For Whom the -R Rolls

During the last year, I’ve researched and tried to translate Kiezdeutsch, a German youth dialect spoken in multiethnic and multilingual neighborhoods of Berlin. For example, Berlin has the largest Turkish community outside Turkey. In 2012, Kiezdeutsch sparked a nationwide debate in Germany on language change, centered on anxieties about “purity” and integration; an all-too-familiar and recurrent discourse. But now Kiezdeutsch makes frequent appearances in pop culture and advertising. In the right context, it’s a sign of belonging; in the wrong one, an impetus for exclusion.

This poem is an attempt to contextualize Kiezdeutsch as both a creative and malleable slang for those who use it and a vessel of xenophobic anxieties for those who don’t. The rolled “-r” of the title indicates the Bavarian accent, a mark of German membership. One finds a different rolled “-r” in the Berlin dialect, yet it’s been scandalized in the press as a threatening intrusion of Turkish. How does a phoneme accrue so much baggage? Documentary evidence has been key in dramatizing these tensions: Der Spiegel’s invented, sexist Kiezdeutsch; racist comment threads on publication websites; and, samples from the Kiezdeutsch corpus compiled by the Universität Potsdam’s Centre for Language, Variation, and Migration, which has documented and advocated for Kiezdeutsch by placing its innovations within a long history of German language change and dialect studies.

In the poem, these documents are woven together with bilingual variations and mishearings of regionally tied terms, engaging the gaps between languages as creative spaces in a sort of dialoch (loch is German for hole). “Gruß Gott!” (“may God greet you”), a Bavarian greeting, becomes “Gruß glott.” A Berliner becomes a Berlan (lan is a Turkish loanword that means “man”) and this identity turns iridescent, spangling from one lingua to another. All the while, spelling oscillates around this rolled “-r,” as the tension between writing and speech—a central difficulty in confronting slang—cannot be smoothed out.