This paper deals with the use and importance of varieties, in this case, Low German, nowadays in the German language. To find out about this, a survey was conducted, where people of different ages were asked about their ability to understand and produce Low German, but also about their opinion on the importance of Low German in consideration of their ancestry, origin, social contacts, and others to find out how present the variety of Low German is. The results show that Low German is losing importance from generation to generation. This predicts that Low German will become extinct in the next years.
Low German is a variety of German that used to be common in the northern and eastern parts of Germany for thousands of years. Being born in the 1990s or later, today's youth is not able to understand their grandparents properly when they start talking Low German or they even do not have any contact with this variety at all. In comparison, a few years ago, almost everyone in that named area of Germany spoke or at least was able to understand Low German properly. Clearly, the use of the German language and its varieties is undergoing a change right now. This paper is not just an apparent time study of Low German in the 21st century, but also looking at the different reasons this change may be caused by. This research is inspired by a German study about the language in the city of Hanover by Hana Ikenaga from Leibniz University Hanover, which will be explained in more detail later on.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. PREVIOUS WORK
2.2 Theoretical Background
2.3 Criteria
2.4 Questionnaire
2.5 Results
3. DATA AND METHOD
4. RESULTS
5. CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
ATTACHMENTS
ABSTRACT
This paper deals with the use and importance of varieties, in this case, Low German, nowadays in the German language. To find out about this, a survey was conducted, where people of different ages were asked about their ability to understand and produce Low German, but also about their opinion on the importance of Low German in consideration of their ancestry, origin, social contacts, and others to find out how present the variety of Low German is. The results show that Low German is losing importance from generation to generation. This predicts that Low German will become extinct in the next years.
Low German is a variety of German that used to be common in the northern and eastern parts of Germany for thousands of years. Being born in the 1990s or later, today's youth is not able to understand their grandparents properly when they start talking Low German or they even do not have any contact with this variety at all. In comparison, a few years ago, almost everyone in that named area of Germany spoke or at least was able to understand Low German properly. Clearly, the use of the German language and its varieties is undergoing a change right now. This paper is not just an apparent time study of Low German in the 21st century, but also looking at the different reasons this change may be caused by. This research is inspired by a German study about the language in the city of Hanover by Hana Ikenaga from Leibniz University Hanover, which will be explained in more detail later on.
When conducting the survey, we made sure to ask all different kinds of people randomly and without sorting out people beforehand, to get an average of German society. The tested people are, apart from biographical data like age and gender, asked about their origin and ancestry of their family to take a look at the influence of immigrants and second-generation- immigrants at the use of Low German. Education and contact with earlier generations are also taken into account. The survey is trying to test people's active knowledge of Low German, so what they are able to produce themselves, but also looking at their passive knowledge, so what they are able to understand and words they know, without being conscious about it being Low German. This work’s thesis is that Low German is losing importance in the use of language through the generations and will be proven by the results of the survey. This would result in Low German becoming totally extinct in the next generations.
2.1 PREVIOUS WORK
As already mentioned, this paper is inspired by the German study “»Tag« oder »Tach«? Eine soziolinguistische Untersuchung(k) der hannoverschen Stadtsprache” by Hana Ikenaga from Leibniz University Hanover, published in 2018. This master thesis covers more than 70 pages, so to not go beyond the scope, the following will only be summarized the aspects that had the most influence on this paper.
The Hanover study is also dealing with varieties, but the other way around than this paper about Low German. In her study, Hana Ikenaga was looking at the myth that the German that is spoken in Hanover is the clearest and nearest to High Standard German out of all Northern Germany. To prove or falsify this myth, she was conducting language samples from 32 persons from Hanover in order to determine the amount of non-Standard German variables in their speech. (Ikenaga 2018: 1-21)
2.2 Theoretical Background
Hana Ikenaga mentions that her study is “correlative to William Labov’s linguistic studies” since she also conducts different language samples from Hanover citizens and evaluates them quantitatively. The frequency of the distribution of different variables is put in context with the sociodemographic background of the tested people, similar to it is handled in this work about Low German. The difference is that Ikenagas aim is to show whether there are nonStandard German variables and in the best case there are none, so she focusses on Standard HighGerman, to prove that the myth is real. Here, in comparison, the focus does not lie on Standard HighGerman, but on Low German. (Ikenaga 2018: 1-21)
2.3 Criteria
Hana Ikenaga also focusses on age, gender and educational background like we do. We extended these criteria and added origin and ancestry to maybe show a connection with the fading of Low German in German language use.
Objectivity, Reliability, and Validity are mentioned as the main criteria when conduction empirical data. Objectivity is described as the absence of subjective influence while collecting data. Reliability is given when results are reproducible. Validity is making sure that it is only measured what should be measured.
In the Hanover city language study, it is claimed that there is proof that men and women use variables differently. Women tend to use Standard varieties, whereas men prefer nonStandard varieties. With Low German, we can neither deny or approve that, because we focused on other influences because it would have been too much to cover in terms of the specifications of this work.
The generational change (Tagliamonte 2006) is also an interesting aspect to look at. It describes the increasing or decreasing use of certain variables from one generation to another, where the relationship to one's parents play a huge role. This is why the origin and ancestry is an important criterion to look at when it comes to the distribution of Low German. (Ikenaga 2018: 26-30)
2.4 Questionnaire
Hana Ikenaga conducted information through a survey and an interview. With the survey, she collected biographical information about the probands and the interview should point out the use of language. The interview was parted into four sections that consisted of naming pictures, fulfilling sentences, phrasing sentences and reading out loud to make it as diversified as possible. Starting with the naming of the pictures should give the probands a good feeling about the tasks and an easy start. When the sentences should be fulfilled, it is asked for the first association that comes to mind. For the third part, the phrasing of the sentences, the probands got different sets of words that they had to puzzle into different sentences and read them out. They were focusing on the structure of the sentences, whereas the real focus was on the pronunciation when reading out. The last task obviously focussed on reading out, but here is a higher chance of hypercorrection. In the following interview, the tested people were not tested to produce voice data, because the chance of them actually producing the words relevant to the study is rather low. Instead, they were asked about their knowledge and attitude towards language and speech. In terms of our research concerning Low German, we modified the questionnaire methods suitable to our topic, which will be explained further in the following chapters. (Ikenaga 2018: 22-41)
2.5 Results
In General, Ikenaga found out that there is a correlation between the sociodemographic background and the use of Low German variants, which we will focus on. The Hanover city language is highly affected by the Low German variants far from Standard German, which shows that the Low German influence unconsciously is there, but society perceives it as HighStandard German. Age and gender hat a huge impact on these results, the educational background did not. It was found that in Hanover city language, the variable ä shows an above-average share of Low German realization, whereas Hanover should have the best Standard German. The variables ng und kurz show an average share, but with the tendency to Low German. So the language that is considered as best Standard German actually has a huge impact from Low German. Other than that, Ikenaga also noticed a decreasing use of pure Low German. Ikenaga also found out that younger women tend to use fewer dialect forms than older women do. There could not be seen as a difference in the use of dialect forms between younger and older men. (Ikenaga 2018: 41-67)
3. DATA AND METHOD
For our topic, we chose to investigate the position of Low German in everyday language use and peoples’ attitudes towards it, especially concerning changes between different generations. The idea came to us through our own experiences, where we discovered that our grand- and grand- grand-parents (people over 60) still speak Low German, but young adults, such as us ourselves do not. We began to wonder why and what might be reasons for that. We then looked for similar studies and found the study about the Hanover city language from Hana Ikenaga (2018), Leibniz Universität Hannover. We took this study and the suggestions in the Leitfaden as guidelines for the design of our survey. In order to gather information on our topic, we decided to use questionnaires. In our case, we wanted questionnaires for different reasons. First, we wanted to provide anonymity to avoid any form of bias, such as the social desirability bias (Oppenheim 1992:139).
Second, we wanted the interviewed people to answer completely voluntarily, honest and through it being anonymous, increasing the number of participants. We distributed those through social networks, mainly WhatsApp, through sharing the online link. The main goal was to compare three main age groups or generations, under thirty, over thirty to sixty and over sixty. These groups appeal to at least three generations of most families. Considering the older generation, we wanted to have a look on, we needed to visit them in person with our computers because none of them had access to the internet. That means we had to slightly change the anonymous questionnaire to a supervised questionnaire, for those who were not able to completely read the questions or work with a computer. This could be more endangered to cause bias but was the only possible method to interview people beyond the age of 60 who were ready to take part. All in all, we ended up with forty participants. One could state here, that the more people would take part, the more representativeness the survey would gain. First, we collected some basic demographic data on age, sex, education, and heritage as Tagliamonte suggests (Tagliamonte 2006: 23). Then we gave the participants some tasks where they each had to choose one right translation from three possible answers. We took those Low German words from the Wörterbuch westfälischer Mundarten and selected a mix: Some words that we knew from our family background and some that we found more difficult or that we did not know before.
Through our survey, we could gather information about different factors affecting Low German and its future use. During the first phase of our survey which included the multiple- choice questions (translations of words), and the direct translations of two sentences from a famous Low German poem, we could clearly see a difference between the three age groups. The group aged under thirty had the lowest rate of correct translations with 24% percent of the average right translation. The second was the group of people between thirty and sixty, which had slightly decreasing results with an average of 19 % correct answers. The best results with almost 50 % percent of average were shown by the group of people over sixty and older. By this first set of tasks, we could already recognize a decreasing number of Low German words that were translated correctly according to the official translation in the Wörterbuch westfälischer Mundarten (Gehle 1977). Here it can already be seen that there is a falling tendency of knowledge about Low German words.
For the first translation task, the participants had to translate the beginning of the famous Low German poem “Twee Künnigeskinner”. While 14 percent of the group aged under thirty translated it completely wrong, 48 percent named the right translation and 38 percent translated parts correctly. The second age group representing the generation between thirty and sixty translated 25 percent correctly, 25 percent partly correct and 50 percent wrong. The oldest participants all translated the sentence correctly which makes 100 percent for the oldest generation of correctly translated words. The oldest participants made the best results here, but the group between thirty to sixty had results worse than the youngest people under thirty, which surprised us. We then investigated those results separately and discovered that in this group, the participants showed a higher amount of migration background as in the other groups. Only 75 percent of them had grown up in this area. The rest was either from the South of Germany or of Polish descent and had come to North Rhine-Westphalia as adults. Therefore, we also started to connect further generations and place of upbringing with the results as a factor influencing the adaption/Verschwinden of Low German. Those people with a migration background did not adapt Low German after coming to the area were Low German was spread.
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