We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

Given that societies across the globe are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, the notion of communicative competence grounded in constricting definitions of national cultures and languages reflects neither our instructional realities nor the sociolinguistic reality of the languages and cultures we teach. To foster students' development of…

This contribution examines the linguistic perceptions and ideologies of an individual of Latin American origin, Jorge, based in the German-speaking region of Switzerland, through narratives to analyse how pre-existing normative linguistic discourses influence (linguistic) identities. Connecting the micro-level of Jorge's narrative to the macro…

Striving to be more representative in their answer to the question, "What is German," many programs are expanding their curricula to include the history and perspectives of Black Germans and Austrians. Through discussion of a course on "Die afrikanische Diaspora im deutschsprachigen Europa," this article argues that examining…

In line with the other contributions to this issue on teaching pragmatics, this paper provides teachers of German with a two-day lesson plan for integrating authentic spoken language and its associated cultural background into their teaching. Specifically, the paper discusses how "jaja" and its phonetic variants are systematically used…

Attitudes towards language and language education policy (LEP) interact with groups' identities, internal dynamics and intergroup relations. Combining quantitative and qualitative measures, we focused on the Habad community--a Jewish ultra-Orthodox (UO) minority in Israel--exploring its LEP and community attitudes toward languages meaningful to…

In conversations between immigrants and officials, problems of understanding are often noticeable. About 280 recordings realised at the Argentine Aliens' Department and at several public authorities in Germany show that knowledge divergences regarding linguistic, cultural and institutional knowledge result in (sometimes grave) difficulties of…

This paper reports the redevelopment and subsequent evaluation of a unit in dialectology within a foreign language curriculum (German). In doing so it is a case study which serves to offer insight into the student experience of studying linguistics within a foreign language curriculum, the potential of online/electronic pedagogies for the teaching…

The collection of essays on language contact and language conflict includes: "Language Choices: Contact and Conflict?" (Martin Putz); "Language Ecology: Contact Without Conflict" (Peter Muhlhausler); "Towards a Dynamic View of Multilingualism" (Ulrike Jessner); "A Matter of Choice" (Florian Coulmas); The…