- United Kingdom
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Based on data from a language survey conducted in a village in northwest Germany the study analyzes the relationship between language shift and language attitudes. After centuries of stigmatization, the overall attitude towards Low German... more
Based on data from a language survey conducted in a village in northwest Germany the study analyzes the relationship between language shift and language attitudes. After centuries of stigmatization, the overall attitude towards Low German is now overwhelmingly positive. However, this does not lead to parents raising their children with Low German. Low German seems to loose its traditional domains as in-group variety in families and in informal settings while gaining popularity as language used for entertainment purposes.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has left an impact on the semiotic landscapes of both rural and urban environments. The present study analyses two corpora of signs which emerged as a direct result of the pandemic in the rural environment of... more
The Covid-19 pandemic has left an impact on the semiotic landscapes of both rural and urban environments. The present study analyses two corpora of signs which emerged as a direct result of the pandemic in the rural environment of Krummhörn, a municipality in northern Germany, and in the city of Essen (Ruhr Metropolis) between March and July 2020. In addition to regulatory and informative signage, the data revealed a high proportion of affective signs which were displayed mainly by individuals around private homes, intended as boosters of collective moral in times of crisis. The analysis shows that slightly different semiotic strategies were applied when comparing a rural with an urban environment.
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The German-Speaking World is an accessible textbook that offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in the world. This new, second edition... more
The German-Speaking World is an accessible textbook that offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in the world. This new, second edition has been fully revised to reflect the many political and social changes of the last 20 years including the impact of technology on language change. It continues to combine text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems. Key features of this book: •Informative and comprehensive: covers a wide range of current issues •Practical: contains a variety of graded exercises and tasks plus an index of terms •Topical and contemporary: deals with current situations and provides up-to-date illustrative material •Thought-provoking: encourages students to reflect and research for themselves The German-Speaking World is the ideal textbook for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics.
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Quantitative Research Methods for Linguistics provides an accessible introduction to research methods for undergraduates undertaking research for the first time. Employing a task-based approach, the authors demonstrate key methods through... more
Quantitative Research Methods for Linguistics provides an accessible introduction to research methods for undergraduates undertaking research for the first time. Employing a task-based approach, the authors demonstrate key methods through a series of worked examples, allowing students to take a learn-by-doing approach and making quantitative methods less daunting for the novice researcher. Key features include: Chapters framed around real research questions, walking the student step-by-step through the various methods; Guidance on how to design your own research project; Basic questions and answers that every new researcher needs to know; A comprehensive glossary that makes the most technical of terms clear to readers; Coverage of different statistical packages including R and SPSS. Quantitative Research Methods for Linguistics is essential reading for all students undertaking degrees in linguistics and English language studies.
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This paper analyzes the linguistic repertoires of Jews in the Low German-speaking areas in the first decades of the twentieth century, as a contribution to historical sociolinguistics. Based on fieldwork questionnaires held in the... more
This paper analyzes the linguistic repertoires of Jews in the Low German-speaking areas in the first decades of the twentieth century, as a contribution to historical sociolinguistics. Based on fieldwork questionnaires held in the archives of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), it addresses the question of whether the Jewish minorities spoke a supralectal form of standard German or Koiné forms of dialects, relating this to issues of language shift from Western Yiddish. The study shows that many Jews living in northern Germany during the 1920s and 1930s still had access to a multilingual repertoire containing remnants of Western Yiddish; that a majority of the LCAAJ interviewees from this area emphasized their excellent command of standard German; and that their competence in Low German varied widely, from first language to no competence at all, depending on the region where they lived.
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Accepted for publication by Discourse, Context & Media (DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2016.10.002) This article is the first linguistic analysis of a new category of lifestyle magazines in the German speaking countries, based on methods of corpus... more
Accepted for publication by Discourse, Context & Media (DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2016.10.002)
This article is the first linguistic analysis of a new category of lifestyle magazines in the German speaking countries, based on methods of corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis. Since the launch of the magazine LandLust in Germany in 2005, more than twenty publications of so called "land magazines" have appeared on the market, attracting millions of readers. Our research analyses land magazines as discursive events. We examine the specific combination of discourses land magazines are serving or creating by looking at the semiotic practices - writing and images – they manifest themselves by. Our results show that the magazine under scrutiny does not simply provide new forms of escapism but also positions itself politically in subtle ways as part of the traditional-conservative spectrum by reacting to metalinguistic discourses such as purism and feminist criticism.
Key words: Land magazines, discourse, corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis
This article is the first linguistic analysis of a new category of lifestyle magazines in the German speaking countries, based on methods of corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis. Since the launch of the magazine LandLust in Germany in 2005, more than twenty publications of so called "land magazines" have appeared on the market, attracting millions of readers. Our research analyses land magazines as discursive events. We examine the specific combination of discourses land magazines are serving or creating by looking at the semiotic practices - writing and images – they manifest themselves by. Our results show that the magazine under scrutiny does not simply provide new forms of escapism but also positions itself politically in subtle ways as part of the traditional-conservative spectrum by reacting to metalinguistic discourses such as purism and feminist criticism.
Key words: Land magazines, discourse, corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis
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... Divisions: Languages and Social Sciences > Modern Languages. ID Code: 1601. Deposited By: Gertrud Reershemius. Deposited On: 16 Dec 2009 12:16. Last Modified: 16 Dec 2009 12:16. Repository Staff Only: item control page. ...
Eine Veröffentlichung in Verbindung mit dem Forschungsinstitut für deutsche Sprache Deutscher Sprachatlas" der Philipps-Universität Marburg/Lahn Redaktion: Joachim Göschel Herstellung der Druckvorlage: Gundula Grund, Mark... more
Eine Veröffentlichung in Verbindung mit dem Forschungsinstitut für deutsche Sprache Deutscher Sprachatlas" der Philipps-Universität Marburg/Lahn Redaktion: Joachim Göschel Herstellung der Druckvorlage: Gundula Grund, Mark Pennay, Gertrud Reershemius Bibliografische ...
Gertrud Reershemius (Aston, Birmingham) Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia 1. Traces of a language believed dead since the 19th century 1.1 Introduction Whereas Eastern Yiddish was a thriving language used by millions of speakers... more
Gertrud Reershemius (Aston, Birmingham) Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia 1. Traces of a language believed dead since the 19th century 1.1 Introduction Whereas Eastern Yiddish was a thriving language used by millions of speakers until the Second World War and the ...
Grammatical borrowing in Yiddish Gertrud Reershemius 1. Background The history and development of Yiddish, a west-Germanic language, is inter-twined with language contact from its very beginning. Three layers of con-tact, historical,... more
Grammatical borrowing in Yiddish Gertrud Reershemius 1. Background The history and development of Yiddish, a west-Germanic language, is inter-twined with language contact from its very beginning. Three layers of con-tact, historical, recent and current, can be distinguished. ...
This study is concerned with two phenomena of language alternation in biographic narrations in Yiddish and Low German, based on spoken language data recorded between 1988 and 1995. In both phenomena language alternation serves as an... more
This study is concerned with two phenomena of language alternation in biographic narrations in Yiddish and Low German, based on spoken language data recorded between 1988 and 1995. In both phenomena language alternation serves as an additional communicative ...
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... Divisions: Languages and Social Sciences > Modern Languages. ID Code: 1603. Deposited By: Gertrud Reershemius. Deposited On: 25 Nov 2009 10:51. Last Modified: 14 Dec 2009 13:47. Repository Staff Only: item control page. ...
Gertrud Reershemius (Aston, Birmingham) Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia 1. Traces of a language believed dead since the 19th century 1.1 Introduction Whereas Eastern Yiddish was a thriving language used by millions of speakers... more
Gertrud Reershemius (Aston, Birmingham) Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia 1. Traces of a language believed dead since the 19th century 1.1 Introduction Whereas Eastern Yiddish was a thriving language used by millions of speakers until the Second World War and the ...
Umschlag und Titelseite zeigen zwei junge Auricher, die 1928 ein Gedicht im Auricher Judendeutsch vortragen. Mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Johannes Diekhoff, Aurich. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die... more
Umschlag und Titelseite zeigen zwei junge Auricher, die 1928 ein Gedicht im Auricher Judendeutsch vortragen. Mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Johannes Diekhoff, Aurich. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese ...
... in 1995 and Glasgow in 1996 (Brentano), Manchester in 2001 (Wolzogen), Sydney in 2004 (Raabe), and Lancaster in 2005 (Jensen). ... the Romanies is painfully evident in Thomasius's remarkable amalgam of apology and... more
... in 1995 and Glasgow in 1996 (Brentano), Manchester in 2001 (Wolzogen), Sydney in 2004 (Raabe), and Lancaster in 2005 (Jensen). ... the Romanies is painfully evident in Thomasius's remarkable amalgam of apology and denunciation, fact and invention, critique and credulity. ...
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This article analyses language insertion as a bilingual communicative practice, applying a functional, speaker-focused approach to the study of sociolinguistics and language contact. The article is based on a study of contact phenomena in... more
This article analyses language insertion as a bilingual communicative practice, applying a functional, speaker-focused approach to the study of sociolinguistics and language contact. The article is based on a study of contact phenomena in a formerly diglossic region in Northern Germany, where the previously spoken language – Low German – is in the process of being replaced by the dominant standard variety, German. It examines regional publications in order to establish the linguistic techniques by which Low German elements are incorporated into the Standard German texts and the communicative purposes that they serve. The paper concludes that in the process of language shift an emblematic repertoire from Low German is created which can be applied into the dominant contact language, German, for specific communicative purposes.
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Based on a corpus of English, German, and Polish spoken academic discourse, this article analyzes the distribution and function of humor in academic research presentations. The corpus is the result of a European research cooperation... more
Based on a corpus of English, German, and Polish spoken academic discourse, this article analyzes the distribution and function of humor in academic research presentations. The corpus is the result of a European research cooperation project consisting of 300,000 tokens of spoken academic language, focusing on the genres research presentation, student presentation, and oral examination. The article focuses on differences between the German and English research cultures as expressed in the genre of specialist research presentations and the role of humor as a pragmatic device in their respective contexts. The data is analyzed according to the paradigms of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). The findings of the analysis show that humor is used in research presentations as an expression of discourse reflexivity. They also reveal a considerable difference in the quantitative distribution of humor in research presentations depending on the educational, linguistic, and cultural background of the presenters, thus confirming the notion of different research cultures. Research cultures nurture distinct attitudes to genres of academic language: whereas in one of the research cultures identified researchers conform with the constraints and structures of the genre, those working in another show attempts to subvert them, for example by the application of humor.
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In a time of rapid shift and loss of smaller, regional and minority languages it becomes apparent that many of them continue to play a role as post-vernacular varieties. As Shandler (2006) points out for Yiddish in the United States, some... more
In a time of rapid shift and loss of smaller, regional and minority languages it becomes apparent that many of them continue to play a role as post-vernacular varieties. As Shandler (2006) points out for Yiddish in the United States, some languages serve the purpose of identity ...
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This article deals with language contact between a dominant standard language – German – and a lesser-used variety – Low German – in a situation in which the minoritised language is threatened by language shift and language loss. It... more
This article deals with language contact between a dominant standard language – German – and a lesser-used variety – Low German – in a situation in which the minoritised language is threatened by language shift and language loss. It analyses the application of Low German in forms of public language display and the self-presentation of the community in tourism brochures, focusing on bilingual linguistic practices on the one hand and on underlying discourses on the other. It reveals that top-down and bottom-up approaches to implementing Low German in public language display show a remarkable homogeneity, thus creating a regional ‘brand’. The article asks whether a raised level of visibility will in itself guarantee better chances for linguistic maintenance and survival of the threatened language.