SHWITZER: Amish Shwitzer as a mixed language with closely related parents

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Guido Seiler
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403803976

Mixed languages inherit linguistic subsystems from two different parental languages, viz. e.g. Media Lengua with Quechua grammatical structure and Spanish lexicon. Such systematic splits seem to be possible only in mixed languages whose parental languages are genetically and typologically distant from each other. However, Amish Shwitzer (Indiana, USA) is a mixed language derived from two closely related parental languages, namely Bernese Swiss German and Pennsylvania Dutch, whereby grammatical structure is largely Pennsylvania Dutch and Bernese linguistic features are concentrated in the lexicon. It is thus a so far unreported type of mixed language. The proposed project aims at determining the amount and nature of Bernese and Pennsylvania Dutch features in Amish Shwitzer. Furthermore, the project aims at reconstructing the sociolinguistic context under which this group of 19th century Swiss Anabaptist immigrants came into such close contact with Pennsylvania Dutch. The project sheds new light on the conditions and possible outcomes of intensive language contact, since Amish Shwitzer is rather untypical in the context of other known mixed languages. We expect that the proposed study has the potential to revise and refine long-standing assumptions of contact linguistics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants