Regional Identity in Schalke Football Chants.

Schiering René.

Abstract

The football rite is structured by a strict succession of ritualized, verbal and non-verbal practices, such as football cheers and chants. Collective fan utterances fulfill the same function as other forms of ritual communication: they establish and strengthen a bond of unity within a group. Due to the organizational format of football from local leagues to world championships, the negotiation of regional identity is a salient ingredient of this process. This paper presents a first ethnolinguistic analysis of how regional identity is expressed in Schalke football cheers and chants. Essentially, the group defines itself by referring to romanticized concepts of the industrial area of the Ruhr. Although the regional substandard Ruhrdeutsch provides a linguistic means to demonstrate one's own regional background, the fans' cheers and chants exhibit only very few substandard features. The complementary distribution of ritual communication and substandard usage can be explained with reference to the sociolinguistic status of the variety. On the one hand, patterns of situative variation disfavour substandard usage in public domains, such as a football arena. On the other hand, the short history of the variety, which until lately has been highly stigmatized, did not allow it to be promoted as an appropriate register for song.