Anna MammitzschPhD-student

Germans are a significant minority in Sweden, as they are not only one of the biggest skilled immigrant groups in the country, but also because German migration has a centuries-long history and tradition in Sweden. Despite a current high interest in qualitative studies on transnational and multilingual identities, none of them has been applied in a Swedish-German context.

Therefore, the dissertation project focuses on oral narratives of German immigrants about their experiences with migration, language and identity, and also on how public discourses and collectively socialized interpretative patterns affect the stories and multilingual repertoires and, by extension, the immigrants' identity-forming processes and migration experiences. The study is interested in stories by multi-generational members of different German interest groups in Stockholm who actively engage in these groups to keep in touch with other German speakers.

Through participant guided walking tours, interviews, language portraits and focus group discussions, the project aims to uncover discursive identity construction processes of transnational individuals from a linguistic-ethnographic perspective. A further purpose is to investigate the relationship between time and space in a context of migration and multilingualism. The project also has the potential to highlight the current standard of the position, inclusion and integration of German immigrants into the labor market and make potentially suggestions for improvement.