Attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch: From miners’ slang to Ruhrpott love?

1 Introduction

This paper investigates language attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch, a regiolect spoken in the Ruhr Area, the largest conurbation in Germany and home to 5.1 million inhabitants. Ruhrdeutsch, based on a Low German substrate, emerged during the 18^th century as a prestigious Beinahe-Hochdeutsch (‘Almost Standard German’, Scholten 1988: 15) among the industrial bourgeoisie, but lost prestige during industrialization, urbanisation, and immigration as it spread among the working class. These attitudinal dynamics make Ruhrdeutsch an interesting case to study and explore whether the valorisation of Ruhrdeutsch has changed in recent years; namely, if it has been ideologically upgraded from a low-status and stigmatized variety (Mihm 1997) to a variety serving as a collective symbol for regional identity.

Changes in language attitudes and ideologies have been approached from different linguistic perspectives (e. g. language acquisition, language learning, language change, language policy) using a range of methodologies. Woolard (2011), for instance, investigates in a longitudinal study of bilingual speakers in Barcelona language attitudes across the lifespan, i. e. how life experiences impact changes in language use and attitude. Schulte (2019) analyses biographical narratives of young German-American bilinguals in Berlin and the ways in which they discuss their changing attitudes towards German, English and German-English code-mixing practices. Furthermore, Ianos et al. (2017) found no evidence that socio-demographic variables influence attitudes towards Catalan, Spanish, and English among immigrant students in Spain over a two-year period, as indicated by their questionnaire-based longitudinal study.

While in these studies attitude change is explored within the same group of speakers, we are interested in examining attitude change and differences within and between different groups of speakers. Our approach to language attitudes and ideologies towards Ruhrdeutsch is through a stancetaking perspective (Du Bois 2007). Stancetaking can be broadly defined as a key feature of communication, an activity directed at a particular object (event, person, issue, statement etc.) and expressed in relation to the expectation of the addressee. Acts of stancetaking reveal a speaker’s attitude towards what they are saying and how they are saying it. The analysis is based on a corpus of narrative interviews (N = 72) conducted with informants of different age groups and repertoires (monolingual German, bilingual German-Turkish, bilingual German-Arabic, bilingual German-Kurdish). Our focus is on the question how the interviewees position themselves towards Ruhrdeutsch, its use and speakers. The main research questions are: How is Ruhrdeutsch perceived and evaluated and how have attitudes changed in recent years? The specific sub-questions are:

1. How do social variables such as age, gender, and linguistic repertoire (monolingual, bilingual) affect attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch?

2. What are frequent markers for a positive, negative, or neutral stance towards Ruhrdeutsch?

3. What linguistic forms and strategies are used to encode claim-making and perspective (subjective, intersubjective, generalizing) when taking a stance towards Ruhrdeutsch?

This paper is structured as follows: In the first section, we will lay out our understanding of language attitude and ideology and introduce the concept of stance and different stance types. In section 2, we will describe the historical development of the regiolect Ruhrdeutsch. In the third section, we introduce the corpus from which the interview data are taken and explain the data collection method. Next, we present the stancetaking-analysis (section 4) which focusses both on quantitative and qualitative aspects, demonstrating how stancetaking is managed to express attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch. In the final section, we summarize the main findings and reflect the broader societal context.

2 A stancetaking approach to language attitudes and ideologies

We begin this section by presenting our understanding of what we mean by “language attitudes” and “language ideologies”. Language attitudes and language ideologies are related but distinct concepts. Attitudes to language can be defined as feelings and beliefs about language, its use, and its users (Garrett 2010: 179). They can be positive or negative and refer to all modes and levels of language: spoken and written language use, grammar, lexis, names, accents, and discursive practices. The study of language attitudes is important because attitudes impact language choice, language loyalty, and language prestige, all of which give indications of identity construction and social recognition.

Past research has primarily focused on an understanding of language attitudes as stable, individual, and consistent with behaviour. As Lasagabaster (2007: 401) points out, the “attitude construct stems from the attempt to account for the observed behaviour of the individual.” Much attention has been paid to the attitude-behaviour relationship and the idea that the more stable attitudes are, the more consistent they are with language behaviour. But empirical research studies^[1] have shown that attitudes – contrary to this behaviouristic conceptualization – are not always stable and consistent with behaviour but are often situational. They may vary between situations and even in the same situation, depending on the interactional context and functions they fulfil for the speaker, e. g. self-presentation, recipient design, and accommodation, to name only a few (Tophinke and Ziegler 2006, 2014; Liebscher and Dailey O’Cain 2009; Lenz, Soukup and Koppensteiner 2022). These inconsistencies make it difficult to generalize from single attitude instantiations (be they spontaneous or elicited) to fixed attitudes.

Our perspective on language attitudes is inspired by social or discursive psychology, and conversation analysis. According to Billig (1996: 2), “[a]ttitudes are not to be understood in terms of the supposed inner psychology of the attitude-holder. They have an outer, rhetorical meaning, for to hold an attitude is to take a stance in a matter of controversy.”

As such, statements of attitudes are embedded in various contexts and co-constructed in interactions. Hence, an “attitude should not be seen as a semi-permanent mental entity, causing people to say and do certain things. Rather, it comes into existence in displays expressive of decisions and judgements and in the performance of actions” (Harré and Gillet 1994: 22). Displays of attitudes are “context sensitive” and “context relative” in the sense that they always occur in a particular cultural, situational, and interactional context, just as they are acquired in contexts through socialization and experiences (Tophinke and Ziegler 2014). As Holmes and Wilson (2004: 343) point out, “[p]eople do not hold opinions about languages in a vacuum. They develop attitudes towards languages which reflect their views about those who speak the languages, and the contexts and functions with which they are associated. [...] Attitudes to language are strongly influenced by social and political factors.” When a particular variety is the subject of conversation and someone describes the speakers of this variety as “sounding vulgar”, it not only expresses an attitude but also creates a specific image of this variety and its users. According to discursive psychology, these descriptions and evaluations are not an end in themselves but have a specific social meaning in the respective conversational context. For example, an evaluation of Standard German as “cold” and “distant”, when uttered in a group of dialect speakers, may aim at the social cohesion of the group, and contribute to the affirmation and confirmation of the collective identity of the involved dialect speakers. Statements like these are therefore not to be interpreted as an “expression of a personal opinion, but rather a linguistic-interactive action” (Tophinke and Ziegler 2014: 212, our translation), a “doing of an attitude” (Gergen 2010: 82) that takes place in a social context involving interactions between individuals or groups. Expressing an attitude is an observable and meaningful activity that is moulded by societal norms, values, and expectations. Acts of attitude expression contribute to the shaping and maintenance of social structures, relationships, cultural patterns, and social categorizations. Viewing attitude statements like those mentioned above as a social act implies recognizing their significance within the broader social context, including their impact on ideologies.

Ideologies encompass collective or societal beliefs and values about culture and language. To be more precise: they represent “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 193) that shape people’s perceptions of language and its role in society. In connecting the linguistic with the social, ideologies are intrinsically related to power, identity, and social hierarchies within a given community (Kroskrity 2000) and often underlie and guide language attitudes. The formation of ideologies is not a one-way process but a dynamic, reciprocal one.^[2] Engaging in interactions shapes the speakers’ language ideologies, but these ideologies, in turn, impact how speakers engage in specific interactions. Accordingly, interactions reflect and (re)construct ideologies. During the process of “rhematization”, as described by Gal (2005), ideologies may undergo normalization or naturalization, being considered as common sense (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994).

In light of the previous discussion and to consider the interactive dynamics of attitude construction and ingrained ideologies, we adopt a stancetaking approach to analyse “expressions of language attitudes” (Spracheinstellungsäußerungen,Tophinke and Ziegler 2006) towards Ruhrdeutsch. For Kockelman (2004: 131), “the turn from attitude to stance is in keeping with other trends in linguistics and anthropology: from an emphasis on the private, subjective, and psychological (attitude) to an emphasis on the public, intersubjective, and embodied (stance).” Stance is inherent in conversational interaction as it cannot be avoided: we cannot not take a stance (Imo and Ziegler 2022: 77). As Du Bois (2007: 139) points out:

“One of the most important things we do with words is take a stance. Stance has the power to assign value to objects of interest, to position social actors with respect to those objects, to calibrate alignment between stancetakers, and to invoke presupposed systems of sociocultural value”.

Stancetaking analysis tries to reconstruct how interactants (so-called subjects in Du Bois’ model of the stance triangle) take a stance, i. e. position themselves towards a certain object (fact, event, utterance, etc.) and thereby align and display affiliation/disaffiliation or degrees of affiliation/disaffiliation with each other. Du Bois (2007: 163) understands stance as

“a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field.”

This means that stancetaking is a dynamic, dialogic, and collaborative practice “whose meaning is to be construed within the broader scope of language, interaction, and sociocultural value” (Du Bois 2007: 139). Stance “always invokes, explicitly or implicitly, systems of sociocultural value” (Du Bois 2007: 173) which we may refer to as ideologies. When speakers take a stance, they select and reproduce specific sociocultural values of a community. However, they also modify these values in different ways and to varying degrees, depending on the context and purpose.

According to Du Bois, evaluation leads to two types of stances: the first is affective stance, with which the stance subjects express their attitudes and feelings towards stance objects; and the second is epistemic stance, with which they express the certainty or uncertainty of their knowledge about those objects. Recent research has added to these two types of stances two more: deontic stance and style stance (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2018; Biber et al. 1999; Kiesling 2009; Imo and Ziegler 2022).

With deontic stance, Couper-Kuhlen and Selting refer to the speaker’s tendency or disposition to act in certain ways towards something/someone, or to how the speaker wants others to act in certain ways towards something/someone. Deontic stances have a normative dimension. Analysing various types of constructions with the German indefinite pronoun man/‘one’ (= generic you), Imo and Ziegler (2019) show that man/‘one’ can take on deontic meaning which points to social norms and norm conformity or serve as a distancing device for socially precarious attitude expressions (see also Truan 2018).

Style stances are a special category. They indicate the speaker’s attitude towards the “manner of conveying a message” (Biber et al. 1999: 857) and are typically expressed through metacommunicative comments such as “quite frankly” or “honestly”. Style stances may also be linked to processes of enregisterment (Agha 2007). Style stance which occurs within acts of enregisterment often takes the form of iconic stance, whereby the use of certain linguistic features in itself is an expression of stance. A typical example of this strategy is when speakers express positive attitudes towards a certain regional dialect by using that regional variety when speaking.

Stances can be (i) positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) convergent, divergent, or vague with respect to alignment, and they can (iii) vary in degrees on a continuum from less negative to more negative, from less positive to more positive. To these types of stances another can be added, which is resisting to take a stance – a perspective which has received little attention in other work of this kind. People may resist taking a stance for various reasons, e. g. fear of conflict, uncertainty, or lack of knowledge, or for strategic purposes (to avoid polarization in a debate or conversation). Stances are realized through stance markers (Gray and Biber 1999). Stance markers include epistemic, affective, and deontic lexis, hedges and boosters, grammatical devices such as sentence mode and syntactic structures.

In summary, a stancetaking approach to attitude expressions deepens our understanding of attitudes and adds value to attitude research in several ways: it is not only interested in discovering attitudes and how they relate to social practices but also looks beyond content analysis by investigating the ad hoc construction, negotiation, defence, reworking, etc. of stances. What characterizes this approach in particular is its focus on the linguistic resources with which stances are expressed.

3 Attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch: State of research and changes in the “indexical field”

Ruhrdeutsch is a regional variety spoken in the Ruhr Area, a polycentric, densely populated, and culturally diverse metropolitan area in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and is home to approximately 5.1 million inhabitants. The Ruhr Area is not to be understood as a territorial or administrative unit with clear boundaries but as a coherent urban settlement zone of the 19th and 20th centuries with a high degree of industrialization (large-scale coal mining and steel production) and internal mobility, in which a supra-urban awareness of a common history and culture gradually developed (Mihm 1997: 20; Ziegler et al. 2018: 17). Once the industrial heart of Germany and the motor of the German Wirtschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’), the Ruhr Area continues to grapple with the effects of de-industrialization after the end of the coal-mining era.

Like the Ruhr Area with its blurred territorial boundary, Ruhrdeutsch displays fuzzy geographic, sociolinguistic, and linguistic boundaries in terms of its use and users and its structural characteristics. The diachronic development of Ruhrdeutsch has been described as a gradual loss of base-dialect features of Low Franconian and Westphalian, both dialect groups of Low German. This process began in the 18th century when Hochdeutsch (Standard German) was gaining importance as a prestige variety. At that time, Ruhrdeutsch became enregistered as a prestige variety of the new industrial bourgeoisie. This development is captured in the term Honoratiorenvarietät (‘honorific variety’, see Mihm 1997: 35). During the 19th century, in the context of industrialization (especially coal mining and steel production) and labour migration from different regions and countries, it became the model of the working-class population. In this process of demotization,^[3] the valorisation of Ruhrdeutsch changed and it thus lost prestige, as reflected in the indexical association with Kumpelsprache (‘miners’ slang’). According to Mihm (1997: 19), the downgrading and covert prestige of Ruhrdeutsch as a social variety persisted until the late 20th century: “It is generally accepted that Ruhrdeutsch is still considered the rough but warm dialect spoken by the common people in the context of industry and mining” (our translation^[4]). Despite the prevailing perception of Ruhrdeutsch as a low-prestige variety, empirical substantiation of its general stigmatization remains elusive. Negative attitudes towards the origins of Ruhrdeutsch and the influence of Polish language contact during the Polish immigration period (Mihm 1985: 173–175) are reported. But this stereotype has long been debunked as a myth as there are only very few linguistic traces (see Honnen 2018). Unfavourable attitudes also exist towards specific linguistic features and phenomena. Features such as the cliticization of preposition and definite article (e. g. auf der > auffe) or of verb and personal pronoun (e. g. hast du > hasse) are commonly perceived as indicators of “lazy pronunciation” (Mihm 1985: 173) and the users of these constructions as sloppy. Similar attitudes hold for deviations from nominal and accusative case, periphrastic constructions instead of inflected genitive forms, and double plural marking. These variants are associated with deviance and regarded as grammatical mistakes.

Compared to the stigmatization of Ruhrdeutsch in the 19th century and its reported covert prestige in the 20th century, perceptions of it seem to be increasingly favourable in recent years. These are often linked to its association with encouraging informal and casual communication. As Bellamy (2016: 208) reports, Ruhrdeutsch serves as a “key marker to indicate nearness, signal informality, and express emotion. [...] This function is not class-specific but function specific.” Another important finding from Bellamy’s empirical study is that Ruhrdeutsch is regarded as a symbol of regional identity among younger informants. These results confirm a trend that has been observed in a representative survey on the status of Low German, the dialect substrate underlying Ruhrdeutsch. This study reveals that in North Rhine-Westphalia (including the Ruhr Area) an above-average number of informants (38.2 %) associate Low German with “family/private life” (Adler et al. 2016: 22).

The ongoing re-evaluation of Ruhrdeutsch is further substantiated in Ziegler et al. (2017). On-site interviews indicate that the use of Ruhrdeutsch on signs in the linguistic landscape of the Ruhr Area is considered “highly commendable” because the “Ruhr Area is a cherished homeland” (Ziegler et al. 2017: 369). Further indicators of Ruhrdeutsch as a regional symbol can be found in public discourse. A campaign to promote the Ruhr Area as European Capital of Culture in 2010 used the slogan Woanders is auch Scheiße! (‘everywhere else sucks too!’). This slogan, encoded in Ruhrdeutsch (t-deletion in is/ist (‘is’); omission of es (‘it’), reflects the down-to-earth mentality of the people living in the Ruhr Area and their ability to laugh at themselves during times of “structural change”^[5] and high unemployment (Ziegler et al. 2017: 369–370).

The short overview of the existing body of literature reveals that the valorisation of Ruhrdeutsch has profoundly changed over the centuries. These repeated changes in the “indexical field”^[6] make Ruhrdeutsch an interesting case on which to study its perception and evaluation, even more so as there are no empirical studies based on larger data sets including data on migrants’ attitudes.

4 Corpus and data

The data used to investigate attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch are part of a larger corpus of a total of 130 narrative interviews^[7] on migration and multilingualism in the Ruhr Area. Narrative interviewing, developed by Fritz Schütze (1976), is a qualitative technique to elicit information on individuals’ perspectives, beliefs, experiences, and stories. The main features of narrative interviews are open-ended questions, storytelling, and an emphasis on context (sociocultural, interactional) and on the researcher as an interactant (see Slembrouck 2015). As such, narrative interviews offer an excellent opportunity to explore a variety of scenarios of how language attitudes are expressed by the interviewees (De Fina 2003; Pavlenko 2014; Francesschini 2022). This includes: (i) linguistic strategies to encode perspectives (individual, collective), (ii) types of claim-making (subjectivation, inter-subjectivation, generalization), and (iii) direct and indirect positioning. Narrative interviews allow a more detailed and nuanced perspective on attitude expressions, as the focus is not only on content but also on function, linguistic form, and the dynamics of co-construction.

The interviews were conducted by student assistants and students of the Master seminar “Language Attitude Research”. The students were given a manual on the dos and don’ts of interviewing, such as not to interrupt interviewees and not to phrase questions to suggest a specific answer. A smaller corpus was created from the full corpus to focus on those interviews that addressed Ruhrdeutsch. This “convenience corpus” comprises 72 narrative interviews. The interviews were conducted with speakers of German, Turkish and/or Arabic as their first language(s) from the cities of Duisburg, Essen, and Gelsenkirchen. The focus on bilingual German-Turkish and German-Arabic speakers as contrast groups to so-called monolingual German speakers is due to the size of the immigrant groups: immigrants of Turkish origin constitute the largest single immigration group (currently 15 %), while immigrants from Morocco, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon together form another large immigration group that has grown strongly since 2015 (currently 17 %). The narrative interviews were based on an interview guide covering language acquisition, country of origin, life in the Ruhr Area, social relations of the interviewee, use of languages in private and public domains, attitudes towards the German and Turkish/Arabic language and culture, attitudes towards other ethnic groups living in the Ruhr Area, social stereotypes, and language practices such as code-switching. The interviews took place in the interviewees’ homes, which provided a high level of confidentiality and made the interviewees feel more at ease. The informal setting encouraged the interviewees to open up and talk freely about personal experiences and beliefs related to their language use.^[8] Being interviewed in a familiar environment seems to have also led to the interviewees using more colloquial language, including Ruhrdeutsch features, as the extracts below indicate. However, due to the absence of interviews conducted in more formal environments, we cannot determine the impact of the informal interview setting on the expressed language attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch more precisely.

A total of 47 female speakers and 25 male speakers were interviewed, of which 54 were aged 18 to 35 and 18 were aged 50+. Of the interviewees, 38 gave German as their first language, 23 German and Turkish as their first languages, 9 German and Arabic, and 2 German and Kurdish. The interviews varied between 45 and 60 minutes in length. All interviews were recorded, and the sound files were entered in a database for computer-assisted transcription. The interviews were transcribed according to the GAT 2 transcription system using the conventions for basic transcription (Selting et al. 2009) and then annotated according to demographic variables and stance markers. To identify and categorize stance types (positive, negative, neutral), we analysed stance markers, i. e. lexical items such as adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.

5 Analysis and results: Once stigmatized, always stigmatized?

In this section, we present the results of the stancetaking analysis in a two-step procedure. First, we discuss the results of the quantitative analysis and focus on social variables and preferred stance markers; and second, we illustrate different stance types (positive, negative, neutral) and their shapes with extracts of selected interviews.

5.1 Quantitative analysis

The quantitative analysis (N=72) of the valorization of Ruhrdeutsch shows that the majority of interviewees are in favour of Ruhrdeutsch: 57 % are positive towards it, 10 % take a neutral position, and 14 % a negative position. A detailed analysis of the social variables reveals that more positive stances were produced in the older generation, with a rate of 68.4 % (13) compared to 52.8 % (28) among the younger generation. Since the younger informants were generally better educated than the older informants, this result is remarkable as it reveals that Ruhrdeutsch is losing its social class stigma. As for the linguistic repertoires of the informants, the analysis reveals that monolingual Germans produced by far the most positive stances (62.5 %), followed by German-Turkish bilinguals (54.5 %) and German-Arabic bilinguals (37.5 %). Because only two German-Kurdish informants participated, the answers from these informants are negligible. Regarding gender, male interviewees are fonder of Ruhrdeutsch, with a rate of 65.4 % positive attitudes, than female interviewees (52.2 %).

However, 19 % of the interviewees did not respond to questions concerning the language use in the Ruhr Area,^[9] claimed insufficient knowledge (e. g. “I don’t know”; see Beach and Metzger 1997), or gave a non-answer by changing the subject. Example 1 illustrates how informants express lack of sufficient knowledge. The interviewee (a female university student living in Essen and raised in a monolingual German family) expresses her lack of knowledge. It can be assumed that her repeated display of not knowing is based on her desire to avoid making inaccurate or uninformed statements about Ruhrdeutsch, especially as she is a student of linguistics.

Example 1: “There wouldn’t be much that comes to mind right now”

144 IntMC: gibt es auch MERKmale die offenbaren,

are there characteristics that reveal

145 dass jemand aus dem RUHRpott,

that someone comes from the Ruhr area

146 oder aus dem NORden kommt?

or from the north?

147 P: (0.6)

148 Rüt_w_j_D_11: hm:;

149 P: (0.9)

150 Rüt_w_j_D_11: würde mir jetzt auch nicht SO viel

einfallen;

there wouldn’t be much that comes to

mind right now

151 P: (0.5)

152 Rüt_w_j_D_11: oder diREKT was einfallen;

or directly comes to mind

153 P: (0.6)

154 IntMC: hm_M;

When asked about characteristics that reveal that someone comes from the Ruhr Area or from the north, the interviewee responds with a hesitation marker (l. 148) followed by a pause (l. 149), indicating that she is thinking about what to say. She then answers that “there wouldn’t be much that comes to mind right now” (l. 150). After another pause, she rephrases her not knowing stance by switching from subjunctive II to present indicative, stating “or directly comes to mind” (l. 152), which emphasizes that she is in fact “unknowing”.

The analysis of the stance markers suggests that emotions in favour of or against Ruhrdeutsch are rather strong, as illustrated by the word clouds for the most frequent lexical markers and constructions below:

Figure 1

Markers for positive stances

The word cloud in Figure 1 presents the most frequent markers for a positive stance: superlative constructions such as sehr cool (‘very cool’) and mag ich sehr (‘I like it very much’) or attributions with the adjectives schön (‘nice’), gut (‘good’), interessant (‘interesting’), lustig (‘fun’ referring to pleasant activities), toll (‘great’), angenehm (‘pleasant’), einzigartig (‘unique’), vertraut (‘familiar’), offen (‘open-minded’), and süß (‘sweet’) indicating the social appeal of Ruhrdeutsch. Compared to negative and neutral stances, lexical variation is higher in positive stances. When expressing a positive stance, interviewees tend to use a wide range of expressive language to highlight different qualities of Ruhrdeutsch and to describe individual perceptions. They also frequently use adverbs such as ganz (‘quite’) and recht (‘pretty’) as softeners to avoid sounding too formal.

Figure 2

Markers for negative stances

Stances denoting negative feelings (see Figure 2) towards Ruhrdeutsch are expressed through emotion-laden constructions such as einfach schlimm (‘just awful’) and richtig kacke (‘really sucks’) with intensifiers and swear words for emphasis. Negative stances may also be indirect and take the form of a rhetorical question, as in ob das wirklich schön ist (‘whether it’s nice or not’) or are modified in such a way that the propositional content of the negative stance is toned down. With manchmal ein bisschen nervig (‘sometimes a bit annoying’) and gar nicht so schön (‘actually not that nice’), informants convey their hesitation to take an overt negative attitudinal stance as they navigate between strong and less strong negative assessments of Ruhrdeutsch. The effect interviewees create by constructing negative stances with ‘sometimes’ and ‘not so x’ is that they can restrict the validity of their claim and maintain a positive image during the interview.

Figure 3

Markers for neutral stances

The analysis of markers for neutral stances (see Figure 3) reveals that neutral stances are rare. Frequent stance markers indicating indifference are gleichgültig (‘indifferent’), neutral (‘neutral’), and egal (‘I don’t care’), in most cases realized with adverbs ranging from relativ (‘relatively’) and recht (‘quite’) to echt (‘really’) and wirklich (‘truly’) to indicate the varying degrees of a neutral affect. This strategy suggests that, from the informants’ perspective, communicating a neutral stance needs further specification. The use of adverbs to grade neutral stances is a linguistic strategy employed to provide a more nuanced perspective for a more detailed and expressive communication of attitudes.

5.2 Qualitative analysis

In the following, we illustrate various evaluative stance types (positive, negative, neutral) by looking at instantiations of taking a stance. We focus on context, linguistic form, and strategies of subjectivation, intersubjectivation, and generalization to shed light on the construction of attitudes and their ideological underpinning.

Example 2 is an extract from an interview with a young male German-Turkish bilingual speaker who was born in Iserlohn, a city in Sauerland near to the river Ruhr and the Ruhr Area. The interviewee (E_Rüt_m_j_T_5^[10]), a student who now lives in Essen-Rüttenscheid, expresses a positive attitude towards Ruhrdeutsch through several stance acts in successive utterances.

Example 2: “It sounds very familiar”

889 IntJK: bist du der meinung dass es

MERKmale gibt,

do you think that there are

characteristics

890 die offenbaren dass jemand

aus dem RUHRpott kommt?

that reveal that someone comes

from the Ruhr area?

891 P: (0.7)

892 E_Rüt_m_j_T_5: ja;

yes;

893 auf jeden FALL;

definitely;

894 (0.2)

895 IntJK: MAGST du diese regionalen merkmale?

do you like these regional

characteristics?

896 P: (0.8)

897 E_Rüt_m_j_T_5: äh DIE:-

uh which-

898 P: (0.5)

899 E_Rüt_m_j_T_5: das RUHRpott betreffen ja:;

concern the Ruhrpott yes;

900 P: (0.4)

901 E_Rüt_m_j_T_5: weil sich das auf jeden fall verTRAUT

anfühlt;

because it definitely feels familiar;

902 weil ich ja SELber quasi;

903 P: (0.5)

904 E_Rüt_m_j_T_5: indirekt da HERkomme;

because I indirectly come from there more

or less;

905 oder ich wohn ja auch ANgrenzend zum

ruhrpott;

I also live close to the Ruhr area;

906 P: (0.3)

907 E_Rüt_m_j_T_5: das KLINGT schon sehr vertraut;

it sounds very familiar;

908 das das gefällt mir doch SEHR ja;

I really like it a lot;

When asked if he knows of any features indicating that a person comes from the Ruhr Area, the interviewee says “yes” and positions himself towards Ruhrdeutsch along an epistemic scale as in line 892-3: “yes, definitely”. Asked if he likes the features of Ruhrdeutsch he again says “yes”, positioning himself on an affective scale (see l. 897–8) and explaining “because it definitely feels familiar” (l. 901). He then elaborates on his association of Ruhrdeutsch with belonging/sense of home by pointing to his biography, saying “I indirectly come from there [the Ruhr Area] more or less” and “live close to the Ruhr Area” (l. 904–5). With the hedge “quasi” (‘more or less’), he uses an epistemic stance resource to mark the degree of truth of his proposition (Imo 2016: 11) as both a strategy of addressee orientation and saving face. He finishes by repeating “it [Ruhrdeutsch] sounds very familiar”, which serves as a “sequential bracket” (König 2014) to his prior stance (l. 901), stressing his feeling of belonging. With doch/‘really’ in line 908: “I really like it a lot”, he emphasizes his positive subjective self-positioning towards Ruhrdeutsch. This overt ideologizing of Ruhrdeutsch as a regional symbol is remarkable and shows that the ecology of Ruhrdeutsch has changed. Through a process of “erasure” (Irvine and Gal 2000: 37) running parallel to de-industrialization and the decline of the working class, Ruhrdeutsch is no longer associated with lower-class speakers.

The following example presents a complex stance sequence which extends over several turns creating various perspectives (subjective, social) and identities (individual, collective). These multiple facets of meaning-making in interaction are indicated in the interviewee’s pronoun use, which varies between first-person singular, first-person plural, and the indefinite pronoun man/ ‘one’. While the subjective dimension is realized with the speaker-inclusive “we” and “I” in reference to Ruhrdeutsch and its users, the social dimension is expressed with man/‘one’ to indicate social norms of language behaviour which give indications of underlying language ideologies.

Example 3: “you can’t get them out of your language”

019 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: ja;

yes;

020 da gibt_s natürlich MERKmale;

there are of course characteristics;

021 wir sagen GERne;

we like to say;

022 !NE!;

ne;

023 ((lacht)) °h

laughing

024 P: (1.5)

025 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: mh;

uh;

026 und haben auch noch so andere Endungen

((lacht));

and we also have other endings;

027 P: (0.6)

028 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: die man wahrscheinlich JETZT schon;

that you proably already;

029 P: (0.5)

030 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: mh;

uh;

031 HÖRT;

hear now;

032 wenn ich so SPREche;

when I speak like this;

033 P: (1.7)

034 IntLG: du kannst sie auch gerne NENnen;

you can also call them [the

characteristics];

035 wenn du MÖCHtest ((lacht));

if you want to ((laughing));

036 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: ((unverständlich)) [mir- ]

((incomprehensible)) I-

037 IntLG: [((lacht))]

((laughing))

038 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: <<lachend> mir fällt jetzt nicht so

RICHtig was ein>,

<<laughing> I can‘t think of anything

right now>,

039 P: (1.8)

040 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: !ÄH!;

041 sagen wir auch <<lachend> OFT>;=

we also often <<laughing> say>;=

042 =NE;

043 ((räuspert sich))

((clears throat))

044 P: (1.6)

045 P: u:nd;

and;

046 IntLG: MAGST du diese regionalen merkmale?

do you like these regional features?

047 P: (1.2)

048 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: die: <<lachend>aus dem RU:HRgebiet>;

the ones <<laughing> from the Ruhr Area>;

049 find ich gar nicht so !SCHÖ:N! ((lacht)),

I don’t like them all that much ((laughing)),

050 P: (1.3)

051 Gelsen_w_a_D_1: aber die hat man sich ANgewöhnt;

but you get used to them

052 UND man;

053 P: (0.3)

054 Gelsen_w_a_ D_1: bekommt sie aus der SPRAche;

055 auch gar nicht mehr RAUS;

and one can’t get them out of one’s

language anymore;

The stance of the interviewee (Gelsen_w_a_D_1), a monolingual German industrial management assistant born in Gelsenkirchen, extends over several turns, shifting from an epistemic via an affective to a deontic stance oriented towards a negative evaluation of Ruhrdeutsch and its characteristics.

When asked by the interviewer whether she knew characteristics of Ruhrdeutsch, the interviewee answers yes and goes on to say that “there are of course characteristics”, producing an epistemic stance. She substantiates her epistemic stance and continues “we like to say” (l. 21), naming two of the most salient features of Ruhrdeutsch: the negative question tag “ne” (l. 22) and cliticization (which she calls Endungen/‘endings’, l. 26). She finishes her list of Ruhrdeutsch features by using the negative question tag “ne” herself to seek confirmation.

With the speaker-inclusive “we” (l. 21), she characterizes the use of Ruhrdeutsch features as a collective, group membership-constructing habit. In her subsequent stances she positions herself as a speaker of a stigmatized variety in her assessment of Ruhrdeutsch, which makes her feel insecure about her language use in the interview. This is indicated in lines 28 to 32, where she says that the interviewer “can probably already hear” features of Ruhrdeutsch in her utterances and adds certainty to her epistemic claim with the degree particle^[11] “already”. That stancetaking is a social act and sociocultural values and norms come into play is implied through the indefinite pronoun man/‘one’, a characteristic device used to place the addressee in a non-specified group of people and generalize the anticipation of normative expectations (see Bredel 1999). The use of the perception verb “to hear” (l. 31) indicates that the interviewee takes the perspective of the interviewer. In doing so, she activates metapragmatic knowledge, i. e. social norms of how speakers ought to behave in more formal situations, which gives indications of the ideology of a pure standard variety. With her generalizing account of the social perception of Ruhrdeutsch, she also conveys her efforts to aim at Standard German and to save face.

However, an affective element also comes into play when she evaluates Ruhrdeutsch features (l. 48–51) using the affective stance verb finden (‘to find’) and specifying that she does not “like them all that much” (l. 49). The fact that she complements her statement with laughing is worth noting, as laughing can be a stance device, a social signal to smoothen/soften a negative stance and express discomfort, and is often multifunctional. She continues that “you” got used to them and that “you can’t get them out of your language anymore”, implying a deontic stance and that she is reprimanding herself for not having got rid of these features of Ruhrdeutsch from her language. That her stance is by no means to be understood as a merely personal stance but as a social act is further indicated through the switch from the first-person singular pronoun “I” to the indefinite pronoun “one”, a technique employed to create a sense of detachment and to avoid personal accountability by portraying oneself as part of a collective facing a shared issue (Imo and Ziegler 2019).

Throughout this sequence the interviewee displays linguistic insecurity and “linguistic shame” (Busch 2013), indicated by hesitation markers, tag questions, and laughing. A feeling of shame arises “because one has chosen a ‘wrong’ word, a ‘wrong’ tone, or spoken with a ‘wrong’, a misplaced accent” (Busch 2013: 28, our translation). The emergence of the feeling of shame is based on a shift in perspective: subject 1 adopts the perspective of subject 2 and with it the normative beliefs for situational appropriateness, viewing herself as violating normative expectations. Actions resulting from perceived inadequacy include wanting to save face, which is exactly what this stance sequence shows.

According to Kiesling (2009), stancetaking through style is about choices of linguistic forms and how they contribute to stancetaking. The analysis of lexical choices in positive, neutral, and negative stances reveals a clear pattern of variation in references to the Ruhr Area, as shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4

Style stance: “Ruhrpott” vs. “Ruhrgebiet”

Interviewees who position themselves positively towards Ruhrdeutsch refer to the Ruhr Area with the regional variant Ruhrpott, thus expressing their attachment to the region, whereas interviewees who position themselves negatively towards Ruhrdeutsch make use of two variants, i. e. the standard variant Ruhrgebiet as an expression of distancing and the regional variant Ruhrpott. Those who claim to have a neutral attitude towards Ruhrdeutsch prefer the standard variant. This finding neatly illustrates how particular linguistic resources function as markers of a speakers’ identification with a region.

Remaining neutral inherently constitutes a stance (Jaffe 2009: 3) and is often the default stance when speakers are asked to take a position. Example 4 demonstrates this strategy of neutrality. The interviewee is a bilingual German-Turkish call centre worker born in Essen (E_Alt_m_j_T_2), who makes an effort (“investment” Kiesling 2011) to make his position clear, especially as a neutral stance is a dis-preferred reaction in interviews.

Example 4: “relatively neutral”

131 IntEK: magst du denn PRINzipiell dialekte,

do you like dialects in general,

132 und fremdSPRACHliche akzente

allgemein?

and foreign accents in general?

133 P: (1.2)

134 E_Alt_m_j_T_2: wie geSAGT;

as I said;

135 also ich bin relativ neutral

dagegen;

well, I feel relatively neutral about it;

136 man kann die HAben;

one can have them;

137 oder man kann die auch NICHT haben;

or one can also not have them;

138 ist mir da WIRKlich egal;

I really don’t care;

When the interviewee is asked if he likes dialects or foreign accents, he first replies “as I said” (although he has not said anything about dialects or accents before). He then utters that he feels “relatively neutral” (l. 135) about dialects, which means that he does not have a strong positive or negative emotional response to them. With the no-agent construction “one can have them ... or not” and the extreme case formulation in line 138 “I really don’t care” (Pomerantz 1986), he ends his answer and re-emphasizes his neutrality indicating an orientation towards affect. By scaling the intensity attached to his neutral assessment of dialects and accents, he moves from toning down (“relatively”) to intensifying (“really”) in order to confirm his neutral stance, which seems important to him in the context of the interview.

6 Conclusions

As we have shown, attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch have changed significantly in several respects: (i) Ruhrdeutsch is now perceived as a regional rather than a social variety, and (ii) it is mostly positively evaluated, i. e. considered as an identity symbol, and associated with a sense of Heimat (‘home’). Social attractiveness has increased significantly, which is especially indicated by the positive evaluations of younger interviewees (students and young professionals), many of whom have higher education degrees. At the same time, the interview data suggest that negative attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch also exist, albeit only to a small extent. Those interviewed expressing negative stances towards Ruhrdeutsch consider it to be a variety whose use is subject to criteria of situational appropriateness. In formal interactions that require Standard German, Ruhrdeutsch is often regarded as inadequate and the use of Ruhrdeutsch features avoided. These are indications of a hierarchy between the standard variety and the regiolect Ruhrdeutsch that is grounded in aesthetic qualities such as “not that nice” (cf. word cloud in Figure 2), while functional qualities are disregarded or erased. The examples also show that stances and underlying ideologies are always “specific to actors’ perspective” (Gal and Irvine 2019). In other words, those who can switch between Ruhrdeutsch and Standard German tend to evaluate Ruhrdeutsch more positively, while those who cannot switch tend to evaluate it more negatively.

From a linguistic, i. e. style stance, perspective, positive attitude expressions towards Ruhrdeutsch can be observed to co-occur with a preference for the first-person singular and the regional variant Ruhrpott (Ruhrgebiet/’Ruhr Area’). This suggests that positive feelings are more easily expressed though a first person singular, while negative attitude expressions co-occur with the indefinite pronoun man/‘generic you’ and the standard variant Ruhrgebiet (‘Ruhr Area’).

How can the change in societal attitudes be explained? First, the re-indexicalization of Ruhrdeutsch as a regional variety can be related to a process referred to as “structural change”, i. e. the disappearance of “old” industries such as coal and steel in the Ruhr Area. Through this process many jobs were lost and with them the less prestigious social basis of Ruhrdeutsch. As a consequence, Ruhrdeutsch can now be used by everyone. Second, profound transformation processes such as “structural change” naturally lead to a re-imagining of a region’s identity. In this process of re-imagining, Ruhrdeutsch becomes an anchor point for one’s own regional feeling. It is no longer perceived as a social symbol associated with the lower classes but as a class-overarching regional symbol. Following Eckert, these “reconstruals are ‘always already immanent’ (Silverstein 2003: 194) precisely because they take place within a fluid and ever-changing ideological field” (Eckert 2008: 464). This result also confirms findings documented in Kircher and Zipp (2022: 6), who point out that “language attitudes may also change more dynamically as the frame of reference for categorization and social identification is altered.”

The positive valorisation of Ruhrdeutsch and its use as a regional symbol are also visible in the linguistic landscape of the Ruhr Area. For instance, the city of Essen has started using the regional attention-getter Hömma/Hör mal (‘Listen’) together with the city’s logo in electronic public notices, as seen in the public notice displayed during the COVID pandemic in Figure 5. Examples of the commodification of Ruhrdeutsch features can be found in Figure 6 (cliticization of preposition and definite article in aufe/auf die) and in Figure 7 (wat/was, dat/das; cliticization of conjunction and pronoun in wenns/wenn es; spirantization of /g/ and deletion of /r/ in fettich/fertig; t-deletion in is/ist), of which cliticization and unshifted /t/ in dat and wat are prominent and salient features of Ruhrdeutsch.

Reflecting on our methodology and analysis, we identify the following key questions for future research on stancetaking:

1. Should the catalogue of stance types be expanded to include, for example, the category of engagement stance, which refers to the degree of personal involvement or commitment of the speaker to the discussed topic?

2. How can stance types be differentiated and avoiding taking a stance be described?

3. How is stancetaking expressed explicitly/implicitly, including multimodality?

4. Does semantic stereotyping correspond to a schematization of the form of stancetaking (e. g. if-then constructions for articulating deontic expectations)?

5. How can the stancetaking approach be used for historical data?

Figure 5

“Listen! We say thank you! To everyone who is doing their best and is there for us in times of crisis.”

Figure 6

“French fries with currywurst for ‘on the hand’ (to eat now) or to take away.”

Figure 7

“What’s it supposed to be when it’s finished?” (tarpaulin for construction cover)