertenseminar zum Thema “Euro-Med Dialogue between Cultures and Civilizations – The Role of the Media”. Dies ist ein Bestandteil des EURO-MED-Prozesses, in dem die Partnerländer übereingekommen sind, „untereinander eine umfassende Partnerschaft, die Europa-MittelmeerPartnerschaft aufzubauen, die über einen verstärkten regelmäßigen politischen Dialog, den Ausbau der wirtschaftlichen und finanziellen Zusammenarbeit und eine stärkere Herausstellung der sozialen, kulturellen und menschlichen Dimension [. . .] verwirklicht werden soll“ (Erklärung von Barcelona 1995). Hochrangige MedienvertreterInnen, JournalistInnen, SchriftstellerInnen und WissenschafterInnen aus allen 27 Europa-Mittelmeer-Partnerstaaten haben in strukturierten Podiumsdiskussionen konkrete Schritte identifiziert, wie Medien, aber auch die Literatur – als vorrangige Kommunikatoren von Bildern und Vorstellungen über „andere“ Kulturen – den Dialog der Kulturen und Zivilisationen in der Europäischen Union sowie in den Staaten des Mittelmeerraumes und Mittleren Ostens bestmöglich unterstützen können.[. . .]

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Appendix K Extract from 2001 White Paper: National Programme for the Development of Education in the Czech Republic

1. General Aims of Education [. . .] In accordance with the General Declaration of Human Rights and other international pacts, the European Charter of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Children, the Constitution of the Czech Republic, and the Paper of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, the Czech Republic aligns itself with the idea that education is one of the basic human rights of all human beings without distinction and declares that education is an inalienable and universal human value. The aims of education must therefore be derived from both individual and social needs. Education is related not only to knowledge and learning, i.e. the development of intellectual abilities, but also to the acquisition of social and other skills, spiritual, moral and aesthetic values, and desirable relations with other people and society as a whole, to emotional and volitional development, and last but not least to the ability to survive in the changing conditions of employment and the labour market. These are the reasons why education is now multi-dimensional, aimed at personal development, social integration, the formation of citizens and preparation for working life. The education system consequently focuses on the following aims: – The development of human personality, which presupposes concern for the preservation of an individual’s physical and mental health, involves the cultivation and support of self-fulfilment for every individual, and the maximum utilisation of his or her abilities. The fundamental aim is the cognitive, psychomotor and affective development of a human being, which is necessary not only from the point of view of an individual but also from that of society,

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because the creative potential of the population is always the main resource of a country’s development and economic prosperity. – Transmission of the historically evolved culture of the society, which forms part of science, technology, art, vocational skills, spiritual and moral values, both to coming generations and into the awareness and activities of all members of the society. In this way, the educational sphere guarantees the continuity of the past, present and future, and integrates an individual into the social process of cognition. An inseparable part of this is the preservation and development of national, linguistic and cultural identity, especially through the preservation of the cultural heritage. – Teaching people how to protect the environment in the sense of ensuring the sustainable development of a society should be seen as one of the important conditions for preserving the continuity of human society and its culture. This is not only a question of the transmission of knowledge, but also of developing sensitive attitudes towards nature and the acquisition of skills and motivation, towards the active formation of a healthy environment and the removal of poverty worldwide. – Strengthening social cohesiveness. The education system is one of the most significant integrating forces, not only through the handing on of shared values and common traditions, but primarily through ensuring equal access to education, by levelling out of social and cultural background, as well as all disadvantages caused by health, ethnic or specific regional conditions, and through the support of tolerant and democratic attitudes towards all members of society without distinction. This is the focus of education in human rights and multiculturalism, which is based on providing factual information on all minorities, especially the Romany, Jewish and German ones, and their fates and cultures, and shaping the relations of understanding and solidarity. An important role in this is played by minority education, bilingual schools and education for foreigners and their children as a part of the integration of these groups into Czech society. – Support for democracy and civic society. A democracy needs sensible and critical citizens, who are capable of independent thought, aware of their own dignity and respect other people’s rights and freedoms. The school community is the first social environment a child enters after their relatively closed family environment. The community influences children directly in many ways, every day and over many years: through the nature of teacher–pupil relations, which should be based on mutual respect, through the form of the school community, which should be a democratic community of equal partners, and through the whole structure of the education system, which should be open, with balanced areas of responsibilities at individual levels and open

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to the involvement of all partners. Education for democratic citizenship also applies to adults and takes place in their local, interest-related and working communities. Another essential part of education for democratic citizenship is the development of a critical attitude towards the dissemination of information and views by media (so called media education). – Education for partnership, cooperation and solidarity within European as well as globalising society adds another dimension to this. It means to strive for a life without conflicts and negative attitudes in a community not only of other people but also of other nations, languages, minorities and cultures, to be able to accept and respect even considerable differences between the people and cultures of today’s interconnected world. – Increasing economic competitiveness and the prosperity of society. The education system in a modern society is an important contributor to a high level of human resource development, as one of the fundamental factors of economic development. The education system influences not only the qualifications, flexibility and adaptability of the labour force, but also its capacity for innovation and change, the development and application of new technologies and the quality of management. – Increasing employability, in other words, the ability to find a job and be a full participant on the labour market, not only in one’s home country but also abroad – especially in Europe. This requires both general and vocational education to be focused on the continuous increasing of individuals’ flexibility and adaptability, their creativity and initiative, independence and responsibility. It means strengthening the role of general education, creating a broad basis of vocational education and applying key skills. It supposes that everybody has an opportunity to learn throughout their lives. Above all it means ensuring a sufficient quality of education in the areas favoured by the global market, which in the case of the twenty-first century means working in an information society, the ability to use modern information and communication technologies, the ability to find information, and critical thinking.

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Appendix L Extract from 2004 Education Act of the Czech Republic

ACT No. 561 of 24th September 2004 on Pre-school, Basic, Secondary, Tertiary Professional and Other Education (the Education Act) The Parliament has resolved upon the following Act of the Czech Republic: PART ONE GENERAL PROVISIONS Section 1 Subject and Scope of Application This Act shall regulate pre-school, basic, secondary, tertiary professional and other education at schools and school facilities, lay down conditions under which education and training (hereinafter referred to as ‘education’) are executed, define the rights and duties of natural and legal persons involved in education, and specify the scope of competencies of the bodies executing state administration and self-government in the system of education. Section 2 Principles and Goals of Education (1)

Education shall be based on the principles of

a) equal access of all citizens of the Czech Republic or nationals of any other European Union Member State to education without any discrimination based on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, belief or religion, nationality, ethnic or social origin, property, kith or kin, or the health condition or any other status of a citizen;

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b) considering the educational needs of an individual; c) mutual respect, deference, toleration of opinions, and dignity of all parties in education; d) free basic and secondary education of citizens of the Czech Republic or nationals of any other European Union Member State at schools established by the state, a region, a municipality or a union of municipalities; e) free dissemination of findings arising from the results of current knowledge of the world and in compliance with general goals of education; f) enhancement of the process of education on the basis of results achieved in the sciences, research and development and the widest possible application of effective up-to-date pedagogical approaches and methods; g) evaluation of results of education with regard to achieving goals of education laid down herein and in educational programmes; and h) the opportunity given to everybody to learn for all their life whilst being aware of having co-responsibility for one’s education. (2)

General goals of education shall be, in particular, as follows:

a) the personal development of a human being who shall possess knowledge and social competencies, ethical and spiritual values for their personal and civil life, for the execution of a profession or working activities, and for acquiring information and learning in the course of life; b) acquiring general education or general and vocational education; c) understanding of and application of principles of democracy and a legal state, fundamental human rights and freedoms along with responsibility and a sense of social coherence; d) understanding and application of the principle of equality of women and men in society; e) the formation of national and state citizenship awareness and respect for the ethnic, national, cultural, language and religious identity of every person; f) knowledge of global and European cultural values and traditions, understanding and acquiring principles and rules arising from European integration as a basis for coexistence at national and international levels;

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g) acquisition and application of knowledge of the environment and its protection arising from the principles of sustainable growth and of safety and the protection of health. (3)

Education provided hereunder shall be a service of general interest.

[. . .] Language of Instruction and Education of Members of National Minorities Section 13 Language of Instruction (1) The language of instruction shall be the Czech language. (2) Members of national minorities1 shall have the right to be educated in the language of the relevant national minority under conditions stipulated in Section 14. (3) The Ministry may permit the teaching of some subjects in a foreign language. (4) A foreign language may be the language of instruction at tertiary professional schools. Section 14 Education of Members of National Minorities (1) A municipality, a region or the Ministry shall ensure education for members of national minorities in the language of the relevant minority at nursery, basic and secondary schools, namely in the municipalities where, in compliance with a special legal regulation,2 a Committee for National Minorities has been established and if conditions stipulated herein are satisfied. (2) Should at least eight (8) children claim to be members of a national minority a class of the relevant grade of nursery school may be set up; should at least ten (10) pupils claim to be members of a national minority a class of the relevant grade of basic school may be set up. A nursery school or basic school with the language of the national minority may be established provided that all classes have on average at least twelve (12) children or pupils who claim to be members of the national minority in one class. (3) Should at least twelve (12) pupils claim to be members of a national minority a class of the relevant grade of secondary school may be set up;

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a secondary school with the language of the national minority as a language of instruction may be established provided that all classes have on average at least fifteen (15) pupils who claim to be members of the national minority. (4) In organising education in the language of a national minority, municipalities, regions or the Ministry shall take into account the accessibility of this education. Education in the language of a national minority may be also organised by a union of municipalities or municipalities, or a municipality and a region may mutually agree on the manner of organisation, including funding. (5) If conditions stipulated in sub-sections 2 and 3 are not satisfied a head teacher with the consent of the founder may specify in the School Educational Programme subjects or their parts which may be taught bilingually, both in the Czech language and the language of the relevant national minority. (6) At schools with instruction in the language of the relevant national minority, school reports, apprenticeship certificates, and diplomas on completion of education shall be issued bilingually, both in the Czech language and in the language of the relevant national minority.

Notes 1. Section 2 (2) of Act No. 273/2001 Coll., on the Rights of Members of National Minorities and on the Amendment to Some Other Acts 2. Section 117 (3) of Act 128/2000 Coll., on Municipalities (Municipal Establishment), as amended by Act No. 273/2001 Coll.

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Appendix M Extract of Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity. National Report Template EXP LG 5/2006 EN Annex FIN

3. Building a Language-Friendly Environment 3.1. An inclusive approach to linguistic diversity National and regional authorities are encouraged to give special attention to measures to assist those language communities whose number of native speakers is in decline from generation to generation, in line with the principles of the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages. Member States are encouraged to give special attention to measures to assist language communities whose number of native speakers is in decline from generation to generation, in line with the principles of the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages. a) What concrete actions (if any) have been accomplished in this field since 2004? The Education Act of 2004 states that a municipality, a region or the Ministry shall ensure education for members of national minorities in the language of the relevant minority at nursery, ‘basic’ (primary and lowersecondary) and secondary schools. Should at least eight children claim to be members of a national minority, a class of the relevant grade of nursery school may be set up; should at least ten pupils claim to be members of a national minority, a class of the relevant grade of basic school may be set up. A nursery school or basic school with the language of the national minority may be established provided that all classes have on average at least twelve pupils. Should at least twelve pupils claim to be members of a national minority, a class of the relevant grade of upper-secondary school may be set up; an

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upper-secondary school with the language of the national minority as the language of instruction may be established provided that all classes have on average at least fifteen pupils who claim to be members of the national minority. In organising education in the language of a national minority, municipalities, regions or the Ministry take into account the accessibility of this education. Education in the language of a national minority may be also organised by a union of municipalities, or, a municipality and a region may mutually agree on the manner of organisation, including funding, of such education. If conditions mentioned above are not satisfied a head teacher with the consent of the founder may specify in the School Educational Programme subjects or their parts which may be taught bilingually, both in the Czech language and the language of the relevant national minority. Schools with instruction in the language of the relevant national minority issue bilingual documents: school reports, apprenticeship certificates, and diplomas on completion of education, both in the Czech language and in the language of instruction. b) What obstacles to the implementation of this recommendation have been identified? c) What are the proposed initiatives to overcome these obstacles?

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Appendix N Extract from Hungarian 1997 Directive Concerning the Education for National Minorities, 32/1997 (5.XI.)

Beilage Nr. 1 zur Verordnung 32/1997 (5.XI.) Richtlinien für die Bildung im Kindergarten der nationalen und ethnischen Minderheiten Einleitung Die Bildung und Erziehung der nationalen und ethnischen Minderheiten ist Teil des einheitlichen Erziehungs-und Bildungsplans unseres Landes, das seine spezifischen Ziele und Aufgaben mit denen im Landesgrundprogramm der Erziehung im Kindergarten in Einklang mit der Regierungsverordnung 137/1996 (28.VIII.) verwirklicht. Die Richtlinien der Erziehung der nationalen und ethnischen Minderheiten bestimmen die Grundprinzipien der pädagogischen Arbeit in den Minderheitenkindergärten. Die Richtlinien des Minderheitenkindergartens beinhalten die Ziele und Aufgaben der Erziehung der Minderheiten. Sie verfügen auch über die Prinzipien, nach denen die Arbeit im Kindergarten verläuft, über die Formen und die Charakteristika der Entwicklung der Minderheitenerziehung bis zum Ende des Kindergartenalters. Ziele und Aufgaben der Bildung im Minderheiten-Kindergarten 1. Die Bildung im Minderheiten-Kindergarten dient dazu, entsprechend den Altersbedingungen und der individuellen Entwicklung der Kinder in diesem Alter, dass die Kinder die Sprache und die Kultur der Minderheit kennen lernen und sich aneignen, dass die kulturellen Traditionen weitergegeben und entwickelt werden.

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2. Ziel und Aufgabe der Bildung für Minderheiten ist es, dass – für die Kinder eine muttersprachliche Umgebung geschaffen wird, – die für das Minderheitendasein wichtigen, an die Kultur und die Lebensweise der Minderheit anknüpfenden Traditionen und Bräuche entwickelt und gepflegt werden, – die Kinder auf den schulischen Minderheitenunterricht vorbereitet werden, – die Entwicklung der Minderheitenidentität gefördert wird. 3. Im Minderheiten-Kindergarten soll angestrebt werden, dass – bei Sicherung der Gefühlsentwicklung des Kindes und bei Berücksichtigung der Sprachkenntnisse des Kindes – die Kommunikation in der Minderheitensprache einen möglichst vollständigen Ausbau erreiche. Die Kindergartenpädagogen sichern durch die regelmässig wiederkehrenden Kommunikationssituationen den auf Nachahmung beruhenden Spracherwerb. 4. Mit Hilfe einer aus dem Minderheitenkulturschatz und der Kultur des Mutterlandes (Literatur, Musik, Volksspiel) bewusst aufgebauten Thematik soll der Spracherwerbsprozess möglichst vielseitig gestaltet werden. In Abhängigkeit der entstandenen sprachlichen Situationen, und entsprechend dem natürlichen Spracherwerbsprozess soll der Wochenund Tagesablauf der Kinder flexibel gestaltet werden. [. . .] Beilage 2. zur Verordnung des Ministeriums für Bildung und Erziehung 32/1997. (XI.5.) Richtlinien für den schulischen Unterricht der nationalen und ethnischen Minderheiten ALLGEMEINE VERORDNUNGEN Einleitung Die Schule für die Bildung und den Unterricht der nationalen und ethnischen Minderheiten sichert in Übereinstimmung mit dem im Nationalen Grundlehrplan 130/1995 (X.26.) herausgegegeben Regierungsbeschluss und den Richtlinien des Unterrichts für nationale und ethnische Minderheiten, folgende Zielstellungen: Der Minderheitenunterricht – als Teil des Allgemeinunterrichts in Ungarn – verwirklicht die allgemeinen Ziele und Aufgaben der Schule und sichert des Weiteren auch das Erlernen der Sprache der Minderheit, das Lernen in dieser Sprache, das Kennenlernen der Geschichte, der geistigen und materiellen Kultur, die Traditionspflege, die Entfaltung der Selbstkenntnis, die Übung und das Kennenlernen der Minderheitenrechte.

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Der Minderheitenunterricht unterstützt den Angehörigen der Minderheit darin, dass er seine Identität findet, bewahrt und entwickelt, sein Anderssein akzeptiert, seine Werte anerkennt und auch anderen gegenüber zeigt, und seine Bindung an die Gemeinschaft stärkt. In den Institutionen zur Bildung und zum Unterricht der Minderheit soll angestrebt werden a) dass für den Schüler die sprachlichen und kulturellen Vorteile des Reichtums der Minderheit verständlich werden und im Schüler ein reales Bild über die Nation und seine Minderheit entsteht, b) dass die Schüler die Formen der Vorurteile und des Absonderns erkennen, die Gefahr, den Hintergrund dieser Erscheinungen kennen lernen, genauso wie die Erscheinungen der Verletzung der Minderheiten- und Menschenrechte.

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Appendix O Extract from the Hungarian National Core Curriculum 2007

PART II COMMON VALUES IN SCHOOL EDUCATION The values advocated by the NCC are determined by the Constitution of the Republic of Hungary, the Hungarian laws in force, especially the Public Education Act, other Hungarian legislation, international declarations and conventions concerning human rights, children’s rights, the rights of national and ethnic minorities, and gender equality. The NCC helps schools operate in a way that teaching and learning processes are organised to promote the values of democracy, humanism, respect for the individual, the freedom of conscience, the development of personality, progress towards cooperation between fundamental communities (family, nation, community of European nations, mankind), equality between peoples, nations, national minority and ethnic groups and genders, solidarity and tolerance. The NCC seeks to strengthen a school system which advances the achievement of equality of chances. The NCC defines the common content requirements and development tasks of public education in a way so that it propels school education towards contributing to the economic development of Hungary. To enhance longterm environmental and economic sustainability and to promote a greater sense of responsibility in society, the NCC encourages the dissemination of different forms of ethical business and social behaviour. It regards the knowledge and behavioural characteristics that are indispensable for the Hungarian economy to reinforce its position in global economic competition and to maintain sustainable growth to be particularly valuable. It cherishes all values that represent high-level expertise, the sound management of assets, reliability in one’s work, the creation of value through work, quality work and an effective participation in the economic arena. It appreciates all efforts directed at the acquisition of knowledge that is the driving force of the modern economy.

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The NCC is national because it promotes common national values. Knowing the country and its broader surrounding area, the Carpathian Basin, being familiar with national traditions and developing a national identity, as much as helping to preserve and maintain the identity of the members of the country’s national and ethnic minorities are precious items on its agenda. The NCC encourages students to get acquainted with the life and culture of the minorities that live in the country, and at the same time, in defining the development tasks, it focuses on those European and humanistic values and contents that strengthen our sense of belonging to Europe. By joining the European Union, each citizen of Hungary became a citizen of a larger social, political, economic and cultural community. Civic education therefore is as much the education of the citizens of the country as that of the European Union. The NCC seeks to enhance the knowledge of and respect for the history, traditions, culture, customs and lifestyle of other peoples in order to create an openness towards and understanding of the different cultures. In line with the above, the document addresses the common global problems mankind has to cope with. In respect of universal questions that concern the whole world, it stresses the responsibilities, options and duties of the individual, the state, civic organisations and smaller and larger communities in exploiting the opportunities globalisation can offer and in mitigating and eliminating the inherent dangers. School education is a process that demands massive financial resources as well as considerable time and energy. Thus, it follows that, from the viewpoint of both the adult society and students, the NCC deems the efficiency of teaching and learning processes at school and the viability and usefulness of the knowledge and competences acquired to be of essential value. Therefore, its fundamental goals include the development of key competences that are supremely important for being successful as an adult, the preparation for lifelong learning, and as a precondition of efficiency, a regulation which facilitates the mainstreaming of the procedures and methods in the organisation of learning and a teaching culture which are rooted in a modern, personoriented, interactive and experience-based form of learning.

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PART III FUNDAMENTAL GOALS OF SCHOOL EDUCATION Key competences Communication in the mother tongue Communication in the mother tongue is the ability to express and interpret concepts, thoughts, feelings, facts and opinions both orally and in writing (listening and reading comprehension, text writing) as well as the appropriate and creative use of the language in a full range of societal and cultural contexts such as education and training, work, home life and leisure.

Necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes Communication in the mother tongue results from the acquisition of the mother tongue, which is intrinsically related to the development of the individual’s cognitive faculties. Communication in the mother tongue requires an appropriate vocabulary and knowledge of grammar and the specific functions of language. This proficiency comprises being cognisant of the main types of verbal interaction, a whole range of literary and non-literary texts, the major characteristics of different styles of language use and the variability of language and communication in different situations. Individuals should have the skills to engage in oral and written communication in various communicative situations, to keep track of the communication and to change it as the situation requires. Individuals must be able to differentiate between and to use different text types, to seek, collect and process information, to use various aids, and to formulate and express his or her own oral and written arguments in a way adequate to the situation. A positive attitude entails that the individual endeavours to conduct a critical and constructive dialogue, as well as respect for aesthetic quality and desire to get to know others. This demands that one be aware of the effect language has on others and of the significance of socially responsible language use. Communication in foreign languages Communication in foreign languages is considered to have the same elements as communication in the mother tongue: the ability to understand, express and interpret concepts, thoughts, feelings, facts and opinions both orally and in writing (listening and reading comprehension, text writing)

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in an appropriate range of societal and cultural contexts – education and training, work, home life and leisure, in line with one’s individual needs. Communication in a foreign language demands other skills, such as mediation and intercultural understanding. The level of proficiency is not necessarily the same for all four dimensions (listening comprehension, speaking skills, reading comprehension and writing skills), and there can be differences between languages or based on the individual’s sociocultural background, environment and needs/interests.

Necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes Communication in foreign languages is conditional upon the knowledge of vocabulary and functional grammar and the main types of verbal interaction and registers of language. It is also important to be familiar with societal traditions as well as the cultural aspects and diversity of languages. The skills necessary for communication in foreign languages include the ability to understand oral messages, to initiate, conduct and conclude conversations, and to read, comprehend and create texts in accordance with individual needs. One should also be able to use aids adequately and, as part of lifelong learning, to acquire a foreign language through a non-formal learning path. A positive attitude entails respect for cultural diversity and interest in and curiosity in languages and intercultural communication. Mathematical competence Mathematical competence is the ability to develop and apply mathematical thinking which also enables an individual to solve a range of problems in everyday situations. The emphasis is as much on process and activity as on knowledge. Mathematical competence – although to different extents – embraces the development and use of abilities related to mathematical modes of thought, the application of mathematical models (formulas, models, constructs and graphs/charts), as well as an inclination to apply these.

Necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes Essential knowledge in mathematics include the progressive knowledge of numeracy, measures and structures, basic operations and fundamental mathematical presentations, mathematical notions, correlations and concepts and understanding the questions to which mathematics can give answers.

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Having acquired mathematical competence, the individual has the skills to apply basic mathematical principles and processes in the context of knowledge acquisition and problem solving in everyday situations, at home and work. An individual should be able to follow and interpret a chain of arguments, to explain results with the means of mathematics, to understand mathematical reasoning, to communicate in the language of mathematics and to use appropriate resources. A positive attitude in the field of mathematics rests on the respect for truth and the disposition to seek logical reasons and their validity. Competences in natural science Competences in science refer to the body of knowledge and methodology employed to explain, to make predictions and to control our actions with regard to the natural world and the processes that take place as a result of interaction between mankind and the natural world. Technological competence is viewed as the application of that knowledge in order to satisfy human desires and needs. This competence entails understanding the changes brought about by human activity and the related individual and public responsibility for sustainable development.

Necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes For natural science the essential knowledge comprises the main principles of the natural world, the basic scientific concepts and methods, the technological processes as well as the effects human activities have on the natural environment by applying these. Equipped with this knowledge, the individual understands the role scientific theories play in the development of social processes and the benefits, limits and dangers of various applications and technologies in the whole of society (in relation to decision-making, values, issues of morality, culture, etc.). Having acquired the competences in science, the individual is able to activate his or her scientific and technological knowledge to solve problems at work and in everyday situations. He or she should be able to apply knowledge in a practical manner to get acquainted with and to operate new technologies and equipment, to utilise scientific achievements, solve problems, achieve individual and community goals, and to make decisions that demand technological literacy. This includes a critical approach to pseudo scientific and anti-scientific and anti-technology assertions and a willingness to act in order to create the conditions for sustainable development both at the local and global level. Competences in science equally presuppose a critical and curious attitude, interest in issues of ethics and respect for safety and sustainability, in

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particular with regard to the impact scientific and technological development has on us, our families, communities and the Earth. [. . .] Social and civic competences Personal, value-oriented, interpersonal, intercultural, social and civic competences are prerequisites for a harmonious life and community integration, a commitment to and activity for the public good. These comprise all forms of behaviour that an individual should master in order to participate in an efficient and constructive way in social and working life, in an increasingly diverse society, and, furthermore, if need be, to resolve conflicts. Civic competence enables an individual to apply his or her knowledge of social processes, structures and democracy in order to actively participate in public affairs. Necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes Personal and social well-being demands that one possess knowledge of one’s own physical and mental health and understand the decisive role a healthy lifestyle plays in preserving this. Being conscious of the norms and understanding the generally accepted rules of behaviour and codes of conduct are essential for successful relationships and social participation. It is important to be familiar with the basic concepts concerning individuals, groups, work organisation, gender equality, non-discrimination, society and culture. Being aware of the multicultural and socio-economic dimensions of European societies and understanding the interaction between national cultural identity and European identity are also desirable components of this competence. The core skills of this competence include the ability to communicate efficiently in different spheres of life, to consider and to understand various viewpoints, to invoke trust in negotiating partners and to show empathy. Coping with stress and frustration and responsiveness to changes also belong here. As regards attitudes, cooperation, assertiveness and integrity are the most important and so is interest in social and economic development, intercultural communication and the recognition of diversity. An ambition to overcome personal prejudices and to reach compromise is a further relevant element of this attitude. Civic competence is based on the knowledge of the concept of democracy, citizenship and civil rights as defined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and in other international declarations and as applied at local, regional, national, European and international level. This competence incorporates an awareness of current events, the major events and tendencies of national, European and world history as well as the goals,

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values and policies of social and political movements. This extends to being familiar with the idea of European integration and the EU’s structures, main objectives and values as well as an awareness of European diversity and cultural identity. Skills for civic competence require abilities such as efficient cooperation in public matters, as well as solidarity with and interest in resolving problems that concern the local and broader community. This includes critical and constructive analysis of community activities and decisions made at various levels – from local to national and European level – as well as participation in decision-making, primarily through voting. Positive attitudes are based on full respect for human rights, including respect for equality and democracy, and understanding the cultural diversity of religious and ethnic groups. This further implies a sense of belonging to the locality, the country, the EU and Europe in general, an openness to participating in all levels of democratic decision-making as well as a demonstration of responsibility and acceptance of and respect for the common values that ground community cohesion (e.g., respect for democratic principles). Constructive participation also entails a supportive attitude towards civic activities, social diversity, social cohesion and sustainable development, no less than respect for others’ values and privacy.

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Appendix P Extract from Hungarian Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity. National Report Template EXP LG 5/2006 EN Annex FIN [official translation]

3. Building a Language-Friendly Environment 3.1. An inclusive approach to linguistic diversity National and regional authorities are encouraged to give special attention to measures to assist those language communities whose number of native speakers is in decline from generation to generation, in line with the principles of the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages. Member States are encouraged to give special attention to measures to assist language communities whose number of native speakers is in decline from generation to generation, in line with the principles of the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages. a) What concrete actions (if any) have been accomplished in this field since 2004? The 1993 Act on National and Ethnic Minorities defines 13 national and ethnic minorities in Hungary, recognised by the state. These minorities have a community right to preserve their culture. It is this community right ensured by law which forms the basis of state obligation to operate institutions to preserve the cultural identity of minorities. Croatian, German, Rumanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian are the minorities where Hungary also assumed commitments in the European Charter. Minority education receives extra funding from state, an additional 40% per pupil in addition to the normal subsidy. Access to national and minority language education is conditioned by a specific number (8) of parents who jointly request it.

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There are five forms of minority education in Hungary: Mother tongue education (the language of instruction is the minority language except Hungarian language and literature); minority language as language of instruction (bilingual education where at least 50% of education is in Hungarian); minority language as subject (language teaching programme, all subjects are taught in Hungarian); Roma minority education (Roma culture is taught in Hungarian). The fifth form of minority education is called supplementary minority education, and was introduced for Greek, Bulgarian and Polish from 2004. The latter is especially important for minorities dispersed in Hungary, see in point c). From September 2004 it is possible to introduce the year of intensive language learning where 40% of the total teaching hours is devoted to foreign or minority language learning. b) What obstacles to the implementation of this recommendation have been identified? In the majority of minority families, the process of passing on the language has broken down; and the Hungarian language has become dominant. The different dialects spoken by the minorities do not lend themselves to regular refreshment, and thus their role in social communication is decreasing. This makes the role of the school in passing on the native language all the more important. The geographical dispersion of minorities can cause problems mainly at the level of secondary schools. The number of pupils wanting to attend a minority secondary school may not be sufficient in one settlement to run for them a secondary school or a class. (The state is obliged to organise schooling at the request of the parents of 8 pupils.) c) What are the proposed initiatives to overcome these obstacles? The Act on Public Education offers from 1999 the possibility that can be a good solution in the case if there are no 8 minority pupils in the given settlement [sic]. This is a new form called complementary minority education, which makes participation in minority education possible also for those minorities that do not have a minority school. In 2004 it was introduced for Bulgarian, Greek and Polish. In this case, pupils attending normal school education elsewhere have special additional (afternoon) courses to study their minority language and culture. This instruction is recognised as part of the normal school system, and the certificate the pupils get here entitles them to pass the exam in the given subject and to enter higher education. Within the framework of this type of minority education both the language and the culture of the given minority are taught. The complementary education may be organised within a school or through a so-called travelling teacher.

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Office of the Government of the Czech Republic – Council of the Government for National Minorities (2002). Report on the Situation of National Minorities in the Czech Republic 2001. Prague. Minister für Forschung und Entwicklung, Menschenrechte und Personalentwicklung. Regierungsratsvorsitzender für nationale Minderheiten (2003). Informationsbericht zur gegenwärtigen Lage der deutschen Minderheit in der tschechischen Republik und über ausgewählte Fragen der kroatischen und polnischen Minderheit. Prague. Government of the Czech Republic (2003). The Czech Republic. Second periodic report on measures taken to give effect to the principles set out in the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities under Article 25, paragraph 2 of the Convention. Prague. European Commission – Education and Culture (2005). Euromosaic III. Czech Republic at http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/archive/languages/langmin/ euromosaic/cz_en.pdf (accessed 26 August 2009). Office of the Government of the Czech Republic – Secretariate of the Government Council for National Minorities (2005). Report on the Situation of national Minorities in the Czech Republic in 2004. Prague. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (2006). The Education Act. Act No. 561 of 24 September 2004 on Pre-school, Basic, Secondary, Tertiary Professional and Other Education. Prague. European Commission – Education and Culture (2006). Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity. National Report Template. Country: Czech Republic. EXP LG 5/2006 EN Annex FIN at http://ec.europa.eu/education/ languages/archive/policy/report/cz_en.pdf (accessed 26 August 2009).

Hungary Parliament of the Republic of Hungary (1993). Gesetz Nr. LXXVII/1993 über die Rechte der nationalen und ethnischen Minderheiten (mit den Modifizierungen in einheitliche Fassung gebracht). Budapest. Ministerium für Bildung und Erziehung der Republic Ungarn (1997). Die Verordnung über die Herausgabe der Richtlinien für die Bildung im Kindergarten sowie für den schulischen Unterricht der nationalen und ethnischen Minderheit 32/1997 (5.XI.). Budapest. Office for National and Ethnic Minorities (1998). Report by the Ombudsman for National and Ethnic Minority Rights Regarding the Comprehensive Survey of the Education of Minorities in Hungary. Budapest. Office for National and Ethnic Minorities (2005). National and ethnic minorities in Hungary. Updated 31 January 2005. Budapest. European Commission – Education and Culture (2005). Euromosaic III. Hungary, at http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/archive/languages/langmin/euromosaic/ hu_en.pdf (accessed 26 August 2009). European Commission – Education and Culture (2006). Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity. National Report Template. Country: Hungary. EXP LG 5/2006 EN Annex FIN, at http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/archive/policy/report/hungary_en.pdf (accessed 20 March 2009).

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Ministry of Education and Culture (2009). Hungarian National Core Curriculum (abridged version). 7 January 2009, at http://www.okm.gov.hu/main.php?folderID =137&articleID=6994&ctag=articlelist&iid-1 (accessed at 16 April 2009).

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Index

‘A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism’ (EU, 2005), 87, 88, 91–5, 96–7, 102, 209 extract, 214–15 Act on General Education (Hungary) (1993), 74, 78–9 Act on Rights of Members of National Minorities (Czech Republic) (2001), 69–70 Act on Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities (Hungary) (1993), 74–5, 120–1 ‘Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity’ (template) (European Commission), 120, 208–9 agency in creating identities, 23, 137–8, 159, 162 in Czech Republic’s language policy discourse, 108 and European Commission’s role in language policy, 96, 97 in Hungary’s language policy discourse, 107, 121, 124 relationship with time and space in narratives, 136–7, 144, 193, 200–1 agriculture, 59, 62 Alsace, 30 Ammon, U., 18–19 aristocracy, in history of Czech lands, 54–5 Armbruster, H., 138 Armenia, 126n

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Association of Ethnic Germans in Hungary, 169 Association of Germans in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, 72–3 Association of Germans in Hungary, 48, 49, 78, 121–4 Augsburg, 135–6 Ausgleich (Compromise, 1867), 56 Auslandskulturkonzept NEU (Austrian foreign cultural policy extract), 104–5, 227–9 Austria, 9n, 51, 80, 81n, 82, 83, 203 bilingualism and language ideologies, 19, 22 promotion of German language, 4, 31–2, 67, 97, 99 and status of German language today, 3, 98, 170 Austria Institute, 104, 221 ‘Austria Kulturint. Tätigkeitsbericht 2002 Auslandskultur’ (Austrian report on foreign cultural policy), 106–7 extract, 231–3 Austrian Cultural Forum, 104, 220–1 Austrian foreign cultural policy, 97–8, 99 agents and institutions, 219–21 extracts from official documents, 227–9, 231–3 as part of European cultural policy, 104–7, 124 promotion of German in present day, 4, 67, 97 Austro-Hungarian empire, 52, 53, 56, 57 Austro-Prussian War (1866), 56

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274 Auswärtige Kulturpolitik – Konzeption 2000, 99–100, 101–2 extract, 222–4 Azerbaijan, 126n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 33 Balkan countries, 105, 126n Bamberg, M., 27 Bantu languages, 15 Barcelona summit (2001), 94–5, 106–7 Battle of the White Mountain (1620), 54 Bauman, R., 138 Bavaria, 172 Baynham, M., 33, 133–4 belonging in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 119–20 and language, 13, 32, 84, 205 and role of community centres for German speakers, 165 Beneke, Jürgen, 165 Beneš decrees, 64, 81n Berlin, 12, 188, 189 Bethlen, István, 58 bilateral/bi-national agreements, Czech Republic, 69, 73, 81n bilingualism, 12 education in Czech Republic, 70–1, 109, 110–12 education in present-day Hungary, 76, 125, 189–90 in language biographies, 141, 156–7, 197 and language ideologies, 19 in present-day education, 48, 49, 70–1 schools in communist Hungary, 63 in stories of language loss and recovery, 131, 149, 152–3, 156–7, 184, 205–6 street signs and inscriptions, 79 Blackledge, A. 23, 25, 166 Blommaert, Jan, 6, 8, 18, 19, 20, 22–3, 39–40, 41n, 41–2n, 83, 86 BMW, 48 Bohemia, Bohemians, 53, 54–5, 56, 65, 169 border areas, 135 Český Těšín, 50, 60 personal narratives, 171–2 bourgeoisie, in Czech lands, 55

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Index Braudel, Fernand, 20 Brazil, 14 Britishness, 32 Brittany, 12 Brockmeier, J., 133 Bruner, J., 133, 137–8 Budapest, 36, 77, 169, 169–70 Bulgaria, 105 Byelorussia, 126n Canagarajah, S., 14, 30 Capps, L., 27, 128, 132 Carli, A., 193, 194 Carpathian mountains, 53 census 1941, Hungary, 20–1, 22, 44, 52, 166 census 2001, Czech Republic, 67–8, 73 Central Bureau for Education Abroad (Germany), 219 central Europe, 1, 9n cleavage after 1945, 5 complex history of German language, 4, 43–4, 79–80, 98–9 expulsion of ethnic Germans from, 4, 51, 203 geographical considerations, 1, 3 historic importance as multilingual space, 98 key transformative points in history, 8–9, 43, 66, 98, 105, 166, 206–7 origin of linguistic nationalism, 203 promotion and proscription of German language, 34, 101–2 regional importance to Germany and Austria, 99, 105 special status of German language today, 3–4, 49, 98–9 Český Těšín, Czech Republic, 50, 60, 71 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, 93 Charter for Regional or Minority Languages see European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Czech Republic, 1993), 69 citizenship in communist Czechoslovakia’s policy, 156 in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 112–13, 114

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Index in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 120 language and belonging, 13, 32 and multilingualism, 12, 84 and nationality in Czech Republic, 73 citizenship rights, ethnic Germans’ loss of, 62, 64 civic education, Hungary, 117, 119, 120 class and German as ‘imperial language’, 52 and nationalist ideologies, 54, 55 Cold War, 118, 135, 203, 205 end of, 7, 9, 80 collective identities language (auto)biographies, 5 and language in Czech lands, 54–5 collective memory/memories, 128, 165–6, 184 Communism, collapse (1989), 43, 45 Communist Party, 131–2 community/communities at risk from diminution of cultural heritage, 146–7, 159 cooperation, 119 dislocation and relocation of, 207 language and belonging, 13, 164–5 of memory, 165–6, 200 notion of ‘speech community’, 163 and varying definitions of Germanness, 163–4 Community of Young Hungarian Germans, 175 competences cultural/intercultural, 92, 119 in European Commission’s language policy discourse, 92, 96 in Hungary’s Core Curriculum, 119 Constitution of the Czech Republic, 69 Constitution of the Republic of Hungary, 74, 75, 77, 77–8, 118 Copenhagen summit (1996), 211 Council of Europe, 31, 35 and European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 88, 91 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, 68–9, 73, 74, 210–11 member states, 125–6n role in language policy, 86, 87, 88, 210–11

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275 Council of Ministers, 91, 94–5 Council for National and Ethnic Minorities, Czech Republic, 72 Counter-Reformation, 54 crafts sectors, 62–3 Croats, 57, 62 cultural assimilation in communist Czechoslovakia, 64–5 and concerns about Hungary’s minority education policy, 79, 121–2 in Czech Republic’s education policy discourses, 110, 114 and language loss, 140–1, 159 and resistance in language biographies, 156–7, 159 Cultural Association of Citizens of the ČSSR of German Nationality (Kulturverband), 64–5, 72 Cultural Association of German Workers in Hungary, 63–4 Cultural Association of Germans in the Czech Republic, 28 cultural associations Bohemia and Moravia, 35 Czech Republic, 28, 72–3, 141, 172 Czechoslovakia in communist era, 64–5, 72, 135–6 Hungary, 58, 63–4 present-day Hungary, 48, 49, 175, 193–4 cultural autonomy, minority selfgovernments in Hungary, 78 cultural categories/groups, Hungary, 175–9 cultural diversity conflict with national homogeneity and sovereignty, 84–5, 113 in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 109, 110, 112 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 119 policy focus of Austria, 105 cultural heritage/traditions Austria and common history of Habsburg empire, 105 in Czech Republic’s policy discourse, 109, 110, 112, 114 and iconisation of German language, 199, 200

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276 cultural heritage/traditions (cont.) and loss of sense of community, 146–7, 158–9 in present-day education in Hungary, 76 role in ‘community of memory’, 165–6 role of Council of Europe in protecting, 88–9 cultural identity in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 109–10, 110, 112, 114 in EU language policy, 86–7, 93 in Hungary’s minority education policy, 117–18, 121, 125 as problematic for minorities after First World War, 60 Silesians, 50 cultural policy legal framework for minorities in Czech Republic, 68–74 legal framework for minorities in Hungary, 74–9 national and domestic, 8, 82 see also foreign cultural policies; interculturalism cultural practices changes in communist Czechoslovakia, 65 post-1945 changes in Hungary, 62–3 cultural production, 13, 67 cultural spaces, 43, 44, 47–8, 67, 125 Czech 2004 Education Act, 70–1, 74, 108, 112–13, 113 extract, 237–40 Czech-German agreements, 69 Czech-German Future Fund, 81n Czech-Germans, after Second World War, 181–6 Czech lands background to emergence of linguistic nationalisms, 53, 54–7, 105 German-speaking classes after First World War, 52 new Czechoslovak state created after First World War, 58–60 Czech language after First World War, 58, 61 changing relationship with German language, 9, 27, 43, 44, 141

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Index Czech-Germans’ strategies after Second World War, 185 and linguistic nationalism in nineteenth century, 54, 55, 56, 203 and loss of local speech forms, 140–1 situation since 1980s, 67–8 in stories of language loss and recovery, 156, 181–2, 194–5 Czech Republic, 7, 9n, 36, 43 application for EU membership, 68, 85–6, 211 cultural ties with Austria, 105, 220–1 ethnic homogeneity, 67–8 language policy discourses, 83, 84, 97–8, 107–14, 124–5 lasting legacy of National Socialism, 61, 99 legal framework for language and cultural policies, 68–74 minority education in Hungary compared with, 118 present-day situation of German language, 45, 49–50, 67, 97, 98, 114, 204 recent trends in foreign language learning, 46, 47, 49–50 Sudetengebirge, 53 use of community centres by German speakers, 165 Czechoslovakia break-up of socialist republic, 73 emergence as independent state in interwar years, 51–2, 52, 57, 58–60, 61 experiences during and after Second World War, 51, 61, 154, 182–5 German language after 1989, 66–8, 134, 185–6 German minorities in communist era, 51, 64–6, 134–6 German occupation in 1938, 194–5 imposed identity of ‘German’ after 1945, 24, 173 Magyar minorities during communist era, 63 national minorities after First World War, 58–60, 59

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Index speaking German in post-1945 years, 30, 134–6 ‘velvet revolution’, 44 Czechs collective memory of deported Germans, 166 of German origin in present day, 50 in new Czechoslovak state, 58, 59 population in Czechoslovakia in 1950, 65 present-day population in Czech Republic, 67 Davies, B., 25 De Certeau, M., 33 De Fina, A., 27, 39–40, 129–30, 138–9 democratic values in 2005 Framework Strategy, 94 in German and Austrian foreign cultural policies, 100, 104 in Hungary’s Core Curriculum, 119 demographic changes, 166 see also population Denzin, N. K., 37 deportations/expulsions, 4 ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, 51, 64, 81n, 154 ethnic Germans from Hungary, 20, 51, 52, 61–2, 169 Deutsche(r) (category of identity), 162, 174 Deutscher Bund, collapse, 56 dialects being replaced by standard German, 117, 121–2, 125, 145, 170, 200, 203–4 boundary between languages and, 15, 66–7, 115, 122, 170, 176–7, 179–80, 190–1 German terms for, 181 historically used by minorities, 44, 49, 61, 80 and Muttersprache, 193 in nineteenth-century Hungary, 52 restricted to private spaces, 67 and stories of language loss and recovery, 145, 148, 152, 180, 186–8, 191–2 Dialogue of Cultures and Civilisations

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277 (European Council of Foreign Ministers), 106 discourse(s) linguistic difference, 17–18 uses of term, 10–11 discourses on language and identity, 161, 162, 180 discourses on language policy, 12–13, 202, 204–5 context, 83–5 Czech Republic, 84, 97–8, 107–14 European level, 86–98, 113–14, 204 and foreign cultural policies, 82, 124 German language, 5, 8, 98, 204 Hungary, 97–8, 114–24 importance of place, 32–3 and individual narratives/experiences, 9, 82, 124 interconnections, 6–7, 10–11, 40, 202–3 and national identities, 82, 99 and performance of identity, 28–32 discourses on language in social life, 7–8, 10–13, 34–9, 82, 85, 125, 206–7 EU texts, 87–8 language (auto)biographies, 127, 139, 158–9, 162 language ideologies, 14–18, 30, 202–3 diversity in European values, 92–3, 95 see also cultural diversity; linguistic diversity Donauschwabe (Danube Swabian), 53–4, 162, 174, 175, 179 Eakin, P. J., 138 economic changes factors in German language shift, 2–3, 67, 122, 205 in Hungary after Second World War, 62–3 influence of global demands on language policy, 98 in new Czechoslovak state after First World War, 59 economic opportunities and German language in language biographies, 148, 157–8 languages as commodities, 13, 47–8, 171

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278 economic opportunities (cont.) multilingualism as skill for access to, 88, 92, 93 economic policy, and EU language policy, 95, 114 education Czech language policy discourses, 109–12, 125 decline of standard German after First World War, 61, 80 discourses in language education, 13 elements in Austrian foreign cultural policy, 104 ethnic Germans in new Czechoslovak nation-state, 59 in European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 90 European Council’s policy aims, 210–11 German minority languages in communist Czechoslovakia, 63, 65, 155–6 Hungarian language policy discourses, 115–20, 120, 121, 124, 125, 204 and linguistic nationalisms in nineteenth century, 55, 56 official documents of Czech Republic, 70–1, 234–40 official documents of Hungary, 75–6, 243–52 recent problems raised by selfgovernments in Hungary, 78–9 recent trends in foreign language learning, 45–50, 47, 73–4, 180 shifts in pedagogical practice, 14–15, 14 standard German as positive resource, 170, 188 Eichinger, L. M., 1–2 empires, break-up of, 43 employment opportunities ethnic Germans remaining in post1945 Czechoslovakia, 135 and value of German language, 98, 135, 144, 145 England, ‘subversive’ multilingualism, 12 English language global nature, 6, 83 and identity, 29

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Index recent trends in foreign language learning, 46, 47, 47 English Language Teaching (ELT), 14, 14 Enlightenment, 44, 54 equal rights/equality EU promotion of, 92 in Hungary’s Core Curriculum, 118–19 erasure, 17, 182, 187, 199, 203 Errington, J., 15 ethnic Germans deported from post-1945 states, 4, 20, 51, 52, 61–2, 64, 68 dialect or Muttersprache at time of Second World War, 194 interwar equality measures in Hungary, 58 language biographies within interviews, 139–40 language learning in present situation, 45, 49–50 language use in mid- to late nineteenth century, 44, 123–4 population in Czechoslovakia in 1950, 65 population in Hungary in 1949, 62 present-day situation in Czech Republic and Hungary, 67, 68 property expropriations and expulsions from Czechoslovakia, 64 remaining in Czechoslovakia after 1945, 135, 173, 195 as seen in German cultural policy documents, 104 see also German minorities; German speakers; Sudeten Germans ethnic homogeneity and Czechoslovak state after 1945, 64 Hungary after 1945, 62 Hungary after Treaty of Trianon (1920), 57–8 Hungary and Czech Republic since 1980s, 67–8 ethnic minorities in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 112 and ethnolinguistic ideology, 23 and EU celebration of diversity, 93

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Index Germans represented as separate from Magyar population, 170 Hungarian language policy discourses, 114, 115–24, 118–19, 125, 203 legal framework for policies in Czech Republic, 68–74 legal framework for policies in Hungary, 74–9 and nationalist movements, 57, 60 see also ethnic Germans; German minorities ethnicity effects of 1941 census in Hungary, 20–1 in Gal’s sociolinguistic study, 3 indexicality with language varieties, 23, 128, 161–2, 182 issues in Czech Republic, 73 language and belonging, 13, 164–5 and language as identity marker, 54, 200 and social identities constructed in personal narratives, 161–2, 164, 168, 168–9 see also multiethnicity ethnolinguistics, 23, 34–5 and nationalist ideologies, 55, 57, 60 post-1989 need to accommodate differences, 98 Euromosaic report, 210 Europe, geographies, 1, 9n European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 31, 68–9, 74, 85–6, 87–8, 88–91, 96, 97, 210–11 and Hungary’s Core Curriculum, 119 preamble, 212–13 European citizens, 94 European Commission ‘A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism’ (2005), 87, 88, 91–5, 96–7, 102, 209, 214–15 ‘Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity’ (template), 120, 208–9 ‘Multilingualism: an asset...’ (Commission Communication, 2008), 87, 88, 91–2, 94–7, 106–7, 114, 209, 216–17 restructuring in 2010, 97

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279 role in language policy, 31, 35, 86, 87, 88, 92, 96 European Convention on Human Rights, 69, 211 European identity emphasised in Austrian foreign cultural policy, 105–6 emphasised in German foreign cultural policy, 101 in Hungary’s language policy discourse, 118–20, 125 European institutions in EC Communications on multilingualism, 94, 96 role in languages and cultures policy, 31, 86 European integration, 94, 105–6 European Parliament, 91, 208 European Union (EU), 7, 81n applications for membership, 68, 85–6, 211 discourses on language policy, 86–98, 107, 204 as key element in Austrian foreign cultural policy, 105–6 as key element in German foreign cultural policy, 101 language policy strategies, 8, 17, 31–2, 85–6, 208–10 multilingualism and language policy, 83–5, 86–7, 87–8, 91–7 preparations for accession of central European countries, 98 and struggle between nation states and rights of minorities, 90–1 European values in ‘A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism’, 92–3, 102, 214–15 in Austrian foreign cultural policy, 105–7, 124 in German foreign cultural policy, 100–1, 102 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 118–20 evictions, ethnic Germans in Hungary, 51, 61–2 family and kinship historic ties between Germany and central European countries, 103

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280 family and kinship (cont.) interactions with social identities, 164, 168, 170, 182, 197–8 and legacy of mother tongue, 194–5, 197 in stories of language loss and recovery, 140, 142–4, 146–7, 148–50, 151–4, 154, 156–8, 187, 191–3 fascism, 9 association with Germanness in communist Czechoslovakia, 186 contribution to decline of German language, 21, 203 Hungary during Second World War, 51, 169–70 see also National Socialism First World War, 43, 52, 57–61, 80 ‘Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity’ (Czech Republic) (2006), 108, 113–14, 120 extract, 241–2 ‘Follow-up of the Action Plan on language learning and linguistic diversity’ (Hungary) (2007), 114, 120–4 extract, 253–4 foreign cultural policies, 82, 84, 124 see also Austrian foreign cultural policy; German foreign cultural policy foreign direct investment, liberalisation, 48 foreign language learning Czech Republic’s policy discourse of ‘creating the norm’, 110–12, 114, 125 effects of collapse of Communism, 43, 45 in EU strategy for multilingualism, 86–7, 92–3 European Commission’s Action Plan strategies, 208–9 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 116–18, 119, 125, 180 official view in communist Czechoslovakia, 156 recent trends, 46, 47 restrictions in communist Hungary, 50–1, 63

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Index Russian during communist era, 45–6 foreign languages in language education discourse, 13 and minority languages, 86 political context in communist Czechoslovakia, 156 Foucault, M., 30 fractal recursivity, 17, 199 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe), 68–9, 73, 74, 210–11 FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), 15 French language, 30, 46, 47, 84 French Revolution, 54 Gal, Susan, 6, 33, 39–40 on changing status of linguistic varieties, 19, 200 Language Shift, 2–3, 4 on languages and language ideologies, 15, 17, 166–7, 199 gender in common European policies, 96 language and belonging, 13 as significant in language biography, 143, 164 General Education Act (Hungary), 78 geography central Europe, 1, 9n dispersion of German minorities in Czech Republic, 50, 73–4, 78 German Academic Exchange Service, 218–19 German Association for National Education in the Hungarian Lands, 58 German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe, 219 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 67, 142, 186, 196 communist Czechoslovakia’s links with, 45, 66 Saxon dialect (Sächsisch), 17, 22 German empire/lands, 51, 52, 55 German foreign cultural policy, 97–8 agents and institutions, 218–19

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Index extracts from official documents, 222–4, 225–6 as part of European cultural policy, 99–104, 124 promotion of German language, 4, 67, 97, 99, 101–2, 204 German Foreign Ministry, 35 German language association with Nazi policies after Second World War, 51, 66, 154 catastrophic events contributing to decline, 21 in context of European multilingualism, 84, 104 cultural associations in Hungarian state after First World War, 58 decline in Czechoslovak state after First World War, 59 decline due to linguistic nationalisms, 55, 56, 59, 61, 80, 203 decline in Hungary after Second World War, 63, 121, 149, 187, 198–9 different personal experiences in Hungary, 167 in discourses on language policy, 5, 34, 98, 204 downward trend in international status, 19 education in communist Czechoslovakia, 65 education in communist Hungary, 51, 63 flouting of linguistic conventions or rules, 30 in Gal’s study of language shift, 2–3 in German and Austrian language policies, 4, 31–2, 67, 83, 97, 99 history in central Europe, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9, 34–5, 43, 98, 103–4, 207 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 116–17, 125 iconisation of, 170, 199, 200 in language (auto)biographies, 66, 134, 141–58, 183–4, 195–6 linguistic forms used in individual narratives, 25, 37 and post-1945 hostility towards Germans, 51, 62, 64, 136, 154 present-day functions in central Europe, 98–9

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281 in present-day mainstream Czech education, 110–11, 114 recent trends in learning, 46, 47–8, 47, 73–4 regional status today, 67, 83, 114, 152, 170 relationships between dialects and with other languages, 9, 27, 66–7, 140–1 and reversal of order of spoken languages in central Europe, 44, 80 since 1960 in Hungary, 63 special and changing status, 3–4, 34–5, 49, 67, 121–4, 125, 167, 200, 202–3 standard German in education of German minorities, 49, 117, 122, 125, 170, 180, 181, 203–4, 205 German minorities after Second World War, 61–6, 121 community coherence, 200, 204 cultural restrictions in communist era, 51, 65 in Czech Republic, 109–10, 172 during interwar period, 51, 60–1 language learning in present-day Hungary, 121–4 in new Czechoslovak state after First World War, 58, 59–60, 59 primary school language learning in 2000, 46 solidarity links since Wende, 172, 174, 177 see also ethnic Germans German National Assembly, Frankfurt, 56 German nationalism, 58, 59, 61 see also National Socialism German speakers class factors after First World War, 52 ‘community’ of, 163–4 consequences of 1941 census in Hungary, 44, 52, 166, 169–70 consequences of being associated with Nazi terror, 51 Czechs in present day, 12, 172, 182–5 dwindling numbers, 4, 34, 166 in EU, 34–5 and historicity of language ideologies, 20

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282 German speakers (cont.) history of settlers and linguistic nationalisms, 53–4, 80, 98 identity and sense of self, 24, 118, 127, 148 language (auto)biographies, 25–6, 27, 127, 128, 130–2, 134–6, 136, 139–41, 179 language use in post-1945 Czechoslovakia, 134–6, 198–9, 203–4 negotiated identities, 24, 27, 162–4, 173–4, 176 position of Czechs after Second World War, 22, 182 standard German and dialects, 9, 49, 67, 180, 200 standard German in nineteenth century, 52 story of in central Europe, 4–5, 9, 207 Germanness, 32 individual narratives and rediscovery of, 134, 141–2, 145–7, 148, 189 Germany, 9n, 81n, 170 bilateral/bi-national agreements with Czech Republic, 69, 73, 111 connections with Austria, 83, 105 as export market for Czech Republic, 48 first German nation-state (1871), 80n German language, 3, 98 historic relations with central European countries, 102–4 language policy, 31–2, 82 promotion of German language in present day, 4, 67, 97, 99, 101–2 support of German minorities in Czech Republic, 172, 173–4 see also German Democratic Republic (GDR); West Germany Gibson, G., 138 ‘global languages’, 12, 83 globalisation, 12 in Czech discourses on language policy, 108, 110 and decline of cultural heritage, 146–7 relationship with language policies, 31, 83, 95, 98 sociolinguistics of, 6, 139

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Index GoetheInstitut, 12, 35, 218 ‘Förderung der deutschen Sprache...’, 102–4 ‘Leitbild des Goethe-Instituts’, 100–1, 225–6 Government Council for National Minorities, Czech Republic, 71–2 gypsies, in stereotypical image of Hungary, 178–9 Habsburg empire Austria’s historical legacy, 99, 105 break-up after First World War, 51 defeat of 1848 uprising, 57 and linguistic nationalisms, 53, 54, 55, 55–6, 60 status of German language, 45, 52, 80, 98 Harré, R., 25 Harris, R., 15 Haugen, E., 166 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 44, 55 historical context, 7, 43–4 Austria’s cultural ties with central and eastern European countries, 105 creating possibilities open to language, 202 as lacking in Hungary’s language policy discourse, 121 life stories, 136–7, 140, 158, 159, 161 political claims to independence, 55–6 relations between Germany and eastern central European countries, 102–4 historicity, discourses on language and language use, 19–21, 154 Hitler, Adolf, 60 Hochdeutsch (High German), 181 Hohenzollern empire, 98 Holocaust, 21 human rights in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 109 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 118–19 importance of Council of Europe, 89 and multilingualism, 84, 87–8, 97 humanitarian aid, 172 Hungarian Directive Concerning the Education of National and Ethnic

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Index Minorities (1997), 114, 115–18, 119, 121 extract, 243–5 Hungarian-Germans collective memory of 1941 census, 166, 169 and iconisation of German language, 199 personal experiences during Second World War, 169–70, 185 since 1960s, 174–81 use of ‘modern’ German, 19, 188 see also Ungarndeutsche(r) Hungarian language after First World War, 61 after Second World War, 63, 121, 149 changing relationship with German, 43, 44, 180, 186–8 decline of dialects, 121 decline during 1990s, 45 Gal’s studies, 2–3, 19, 22 in Hungarian foreign cultural policy, 84 in individuals’ language biographies, 9, 27, 144, 148, 187–8 linguistic nationalism in nineteenth century, 52, 54, 55, 56, 203 and loss of local speech forms, 140–1 recent problems concerning minority education, 79 situation since 1980s, 67 Hungarian National Core Curriculum 2007, 114, 118–20 extract, 246–52 Hungarian Office for National and Ethnic Minorities, 35 Hungarian People’s Republic, 1949 Constitution, 63 Hungarians in new Czechoslovak state, 58, 59 see also Magyars Hungary, 7, 9n, 36, 43 annexation of Czech lands, 51, 60 application for EU membership, 85–6, 211 census of 1941, 20–1, 22, 44, 52, 166, 169 claim to autonomy in nineteenth century, 55–6, 105

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283 cultural integrity of German minority today, 50 cultural ties with Austria, 105 demographic and geographical effects of First World War, 57–8, 60 different evaluations of Hungarian and German, 167 different nationalist movements, 57 early German-speaking settlers, 53–4 effects of mass evictions after 1945, 51, 52–3, 61–2 ethnic Germans and national minorities in communist era, 50–1, 62–4, 203 ethnic homogeneity in present day, 67, 68 European identity and national identity, 118–20 experiences during and after Second World War, 51, 60, 169–70 foreign cultural policy, 84 German-speaking classes after First World War, 52 homogeneous ‘German’ villages, 192–3, 198 Hungarian made official national language in 1844, 52, 55 imposed identity of ‘German’ after 1945, 24 as independent state in interwar years, 51–2, 60 language policy discourses, 83, 97–8, 114–24, 124–5, 204 legal framework for language and cultural policies, 74–9 national minorities in nineteenth century, 52–3, 57 policy of Magyarisation, 55, 60 population by nationality in 1949, 62 present-day situation of German language, 45, 48–9, 67, 97, 98, 152, 179–81 recent trends in foreign language learning, 46, 47, 49 rise of German nationalism, 58 use of cultural centres by German speakers, 165 Hüppauf, B., 6 Hussite wars, 54–5

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284 Iceland, 126n identity/identities distinction with discourses of identity, 41n language and creation of spaces, 34, 58, 168 and language ideologies, 11, 22–4, 162, 166–7, 199 and language rights, 31, 93 in life story narratives, 7, 9, 27–8, 128, 161, 202 in political discourses, 80 relationship between policy and action, 29–32 and social life/relationships, 23–4, 25–6, 26 struggle with globalisation, 6 types, 23–4 see also collective identities; cultural identity; European identity; social identities/categories indexicality concept, 21–2 language and ethnic or national group, 22, 23, 128 social categories and context of use, 168 India, 14 institutions language policy, 12–13 relevant to Hungary’s language policy discourse, 76–9, 121, 125, 180 relevant to language and cultural policy of Czech Republic, 71–4 Instituto Cervantes, 12 interculturalism, 89 in Austrian foreign cultural policy, 105–6, 124 emphasised in German foreign cultural policy, 100, 102 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 76, 119, 120 international agreements protection of minorities, 68–9, 74 underlying Hungary’s Core Curriculum, 118–19 Irvine, J. T., 16, 17, 199 Israel, 41n Italian language, 46, 84 Italy, 57, 105

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Index Jews, 58, 59, 109–10, 195 Kádár, János, 63 Kamusella, Tomasz, 1–2 Klaus, President Václav, 81n, 172 Kohl, Chancellor Helmut, 81n Kroskrity, P., 16, 18 labour markets advantages of knowing German language, 46, 48 changing factors in post-1945 Hungary, 62–3 and post-1945 discrimination against Germans in Czechoslovakia, 64 language and creation of nation-states, 52–3 and ethnicity in national identity, 54, 57 EU definition in 2005 Framework Strategy, 93 political perspective, 88 relationships with social change, 7, 67, 141, 202, 205–6 understanding historical context, 202 language (auto)biographies, 5, 26–7, 127–8, 139–41 importance of place, space and time, 32–4, 133–7, 158 individuals’ positioning strategies, 25–6, 181 and negotiation of identities, 161–2, 164, 167–8, 168, 191 sociolinguistics of, 139, 159, 167–8 see also life stories/histories language choice, 5 and agency in creation of social identities, 193 language contact, and German language learning in present day, 44–50, 121 language education see education; pedagogical practice language forms/linguistic varieties characteristics of discourse view, 18–22 and historicity, 19–21, 154–5 iconisation, 17, 22, 170, 199, 200 ideological framework, 40 interactions with social identities/

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Index categories, 161–2, 164, 168, 179–80, 202–3 language policy discourses, 8, 13, 84, 86, 115 positioning strategies in individual narratives, 25–6, 146, 152, 162, 167–8, 180–2, 187–8, 190, 193 relationships, 9, 40, 167, 191–3 and social identities/categories in personal narratives, 128, 161–2, 164 tensions between hegemonic and standard forms, 35, 140–1, 156, 167 use of standard German in minority education, 49, 122, 170, 180, 203–4, 205 language ideologies definitions and discourses, 15–16, 40 iconisation, 17, 22, 164, 194, 199 and identity work, 22–4 and language policies and practices, 3, 5, 11, 30, 32, 162, 202, 203 and linguistic nationalisms, 44, 52, 55 and negotiation of identities, 162, 166–7, 184, 191, 193 and notion of indexicality, 21–2 semiotic processes, 17–18, 199 shown in discourses on language and identity, 162 language loss, 140–1, 144–5, 158–9 language policy elided in Austrian foreign cultural policy, 107 European, 17, 31–2, 83–6 importance of spaces, 34, 58 and language ideologies, 5, 11, 30, 162, 202 ‘layering’, 8, 32, 124, 204 legal framework for minorities in Czech Republic, 68–74 legal framework for minorities in Hungary, 74–9 levels and interconnectedness, 29, 82, 83 see also discourses on language policy language rights, 13, 67 contemporary discourses, 30–1 revoked in nineteenth-century Hungary, 56 UN Convention, 89

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285 language shift, 66–8, 205 from German varieties to Hungarian/ state language, 121, 203 Gal’s study, 2–3 and individual agency, 200–1 policy within families, 182 languages boundary between dialects and, 15, 66–7, 115, 122, 170, 176–7, 179–80 co-existence in European language policy, 95 as discrete, 12 notion of purity, 13, 55 Latin, 55 Lefkowitz, D., 26, 33, 41n, 133, 168, 202 legislation behind Hungary’s language policy discourse, 118, 120–1 Council of Europe’s role, 210–11 Czech Republic’s framework for language and cultural policies, 68–74 Hungarian nationality law (1868), 57, 63 Hungary’s framework for language and cultural policies, 49, 63, 74–9 and reality of minority politics, 80 Liberec (Reichenberg), Czech Republic, 72 personal narratives, 36, 38, 135–6, 154–8, 172–4 Liechtenstein, 126n life stories/histories, 7, 8–9, 129, 158–9 historical context, 127–8, 136–7 and identity-formation, 26, 27–8, 137–9, 202, 205–6 and wider cultural story, 4–5, 127–8, 139, 158, 200–1 see also language (auto)biographies Linde, C., 26, 137 linguistic assimilation, 177, 187, 200, 203 linguistic diversity in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 107, 112–13 EU promotion of, 31, 86–7, 92, 209 in Hungary’s language policy discourse, 107, 120–4 linguistic homogeneism, 22–3

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286 linguistic homogeneity conflict with cultural diversity, 84–5, 113 Hungary after Treaty of Trianon (1920), 57–8 and language shift, 200–1 as state ideology in post-war Czechoslovakia, 195, 197 linguistic memory and demand for learning German, 103–4 as source of identification, 11, 201 linguistic minorities language rights, 13, 67 and nationalist movements, 57 and persistence of ‘national’ languages, 7 linguistic nationalisms, 32, 203 after Second World War, 61–6, 156 ethnic tensions in new Czechoslovak state, 60 and formation of nation states, 52, 56–7, 80 nineteenth century, 52–3, 54–7, 203 literacy, 13, 115 literature, in present-day Hungarian minorities education, 76, 79 local government and Hungarian legislation on minorities, 74, 76, 77–9 institutions and language policies, 12–13 role in language and cultural policies of Czech Republic, 72 ‘self-government’ during communist era, 78 ‘local’ languages in Gal’s sociolinguistic study, 3 loss of traditional speech forms, 140–1 loss, in language biographies, 140, 140–1, 206 Maalouf, Amin, 216 Magyar see Hungarian language Magyarisation, 55, 60 Magyars as dominant in nineteenth-century Hungary, 57 Hungarian foreign cultural policy, 84

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Index in language (auto)biographies, 136, 170 in neighbouring states during communist era, 63 population in Czechoslovakia in 1950, 65 population in Hungary in 1949, 62 in present day, 67, 75, 177, 179 Makoni, S., 15 market see economic opportunities; employment opportunities May, S., 164 Medgyes, P., 46 Meinhof, U., 138 memory in individual narratives, 128, 137–8, 142 see also collective memory/memories; linguistic memory metadiscourses, 18, 19–20 migrants advantages of knowing German language, 48 in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 112 and EU celebration of linguistic diversity, 93 German speakers from Germany and Austria, 207 language proficiency tests, 84 use of term Schwabe, 175 migration and decline of German language, 21 and decrease in German minorities since 1945, 68 early German-speaking settlers, 53–4 in language education discourse, 13 narratives, 134 Miklósy, K., 46 minorities see ethnic minorities; German minorities; national minorities Minorities Act (Czech Republic, 1993), 69–70, 71, 73 Minorities Act (Hungary), 78 minority languages, 86 in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 112–13, 113, 114 in EU strategy for multilingualism, 87 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 115–18, 121–4, 125

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Index in new Czechoslovak state after First World War, 59 opposition with majority languages, 166–7 recent problems raised by selfgovernments in Hungary, 79 recent trends in teaching German, 48–50 rights legislation in Czech Republic, 70–1 rights legislation in Hungary, 75–6 see also European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages Mishler, E., 132–3 Moldova, 126n monolingualism dichotomy with multilingualism, 17 and discourses of national identity, 32 minority populations in Cold War period, 203 in stories of language loss and recovery, 151, 152–3, 171–2, 189, 191–2 morality aspects in language biographies, 129, 144, 156, 199 in linguistic practices, 3 Moravia, 53, 65 see also Moravia-Silesia; South Moravia Moravia-Silesia, 72 Moravians, 54–5, 68 mother tongue and construction of identity in language biographies, 148, 181, 191 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 76, 115, 119, 121, 123–4 in ideology of 1941 census in Hungary, 20, 52, 169 and minority identities in present day, 67 and multilingualism in foreign cultural policies, 93, 102 political context in communist Czechoslovakia, 156 Mozambique, Bantu languages, 15 Mucha, Stanisław, 1 Mühlhäusler, P., 166

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287 multiethnicity Europe before Second World War, 79–80 new Czechoslovak state, 58 and question of language in nineteenth-century Hungary, 55 multilingualism conflict with national languages, 89–90 in Czech discourses on education policy, 108, 110–12, 114, 124–5 dichotomy with monolingualism, 17 in discourses on language, 12, 82, 83–5, 124–5 in EU policy discourse, 8, 31, 32, 83–5, 86–98, 124, 209, 214–15, 216–17 Europe before Second World War, 79–80, 80 in German foreign cultural policy, 101, 102, 104 historic importance of central Europe, 98 in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 117–18, 120 identities in context of, 118, 166 importance of Barcelona summit (2001), 106–7 in language (auto)biographies, 128, 191–3 street signs and inscriptions, 74 ‘Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment’ (2008), 87, 91–2, 94–7, 209 extract, 216–17 Munich Agreement (1938), 59–60 Mussolini, Benito, 60 Muttersprache (mother tongue), 25, 162, 181, 193–5, 197 see also mother tongue myths function in sustaining culture and community, 165 ‘old multilingual generation’, 193 narratives data collection, 36–9 as discourses on language and identity, 7, 9, 27–8, 128, 138, 161–2 as life stories, 7, 129, 132, 158

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288 narratives (cont.) organisation and creation of coherence, 129–37, 154–5, 206 positioning strategies, 25–6, 146, 162, 167–8, 177–8 relationship with language policy discourses, 9, 82, 124 see also life stories/histories nation-states emergence after First World War, 43, 51–2, 57, 57–61, 80 formation in nationalist struggles, 56–7 and question of language, 52–3, 55, 79–80 recent destabilisation, 32 National Association of Germans in Bohemia and Moravia, 35 National Association of Germans in Hungary, 58 National Association of HungarianGermans, 175 National Base Curriculum (Hungary), 74, 76, 79 national culture in language policy of Czech Republic, 108, 124–5 and multilingualism, 84, 124–5 as problematic for minorities at end of First World War, 60 ‘national’ groups, and ethnolinguistic ideology, 23 national identity in Czech Republic’s minority policy discourse, 113–14, 125 in Hungarian discourses on education policy, 48–9, 118–20, 124–5 in ideology of 1941 census in Hungary, 52, 169 language as marker of, 54 in language policy discourses, 82, 99 legislation in Czech Republic, 70 legislation in Hungary, 74–5 and monolingual ideologies, 32 national languages changing relationship with German language, 44, 55, 66–7 conflict with multilingualism, 89–90 favoured in interwar period, 51, 200

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Index fostered by national and domestic cultural policies, 8, 31–2, 82, 200 German language, 98 and persistence of linguistic minorities, 7 present situation for ethnic Germans, 44, 45 national minorities in Czech Republic’s education policy discourse, 70–1, 112–13 Czech Republic’s legal framework for language and cultural policies, 68–74 in Czechoslovakia after First World War, 58–60, 59 definitions according to Czech Minorities Act (1993), 69–70 during communist era, 50–1, 63 equality measures in interwar Hungary, 58 and EU celebration of diversity, 93 with German as heritage language, 98 huge decrease in Hungary after First World War, 57–8, 60 in Hungarian language policy discourses, 114, 115–24, 125 Hungary’s legal framework for language and cultural policies, 74–9 identities and language learning, 48–9 and nationalist movements, 57 present situation of ethnic Germans, 67, 68, 173 recent policies in education, 48–50 ‘National Programme for the Development of Education in the Czech Republic’ (2001 White Paper), 108, 108–12, 114 extract, 234–6 National Socialism, 43, 45, 81n annexation of Czech lands, 51, 59–60 and German nationalism in Hungary, 58 Germany’s historical legacy of, 99 indexical relationship with ‘speaking German’, 22 and subsequent deportation of German speakers, 20, 52 see also fascism; Nazism

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Index nationalism Bohemia, 54–5, 56 campaigns for independence from Habsburg empire, 105 democratic notion of, 57 and ethnolinguistics, 55, 57, 60 and (re)emergence of independent states, 51 see also German nationalism; National Socialism; protonationalisms nationality and citizenship in Czech Republic, 73 and effects of 1941 census in Hungary, 20, 52 indexicality with language varieties, 23, 128, 140–1, 182 language and belonging, 13, 32, 84 Nazis see National Socialism Nekvapil, Jiří, 182 newspapers, German-language, 58 Nicholas I, Tsar, 57 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 12–13, 35, 72–3 Norway, 126n Oberwart, in Gal’s study of language shift, 2–3 Ochberg, R. L., 154 Ochs, E., 27, 128, 132 Ödenburg see Sopron Office for National and Ethnic Minorities (Hungary), 28, 77 Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 31 Palacký, František, 54–5, 56 Palestinian identity, 41n Paris, ‘subversive’ multilingualism, 12 Pavlenko, A., 23, 25, 166 Pécs, Hungary, personal narratives, 36, 145–54, 186–8, 189–91 Pedagogical Exchange Service of the Council of Ministers of Culture and Education (Germany), 219 Pennycook, A., 15 philosophy, basis of linguistic nationalisms, 44, 55

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289 place association of Ungarndeutsche(r) with, 175 in Gal’s sociolinguistic study, 3 importance in language discourses, 32–3, 33 in language (auto)biographies, 32–3, 128, 133–4, 142, 168–9, 193 and relativity of language ideologies, 19 Platform Culture Central Europe (‘Plattform Kultur-Mitteleuropa’), 105–6, 220 extract, 230 Plzeň, Czech Republic, personal narratives, 36, 141–2, 194–5, 197 Poland, 9n, 45, 105 and Český Těšín border area, 50, 60 claim to autonomy in nineteenth century, 55–6, 56–7 emergence as independent state in interwar years, 51–2, 52, 57, 60 and German language today, 98 lasting legacy of National Socialism, 61, 99 present-day status of German, 45, 46 Poles, 58, 59, 65, 71 policy decisions and action, 28–9 and practice, 5, 29–30, 204 see also foreign cultural policy; language policy Polish language, 54, 55, 65 political actors in language and cultural policy of Czech Republic, 71–4 in language and cultural policy of Hungary, 76–9 politics and changing relationship between national languages and German, 44, 51 claims to autonomy in nineteenth century, 55–6 cooperation in Austrian foreign cultural policy, 105–6, 124 and discourses in language policy, 82, 83, 84–6, 202–3 effects of 1941 census in Hungary, 20–1, 169

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290 politics (cont.) key transformations in central Europe, 9, 44, 66, 98, 157–8, 166 language choices, 193 language ideologies, 15 language rights and obligations, 30–1 in life stories/language biographies, 129, 161 popular mass-movements, linguistic nationalisms, 52, 53 population changes in make-up of Hungary and Czechia, 67–8 huge decrease in German population in Czechoslovakia, 64 huge decrease in national minorities in interwar Hungary, 57–8 nationalities in Czechoslovakia in 1950, 65 nationalities in Hungary in 1949, 62 and shift from Hungarian to German language, 2–3 see also demographic changes positioning (theory), 9, 25–6, 29, 39, 85, 156, 169, 181–91, 195, 200, 203–6 Prague, 12, 72 language (auto)biographies, 168–9, 170–1, 181–2, 185–6, 188–9 Prague Spring (1968), 64 private spaces/niches distinction with public spaces in linguistic behaviour, 67, 134–5, 198, 199, 206 position of German language during communist era, 66, 134, 151, 204 property expropriations, ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, 38, 64 proto-nationalisms, pre-nineteenth century, 52, 53, 55–6 Prussia, 54, 55–6, 80 public spaces and cultural identity in Hungary’s minority education policy, 117, 125 distinction with private spaces in linguistic behaviour, 67, 134–5, 198, 199, 206 granted to national minorities in Czech legislation, 69–70 as lacking for minorities in Czech education system, 109–10, 112–13

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Index open for minorities in Hungary, 114 as restricted for German language during communist era, 66, 134 standard German in nineteenth century, 52 use of national languages in present day, 67 regional languages, and multilingualism in EU strategy, 87 regions effects of globalisation, 6 institutions and language policies, 12–13 role in language and cultural policies of Czech Republic, 72 role of Platform Culture Central Europe, 105–6 and status of German language, 83 Reichenberg see Liberec religious faiths, in Dialogue of Cultures and Civilisations, 106 resistance, in language biographies, 156–7, 159, 166, 167, 182, 200 rights in Hungary’s education policy discourse, 118–19 minorities legislation and actors in Czech Republic, 68–71, 71–2 minorities legislation and actors in Hungary, 74–6 see also citizenship rights; equal rights; language rights Romania emergence as independent state in interwar years, 51–2, 57 and German language today, 98 Hungarian foreign cultural policy towards, 84 Magyar minorities during communist era, 63 present-day status of German, 45 Romanians, 57, 62 Romany minorities, Czech Republic, 109–10 Rosenwald, G. C., 154 rural communities, nineteenth-century Hungary, 52 Russian empire, 51, 52, 56 Russian Federation, 126n

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Index Russian language, 45–6, 46, 47, 51, 66 Rust, Austria, 143 Ruthenia, 59, 60 Ruthenian language, 59 Ruthenians, in Czechoslovakia, 58, 59 San Marino, 126n Saxon dialect (Sächsisch), 17, 22 schools, see also education Schwabe(n) (Swabian(s)), 174, 175–7, 179, 185, 194 see also Donauschwabe Schwäbisch, 25, 191 Sczecin Silesia, 71, 72 Second World War, 30, 43, 66, 79 aftermath, 8–9, 61–6, 80, 121 effects of Nazi annexation of Czech lands, 51, 195 in language (auto)biographies, 134, 154 self and construction of Germanness in individual narratives, 162–3, 189 and cultural identity in Hungary’s minority policy, 117, 118 and identities in life stories, 5, 26, 27–8, 127–8, 137–9, 148, 158, 168, 202–3, 205–6 self-government, minorities in Hungary, 77–9 Serbs, 57, 62 Siemens, 12, 48 Silesia, 53, 60 see also Moravia-Silesia; Sczecin Silesia Silesians, 50, 68, 71, 72 Silverstein, Michael, 16, 21 Škoda, 48 Slav Congress (June 1848), 56 Slavs, 58 Slovak language, 58–9, 61, 65 Slovak proverb, 91 Slovak Republic, 53, 98 Slovakia, 9n, 105, 130 events in 1939, 60 Hungarian foreign cultural policy towards, 84 Magyars evicted from, 62 present-day status of German, 45, 46 use of Slovak language, 58–9

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291 Slovaks in new Czechoslovak state, 58, 59 population in Czechoslovakia in 1950, 65 population in Hungary in 1949, 62 Slovenes, population in Hungary in 1949, 62 Slovenia, 105 social changes key transformations in central Europe, 6–7, 8–9, 166 relationship with language, 2–3, 67, 141, 202, 203, 205–6 and story-telling, 127–8, 133–4, 148, 161 social identities/categories, 80, 82 and agency in language choice, 148, 193 in individual narratives/life stories, 25–6, 129, 159, 161–2, 167–8, 179–80, 181, 200, 206 interactions with family and ethnicity, 146, 161–2, 164 social life/relations Czech Republic’s policy discourse, 109, 109–10, 114 effects of 1941 census in Hungary, 20–1 and EU language policy, 87 and identity-formation, 22, 22–4, 25–6, 26, 139, 161–2 and language ideologies, 15–16, 18–22, 202 in story of German language in central Europe, 4–5, 206–7 see also discourses on language in social life social practices, discourses on language, 14, 29 social spaces, 43, 44, 67, 167, 207 sociolinguistics concept of ‘speech community’, 163 in discourses on language, 12, 83, 159, 166–7, 203 German language, 3, 4–5, 8, 9, 17, 166–8, 206–7 of globalisation, 6, 12 Somers, M., 138

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292

Language and Social Change in Central Europe

Sopron (Ödenburg), Hungary, personal narratives, 36, 130–1, 142–5 South Moravia, 72 south-eastern European region, 105, 106 Soviet Union, 45, 48, 61 space different aspects in community of memory, 166 in language (auto)biographies, 33, 128, 133–4, 158 in language policy discourses, 33, 33–4 for negotiation of identities, 168, 193 and relativity of language ideologies, 19 see also cultural spaces; public spaces; social spaces Spanish language, 46, 47, 83, 84 ‘speech community’, 163 SS (Schutzstaffel), 169 state recent role in language policies, 32 right to maintain national language, 89, 90 role in Czech Republic’s language and cultural policies, 71–2, 108 role in Hungary’s language and cultural policies of Hungary, 121, 125 Steinberg, Jonathan, 1 subjectivity, in life stories, 128, 138 subsidiarity, principle of, 92, 96 Sudeten Germans, 53, 81n, 135–6, 172 Sudetenland, 59–60 Swabia, 54, 175 Swabians see Donauschwabe; Schwabe(n) Switzerland, 1, 4, 21, 126n television, West German, 45, 196–7 Thirty Years War, 53 time in historicity of language, 19–20, 21, 44 in language biographies/life histories, 33, 128, 132–4, 140, 142, 193

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in structuring accounts of events, 33, 44, 132–3, 139, 158 tourism, 48, 98 Townson, M., 202 Transylvania, Romanian, 62 Treaty of Trianon (1920), 57, 84 Turkey, 105, 126n Turkish invaders, 53 Ukraine, 60, 62, 84, 126n Ukrainians, population in Czechoslovakia in 1950, 65 Ungar(in) (Hungarian citizen), 177–8 Ungarndeutsche(r) (ethnic Germans in Hungary), 25, 175 cultural organisations, 193–4 in language biographies, 136, 147, 152, 174, 179, 186, 198–9 see also Hungarian Germans United Nations Convention on Civil and Political Rights, 89 universities, 67 Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic, 36, 72, 131–2 Verschueren, J., 22–3 Veszprém, Hungary, personal narratives, 36, 134, 136 Vienna, 143 voice, 25 Volkswagen, 12, 48 Wales, 12 War of Independence (1848–9), 56 Welsh language, 29 Wende (1989–90), 148, 172–4, 200 West Germany, 51 television, 196–7 Woolard, K., 15, 15–16, 40, 193 Wordsworth, William, 133 Wright, S., 83 Yugoslavia, emergence as nation-state, 57

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