Uprooted Speakers’ Grassroots English: Metalinguistic Perspectives of Asylum Seekers in Germany

This chapter discusses metalinguistic discourse produced by asylum seekers from English-speaking West Africa in Germany, with a focus on the role of English in participants’ communicative environment and the values and affordances ascribed to different varieties of English. The chapter argues that, in this specific context, a) English loses much of its communicative range but retains important identity-related functions, and b) the values associated with different varieties of English reflect global relationships in the World system of Englishes. African varieties are linked to in-group functions and receive differential evaluation, with Nigerian English being constructed as more standard-distant than Ghanaian English, whereas the English of German interlocutors is associated with the prestige varieties American and British English. Particularly surprising is the frequent equation of Gambian English with Jamaican ways of speech, a pattern accounted for not in terms of linguistic similarity but of the global circulation of reggae and dancehall culture. The chapter thus contributes to the sociolinguistics of globalization and the study of language, mobility, and migration.