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Sprachkontakt in Namibia: Registerdifferenzierung im Namdeutschen
Abstract
Language contact research is a vibrant discipline that is gaining in importance due to the increasing mobility of speakers and thus of languages. The essays in this volume present recent research on scenarios in which varieties of German confront one or more contact languages in different constellations. Varieties are also included which historically emerged from one or more German variety(ies), but which today are largely detached from the German diasystem. The contact languages or varieties belong predominantly to the Germanic (Frisian, Luxembourgish, English, Afrikaans) and Romance (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) language families.
I bring together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem incommen-surable, namely sociolinguistic approaches to linguistic fluidity and multi-competence on the one hand, and structural approaches to linguistic coherence and grammatical systems on the other hand. I show that we can reconcile insights from these two strands in a linguistic architecture that takes communicative situations as the core of linguistic systema-ticity, and integrates them into lexical representations. Under this view, communicative situations are the basis for linguistic coherence and grammatical systems, while languages can emerge as optional sociolinguistic indices.
This chapter presents a quantitative corpus study of informal speech from male and female adolescent and adult Namibians with L1 German. A key feature of Namibian German is various forms of language mixing, mostly with material from English and Afrikaans. Previous sociolinguistic research, as well as statements by community members, suggest that male speakers might use more other-language material in their speech. I identified other-language material in a corpus of peer group conversations by Namibian German adolescents and adults and investigated the amount of transferred lexical items (other-language material excluding multi-word code-switches) that speakers of different age and gender used. Furthermore, I analyzed the proportion of the donor languages English and Afrikaans. Concerning the frequency of transferred lexical items, the results show an age difference between younger and older speakers, but fewer clear differences between speakers of different gender. English is the prime donor language in all groups, but subtle differences in the proportion of Afrikaans may point to interesting sociolinguistic dynamics.
This study analyses the role of Namdeutsch – a German-based non-standard variety spoken in Namibia which includes loanwords from Afrikaans, English and indigenous languages – in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Research on Namdeutsch has so far taken mainly the historical perspective, and data on contemporary Namdeutsch are still rare. The present article bridges this gap by analyzing a cmc-based corpus consisting of 33,000 running words. The data are taken from the online edition of the Allgemeine Zeitung, Namibia’s only daily newspaper published entirely in German. Stylistic features of Namdeutsch usage such as compounds, identifiers and pejoratives are documented, and metalinguistic statements by authors and readers of the newspaper are analysed. The data show that Namdeutsch fulfills a double function within Namibian cmc, serving both as an in-group identifier for Namibian(-German) culture and as a bridge to German-speaking communities in Europe.
In this paper, I describe a 'Language Situations' method that allows us to systematically tap into speakers' repertoires: it captures naturalistic productions across different communicative situations, including informal as well as formal, and written as well as spoken settings. In order to do so, the 'Language Situations' method combines the advantages of controlled elicitations with those of spontaneous data collection. In this design, participants are familiarised with a fictional event. They are asked to imagine being a witness to this event and describe it in different communicative situations, e.g., in a phone call and in a WhatsApp message to friends, in a conversation with a stranger or in a formal written report. I show that the method is flexible enough to be adapted for different speaker populations and research questions, it is easy to apply, yet powerful enough to yield comparable, naturalistic data that captures register-bound choices within and across speakers, speech communities, and languages
Aufgrund ihrer plurizentrischen Struktur weist die deutsche Sprache Standardvariation auf. Dies gilt insbesondere für die Lexik in den europaischen Staaten und Regionen, in denen Deutsch Amtssprache ist. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt, dass auch auserhalb der Amtssprachregion standardsprachliche Wortschatzvarianten existieren. Am Beispiel der deutschsprachigen Minderheiten in Rumanien, Namibia und Mennonitensiedlungen des amerikanischen Kontinents werden Grunde für den Erhalt der deutschen Sprache und fur die Entwicklung und Pflege spezifischer standardsprachlicher Lexeme dargestellt
Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively speaking, in these varieties, subject-verb inversion may be absent under certain well-defined conditions. In this article I outline those conditions and the type of syntactic analysis required to account for them, claiming that an articulated left periphery is needed to account for the findings. The similarity of the V3 patterns found in these new varieties, which are geographically isolated from each other but which share a characterization in terms of the demographics of their speaker groups, invites a diachronic account in terms of language contact. I argue that transfer cannot account for V3, but that a scenario of sequential simplification and complexification is able to do so. Finally, turning to Old English, which exhibits similar (though not identical) V2/V3 alternations, I argue that a similar synchronic analysis can be upheld and that its diachronic origins may well also have been similar—a case of using the present to inform our approach to the past.
Language Variation – European Perspectives III contains 18 selected papers from the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which took place in Copenhagen 2009. The volume includes plenaries by Penelope Eckert (‘Where does the social stop?’) and Brit Mæhlum (on how cities have been viewed by dialectologists, sociolinguists – and lay people). In between these two longer papers, the editors have selected 16 others ranging over a wide field of interest from phonetics (i.a. Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Alam) via syntax (Wiese) to information structure (Moore and Snell) and from cognitive semantics (Levshina, Geeraerts and Spelman) to the perceptual study of intonation (Feizollahi and Soukup). Several of the papers concern methodological questions within corpus based studies of variation (Buchstaller and Corrigan, Vangsnes and Johannessen, and Ruus and Duncker). Taken as a whole the papers demonstrate how wide the field of variation studies has become during the last two decades. It is now central to almost all linguistic subfields.
Existential constructions in a corpus of spontaneous English from Bequia (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) are used to explore a linguistic problem (Is variation in verb form in existential constructions best viewed as grammatical or lexical?) and a sociolinguistic problem (What aspects of variation change over a lifetime?). We compare “urban sojourners” (Bequians who have been away) with their home village norms. We observe differences in the frequency of the type of existential preferred in different villages and by the urban sojourners. We also observe differences in whether or not the main verb agrees in number with a postposed plural subject. Building on William Labov's early discussions of constraints on variation imposed by the “sociolinguistic monitor,” we suggest that variation in individual speakers supports the notion that variables that are fundamentally grammatical are less likely to mark social factors than lexical variables are. (Bequia, Caribbean English, existentials, subject-verb agreement)*
In diesem Beitrag wird der Sprachgebrauch der deutschsprachigen Minderheit in Namibia, die heute etwa 20.000 Personen umfasst und im Wesentlichen auf Migration im Zuge der Kolonialisierung des Gebietes (Deutsch-Südwestafrika; 1884 −1915) zurückgeht, mithilfe eines systematisch zusammengestellten Korpus beschrieben und analysiert. Neben einem breit angelegten Überblick über Charakteristika in Phonetik/Phonologie, Morphologie, Syntax, Lexik und (lexikalischer) Semantik, der auch Informationen zur Verwendungshäufigkeit der untersuchten Varianten enthält, werden ausgewählte Phänomene etwas ausführlicher behandelt, um allgemeine Zusammenhänge offenzulegen. Dabei kommen unter anderem die folgenden Bereiche zur Sprache, die als prägend für das Deutsche in Namibia angesehen werden können: Entlehnungen und Sprachkontakt (vor allem mit Afrikaans und Englisch), der im multilingualen Setting verstärkte Ausbau binnenstrukturell angelegter Tendenzen sowie importierte sprachliche Merkmale und damit einhergehender Varietätenkontakt innerhalb der deutschsprachigen Community.
Für das Deutsche wird gemeinhin eine strikte V2-Beschränkung angenommen, die für deklarative Hauptsätze besagt, dass sich vor dem finiten Verb genau eine Konstituente befinden muss. In der Literatur werden häufig Beispiele angeführt, in denen sich zwei Konstituenten vor dem finiten Verb befinden und die somit gegen die V2-Beschränkung verstoßen. Diese syntaktische Konfiguration, so das Argument, führt zu Ungrammatikalität: (1) *Gestern Johann hat getanzt. (Roberts & Roussou 2002:137) Die Bewertung in (1) fußt jedoch nicht auf empirischer Evidenz, sondern spiegelt ein introspektives Urteil der Autor*innen wider. Daten zum tatsächlichen Sprachgebrauch zeigen, dass Sätze wie in (2) im Deutschen durchaus verwendet werden: (2) Aber immer alle sagen das. [BSa-OB, #16] Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit dem Status dieser V3-Deklarativsätze im Deutschen. Der Status wird aus drei einander ergänzenden Perspektiven auf Sprache untersucht: Sprachverwendung, Akzeptabilität und Verarbeitung. Hierzu werden Daten, die in einer Korpus-, einer Akzeptabilitäts- und einer Lesezeitstudie erhoben wurden, ausgewertet. Basierend auf den empirischen Befunden diskutiere ich V3-Modellierungen aus generativer Sicht und entwickle einen Modellierungsvorschlag aus konstruktionsgrammatischer Sicht. Die Arbeit zeigt, dass die Einbeziehung von nicht-standardsprachlichen Mustern wichtige Einblicke in die sprachliche Architektur gibt. Insbesondere psycholinguistisch gewonnene Daten als empirische Basis sind essenziell, um mentale sprachliche Prozesse zu verstehen und abbilden zu können. Die Analyse von V3 zeigt, dass solche Ansätze möglich und nötig sind, um Grammatikmodelle zu prüfen und weiterzuentwickeln. Untersuchungen dieser Art stellen Grammatikmodelle in Frage, die oft einer standardsprachlichen Tradition heraus erwachsen sind und nur einen Ausschnitt der sprachlichen Realität erfassen. V3-Sätze entpuppen sich nach dieser Analyse als Strukturen, die fester Bestandteil der Grammatik sind.
This paper is a quantitative study of the factors that determine the selection of passive constructions over active ones by English speakers. By examining a large body of passives used in spontaneous speech, together with the sentences that show an opposing choice, we are able to throw light on the crucial question of which syntactic and which semantic features of the environment act to constrain the choice and whether syntactic or semantic factors predominate in this case. In the course of the analysis, we will also have something to say about the social factors that have been reported to determine the use of the passive.(Received February 18 1981)
This paper provides the first overview of the history, sociolinguistics, and structures of Namibian Kiche Duits (lit. “kitchen German”), which is today a dying contact variety. The analysis draws on archival records, colonial publications, and memoirs, as well as over 120 sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2000. Early varieties of Namibian Kiche Duits emerged from 1900 under German colonial rule. The language was used primarily for inter-ethnic communication within the work context. However, speakers also “crossed” playfully into Kiche Duits in a number of within-group speech genres (competition games, scolding, banter, etc.), thus appropriating the colonial language—alongside cultural borrowings (Truppenspieler, “traditional” dress)—for new in-group practices. These within-group uses contributed to the linguistic stabilization of the language as well as the formation of new (post-)colonial (neo-African) identities.
Deutsch in Afrika. Die Stellung der deutschen Sprache in Afrika vor dem Hintergrund der bildungs-und sprachpolitischen Gegebenheiten sowie der deutschen auswärtigen Kulturpolitik
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