Resumen de Mixed Language Varieties of Migrant Adolescents and the Discourse of Hybridity
This paper is a study of mixed language use within the frame of interactional sociolinguistics. Adolescents of Turkish background in Germany have developed their own patterns of bilingualism, in particular mixed varieties of German and Turkish. By the analysis of some transcribed examples of Turkish–German mixed speech (code-switching, code-mixing, code-oscillation, stylised forms of 'Immigrant German') it is shown that the switching and mixing oscillates between local sequential functions and a more global 'We-group'-function. The particular role assigned to 'speaking mixed' can only be appreciated against the specific background of the German migratory discourse. The adolescents' use of hybrid language is an attempt at appropriating semantic space where their language is no longer the object of the migratory discourse as defined by majority society but constitutes an autonomous and exclusive form of (counter-) discourse in its own right.
