A number of special programmes have been initiated in preschool institutions, many of which aim to integrate immigrant minority children as early as possible. One such programme was called Sag mal was and was developed by the Land Baden- Württemberg (see www.sagmalwas-bw.de/) (Baden- Württemberg-Stiftung, 2011).

There is also a major push to raise the quality of pre-primary educators' qualifications, since as yet the majority of these educators do not have academic degrees or comparably high-quality training. One of the central pillars of these initiatives is how to deal appropriately with linguistic and cultural diversity in elementary education.
(See, for example, www. weiterbildungsinitiative.de; www.dji.de/sprachfoerderung).

In 14 out of 16 German Länder, children with ‘identified deficits’ in German are entitled to receive special support before entering primary school. The vast majority of the respective tests neither consider bi- or multilingualism as a relevant influential factor for language development, nor do they take languages other than German into account. Some tests, however, include the aspect of multilingualism and allow for bilingual testing in a number of immigrant languages. An example is HAVAS 5 Katze und Vogel, a test for the age group five to six, which was developed for German and roughly ten immigrant languages (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2012; Reich, Roth, & Neumann, 2007).

Pre-primary education in the Sorbian language takes place in some nurseries in Saxony and Brandenburg, and in Schleswig-Holstein we find such nurseries in Danish. Only the Länder Saxony, Brandenburg (Sorbian) and Schleswig-Holstein integrated the protection of regional minorities in their constitutions. In the other Länder, there are no officially accepted regional minority languages.[1] Instruction in languages other than German takes place in a wide number of foreign languages (mostly English and French), as well as, in some cases, immigrant languages.

[1]  This remark concerns the whole education system.

German is the language of schooling in the majority of primary schools in Germany, although there is no official regulation determining this. In some Länder we find single primary schools working according to so-called bilingual models. The majority of these schools – some of them call themselves ‘international schools’ – work with English or one of the other prestigious ‘classical’ foreign languages, such as French (see, for example, the Staatliche Europaschulen Berlin). A few Länder have established bilingual models for pupils from autochthonous minorities (for example, in Danish in Schleswig-Holstein, and Sorbian in Saxony – see Gantefort und Roth 2011 for an overview). Likewise, in a few Länder, bilingual schools with immigrant minority languages have been established. Hamburg is one example for this, with a total of six schools with one ‘bilingual’ branch or class, concerning the languages Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish (Duarte 2011).ğmur, 2003). Most of the provisions are based on private initiatives and not linked to the official school system.

In general, English is the first foreign language. However, according to regional regulations, other languages can also be offered. Schools in border regions, for example, offer French or Dutch as the first foreign language. Some Länder offer the first foreign language from grade one, but mostly children start at grade three, that is, at the age of nine years. Where these offers are made they are obligatory for all children, including those with an immigrant background.

With respect to education in immigrant minority languages, again a highly differentiated picture emerges. In the 1970s, the Länder of the former Bundesrepublik Deutschland had established systems of so-called mother tongue teaching with respect to the then relevant Gastarbeiter languages, that is, the languages of those sending countries with which contracts for labour migration had been established. The languages concerned were primarily Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, ‘Yugoslavian’, Turkish, and, in rare cases, Moroccan-Arabic. These systems were established in response to recommendations of the European Community.

However, since the late 1990s, and especially after German re-unification, these models faded out for manifold reasons. Today, there is no reliable data available about the number and range of immigrant languages that are taught either within the official school systems or outside of it, and likewise no data about the numbers of participants in these programmes. We can assume on the basis of reported data that there is a considerable and probably growing interest in such language tuition (Fürstenau, Gogolin, & Ya

In principle, teachers are qualified in teaching German as well as foreign languages, as German teacher education requires that two subjects are studied, and that teachers are appointed according to their qualification. There is hardly any specific qualification at German universities for teachers of immigrant languages. A small number of teachers of Russian or Turkish as foreign languages are trained, for example, at the Universities of Hamburg, Duisburg-Essen (North-Rhine Westphalia) and Tübingen (Baden-Württemberg). Proficiency levels for national and foreign languages must comply with national standards.

Germany has established a rather extensive system of foreign language education at secondary level. The vast majority of pupils learn at least one foreign language, namely English. German is compulsory at all levels and school types of secondary education and also part of all school leaving exams. Additionally, one foreign language is compulsory in all secondary schools with the exception of special needs schools. A second foreign language is compulsory only for the purpose of reaching the highest school leaving examination (Abitur), but is often also offered from grade six in intermediate schools.

The choice of languages varies regionally, as well as from school to school. Today, French and Spanish are the most popular foreign languages. Languages such as Chinese or Japanese, however, show increasing numbers of learners, especially in urban area schools. Schools are more or less free to offer a range of different foreign languages in their curricula, if they wish to promote distinctive profiles or programmes. For a number of university degree courses (for example, for doctorates), Latin is still required in most universities. Thus, Latin (and in less common cases also classical Greek) is offered at many schools that lead to the highest school leaving examination, the Abitur. As a rule of thumb, roughly 15 different languages are taught as foreign languages in Germany’s public school system.

There is one compulsory foreign language in secondary education. Usually students continue to learn the same language they have chosen during primary school (English, German or French) but they can also choose from other foreign languages. According to the general education plans for basic and secondary education (2011-2013), students can choose their second foreign language from: English, Latvian, Polish, French, Russian, German and other languages. The school should make it possible to choose a second foreign language from at least two additional foreign languages and to provide the necessary conditions to learn the chosen language.

Further Education (in three institutions)

In the responding schools, the focus was on skills in German as well as foreign languages (English, French and Spanish) and no immigrant languages were offered. One interesting result was found in the vocational school in Flensburg, where Danish was listed as a foreign language rather than a recognised minority language.

Higher Education (in three institutions)

The LRE questionnaire was delivered to three universities: Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, the University of Flensburg and the Free University of Berlin. In all of them, parts of the tuition were provided in both German and foreign languages. There was no question about the language of tuition in the questionnaire, but it is most likely that it is English. All universities offer websites and information on admission requirements in German and foreign languages. The University of Flensburg points to the usage of ‘regional and minority languages’; in practice this refers most likely to Danish, the regional minority language of the area. The languages offered at the universities surveyed are Arabic, Basque, Chinese, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Danish.

Until the late 1990s, many public and private radio and television stations offered programmes in regional dialects, autochthonous minority languages or immigrant languages. The latter were often labelled as multicultural programmes (or even stations). These offers are almost completely gone in radio or television under public law.

One considerable ‘multilingual’ station is the French-German television co-operation ARTE. ARTE offers most of its programmes with a second – French or German – audio programme. Other widely offered ‘multilingual’ options are subtitles, in German, for the hearing impaired and audio commentaries for visually impaired audiences. Sign language plays only a minor role; there is no regulation requiring this provision. The private television and radio market is largely monolingual. However, cable and satellite television and radio allow audiences to access a lot of foreign stations. Many of them are from the UK and France, but there is also a considerable amount of programmes in immigrant languages, for example, from Russia and Turkey.

Another specific feature of German television, as well as the wider movie market, is the dubbing of foreign language films. Almost all foreign language films and television series are dubbed. Only in exceptional cases can the original languages be accessed on a second audio programme. Similarly, most mainstream cinemas only show dubbed versions of foreign language films. Original language and subtitled versions are more or less restricted to arthouse cinemas. This is due to the development of a considerable ‘dubbing industry’ alongside a flourishing film industry.

The number of newspaper titles as well as languages offered we identified in Berlin exceeds those in Flensburg by a large margin. Given the size of the two cities and the international character of a city like Berlin this comes as no surprise. The offer in Berlin is again dominated by European languages, but Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and other African languages are also represented.

In line with expectations, autochthonous minority languages do not play a significant role in the German media market, except of the regions where the respective languages are recognised. Media in immigrant languages are widespread. Media in foreign languages representing main political and economic partners of Germany can be found in all regions. A recent development on the newspaper market is ‘print on demand’. This technology allows for the presence of printed media in any language, even if only a single person asks for it.

The official language of Germany is German, although no codification of a ‘national language’ exists. Any communication that is legally binding has to take place in German or it will be assumed not to have taken place. In the case of legal disputes, the defendants are entitled to be assisted in their home language by interpreters.

In practice, however, at least larger cities in Germany apparently take a pragmatic stance and cities aim to convey as much information as possible to speakers of languages other than German, particularly regarding social welfare and social inclusion, security, immigration services and tourism. How far this represents a coherent strategy remains unclear from the answers to the questionnaire.

The respondents from all three cities – Berlin, Flensburg and Munich – state that a strategy for promoting multilingualism is at least occasionally practised. Danish has a special status as an official minority language in Schleswig-Holstein. English is supported, as everywhere in Germany, not only for business purposes. The respondent from Munich gives very detailed examples of support to multilingualism.

In the following paragraphs we present some of the answers for the cities Berlin and Munich. For Flensburg we do not have sufficient information to say more than we stated above.

Domain 7A asked for institutionalised language strategies at city or council level. The Berlin contact remarked that it is difficult to answer these questions at city, or, in the case of Berlin, concurrently state-level.[1] Here again, decentralisation as a general element of administration and politics becomes visible: authorities at district level are free to set their own policies. The main topics that call for multilingual communication from the respondent’s point of view are security, crime- and accident prevention and general information. For example, leaflets on home security in Arabic and Turkish are distributed in districts with a significant immigrant population.

Also, parts of the city council’s website and other information are available in English, French, Italian, Chinese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Serbian and Croatian, and Spanish. In most other cases, multilingual competences of civil servants or other state employees are exploited on an ad hoc basis. This leads to a situation where in some cases a broad variety of languages are available, and in others there will only be German and English, depending on who is working what shift. For legal purposes and in criminal prosecution, qualified external translators or interpreters are drawn in. Apparently it is only the police who ask for non-German language skills as an additional competence that is rewarded with extra credits in the application process. This holds for high-interest languages such as Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Italian, Croatian and Serbian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese.

Munich city authorities provide a more diversified picture. However, this is most likely an effect of the communicative strategy of a particular respondent. For Munich it is reported, for

example, that the department of social welfare offers interpreter services in Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dari, English, Filipino, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Kikongo, Kiswahili, Kurdish, Lao, Macedonian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Tamil, Tajik, Thai, Turkish, Uyghur, Ukrainian, Urdu and Vietnamese. Advice on educational topics is offered by the authority for education and sports in many of these languages too. The City of Munich also has a web presence in English, French, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. The City administration offers translation and interpretation services in English, French, Turkish, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. For 40 other languages external support can be drawn in. The City of Munich further acknowledges multilingualism by allowing job applicants to balance ‘deficit’ in German language competence with multilingual competences. Also, language courses taken by staff of city authorities can be part sponsored if the language can be useful in their job. But, like Berlin, Munich does not keep track of the language skills of their employees.

Domain 7B asks for oral communication facilities in the city. The replies in this section have been scarce, which could be due to the formulation of the questions or that some services, for example, transport and tourist information, are provided by private companies. Some detailed information has been provided for the emergency services in Berlin where, depending on who is on duty, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and French, as well as English, are spoken at varying levels of competence but independent of a person’s first language. Immigration and integration services are often accessible in English plus in some cases in French, Turkish, Russian, and Spanish. For languages like Arabic, Vietnamese, Romanian and Bulgarian, external support will be called in. Theatres mainly offer information in German and English with the exception of the Russian Theatre and one fringe theatre, the ufa-Fabrik, where information in English, Spanish, and French is provided. For Munich we do not have information at a comparable level of detail.

Many German cities have established either a Foreign Citizens’ Council (Ausländerbeirat) or similar institutions dealing with the interests of immigrants and supporting their integration.

Domain 7C then asks for written communication facilities. Here the answers do not offer any additional insights compared to the previous two domains. The general impression is that the two big cities acknowledge linguistic diversity, but their reaction towards it could be more coherent.

[1] The three German cities Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg have also the political status of Bundesländer (Federal States).

We only received a few answers to the questionnaire because many companies were reluctant to reveal their internal policies.

The public debate around languages in businesses in Germany concentrates on two issues. The first is the issue of German language competencies. Employers’ organisations – among others – complain that school leavers do not show sufficient German language skills to start an apprenticeship. Although this complaint is sometimes narrowed down to school leavers with an immigrant background, it is usually more general and refers to young people with a school leaving certificate from the lower tracks.

The second is that a number of substantial studies show that employers do not consider the mastery of English and German as sufficient any more, but require mastery of additional languages from their employees (Meyer & Apfelbaum, 2010). From the 15 companies we spoke to, it is probably safe to conclude that multilingual strategies do play a role in the companies, provided there is a need to use other languages for internal communication in the case of multinational companies or communication with customers, clients, and business partners. In many cases, however, these strategies would not be termed ‘multilingual strategies’, but be part of more general concepts of dealing with diversity.

In terms of specific language management practices, almost all (13 out of 15) use German for internal documents. Business English is widely used by two companies, with five using it occasionally, and the rest not at all. Other languages are only used by three companies and these languages are: Danish (a bank); Slovenian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Czech and Bulgarian (a construction company, presumably using the languages that cover their area of operation as well as the countries of origin of their employees); and English and French by a hotel. Questions about the languages of internal software, marketing activities, and websites show a very similar picture, with only one bank standing out from the crowd in reporting the use of German and Danish across the board. Furthermore, one construction company ran a marketing campaign in Danish but this has been terminated.

One of the hotels provides information on its website in – according to their response – English, French, ‘Belgian’, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, ‘Austrian’, Portuguese, ‘Swiss’ and ‘Brazilian’. Only two companies use external translators or interpreters widely and four occasionally.

Only one company, a bank, keeps a regular record of the language skills in German and English of their employees. These rather anecdotal answers do not allow for any generalisations. They might be interpreted as indicators of a lack of interest in language management, which only becomes relevant when business demands require communication in languages other than German. The question could be posed as to which other expectation one could have with respect to the business sector. Meyer (2009) could show that German companies actually invest in linguistic diversity among their staff if this is justified by the requirements of diversity management on the one hand and of their field of business on the other.

 

 

In Germany, we find an ambivalent atmosphere with respect to linguistic diversity. On the one hand, many public initiatives and campaigns carry a ‘German only’ message. A recent campaign of the Deutschlandstiftung (which is supported by the National Commissary for the Integration of Migrants and Refugees, Minister Maria Böhmer) is one example for this kind of strategy. The message is that speaking German is the best (if not only) key to integration (see www.ich-spreche-deutsch.de/de/.)

On the other hand, and at least on a rhetorical basis, we can find clear statements that support and recognise multilingualism. An example for this is a campaign ‘Multilingualism www.goethe.de/ges/spa/prj/sog/deindex.htm). Even on the highest political level, the acknowledgement of multilingualism is frequently expressed. An example for this can be found in the ‘National Integration Plan’, a political framework that was developed on behalf of the Central Government (Bundesregierung, 2007). In the section concerning education, we find the statement that the Ministers of Cultural Affairs of the Länder will invest in strategies that promote a better command of German for all pupils. Besides the support for learning German, however, the Ministers declare that ’the Länder acknowledge the importance and relevance of multilingualism for all pupils. This includes the heritage or family languages of immigrant children. Appropriate measures shall be identified that support the establishment of multilingualism as a general educational principle in the school routines’ (Bundesregierung, 2007, p. 25f, our translation).

The illustration of ‘policies and practices for multilingualism’, as it is intended by the LRE project, brings about a highly fluid, anything but definitive picture of the situation and we are convinced that this is no German peculiarity, but an appropriate sketch of European societies in general.– languages without borders’ which was initiated by the Goethe-Institut (see 

Although there is no general strategy for dealing with it in Germany, the official recognition of multilingualism has risen in recent years. Many promising initiatives can be identified; yet, in a decentralised system as is the case in Germany, they will probably not be discovered on the basis of the LRE instrument. Initiatives range from bilingual education models to wide-ranging models of school innovation which aim at implementing multilingualism as a general feature of language education (see the projects Durchgängige Sprachbildung/Continuous Language Education –

Another example is the numerous diversity management strategies in companies. Such strategies can usually be found in big companies rather than small and medium-sized enterprises, although the latter also develop ways to deal with diversity among their staff or in their clientele. In major motor companies, for example, language resource groups take care of migrant members of staff. Support for heritage language abilities is one part of such activities.

To conclude: whereas on the level of public laws and regulations we do not find extensive initiatives that promote multilingualism, we can find a lot of such initiatives on the regional and local level. In other words, the closer we look at actual practice, the more we can make discoveries on multilingual experience.

www.foermig.uni-hamburg.de). A number of projects promote linguistic diversity as a general feature of early childhood education (Tracy, Weber, & Münch, 2006). Such initiatives can be found in the private sector as well as in public elementary education. They include models with ‘classical’ foreign languages, namely English or French, as well as models which care for immigrant languages. Information portals exist for parents as well as for interested teachers or experts (see, for example, www.fmks-online.de with respect to foreign languages, or regional portals such as Bilingual erziehen [educating bilingual], www.bilingual-erziehen.de which refer to all models, irrespective of the languages that are addressed). As in the latter example, the terms ‘bilingual’ and ‘multilingual’ are often used as if they were synonyms by private initiatives as well as in the public or political sphere and in research.