The Discursive Construction of Austrian National Identity - page 4
Keywords: German; Austrian; Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; discourse; identity; analysis
By sth202 on 25/09/2008
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 4 of 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
had Nadine been discussing the same topics or images with another native Austrian or even German she would probably have elected to use alternative phrases. During the interview I was aware that she seemed to feel that she had to explain or describe things she said, and although I was impressed with her background knowledge, there were several occasions that I had the impression that much of the detail was for my benefit, for instance in explaining the past and present uses of the Belvedere Palace. Additionally, there is a fairly high consistency of pauses which may suggest that Nadine is carefully electing her discourse specifically for me as the recipient, though I believe that it is rather due to her apparent self-awareness when speaking. That is to say, at times she appears to be voicing opinions that she doesn’t seem to think she should be saying and which, in certain contexts could be considered to be hugely controversial. For example, in the transcript Nadine describes such institutions as the State Opera and the Burgtheater as ‘steife’ and ‘only for the elite.’ This is an unmistakable contradiction of the stereotype that all Austrians love to enjoy the theatre and opera. In fact, Nadine claims that nowadays these events are viewed as high culture.
Meinhof and Galasiński (2005: 8) say that “identities are necessarily relational - as much as identity is about who ‘I am,’ it is also about who ‘I am not’”. They also claim that it is “a discourse of (not) belonging which is continually negotiated and renegotiated within a localised social context” (2005: 8). To have an identity is to be different from others, and in order to realise this identity we must compare ourselves to others. Nadine used her own opinions constantly and seemed to want to ensure that I knew they were her own views and not necessarily those of others. For example she made use of phrases such as ‘ich glaube’, ‘ich kann mich erinnern’, ‘ich würde differenzieren’, and ‘persönlich’ etc. to convey that they were her personal feelings. Nevertheless in expressing these notions, when we look behind the words we can see that in fact, although the tone of her voice implied that she was quite certain of these views, maybe she was actually fairly unsure of either what she was saying or how it would be received by me. However, these ideas
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