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Colonial language contact is shaped by many extralinguistic factors that, in turn, lead to different linguistic outcomes. The project outlined here aims at documenting contact contexts that existed during the German colonial rule in the Pacific, with special emphasis on German New Guinea. Trading places, institutions (e.g. schools), plantations and other settings that involved (language) interaction between the colonizers and the colonized are charted on a historical map of the area to determine where contact intensity is likely to have been high, and what languages were involved and can be expected to show traces of such interaction (e.g. loanwords). It is intended to digitize this information in form of an interactive map, allowing to show and hide different types of information and thus being able to draw conclusions on historical language contact settings and their long-term linguistic results.
In the lexicon of pidgin and creole languages we can see an important part of these languages’ history of origin and of language contact. The current paper deals with the lexical sources of Tok Pisin and, more specifically, with words of German origin found in this language. During the period of German colonial domination of New Guinea and a number of insular territories in the Pacific (ca. 1885–1915), German words entered the emerging Tok Pisin lexicon. Based on a broad range of lexical and lexicographic data from the early 20th century up until today, we investigate the actual or presumed German origin of a number of Tok Pisin words and trace different lexical processes of integration that are linked to various, often though not always colonially determined, contact settings and sociocultural interactions.
Historical sociolinguistics in colonial New Guinea: The Rhenish mission society in the Astrolabe Bay
(2017)
The Rhenish Mission Society, a German Protestant mission, was active in a small part of northern New Guinea, the Astrolabe Bay, between 1887 and 1932. Up until 1914, this region was under German colonial rule. The German dominance was also reflected in rules on language use in official contexts such as schools and administration.
Missionaries were strongly affected by such rules as their most important tool in mission work was language. In addition, they were also responsible for school education as most schools in the German colonial areas in the Pacific were mission-run. Thus, mission societies had to make decisions about what languages to use, considering their own needs, their ideological convictions, and the colonial government’s requirements. These considerations were framed by the complex setting of New Guinea’s language wealth where several hundred languages were, and still are, spoken.
This paper investigates a small set of original documents from the Rhenish Mission Society to trace what steps were taken and what considerations played a major role in the process of agreeing on a suitable means of communication with the people the missionaries wanted to reach, thereby touching upon topics such as language attitudes, language policies and politics, practical considerations of language learning and language spread, and colonial actions impacting local language ecologies.
Mit dem hier besprochenen Band liegt eine Monographie zu Pennsylvania Dutch(Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania-Deutsch; im Weiteren auch PD) vor, die sowohl die Entstehungsbedingungen und -verläufe und den soziohistorischen, soziopolitischen und religionsbezogenen Kontext seiner Entwicklung als auch seine sprachlichen und literarischen Formen, seine historische und heutige gesellschaftliche Stellung und Verwendung umfassend und gründlich darstellt. Louden wendet sich dabei nicht nur an ein linguistisches Fachpublikum, sondern auch an LeserInnen ohne eine speziell linguistische Vorbildung. Dementsprechend werden für die Darstellung relevante linguistische Konzepte eingeführt und erklärt. Ein umfassendes Stichwortverzeichnis macht die Monographie gut erschließbar, und die umfangreiche Bibliographie ermöglicht es, sich weitergehend zu allen angesprochenen Themen zu informieren. Die Endnoten werden strategisch gut eingesetzt, da sie nicht nur fachwissenschaftliche ‚Unterfütterung‘ bieten, sondern auch dazu genutzt werden, alle zitierten Quellentexte sowohl auf Englisch als auch in der (pennsylvania-)deutschen Originalfassung zur Verfügung zu stellen.
Mit dem hier besprochenen Band liegt eine Monographie zu Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania-Deutsch; im Weiteren auch PD) vor, die sowohl die Entstehungsbedingungen und -verläufe und den soziohistorischen, soziopolitischen und religionsbezogenen Kontext seiner Entwicklung als auch seine sprachlichen und literarischen Formen, seine historische und heutige gesellschaftliche Stellung und Verwendung umfassend und gründlich darstellt. Louden wendet sich dabei nicht nur an ein linguistisches Fachpublikum, sondern auch an LeserInnen ohne eine speziell linguistische Vorbildung. Dementsprechend werden für die Darstellung relevante linguistische Konzepte eingeführt und erklärt. Ein umfassendes Stichwortverzeichnis macht die Monographie gut erschließbar, und die umfangreiche Bibliographie ermöglicht es, sich weitergehend zu allen angesprochenen Themen zu informieren. Die Endnoten werden strategisch gut eingesetzt, da sie nicht nur fachwissenschaftliche ‚Unterfütterung‘ bieten, sondern auch dazu genutzt werden, alle zitierten Quellentexte sowohl auf Englisch als auch in der (pennsylvania-)deutschen Originalfassung zur Verfügung zu stellen.
Canadian heritage German across three generations: A diary-based study of language shift in action
(2019)
It is well known that migration has an effect on language use and language choice. If the language of origin is maintained after migration, it tends to change in the new contact setting. Often, migrants shift to the new majority language within few generations. The current paper examines a diary corpus containing data from three generations of one German-Canadian family, ranging from 1867 to 1909, and covering the second to fourth generation after immigration. The paper analyzes changes that can be observed between the generations, with respect to the language system as well as to the individuals’ decision on language choice. The data not only offer insight into the dynamics of acquiring a written register of a heritage language, and the eventual shift to the majority language. They also allow us to identify different linguistic profiles of heritage speakers within one community. It is discussed how these profiles can be linked to the individuals’ family backgrounds and how the combination of these backgrounds may have contributed to giving up the heritage language in favor of the majority language.
Colonial studies
(2019)
Defining groups and affiliating the self and the other with specific social categories is an important part of constructing a colonial conceptualization of societies. Many written documents from the colonial period attest to this practice. The current paper focuses on missionaries’ ways of positioning themselves and others within the colonial context. The German speaking Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft (RMG, Rhenish Mission Society) established mission stations in the Astrolabe Bay area of New Guinea, an area that was under German domination between 1884 and 1914. The paper analyzes how RMG missionaries, by means of language, construct, define, and position different population groups, and it investigates what patterns emerge from these language practices.
Language shift after migration has been reported to occur within three generations. While this pattern holds in many cases there is also some counter evidence. In this paper, family documents from a German immigration community in Canada are investigated to trace individual decisions of language choice that contributed to an extended process of shift taking four generations and more than a century.
The book investigates the diachronic dimension of contact-induced language change based on empirical data from Pennsylvania German (PG), a variety of German in long-term contact with English. Written data published in local print media from Pennsylvania (USA) between 1868 and 1992 are analyzed with respect to semantic changes in the argument structure of verbs, the use of impersonal constructions, word order changes in subordinate clauses and in prepositional phrase constructions.
The research objective is to trace language change based on diachronic empirical data, and to assess whether existing models of language contact make provisions to cover the long-term developments found in PG. The focus of the study is thus twofold: first, it provides a detailed analysis of selected semantic and syntactic changes in Pennsylvania German, and second, it links the empirical findings to theoretical approaches to language contact.
Previous investigations of PG have drawn a more or less static, rather than dynamic, picture of this contact variety. The present study explores how the dynamics of language contact can bring about language mixing, borrowing, and, eventually, language change, taking into account psycholinguistic processes in (the head of) the bilingual speaker.