The project Deutsch in den Niederlanden [German in the Netherlands] is a student-led research project conducted at Leiden University in 2024-2025. Its main aim is to explore how German is used and perceived in the Netherlands while contributing to making German more visible to the public.
The project pursues three interrelated goals:
(1) empower students in German Studies to practice German through interviews with German speakers;
(2) map out how German is being used and by whom in migration contexts with a focus on the Netherlands;
(3) enable students and the interviewees to embody their multilingual identity.
This corpus was created during the course Introduction to Sociolinguistic Fieldwork: German-Speaking Communities in the Netherlands at Leiden University. It consists of interviews with German-speaking individuals living in the Netherlands—both those who learned a variety of German as their first language and those who acquired it as a second or third language. The project aims to explore the German-speaking community in the Netherlands, with a focus on the relationship between language, identity, and multilingualism. The project addresses both the language use and language ideologies of the interviewees, as well as their individual experiences and participation in daily life in the Netherlands.
Amberscript, 2024
