German is the holy grail: language, migration and ethnolingual belonging in transnational spaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the dynamics of migration in the growing prominence of German in Nigeria, and the ways self-perception of language competence shapes ethnolingual belonging and future trajectories of transmigrant Nigerians residing in Germany. Drawing on promotional texts of German language schools and migration-themed discourses on Nairaland, I show that while German is mainly espoused for migration purposes back at home, most Nigerians in Germany conceptualise belonging and otherness through the lens of language proficiency—a perspective that rationalises their inclination towards relocating to Anglophone destinations for greater linguistic capital and social inclusion. I argue that the narrowed view of German as a migration asset impedes its wider adoption and mainstreaming in the Nigerian linguistic market, and illuminate the complex nexus between language, racialisation, migration, and belonging, as well as the tenuous link between language learning and acculturation. The paper offers insights into the ways language competence shapes ethnolingual membership and migration patterns in a globalised world and suggests a nuanced understanding of new language acquisition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".