Language and Identity in Migration Contexts

The volume «Language and Identity in Migration Contexts», which contains studies from different languages and migration contexts across the world, provides an excellent overview of the topic while highlighting some key elements like multilingualism, societal and educational contexts, as well as forced migration. The volume will therefore be of much interest to researchers working on these topics. (Prof. Dr. Anita Auer, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland)

The contributions to this volume shed a new light on various central topics in the discourses on language, migration and identity. The continued centrality of language on identity formation processes is underlined but it is shown that language is not a defining criterion for identity formation processes of migrants, in the context of migration or for heritage speakers in all cases. However, societal contexts play an important role in identity formation and these societal contexts themselves are strongly influenced by the ideologies that are prevalent in societies and that may be perpetuated in educational contexts. In the discussion of language, identity and migration in this volume, perspectives from the Global North are enriched by perspectives of the Global South, and the impact of media influence in migration discourse is analysed.

Patricia Ronan holds a chair of English Linguistics at TU Dortmund University. She received her PhD at Maynooth University (Ireland) and she has held further positions in Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany. Her main research interests are in language variation and language contact. At the time of writing, she is co-authoring an Introduction to Multilingualism for Palgrave Macmillan (with Sarah Buschfeld), and is working, amongst other projects, on the linguistic inclusion of migrants, on media language and on variationist pragmatics.

Evelyn Ziegler is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She earned her PhD in sociolinguistics at the University of Heidelberg. Her research focus is on language variation, multilingualism, computer mediated communication, linguistic landscapes and attitude studies. Currently, she is particularly interested in the construction of language attitude expressions in the context of migration and integration (Ziegler et al. 2020).