230666 Language dynamics in South-South migration processes (S) (SoSe 2026)

The seminar is located in the research field of so-called migration linguistics, a relatively new discipline that combines methods of sociolinguistics and recent language contact research, often treating them at the interfaces with neighboring disciplines such as political science, sociology, economics, or psychology. Without ignoring migration-related processes from the so-called “Global South” to the “Global North” from a comparative perspective, the seminar focuses on the linguistic aspects of migration movements within the Global South.

These migration processes are often characterized by a high degree of multilingualism—both in the host countries and in the countries of origin, where the active use of official (originally European) languages often has a distinctly elitist character. Added to this are political borders of colonial origin, which are often relatively permeable and do not correspond to language boundaries, as well as language-ideological factors resulting from the possible perception of the host country as not necessarily a final place of residence (e.g., in the case of continuing migration aspirations toward the “Global North”).

In addition to ecological pressure factors (including social factors) that determine the development of linguistic repertoires—for example, with regard to functional differentiations, symbolic attributions of languages, or their (non-)transmission to subsequent generations— the seminar also addresses the structural manifestations of the joint management of multilingual repertoires, in particular hybridization processes that go beyond classic code-switching.

Methodologically, the seminar works with both secondary literature and authentic language data from field research, including on Haitians in Brazil (intra-American migration), Congolese in Angola (intra-African migration), and Filipinos in Malaysia (intra-Asian migration). The focus is primarily on migration scenarios in which Romance languages (French, Portuguese, Spanish) play at least a certain role either in the country of origin or in the host country.

Bibliography

Allerton, Catherine. 2017. Impossible children: illegality and excluded belonging among children of migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Blommaert, Jan and Ben Rampton. 2012. Language and Superdiversity. MMG Working Paper 12 (9).
Borlongan, Ariane Macalinga. 2023. Migration Linguistics. A Synopsis. AILA Review 36 (1): 38–63.
Deuchar, Margaret. 2020. Code-Switching in Linguistics: A Position Paper. Languages 5 (2): 22.
Gutiérrez Maté, Miguel. 2024. The multilingual repertoire of the Haitian community in Chapecó (SC, Brazil): Patterns of linguistic evolution in a South–South migration context. Open Linguistics 10.
Koch, Nikolas & Claudia Maria Riehl. 2024. Migrationslinguistik. Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Narr.
Krefeld, Thomas. 2004. Einführung in die Migrationslinguistik. Von der Germania italiana in die Romania multipla. Tübingen: Narr.
Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2017. Worldwide Globalization, International Migrations, and the Varying Faces of Multilingualism: Some Historical Perspectives. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 174.
Vigouroux, Cécile B. 2018. Toward a Sociolinguistics of Modern Sub-Saharan African South–South Migrations. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.