In the New German, English is a “lifestyle diglossia”

It doesn’t really matter at this point how it all started, English in German. Of course it’s related somehow to the occupation. But even that seems like old history now. English doesn’t exactly have prestige. It’s more like a functionality in advertising that makes it a privileged language for that medium. And travel and most everything else beyond German borders.  English is a utilitarian partner in life if you need to wander. But English also has a diglossic role to play in Germany itself. I am not talking about the classic idea of diglossia, how there is a high language and a low language (usually dialect) in a given country. [If pushed, I might say German is the “higher prestige” language of the two, but not when German dialects are involved.] The situation is more like this: there are uses for either language in certain situations. Diglossia used to be how we thought of the linguistic code-switching that took place among certain sociological groups. How people in neighborhoods spoke to each other versus the way they spoke to people in other parts of the country. Or even the differences how immigrants spoke to each other versus how they talked at work with superiors or authorities or “native” Germans. Your success in a nation with a standard language was dependent on your ability to switch between two codes and to be convincing in both. A lot of things depended on race and class and gender (women have always been better code switchers, apparently).

For this reason, diglossia was always thought of as the difference between “what the people really spoke” and the language that “came from above.” This top-down model helped explain the yawning gap separating the Queen’s English and Manx, or even the difference between African-American English (and all its regional variation) versus the English African Americans spoke at their workplaces. (Yes, please forgive me my English bias, I know there must be better examples elsewhere.)

But today we think that the speaker has more agency that those days when mobility was less frequent and people were confined to listening to two sources of language: their neighborhoods and their television/radio, where one was a mostly a passive listener and you couldn’t perform just any persona through language. The internet has changed things in such a way that we accord individuals more agency and the ability to know and pass in another language well. It’s not that there are no more accents or no more social classes or national origins. It’s just that language has been further separated from those other defining categories if one has the ability to mimic and learn other linguistic codes and if those language codes allow themselves to be accessible. We call this new agency “critical diglossia” and it’s no longer about “top-down” languages. And I don’t think English is a simple top-down language. Or at least, this is not the predominant way to think of English, even if the German government forces everyone to learn it.

There’s a lot to say about the German and Germany today and its relationship to English and it’s really so overanalyzed that I dare not repeat it all. But I do often notice that in certain contexts, there are Germans whose English is more detailed, more able, more specific and knowing about a particular aspect of society or just an aspect of knowledge in general that I learn new English words from listening to German. German media, German radio, German TV and German books.  Of course I know the words they are speaking come from my own language. But the speakers’ knowledge of that term, the easy way with which they deploy a term or phrase, and the bored lassitude I am met with when I ask “huh?” tells me that these German speakers are doing more than speaking a foreign word. It’s like a second native word. Or just another word native to them.

This is particularly striking when I am listening to people talking about certain things that interest them most. So this year, when I read an article about a new type of diglossia, it was something that rings true to me about Germany and yes, about the New German, because I think New German is related to this issue of English diglossia. Anyway, this “new diglossia” is called “lifestyle diglossia” and it refers to the way in which certain languages are used for certain things in a country (such as Germany) depending on the speakers’ interests in their lifestyle. Is it fashion? Is it music? Is it computers or data security? Economics? Cars? Sports? Food? Then there is a spontaneous diglossia that develops from the speaker himself or herself as part of the expanded knowledge stemming from that person’s interest. “Lifestyle diglossia explains HOW and WHY diglossia can also develop from below in the way individuals’ everyday socio-cultural practices and projection of identities shape their language practices.” [1]

The use of English doesn’t express some asymmetrical power relationship between German and English, nor is it related to class or race or whatnot. Sure, there are poseurs, but it’s stupid to think Germans who can speak the language of cars in English because they race them or the language of music because they consume and/or play music are living out some desperate wannabe existence by using and knowing English terms for these things. It’s probably because with the English knowledge of these terms, one can find an even larger pool of interlocutors about a specific subject (or “lifestyle” object) online or even within Germany itself. These words become native to the speaker of that “lifestyle diglossia” in ways that those words are not native to the “native” to the speakers of the language where these words ostensibly come from.  When I am listening to someone talk about contemporary music theory in German, I have little or no advantage as a native English speaker. I do have the advantage over someone who speaks no English. But then again, I don’t think you can speak the New German without being able to speak English. What I mean is that I often have no more insight into some of these English terms I hear in music criticism in German than the supposedly “non-native” German speaking those English-origin terms. This situation gets more pronounced with each new generation in Germany that I am alive to see.

Okay, if you are still following me, let me just make one final comment. When I think about language ability of this sort, this linguistic capacity expanded through the modality of one’s lifestyle interests and the social groups that form within these lifestyles, I start to wonder why we are still naming languages by their nation of origin. Because I know I don’t have much extra insight into the world of fitness and working out just because many of the words to describe new workout techniques come from English. With the active English lifestyle diglossia, people project their identities and group affiliations into the flow of global capital and information. It might not yet be time to completely detach this lifestyle diglossic English in Germany from its US American or British English origins. But I can foresee a time when we could. Or we should?