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Ethnic and Racial Studies
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rers20
“Sprich Deutsch”. A race critical reading of
discourses on language and citizenship in twenty-
first century Germany
Paul Mecheril & Radhika Natarajan
To cite this article: Paul Mecheril & Radhika Natarajan (09 Jan 2025): “Sprich Deutsch”. A race
critical reading of discourses on language and citizenship in twenty-first century Germany,
Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2024.2446481
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“Sprich Deutsch”. A race critical reading of discourses on
language and citizenship in twenty-first century Germany
Paul Mecheril
a
and Radhika Natarajan
b
a
Faculty of Education Science, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany;
b
Institute of Education, University
of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany
ABSTRACT
The political and pedagogical discourse about migration in
Germany foregrounds language especially after the turn of the
century. Consequently, the acquisition of and prowess over the
German language have been deemed a necessity for the smooth
functioning of the national society and moralised at times in the
guise of a duty. A race critical reading expounds that the colonial
scheme of distinguishing people was and is not only applied to
physiognomic features but above all to the category of culture.
Hereby, language is primarily deployed as a marker of dierence
and aids in making racist distinctions. Therefore, we can refer to
language as a linguistic hiding place for race. Elucidating the
racial nature of the nation-state against the backdrop of Unified
Germany, we map out the role of the German language in orders
of belonging and examine the interface between language and
citizenship.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 31 January 2024
Accepted 17 December 2024
KEYWORDS
Orders of belonging; neo-
linguicism; linguistic
citizenship; regimes of
language; race critical
reading; re-Unification of
Germany
Introduction
What constitutes the stability and connexion in a nation-state that cannot look back on its
own history nor project the image of a glorified past for its sense of self-worth? What
imagery of German is eectively conjured in a nation-state when it is perceived to be
in a crisis and under re-construction? And consequently, what kind of regulatory practices
come into play and are made plausible? In an otherwise fractured understanding and
memory of the nation-state formed in the last third of the nineteenth century, language
functions as a stabilising and identificatory aspect. One of the answers to the opening
questions is thereby the German language which seemingly ensures continuity (Stuken-
brock 2005) and a collective identification. Central institutions of this identity-work are
educational establishments, and predominantly schools. In fact, the national school was
fostered and supported as public education to teach and cultivate the German language
in accordance with the formula of “one language – one nation” (Wenning 1996). The
national school must be understood as part of the overall context that produces the
qualified dierence between the linguistic practices at the level of the school organisa-
tion, the curricular, and didactic aspects, and finally also at the level of the actions of indi-
vidual teachers. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that the school essentially
© 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Radhika Natarajan radhika.natarajan@uos.de
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2024.2446481
emphasises the training of language skills that are considered legitimate. Pupils are
taught and educated in the ocial language, German, which is regarded as Hochdeutsch
[standard or High German] (Mecheril and Quehl 2006).
The self-evident preference for one language is, historically speaking, closely linked to
the process of inventing the nation. In his Addresses to the German Nation Johann Gottlieb
Fichte ([1824] 2009) evocatively asserts what would later become a generally accepted
fiction through educational institutions: the purity and originality of the German language
as the basic feature of a common culture that indicates the unity of the Germans as a Volk.
The mutually constitutive processes of unifying language, culture, and people work with
imaginative processes based on ideas and myths resulting in the production of an
eective belief in a collective we. In Racism as Universalism Étienne Balibar (1994, 202)
underscores that “dierent and powerful institutions” like the “army” and the “school-
system” help create “national unity”. At the organisational centre lies the national
school. Educational institutions are designed as part of the national normality, and
their structures and practices are constituted in such a way that they function precisely
as apparatuses of the idea of state and modernity as shall be explicated further on
with reference to the German language and the changes brought about in the citizenship
laws in Germany.
At the end of the twentieth century, not only did the Cold War end and the two
German states become – what was and is referred to in an organic metaphor as Wieder-
vereinigung [“reunification”] – one nation, but the post-transition era was also character-
ised by a change in the citizenship law in Unified Germany. The law prevalent all through
the twentieth century changed from the exclusive right of blood and descent, jus sangui-
nis, to also taking the territorial principle and place of birth into account, jus soli. The
societal vicissitudes after the Wiedervereinigung which was followed by a marked increase
in violent racist attacks and the simultaneous de-thematising of this violence as racism, on
the one hand, and the juridical implications after the modification in the citizenship law,
on the other hand, brought about an upheaval and a range of open and subtle violence
on the individual, institutional, and structural fronts. Yet, none of these was viewed as or
deemed racist in nature in the public sphere. Barring the works of committed academi-
cians, albeit few and far-between (Kalpaka and Räthzel 1986; Mecheril and Teo 1997; Ter-
kessidis 1998, 2004), a sustained critique of racism as a societal malady, normality, and a
structuring device of post-war Germany was largely absent from the mainstream public
discourse (Bojadžijev 2022; see also Bojadžijev, Celikates, and Mecheril 2025b, in the intro-
duction to this volume).
After a long period of public ignorance, the murders by the so-called National Socialist
Underground (NSU) in dierent German cities in the first decade of the twenty-first
century have gained public attention, thanks to the initiative of anti-racist actors. Focuss-
ing on the NSU, Juliane Karakayalı and her co-authors (2017) contend that it is not poss-
ible to resolve or fathom the dynamics of these murders without understanding the
structural and institutional racism in Germany. How else, they assert, can one comprehend
the reversal of erroneously blaming and persecuting the victims of the NSU-terror by the
media, the mainstream society, and the criminal prosecution itself (Karakayalı et al. 2017,
9)? The task force assigned to unearth the connections and to find the assailant(s) was
called SoKo Bosporus [“Special Force Bosporus”] and the crimes were informally termed
the Dönermorde [“doener murders”] in the press (Virchow, Thomas, and Grittmann
2 P. MECHERIL AND R. NATARAJAN
2015). This, once again, accentuates the way racist and prejudiced language perpetrates
linguistic discrimination and violence on an everyday basis (see also Thompson 2025, in
this volume).
Read from a raciolinguistic perspective (Alim 2016; Alim, Reyes, and Kroskrity 2020),
one could surmise that these seemingly harmless neologisms like Dönermorde subvert
the victim-perpetrator relationship, while stigmatising and creating new orders of exclu-
sion and discrimination as seen, for instance, in the neologisms Migrationshintergrund
[“background of migration”] (Natarajan 2022; Scarvaglieri and Zech 2013) and Seitenein-
steiger [“lateral entrant”] (Mecheril and Shure 2015). The relationship between language
and racism is multifaceted and multi-layered, yet often rendered invisible or camouaged
in myriad ways as these afore-mentioned linguistic expressions demonstrate whereby the
phrases invoke racist schemata. In our text we take a “rassismuskritische” [race critical] per-
spective (Mecheril 2004, 180) and focus on the interconnectedness, co-constitution and
co-construction of language, citizenship, and the nation-state in Germany, as well as on
the chains of equivalence of race and language. We proceed by examining the racial
nature of the nation-state especially against the backdrop of unified Germany, delineating
the role of the German language in orders of belonging, and illustrating the interface
between language and citizenship in a perceived national crisis. Finally, we advance
the theoretical insights on “neo-linguicism” (Dirim 2010, 96) and “racecraft” (Fields and
Fields 2012, 18) in the arena of linguistic citizenship in re-unified Germany.
Race-constructions and the nation-state
The category of nation and the recourse to an imagined national we as a unit worthy of
protection have experienced a boom worldwide, as also in Germany, in recent years.
According to David Theo Goldberg (2002) the idea of this national we, which constitu-
tively underlies the conception of the modern nation-state, cannot be considered inde-
pendent of race-constructions. Instead, the relationship between race and modern
statehood is to be understood as a relationship of co-articulation (see also Bojadžijev
2025, in this volume). In The Racial State Goldberg (2002, 4) argues that “race is integral
to the emergence, development and transformations (conceptually, philosophically,
materially) of the modern nation-state”. In an interview conducted by Lawrence Gross-
berg (1986, 53, emphasis in original) Stuart Hall explains: “An articulation is […] the
form of the connection that can make a unity of two dierent elements, under certain
conditions”, and qualifies that “[i]t is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absol-
ute and essential for all time”. In line with this understanding of articulation, race and state
are linked as forms of identity or belonging to form a unity. They intertwine to form a
mutually determining context. The construction and imagination of the nation-state gen-
erate space as territory as well as the idea of people in a referential context as a natio-
racial-culturally coded we.
1
The development of modern nation-statehood as a primarily
European or Western concept is interwoven with European expansion and violence, that
is, colonial constellations, and this statehood is formed, among other things, through the
constant reference to and the production of meaning of race (Goldberg 2002).
With Stuart Hall (2017, 32), we can say that “race is a cultural and historical, not biologi-
cal, fact – that race is a discursive construct, a sliding signifier” and to be understood as a
product of racism. Such an understanding of race makes it possible to visibilise and
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3
thematise “normal” and everyday distinctions and symbolic dividing lines that appear as
“ordinary distinctions” (Mecheril and Melter 2010, 150) in the context of social structures
of power and domination.
A race critical lens represents a tool and oers a vision that makes it possible to analyse
structures of domination that would otherwise remain invisible.
2
A race critical perspec-
tive as an analytical tool (see also Celikates 2025, in this volume) allows to focus attention
on the implementation of the European state system following the “Peace of Westphalia”
(1648) and on the power structures still currently eective, despite their concealment in
the self-evident nature of things (Kooroshy and Mecheril 2019). The European we also
established itself decisively from the fantasised and fabricated notion of a non-European
Other in the context of European expansion, colonialism, and imperialism (Mbembe 2017).
Edward Said with his explication in Orientalism (1978) and Stuart Hall with his analysis of
the constitutive interrelation in The West and the Rest (1992) have shown how European
identity has been established and reproduced since the beginning of modernity with the
help of discursive techniques of representation that produce the Other(s) of Europe.
Nations enable relationships and the feeling of connection to people whom we would
not know if we met them face-to-face. The national can therefore be understood as an
imagined concept tied to spatial aspects with a territorial reference (Anderson [1983]
1991). Historically, we find ourselves in a situation in which the nation-state, and in
general, natio-racial-culturally coded collectives with a claim to territory are in multiple
– both functional as well normative – crises
3
Subsequently and as a reaction to this
multi-pronged crisis, apparent and subtle violent forms of strengthening the national
order can be noted worldwide, as also in Europe and Germany (Mecheril 2021a).
In Aliens and Citizens Joseph Carens (1987, 252) proposes that “[c]itizenship in Western
liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege – an inherited status that
greatly enhances one’s life chances”, and Carens (1987, 270) concludes, “[l]ike feudal bar-
riers to mobility, they [restrictions on immigration] protect unjust privileges.” The more
intense the primacy of the nationally coded we becomes, for example, through the phys-
ical presence of people from other parts of the world, who not only embody hardship, but
also the reality of global feudality, and given that there is no willingness to question the
legitimacy and appropriateness of the privileged access of the natio-racial-culturally fan-
tasised we to material and immaterial resources, the more likely it is that the safeguarding
of the primacy of we will fall back on racist categories and thus on discursively mediated
media, political, every day, or scientific practices of demonising the Other (Castro, do Mar,
and Mecheril 2016). In The Spoils of Freedom Renata Salecl (1994, 15) summarises this suc-
cinctly: “The nation is an element in us that is ‘more than ourselves’, something that
defines us but is at the same time undefinable; we cannot specify what it means, nor
can we erase it”. We are dealing here with a symbolic gap that can become a problem
under certain conditions. Subsequently, concepts of race represent tried and tested
means of closing the symbolic gap.
The more significant the diculty of defining the border becomes, the more attractive
the phantasmatic safeguarding and iteration of the we becomes. This insistence on the
legitimacy of the far-reaching impermeability of the natio-racial-culturally coded
borders for Others, fantasised as the radically Other, mobilises racism. The contemporary
border practices of the natio-racial-cultural supra-contexts such as Europe, formally and
programmatically coded as anti-racist nation-states from around the middle of the
4 P. MECHERIL AND R. NATARAJAN
twentieth century, result in a modification as well as strengthening and expansion of
racist practices. “The discourse and practice of western states are both racist and anti-
racist” (Lentin and Lentin 2006, 7).
In the development of modern nation-statehood seamlessly overlapping with and suc-
ceeding Europe’s colonial project of violence, whiteness as white normality is produced. In
this sense, “racial states” represent a meaning-giving unit for the subjects, in and with
which a specific idea of social normality is designed: “They are states […] where whiteness
increasingly becomes the norm. Racial states, in short, are states ultimately where white-
ness rules. They are states where the assumptions, norms, and orders for which it stands
reign supreme” (Goldberg 2002, 195). Illustrating how racial states govern and manage
otherness functionally whilst simultaneously maintaining the racist mode of distinction
Goldberg (2002, 24, emphasis in original) observes: “The racial conception of the state
becomes the racial definition of the apparatus, the projects, the institutions for managing
this threat, for keeping it out or ultimately containing it – but also (and again paradoxi-
cally) for keeping it going”. Whiteness and its pendant otherness are constantly produced,
reproduced, and contested in order to create, manage, and govern a stable order. This is
seen especially in the multiple “becomings” which then stabilise into “being” and the new
normality, as in case of the Irish (Ignatiev 1995), Jews (Brodkin 1998), and the Germans
(Hund 2017) becoming white.
Goldberg’s approach makes it possible to see the connection between race and state
not exclusively as a connection that can be related to totalitarian regimes of violence such
as the National Socialist state in Germany from 1933 to 1945 or the programmatically
racist state in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, but rather as one that is fundamental to
an examination of modern statehood.
Racial states […] are states that historically become engaged in the constitution, mainten-
ance, and management of whiteness, whether in the form of European domination, coloni-
alism, segregation, white supremacy, herrenvolk democracy, Aryanism, or ultimately
colourblind or racelessness. (Goldberg 2002, 195)
The staging of the modern nation-state as supposedly raceless, which has become
increasingly relevant, especially in the twentieth century, and in which the idea of over-
coming racism has been quasi-institutionalised, can be understood as a kind of ideologi-
cal concealment. The concept of the racial state can be used to show how, for example,
the concealment of the meaning of race, the ignorance regarding “the racial dimension of
the modern state” (Goldberg 2002, 2), is maintained in and through the engineering and
performing of raceless states. Goldberg’s analysis breaks with the dominant narrative of
modern nation-statehood and points to the extent to which the meaning of race –
especially in the form of white normality – is de-thematised and thus rendered unmen-
tionable or unmarkable. The modern nation-state can thus be engineered and spun as
a normality whose connection to race is obscured.
The interface of language and citizenship: “a regime of Shibboleth
consciousness”
In the German nation-state, which the philosopher Helmuth Plessner has called “a late
nation” as it came into being much after the English, American, and French nation-
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 5
states, belonging was traditionally linked to Volksdeutschtum [ethnic Germanness]. This
belief manifested itself in myths of language and (superior) identity. During the entire
course of the twentieth century, it was possible to become a French, British or American
citizen, whereas this was not the case in the nation-state of Germany. It is only with the
introduction and inclusion of jus soli, the principle of birthplace, in the year 2000, in
addition to the exclusive and long prevailing jus sanguinis, the principle of descent,
that the law of naturalisation in Germany has undergone – what is critically viewed as
– a long overdue landmark reform.
An axis of dierentiation and classification of an unmatched relevance in the “Migra-
tionsgesellschaft” [“migration society”] (Mecheril 2004, 8), especially in the post-transition
era, i.e. after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Re-Unification of both the German states
into one nation, is language. The strengthening of the “Sprich-Deutsch”, i.e. “Speak-
German”-discourse is also directly related to Reunification as this helps to believe in
the logic of “We the People” and a “Re-Unification”, an identity construct of togetherness
based on a common language. The naturalised yet contradictory aliation between a
language and its speakers can be demonstrated in the case of German and its so-called
legitimate users at several intersections: in the manufactured conation of language
and nation (Bonfiglio 2010), in the significant role of compulsory schooling and primary
schools in their respective development in the nineteenth century and their joint contri-
bution to German-language schooling (Krüger-Potratz 2019), and in the imagined discon-
tinuities in German history in which language is seen as a significant and consequential
continuum. Tracing the beginnings and the development of the century-long history of
primary schooling in the nation-state, Marianne Krüger-Potratz (2019, 383) asserts that
although “[t]he ‘primary school common for all’ was supposed to be a German, nationally,
linguistically and socially inclusive school”, in reality, it “resulted in the exclusion of chil-
dren of foreign national origin and in the marginalization of children with non-German
ethnic and linguistic aliation”.
In the historical constellation of post-war Germany, otherwise marked by breaks,
fissures, and volitional historical erasure, the German language functions as an identifica-
tory constant (Stukenbrock 2005) in the migration society. Migration society is character-
ised in the main by debates about migration wherein it is proposed that everyone in the
society is touched by migration and that political and pedagogical discourse about
migration aects everyone, not merely those identified as or misidentified and imputed
to be migrants. Migration society as a category of analysis does not (only) focus on the
regulation of migrants (Karakayali and Tsianos 2007), but also on the question of how dis-
courses and practices create images and positions of migrants and non-migrants, natives
and foreigners, and so on. The reformist legislation on citizenship at the cusp of the new
millennium heralded a tectonic shift in the gamut of languages and migration. Two laws
in the Federal Republic of Germany – the Nationality Act of 2000 and the Immigration Act
of 2005 – which were either renewed or newly passed within a five-year window, aect
children and adults living in Germany without a German passport on their way to
German citizenship. Both laws represent milestones because residents can become citizens
(Natarajan 2023a, 47).
The amendment to the citizenship laws is an expression of a new political narrative
that no longer ties belonging to the national-racial-cultural we nor binds it as strongly
to physiognomy. Nevertheless, it is imperative in terms of dominance culture, to
6 P. MECHERIL AND R. NATARAJAN
dierentiate between unquestionably belonging and precariously belonging in the
internal space of national society.
4
The inherent logic, thereby, is that the line of demar-
cation is not drawn only between those perceived as external or internal to the nation-
state, but also that the nation-state constantly produces internal natio-racial-culturally
coded Others. And at this juncture, language, and specifically the German language,
takes on the task of marking this distinction. Language plays a distinctive role in the
work of belonging that is demanded of these Others. The aforementioned natio-racial-cul-
turally coded social dierentiation can be extended to include language as “natio-racial-
lingual” orders of belonging (Thoma 2018, 14). Thus, the national language in natio-racial-
cultural orders of belonging can be applied to the entire nation-state to comprise not only
children but adults too, especially in the context of citizenship (Natarajan 2022).
5
According to Inci Dirim (2010), linguistics as a discipline has its moorings in colonial
times. This was also the time when philological work was undertaken to systematise
and categorise languages in colonised territories, albeit with the vocabulary and imagin-
ation of prevalent European languages and their taxonomical categorisation. Typologies
classified languages in a value-added and hierarchical fashion as isolating, agglutinating,
and inecting languages, so that “master languages” emerged just like the “master race”
(Dirim 2016, 203). German had to, she adds, of course, belong to the highest and most
developed language type, although it exhibits characteristics of all three types. Christoph
Stroud (2015, 21) notes that
[c]olonial linguistics crafted language as a technology for constraining and containing the
diversity of others. Languages were described in speech forms indexically linked to identity
and place in ways that sorted speakers hierarchically into categories of social class, ethnicity,
and race.
Distinguishing between older and newer forms of racialising and creating new orders
through language, Dirim concludes that the colonial continuity in the German migration
society is not merely linguicism which is a state sanctioned policy and openly aggressive in
its language politics, but “neo-linguicism”. “Neo-linguicism is subtle, it feigns facts, it oper-
ates behind the guise of innocuous-sounding labels, it belies exclusion and oppression,
and thus, in comparison to linguicism, it is in a sense ‘sneaky’ and dicult to detect”
(Dirim 2010, 96; our translation).
In light of the passing of the naturalisation laws in Germany at the turn of the century
that transformed the erstwhile jus sanguinis into a more inclusive jus soli, the immediate
and long-lasting consequence was language testing. In a discursive subversion, the long-
standing demand of migrant communities and social workers for more access and more
resource allotment (Hentges, Hinnenkamp, and Zwengel 2010; see Salgado 2021 for
Austria) towards the teaching of the German language to enable participation was
turned into a prerequisite for attaining German citizenship. This was immediately fol-
lowed by the creation of neologisms conveying disciplinary measures like integrationswil-
lig [“willing to integrate”] and integrationsbedürftig [“in special need of integration”].
Citing a number of examples of historical as well as contemporary purport and span-
ning many a continent and region, Tim McNamara and Carsten Roever (2006) demon-
strate how language testing at the level of the phoneme, lexeme and on the sentential
level has served as a passage (to safety) or resulted at times in the death for those who
could not pronounce words or produce sentences according to the political need of
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 7
the hour or the warring powers that clash. The linguists summarise myriad experiences
from the medieval ages in Britain, Yemen, Sicily, pre- and post-colonial times in Haiti,
Japan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, times of war as well as of peace, from the experiences of
the Jewish multidialectal and multilingual survivor of Holocaust, passing as a non-
Jewish Pole, to the Late Repatriate in post-reunification-Germany and call this a
“regime of shibboleth consciousness”. They explain what they mean as follows:
We might speak then of a regime of shibboleth consciousness: First, no single word or pro-
nunciation is involved, but speech in general; Second, the relevance of the shibboleth is not
limited to a particular moment, but is a sustained feature of social relations; Third, the threat
of violence is pervasive, so that conformity with the regime must be sustained at all times, or
the social and political consequences felt. (McNamara and Roever 2006, 158)
Although the myriad historical examples cited foreground the importance accorded to
language in general, towards the formation of we-groups and ascertaining alleged
belonging, and the Fichtean interpretation postulates a naturalised bonding of the
German language and the German nation-state, German language skills were neither
expected from adults nor cultivated systematically in post-war Germany. The language
testing machinery in Germany sprang into action after the passing of the Immigration
Law in 2005 and the systematic inclusion of language testing from 2008 onwards.
Patrick Stevenson and Livia Schanze (2009) take stock of the law, the underlying principle
of so-called integration in Germany, the connections made to criminality, lawlessness, and
the ideologically loaded discourses which find cross-national echoes in the writings of
Adrian Blackledge (2004) in his take on Britain. Telling is their inclusion of the concluding
remarks of two politicians from diametrically opposite political parties with their particular
and wishful reading of the law, where one member from the Green party claims that
“Germany is a country of immigration. With the passage of this Immigration Act this
fact is now recognized”, whereas the other member from the Christian Democratic
Party opines that “This act is an act for restricting immigration. It puts an end to the
idea that Germany can be transformed into a multicultural immigration society” (Steven-
son and Schanze 2009, 93). They draw the following conclusion: For all its positive and
optimistic tone, it [the Immigration Act] still implicitly focuses more on what migrants pur-
portedly lack as potential citizens than on what they might be able to contribute to a gen-
uinely more diverse and ‘modern’ conception of citizenship. (Stevenson and Schanze
2009, 103).
A decade and a half later we could surmise that the new laws of citizenship aided in
creating and hierarchising “migrantised citizens and citizenised migrants” (Dahinden
and Anderson 2021, 34) through “language as both a yardstick and a bludgeon” (Natar-
ajan 2023b, 495). Responding to the perceived crisis of the we in the post-unification
period, the German language undergoes a mythologisation, and through language
testing a re-sacralisation is brought about and disciplining enforced. Reunification
makes it impossible for the imagination of the we to be energised by cultural matters
such as shared culinary and sartorial practices, shared sporting experiences or shared pol-
itical history. Therefore, the animation must be achieved dierently, somehow stripped of
content and focussed on form. The reunified imagination shifts and glides to the
language that we not only share, but that enables the bond between us (Wir als Volk
[“We as a people”]). After re-unification and the amendments to citizenship laws, a shift
8 P. MECHERIL AND R. NATARAJAN
in the form of state and social dierentiation occurs, and in the logic of pivotal insti-
tutions, the focus shifts from what can be described as physiognomic racism to linguistic
racism. By recognising the reality of migration society, racism does not disappear from the
centre of society; it changes (Pieper, Panagiotidis, and Tsianos 2011; Tsianos and Kara-
kayalı 2014), gets transformed, and the emphasis on language plays an unprecedented
role.
Linguistic racism is a variety of cultural racism that combines older forms of racism and
structures newer orders of belonging. While it tends to transcend the racial-physiognomic
logic, it is not, so to speak, disembodied, since dominance culture continues to attribute
certain linguistic abilities to the appearance of a speaker in the sense of whiteness. With
reference to the reections of Goldberg (2002) cited above, regarding whiteness as con-
stitutive of racial states, what he calls whiteness points to three possible analytical options
in the discourse on the necessity of speaking German: (a) linguistic racism transcends
whiteness, (b) speaking German is a new form in which whiteness manifests itself (I
speak German, therefore I am white), (c) linguistic racism and racial-physiognomic
racism (whiteness) coexist and enter into complex connections. We surmise that it is
tenable not to decide in favour of the uniqueness of one of the options, since all three
options can be empirically valid and thus the investigation of social reality under the
three possibilities is significant in the future, in terms of Rassismuskritik (Mecheril 2021b).
Racecraft and neo-linguicism: two sides of a coin
The nexus between race and language in the German migration society predates the for-
mation of the nation-state. Whereas the formation of the nation-state in 1871 foresaw the
right and duty of most residents to attend primary school followed by the comprehensive
and widespread instruction of the German language as the standardised national
language, the equally widespread racialised structuring of the geographical area called
Germany could not continue after the Second World War. The term race was consigned
to the scrapheap in the immediate aftermath of the War and for decades to come. None-
theless racism and the racial structuring of a now vibrant and thriving migration society
did not disappear from the German society (see Bojadžijev et al. 2025a in the panel dis-
cussion, in this volume). First, it resurfaced as violent racism in the wake of the German re-
unification with attacks on asylum seekers and labour populaces in West and East
Germany (Poutrus 2020; Warda and Poutrus 2023). Nonetheless, the term used for
these attacks and killings was “xenophobia” or Gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit
[“group-based enmity”] (Heitmeyer [2002] 2012) and not “racism” (see also Kara-
kayali 2025, in this volume). Second, racism as “racecraft” (Fields and Fields 2012, 18)
found an alibi and a “hiding place in language” (Dirim 2016, 202), conjuring linguistic
dierentiation as the new structuring of racialised bodies and migrantised voices.
Analysing the functioning of racism in the United States Karen Fields and Barbara Fields
(2012, 18) introduce the term “racecraft” and explain how racecraft is akin to witchcraft.
Numerous theologians and law makers across various empires in Europe invested a
great deal of time, energy, and their so-called intellectual prowess in establishing how
and why witchcraft was real, self-evident, and in accordance with the readings of the
scriptures. Similarly, the putatively self-evident nature of race, racial superiority, and con-
sequently inferiority was the rationale of colonial and slave trade as well as the subject of
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 9
various academic and scientific disciplines ranging from biology to philosophy. Belying
anything natural about racism and that “racecraft” neither refers “to groups’ nor ‘to
ideas about groups’ traits, […] and instead to mental terrain and to pervasive belief”,
the authors underscore that “racecraft originates not in nature but in human action
and imagination; it can exist in no other way. The action and imagining are collective
yet individual, day-to-day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in
mundane routine” (Fields and Fields 2012, 18f.). Racecraft, thereby, makes the implausible
seem plausible.
Akin to racecraft, the camouaging and obfuscation through language operates in a
two-pronged fashion in the German migration society, inventing the monolingual citize-
nised insider and simultaneously bringing forth the multilingual migrantised internal
Other (Natarajan 2016). The concealment is achieved through mechanisms of rendering
invisible or inaudible and manoeuvres a perfectly innocent and naturalised diversion –
language – for the continuance of racialised societal structuring.
Familiar, and more importantly familial, languages are pushed away, externalised,
made alien, rendered incomprehensible, deemed foreign to one’s being. This can be
observed both regarding German dialects which were once widely spoken and under-
stood in North Germany (Bonfiglio 2010) as well as immigrant familial languages (Dirim
2010, 2016). This externalisation and bodily distancing can be theorised as involuntary
embarrassment, public muting, and rejection of familial tongues in their estrangement
as “Fremdsprachisierung” [“foreign languagisation”] (Natarajan 2023b, 501). Children
who have grown up hearing these familial languages express an auditory incomprehen-
sion once they step into the German migration society, internalise the inferiority of the
otherised language and take on the onus of the “monolingual habitus” (Gogolin 1994),
even without any explicit instruction to this eect. The life-world examples of this linguis-
tic estrangement which bears a generational stigma as the speech of grandparents and,
conceptually, of older, more traditional or old-fashioned persons, are of dialects like Low
German or Sorbic as well as immigrant languages which seem inaccessible or incompre-
hensible to younger migrantised persons.
In Mother Tongues and Nations Thomas Paul Bonfiglio (2010, 4) paints the linguistic
landscape of North Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War where active
usage of dialects was prevalent as a time “when the Low German dialects of the north,
which are currently highly marginalised, were still actively spoken. At that time, the lin-
guistic insecurity of code switching from dialect into standard occurred in all regions.”
Locating this decline and pushback in the logic and uncertainty of the post-war period,
Bonfiglio observes, “[i]t seems that one is confronted here with a postwar problematic
matrix of national, linguistic, and cultural identity.” His explanation on the level of the poli-
tics of language reads:
After WWII, Germany could not look backward to tradition and had to reinvent itself within
the international political economy of the Anglophone pax americana. Language then
became a surrogate theater for the struggle to establish ownership of the German identity.
(Bonfiglio 2010, 4)
A similar social control and penalising of multilingualism especially when associated with
immigrant languages has been the object of many a study (Dlugaj and Furstenau 2019).
What unites both these experiences – that of the supposed Established and alleged
10 P. MECHERIL AND R. NATARAJAN
Outsiders, to borrow from the insights of Elias and Scotson – is the axis of social class
whereby access to multidialectal and multilingual landscapes is sanctioned in the name
of a nation-state that imagines itself to be monoglossic.
Today’s postcolonial neo-linguicism is often not accompanied by direct language bans
or open rejections of languages and their speakers but operates more subtly. For example,
in many schools, the speaking of languages in schoolyards is not forbidden with reference
to their inferior grammar and syntax, as was common in colonial times, but with other
arguments such as the requirement of polite behaviour not to linguistically exclude
others, for instance by using the Turkish language in the schoolyard (Dirim and Mecheril
2016, 452f.). Brigitta Busch (2021, 118f.) employs a job advertisement from South Africa to
illustrate that they are looking for someone who uses English with a “neutral” accent and
explains that this description hides the English pronunciation of the white middle class
which is considered “neutral”. Likewise, Bonfiglio (2010, 1f.) begins his monograph with
a similar job advertisement in Singapore that adds “Caucasian” to the original description
of “native speaking English teachers” to qualify who need not apply for the post. What
Jonathan Rosa (2019) concludes in the context of Hispanics growing up in California, is
equally true of racialised bodies as well migrantised voices heard or otherwise in the nar-
rative inequality that prevails growing up in Germany. Rosa (2019, 2) argues
that the co-naturalization of language and race is a key feature of modern governance, such
that languages are perceived as racially embodied and race is perceived as linguistically intel-
ligible, which results in the overdetermination of racial embodiment and communicative
practice – hence the notion of looking like a language and sounding like a race. Thus, race,
language, and governance must be analyzed collectively.
It is indeed the need for this “governance” that brings together the conuence of citizen-
ship and language in Germany (Natarajan 2023a).
Conclusion
The mutually constitutive processes of unifying language, culture, and people work with
imaginative processes based on ideas and myths and produce an eective belief in the
we. The extent to which this idea of the intertwinement between language, nation and
culture – which has no historical origins – as mutually generative entities still forms the
basis of many aects and arguments today can be seen in the fears that are communi-
cated at the idea that the German language could lose its pre-eminence in Germany. It
is important to realise that these fears ultimately indicate a relatively recent and anything
but a natural phenomenon in historical terms: the correspondence of linguistic, national,
and state unity, in which language, nation and state are constituted in the first place.
It is, thereby, no coincidence that in the twenty-first century, not only are children and
the purported lacunae in their knowledge of German constantly being discussed discur-
sively and lamented in the media, but that adults and their knowledge of German too fall
within the state’s mandated purview, area of responsibility, and gamut of disciplining.
Apart from a linguistic Othering and inferiorisation, we can conclude that a particular
kind of infantilisation is at play with racialised adults. The exclusion occurs within
society, i.e. creating the internal Others imagined as the linguistically Other, who are per-
petually relegated to remaining the Outsider as opposed to the continual and naturalised
becoming of the Established in their re-unified togetherness.
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 11
The more the imaginary of German, which is constitutive for the nation-state Germany,
is called into question, the more intensively this crisis of the we must be countered with
regulatory practices (Mecheril 2018b). In the wake of the reunification of the two German
states, the disciplining and simultaneously infantilising demand for language competence
can be read as an attempt to restore the imaginary, which is conjured and called into
question in the multilingual migration society. Language, in this case, we can surmise,
is an unnamed equivalent of race. As neo-linguicism, the reference to language enables
the racist division of society, whereby the “co-naturalization” (Rosa and Flores 2020,
102) of race and language promotes the disadvantage of people coded natio-racial-cultu-
rally as the Other. Racism has not disappeared after the recognition of the fact of
migration in Germany at the turn of the millennium but has changed and been trans-
formed. In fact, a ceremonial-administrative integration brought about by access to citi-
zenship is accompanied by a patriotic-ethnic sacralisation of the German language,
which is reected, for example, in the regime of language examinations. This can be
read as an attempt to re-sacralise the crisis-ridden sacral we in the migration society
through the sacralisation of the German language.
Apart from the general moments of crisis, such as significant political, cultural, virolo-
gical or ecological loss of autonomy of the nation-state, we identify two aspects as rel-
evant after reunification and the change in the citizenship regulation: Firstly, cultural
strangers – West Germans for East Germans and vice versa – must see themselves as con-
nected by a shared identity after reunification. Language comes to the rescue to solve the
crisis: the fiction of the common national language makes this possible despite and
because of cultural dierences. We are, indeed, dealing with cultural racism after reunifi-
cation, but it is a specific cultural racism with which it is possible to transcend and ignore
cultural dierences within the phantasmatic we-group and to declare them not quite so
significant. Secondly, with the recognition of the societal reality of migration and the pro-
grammatic distancing from ethnic aliation, the natio-racial-cultural Others must be
recognised other than through their physiognomy: Language once again comes to the
rescue in an attempt to solve the crisis: the attribution of non-belonging on the basis
of language is enabled by testing (for example, so-called language proficiency tests)
and by insinuations and fantasies (for example, you speak German so well!). In the
context of the revision of the citizenship laws, which is at least symbolically significant
in terms of belonging, the pattern continues whereby status, and symbolic positions
arise that are assigned to those considered to be natio-racial-culturally dierent in the
German migration society. Modes and valences of social distinctions do not simply
break o, but “slide” (Hall 2017, 32) into the new concepts that further former structures
and schemata.
Finally, the commonality between “witchcraft and racecraft” (Fields and Fields 2012,
19) and neo-linguicism in Germany is that they “are imagined, acted upon, and re-ima-
gined, the action and imagining inextricably intertwined”, and the authors conclude
that “racecraft is not a euphemistic substitute for racism. It is a kind of fingerprint evidence
that racism has been on the scene”. The German language can be understood as the
national language which was indirectly connected with being German in the twentieth
century and has become a prerequisite in matters of citizenship in the twenty-first
century. This connection between the German language and German citizenship serves
as a terrain with continual skirmishes, where battles are fought, orders of belonging are
12 P. MECHERIL AND R. NATARAJAN
established and demolished, a permanent dierentiation of the polity is worked out to
create those who constantly need to prove their loyalty through the use of the German
language, yet fail, and those who – in the imagination resulting from political speeches,
discourses, and practices of social distinctions – unquestionably belong.
Notes
1. “The expression ‘natio-racial-cultural’ (natio-ethno-kulturell, see Mecheril 2003, 118–251)
refers on the one hand to the fact that the concepts of nation, ethnicity, race, and
culture are often used in a diuse and undierentiated way, both in research and everyday
communication. On the other hand, this term indicates the fact that concepts of nation,
ethnicity, race, and culture are manifested formally in laws and regulations, materially
through border controls and identity documents, and also socially through symbolic prac-
tices that generate rather blurred meanings and outcomes that are subsequently used pol-
itically. […] The orders of belonging are historically developed structures that create
subjective experiences of symbolic distinction and classification, experiences of empower-
ment and ecacy, and biographical experiences of contextual location. Membership,
ecacy, and connectedness are the constitutional analytic elements of belonging”
(Mecheril 2018a, 129–130).
2. The argumentation in the following three paragraphs is explained at length in Geier and
Mecheril (2021), Kooroshy and Mecheril (2019), and Mecheril (2021a). We present a con-
densed version here.
3. According to Reinhart Koselleck (1959), the term crisis was one of the central concepts of poli-
tics in Greek. In modern times, the medical meaning of crisis has been applied to social issues,
with social and political conditions sometimes being compared to a feverish state, i.e. a criti-
cal condition that indicates a decisive change for the future. Those who diagnose a crisis
usually proclaim an emergency and demand preventive, therapeutic or immediate action.
Koselleck (1959) points out that crises are cultural constructs, i.e. relative to perception,
location and interests, and call for quick decisions. Crisis diagnoses, especially when they
concern our immediate present, therefore quickly take on an alarmist element (Schulze
2011). According to Jan Marco Sawilla (2016), successful crisis stagings already made it poss-
ible in the early modern period to view the state as an organism and legitimised actions
against the crisis; they also made it possible, in the face of the (supposed) pressure to act,
to maintain a certain tolerance towards the state.
4. In the crisis of the current natio-racial-cultural order, a central figure of strengthening consists
of relegating the Others to what is considered their ancestral place, not only in the sense of
ethno-pluralism (Balibar 1994), but also in the sense of a thinking that follows the primacy of a
natio-racial-cultural we, whether in violent language and action (the right-wing extremists), or
civil and democratic action (deportations, also of children and young people). If no claims to
belonging are made, cosmopolitanism and humanity can be shown to the outside world, and
to the Others. However, as soon as the otherwise unquestionable and sacrosanct principle of
being privileged in this territorial space is called into question, the countenance that was pre-
viously shown to the outside world turns out to be a mask and the “dagger of racism is ung
from beneath the liberal cloak” (Bauman 1991, 71). The praxis of dierentiation takes place
both within the natio-racial-culturally coded we and in demarcation from it. In the second
case, this practice of dierentiation is more brutal. In the biopolitical discourse, not least in
the political regulation of migration, a distinction is made between good and bad, useful
and useless subjects (e.g. Bauman 2004).
5. Religion or religious ascription as another axis of dierentiation also functions as an impor-
tant marker of dierence, which is however not the focus of this article. It can be stated
that erstwhile “guest workers” and refugees are no longer viewed as labour migrants from
Turkey or asylum seekers from Lebanon, but instead as “Muslims” (Dirim et al. 2015; Konz
and Schröter 2022; Mecheril and Thomas-Olalde 2011). The creation of groups and supposed
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 13
communities erases the dierence between practising and non-practising members of a reli-
gion. It clubs together people from myriad regions like Turkey, West Asian, North African, and
Arab countries with diering notions and varied versions of the named religion Islam, imagi-
nes them to be one group, imposes an artificial homogeneity, and thus creates the internal
Other. Moreover, this feeds into the logic of the alleged cultural backwardness of the Other. In
the wake of the securitisation debates that have gained the upper hand in the political dis-
courses, world over as also in Germany (Attia, Zakariya Keskinkılıç, and Okcu 2021), the emer-
gence of the internal Other is very closely associated with the probability of violence,
radicalisation, the threat of terror, and the discursively construed “enemy within” (Khan
2020, 399).
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Paul Mecheril http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7467-7805
Radhika Natarajan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8731-5165
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