Nomi, identità e spazi nelle interviste narrative dell’Israelkorpus

In the context of research on language and identity, names are regarded as symbolically elaborated ‘acts of ‘identity’ that serve both as other- and self-identification. Knowing the names of those who participate in an interaction is in fact on the one hand necessary to establish a personal relationship; on the other hand, names are markers, because their linguistic form can give information about the person’s ethnic and/or cultural background. As a marker of belonging or difference, the name is thus a shibboleth; as such it is also an element of the discursive construction of the self, i.e., of positioning. Against this background, the contribution aims to investigate the relationship between names and identity in the so-called Israelkorpus, a corpus of narrative interviews with German-speaking Israelis who immigrated to Palestine/Israel mostly before 1939. The relationship between names and identity in Israelis of German-speaking origin is in fact particularly complex, first due to the other-positioning of citizens of Jewish origin by the Nazi regime, and then due to the Zionist policy of hebraization of names in Palestine/Israel. In my analysis, I firstly highlight the role of names in identity construction and, secondly, tackle how speakers of the Israelkorpus thematize their relationship with the names they were given to or they took after migrating to Palestina/Israel. The study, carried out with the tools of narrative analysis and sociolinguistics, is essentially qualitative, supplemented with quantitative elements.