From the biographical narratives of Czech Germans

The article proceeds from the linguistic, social and political situation that has developed on the territory of the Czech Republic over the course of the 20th century. The biographical accounts given by people of German extraction who live in the Czech Republic form the empirical starting point. The article focuses on how they construct their language biographies. Of particular interest is how they acquired the Czech language (especially after 1945) — namely which factors in the acquisition of Czech they view as important and what their reported acquisition strategies are like. Similarly, the paper takes notice of how the German language has been preserved in the older generations of Czech Germans and the ways in which the younger generations of Czech Germans acquire German.