The monolingual habitus (Gogolin 1994) established in the course of the emergence and consolidation of nation-states in the 19th century continues to characterise Europe. Today we can see that this habitus does not mean that there is no plurilingualism or language contact in our society yet given their lack of compatibility with this ideology plurilingual situations are difficult to embed in the dominant narrative. Against this background the present article examines how German-speaking Israelis born before 1930 represent situations of plurilingualism and language contact – focussing in particular on the Yiddish language. The study is based on excerpts from the so-called Israelkorpus which was collected between 1989 and 2019 by the German linguist Anne Betten and her collaborators in Israel. The corpus consists of narrative interviews with German-speaking Israelis who were forced to emigrate from Germany Austria and gradually annexed territories in the 1930s for racist and political reasons. The analysis tackles the language attitudes of these speakers and the interplay between migration processes and prevailing language ideologies.
Fern und nah: Jiddisch in Zeitzeugeninterviews mit deutschsprachigen Emigrant*innen in Israel (sog. Israelkorpus)
Simona Leonardi
2023-01-01
Abstract
The monolingual habitus (Gogolin 1994) established in the course of the emergence and consolidation of nation-states in the 19th century continues to characterise Europe. Today we can see that this habitus does not mean that there is no plurilingualism or language contact in our society yet given their lack of compatibility with this ideology plurilingual situations are difficult to embed in the dominant narrative. Against this background the present article examines how German-speaking Israelis born before 1930 represent situations of plurilingualism and language contact – focussing in particular on the Yiddish language. The study is based on excerpts from the so-called Israelkorpus which was collected between 1989 and 2019 by the German linguist Anne Betten and her collaborators in Israel. The corpus consists of narrative interviews with German-speaking Israelis who were forced to emigrate from Germany Austria and gradually annexed territories in the 1930s for racist and political reasons. The analysis tackles the language attitudes of these speakers and the interplay between migration processes and prevailing language ideologies.
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