2. Dez 2025
Semra Kızılkaya
Universität Bielefeld, Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft
Exploring social indexicality and regional variation: Inshallah as a multifunctional expression in German
Abstract: In this talk, I examine the interaction between linguistic form and social meaning in the use of the univerbated phrase inshallah, which translates to ‘God willing’ in Arabic, and has been borrowed into urban vernaculars of German through language contact. Being a multipurpose expression, inshallah can serve as a modal adverbial, discourse marker or quotation, while the various grammatical functions can be interrelated to different social actors and orders of indexical meaning.
It will be demonstrated that inshallah has undergone significant grammatical and pragmatic integration into urban German vernaculars and, similar to wallah, has an emblematic function associated with multiethnolects (first-order of indexicality) (Quist 2024). As a modal adverbial (1), it expresses a volitive speech background, is syntactically integrated and affects the truth conditions of the proposition.
(1) Hab so hunger insallah gibts daheim was geiles
‘I am so hungry, inshallah there’s something delicious at home.’
[1201575344014315520, 2019-12-02, X-GTA Corpus]
As a discourse marker (2), inshallah shows a variety of pragmatic uses, conveying speaker-attitude, discourse structuring (frame-setting, turn-taking) or politeness-related functions, minimizing the face threat for both interlocutors (Brown & Levinson 1987), or even signal the absence of relevant intentions to carry out the action, potentially presenting impolite behavior (Locher & Watts 2005).
(2) Inshallah – du hast es erfasst!!
‘Inshallah (finally) – you got it!!’ [2019-12-23, id_1.209143126738129e+18, X-GTA Corpus]
While the modal adverbial and discourse marker uses in multiethnic, urban vernaculars most commonly index solidarity and in-group membership, there is a third-order indexical, ironic function which is mainly expressed through the quotational function of inshallah. An example is provided in (3), where inshallah is inserted as a quotation between two constituents of a complex personal-name construction (cf. Finkbeiner & Meibauer 2016). This use is commonly attributed in jocular contexts, representing sarcasm/mock politeness (Culpeper 1996). Oftentimes, it relies on negative stereotypes of Muslim speakers, similar to Mock Spanish (Ochs 1990; Hill 2008).
(3) Bestimmt wieder im Auftrag von Bodo Inshallah Ramelow...
[209208360266031e18, 2019-12-02, X-GTA Corpus]
Empirically, the data come from the Cross-Topic German Twitter Archive (X-GTA Corpus), which comprises a near-complete collection of all German-language tweets between 2018-2023 and is annotated for geo-locations (Nguyen et al. 2022). Drawing on a sample of n= 1.476 attestations in the corpus (absolute frequency of inshallah in the corpus n= 174 977), the talk will discuss regional and inter-individual variation in the use of different functions of inshallah and align those with different orders of indexical meaning. The discussion will also refer to socio-demographic factors, familiarity, i.e., through any language which actively employs the term, and metapragmatic as well as political and racial/ethnic stances in the individual twitter profile descriptions.
References
Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25(3). 349–367.
Finkbeiner, Rita & Jörg Meibauer. 2016. Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker (‘Boris I am in Becker’). Syntax, semantics and pragmatics of a special naming construction. Lingua 181. 36–57.
Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Locher, Miriam A. & Richard J. Watts. 2005. Politeness Theory and Relational Work. Journal of
Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture 1(1).
Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, Elinor. 1990. Indexicality and socialization. In James W. Stigler, Richard A. Schweder &
Gilbert Herdt (eds.), Cultural Psychology, 287–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quist, Pia. 2024. Modern Urban Multiethnolects of Germanic Languages. In Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press