Sociolinguistic Resilience Among Young Academics. A Quantitative Analysis in Germany and France

Abstract

Already Friedrich Schiller was convinced that language mirrors a nation. If this is the case, then the often deplored ‘brutalization of language’, which has almost become a buzzword in the wake of the refugee crisis in Germany that started in 2015, points to a serious social crisis by raising questions of (national) identity and self-understanding. Based on newly introduced sociolinguistic resilience concept in line with the concept of group focus enmity (GFE) combining the dimensions of co-adaptation and co-evolution of linguistic signs, this article presents preliminary empirical evidence of a ‘classroom’ survey conducted among students in four university towns in Germany (University of Trier), and France (Sciences Po Paris, Campus Nancy, Catholic Institute of Paris and Le Mans University). Not all of our findings confirm our assumptions. Whilst the level of tolerance is equally low regarding racist and xenophobic, anti-Semitic as well as homophobic statements, German students show more tolerance for sexist and Islamophobic statements. However, there is clear-cut evidence throughout all five categories that the level of tolerance among both German and French students is higher in the private domain than in the public domain. Finally, it could be shown that the co-evolution of linguistic signs (symbols) is strongly dependent on specific society-related phenomena, such as the recent refugee crisis.