How language shapes our identityliving with two (or more) languages

Zusammenfassung

Time and again, bilingual and multilingual individuals report feeling "different" when they use one or the other of their languages from their language repertoire.The aim of my research is to show that this feeling of "differentness" is indeed experienced and, moreover, I want to find out how it manifests itself. The thesis also deals with the central concepts of my research, namely "bilingualism", "accommodation" and the "linguistic relativity hypothesis". Additionally, a study of linguist Susan Ervin-Tripp, which influenced my research tremendously, among many others, is part of it. However, the heart of my research are narratives written by German-English bilingual participants. Based on two pictures, narratives were written (with a six-week interval) first in English than in German. These narratives have then been analysed with a linguistic computer program ("LIWC") for automatic quantitative text analysis. The findings are presented within this thesis Key words: bilingualism, multilingualism, accommodation, personality, identity, linguistic relativity hypothesis, LIWC