Navigating the German school system when being perceived as a student ‘with migration background’: Students’ perspectives on linguistic racism

•By putting emphasis on multilingual women aged 16–23 who speak German and Turkish, we show how young women who are constructed as ‘with migration background’ are confronted with expectations regarding their use of ‘good German’ and how they respond to these perceived social norms along a continuum moving from collusion to contestation (Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996).•While previous research on the German context has repeatedly emphasized this fact (e.g. Wiese et al., 2015), our paper presents novel interview data and places emphasis on the students affected by standard language ideologies.•Our findings invite for a shift from the speakers to the addressees. In doing so, we argue that while giving students ‘with migration background’ the tools to navigate heteroglossic repertoires is still necessary, these speakers remain subjected to judgements on their ways of speaking, no matter how competent they are in standard German. Standard language ideologies, as a construct characterizing presumably unmarked and stable ways of speaking or writing, pervade all aspects of social life, and schools make no exception. The classroom realities in Berlin, our field of investigation, remain fixed on idealized notions of (White) monolingual standard German. On the basis of eight interviews with multilingual women aged 16–23 who speak German and Turkish, we show how young women who are constructed as having a ‘migration background’ partially align with, but also challenge, teachers’ expectations regarding their use of German. Specifically, we show that because of their perceived ethnicity, the interviewees are viewed as ‘having an accent’ or ‘using non-standard German’ across contexts. Based on these findings, we argue for a renewed focus on addressivity. Following Flores and Rosa (2015), we propose that in order to value heteroglossic repertoires, a shift from the speakers to the addressees needs to take place.