{"id":8402,"date":"2009-01-07T07:47:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T04:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=8402"},"modified":"2011-09-01T20:01:46","modified_gmt":"2011-09-01T17:01:46","slug":"street-talk-not-sweet-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/01\/07\/street-talk-not-sweet-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Street Talk, Not Sweet Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Immigrant youth in urban Germany mix tongues to create a language of their own. <\/em><\/p>\n

06 January 2009 | Vina Seelam<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t sleep anymore, it\u2019s loud where I live\u2026but I grew up here and I am staying here; I belong to Berlin,\u201d raps Lisi, a half-German and half-Nigerian MC. In Germany, Lisi\u2019s lyrics are provocative\u2014as much for their message as for the words themselves. Lisi often raps in Kiezdeutsch, a hybridized street slang embraced by pockets of urban youth in Germany. While the language grows in speakers and prominence, for many traditional Germans, Kiezdeutsch evokes fear and disdain.<\/p>\n

Kiezdeutsch\u2014\u201chood German\u201d\u2014 is one of several immigrant-influenced street slangs in Germany today. Unlike \u201cT\u00fcrkendeutsch,\u201d a language generally spoken by Turkish immigrants<\/strong>, Kiezdeutsch is spoken by youth from various backgrounds, including native German speakers who live in ethnically diverse neighborhoods or identify with the distinctive youth culture of Kiezdeutsch speakers. T\u00fcrkendeutsch is primarily a Turkish-German hybrid; Kiezdeutsch draws heavily on Turkish but incorporates elements of languages like Arabic, Persian, and Russian as well. The strong Turkish influence upon many street languages<\/strong> reflects the recent history of immigrants to Germany: Turks comprise the majority of the over 2.5 million immigrants who came to Germany over the past 50 years as Gastarbeiter, or guest workers. One hybrid street language is even called \u201cGastarbeiterdeutsch\u201d\u2014 indicating its immigrant roots in its very name.<\/p>\n

Mixed Turkish-German languages such as T\u00fcrkendeutsch and \u201cGastarbeiterdeutsch\u201d evolved as immigrants attempted to both preserve their native tongues and adapt to the language of their new country. The fact that many of these guest workers never formally learned the German language is apparent in the vocabulary and structure of these street languages, which native German speakers belittle as \u201cincorrect\u201d or \u201cbroken German.\u201d The slang is so divergent that it is often unintelligible\u2014and undesirable\u2014to native German ears. But the presence and growth of these languages proves that this influx of immigrants has had a significant impact in Germany, whether wanted or not.<\/p>\n

Because T\u00fcrkendeutsch and Gastarbeiterdeutsch do not follow the rules of the Turkish language, many native Turks also find such mixed languages difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Basak Otus, a junior in Yale College, related her cousin Handan\u2019s experience with slang. Handan\u2019s parents immigrated to Germany from Turkey in the mid-1970s as Gastarbeiter. \u201cHer Turkish is disastrous,\u201d Otus explained. \u201cShe speaks Turkish at home but she can only go to German schools, so she can\u2019t write in Turkish.\u201d Because most of her friends from her neighborhood in Hamburg also have Turkish backgrounds but do not speak pure Turkish, their chosen means of communication is often a Turkish-influenced German slang.<\/p>\n

Although mixed languages like the one used by Handan and her friends facilitate communication and strengthen bonds within immigrant communities, they have also reinforced the sense that immigrants have not assimilated in Germany. For the children and grandchildren of these Gastarbeiter, these dialects and slangs point to the halfway-integration that these youth experience: they are perceived as \u201coutsiders\u201d even though they have grown up in Germany and may feel little connection to their family\u2019s country of origin.<\/p>\n

There have been recent movements in Germany to change this perception by introducing politically correct terms such as \u201cmigrant\u201d into the mainstream, as opposed to Gastarbeiter or Ausl\u00e4nder\u2014\u201cperson from an outside country.\u201d But, according to Julia Eksner at the Center for Culture, Brain, and development at University of California, Los Angeles, little has changed. \u201cTeenagers on the street have never heard of the new term \u2018migrant,\u2019\u201d she explained. \u201cThey feel, \u2018I\u2019m an Ausl\u00e4nder.\u2019 So this word\u2014not being German\u2014is always there.\u201d<\/p>\n

While conducting research in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood in Berlin where many Turkish-German youth live, Eksner found that speakers of Turkish-German dialects often identify as Turks but emphasize that they are from Germany and not from Turkey. They live in limbo between two competing cultures, and, perhaps as a result, some speakers of mixed dialects like Kiezdeutsch and T\u00fcrkendeutsch embrace a cult of aggression and rebellion. Their semi-foreign language can be a tool for intimidation or defense, useful in neighborhoods like Kreuzberg where violence and poverty are the status quo.<\/p>\n

Magbule, one of the teenagers whom Eksner interviewed, explained that to a non-Turkish speaker, the language could sound \u201cchaotic and fast, and somehow\u2026hard and strange.\u201d Rahman, an other teenager, told Eksner that using a mixed Turkish-German language can be advantageous for this reason. \u201cYou come across hard somehow,\u201d he said. \u201cWith that I want to show that I\u2019m serious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Young Kiezdeutsch and T\u00fcrkendeutsch speakers like Rahman have succeeded in appearing \u201chard\u201d through the use of a mixed language: other Germans tend to fear these youth and the unfamiliar and dangerous lifestyles that their slang has come to represent. \u201cIt\u2019s everything\u2014it\u2019s the way they dress, the way they move,\u201d says Eva Wittenberg, a linguistics scholar who worked on a research project in Berlin, when asked what it is about the speakers of this language that evokes fear.<\/p>\n

While making the languages of the \u201cstreet\u201d more accessible to German audiences, Lisi\u2019s rap songs and other media that use stylized versions of slang have other consequences. Such elements of popular culture contribute to the stereotype of Kiezdeutsch speakers as semi-literate, aggressive teenagers. As Eksner explained, in the media these teenagers are able to \u201cmove out of total exclusion, from outside of society, but then are presented in stereotypes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wittenberg added, \u201cWhenever people don\u2019t use proper German, there is a big outcry in society, from a connection of a fear of strangers and a fear of German culture dying.\u201d Native German speakers fear that hybrid languages like Kiezdeutsch and T\u00fcrkendeutsch will erode the purity of \u201chigh\u201d German. While speakers of \u201chigh\u201d German poke fun at the idiosyncrasies of dialects like Bavarian and Saxonian, they do not seem to fear the speakers of these dialects as they do the people who speak the slang of the streets.<\/p>\n

The expanding reach of Kiezdeutsch among youth of various ethnicities and across various media has particularly heightened these fears. The language\u2019s emergence and popularity reflect the changing face of Germany\u2019s demographics\u2014a change which some Germans are not ready to embrace. Unlike T\u00fcrkendeutsch, which is generally spoken only by Turkish-Germans, Kiezdeutsch exemplifies the blending of cultures that is occurring in Germany\u2019s cities. It remains to be seen whether the solidarity between ethnic groups that is reflected in these languages will spread beyond the immigrant neighborhoods where they are spoken today. Although native Germans are generally distrustful and even afraid of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, the German youth who have adopted the slang speak to Germany\u2019s potential for greater recognition, integration, and acceptance of its significant population of ethnic minorities.<\/p>\n

Like the teenagers who speak it, Kiezdeutsch seems to be the rebel in the crowd, neither fitting into mainstream German culture nor into any other cultural mold. But whether they are Turkish, half- Nigerian like Lisi, or something else entirely, the ethnically diverse youth in Germany exhibit a deep loyalty to the places they choose to call home\u2014a loyalty expressed in the languages they use with their peers. In her music, Lisi makes it clear that she, like many other children of immigrants, is a product of the distinct culture of Berlin, where \u201cbetween discos, schools, stores, between mosques and churches, somewhere here sects write sick slogans in the subway.\u201d She calls it \u201cthe city where my parents raised their children,\u201d and assures us that she is not planning on leaving any time soon.<\/p>\n

Source: The Yale Globalist<\/span>,\u00a0 06 January 2009<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Immigrant youth in urban Germany mix tongues to create a language of their own. 06 January 2009 | Vina Seelam \u201cI can\u2019t sleep anymore, it\u2019s loud where I live\u2026but I grew up here and I am staying here; I belong to Berlin,\u201d raps Lisi, a half-German and half-Nigerian MC. In Germany, Lisi\u2019s lyrics are provocative\u2014as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":634077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[973],"class_list":["post-8402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-germany","tag-turkendeutsch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}