Publications
Publication details [#62188]
Andersen, Christiane. 2016. Syntax in Contact. Word Order in a Contact Variety of German Spoken in Eastern Siberia. Journal of language contact 9 (2) : 264–292.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Brill
Annotation
A large number of local German language communities were founded in various parts of Russia between 1765 and the second half of the 19th century. The continuity of development in these German-speaking communities was sharply interrupted by WWII. As a result, the particular variety of Russlanddeutsch ‘Russian German’ (RG) is dying out. This study examines a sample of nowadays spoken German in Eastern Siberia employing the digitalized Siberian German Corpus (SGC) at the University of Gothenburg. It tries to determine (i) which word order variants are accomplished especially in clauses with the German discourse marker nun ‘well’ and its Russian counterpart nu ‘well’, and (ii) what the impact of language contact could be. There appears to be a great variety of word order phenomena and a high level of language contact in the examples comprising Russian nu. Various kinds of borrowing (lexical transference inclusive) are repeated features of this contact variety.