Project proposal

Attitudes of the Serbian community in Vienna towards the Serbian and German language and culture

Sanja Miketić Subotić

The Serbian community is the second largest immigrant group in Austria, with approximately 207 000 Serbs living there, and more than a half living in Vienna (Stanković et al. 2010). The previous scientific scope of interest was mainly focused on their historical, anthropological, ethnological and sociological framing (ex. Medaković 1998; Davidović 1999; Marković 2005; Haider-Labudović 2007; Dobrivojević 2007; Dragišić 2009, 2010, 2013; Antonijević 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2013; Antonijević et al. 2011; Krstić 2011; Kovačević and Krstić 2011; Ivanović 2012; Antonijević and Milosavljević 2016a, 2016b; Rašić 2020). In the 18th and 19th centuries, Serbs were largely oriented towards Austria, as a geographically close Central European country, therefore a large number of notable Serbian figures in the fields of culture and science were educated in Austria (see Matić, Lopušina 2019; Geoportal). Although in the 20th century Paris assumed Vienna’s function when it comes to professional development and schooling, cultural connections between Serbs and Austria were reduced but didn’t vanish, making migrations to Austria mainly of an economic nature, especially from the 1950s onwards. Most immigrants at that time were workers, while nowadays Serbian diaspora in Vienna mostly consists of workers, intellectuals, artists, athletes and students (Matić, Lopušina 2019). In 1966, when the Agreement on the Regulation of the Employment of Yugoslav Workers in Austria was signed between Yugoslavia and Austria, year after year, the number of Serbs migrating towards Austria to find a supposedly temporary job and come back to their homeland was rising and gave us “gastarbaiters”. After that, different crisis in socialist Yugoslavia, later Serbia and Montenegro and the Republic of Serbia, influenced waves of further migrations, so nowadays there are three or four migrant generations of Serbs living in Austria and their level of integration in the Austrian society, as well as their language competences, may differ. Higher standard, job opportunities, geographical nearness, strong cultural and economic connections in the past as well as the numerous Serbian community in Austria at the moment, Austrian organized democratic society, various interstate agreements that facilitate the migration of workers, poor socio-political situation in the socialist Yugoslavia followed by the wars in the Balkans in the 20th century, and according to Dinić (2017: 14), Austrian liberal policy towards asylum seekers – all of that resulted in a great number of Serbs migrating to Austria. Despite the long tradition of Serbs migrating to Austria and the fact that the Serbian community in Austria was a focus of different social sciences, its native language, as well as linguistic behavior of its speakers in Austria, are poorly explored in linguistic, especially in the sociolinguistic context (the only sociolinguistics studies this author found that provide information on the Serbian community in Austria are: Vegar 1986, 1987; Ilić-Marković 2010; Rašić 2020: 182-189). Even though some (socio)linguistic studies focused on the German language were conducted among the Serbian community in Germany (see Vuletić 2016; Vuletić Đurić 2016), and Austria is seen as “an ideal sociolinguistic research laboratory” (Lenz 2018), such studies in Austria are completely underexplored. In order to fill that gap, this research aims towards answering the following research question: What attitudes do members of Serbian community in Vienna have towards their native language in general, degree of its use, perceived mechanisms of its preservation, different dialects and the importance of learning Serbian the German language in general, attitudes towards bilingualism and towards the importance of learning German, and the Serbian community in Austria and perceived Serbian and Austrian culture, and do the attitudes differ due to a different socio-demographic background of the community member (eg. age, gender, level of education, migrant generation)? Language attitudes examine an implicitly or explicitly expressed integral segment of an individual’s linguistic identity that depends on the social context, investigated primarily by the theoretical and methodological framework of sociology or social psychology (Vlahović 1989, 1997; Baker 1992; Bohner, Wanke 2002; Banaji and Heiphetz 2010; Garrett 2010; Dragojević, Giles, Watson 2013). They are “linguistic reflexes of deep-rooted and often only half-conscious socio-psychological perceptions of a territorial, ethnic or social group by the speaking representatives of other groups” (Bugarski 1997: 81-82), which would be only one definition, given that they can be observed at different levels. Colin Baker (1992: 10–11) regards attitude as a hypothetical construct used to explain direction and consistency in human behavior and believes that the status, value and importance of language is most often and most easily, albeit incompletely, measured by attitudes towards language in individuals or in the community. “The role, functions and valuation of a certain language depend on a series of social, political, economic, cultural and other extralinguistic factors that determine its status, importance and power within a certain community (linguistic, cultural, ethnic, political, etc.)” (Filipović 2009: 18). Ranko Bugarski is of the opinion that some language features or some types of speech are liked or disliked, appreciated or not appreciated, not because of what they are in themselves but because of what they represent – therefore, not for linguistic but for social reasons (Bugarski 2003: 100). It is assumed that evaluative reactions to spoken language are similar to reactions caused by interaction with individuals, members of a community, so the language we hear can evoke mostly generalized or stereotyped characteristics of the group (Lambert, Hodgson ,Gardner, Fillenbaum 1960: 44), as “a specific language variety [is] metonymically associated with a specific social group” (Kristiansen 2008). Such public opinions are deeply and sincerely founded and spread in society (Milroy 2001: 538). When the research concludes that the attitudes of the majority of representatives of a community are identical, we can no longer view them as subjective and individual creations, but as a consequence of the existence of different ideologies present in the consciousness of the members of that community. Patterns of linguistic behavior can be seen as a reflex of cultural models and ideologies, as well as a factor that confirms or challenges, maintains or changes a certain ideology (Filipović 2009: 46). As language attitudes and ideologies are two closely related concepts, for the purpose of this research, we will deal with both of them, tackling also some more sociological rather purely sociolinguistic concepts in order to generate a broader picture of the attitudes and ideologies by which the members of the Serbian community in Vienna are guided, towards the Serbian and German language, but also towards Serbian and Austrian culture. This research could be a slightly different follow-up of numerous previous contemporary studies on attitudes towards the standard German language and its dialects in Austria (ex. Soukup 2009, 2011, 2013b; Lenz 2018; Lenz, Soukup, Koppensteiner 2022 and numerous other papers). The methodology of this research relies on using both quantitative and qualitative methods, and the questionnaire should be cross-checked and preceded by the pilot study. In order to have a broader picture and to make a relevant questionnaire, the qualitative research will be followed by the quantitative one. Due to limitations of quantitative and quantitative methods themselves, both methods will be used, and final results will be triangulated yielding a relevant conclusion on the preferred language and language usage in general, language attitudes and ideologies, both towards the Serbian and German language and culture. The suggested methodological frame is relevant for this type of research and based on recent methodologies for exploring language attitudes (Soukup 2013a; Kircher, Zipp 2022). The number of participants for the quantitative part of the research should not be less than 30 for interviews (semi-structured), and at least two focus groups with different representative participants should be added, having in mind their different socio-demographic background (8-10 participants in each focus group). Conducting the focus group research would be considered necessary in order to prevent giving socially desired answers, as that is less likely to happen in a group. The central part of this study would primarily be based on the quantitative method (questionnaire) mostly consisted of closed-type answers (5-degree semantic differential scale, yes/no questions), with a possibility to include some open-type questions if the results of the qualitative part induce that the topic requires them. All the results will be statistically processed by using the SPSS software according to socio-demographic variables of participants, such as: a) age, b) gender, c) level of education, d) whether participants are born and raised in Austria or not, e) immigrant generation (1st, 2nd or 3rd) and f) the decision to return to the homeland in the future. The quantitative part of the research would require not less than 300 participants in order to be relevant. The questionnaire would be made especially for the requirements of this research, but will be based on previous research of the Serbian language in the diaspora (eg. Pavlović 1990, 2012; Lukić-Krstanović 1992; Prelić 2008; Vuletić Đurić 2016; Savić 2019). Special attention would be paid to the statistically significant claims. The summarized final results could be a solid and very informative ground for further sociolinguistic research among this community, nowadays or in future, and, as all attitude studies, it may reveal and identify some contemporary social and (socio)linguistic issues, and possibly help the community in perspective by bringing the potential solutions. The main reason for this research stay is to find appropriate participants for both qualitative and quantitative research, and to participate in the observed community as a researcher. Besides that, the Austrian Academy of Sciences has a distinguished and experienced team of researchers who share the same research interest, who could support, guide and supervise me to conduct a research methodologically based on my PhD thesis (Miketić 2017), but undertaken on different participants – Serbians who live in Austria. Speaking Serbian as a native language and having personal connections in Vienna could be of immense importance for finding the participants and for being involved in the everyday life of the examined community, and Austrian colleagues could also assist me access the relevant references on this topic written by Austrian authors. The most prominent benefits of this research would be to fill the gap of sociolinguistic studies of the Serbian language in Austria, to have a positive impact on further studies of Serbian language in diaspora, as well as to discover covert and overt attitudes of Serbian community members towards the German language and Austrian culture. The expected personal benefit would be publishing a highly informative peer-reviewed article/study in English, in Austrian linguistic journals, while being guided and mentored by more experienced Austrian colleagues. We could possibly continue the team-work and have a good long-term cooperation, as many interesting topics may be further explored – ex. to publish co-authored papers on different topics concerning the Serbian language in Austria, as it is a language of a huge migration community and this area is scientifically completely underexplored. Possible topics for further research could be attitudes towards the Serbian and Croatian languages among the members of their communities in Vienna, or attitudes towards the standard Serbian language and its dialects among the Serbian community in the same city, lexical interference and code-switching to German among members of different migration generation of Serbs et cetera. The desired research stay would last six months (180 days, optimally from 1st February to 1st August): 15 days: introducing the subject and finding participants; 25 days: conducting the qualitative research (30 interviews and 2 focus groups); 20 days: analyzing and discussing quantitative data; 10 days: developing the questionnaire; 20 days: conducting the pilot-study and editing the questionnaire; 20 days: conducting the quantitative research (300 participants); 30 days: analyzing and discussing quantitative data by using SPSS; 40 days: summarizing the results and finishing the study (180 days in total).