Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Minority Languages: The case of German Brazilian linguistic and cultural practices

研究生克莱尔Insel，由博士监督布鲁斯曼海姆，将进行研究如何少数民族语言有助于组织在一个特定的国家背景下，使用巴西的测试情况下，其扬声器的社会地位。对巴西南里奥格兰德南里奥格兰德德语方言的存在和战略性缺失进行研究，可以表明说话者如何进入平等权利的国家话语，成为一个具有独特历史或种族的群体意味着什么，以及最终成为一个少数群体意味着什么。1824年，来自Hunsruck（今天德国西南部的一个地区）的第一批移民抵达南里奥格兰德，面临着恶劣的自然环境和来自土著和邻近民族的敌意。今天，南里奥格兰德约有70万人说亨斯鲁基什德语，这是第二次世界大战后最后一波重要的德国移民潮。该研究将使用民族志和正式的语言学研究方法来分析言语风格如何与非语言（审美）风格相关，以及这些风格如何与巴西其他少数民族的代表性相关。 数据将通过与两个不同地点的Hunsruckisch讲者一起生活来收集，陪同他们参加非Hunsruckisch讲者也参加的聚会，并进行档案研究。语言样本将被记录在正式和非正式的上下文中，数据将被分析为特定语言特征的正式变化。这项研究很重要，因为它将有助于理解移民身份对社会关系和政策的影响，以及语言在多语言环境中的作用。这项研究也将有助于社会科学家的教育。

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.