Inventing ethnolect , Die Erfindung des Ethnolekts

The paper takes a critical look at the discourse processes that lead to the language-ideological formation of <the ethnolect> as a distinct variety of German. Theoretically situated at the interface between language-ideology research and critical discourse studies, it offers qualitative analyses of selected discourse data from 1995 to 2010. The paper discusses the following suggestions: Perceptions of a distinct variety among immigrant-background young people emerge in a circulation process among a range of institutional discourses, including academia, popular culture, journalism, and language teaching; these share a number of discursive procedures and language-ideological assumptions regarding <the ethnolect>, which are recontextualised according to the formation rules of each discourse. Linguists played a pivotal role in that process, both in academic publications and as <language experts> quoted in the media. In particular, they introduce a number of descriptive procedures on which the production of knowledge on ethnolects is based: labelling, classification, normative comparison, feature selection, and interpretive binarisms; these also occur across media and language teaching discourse in recontextualised ways. Homogenism and standardisai serve as language-ideological pillars on which <the> ethnolect can be imagined as a <deviation> from standard language. Its use in the iconisation of <problem> immigrant youth and its metaphorical conceptualisation in terms of military aggression are particular to media discourse. Finally, the label ethnolect is indifferent to the ethnicity of its purported speakers, but primarily indexes their difference, i.e. heteroethnic relation to the imagined majority group.