4 - Deutsch in improvised performance

Summary

Every weekday, either by choice or compulsion, vast numbers of children and adults all round the world participate in foreign language learning classes, focusing on languages other than English. This process is often the focus of intense local and national dispute, and although very substantial sums of money are devoted to it, in Britain and other English-dominant countries, massive educational underachievement is one of its most striking outcomes (Boaks 1998; Branaman and Rhodes 1998; Schulz 1998). And yet looking back either over the last twenty-five years of the leading sociolinguistics journal (Language in Society), or through introductory textbooks on sociolinguistics, there are no detailed analyses of instructed foreign language practices, and it is hard to find even a cursory reference. So the question of why sociolinguistics has shown such little interest in instructed foreign languages is one issue to address in this chapter, and for me, it sprung into salience when I heard the young people in my radio-microphone recordings using Deutsch among themselves, playing vigorously with its sound properties and re-styling it in their maths and English lessons.

Admittedly, peer group Deutsch turned out to be a passing fad. Eighteen months or so after I last recorded it, its principal exponents said in interview that they no longer used the language among themselves, and they were very negative about the German classes that they continued to attend. So there are no grounds for supposing that their japes with Deutsch spurred them on to become enthusiastic modern linguists.