Mother Tongue: Intergenerational negotiations over language and identity among Chinese immigrants in Berlin

Abstract

The Chinese immigrants in Germany have a special story to tell. Due to the political turbulence in both China and Germany in the second half of the 20th century, migration from China to Germany did not fully take off until the reunification of Germany in 1990. The current community of Chinese immigrants in Germany has a short history, compared to those in the US and Southeast Asia. Chinese immigrant families mainly consist of the first and the second generations, with a high percentage of university graduates and young professionals who arrived in Germany with a student visa. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Chinese immigrants in Berlin, focusing on the process of how the second generation loses and learns the Chinese language within the resources of the nuclear families, but without a sizable ethnic Chinese community. This thesis mainly draws on and contributes to the scholarship in migration studies and language socialization. I conducted a 12-months fieldwork in the classrooms of one public primary school and several private Chinese language schools, the Sunday programs for children at Chinese Christian churches, and numerous Chinese immigrant households throughout the city of Berlin. Driven by the anxieties of acquiring decent education, wider career opportunities, upward mobility and eventually political power, the first-generation Chinese immigrants often focus on the fabrication of a German identity for their children, and put their Chinese origins aside. However, the loss of the Chinese language among the second generation can lead to the lack of communication between parents and children, as well as the increase of inter-generational conflicts. Especially for immigrant families with no other family member in Germany and with limited transnational connection to China, institutions like language schools and Christian churches in Berlin become important venues, not only for the second generation to obtain additional education, but also for the first generation to gain further resources and authorities for themselves to amend the challenges at home. Based on extensive ethnographic materials, this thesis examines the interactions between the two generations of Chinese immigrant families in Berlin, and analyzes their ambivalent relation towards the Chinese language and their Chinese background. Following the literature on language socialization and its emphasis on children’s agency, I investigate the scope and the content of this agency, and address the impact of parents on the formation of children’s agency in learning their heritage language. Building on Bourdieu’s concepts of “a relation to a language”, “implicit” and “explicit socialization”, I argue that parents’ relation to their Chinese background constitutes considerably children’s relation to the Chinese language, and children’s acknowledgement of their Chinese background.