The dynamics of German in the multilingual context of Southern Africa

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Horst Simon; Professor Dr. Christian Zimmer
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 321339406

The aim of the research project is to describe and to analyse the language use of German-speaking minorities in Southern Africa. The undertaking draws upon an earlier project whose central goal was the documentation and analysis of Namibian German. This took place in the form of a systematic corpus of informal and formal speech. The corpus documents the language use in a community which is particularly dynamic due to its active multilingualism (German, English, Afrikaans), but which ¬¬− unlike many German language islands − actively cultivates German despite its status as a minority language and uses it across generations. Using the newly created resource, the detailed analysis of Namibian-German specifics will be continued, so that their heuristic potential can be exploited with regard to the interaction of the language system, change and contact. In a further step, Namibian German will be contrasted with the language use of German-speaking communities in South Africa (the so-called Springbok-German communities). This is done on the basis of data that has already been archived but has not yet been analysed. Furthermore, targeted follow-up surveys will be conducted in South Africa and Namibia. The comparison makes it possible, among other things, to focus on dialect contact and thus on a previously neglected cause of language change. This is possible because the compared communities are, on the one hand, similar in many aspects (Afrikaans and English are the main contact languages in both cases, emigration took place from the second half of the 19th century, etc.), but, on the other hand, the two settings differ significantly with regard to the historical settlement structure. Namely, settlements founded in South Africa were linguistically very homogeneous, since usually a larger group of settlers emigrated from one town and founded a new, comparatively isolated settlement. In contrast, the former South-West Africa can be regarded as a melting pot of various German dialects. Here, German speakers from all parts of the German-speaking area came into close contact with each other from the very beginning. The comparison of the communities promises to shed light on the linguistic effects of these different circumstances. In this undertaking, phonological analysis is one of the focal points − covering a subject area that has so far been completely neglected for German in Africa. In addition to shared linguistic interests (such as multilingual communities and German in Southern Africa), the project partners contribute important complementary expertise on language change, dialect development, corpus linguistics, and quantitative sociolinguistics. The project is carried out in close coordination with cooperation partners from Namibia and from South Africa, respectively, both of whom are involved in the conception of the analyses and the preparation of the field research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Namibia, South Africa
• Co-Investigators: Privatdozent Dr. Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers; Professorin Dr. Heike Wiese
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Ana Deumert; Professorin Dr. Marianne Zappen-Thomson