Yeasemin Yildiz
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823241309
- eISBN:
- 9780823241347
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823241309.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter discusses code-switching and mixing of languages as the most contested linguistic practice in the age of globalization. It demonstrates how this practice, particularly associated with ...
More
This chapter discusses code-switching and mixing of languages as the most contested linguistic practice in the age of globalization. It demonstrates how this practice, particularly associated with immigrant youth, is racialized by public discourse, but can also serve to thematize such racialization when employed critically. Feridun Zaimoglu's provocative 1995 bestseller Kanak Sprak, a collection of stylized monologues attributed to young Turkish-German men “on society's edge”—from pimp, garbage collector, and transsexual to Islamist—exemplifies such a mobilization of multilingual youth language. Yet, as the chapter shows, Zaimoglu's literary language does not follow sociolinguistic models but rather mixes codes drawn from such diverse sources as Northern German dialect, biblical language, hip-hop English, and Germanized Yiddish. This particular mix, it is argued, is closely connected to articulating an abjected but defiant racialized masculinity. Throughout, the chapter situates the style and impetus of Kanak Sprak in relationship to comparable Anglophone writing, which has been referred to as literature in “Rotten English” (Dohra Ahmad). A coda focuses on the ambivalent legacy of Kanak Sprak in media discourses and comedy routines.Less
This chapter discusses code-switching and mixing of languages as the most contested linguistic practice in the age of globalization. It demonstrates how this practice, particularly associated with immigrant youth, is racialized by public discourse, but can also serve to thematize such racialization when employed critically. Feridun Zaimoglu's provocative 1995 bestseller Kanak Sprak, a collection of stylized monologues attributed to young Turkish-German men “on society's edge”—from pimp, garbage collector, and transsexual to Islamist—exemplifies such a mobilization of multilingual youth language. Yet, as the chapter shows, Zaimoglu's literary language does not follow sociolinguistic models but rather mixes codes drawn from such diverse sources as Northern German dialect, biblical language, hip-hop English, and Germanized Yiddish. This particular mix, it is argued, is closely connected to articulating an abjected but defiant racialized masculinity. Throughout, the chapter situates the style and impetus of Kanak Sprak in relationship to comparable Anglophone writing, which has been referred to as literature in “Rotten English” (Dohra Ahmad). A coda focuses on the ambivalent legacy of Kanak Sprak in media discourses and comedy routines.
Yasemin Yildiz
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823241309
- eISBN:
- 9780823241347
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823241309.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book is a study of the workings of a monolingual paradigm and of multilingual attempts to overcome it. It argues that monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is a ...
More
This book is a study of the workings of a monolingual paradigm and of multilingual attempts to overcome it. It argues that monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is a recent invention dating back only to late-eighteenth-century Europe, yet has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, their “mother tongue,” while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. The book argues that since reemergent multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, they need to be analyzed as “postmonolingual,” that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism. Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, the individual chapters examine distinct forms of multilingualism: writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the “mother tongue” into another language (Emine Sevgi Özdamar); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoğlu). These analyses suggest that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the “mother tongue” are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.Less
This book is a study of the workings of a monolingual paradigm and of multilingual attempts to overcome it. It argues that monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is a recent invention dating back only to late-eighteenth-century Europe, yet has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, their “mother tongue,” while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. The book argues that since reemergent multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, they need to be analyzed as “postmonolingual,” that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism. Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, the individual chapters examine distinct forms of multilingualism: writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the “mother tongue” into another language (Emine Sevgi Özdamar); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoğlu). These analyses suggest that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the “mother tongue” are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.
