- Linguistics, Urban Youth languages, Linguistic Diversity (Languages And Linguistics), German Language and Linguistics, Linguistic Architecture, Language and Migration, and 11 moreSociolinguistics, Multilingualism, Languages and Linguistics, Dialectology, Youth Language, German Language, Grammar, Applied Linguistics, German, Language and Identity, and Language Variation and Changeedit
Public discourse in a range of countries has been reported to be characterised by Othering practices that support dichotomies between a national and monolingual "in-group" and multilingual speakers who are constructed as secondary... more
Public discourse in a range of countries has been reported to be characterised by Othering practices that support dichotomies between a national and monolingual "in-group" and multilingual speakers who are constructed as secondary citizens and often associated with special needs, even if they have grown up locally. Less in the focus of analysis is the fact that such patterns are also found in our field, and a closer look at linguistic publications reveals that certain patterns of Othering might be typical or even systemic, rather than exceptional. Exclusionary practices are evident in terminology that continues to reflect a narrow, monolingual view of (ethnic and) linguistic in-groups. Monolingual practices still tend to be canonised as defining the normal, unmarked case, and bilinguals are then assessed against this yardstick in terms of deviations. As a result, they can be erased as native speakers, have their language use analysed through a lens of potential errors and problems, or be excluded from the speaker pool for linguistic analysis. We present examples from different linguistic subdisciplines and discuss language-ideological implications and possible effects on research perspectives and agendas.
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We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on... more
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the openaccess RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found noncanonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the nativespeaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for noncanonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Greek Language, Multilingualism, English language, German Language, and 15 moreSyntax, Morphology, Linguistics, Russian Language, Language Variation, Heritage language studies, Turkish Language, Bilingualism, Language contact, Phonetics and Phonology, Heritage Language Speakers, Namibia, Monolingualism, Native Speaker, and German in Namibia
Mit Unterstützung der Robert-Bosch-Stiftung im Rahmen ihres „Denkwerk“- Programms führten mehrsprachige Berliner SchülerInnen zusammen mit Studierenden und WissenschaftlerInnen der Germanistik der Universität Potsdam eigene... more
Mit Unterstützung der Robert-Bosch-Stiftung im Rahmen ihres „Denkwerk“-
Programms führten mehrsprachige Berliner SchülerInnen zusammen mit Studierenden und WissenschaftlerInnen der Germanistik der Universität Potsdam eigene Forschungsprojekte zu selbstgewählten sprachwissenschaftlichen Themen durch. Themen waren u. a. ihre eigene Sprachpraxis und der Wechsel zwischen Sprachen (Code-Switching), die tatsächliche Verbreitung angeblicher „Wörter der Jugendsprache“, neue Fremdwörter im Kiezdeutsch, Einstellungen gegenüber Dialekten und Mehrsprachigkeit und vieles mehr. Die Projektpartnerschaft mit Schulen aus sozial benachteiligten Wohngebieten eröffnete gerade solchen Jugendlichen die Perspektive eines geisteswissenschaftlichen Studiums, die an der Universität bislang stark unterrepräsentiert sind, nämlich Kindern aus nicht-akademischen Familien und/oder mit einem sogenannten „Migrationshintergrund“. Kiez goes Uni verstand sie als
SprachexpertInnen, brachte ihnen sprachwissenschaftliche Forschungsmethoden nahe und ermutigte sie zu akademischer Karriere.
Programms führten mehrsprachige Berliner SchülerInnen zusammen mit Studierenden und WissenschaftlerInnen der Germanistik der Universität Potsdam eigene Forschungsprojekte zu selbstgewählten sprachwissenschaftlichen Themen durch. Themen waren u. a. ihre eigene Sprachpraxis und der Wechsel zwischen Sprachen (Code-Switching), die tatsächliche Verbreitung angeblicher „Wörter der Jugendsprache“, neue Fremdwörter im Kiezdeutsch, Einstellungen gegenüber Dialekten und Mehrsprachigkeit und vieles mehr. Die Projektpartnerschaft mit Schulen aus sozial benachteiligten Wohngebieten eröffnete gerade solchen Jugendlichen die Perspektive eines geisteswissenschaftlichen Studiums, die an der Universität bislang stark unterrepräsentiert sind, nämlich Kindern aus nicht-akademischen Familien und/oder mit einem sogenannten „Migrationshintergrund“. Kiez goes Uni verstand sie als
SprachexpertInnen, brachte ihnen sprachwissenschaftliche Forschungsmethoden nahe und ermutigte sie zu akademischer Karriere.
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Using the cover term "Kiezdeutsch", we discuss urban contact dialects in Germany, drawing on different lines of research with different conceptual/theoretical backgrounds. We look at the setting of Kiezdeutsch, a society whose strongly... more
Using the cover term "Kiezdeutsch", we discuss urban contact dialects in Germany, drawing on different lines of research with different conceptual/theoretical backgrounds. We look at the setting of Kiezdeutsch, a society whose strongly dominant monolingual habitus contrasts with its linguistically highly diverse makeup (Section 1); give pointers to pertinent corpora that are available through open access and to the different research foci for Kiezdeutsch so far (Section 2); and provide an overview of findings at grammatical, pragmatic, lexical, and prosodic levels (Section 3). Finally, we summarise sociolinguistic findings from the Kiezdeutsch corpora, including domains of usage and the attitudes and perceptions evident in the macro context (Section 4).
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Die folgende Untersuchung wird Parallelen in der semantisch-konzeptuellen Struktur von Nominalgruppen und Sätzen aufzeigen und so unabhängige, semantische Argumente für den „sentential aspect“ von Nominalgruppen liefern, wie er bereits... more
Die folgende Untersuchung wird Parallelen in der semantisch-konzeptuellen Struktur von Nominalgruppen und Sätzen aufzeigen und so unabhängige, semantische Argumente für den „sentential aspect“ von Nominalgruppen liefern, wie er bereits von Abney (1987) auf syntaktischer Seite motiviert wurde. Ich werde im ersten Teil die semantische und syntaktische Struktur von Sätzen skizzieren und hierbei insbesondere die zentralen semantisch-konzeptuellen Operationen identifizieren, die die Generierung von CPs begleiten. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden im zweiten Teil die zentralen übereinzelsprachlichen Merkmale von Nominalgruppen diskutiert und durch semantisch-konzeptuelle (sowie - in einer Skizze - syntaktische) Repräsentationen erfasst. Das Modell zur Struktur von Nominalgruppen wird in Bezug zu den zuvor skizzierten Annahmen über Sätze gestellt. Es wird sich hierbei zeigen, dass bei der Generierung von DPs die gleichen semantisch- konzeptuellen Operationen wirksam werden, wie sie für CPs fes...
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10. Tagung der Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft Universitätsverlag Potsdam Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen... more
10. Tagung der Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft Universitätsverlag Potsdam Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über
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This paper presents the first release of the KiezDeutsch Korpus (KiDKo), a new language resource with multiparty spoken dialogues of Kiezdeutsch, a newly emerging language variety spoken by adolescents from multi-ethnic urban areas in... more
This paper presents the first release of the KiezDeutsch Korpus (KiDKo), a new language resource with multiparty spoken dialogues of Kiezdeutsch, a newly emerging language variety spoken by adolescents from multi-ethnic urban areas in Germany. The first release of the corpus includes the transcriptions of the data as well as a normalisation layer and part-of-speech annotations. In the paper, we describe the main features of the new resource and then focus on automatic POS tagging of informal spoken language. Our tagger achieves an accuracy of nearly 97% on KiDKo. While we did not succeed in further improving the tagger using ensemble tagging, we present our approach to using the tagger ensembles for identifying error patterns in the automatically tagged data.
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Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extra-territorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it... more
Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extra-territorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it is based on a speech community with German ancestry who still live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from such colonial varieties as Unserdeutsch in the South Pacific and makes it more similar to such German ‘language island’ varieties as, e.g., Texas German in the United States or the German varieties still spoken in Brazil. Second, though, unlike language island varieties as well as other postcolonial varieties and more similar to those in Germany, Namibian German is linguistically vital. It is passed on to younger generations and is also used in public domains, supporting, e.g., register differentiation. Third, unlike most varieties in Germany, however, it is integrated in a setting of societal multilingualism, with speakers who routinely u...
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Mass and Count in Language and Cognition: Some Evidence from Language Comprehension Heike Wiese (heike.wiese@rz.hu-berlin.de) Humboldt University Berlin, Department of German Language and Linguistics, Unter den Linden 6 100999 Berlin,... more
Mass and Count in Language and Cognition: Some Evidence from Language Comprehension Heike Wiese (heike.wiese@rz.hu-berlin.de) Humboldt University Berlin, Department of German Language and Linguistics, Unter den Linden 6 100999 Berlin, Germany Maria M. Pinango (maria.pinango@yale.edu) Yale University, Department of Linguistics, P.O.Box 208236, HGS 318 New Haven, CT, USA In linguistics and the philosophy of language, the mass/count distinction has traditionally been regarded as a bi-partition on the nominal domain, where typical instances are nouns like ‘beef’ (mass) vs. ‘cow’ (count). In the present paper, we argue that this partition re- veals a system that is based on both syntactic features and conceptual features, and present experimental evi- dence suggesting that the discrimination of the two kinds of features has a psychological reality. We account for the mass/count distinction by a binary classification of nouns based on a syntactic feature [± tn] (‘transnumeral’) and a conc...
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Mit dem neuen Rahmenlehrplan fur die Lander Brandenburg und Berlin wird der Kompetenzentwicklung der Schulerinnen und Schuler unter den Bedingungen lebensweltlicher Erfahrungen ein besonderer Stellenwert beigemessen. Der Sammelband... more
Mit dem neuen Rahmenlehrplan fur die Lander Brandenburg und Berlin wird der Kompetenzentwicklung der Schulerinnen und Schuler unter den Bedingungen lebensweltlicher Erfahrungen ein besonderer Stellenwert beigemessen. Der Sammelband enthalt Beitrage, in denen den Lehrerinnen und Lehrern vielfaltige Unterrichtsmaterialien und didaktische Anregungen fur einen praxisnahen, entdeckenden Unterricht in der Primar- und Sekundarstufe fur den Deutschunterricht vorgestellt werden. Diese reichen von theoretischen Grundlagen, uber einzelne Unterrichtssequenzen und Projekte bis zur Darstellung einer Lernspirale fur die Jahrgangsstufen 1 bis 10. Vielfaltige, auch multimediale Zugange bis zum spielerischen Umgang mit der Sprache zeigen, dass Sprache kein „trockener“ Lerngegenstand sein muss. Die Beitrage geben daruber hinaus Einblicke in die fachlichen Hintergrunde, die helfen sollen, den Zugang zu den einzelnen Gegenstanden zu erleichtern. Das thematische Zentrum „Region“ bildet den Ausgangspunkt ...
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This paper analyses examples of pejoration in the dynamic multilinguals setting of urban German, and their possible Turkish sources. The focus of our investigation is on pejorative functions of m -reduplication (“Cola Mola”). In addition,... more
This paper analyses examples of pejoration in the dynamic multilinguals setting of urban German, and their possible Turkish sources. The focus of our investigation is on pejorative functions of m -reduplication (“Cola Mola”). In addition, we discuss usages of “Scherz”/“Spas” ‘joke, fun’ in urban German, as well as their Turkish counterpart “saka”, as markers that cancels the performative force of a preceding utterance and can thus bring about depejoration , the cancellation of initial pejoration. We show that the pejoration involved in our examples is pattern-based rather than linked to individual evaluative elements, and account for this as “constructional pejoration”. Interestingly, the patterns we find here are not exclusively pejorative, but can also support such concepts as amplification, ‘coolness’, and ludic aspects, putting a spotlight on links between pejoration and other cognitive domains. We model these links in a network of systematic conceptual relationships and pragmatic inferences.
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This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whetherKiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in... more
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whetherKiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language ‘High German’, a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of ‘German’ speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane. (Standard language ideology, Kiezdeutsch, dia...
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Semantics, Predication, Linguistics, Gottlob Frege, and 3 moreNouns, DDC, and Lexikologie
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Der Beitrag beschreibt ein Korpus spontansprachlicher Daten von Jugendlichen aus urbanen Wohngebieten und präsentiert Ergebnisse darauf basierender Korpusanalysen. Die Daten stammen aus Selbstaufnahmen von Gesprächen Berliner Jugendlicher... more
Der Beitrag beschreibt ein Korpus spontansprachlicher Daten von Jugendlichen aus urbanen Wohngebieten und präsentiert Ergebnisse darauf basierender Korpusanalysen. Die Daten stammen aus Selbstaufnahmen von Gesprächen Berliner Jugendlicher (23 Ankersprecher/innen, 14 bis 17 Jahre alt). Das Korpus umfasst rund 333.000 Token. Den größeren Teil stellen Daten ein-und mehrsprachiger Sprecher/innen dar, die aus einem Wohngebiet mit einem hohen Bevölkerungsanteil mit Migrationshintergrund stammen. Wie an ande-rer Stelle argumentiert, kann die multiethnische Jugendsprache, die hier gesprochen wird, das sog. "Kiez-deutsch", als neuer, dynamischer Dialekt des Deutschen charakterisiert werden. Ein kleinerer Teil des Kor-pus bringt Daten aus einem sozioökonomisch vergleichbaren, aber weitgehend monoethnischen Wohngebiet zusammen. Das Korpus stellt eine neue empirische Ressource für Untersuchungen zum Sprachgebrauch in mehrsprachigen Kontexten, urbaner Jugendsprache und spontaner, infor...
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In the domain of motion event encoding, many of the world’s languages fall into one of two types: verb-framed (the path is encoded in the verb) or satellite-framed (the path is encoded outside the verb in a prefix, particle or adverbial... more
In the domain of motion event encoding, many of the world’s languages fall into one of two types: verb-framed (the path is encoded in the verb) or satellite-framed (the path is encoded outside the verb in a prefix, particle or adverbial while the verb contains information about the manner of movement). A number of studies have investigated the language usage of bilingual speakers or language learners to find evidence of a transfer of the typological pattern of the dominant/native language to the non-dominant/foreign language. These studies have largely failed to show evidence of a straightforward transfer, although more subtle effects on usage have occasionally been observed. In this paper, we report the results of a corpus study comparing two groups of speakers of the urban German ethnolect “Kiezdeutsch”: one with a monolingual German background and one with a bilingual Turkish-German background. We find no significant differences in their preference for path or manner verbs, which...
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I give a unified account of numeral classifiers as lexical items that are reduced to the function of individuation in cardinal counting constructions with transnumeral nouns. I argue that individuation is a lexical-semantic phe- nomenon... more
I give a unified account of numeral classifiers as lexical items that are reduced to the function of individuation in cardinal counting constructions with transnumeral nouns. I argue that individuation is a lexical-semantic phe- nomenon that triggers a focus shift from a whole set to its individual elements, but does not affect the conceptual representation. The semantic reduction of numeral classifiers to individuation functions is, on the one hand, re- flected by a morpho-syntactic reduction; numeral classifiers do not project to full NPs, but occur as head- adjuncts in QPs. On the other hand, it leads to a loss of conceptual features. As a result, nouns that are used as numeral classifiers are conceptually divorced from their NP counterparts. They integrate the nominal concept not as part of their interpretation, but via agreement features that govern the distribution of nouns in classifier- constructions. I show that the selection of conceptual features relevant for the distribu...
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Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure... more
Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure has rarely been investigated. One reason for this might be, that measuring effects of syntactic structure involves the use of complex stimuli, for which the emotional impact of grammar is difficult to isolate. In the present experiment we examined the emotional impact of structural parallelisms, that is, repetitions of syntactic features, on the emotion-sensitive "late positive potential" (LPP) with a cross-modal priming paradigm. Primes were auditory presented nonsense sentences which included grammatical-syntactic parallelisms. Visual targets were positive, neutral, and negative faces, to be classified as emotional or non-emotional by the participants. Electrophysiology revealed diminished LPP amplitudes for positive faces following parallel primes. Thus, our findings suggest that grammatical structure creates an emotional context that facilitates processing of positive emotional information.
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This article gives an overview of our ongoing research on the processing and representation of light verb constructions. Light verb constructions consist of a light verb, which is semantically bleached, and an event nominal, which... more
This article gives an overview of our ongoing research on the processing and representation of light verb constructions. Light verb constructions consist of a light verb, which is semantically bleached, and an event nominal, which identifies the kind of event. Together the noun and the verb determine the structure of that event (the number of participants and their roles). Critically, in light verb constructions the canonical mapping from surface syntactic structure to event structure is disrupted. The present studies examine this phenomenon through the lens of language processing. We summarize several behavioral and neurolinguistic studies that show that the interpretation of light verb constructions relies on noncanonical mappings between syntax and semantics, while their syntactic structure is not different from non-light constructions.
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The paper investigates sociolinguistic coherence and differentiation for the example of Namibian German (‘Namdeutsch’), based on corpus data and a copy-editing task. The Namdeutsch speech community draws on a local Namibian identity as... more
The paper investigates sociolinguistic coherence and differentiation for the example of Namibian German (‘Namdeutsch’), based on corpus data and a copy-editing task. The Namdeutsch speech community draws on a local Namibian identity as well as an ethnic German identity. At the linguistic level, this leads to a tension between a tendency for Namdeutsch to develop distinctive local features on the one hand, and to remain close to standard German in Germany on the other hand, and this can interact with register distinctions. Data from the DNam corpus of German in Namibia shows that noncanonical local variants are primarily associated with informal registers, but that some are also used in formal language. We hypothesised that particularly variants with weaker overt reflexes, which we assumed to be of lower social salience, can enter formal registers. This was confirmed in a copy-editing task where Namdeutsch speakers were asked to correct a newspaper article. Taken together, our findings point to a broader Namdeutsch dialect that encompasses informal and formal settings in an orderly heterogeneity that is modulated by social meaning linked to local and ethnic identities and a hierarchy of sociolinguistic salience reflecting the overt manifestation of linguistic variables.
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I bring together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem incom-mensurable, namely sociolinguistic approaches to linguistic fluidity and multi-competence on the one hand, and structural approaches to linguistic... more
I bring together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem incom-mensurable, 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 systematicity, 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.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Contact Linguistics, Multilingualism, Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, and 14 moreLanguage and Identity, Theoretical Linguistics, Language Variation, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Heritage language studies, Crosslinguistic Influence, Language contact, Grammar, Numerals, Street Markets, Numeral Classifiers, Register Analysis, Kiezdeutsch, and Emoji
This paper brings together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem in-commensurable, namely sociolinguistic approaches to linguistic fluidity and multi-competence on the one hand, and structural approaches to... more
This paper brings together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem in-commensurable, 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 systematicity, 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.
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We investigate emoji as graphic discourse markers in German WhatsApp® messages. As comparably novel devices in the rapidly evolving domain of digital messenging, emoji provide an interesting example to observe change in progress. We... more
We investigate emoji as graphic discourse markers in German WhatsApp® messages. As comparably novel devices in the rapidly evolving domain of digital messenging, emoji provide an interesting example to observe change in progress. We present a corpus study and an experimental study. Main results are (i) an overall salience of subjective and intersubjective discourse meanings for emoji, with (ii) a general advantage for the former, especially for emoji that iconically include more active elements, while (iii) dominance relations can be modulated by left-vs. right-peripheral positions in favor of subjective vs. intersubjective meanings, respectively. By approaching emoji as discourse markers, the studies contribute to our understanding of their pragmatic contribution and provide novel evidence on positional-functional associations for pragmatic markers.
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Nach einer Unterrichtsstunde, in der intensiv Präpositionen behandelt wurden, dreht sich eine Schü-lerin zu ihrer Freundin um und sagt "Lassma Cafeteria gehen, lan." Wie geht man mit so etwas um? War das Bemühen um korrekte Grammatik im... more
Nach einer Unterrichtsstunde, in der intensiv Präpositionen behandelt wurden, dreht sich eine Schü-lerin zu ihrer Freundin um und sagt "Lassma Cafeteria gehen, lan." Wie geht man mit so etwas um? War das Bemühen um korrekte Grammatik im Deutschunterricht völlig umsonst? Wieso erscheint hier ein türkisches Wort ("lan"-"Typ/Mann") im deutschen Satz? Was sagt eine solche Äußerung über die Deutschkompetenzen der Schülerin aus? Dieser Forumsbeitrag behandelt solche und ähnli-che Fragen zu "Kiezdeutsch", dem Sprachgebrauch Jugendlicher in mehrsprachigen Wohngebieten, geht auf einige Besonderheiten in Grammatik und Wortschatz ein und zeigt, wie man Kiezdeutsch für grammatische und lexikalische Übungen im Deutschunterricht nutzen kann.
Modern German is usually regarded as a typical instance of a Germanic V2 language, with a strict V2 restriction for matrix declaratives that requires exactly one position to be filled in the 'forefield' in front of the finite verb.... more
Modern German is usually regarded as a typical instance of a Germanic V2 language, with a strict V2 restriction for matrix declaratives that requires exactly one position to be filled in the 'forefield' in front of the finite verb. However, recent findings from spoken language use outside formal standard German provide evidence for linearisations that violate this constraint, suggesting that there might be extensions of V2 in German to a more liberal forefield that can also accommodate V3. Evidence for this was first reported from Kiezdeutsch, an urban dialect from informal peer group settings in multilingual contexts (Wiese 2009, 2013), and has subsequently also been found in more monolingual settings of German (Schalowski 2012, 2015). Findings point to a specific pattern that allows both framesetters and topics to appear together in the left periphery. We present results from a cross-linguistic study that further explored such an information-structural motive. The investigation was inspired by a seminal study by Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) that revealed language-independent preferences for the serialisation of thematic roles, a 'natural order of events'. In our study, we investigated a possible 'natural order of information': we tested whether speakers of typologically different languages, namely German, English, and Turkish, were more likely to place verbs in a position after framesetter plus topic (supporting V3) if language-specific grammatical restrictions were removed. In order to test this, we presented speakers with a (non-verbal) comic sequence and asked them to describe the final picture, which included a framesetter (a time indicated on a clock) and an animate or inanimate topic. Participants had to render the scene (a) verbally and (b) in an 'extra-grammatical' setup , using little plastic figures, wooden clocks, and paper slips with written verbs. Results indicate an information-structural motivation of V3 that holds across speakers of different linguistic backgrounds (German, English, Turkish), even in violation of language-specific word order options.
This chapter looks at cities as vibrant sites of language contact. Urban areas have always been a magnet for immigration, from surrounding areas as well as from more distant regions and other countries, and as a result they have always... more
This chapter looks at cities as vibrant sites of language contact. Urban areas have always been a magnet for immigration, from surrounding areas as well as from more distant regions and other countries, and as a result they have always been characterised by a rich diversity of social groups, (sub-)cultures, and the different languages, dialects, and styles associated with them. The linguistic fluidity and diversity of cities offers a particularly favourable context for new developments, providing a rich pool of linguistic ressources and ample opportunities for language contact in individuals as well as speech communities. This makes urban areas a hotbed of code mixing, switching, and linguistic innovation leading to new linguistic practices and the emergence of new varieties.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Contact Linguistics, Dialectology, Multilingualism, Sociolinguistics, and 15 moreLanguage Variation and Change, German Language, Linguistics, Language Variation, Berlin, Bilingualism and Multilingualism, Language contact, Urban Youth languages, Mixed Languages, Contact Linguistics Language Contact and Sociolinguistic Variation, Urban markets - informal retailing, Street Markets, Language Contact, Variation and Change, Metrolingualism, and Kiezdeutsch
Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extraterritorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it is... more
Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extraterritorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it is based on a speech community with German ancestry who still live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from such colonial varieties as Unserdeutsch in the South Pacific and makes it more similar to such German " language island " varieties as, e.g., Texas German in the United States or the German varieties still spoken in Brazil. Second, though, unlike language island varieties as well as other postcolonial varieties and more similar to those in Germany, Namibian German is linguistically vital. It is passed on to younger generations and is also used in public domains, supporting, e.g., register differentiation. Third, unlike most varieties in Germany, however, it is integrated in a setting of societal multilingualism, with speakers who routinely use two or more languages in addition to German in their daily lives, and with a broader context of high linguistic diversity, offering a wealth of language contact opportunities. In this paper, we describe this special status of Namibian German and present first results from a project that capitalises on this to investigate the (socio-)linguistic dynamics that this setting supports, affording us a spotlight on tendencies of language attitudes and language variation in contact situations of German.
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... more
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.
English Abstract Namibian German has an interesting status among German contact varieties outside Europe. It has its roots in colonisation, but is used by a speech community with German ancestry who live in Namibia today, which... more
English Abstract
Namibian German has an interesting status among German contact varieties outside Europe. It has its roots in colonisation, but is used by a speech community with German ancestry who live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from typical (post-)colonial varieties, and makes it more similar to " language island " varieties of German. However, unlike either of these types – and more similar to the situation within Europe than those – German in Namibia is linguistically vital, it is acquired by children, and also used in public domains. This means that we find not only a number of interesting contact phenomena, but also systematic register differentiation. In our paper, we compare language use in informal and formal settings, address the status of informal vernaculars in speakers' broader linguistic repertoires, and discuss how standard language ideologies pan out in this setting where German is not the national majority language, and how they interact with markers of local, Namibian identity.
Namibian German has an interesting status among German contact varieties outside Europe. It has its roots in colonisation, but is used by a speech community with German ancestry who live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from typical (post-)colonial varieties, and makes it more similar to " language island " varieties of German. However, unlike either of these types – and more similar to the situation within Europe than those – German in Namibia is linguistically vital, it is acquired by children, and also used in public domains. This means that we find not only a number of interesting contact phenomena, but also systematic register differentiation. In our paper, we compare language use in informal and formal settings, address the status of informal vernaculars in speakers' broader linguistic repertoires, and discuss how standard language ideologies pan out in this setting where German is not the national majority language, and how they interact with markers of local, Namibian identity.
Kiezdeutsch ist ein Sprachgebrauch, den Schüler/inne/n meist gut kennen; viele verwenden es auch in ihrer eigenen Alltagssprache. Diese Vertrautheit und das oft große Interesse an Kiezdeutsch kann man sich im Deutschunterricht zu Nutze... more
Kiezdeutsch ist ein Sprachgebrauch, den Schüler/inne/n meist gut kennen; viele verwenden es auch in ihrer eigenen Alltagssprache. Diese Vertrautheit und das oft große Interesse an Kiezdeutsch kann man sich im Deutschunterricht zu Nutze machen, um die Reflexion über Sprache und Grammatik und den Umgang mit grammatischen Regeln und Begrifflichkeiten zu fördern. Wir stellen multimediale Materialien vor, mit denen Schüler/innen selbst zu Sprachforscher/innen werden und in Form von Gruppenarbeit die systematischen Regeln, die auch Kiezdeutsch-Phänomenen zugrunde liegen, aufspüren und denen des Standarddeutschen gegenüberstellen. Die Materialien fördern auf unterhaltsame Weise einen aktiven Umgang mit Grammatik, zeigen sprachliche Kompetenzen auch außerhalb des Standarddeutschen auf und fördern ein positives sprachliches Selbstbild, das Schüler/innen beim Ausbau des Standarddeutschen und der schulischen „Bildungssprache“ unterstützt. Sämtliche Materialien (einschließlich Folien, Audio- und Video-Dateien, Arbeitsaufträgen für die Gruppenarbeit und Ablaufplänen) stehen zum kostenlosen Download unter www.deutsch-ist-vielseitig.de zur Verfügung.
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In diesem Aufsatz stellen wir Unterrichtsmaterialien vor, die das Ziel haben, den spielerischen Zugang zur Grammatik von Dialekten im Unterricht zu unterstützen. Im Mittelpunkt steht ein Dialekt-Quiz zum Berlinischen, das in... more
In diesem Aufsatz stellen wir Unterrichtsmaterialien vor, die das Ziel haben, den spielerischen Zugang zur Grammatik von Dialekten im Unterricht zu unterstützen. Im Mittelpunkt steht ein Dialekt-Quiz zum Berlinischen, das in Gruppenarbeit, aber auch im Plenum gespielt werden kann. Durch ein solches Quiz entdecken die Schüler/innen, dass auch Dialekte grammatischen Regeln folgen und nicht eine fehlerhafte Variante des „richtigen“ Deutschen sind. Sie machen die Erfahrung, dass sie diese Regeln intuitiv richtig beurteilen können. Durch den anschließenden analytischen Zugang erweitern und festigen die Schüler/innen ihr grammatisches Wissen und lernen, Varietäten des Deutschen zu unterscheiden und zu charakterisieren (eine Vorgabe der Rahmenlehrpläne der meisten Bundesländer).
Im Beitrag wird nach einer kurzen Vorstellung des Berliner Dialekts hinsichtlich seiner historischen Entwicklung und einiger grammatischer Merkmale das Berlinisch-Quiz detailliert kommentiert und erläutert. Das Quiz wird ergänzt um Arbeitsmaterialien für Frei¬arbeit in Gruppen, um eine Online-Komponente für ein Publikums-Voting und um Powerpoint-Foliensätze für den Einsatz im Unterricht.
Das Quiz bildet einen Baustein in einem größeren Programm, das unter dem Titel „Deutsch ist vielseitig“ multimediale Materialien für Kindergarten und Schule (Primar- und Sekundarbereich) zur Verfügung stellt. Alle Materialien, auf die hier verwiesen wird, stehen auf der Programm-Website zum kostenlosen Download bereit (www.deutsch-ist-vielseitig.de).
Im Beitrag wird nach einer kurzen Vorstellung des Berliner Dialekts hinsichtlich seiner historischen Entwicklung und einiger grammatischer Merkmale das Berlinisch-Quiz detailliert kommentiert und erläutert. Das Quiz wird ergänzt um Arbeitsmaterialien für Frei¬arbeit in Gruppen, um eine Online-Komponente für ein Publikums-Voting und um Powerpoint-Foliensätze für den Einsatz im Unterricht.
Das Quiz bildet einen Baustein in einem größeren Programm, das unter dem Titel „Deutsch ist vielseitig“ multimediale Materialien für Kindergarten und Schule (Primar- und Sekundarbereich) zur Verfügung stellt. Alle Materialien, auf die hier verwiesen wird, stehen auf der Programm-Website zum kostenlosen Download bereit (www.deutsch-ist-vielseitig.de).
Research Interests:
Heike Wiese is Professor of Contemporary German Language at the University of Potsdam, Germany and Speaker at the university’s Centre for Language, Variation, and Migration. She has research interests in linguistic variation, grammar,... more
Heike Wiese is Professor of Contemporary German Language at the University of Potsdam, Germany and Speaker at the university’s Centre for Language, Variation, and Migration. She has research interests in linguistic variation, grammar, lexicon, and linguistic architecture, and her most recent work has investigated the urban vernacular Kiezdeutsch (lit. '(neighbour-)hood German'), spoken informally by young people living in linguistically and ethnically diverse urban areas. While the general public has tended to see Kiezdeutsch as 'broken German' and as evidence for a 'double semilingualism', Heike approaches it from a dialect perspective, showing that Kiezdeutsch phenomena are systematic, innovative and primarily motivated by internal dynamics of the German linguistic system rather than heritage language interference. This has provoked a veritable firestorm – an intense and often aggressive language ideological debate in the media, on the internet and in hate mail. She has described the conceptual contours of this in an earlier working paper, and in this very wide-ranging interview with Louise Eley and Ben Rampton, she talks about her personal experience of being at the centre of this uproar, the strategies she developed to handle it, the other ways in which she engages the public with her research on Kiezdeutsch, the responses from other linguists, and approaches to public and practical intervention in German academic life.
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This is the introduction to a collected volume "Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South." In this introduction, we define urban contact dialects, explain our perspective on examples from... more
This is the introduction to a collected volume "Urban Contact Dialects and
Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South." In this introduction, we define urban contact dialects, explain our perspective on examples from countries with a strong monolingual habitus vs. those with a multilingual societal perspective, and give an overview of the contributions in the book.
Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South." In this introduction, we define urban contact dialects, explain our perspective on examples from countries with a strong monolingual habitus vs. those with a multilingual societal perspective, and give an overview of the contributions in the book.
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This paper describes the corpus Deutsch in Namibia (DNam, 'German in Namibia'), which will be openly accessible via the Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD, 'Database for Spoken German'). This corpus is a new digital resource that... more
This paper describes the corpus Deutsch in Namibia (DNam, 'German in Namibia'), which will be openly accessible via the Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD, 'Database for Spoken German'). This corpus is a new digital resource that comprehensively and systematically documents the language use of the German-speaking minority in Namibia and related language attitudes. We discuss data collection and elicitation methods (conversation groups, "language situations", semi-structured interviews), data processing including transcription, normalisation and tagging, general corpus characteristics available (size, available metadata etc.) and some basic functionalities within the DGD. First research results based on this new empirical resource illustrate its value for studies on language contact, variation and sociolinguistics.
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Taking a comparative perspective on European and African settings, this chapter describes several contact dialects that emerged in multilingual and multiethnic urban contexts among young people. These dialects emerge as peer-group markers... more
Taking a comparative perspective on European and African settings, this chapter describes several contact dialects that emerged in multilingual and multiethnic urban contexts among young people. These dialects emerge as peer-group markers of a new generation of locally born speakers who grow up in multiethnic urban communities based on (internal or external) immigration. In different societal contexts, they take on different forms of contact-linguistic codes: the societal multilingualism typical for many African countries supports the formation of Multilingual Mixed Languages, whereas the monolingual bias in European societies favours new variants of the respective majority languages, which involve contact-induced as well as contact-facilitated language change. In both cases, standard language ideologies can lead to negative views of urban contact dialects in the larger society; in European nation states, the devaluation of these dialects can also serve as a proxy for the devaluation of their speakers, who are constructed as social and ethnic 'Others'.
Research Interests:
Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extraterritorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it is... more
Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extraterritorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it is based on a speech community with German ancestry who still live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from such colonial varieties as Unserdeutsch in the South Pacific and makes it more similar to such German " language island " varieties as, e.g., Texas German in the United States or the German varieties still spoken in Brazil. Second, though, unlike language island varieties as well as other postcolonial varieties and more similar to those in Germany, Namibian German is linguistically vital. It is passed on to younger generations and is also used in public domains, supporting, e.g., register differentiation. Third, unlike most varieties in Germany, however, it is integrated in a setting of societal multilingualism, with speakers who routinely use two or more languages in addition to German in their daily lives, and with a broader context of high linguistic diversity, offering a wealth of language contact opportunities. In this paper, we describe this special status of Namibian German and present first results from a project that capitalises on this to investigate the (socio-)linguistic dynamics that this setting supports, affording us a spotlight on tendencies of language attitudes and language variation in contact situations of German.
Research Interests:
Manuscript / Authors’ copy: a shorter version will appear as a contribution to HSK 30.4, "Language & Space: Deutsch" (de Gruyter), eds. Joachim Herrgen & Jürgen Erich Schmidt; Chapter 38.