Research at the Chair of Language Use and Migration

This project is concerned with posthumanist understandings of correct language and ‘normal’ language use in the context of digital culture. While today’s concepts of standard language and linguistic appropriateness are still framed in traditions of literacy, technologies of the printing press, ideologies of the ‘native’ speaker and national boundedness, some of the modernist certainties regarding language become dismantled in contemporary communication practices. In this project, transformations of language and of concepts of language (referred to as language ideologies in linguistic anthropology) are approached. Embedded in general observations on digital language practices, including informal written interaction, the emergence of transnational communities and the ideological and technological underpinnings of AI translation tools, the main focus of the project is the analysis of human-machine interaction. I study the impact of voice-controlled human-machine interaction on the conceptualization of language appropriateness as well as on the conceptualization of computers as interaction partners. Qualitative interviews with users of voice-controlled digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa here give insight into the effects of new conversational practices on language ideologies in the 21st century that overcome national borders but at the same time display new logics of inclusion and exclusion.

Related Publications

• Heyd, Theresa, and Britta Schneider. 2019. Special Issue: The Sociolinguistics of Late Modern Publics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 23.
• Schneider, Britta. 2020. “Was ist richtige Sprache in digitaler Gesellschaft? Von der Gutenberg zur Alexa Galaxie.“ Beitrag auf dem Blog des Humboldt Instituts für Internet und Gesellschaft (HIIG) https://www.hiig.de/was-ist-richtige-sprache-in-digitaler-gesellschaft-von-der-gutenberg-zur-alexa-galaxie/
• Does Alexa have Linguistic Authority? An Interview with Dr. Britta Schneider. https://edgeryders.eu/t/does-alexa-have-linguistic-authority-an-interview-with-dr-britta-schneider/13245

What is a language if we are not sure of how to define the community who speaks it? And what contributes to the emergence of languages and language boundaries in the first place? These questions form this project’s underlying interest in language ideologies in linguistically complex Belize. The study is based on an ethnographic field study conducted in a village characterized by linguistic diversity and inter-ethnic complexity. It gives voice to multilingual speakers whose concepts of language use often do not fit into Western paradigms of the relationship of language and social order. It thus contributes to overcoming a view on language as ‘naturally’ appearing in homogenous, coherent systems, tied to distinct cultural groups. The study of language and of language ideologies in Belize, a context in which languages and social units do not straightforwardly link to each other, exhibits discursive processes that co-construct languages as systemic entity. At the same time, the data demonstrates that a priori epistemological assumptions of languages as given entities as common in the discipline of linguistics are problematic. Thus, the analysis of observational, conversational and interview data from this highly complex linguistic setting proves to be relevant for reframing contemporary linguistic theory where ideologies of ‘one language-one nation language’ have become dismantled.

Related publications (selection):

• Schneider, Britta (submitted habilitation thesis). Liquid Languages. Polymorphous Acts of Identity and the Fluidity of Language Categories in Linguistically Complex Belize
• Schneider, Britta. 2017. "Lobster, tourism and other kinds of business. Economic opportunity and language choice in a multilingual village in Belize" Special Issue 'Language, Mobility and Work' in Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.14702018.11474887 
• Schneider, Britta. 2017. “‘It’s Kriol they’re speaking!’ – Constructing language boundaries in multilingual and ethnically complex communities.” In: Elmiger, Daniel et al. (eds.) Bulletin VALS-ASLA: Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée. Neuchâtel: Institut de Linguistique de l’Université de Neuchâtel. http://doc.rero.ch/record/11876/files/bulletin_vals_asla_2017_special_1.pdf

This project is interested in the language practices of non-national, non-ethnic social formations that come into being on grounds of digital interaction as well as locally grounded practice. While major social formations such as nation, class and gender continue to be crucial in understanding language use of individuals, we can observe the emergence of communities that are based on practices of, for example, media consumption, popular music culture, sports or gaming. Such ‘communities of knowledge’ often makes use of English and criss-cross traditional ideas of language and belonging, implying that concepts of linguistic appropriateness may become reconfigured in often Anglophone but multilingual and transnational interaction. The project focuses on a particular community of consumption that has come into being on grounds of the production, distribution and sale of coffee. Third Wave Coffee Culture is a global urban phenomenon in capitalist culture in which elitist ideologies related to the consumption of a luxury product clash with discourses on egalitarianism, support of marginalized populations in the countries of coffee production and ecological ideals. The dominance of symbolic but also interactional uses of English as an index of new forms of community formation and social hierarchy is the particular interest of this study, methodologically realized on grounds of observational and interview data in Berlin’s localization of Third Wave Coffee Culture.

Related publications:

• Schneider, Britta (in press). "Language in transnational communities of consumption – indexical functions of English in Third-Wave Coffee Culture." In: Rüdiger, Sofia & Susanne Mühleisen (eds.). Talking about Food – The Social and the Global in Eating Communities. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Heyd, Theresa & Britta Schneider. 2019. Anglophone communities in Germany: the case of Berlin. In: Hickey, Raymond (ed.) English in the German-Speaking World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Schneider, Britta & Theresa Heyd, eds. (in preparation) Bloomsbury World Englishes. Paradigms. London: Bloomsbury.

This project offers a societal perspective on the digitalisation of all human life by asking, how together with AI, humans contribute to a functional digital society. The overall aim of the project is to show how human engagement engagement with Voice Assistants (i.e., Siri, Google home, Alexa) affects human agency. The project starts with lived human experience to rethink digital technology as part of a ‘coming together’ of human influences. It asks, first, how people think with and through technology and, second, how human-machine engagement changes a person. The project aims to explore how a user engages with a voice assistant in their home environment and how, over time, engagement with such devices changes human agency. Placing the project in the context of exploring human presencing in the context of non-representational approaches to cognition and language, I propose following research questions:

Research questions

• How do users engage with voice controlled digital tools? What role does the interplay of bodily pico- and micro dynamics (i.e., changes in gaze, body posture, manual gestures, voice dynamics and speech pauses) play in the engagement with such technology? 
• How does a user’s personally constructed understanding of a social system (i.e., household or family) impact their engagement with the digital tool? 
• How does using voice controlled digital tools change the user-as-a-person over time? 

Given an agent-environment perspective on cognition, I prefer to ask how technology enriches a human social cognitive environment. In other words, how digital ‘things’ are part of human cognition. In such views, cognition is irreducible to the inner workings of the brain and needs to be assigned to an organism’s direct engagement with its environment. Using a systemic ethnography, I explore how a user coordinates with digital tools as they draw from their own lived experience and that of others in a shared household. Moreover, I investigate how through recursive engagement with a speaking machine and with others of the same social system a user begins to adapt to the device and changes as a person. The question of how people move each other into becoming informs all my research. When investigating the use of speaking machines in an household environment, I give much attention to how our engagement with people of the same social system enable user engagement with speaking machines. Which circumstances precede giving certain commands to a speaking machine and how does the way of talking about the machine with others impact a user’s perception and action of a voice assistant.

This project is funded by the Postdoc Network Brandenburg.

The aim of my doctoral project is to qualitatively study the relationships between multilingualism as interactionally and ideologically lived experience and identity constructions in the case of five writers who were born in the Soviet Union/early-90s-Russia and moved to Germany or Austria as contingency refugees. In addition to linguistic biographical studies, my research projects focuses on the role of writing in the experience of multilingualism and identity construction. I try to achieve this by looking both at the writers’ biographies and their fictional works and by combining semi-structured interviews and language portraits with research methods on literary multilingualism.

In my PhD project, I investigate how multilingual people navigate and integrate voice assistant technologies (such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant) into their lives and what implications they have for multilingualism and translingual speakers from a critical sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological perspective. Using an ethnographically grounded methodology, I examine the practices people establish with these machines, their different language choices in different mediatized environments, and how they reflect on their practices. Specifically, the study focuses on ten individuals who have recently migrated from Turkey to Germany. The analysis incorporates material/technological entanglements of language(s) and considers the interplay of human and nonhuman actors such as algorithms in the construction of discourses.

Related publications

Leblebici, Didem. "“You are Apple, why are you speaking to me in Turkish?”: the role of English in voice assistant interactions" Multilingua, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2023-0072 

In my doctoral project, I am studying conceptual and discursive constructions of women in fashion discourse. More specifically, I do a qualitative analysis of a large self-compiled corpus from the U.S. Vogue magazine and its official Instagram account. Relying on Critical Discourse Studies (Critical Discursive Psychology and Postfeminist Critical Discourse Analysis) and approaches to metaphor analysis (Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis), I investigate how women are (dis)empowered and (dis)objectified in allegedly feminist-oriented texts. I also look into how dominant repertoires of femininity and subject positions assigned to women by fashion stakeholders are either contested or supported by the larger community. One of the key aims of the project is to demonstrate how gender is discursively dichotomized in fashion.

Related publications

Pilyarchuk, K. (2024). “In/exclusion in fashion discourse: Are we in or out?” Discourse & Society 35 (5), https://doi.org/10.1177/095792652412410

My project investigates the sociolinguistic economy of a linguistically diverse university setting with the broad aim of examining the role of language(s) in processes of social inclusion and exclusion. I'm analyzing the language ideologies of different university stakeholders’ to understand how institutional, group, and individual language practices and beliefs about language create spaces of both social inclusion and social exclusion. These local observations will be compared and contrasted with larger observations of global linguistic and social hierarchies to see if similar inequalities are being produced in the university setting. On the basis of findings about the mechanisms of inequality, I can then provide recommendations for how globalizing, multilingual universities can better pursue their educational and institutional goals with an eye toward critical multiculturalism. An outcome of the project will be to develop tools to empower people of various linguistic resources (including students, faculty, and other university stakeholders) to identify and resist language-based inequality and discrimination.

Subproject: The Language Ideology Workshop (a.k.a. Language in Your Life)

As part of my doctoral project, I have designed a workshop along with my colleague Charlotte Mende. The aim of the workshop is to engage undergraduate students from the Viadrina in critical thinking about how language ideologies function in their lives. Because the European University Viadrina has a very international faculty and student body, students’ real and perceived language abilities and linguistic identities can be sources of insecurity and anxiety with regards to classroom participation. The workshop’s overarching goals are to encourage students to continually develop and use their full linguistic repertoires in their studies (Wilkinson and Gabrïels 2021, to promote translingual activism (Pennycook 2019), and to combat social exclusion through a commitment to critical multiculturalism (Kubota 2010). Discussion topics include “native-speakerism,” students’ fears about making mistakes, and the nature of language for academic purposes. Students are empowered to form alliances among themselves, faculty, and support staff in order to transform the university into a supportive environment that counters linguistic inequality.

The study introduces an analysis of the sociolinguistic situation of transnational Afghan diasporas in Germany. It discusses recent migration trends to Germany, the influential positions held by educated Afghan migrants from the 1970s and 80s, and increased immigration following the 2021 change of government in Afghanistan. The project explores the linguistic identities of Afghan migrants in Germany, their communication methods and language preferences, and the challenges they face in adapting to a new culture and language. Additionally, it examines the use of English and German plus their multilingual background in their daily lives and their role in integration, aiming to understand how transnational Afghan diasporas integrate linguistically into Germany. The study categorizes Afghan individuals in Germany into literate, illiterate, and young speakers, investigating their literacy types, multilingual interactional practices, and their relationship to social bonding. Interview data will provide insights into the everyday language practices of Afghan communities in Germany.