The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

Research suggests that heterogeneous life experiences (e.g. multilingualism) might facilitate the development of mental flexibility. The current paper presents the conceptual replication of a study originally presented by Greve and colleagues [Greve, W., Koch, M., Rasche, V., and Kersten, K. (2021). Extending the Scope of the 'Cognitive Advantage'…

Ethnolinguistic vitality theory asserts that Status, Demographic, Institutional Support and Control factors make up the vitality of ethnolinguistic groups. An assessment of a group's strengths and weaknesses in each of these dimensions provides a rough classification of ethnolinguistic groups into those having low, medium, or high vitality. Low…

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 article deals with language contact between a dominant standard language--German--and a lesser-used variety--Low German--in a situation in which the minoritised language is threatened by language shift and language loss. It analyses the application of Low German in forms of public language display and the self-presentation of the community in…

Addresses conditions of identity education in Germany within the framework of multicultural education. Particular focus is on the interaction theory of Krappmann (1971), which provides a framework for dealing with the necessities of identity education for migrant and German students. The importance of identity education for migrant students and…

On the basis of a corpus of British and German press coverage of European Union (EU) politics over the 1990s, the paper analyses uses of the geopolitical HEART metaphor. Over the course of the 1990s, successive British governments promised to work "at" the "heart of Europe". However, no one ever claimed that Britain was…

Rather than originating in the post-1945 period, the Americanisation of the German language represents the post-war transformation of a gradual anglicisation of German which began in the 18th century with the expansion of English industry and trade. The influence of American English on German began after World War I, and intensified under the…

This paper analyses an extensive corpus of texts from the German media and existing studies of German perspectives on Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia in order to demonstrate that there are two idealised culture cognitive models (ICCMs) that function as overarching categories for Europe: the ICCM west (the members of the European…

With its focus on simplification universals, developmental orders, teachability, and functional-grammatical bases for acquisition, the well-known research on German (L2) language acquisition has contributed much to SLA research in general. At the same time, sociolinguistic investigations focus squarely on the difficult social conditions that…