The legacy of emigration: Conference on German as a minority language abroad

The aim of the international conference series, the fifth edition of which is now taking place at the KU and LMU, is to bring together established and early-career researchers working on German as a global language of origin outside the German-speaking world. "Languages of origin and multilingualism create close connections between people. We study the function of language in multilingual communities, its grammatical properties and current developments in different societies around the world", explains Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kürschner. German had already spread since the early Middle Ages through settlement processes, initially primarily in Eastern and Southern Europe. In the course of emigration movements across the Atlantic, North America in particular was initially strongly German-speaking. There, however, there are now only a few minorities that can be clearly defined by language. In South America, on the other hand, there is still a large group of German speakers, especially in Brazil. Elsewhere, emigration was closely linked to state-organized colonialism. Thus, there is a comparatively large number of people in Namibia who speak German. In Papua New Guinea, on the other hand, "Unserdeutsch" is the only German creole language. This branch of the German language in turn goes back to the contact with the English-based creole language "Tok Pisin". It developed among multilingual children in a boarding school where they were taught High German by German nuns. While it contains many German words, it still differs greatly from German as regards grammar. For example, the equivalent for the German sentence "Um drei Uhr hole ich dich ab.” (I will pick you up at three.) in Unserdeutsch is:  "Drei Uhr i komm aufpicken du." Few descendants of these children, today mainly living in Australia, still speak the "Unserdeutsch", which will be one of the topics at the symposium.

The general linguistic interest in such and other constellations is manifold. Researchers are investigating, for example, what influence contact with the language of the respective country has on the further development of the particular variety of German used. "It is difficult to distinguish precisely between the effects of this contact and the further development that language is subjected to anyway", explains Professor Kürschner's research assistant David Hünlich. "In addition, we are interested in what the language means to those who speak it in terms of identity, what factors contribute to language retention and language loss, and what language policies prevail in the respective country." In Brazil, for example, where Professor Kürschner has conducted research on “Hunsrückisch” German, among other things, German lessons were banned in the course of World War II, so that the dialect was only passed on to the next generation in private. German has survived there, especially in rural areas, and is hardly used in writing today. In North America, on the other hand, a focus of Hünlich's work, varieties with German roots are still used in particular in religiously influenced communities. In Namibia, there are German-language schools with close contact to Germany. Thus, the character of the German language worldwide ranges from rather dialectal usage to varieties that are close to current standard German. Accordingly, the researchers are also interested in how, for example, dialects that are disconnected from standard German continue to develop. Methodologically, it is partly challenging that the transmission was mainly happening orally.