“ganz normale Jugendliche, allerdings meist mit Migrationshintergrund„. Eine funktional-semantische Analyse von “Migrationshintergrund„

The term “Migrationshintergrund„ (migration background) features veryprominently in public German discourses on education and social integration.It serves to explain differences in educational success, income, standardof living, etc. Whereas its official attribution is based on a person’s(and his or her parents’) birthplace, this article examines its actual use inGerman newspapers and reconstructs its meaning according to the use ofthe term in the German language community. As a starting point, the emergenceand historical development of the term is briefly recapitulated andthe meaning of its constituents (“Migration„, “Hintergrund„) is investigatedboth from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. On this basis,a corpus of 4601 instances of the use of the term “Migrationshintergrund„is analyzed. We first point to four exemplary instances in order to give anunderstanding of what can actually be said about persons with a “Migrationshintergrund„.In a second, quantitative hermeneutical step, categoriesof typical usage are derived from the data. This allows the identification ofthe most important aspects of the meaning of “Migrationshintergrund„.The results are validated by comparing them with the co-occurrences of“Migrationshintergrund„ in the same corpus and in a comparative corpus(Leipziger Wortschatzportal). Overall, it appears that “Migrationshintergrund„is used to distinguish between ‘real Germans’ and people who areofficially German, but are not felt to be part of the German community.These persons are seen as a group of ‘Others’ that presents challenges forthe majority because they are not sufficiently integrated and need socialsupport. Against this backdrop, it is investigated whether the concept of“Migrationshintergrund„ does indeed capture salient dimensions of socialstratification, arguing that socio-economic and linguistic factors allow fora much more thorough understanding of social processes than the notion oforigin as it is captured by “Migrationshintergrund„. It is concluded that “Migrationshintergrund„ therefore serves as a means to prevent discourseon social change and that the term and mental concept of “Migrationshintergrund„should be avoided in future linguistic research.