In many Hollywood films, the Germans can be recognized immediately at the accent: they speak hard English, cannot pronounce the "Th" properly and often embody the diabolical villains with Nazi past.
The German psychologist Claus-Christian Carbon speaks very good and almost accent-free English. He regularly attends international professional congresses, including in the USA. Every now and then the professor makes use of another stereotype there: that of the ingenious German researcher à la Albert Einstein. He was known for his strong German accent.
»A friend of Germany from Germany visited me in the USA. He sat at the wheel of the rental car and did not behave at all. The police were after us within a very short time, we had to ride right and crank down the disc, ”reports Carbon. The policeman looked quite grim into the car. "I looked at him faithfully, unpacked my strongest German accent and said: Sorry, we are researchers from Germany and Have Lost the way to our conference." Reaction of the policeman: friendly smile. »Researchers from Germany? - Great. Go ahead."
Theme week "Learn foreign languages"
Am I too old as an adult to learn a new language? Are there easy and difficult languages? Is a foreign accent a problem? And how do adults learn best? This theme week answers questions about one of the most beautiful minor things in the world: foreign languages.
However, a foreign accent can trigger very different reactions: one thinks it is nice, the other doesn't like it at all. Behind it are often prejudices and stereotypes, in good and in the negative sense. In the worst case, this can lead to people with a strong foreign accent.
Studies continue to show that in Germany, people who are assumed to have a Turkish, Arab or other migrant background often have worse chances when looking for a job, an apprenticeship or an apartment. However, such negative ratings are decreasing in the younger age groups, which is not surprising: diversity is now the norm in many classrooms and lecture halls of universities.
Accents activate the head cinema
How we feel about foreign accents – why, for example, Dutch sounds cute and Russian sounds rough – also has something to do with experiences, explains Claus-Christian Carbon, who researches perception and memory at the University of Bamberg. "These empirical values activate areas in the associative memory, in the temporal lobes of the brain. There is a lot of mental cinema going on there, " says the psychologist.
The principle of association was already described in psychology in the 1860s by the doctor and natural philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887). And it applies in most everyday situations.
You can check this for yourself: if you have had an unpleasant boss for years who expressed himself in the broadest Viennese insult, you will probably also be negatively triggered by the dialect later on. And if the beloved grandma comes from Saxony and is a strong Saxon, we associate her humor and her loving nature with it. Other people, on the other hand, think of a Saxon dialect more like the right-wing populist speeches on Pegida demos.
In other words, experiences are linked to emotions. And they determine how we evaluate a strong dialect or foreign accent and what properties we may attribute the spokeswoman.
The same loud sounds sometimes French, sometimes Kreuzberger Kiez
The Germans prefer to like the French accent. While the language of our neighboring country with its melody, the bond between words and the nasal, soft and harmonious, German is perceived by many as hard and throaty, and accordingly the German accent. For example, German soft consonants speak hard at the end of the word, such as the "G" in "Tag", which becomes "K" - and so the English "Dog" (dog) with a German accent becomes "Dok".
But the euphony is only a side aspect. "The attitude towards a language is more of an attitude towards the person or his culture: most of us associate a lot culturally with French, less with Swahili or Romanian. Unless you have lived in Romania or in an East or Central African country for a while or have dealt with the countries in other contexts," says linguist Stefanie Jannedy. She is a research associate at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin and has specialized in sociophonology. Among other things, Jannedy conducts research on the so-called neighborhood German. This is a variant of German, "which is often associated with Turkish-Arab communities, but is used by many young people in multi-ethnic and multilingual contexts, especially in urban regions," for example in Berlin in the districts of Kreuzberg, Wedding or Neukölln.
Together with a colleague, Jannedy examined what expectations of German -speaking people have when they hear "ch" or "sch", a variation that also occurs in neighborhood German. The test subjects should categorize individual sound samples either as "spruce" or as "fishing". During the experiment, a piece of paper was shown on which either "Kreuzberg" or "Zehlendorf" stood to give the impression that the sound test came from a person from Kreuzberg or from the middle -class Zehlendorf. In the first case, the same sound test was perceived more often than "fishing" - that is, as a neighborhood German variant.
A second attempt took advantage of the fact that "sch" sounds are also often heard when French people speak German. The test subjects heard words that deviated from standard German, such as "Honisch" instead of "Honig". In a classic experimental setup, the implicit association test, it was found that the older subjects had negative associations with the alleged neighborhood German more often than with an alleged French accent.
Younger German -speaking test subjects, on the other hand, reacted significantly less negative and stereotypical to the supposed Kiezdeutsch, "presumably because many of them are the sound and the people who express themselves in everyday life are more familiar in everyday life," says Jannedy. "So our reaction to a foreign or supposedly foreign accent has a lot to do with what we believe about knowing about people, in which everyday context we experience it and how much we and our attitudes critically control ourselves," explains the linguist.
A prominent example is the Berlin SPD politician and native Palestinian Raed Saleh. Saleh came to Germany with his parents at the age of five. A few years ago, he expressed ambitions to become a governing mayor. During this time there was a phenomenon that described the daily newspaper "Taz" as "grammar initial": journalists attested grammar errors and a clear accent for the politician. The "taz" then examined his speeches and stated that Saleh's German was grammatically flawless.
"Raed Saleh speaks correctly. He may sometimes sound like someone with a migration background – and that was enough to suggest that he was speaking the wrong German," says Jannedy. Another research team at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin is now working on "grammar Tinnitus": among other things, it is investigating the role of attitudes on the perception of an accent in German and Polish.
Prejudices and stereotypes are a kind of heuristic, a mental abbreviation that enables humans to quickly decide whether someone is a friend or enemy. Several thousand years ago, this abbreviation for people in everyday life was often still vital for survival. The hesitation and rethinking came - from a cultural -historical point of view - only later. It was a good development for social interaction. Because: "The more own diagnostic information you have, the less you can be guided by stereotypes," says social psychologist Melanie Steffens from the University of Koblenz-Landau.
Looking for a job: Better without accent or dialect
A focus of her research is occupational psychology. Among other things, she researches the effect of foreign accents and dialects in job interviews for upscale positions. With a colleague, she examined what effect it has when a person speaks excellently with a darker skin color. "One of the results was: If you look southern and speak German perfectly, then you often get a bonus and high sympathy values from the interlocutor, according to the motto: Oh, they speak German very well!" Says Steffens. "Conversely, this positive assessment did not appear: If you hear the person first and then see."
In another experiment, the two scientists had people, including foreign-looking people, speak German with a strong dialect. Steffen's guess was that this would give the foreign-looking subjects additional advantages: "He or she not only speaks High German, but also perfectly masters the dialect of the region!" But that was not the case. "A strong dialect coloration led to a devaluation for all subjects.«
On the other hand, politicians use dialect to gain sympathy points. This apparently looks particularly good in federal states such as Bavaria or Schleswig-Holstein, where a large proportion of people live in the country and maintains the regional dialect rather than in large cities. The "bilingual" representatives use the effect that people find people particularly personable when they speak a similar dialect. "There are studies on this: According to this, waitresses get more tips if they greet a south German guest with" Grüß Gott "," says Melanie Steffens.
However, this effect is not noticeable in the case of upper positions. Therefore, it is wise to speak High German in job interviews as possible, says the psychologist. Steffens also advises that applicants with the necessary competence, who are still difficult to talk to the German language in conversation, and to initially enclose written references. In such a case, this can certainly be called better than spontaneously if you want to apply for an initiative. "Under certain circumstances, it is also positive if you openly admit in the letter not to be able to speak German so smoothly - and then perhaps better avoid in English if you feel more secure in it." As so often, there are such Situations: The first impression counts.
Employees of public authorities are already being specifically trained in workshops in order to relax the situation for people with a foreign appearance or accent and not to behave in a discriminatory manner themselves. The sociolinguist Inke Du Bois advises, among other things, the Lower Saxony state government on this, conducts workshops with employees and says about her approach: "Basically, the first thing is to make it clear to people what happens on a metacognitive level when they are in a concrete situation." Namely, what happens automatically in the mind when we perceive another person: the perception of another person immediately leads to a feeling and an interpretation – and thus often to a hasty classification. "The three processes of perception, feeling and interpretation are so interconnected that we usually cannot separate them at all," says Du Bois.
The scientist, who researches stigma and prestige of foreign accents, brings the participants in exercises such as role -playing games in situations in which they have to find their way around in a different culture. Or she confronts them with real stories that make their own clichés and prejudices understandable. The goal, says du Bois: perception, feeling and interpretation to look separately from each other in order to make more conscious decisions.
