Übergänge zur Schriftlichkeit. Zu wechselnden Profilen dialektaler Literalität am Beispiel des Niederdeutschen

Different types of Low German literacy create varieties in addition to spoken Low German. Their function differs according to the change of language use. By setting the focus on dialectal literature it becomes clear, which concepts of Low German literature became influential since the 19th century. In the recent situation, new perspectives for Low German and its literature can be found in the field of planned language acquisition for example at school. Therefore written forms of Low German become much more important than usually thought of by looking at the ideas of language policy and the development at schools in Northern Germany

An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them

How to Deal with Non-Dominant Languages – Metalinguistic Discourses on Low German in the Nineteenth Century

This paper discusses nineteenth-century metalinguistic discussions of Low German, an authochthonous of Northern Germany, which, having lost its status as a written language suitable for formal discourse during the Early Modern period, has since been reduced to the spoken domain. During the nineteenth century the language was on the verge of enjoying a revival, with original poetry being published and extensive discussions as to whether Low German ought to play a role in formal education. As this article shows, this discussion was intense and controversial. Comparing the views of Klaus Groth, the leading proponent of Low German in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the internal debates amongst school teachers - hitherto never discussed by the scholarly literature – this article demonstrates the intellectual and ideological split felt by these educational practioners in their views of Low German: on the one hand, they recognise the cultural value of Low German as the historical language of the North and the native language of the pupils they teach, on the other hand they agree with each other that the language of education and science, as well as national unity, can only be High German. We hope to show with our discussion not only how very similar modern thinking on the use of Low German is to these historical discussions but also how the status and perception of many regional and minority languages across the world has been subject to the same or very similar thoughts and pressures

Review of \u3cem\u3eGerman Language, Cradle of Our Heritage\u3c/em\u3e—Amos Hoover

German Language, Cradle of our Heritage provides a window into the social story behind heritage language maintenance among High German-speaking Swiss Mennonites (as opposed to the Low German-speaking Netherlandic Mennonites). Pennsylvania German, also known as Pennsylvania Dutch, is a variety of New World High German, historically spoken in the Old Order Mennonite community, among others. As with many heritage languages in the United States today, Pennsylvania German has faced obsolescence due to a gradual contraction of the appropriate social settings for heritage language. In these communities, American English use expands and fills the social spaces that were historically reserved for the heritage language. [First paragraph

Machine Translation of Low-Resource Spoken Dialects: Strategies for Normalizing Swiss German

The goal of this work is to design a machine translation (MT) system for a low-resource family of dialects, collectively known as Swiss German, which are widely spoken in Switzerland but seldom written. We collected a significant number of parallel written resources to start with, up to a total of about 60k words. Moreover, we identified several other promising data sources for Swiss German. Then, we designed and compared three strategies for normalizing Swiss German input in order to address the regional diversity. We found that character-based neural MT was the best solution for text normalization. In combination with phrase-based statistical MT, our solution reached 36% BLEU score when translating from the Bernese dialect. This value, however, decreases as the testing data becomes more remote from the training one, geographically and topically. These resources and normalization techniques are a first step towards full MT of Swiss German dialects.Comment: 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki (Japan

Проблема змішування турецької, болгарської та німецької мов у болгарських ромів-мусульман у Німеччині

The paper discusses language mixing by Muslim Roma migrants from northeastern Bulgaria living in Berlin, Germany. They identify as Turks and in their everyday communication speak mainly Bulgarian and an old northwestern lect of Turkish, in the scientific literature known as Balkanized Turkish. They can speak relatively little German and have demonstrably low proficiency in the language. The paper examines their language mixing as well as the forms of code-switching between Turkish, Bulgarian and German. These linguistic and social phenomena within the Muslim Roma community are analyzed within the framework of several sociolinguistic theories regarding code-switching and bilingualism. The theory of J. Gumperz (1962) about communication matrix is employed as a dynamic frame and patterns of Turkish-Bulgarian, Turkish-German and Turkish-Bulgarian-German are presented and analyzed. The borrowed grammatical categories in the Turkish-Bulgarian-German language contacts involve nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and negations. However, code-switching is used only in communication with other Bulgarians. In communication with Turks from Turkey the lexical borrowings are from German and they use another variety of Turkish. The Muslim Roma in Berlin observed in this study are diverse in their multilingualism. Among them there are speakers of Romani, Bulgarian and Turkish, and of Turkish and Bulgarian, while German, however learned, is their third or fourth language. Differing emergent patterns among second-generation migrants, born or raised from an early age in Berlin, suggest different patterns emerging and such research is a key desideratum.. У статті йдеться про явище мовного змішування в мусульманських ромівмігрантів із північно-східної Болгарії, що мешкають у Берліні (Німеччина). Досліджувані ідентифікують себе як турки, й у повсякденному спілкуванні розмовляють здебільшого болгарською мовою та давнім різновидом турецької, що в науковій літературі одержало назву балканізованої турецької. Рівень володіння німецькою мовою у досліджуваних мовців відносно низький. У статті описано феномен змішування мови, а також форми перемикання турецького, болгарського та німецького мовних кодів. Ці лінгвістичні та соціальні явища в мусульманській спільноті ромів аналізуються в межах декількох соціолінгвістичних теорій щодо перемикання коду та двомовності. В основу дослідження покладено теорію Дж. Гамперца (1962) щодо матриці спілкування. У статті представлено та досліджено приклади комбінування турецько-болгарської, турецько-німецької та турецькоболгарсько-німецької кодів. З’ясовано, що до граматичних категорій, які підпорядковуються феноменові перемикання коду в турецько-болгарсько-німецькому мовномуваріанті, належать іменники, дієслова, прикметники, прислівники та заперечні конструкції. Однак, перемикання коду простежено тільки під час спілкування з іншими болгарами. Визначено, що у спілкуванні з турками з Туреччини перемикання коду наявне лише між турецькою та німецькою мовами, а також виявлено використання іншого варіанта турецької мови. Роми-мусульмани з Берліна демонструють багатомовність. Серед них – носії ромської, болгарської й турецької; турецької й болгарської. Водночас німецька, попри її знання, посідає третє чи четверте місце за частотністю послуговування. Вивчення мовних патернів мігрантів у другому поколінні, – народжених чи вихованих змалку в Берліні, у своєму розмаїтті видається перспективою подальшого дослідження

Evaluating conjunction disambiguation on English-to-German and French-to-German WMT 2019 translation hypotheses

We present a test set for evaluating an MT system’s capability to translate ambiguous conjunctions depending on the sentence structure. We concentrate on the English conjunction ”but” and its French equivalent ”mais” which can be translated into two different German conjunctions. We evaluate all English-to-German and French-to-German submissions to the WMT 2019 shared translation task. The evaluation is done mainly automatically, with additional fast manual inspection of unclear cases. All systems almost perfectly recognise the ta-get conjunction ”aber”, whereas accuracies fo rthe other target conjunction ”sondern” range from 78% to 97%, and the errors are mostly caused by replacing it with the alternative cojjunction ”aber”. The best performing system for both language pairs is a multilingual Transformer TartuNLP system trained on all WMT2019 language pairs which use the Latin script, indicating that the multilingual approach is beneficial for conjunction disambiguation. As for other system features, such as using synthetic back-translated data, context-aware, hybrid, etc., no particular (dis)advantages can be observed. Qualitative manual inspection of translation hypotheses shown that highly ranked systems generally produce translations with high adequacy and fluency, meaning that these systems are not only capable of capturing the right conjunction whereas the rest of the translation hypothesis is poor. On the other hand, the low ranked systems generally exhibit lower fluency and poor adequacy

Language shift revisited:linguistic repertoires of Jews in Low German-speaking Germany in the Early Twentieth Century. Insights from the LCAAJ Archive

This paper analyzes the linguistic repertoires of Jews in the Low German-speaking areas in the first decades of the twentieth century, as a contribution to historical sociolinguistics. Based on fieldwork questionnaires held in the archives of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), it addresses the question of whether the Jewish minorities spoke a supralectal form of standard German or Koiné forms of dialects, relating this to issues of language shift from Western Yiddish. The study shows that many Jews living in northern Germany during the 1920s and 1930s still had access to a multilingual repertoire containing remnants of Western Yiddish; that a majority of the LCAAJ interviewees from this area emphasized their excellent command of standard German; and that their competence in Low German varied widely, from first language to no competence at all, depending on the region where they lived

Вплив нижньонімецьких діалектів на формування особливостей вокалізму рурського регіолектного мовлення

У статті проаналізовано сучасну мовну ситуацію у Рурській області з урахуванням впливу позамовних чинників на її формування. З’ясовано роль регіональної розмовної мови у регіональному комунікативному середовищі. Визначено основні мовні особливості рурського регіолекту. За допомогою описового методу охарактеризовано типові риси Рурського регіолектного вокалізму, визначено позиційно зумовлені кількісні та якісні фонетичні зміни. Використання зіставного методу дослідження характерних рис вокалізму нижньонімецьких діалектів та рурського регіолекту підтвердило тісний зв'язок регіональної розмовної мови з місцевим діалектним ареалом.В работе анализируется современная ситуация в Рурской области с учетом влияния внеязыковых факторов на её формирование. Определяется роль регионального разговорного языка в региональной коммуникативной среде. Отмечаются основные языковые особенности рурского региолекта. При помощи описательного метода дается характеристика основным чертам Рурского региолектного вокализма, определяются позиционно обусловленные количественные и качественные фонетические изменения. Использование сопоставительного метода исследования характерных черт вокализма нижненемецких диалектов и рурского региолекта подтвердило тесную связь регонального разговорного языка с местным диалектным ареалом.Under consideration is contemporary linguistic situation in Ruhr area and the influence of extralinguistic factors on its development. The Ruhr area has suffered great economic, structural, social and cultural changes during the previous few centuries. Due to active immigration processes the area became multicultural. Till the present day the Ruhr area doesn’t have any fixed borders. Geographically it is situated in the Low German dialectal domain, but its center is crossed by an important dialectal border between the Low Franconian and the Low Saxon dialects. The Low German dialects tended to lose their popularity at the beginning of the IXth century, while the popularity of the standard German language grew steadily. And exactly in the described linguistic situation appeared a specific regional colloquial language – Ruhr regional language variety as a language of reconciliation. The role of the regional colloquial language in the local communicative environment of Ruhr area has been clarified in this article. Language peculiarities typical of Ruhr inhabitants speech have been revealed, the universal and specific features of the local speech in Ruhr area have been pointed out. Basic features of Ruhr regional vocalism have been studies by means of the descriptive method, positiondetermined qualitative and quantitative phonetic changes have been surveyed. A comparative study of Low German phonetic dialectal features and those of the Ruhr regional language variety proves an assumption about the close interaction of the local colloquial language with Low German dialects