Language, Space, and Identity in Migration: from the Local to the Global

Abstract

We started this book with two portraits of our immigrant participants, Frauke and Claudia, who are representative of the diversity of our participants. Frauke’s migration path started in a German settlement in Hungary, and brought her to Germany before she eventually moved to Canada as a teenager. She now lives in Kitchener-Waterloo and is constructing a space in which this migration path is still present, consciously or not, and in which she actively reconstructs and transplants elements of it. In doing so, she makes use of local resources such as German cafés, German ethnic clubs, and other German speakers, though they may not all speak the same German variety that she does. Now near retirement age, her adjustment to Canada can be seen in the ways she creates spaces through a mixed code, the local references she makes, and the ways in which her language attitudes and ideologies correspond to those of German speakers living in Canada rather than European Germans. She has made a choice for Canadian citizenship but ‘my heart is German,’ she says, which indicates the deep emotional traces connected to the languages she has encountered in her life.