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This paper discusses contemporary societal roles of German in the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania). Speaker and learner statistics and a summary of sociolinguistic research (Linguistic Landscapes, language learning motivation, language policies, international roles of languages) suggest that German has by far fewer speakers and functions than the national languages, English, and Russian, and it is not a dominant language in the contemporary Baltics anymore. However, German is ahead of ‘any other language’ in terms of users and societal roles as a frequent language in education, of economic relations, as a historical lingua franca, and a language of traditional and new minorities. Highly diverse groups of users and language policy actors form a ‘coalition of interested parties’ which creates niches which guarantee German a frequent use. In the light of the abundance of its functions, the paper suggests the concept ‘additional language of society’ for a variety such as German in the Baltics – since there seems to be no adequate alternative labelling which would do justice to all societal roles. The paper argues that this concept may also be used for languages in similar societal situations and, not least, be useful in language marketing and the promotion of multilingualism.
With recourse to a broader understanding of the concept of translation, the transfer of source texts in one variety into another variety of the same language can also be called translation. This paper focuses on the target language – or rather – the target variety “easy-to-read language”, which is meant to make texts comprehensible for people with communication limitations. Considering its origins in the disability rights movement, the aim is to inform affected persons about their rights and democratic processes, i.e. to translate especially legal texts into the so-called easy-to-read language. Although there is a whole range of rules and guidelines for formulating in easy-to-read language, ”none offers a sufficient approach for translation into easy-to-read language“ (Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, p. 109). Standardization of the variety is also still a long way off. On the one hand, the contribution takes stock of legal regulations in easy-to-read language. On the other hand, four versions of the Federal Participation Law in easy-to-read language are analysed with regard to their external features and the constructions used to explain technical terminology. The analysis shows that legal texts in easy-to-read language are (still) quite limited in number and are also difficult to find. Concerning the second part, the constructions used exhibit a great structural variance, both intra- and intertextually. It is therefore questionable whether the addressees can access the texts independently. Also, it is still necessary to make the rules, the formulations of the rules and the implementations clearer so that the translations fulfil their function.
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.