German in Samoa: Historical traces of a colonial variety

• Authors: Doris Stolberg
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

During the brief era of German colonialism in the Pacific (1884-1914), German was in contact with a large number of languages, autochthonous as well as colonial ones. This setting led to language contact in which German influenced and was influenced by various languages. In 1900, Western Samoa came under German colonial rule. The German language held a certain prestige there which is mirrored by the numbers of voluntary Samoan learners of German. On the other hand, the preferred use of English, rather than German, by native speakers of German was frequently noted. This paper examines linguistic and metalinguistic data that suggest the historical existence of (the precursor of) a colonial variety of German as spoken in Samoa. This variety seems to have been marked mainly by lexical borrowing from English and Samoan and was, because of these borrowings, not fully comprehensible to Germans who had never encountered the variety or the colonial setting in Samoa. It is discussed whether this variety can be considered a separate variety of German on linguistic grounds.

Keywords

EN

language contact; colonial linguistics; lexical borrowing; Samoan German

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 49
• Pages: 321-353

Dates

published

2013

received

2013-04-25

revised

2013-09-27

accepted

2013-09-28

Contributors

author

Doris Stolberg

• Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2013-0012