Heike Wiese’s research while affiliated with Universität Potsdam and other places

In present-day German, we find new word order options, particularly well-known from Turkish-German bilingual speakers in the contexts of new urban dialects, which allow violations of canonical verb-second in independent declarative clauses. In these cases, two positions are occupied in the forefield in front of the finite verb, usually by an adverbial and a subject which identify, at the level of information structure, framesetter and topic, respectively. We present a study that investigated the influence of verbal versus language-independent information-structural preferences for this linearisation, comparing Turkish-German multilingual speakers who have grown up in Germany with monolingual German and Turkish speakers. For tasks where grammatical restrictions were largely minimised, results indicate a general tendence to place verbs in a position after framesetter and topic; in addition, we found language-specific influences that distinguish Turkish-German and monolingually German speakers from monolingually Turkish ones. We interpret this as evidence for an information-structural motivation for verb-third, and for a profound dominance of German for Turkish-German speakers in Germany.

This paper investigates evidence for linguistic coherence in new urban dialects that evolved in multiethnic and multilingual urban neighbourhoods. We propose a view of coherence as an interpretation of empirical observations rather than something that would be "out there in the data", and argue that this interpretation should be based on evidence of systematic links between linguistic phenomena, as established by patterns of covariation between phenomena that can be shown to be related at linguistic levels. In a case study, we present results from qualitative and quantitative analyses for a set of phenomena that have been described for Kiezdeutsch, a new dialect from multilingual urban Germany. Qualitative analyses point to linguistic relationships between different phenomena and between pragmatic and linguistic levels. Quantitative analyses, based on corpus data from KiDKo (www.kiezdeutschkorpus.de), point to systematic advantages for the Kiezdeutsch data from a multiethnic and multilingual context provided by the main corpus (KiDKo/. Mu), compared to complementary corpus data from a mostly monoethnic and monolingual (German) context (KiDKo/. Mo). Taken together, this indicates patterns of covariation that support an interpretation of coherence for this new dialect: our findings point to an interconnected linguistic system, rather than to a mere accumulation of individual features. In addition to this internal coherence, the data also points to external coherence: Kiezdeutsch is not disconnected on the outside either, but fully integrated within the general domain of German, an integration that defies a distinction of "autochthonous" and "allochthonous" German, not only at the level of speakers, but also at the level of linguistic systems.

Based on corpus data and the results of a linguistic survey, we will examine grammatical and lexical developments in two relatively new varieties of Modern German: Kiezdeutsch and Nam- deutsch. Both varieties are spoken in multilingual speech communities in Germany and Namibia respectively. In spite of considerable differences in the contact languages involved, the social backgrounds of the speakers and other differences, our comparison shows that the inovations have a series of conspicuous similarities. For example, gibs has developed into an element similar to a particle indicating existance and so functions as a focus marker. New particles are also being borrowed. Furthermore, in the course of a semantic-pragmatic development, the article in (ein) bisschen or bietje/bikkie has been gradually disappearing. In comparison to the German spoken in monolingual contexts, the relatively strong changes in Kiezdeutsch and Namdeutsch bear witness to the highly innovative power of these varieties. In addition, the parallelism of the developments in the domains studied here indicates fundamental tendencies of the internal structure of German.