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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 111–134

Chapter 5
“Organically German”?

Changing ideologies of national belonging

ORCID logo | University of Groningen

This chapter examines variation in the situated meanings of the term Biodeutsche(r), a term which has emerged relatively recently as a way to refer to people who are German by descent (i.e., not of migration background). This analysis shows that use of this term reflects competing discourses about the role of ethnicity in national belonging in Germany. While the origin and many uses of the term challenge the validity of ethnicity as a basis for legitimacy in German society, some of the data suggest that it has also been adopted as a supposedly neutral term to describe a segment of the German population, which supports an ethnonational ideology.

Keywords: media discourse, German, national identity, biodeutsch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.German ethnicity, citizenship and belonging: Concepts and policies
    • 2.1Ethnicity
    • 2.2Immigration and citizenship
  • 3.Discourses of belonging
    • 3.1Discourses of ethnonational ideology
    • 3.2Integration and belonging: Discourses of exclusion and inclusion
    • 3.3Post-national discourse
  • 4.The term Biodeutsche(r)
  • 5.Methodology: Media data
  • 6.Overview of term and its meanings
    • 6.1Biodeutsche(r): Challenging ethnonational ideology
    • 6.2Missing the joke: Reclaiming Biodeutsche(r)
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.05ful
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