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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.
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.
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.
During the second half of the 19th century, extended regions of the South Pacific came to be part of the German colonial empire. The colonial administration included repeated and diverse efforts to implement German as the official language in several settings (administration, government, education) in the colonial areas. Due to unfamiliar sociological and linguistic conditions, to competition with English as a(nother) prestigious colonizer language, and to the short time-span of the German colonial rule, these efforts rendered only little language-related effect. Nevertheless, some linguistic traces remained, and these seem to reflect in what areas language implementation was organized most thoroughly. The study combines two directions of investigation: First, taking a historical approach, legal and otherwise official documents and information are considered in order to understand how the implementation process was planned and (intended to be) carried out. Second, from a linguistic perspective, documented lexical borrowings and other traces of linguis tic contact are identified that can corroborate the historical findings by reflecting a greater effect of contact in such areas where the implementation of German was carried out most strictly. The goal of this paper is, firstly, to trace the political and missionary activities in language planning with regard to German in the colonial Pacific, rather similar to a modem language policy scenario when a new code of prestige or national unity is implemented. Secondly, these activities are evaluated in the face of the outcome that can be observed, in the historical practice as well as in long-term effects of language contact up until today.
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 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.
During German colonialism in the Pacific, language contact between German and the local languages took place in different areas and in varying intensity. The numbers of native speakers of German were low, and in many cases German was not the means of communication, so that comparatively little language contact occurred naturally. Despite this situation, several native languages in the German colonial area integrated loanwords from German and preserved them up until today. Quantitative differences in borrowing between the affected languages are arguably due to extralinguistic factors influencing contact duration and intensity as well as local language attitudes. There is one area where the use of German was explicitly supported by the government: These are schools. The present paper investigates the numbers of students who came into contact with instruction of or in German. Many schools were mission-run, and in particular non-German missions had problems finding qualified teachers for their German instruction. Following an overview of population proportions regarding speakers of German and school attendance, this paper compares quantitative loanword data to contact opportunities with German in schools, drawing a tentative conclusion on whether instruction in German, as one extralinguistic factor influencing language contact, had a measurable effect on lexical borrowing from German.
In den zwei Jahrzehnten vor dem ersten Weltkrieg standen weite Teile des Südpazifik unter deutscher Verwaltung. Das Deutsche stand hier in einem eng umrissenen geographischen Areal über 700 anderen Sprachen gegenüber, was zu einer besonderen Situation in Bezug auf Sprachenpolitik, Sprachenverhältnisse und Sprachkontakt führte. Ein konkretes Beispiel für kontaktbedingten lexikalischen Einfluss in diesem Kontext bietet die sprachliche Situation auf der pazifischen Insel Nauru. Hier hielten sich zu Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts etwa zeitgleich zwei deutschsprachige Missionare auf, der Protestant Philip A. Delaporte und der Katholik Alois Kayser; beide trugen aktiv zur Dokumentation und schriftlichen Verwendung des Nauruischen bei. Ein Vergleich der Wörterbücher zeigt jedoch deutliche Unterschiede, v.a. in Bezug auf die Herkunft von Lehnwörtern, Während bei Delaporte in allen auf Nauruisch verfassten schriftlichen Dokumenten eine größere Zahl an deutschen Lehnwörtern auftritt, finden sich bei Kayser an deren Stelle häufig die entsprechenden englisch-basierten Lexeme, sofern die betreffenden Lemmata überhaupt erfasst sind. In der vorliegenden Untersuchung geht es um einen Vergleich der Wörterbücher von Delaporte und Kayser, wobei ergänzend eine Wortliste von Paul Hambruch (1914—15) sowie neuere nauruische Wortlisten (Nauruan Swadesh List 1954, Petit-Skinner 1981) herangezogen werden. Eine zentrale Fragestellung ist, wie sich die Unterschiede zwischen Delaporte und Kayser erklären lassen und welche Schlussfolgerungen aus solchen Unterschieden in der Sprachdokumentation für die weitere Erforschung dieser und vergleichbarer Kontaktsitutationen zu ziehen sind (Zuverlässigkeit bzw. Bewertung linguistischer Dokumente). Dabei kommen auch methodologische Gesichtspunkte zur Sprache, u.a. die Schwierigkeit, eine aussagekräftige und quantitativ ausreichende Datenbasis zusammenzustellen, die eine möglichst zuverlässige Grundlage für die Evaluierung einer solchen historischen Sprachkontaktsituation bieten kann.
During the brief era of German colonialism in the Pacific (1884-1914), German was in contact with a large number of languages, autochthonous as well as colonial ones. This setting led to language contact in which German influenced and was influenced by various languages. In 1900, Western Samoa came under German colonial rule. The German language held a certain prestige there which is mirrored by the numbers of voluntary Samoan learners of German. On the other hand, the preferred use of English, rather than German, by native speakers of German was frequently noted. This paper examines linguistic and metalinguistic data that suggest the historical existence of (the precursor of) a colonial variety of German as spoken in Samoa. This variety seems to have been marked mainly by lexical borrowing from English and Samoan and was, because of these borrowings, not fully comprehensible to Germans who had never encountered the variety or the colonial setting in Samoa. It is discussed whether this variety can be considered a separate variety of German on linguistic grounds.