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The European language world is characterized by an ideology of monolingualism and national languages. This language-related world view interacts with social debates and definitions about linguistic autonomy, diversity, and variation. For the description of border minorities and their sociolinguistic situation, however, this view reaches its limits. In this article, the conceptual difficulties with a language area that crosses national borders are examined. It deals with the minority in East Lorraine (France) in particular. On the language-historical level, this minority is closely related to the language of its (big) neighbor Germany. At the same time, it looks back on a conflictive history with this country, has never filled a (subordinated) political–administrative unit, and has experienced very little public support. We want to address the questions of how speakers themselves reflect on their linguistic situation and what concepts and argumentative figures they bring up in relation to what (Germanic) variety. To this end, we look at statements from guideline-based interviews. In the paper, we present first observations gained through qualitative content analysis.
This paper explores how attitudes affect the seemingly objective process of counting speakers of varieties using the example of Low German, Germany’s sole regional language. The initial focus is on the basic taxonomy of classifying a variety as a language or a dialect. Three representative surveys then provide data for the analysis: the Germany Survey 2008, the Northern Germany Survey 2016, and the Germany Survey 2017. The results of these surveys indicate that there is no consensus concerning the evaluation of Low German’s status and that attitudes towards Low German are related to, for example, proficiency in the language. These attitudes are shown to matter when counting speakers of Low German and investigating the status it has been accorded.
Traditionally, research on language change has been a post-mortem activity, focused on isolated changes that are complete and often only documented in written texts. In the 1960s the field was advanced considerably by Labovian sociolinguistics and the investigation of “change in progress” adduced through patterns of community-internal linguistic variation correlated with external facts about speakers such as age and class (see Labov 1994 for an overview). However, despite the many benefits of such work on “dynamic synchrony,” we still know relatively little about how language change unfolds over the lifetimes of individual speakers, that is, in real time (cf. Bailey et al. 1991). The logistical challenges of such research are, of course, considerable. Whereas it is straightforward for psycholinguists to observe language development in children over the course of a few years, documenting changes in the verbal behavior of individuals over several decades is by contrast much less feasible. Nevertheless, present theoretical models of language change could be considerably improved by the results of real-time studies.
Linguistic variation and linguistic virtuosity of young “Ghetto”-migrants in Mannheim, Germany
(2011)
In this paper, we provide an insight into the life world and social experiences of young Turkish migrants who are categorised by German society as “social problem cases”. Based on natural conversational data, we describe the communicative repertoire of one migrant adolescent and that of his friends. Our aims are (a) to isolate those linguistic features that convey the impression of “foreignness”, and stand out among other German speakers’ features, and (b) to analyse the variability in our informants’ discursive practices - i.e. code- or style-switching, as it is commonly referred to in the literature - in order to show how variation serves as a communicative resource. Our findings show that these adolescents’ remarkable linguistic proficiency and communicative competence contrast markedly to their low educational and professional status.
The contribution will focus on aspects of pluricentricity in spoken Standard German. After a brief overview over the historical and dialectal background of the linguistic diversity in the German speaking area, the regionally balanced speech-corpus "German today” is presented, which has been collected for the analysis of the (regional) variation of spoken Standard German. Aspects of pluricentric German will be discussed by means of both the distribution of certain phonetic variables and a short analysis of regional differences in the use of certain conversational constructions. It is argued that pluricentric structures are constituted by a set of linguistic features on different levels of description. Above all, the analysis tries to reveal traces of the impact of both traditional dialects and national or even subnational political units on the constitution of the standard varieties.