Multikulti in context

Ingrid Piller at Language on the Move looks and English-medium news coverage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent declaration, “Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert.” Piller says that the English language press largely seems to misunderstand the comments.

English press accounts have translated Merkel’s statement as something like “Multiculturalism is dead.” To conservative Germans, however, Multikulti means something like “flower power with diversity”: a positive sounding but unrealistic motto of the left. Thus, Piller suggests, what was interesting about Merkel’s speech was not the dismissal of Multikulti but the admission that Islam is now a part of German society, an idea nearly opposite to the analyses in English-language media.

Read Piller’s comments here.