Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis: Berlin Lives

219 Pages·2017·5.56 MB·English

by  Patrick Stevenson (auth.)

Language and
Migration in
a Multilingual
Metropolis
Berlin Lives
Patrick Stevenson
language and globalization
series editors: sue wright and helen kelly-holmes
Language and Globalization
Series Editors
Sue Wright
University of Portsmouth
Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Helen Kelly-Holmes
University of Limerick
Department of Languages, Literature, Cul
Castletroy Limerick, Ireland
Aims of the Series
In the context of current political and social developments, where the
national group is not so clearly defned and delineated, the state language
not so clearly dominant in every domain, and cross-border fows and
transfers afects more than a small elite, new patterns of language use will
develop. Tis series aims to provide a framework for reporting on and
analysing the linguistic outcomes of globalization and localization.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14830
Patrick Stevenson
Language and
Migration in a
Multilingual
Metropolis
Berlin Lives
Patrick Stevenson
Modern Languages, Faculty of Humanities
University of Southampton
Southampton, United Kingdom
Language and Globalization
ISBN 978-3-319-40605-3 ISBN 978-3-319-40606-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957163
© Te Editor(s) (if applicable) and Te Author(s) 2017
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For Jo, Rosie and Jack
Acknowledgements
Tis book represents a distillation of research carried out in many parts
of Berlin between 2011 and 2015. Some of this work was conducted
in libraries, particularly in the Berlin-Studien section of the Zentral-
und Landesbibliothek Berlin, and I am grateful for the free use of these
facilities. However, the vast majority of the time I devoted to this project
was spent wearing out many pairs of shoes tramping around the streets
of the city and talking with an extraordinary range of individual people
who kindly agreed to share their migration experiences with me. Since
guaranteeing their anonymity was a fundamental part of our agreement,
I sadly cannot acknowledge my debt and gratitude to them by name,
but I would nevertheless like to record here my warmest thanks to all of
them. Many of the people I spoke to don’t appear in this book, as I had
to select a small number to achieve my purpose; however, these conver-
sations—which may yet fnd their way into subsequent publications—
made a deep impression on me and all of them infuenced my thinking
on the book’s subject. All my ‘research partners’ on this project therefore
contributed to the picture I have tried to create.
Particular thanks must, of course, go to the fve people whose stories
form the centrepiece of the book in Chap. 4. I very much wish I could
name them here, but I shall have to restrict myself to a heartfelt expres-
sion of gratitude and an acknowledgement that without them there
would have been no book. More than anything else, I hope they will feel
vii
viii Acknowledgements
that I have done their stories justice and that this collective account of the
experience of language in migration has furthered our understanding of
complex social processes of ‘becoming’.
I would not even have met all these people without the kind and
enthusiastic support of several key intermediaries, who so willingly and
generously gave their time to help me fnd suitable conversation part-
ners. Tank you, above all, Carol, Lucy, Natasha, Andrea, Gisela, Ugo;
also Heike Marquard, former Integrationsbeauftragte for Lichtenberg.
Tis is also the place to thank two friends for providing me with com-
fortable accommodation during my visits to Berlin: Heike Wiese, who
kindly lent me her house one summer, and my old friend and colleague
Adrian Sewell, with whom I have shared a fascination for the city for over
40 years and whose fat in Schudomastraße was my home base on many
occasions during this period.
On a practical note, I am hugely grateful to several people who helped
me overcome some of the challenges in the preparation of the manuscript.
Chris Lutton, Luke Coles and Pham Phuong Hoa (current and past stu-
dents in Southampton) provided some of the photographs (in Berlin
and Hanoi) and George Turner expertly prepared them for publication.
Mark Dover in Cartographic Services, Geography and Environment, at
the University of Southampton drew the map of Berlin. Erin Forward
kindly made time in her busy schedule as our departmental adminis-
trator to draw several fgures. Iustin Dobrean (student in the School of
Architecture at the University of Portsmouth) produced the drawings of
the typical Berlin Mietshaus in Chap. 4, under the expert guidance of his
tutor, Kate Baker. To all of you: thank you very much.
Finally, and very importantly, there are three groups of people who
played an indispensable role in the development of my thinking on the
subject of this book and on its eventual form. I very much wanted to
experiment with a form of writing that would be appropriate to the sub-
ject of story-telling without sacrifcing academic credibility: a kind of
‘genre bending’, as Palgrave’s very helpful reviewer put it. After a lifetime
of writing conventional academic prose, this came as quite a challenge for
me and I’m still not sure I’ve carried it of. But it gave me a great sense
of liberation and I really hope the result is a ‘good read’—if not, then it
Acknowledgements ix
is, of course, entirely my own failing. Either way, I would not have been
able to get to this stage without several kinds of help and encouragement.
First, I want to thank several groups of students at the University
of Southampton who allowed me to try out my ideas and some of my
material in a course on Language and the City. Secondly, I am deeply
grateful for the detailed and critical readings of earlier drafts ofered by
Annette Byford, Louise Eley and Britta Schneider and for the encourag-
ing feedback from Helen Kelly-Holmes and Sari Pietikäinen, which was
very motivating at a difcult moment in the writing process. And I am
keeping till the end my special thanks to the editorial team at Palgrave:
Rebecca Brennan swept aside my initial doubts about the viability of
my proposal and was wonderfully inspiring in her enthusiasm for the
project; I was dismayed when she moved on to a new post when I had
barely started writing, but I couldn’t have wished for a more encouraging
and supportive successor than Esme Chapman, who eased me through
the remainder of the process; and Chloe Fitzsimmons was extraordinarily
patient and helpful throughout the fnal editorial and production stages.
***
I would like to acknowledge with gratitude permission to use the fol-
lowing copyright material in this book: Figure 2.6 ‘Berlin Ostbahnhof ’
is a photograph from Marco Bertram’s online archive www.ddr-fotos.de;
Figure 3.1 ‘Communities’ languages in Westminster, London’ is based
on Figure 6 in Multilingualism in London: LUCIDE city report by Dina
Mehmedbegović, Peter Skrandies, Nick Byrne and Philip Harding-Esch
(the LUCIDE Project was funded by the European Commission Lifelong
Learning Programme); Figures  3.3 and 3.4 ‘Distribution of Panjabi
speakers in London’ and ‘Distribution of Bengali speakers in London’
are reproduced from John Eversley, Dina Mehmedbegović, Antony
Sanderson, Teresa Tinsley, Michelle vonAhn and Richard Wiggins (2010)
Language Capital: Mapping the languages of London’s schoolchildren by per-
mission of the Education Development Trust (formerly CfBT Education
Trust); and Figure  4.3 ‘Vietnamese children arriving in Moritzburg,
1955’ (a photograph by Erich Höhne and Erich Pohl) is reproduced
with kind permission of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats- und
Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB). Some parts of Chap. 4 previ-
ously appeared in my chapter entitled ‘Language (hi)stories: Researching
x Acknowledgements
migration and multilingualism in Berlin’, which was published in Kristine
Horner, Ingrid de Saint-Georges and Jean-Jacques Weber (eds) (2014)
Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe; I am grateful to the publisher
Peter Lang for permission to use this material again here.
Southampton, March 2016