What do our language and our wardrobe have in common?
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| Admission free |
| Book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the Foyer. |
| Duration: 60 min |
| 14 years and older |
| German |
| Humboldt Lab, 1st floor |
| max. 25 persons |
Imagine you have an important appointment at your bank. What do you wear? Dressing gown over jogging pants? Or would that be too informal? Cocktail dress or top hat? Or does that not work either?
We all have a repertoire of clothes and choose from them depending on the occasion: different outfits fit different situations. This is exactly what we do when using language: we adapt to the situation linguistically as well and choose more informal or formal versions from our linguistic repertoire – so-called “linguistic registers”. In doing so, we change not only our choice of words, but also the grammar.
Studies have shown that informal language use is often deprecated: for example, many people imagine someone to be less intelligent and less successful professionally if he or she uses an informal register – such as Kiezdeutsch, the Berlin dialect or another colloquial variant.
In the series “Meet the Scientist”, Heike Wiese and Oliver Bunk talk about linguistic repertoires and the perception of different registers, and show how our first impression of a speaker can mislead us.
LECTURES
Heike Wiese is Professor of German in Multilingual Contexts at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In various projects, she explores the dynamics of German in multilingual contexts from Berlin to Windhoek. Her 2012 book on Kiezdeutschincreased awareness of new dialects and linguistic variation beyond standard German; in 2020, she published the Duden debate book Deutschpflicht auf dem Schulhof? Warum wir Mehrsprachigkeit brauchen (Compulsory German in the schoolyard? Why we need multilingualism).
Oliver Bunk is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for German in Multilingual Contexts at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He explores linguistic variation in monolingual and multilingual contexts and the effects of language attitudes and ideologies on German and its speakers.