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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.
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.
By way of migration, large numbers of German-speaking settlers arrived in Pennsylvania between roughly 1700 and 1750. Pennsylvania German, as a distinct variety, developed through levelling processes from L1 varieties of these migrants who came mainly from the southwestern regions of the German speaking area. Pennsylvania German is still spoken today by specific religious groups (primarily Amish and Menonnite groups) for many of whom it is an identity marker. My paper focuses on those Pennsylvania Germans who are not part of these religious groups but have the same migration history. Due to their being closer to the cultural values of American mainstream society, they were integrated into it, and during the 20th century their use of Pennsylvania German was continually diminishing. A revival of this heritage language has occurred over the past c. three decades, including language courses offered at community colleges, public libraries, etc., where ethnic Pennsylvania Germans wish to (re-)learn the language of their grandparents. Written Pennsylvania German data from four points in time between the 1860s and the 1990s were analysed in this study. Based on these linguistic analyses, differences between the data sets are shown that point towards a diachronic change in the language contact situation of Pennsylvania German speakers. Sociolinguistic and extralinguistic factors are considered that influence the role of PG and make their speakers heritage speakers much in the sense of recent immigrant heritage speakers, although delayed by 200 years.
Travel guides and travel reports constitute an important source for the generation and spread of popular geopolitical epistemes and assumptions. With regard to colonial attitudes and their possible perpetuation, it is therefore of great interest what kind of information such texts convey regarding (post)colonial places, and how they contextualize it. The paper compares descriptions of Qingdao (Tsingtau), a German colonized territory between 1897 and 1914, in travel guides and related material from colonial and postcolonial times and in different European languages. It investigates what differences can be found between these descriptions in relation to time, language, and medium (print or online) of publication. Of particular interest is the question whether, and in what ways, colonial perspectives are perpetuated in present-day (especially German) travel literature.
Picnick and Sauerkraut: German–English intra-writer variation in script and language (1867–1900)
(2023)
Intra-writer variation is a wide-spread phenomenon that nevertheless has received only limited research attention so far. Different addressees, bi- and multilingualism, or changing life phases are among the factors that contribute to such variation. In a study of diary entries by one writer covering three decades (1867–1900), this chapter investigates patterns of intra-writer variation between German and English (language and script) in nineteenth-century Canada, with a special focus on single word borrowings, person reference and place names. The long-term perspective provides a unique insight into the dynamics of a bilingual writer’s emerging sociolinguistic competence as reflected by the flexible yet structured use of his resources within the social space of a bilingual community.
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.