She speaks Russian with her mother and Arabic with her father.

And together they all speak English.

For the German education system, their multilingualism is a flaw that is documented with an official German abbreviation in letters to parents: ndH, "non-German language of origin".

The novelist Olga Grjasnowa uses this example in her first non-fiction book “The Power of Multilingualism” to illustrate how her daughter experiences linguisticism at a young age, i.e. how she is discriminated against because of her language.

The abbreviation is also a judgment, because it is associated with poverty and lack of education.

Anna Schiller

Volunteer.

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“The power of monolingualism” would be a more appropriate title for Grjasnova’s book.

Because at its core it deals with the systematic discrimination of people whose mother tongue is not German.

Using anecdotes, Grjasnowa shows how this is presented in detail.

In doing so, she draws on experience in her family's environment in particular.

She writes at the interface between narrative non-fiction and political program.

Unnecessary ideological baggage

Grjasnowa sees the “paradigm of state-sponsored monolingualism” as historically justified. Using the history of the word “mother tongue”, which the author also rejects as an “expression of ethnic nationalism”, she traces the emergence of German monolingualism. A national language had to be invented for the “Project Germany”. Through dictionaries and grammars, a uniform standard German spread in the nineteenth century, which served as legitimation for the nation.

According to Grjasnowa, however, the mother tongue was increasingly perceived as something "natural" due to the development of Germany as a nation: "Accordingly, one is born into one and only one language and thus also into a nation that shares blood and soil." using the catchphrase that became popular under National Socialism, it torpedoes its cause with unnecessary ideological ballast.

A leading German culture

In her analysis, Grjasnowa refers to the concept of the imagined community developed by the political scientist Benedict Anderson. For him, language also has an integrative character, with it he explains another phenomenon: With the printing of letters and the standardization of the spoken language, works that were previously only accessible to a small elite reading Greek and Latin could be made accessible to larger parts of society . The first mass media emerged and spread a uniform form of the spoken language. Their users increasingly saw themselves as a network of equal speakers. With examples from Richard Wagner's “Judenthum in der Musik” or from the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Grjasnowa focuses primarily on the exclusionary function of the German language.

The author derives from her point of view a function of German that is still valid today.

In current discourses on identity politics, she registers the endeavor to establish German as the guiding language - analogous to a German guiding culture.

For her, linguicism manifests itself particularly in the education system, which she sees as an instrument to reproduce power structures.

According to Grjasnowa, German as the language of education enforces the ideal of monolingualism in schools and universities.

Not much room for alternative suggestions

In addition to this key language, good English and French are perceived as desirable, while knowledge of Turkish, for example, is considered a deficit. Children who speak one of these languages ​​of origin are required to adapt to the “monolingual form”. "Not only are the individual languages ​​hierarchized in this way, but also those who speak them," Grjasnowa sums up. “Monolingualism as the norm” ultimately serves to “establish and maintain a certain social normality”.

Grjasnowa's line of argument does not leave much room for alternative suggestions on how to deal with German in class. Because the demand to maintain the acquisition of the German language as a central achievement of the local education system collides with the ideological legacy it claims. In view of their sharp criticism, their proposed solutions for the education system seem banal: More financial resources should be made available for the expansion of state offers for native language lessons, open native language lessons for all pupils, understand any form of multilingualism as an achievement in the development of a child - not as a flaw.

Teaching in the native language is neglected in many federal states.

According to a report by the Integration Media Service, only consulates are responsible for teaching the native language in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.

One can certainly reproach the federal states for losing many students to largely uncontrolled courses.

Grjasnowa also criticizes these circumstances.

However, such facts are often lost in polemics about “politics” or “the state”.

She adds a no less excited contribution to the already extreme debate on the role of the German language in our society.

Olga Grjasnowa: “The power of multilingualism”.

About origin and diversity.

Dudenverlag, Berlin 2021. 128 pp., Hardcover, € 12.