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This is the first comprehensive volume to compare the sociolinguistic situations of minorities in Russia and in Western Europe. As such, it provides insight into language policies, the ethnolinguistic vitality and the struggle for reversal of language shift, language revitalization and empowerment of minorities in Russia and the European Union. The volume shows that, even though largely unknown to a broader English-reading audience, the linguistic composition of Russia is by no means less diverse than multilingualism in the EU. It is therefore a valuable introduction into the historical backgrounds and current linguistic, social and legal affairs with regard to Russia’s manifold ethnic and linguistic minorities, mirrored on the discussion of recent issues in a number of well-known Western European minority situations.
This edited collection provides an overview of linguistic diversity, societal discourses and interaction between majorities and minorities in the Baltic States. It presents a wide range of methods and research paradigms including folk linguistics, discourse analysis, narrative analyses, code alternation, ethnographic observations, language learning motivation, languages in education and language acquisition. Grouped thematically, its chapters examine regional varieties and minority languages (Latgalian, Võro, urban dialects in Lithuania, Polish in Lithuania); the integration of the Russian language and its speakers; and the role of international languages like English in Baltic societies. The editors’ introductory and concluding chapters provide a comparative perspective that situates these issues within the particular history of the region and broader debates on language and nationalism at a time of both increased globalization and ethno-regionalism. This book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of multilingualism, sociolinguistics, language discourses and language policy, and provide a valuable resource for researchers focusing on Baltic States, Northern Europe and the post-Soviet world in the related fields of history, political science, sociology and anthropology.
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.
This chapter focuses on the way in which co-present parties in meetings manage language choice and treat it as raising problems of participation - in the sense that participants can orient to the fact that a given language choice may increase or diminish participation for some or all co-present group members. Choosing one language rather than another is approached here as a members' problem (in an ethnomethodological sense), and as a decision the participants make themselves, in situ and within their courses of action, displaying the way in which they orient to its local consequences, and how they justify and legitimize it. In order to explore this link between language choice and participation systematically, in this chapter we focus on a particular and recurrent phenomenon, the announcement of a language change. Within the conversation analysis framework, we analyse these announcements by taking into account the sequential position in which they occur, their format, the way in which they are addressed to a sub-group or to the group as a whole, and the specific action they accomplish. We will also look at how the group receives the announcement, its effects on the participation framework, as well as the categorizations that ensue from it. This chapter therefore highlights the mutual configuration between language choice and participation framework. Our analyses are based on several video- and audio-recorded corpora of international work meetings. These video data call for reflection not only on the linguistic dimension of participation frameworks and language switches, but more broadly on their multimodal organization. This chapter shows that multimodal details are crucial if we aim to understand the relation between multilingualism and participation as occasioned, contingent and emergent dynamics.
The analysis which we present in this paper is part of an ethnographically based sociolinguistic study of various immigrant youth groups and their social style of communication. The study describes the wide variety of migrant groups and their socio-cultural orientation in relation to different migrant worlds as well as to different social worlds of the dominant German society. The development of a social style of communication is grounded in the groups’ socio-cultural orientation as well as in the perception of themselves in relation to relevant others. The main purpose of our study is to analyse the construction of the groups’ social identity in terms of their social style of communication.
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.
In long-standing language contact situations, SLA mechanisms can account for changes in LI. While it is obvious that LI influence on L2 can be accounted for as a transfer effect, I postulate that SLA effects are responsible for certain aspects of L2 influence on LI as well. This is transparent if early stages of SLA are compared to early stages of language contact: what is affected most in both cases is the lexicon. Examples are drawn from Pennsylvania German, a German-based language spoken in the USA and in contact with American English (AE) for c. 300 years. The data imply that the conceptual matrix of the Speakers’ minds has shifted from German to AE, resulting in constructions that can be traced to AE, while the conscious language choice is still German. This conceptual shift relates to a stage in SLA, when the learner begins to get a grasp of the internal systematicity of the L2 and reduces the transfer of structural LI material to L2, i.e. the beginning of a structuralization process in the learner’s interlanguage. The quality and sequence of the “invading” material in language contact is strikingly similar to the sequence of the material composed in the process of SLA, implying a close relationship
between the two processes.
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.