Perceived Expressive Reduction in German. Identity, Affect, and Social Relations among Highly Educated Hungarian Migrant Women in Vienna
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Date
2026
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Citation
Balogh Eszter , Szvetelszky Zsuzsanna , Hajnal Virág , Ábrahám Jázmin Szonja , T. Nagy Judit: Perceived Expressive Reduction in German. Identity, Affect, and Social Relations among Highly Educated Hungarian Migrant Women in Vienna. Journal of Intercultural Communication, 26(2), 128-142. p.
MTMT:
37333948
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.
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Keywords
linguistic Code, integration, affective Relationship, identity, migration