Toward a fused lect

This study investigates the use in the German dialect of Palota (Romania) of a mixed construction1 consisting of the Hungarian generalizing particle akár- (‘ever’) and a German interrogative wh-pronoun, e.g. wer, wann, wo etc. which, following the Hungarian ‘ever’-wh-compound pattern has emerged as a conjunction for the concessive conditional (Leuschner 2000) – a clause type that has a complex structure in Standard German but which is not common in German dialects. A qualitative analysis of the data (23 hours of informal conversations with 33 participants) reveals that there are no monolingual alternatives for concessive conditional conjunctions in the German dialect and that there is no variation of these forms, thus pointing to a grammaticalization process and supporting a movement along the continuum code-switching → language mixing → fused lects (Auer 1998b).