https://natogjournal.natog.org/index.php/natog <p align="left">Starting with volume 7 edition, NATOG-JOURNAL is now an online journal and is published once a year. The Journal welcomes articles written in German or English on different aspects of the German language, German as a foreign language, literature, and culture.</p> Nigerian Association of Teachers of German en-US NATOG Journal 1119-1562 https://natogjournal.natog.org/index.php/natog/article/view/105 <p>Increasingly over the years, African migrants have been subjected to dehumanization and social exclusion in various parts of the world, especially in urban centers such as Berlin. This paper examines the critical issue of the discriminatory marginalization of African refugees in Berlin on the basis of their racial and refugee status. The main objective is to analyze how Erpenbeck's <em>Go, Went, Gone</em> reflects the in-group and out-group categorization dynamics, uncovering the social ramifications of these identities on the refugees' experiences. Employing a qualitative literary analysis methodology, the article carefully examines key passages that illustrate refugee categorization, connecting these moments to Tajfel and Turner’s SIT (social identity theory) concepts such as social identity and categorization mechanisms. Erpenbeck critiques the bureaucratic and societal constructs that continue to perpetuate these racialized identities, demonstrating the consequences of being relegated to an excluded group. This research points to the enduring dehumanizing effects of social categorization, and calls for greater empathy and understanding to address the realities of the migration crisis, stressing the need to acknowledge the humanity of each individual beyond surface labels.</p> <!--a=1--><!--a=1--> Chioma Evangeline Okafor Ugonna Ezinne Ubah Copyright (c) 2026 Chioma Evangeline Okafor, Ugonna Ezinne Ubah https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 2026-09-02 2026-09-02 10 1 10 https://natogjournal.natog.org/index.php/natog/article/view/106 <p><strong>M</strong>ultilingualism, a principle of sociolinguistics, which involves the use of many languages within a discourse has become a central motif in African fiction, including francophone African novels. Existing studies on multilingualism on Europhone African novels have largely dwelt on literary analysis with little attention paid to the sociolinguistic features in them. This study was therefore designed to examine multilingual voices and dialects in <em>Le Mandat </em>by Sembene Ousmane. Voices deployed in the novel include cultural, bureaucratic and social voices: while Wolof language was discovered to have been used in conjunction with the French language, other international languages were also deployed, which include: English, Arabic and Italian. All these were used in the selected novel to foreground multilingualism in both native and international languages, while ensuring Attrition does not affect the native language- Wolof. &nbsp;Data were collected from Sembene Ousmane’s <em>Le Mandat</em>, purposively selected due to dominance in multilingualism. The data were gathered from dialogues in the selected novel, while Bakhtin’s theory of diglossia and Myers Scotton’s theory of Codeswitching were adopted for the study. Data were subjected to sociolinguistic analysis. Cultural, bureaucratic and social voices were deployed to resist linguistic assimilation, oppression of Africans by their fellow Africans as well as showcase and resist social inequality in Africa.</p> <!--a=1--> Amos Damilare Iyiola Abiodun J. Ajetunmobi Copyright (c) 2026 Amos Damilare Iyiola , Abiodun J. Ajetunmobi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 2026-09-30 2026-09-30 10 11 23