Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Workshop 4 – Fer 169
Language change in multilingual and multidialectal situations
Johanson, Lars
University of Mainz
johanson@uni-mainz.de
The paper will deal, mostly on the basis of materials from Turkic languages, with the
considerable differences between multilingual and multidialectal situations with respect to
language change and convergence. It will briefly discuss the particular preconditions for
grammatical change in mutually intelligible varieties and the role of dialect contacts for
glottogenetics. The fundamental (and often ignored) difficulties involved in the analysis of
older written sources will be stressed.
Linguistic connectivity in German-Turkish language contact
Karakoç, Birsel / Herkenrath, Annette
University of Hamburg / University of Hamburg
bkarakoc@uni-hamburg.de;annette.herkenrath@uni-hamburg.de
In this talk we deal with some specific linguistic structures of Turkish in the data of children
growing up Turkish-German bilinguals in Germany. We discuss the German influences and
the innovative phenomena we investigated in our research project, in the following exemplary
grammatical areas of Turkish: Wh-constructions and wh-elements, finite aspectual elements in
their function to form discourse types, evidentiality, elements of discourse coordination and
discourse particles, and possessive constructions. Our analysis is based on data gathered by
the projects ENDFAS and SKOBI at the University of Hamburg, funded by the German
Research Foundation and working within the theoretical framework of functional-pragmatic
discourse theory.
Cimbrian in Northern Italy:
a case study into investigations of external motivated grammatical
change at the Germanic-Romance language border
Kolmer, Agnes
University of Zurich
agnes.kolmer@access.unizh.ch
The Cimbrian language, which has been the first language to more than 30'000 people in the
so called Sette comuni, Tredici comuni and the elevated plain of Folgaria and Lavarone in the
17th and 18th century, is almost extinct nowadays. All the settlements in the provinces of
Veneto and Trentino were founded during the late middle ages in the 12th and 13th century.
First of all, lexical and phonological correspondences and similarities of the Cimbrian
language varieties with modern Bavarian varieties undoubtedly confirm the genetic affiliation
of these speech island dialects as (south) Bavarian. Nowadays, after centuries of language
maintenance in a romance speaking environment, one can find speakers still fluent in both the
local Italian dialects and the German dialect called Cimbro, only in Luserna, a small village
near Trient. Luserna emerged last as a Cimbrian speech community in the 17th century as a
secondary settlement of Lavarone. Full competence in Cimbro is found especially among the
old generation, which can be classified as bilingual.
The presentation will concentrate on the results of studies about external motivated grammatical
change. The investigation is based on data from bilingual speakers of Luserna. Besides the
"outer" German / Bavarian shape of Cimbro the "inner" shape has undergone drastic