Production of a bilingual speaker in Bosnian and German
Production of a bilingual speaker in Bosnian and German

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this research is to examine beliefs about language and identity shared by a bilingual speaker. The research was conducted through an interview. The questions in the interview were focused on determining to which extent language influences the participant’s sense of belonging to a certain community and to shaping his identity. The respondent is a bilingual first-generation immigrant from Germany. He is a forty-year old man from Bosnia, who moved to Germany as a teenager in 1992. He moved to Germany as an asylum-seeker during the war in Bosnia and continued his education there, where he eventually graduated college, found an employment and got married. The fact that the respondent is a first-generation immigrant, who managed to master a native-like production in the second language, made him even more suitable for the research. Even more remarkable is the fact that the production of his mother tongue has been strongly influenced by his second language. Additionally, the circumstances under which the person was forced to move to another completely strange and unfamiliar social environment provided an interesting insight in the language acquisition and production by bilinguals.

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