The History of Mecklenburgs Regional Language after the Second World War. Contact of Varieties between the Native Population and German Refugees

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 224625029

The forced migration of more than 12 million German speaking people from their former homes in Central and Eastern Europe did not only have serious impact on the varieties spoken there but it also brought about an entirely new and highly complex contact of German varieties wherever they settled. Focusing on a clearly defined region in Mecklenburg, the research project will for the first time take into account systematically the linguistic consequences of the refugees integration into their new home region. This represents an innovative perspective on the German language history of the 20th century. The complex constellations of varieties within the local communication spaces will be reconstructed according to the three social communities of city, small town and village. The shifts taking place in the hierarchical spectrum of varieties will be examined in the decades from the war until today. Apart from the sociolinguistic, pragmatic and perceptual aspects of the language development beginning in 1945, the structural changes will be analysed with respect to Low German, the regional Mecklenburg standard variety and the varieties of origin that the refugees brought with them. The diachronic research is empirically based on detailed interviews with 90 informants. Each of them were interviewed with respect to their biography and their language biography. Additionally, they were asked to do several language tests. There are four groups among the informants: refugees born in the 1920s and 1930s, their descendants already born in Mecklenburg after 1950 and both the respective age groups of the native Mecklenburg population. The biographical and metalinguistic data are correlated with the performative data about the actual language use of dialects and of the regional standard varieties. The language performance of the interviewed is examined by a frequency analysis of exemplary phonetic and morphosyntactic features. This allows for an exact evaluation of the convergency processes between the different varieties.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants