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Cultural identities and language maintenance: Comparing Hispanic and Iranian communities in the US and in Germany

The focus of the Spring School lies on the question of how multiculturalism and identity constructions of persons with divergent migration backgrounds differ linguistically and culturally in everyday life, how they are perceived, and which reasons are relevant for the respective differences.

The example of persons with Iranian immigrant history:
"Should I stay or should I go?" - Today, in Iranian communities this question is answered in a different way than it was in the 1980s or 1990s. Consequently, changes must have taken place in the consciousness and self-awareness of Iranians, leading to a new relationship with their respective countries of residence, with Iran, and with their compatriots around the world. When considering current productions of films and art by people of Iranian descent, critics often qualify them as "diasporic" because they obviously express a productive engagement with various influences and thus refer to "multiple identifications".

Studies of Iranian communities in North America and Europe show that the process of "repositioning" goes hand in hand with actual social and political environments and situations. These "repositionings" are significantly influenced, on the one hand, by the way mainstream society treats immigrants and "foreigners" and, on the other hand, by its attitude toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. The longing for "Iranianness" is a constant formative factor of Iranian communities. Forms and ideas of what constitutes "Iranianness" are subject to negotiation, resulting in the emergence of new and different manifestations of Iranian identities and culture. This interplay of continuity and change is particularly evident when looking at different generations.

The second and third generations of Iranians, composed of people who grew up abroad, are currently crucial to the formation of identities of Iranian communities. Part of their engagement with ethnicity and Iranian identities is the way they take up and negotiate the existing cultural "stock," i.e., the stories and history of migration, the fault lines and "baggage of history" - in short, the cultural and historical memory and heritage of the generation that left and fled the country - and how they reconcile this with their own and new questions, challenges, and obvious facts of life. This process of "merging" influences and experiences testifies to the continuity and change within Iranian communities that occurs through the adoption and continuation of preexisting, acquired discourses, cultural identities, and relationships, as well as their rejection, reevaluation, and redefinition.

Until the early 1990s, the first generation of Iranian exiles who witnessed the revolutionary upheaval of 1979 often compensated for their longing for the homeland "as they knew it" by nostalgically reproducing what they believed to be "authentic" Iranian culture. For these "exiles", the cultures of their country of residence and homeland were often incompatible, mutually exclusive models of belonging, often lived and practiced in separate spheres -one as a "public persona" in mainstream society, the other as an "authentic person" in the privacy of the homeland. For many Iranians, the provisional limbo of exile began to dissolve in the 1990s, and they (or: because they) were increasingly receptive to the immediate, everyday realities of life and the influences of their "new home". For Iranians in the United States, cultural studies scholar Hamid Naficy observed that in the early 1990s, a shift in self-image from "Iranian" to "Iranian-American" was accompanied by increased political engagement in the "host country." According to Naficy, this changed the social status of the Iranian population from "exiles" whose lives revolved around a "lost" homeland to an "ethnic minority," indicating additional goals and needs to be coordinated and represented. At the same time, an additional factor emerged: They became aware of the history, fates, and living conditions of Iranian compatriots who had made other Western countries and cities their home.

Today, supported by online communication through blogging, video and chat services, as well as social networks and forums, an ever-increasing number of people of Iranian descent are communicating with each other and thus coming into contact with different or similar experiences and forms of "being Iranian" or "Iranian life" outside Iran and in Iran. Thus, an alternative Iranian map is formed, which also lies beyond the borders of the Islamic Republic of Iran and has its points also along the west and east coasts of the USA as well as in Toronto, Sydney and many European cities. In addition to the "old" and the "new" homeland, these communication networks and relationships provide participating Iranians with a new and broader transnational frame of reference and identification.

The example of persons with Cuban immigrant history:
The situation of Hispanic migrants in the U.S., which will be exemplarily examined here through a sociolinguistic lens, is numerically different from the situation of Iranian migrants alone. Miami is the first U.S. city with 2 million inhabitants to have a Spanish-speaking majority, and it bears witness to ubiquitous everyday bilingualism. Both languages are in constant contact with interesting consequences: More than half of Miami's population (1.2 million) is of Cuban descent, a large proportion of whom speak the Cuban variety of Spanish. This provides ideal conditions to observe language contact, language change, transmission from parent to child generation, and thus the development of a heritage language. Other Cuban enclaves are located in northeastern New Jersey (Union City, North Bergen, West New York) and in California.

A central theme in U.S. sociolinguistics is intergenerational continuity vs. change. How does the Spanish of U.S.-born Latinos differ from the language of their Latin American-born parents or grandparents? This question will be further explored using concepts and methods from variationist sociolinguistics and related fields in the Spring School. Attention will be paid to the phonetic characteristics of vowels in the respective and Cuban-Spanish contact varieties. Furthermore, the phenomenon of code-switching will be discussed. In the language comparison, students can observe how the vowel system of the Cuban variety of Spanish is not influenced by English, regardless of language dominance. The English vowels, on the other hand, show variation and transfer from the Cuban variety of Spanish. This is referred to as a "Miami accent" of native English speakers with Hispanic immigrant backgrounds. Using this phenomenon, students will be introduced to the issue of directionality and the extent of language transfer in bilingual contact populations.

Another phenomenon to be observed in multidisciplinary studies of bilingualism is the aforementioned code-switching or code-mixing. Here, the speaker switches between two or more languages, registers, or dialects within a single linguistic utterance. While this used to be described as linguistically deficient, also thanks to the work of sociolinguistics, the view that the phenomenon follows its own systematic and should be classified as a sign of linguistic competence of bilingual and multilingual speakers is gradually becoming established in institutions. During the Spring School, different aspects of code-switching will be discussed and explored in the interviews. Students are introduced to the fact that this phenomenon follows clear grammatical rules and serves a social function. The frequency of language switching depends on various factors: Is one of the two languages clearly dominant for a bilingual speaker? Was bilingualism acquired rather early or late? For example, bilinguals with Cuban immigrant backgrounds who were born in the U.S. are found to use both the intonations of English and the intonations of Spanish in code-switching, whereas those who were born in Cuba favor the pitch accents typical of Spanish.

Communities in comparison:
The comparison of such disparate communities as persons with Iranian and Hispanic immigrant histories is motivated in that, on the one hand, Hispanics are a very well researched immigrant group in the U.S. and thus provide good access to the research literature. On the other hand, the two communities differ in interesting ways: Cuban Hispanics form a much larger community in the U.S., whereas persons of Iranian background represent a much smaller population. Thus, their minority character is more pronounced, and they are subject to greater pressure to assimilate into mainstream society. At the same time, they have a different religious background, which is (presumably) important for the perception of others by the majority society - even more so than the perception of themselves.

The comparison of linguistic practices and identity constructions of different Hispanic and Iranian immigrant communities in two host countries (Germany/USA) provides insight into the diverging immigration contexts in both places and allows discussions on the future development of multilingualism and heterogeneous cultural identities for the coming generations. In this context, also the role of schools is important, especially the question of how migration and cultural/national identity are taught there.

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