This volume is a collection of essays that, through the empirical lens of Berlin, offer a sociolinguistic account of how language practices and language ideologies are co-constitutive of urban spaces and urban-ness itself. Rather than taking for granted ‘the city’ as a generic conceptualization that starts with the nation-state as composed of urban and non-urban spaces, the editors of this volume mobilize sociolinguistic analysis to ask how cities are vibrant and unique socio-spatial forms.
The volume is divided into four sections. The first, ‘From past to present’, contextualizes the concept of a ‘local Berlin’ by problematizing the notion of a standard local register. The three chapters that compose the section demonstrate how localized forms of German in Berlin are variously taken-up, differentially communicated, and politically mobilized in the varied spatiotemporal contexts of the city. For example, chapter 3, by Peter Schlobinski, critiques a classic understanding of dialects as relatively rigid linguistic structures by showing us how ‘traditionalized’ local ‘Berlinisch’ is capacious in its varied spoken forms and metapragmatic recognitions. Chapter 4, by Tanager, offers an analysis of the politics of national standard language policies as they are practiced in the pedagogical context of language classes for students seeking naturalization and ‘learning to be German’.
The second section, ‘New identities’, builds on the first section's accounts of the production of locality through four chapters that each differently analyze the (re)production of ‘local identities’. In chapter 5, for example, Oliver Bunk & Maria Pohle examine the multi-ethnolect Kiezdeutsch as it is meta-linguistically rendered an object of awareness and medium of in-group belonging amongst speakers, many of whom, unexpectedly, do not self-identify as ethnic or even urban ‘others’ in relation to concepts of ‘Germanness’ itself.
Section three, ‘Commodification’, contains three chapters that examine commodification as semiotic processes through which different languages accrue value and meaning in the sociolinguistic settings of Berlin's food and hospitality economies. For example, Chapter 9, by Edith Pichler, focuses on the ways in which localized images of Italian restaurants change over time, focusing on the sociopolitical and economic relationships between Italian entrepreneurs with varied immigrant histories, their social capital within Berlin, and the ways in which these differentiated forms of identification are reflected in restaurant naming conventions. Chapter 11, by Philipp Krämer, describes Spanish not as tied to a particular geopolitical unit of ‘nation’, but as learned in public and private schooling as a ‘lifestyle product’, in which German hotel employees exhibit competency within an emergent and local tourist economy.
The last section, ‘Localities’, spirals us full circle back to ‘locality’, albeit fractally so, scaling down to specific ‘multilingual spaces’ and their sociolinguistically structured presences within Berlin. In chapter 12, for example, Janet M. Fuller demonstrates that representations of written English in public spaces create ‘linguistic landscapes’ of ‘multilingual visibility’ that index sociolinguistic worlds and forms of belonging that exceed the spatialized limits of discrete neighborhoods and the confines of a monolingual German identity.
In the end, this volume offers methodologically and conceptually innovative ways to re-think cities as constituted through the varied linguistic economies and practices that inhabit them: sociohistorically situated, multi-scaled, and ever-capacious in the forms of identification, belonging, difference, and otherness that these sociolinguistic practices (re)produce on a daily basis.
