Graduate student Claire Insel, supervised by Dr. Bruce Mannheim, will undertake research on how a minority language helps to organize the social position of its speakers within a particular national context, using the test case of Brazil. A study of the presence and, equally telling, the strategic absence of a spoken local variety of German in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, can indicate how speakers enter into national discourses of equal rights, what it means to be a group with a distinct history or ethnicity, and ultimately what it means to be a minority group. In 1824 the first immigrants from Hunsruck (an area in the southwest of today''s Germany) arrived in Rio Grande do Sul to face a harsh physical environment and hostilities from indigenous and neighboring peoples. Today, some 700,000 people in Rio Grande do Sul speak Hunsruckisch German, the last significant wave of German immigrants having arrived just after World War II.
The research will use ethnographic and formal linguistic research methods to analyze how speech styles relate to nonlinguistic (aesthetic) styles, and how these relate to the representation of other ethnic minorities in Brazil. Data will be gathered by living with Hunsruckisch speakers in two different sites, accompanying them to gatherings that nonHunsruckisch speakers attend as well, and pursuing archival research. Linguistic samples will be recorded in both formal and informal contexts and the data will be analyzed for formal variation of specific linguistic features.
The research is important because it will aid in the understanding of the implications of immigrant identity for social relations and policy, and the role of language in a multilinguistic context in constructing it. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.
