Language ideologies among Spanish-speaking migrants in Germany: insights from language conflict narratives

Abstract

When migrants move to a new country, they often encounter challenges in understanding and being understood. Narratives serve as a way for individuals to make sense of these experiences, reflecting on their own and other people’s actions, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions while weaving them into coherent stories. This study examines narratives of problematic language incidents among Latin American migrants living in Germany within a language ideologies framework, using narrative analysis and positioning theory. Special emphasis is placed on how the narrators position themselves and other characters relative to widely shared language ideologies. Within the narratives, three pivotal language ideologies emerge: 1. The one-nation-one-language ideology, 2. The native standard ideology, and 3. The ideology of global English. Through their positioning acts, the narrators make moral claims and either affirm or challenge prevailing language ideologies, along with the embedded moral values. While the participants resist marginalization based on exclusionary ideologies of linguistic nationalism and native speakerism, they nevertheless uphold the ideals of a linguistically homogeneous nation-state and the native speaker model. Moreover, they support the use of English as a global language to bridge linguistic inequalities, but tend to overlook its exclusionary potential.