Perceived Expressive Reduction in German: Identity, Affect, and Social Relations among Highly Educated Hungarian Migrant Women in Vienna
Abstract
This article examines how highly educated Hungarian migrant women living in Vienna perceive the differences between the expressive possibilities available to them in Hungarian and the communicative possibilities they experience in German and how these differences relate to their identity, emotions, social relationships, and tendencies toward self-segregation. The study is based on a qualitative secondary discourse analysis of 25 anonymised in-depth interviews collected in 2023 as part of a broader research project on women’s social and labour market integration involving participants with self-reported German proficiency of at least B2 level. The results identify three recurring patterns. Women often associate the German language with feelings of shame, insecurity, and an inability to express themselves. In the participants’ narratives, this experience is linked to identity-related tensions, a diminished sense of competence, and a subjective loss of status. Ultimately, these experiences are associated with more selective social networking, more cautious participation in German-language contexts, and a preference for Hungarian-language networks as emotionally safer spaces. The article introduces the concept of code reduction to describe this identity-related experience of expressive narrowing, interpreted not as an objective linguistic decline but as a subjective experience in which one is unable to reproduce one’s usual native-language repertoire in the second language. The study argues that the linguistic experience of migration should be understood not only as a matter of language proficiency, but also as an emotional and identity-related dimension of social integration.
- Code reduction captures migrants’ perceived loss of expressive range in German.
- German-language insecurity is linked to shame, identity tension, and status loss.
- Hungarian networks provide emotional safety amid reduced German expressiveness.
- Language integration needs support for professional and emotional expression.
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https://doi.org/10.36923/jicc.v26i2.1489
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