In present-day German we find new word order options, particularly well-known from Turkish-German bilingual speakers in the contexts of new urban dialects, which allow violations of the canonical verb-second position in independent declarative clauses. In these cases, two positions are occupied in the forefield in front of the finite verb, usually by an adverbial and a subject, which identify, at the level of information structure, frame-setter and topic, respectively. Our study investigates the influence of verbal versus language -independent information-structural preferences for this linearisation, comparing Turkish-German multilingual speakers who have grown up in Germany with monolingual German and Turkish speakers. For tasks, in which grammatical restrictions were largely minimised, the results indicate a general tendency to place verbs in a position after the frame-setter and the topic; in addition, we found language-specific influences that distinguish Turkish-German and monolingual German speakers from monolingual Turkish ones. We interpret this as evidence for an information-structural motivation for verb-third, and for a clear dominance of German for Turkish-German speakers in Germany.

We discuss an intervention programme for kindergarten and school teachers' continuing education in Germany that targets biases against language outside a perceived monolingual ‘standard’ and its speakers. The programme combines anti-bias methods relating to linguistic diversity with objectives of raising critical language awareness. Evaluation through teachers' workshops in Berlin and Brandenburg points to positive and enduring attitudinal changes in participants, but not in control groups that did not attend workshops, and effects were independent of personal variables gender and teaching subject and only weakly associated with age. We relate these effects to such programme features as indirect and inclusive methods that foster active engagement, and the combination of ‘safer’ topics targeting attitudes towards linguistic structures with more challenging ones dealing with the discrimination of speakers.

Dieser Band versammelt Originaldaten aus einer Erhebung, die im Rahmen des SFB-Teilprojekts B6 „Kiezdeutsch“ im Frühjahr 2010 in Berlin und İzmir, Türkei, durchgeführt wurde. Sämtliche hier dokumentierten Daten wurden schriftlich produziert; sie stammen von drei verschiedenen Sprechergruppen: Jugendliche aus einem multiethnischen Berliner Wohngebiet, die untereinander Kiezdeutsch sprechen, Jugendliche aus einem monoethnischen Berliner Wohngebiet, in dem der traditionelle Berliner Dialekt vorherrscht, und türkische Jugendliche in İzmir, die Deutsch als Fremdsprache gesteuert erworben haben.

This paper discusses a phenomenon that has recently been observed in areas with a large migrant population in European cities: the rise of new linguistic practices among adolescents in multiethnic contexts. The main grammatical characteristics that have been described for them are (1) phonological/phonctic and lexical influences from migrant languages and (2) morpho-syntactic reductions and simplifications. In this paper, I show that from a grammatical point of view, morpho-syntactic reductions are only part of the story. Using 'Kiezdeutsch' as an example. the German instance of such a youth language (which may be the one with most speakers), I discuss several phenomena that provide evidence for linguistic productivity and show that they evolve from a specific interplay of grammatical and pragmatic features that is typical for contact languages: grammatical reductions go hand-in-hand with productive elaborations that display a systematicity that can lead to the emergence of new constructions, indicating the innovative grammatical power of these muitiethnolects.