Mobile and complex: A West African linguistic repertoire

Migration is one of the sources of individual multilingualism. Patterns of mobility are typically more complex than a simple move from an original home to a new residence; they can involve trajectories including internal, rural–urban, south–south, south–north, and circular migration. An individual's experience of migration is reflected in their linguistic repertoire. Migrants commonly acquire new linguistic resources, expanding their repertoire throughout their itinerary. This is especially true of mobile people from West Africa, where urban and rural multilingualism is common in many regions.

In our project entitled “African people in the Rhine-Main region – a project on
linguistic integration”, we study language repertoires of speakers from different
African countries. Through multimodal methods, including the collection of
language portraits, accompanying narratives, and interviews, we get to know mobile
people’s biographies and their histories of language acquisition. The data can also
be analysed with a view to contact phenomena.

In this chapter, we take a close look at the use of German during an extended
interview conversation with one speaker, Kajatu, a woman born in Guinea. We focus
on three examples from different tiers of language structure: the semantics of the
spatial preposition in, morphosyntactic properties of genitive constructions, and
phonetic–phonological details of nasalization processes. In all three, we find
evidence that the speaker draws on her entire linguistic repertoire, marked by several
West African and European languages. Differences between Kajatu’s use of
German and standard norms cannot simply be attributed to ‘automatic’ processes of
native language interference. Instead, individual usage patterns emerge and
stabilize that can sometimes be traced back to one of the various other languages in
her repertoire. In this sense, the linguistic forms on the levels of phonetics,
morphosyntax, and (lexical) semantics index the individual’s biography and identity.