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The article analyzes communicative deviations that occur during the communication between German native speakers and non-native speakers, particularly Ukrainians. Despite existing intercultural and sociolinguistic studies, the analysis of language specificity that causes communicative deviations, failures and misunderstandings remains relevant and understudied. The purpose of this article is to identify and explore the German language peculiarities that cause misunderstandings in communication for non-native speakers, in particular Ukrainian speakers, and offer the algorithm for the representatives of different ethnic communities to help them avoid and resolve possible conflicts given the study of German as a foreign language. The status of the concept of communicative deviation in intercultural communication under conditions of insufficient communicative competence is determined in this article. The study uses the term communicative deviation in favor of a generalized term, a broad concept of linguistic, speech and communicative deviations in dialogic speech, in particular between native German speakers and non-native speakers. The empirical research was based on the speech activity of Ukrainian students during classes at the Department of German Studies and Translation (levels B2–C1) of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in 2019–2021 academic years and definitions from the Universal Dictionary of German Duden, in addition to the materials reflected in textbooks and teaching manuals as well as from authentic German-language sources. Communicative deviations are identified and analyzed in phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic aspects.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native–nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed.