Freie Universität Berlin

I am a sociolinguist, working at the Freie Universität Berlin. My main interest is how language is affected by ethnic diversity and transnational discourse. Generally, my research topics are the sociolinguistics of globalization, linguistic ethnography, discourse analysis, language policy, language and gender and the epistemology of linguistics. Among other things, I have worked on language policies and language rights in educational contexts and on language ideologies in transnational communities of practice constituted by music and dance.

My focus at the moment is on language ideologies, language choice and language mixing in the multilingual nation of Belize in Central America. To study language choice and language ideologies in a highly diverse and multilingual setting where languages and ethnic groups may not match in the way that most (European, Western, academic?) people would expect it, I have developed a research project on languages in Belize, financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG.

In this blog, I want to share in a more informal manner the things I currently work on and that I have found interesting for my research.

Introducing Language Research in Belize

A main aspect of my research in Belize is to collect ethnographic data as to try to understand the ties of social units and linguistic units where a simple language – ethnicity nexus may not be the norm. I want to learn about this from ‚within‘, so I need to know what language means to the people who actually use it. I cannot rely on statistical information on who uses which language but I have to see what really happens.

For this reason, I first study online data (like newspapers, social networks, radio and TV broadcasting) and written material (scientific, popular and literary text) to become acquainted with Belizean public discourse. Then, starting in January 2015, I spend three month in a little village in Belize and observe everyday language behaviour and talk to people. I meet people on the streets but I also volunteer in a high school, where I observe and record language practices inside and outside of classrooms and do some English tutoring. To learn about official views, I meet up with people from the government who are responsible for designing language policies.

For more about my publications, teaching and a CV, see https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we06/institut/mitarbeiterinnen_und_mitarbeiter/schneider/index.html