Repertoires, characters and scenes: Sociolinguistic difference in Turkish-German comedy

Abstract

This paper examines representations of sociolinguistic difference in a German ‘ethnic comedy’ as a means to contribute to a framework for the sociolinguistic study of film. Three levels of analysis of sociolinguistic difference in film are distinguished: repertoire analysis reconstructs the entirety of codes used in a film and their assignment to characters; character analysis looks at how different ways of speaking contribute to characterisation; scene analysis examines how choices of and encounters between different codes within a scene may draw on language-ideological assumptions to contribute to the dramatic development of film narrative, and how relationships or changes in footing among characters are indexed by stylistic variation. This framework is applied to the analysis of ‘Superseks’, a comedy set in the urban milieu of Hamburg’s Turkish community. The findings suggest that the characters’ linguistic repertoires differ by their narrative importance, gender and generation. In scenes with bilingual dialogue, code choice and code-switching are found to contextualise conflictual relations among major characters. Superseks relies heavily on stereotypical assumptions about language and ethnicity, class, gender and generation, by which stereotypical relations between sociolinguistic difference and narrative evaluation or importance are sustained.