Creative German in multilingual urban areas: Youth language in Berlin and Windhoek
The project supports the initiation of a German-Namibian cooperation to investigate the development of German in multilingual contexts, with a focus on Berlin and Windhoek as two urban centres in Germany and Namibia with distinctively multilingual German-speaking speech communities. A shared focus will be the linguistically particularly creative group of adolescent speakers.
The cooperation will allow us a comparative perspective onto two variants of contemporary German which are both supported by multilingual speech communities, but differ in interesting ways with respect to the other languages involved and to the social context of language development. An important empirical output of such a cooperation will be a systematic corpus of speech data on vernacular German in Namibia that will be generally accessible, and useful for a large range of research questions on language structure, language use, language variation and language change.
Cooperation partners: Heike Wiese, University of Potsdam; Horst Simon, Free University Berlin; Marianne Zappen-Thomson, University of Namibia