Siberian German

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Siberian German is the language of the ethnic Germans who live in many parts of Siberia today. They are descendants of emigrants who settled on the Volga , around St. Petersburg , in the Crimea , in the Caucasus , in Volhynia and other areas in what was then Russia since the end of the 18th century . The ethnic Germans in Siberia are now largely assimilated, which u. a. is associated with the loss of German as a mother tongue, but has also created a unique language situation.

Population development and geographical distribution of ethnic Germans in Siberia

Ethnic Germans in Siberia (Russia) 1979 and 2002:

area 1979 2002
Russia as a whole 1,936,214 597.200
Altaj 124,745 79,500
Omsk 120,806 76,300
Novosibirsk 64,985 47,300
Krasnoyarsk 54,518 36,900
Kemerovo 47,040 36,000

Language history - from the beginnings of the language islands to the contact variety

The historical background for the emergence of the dialect geography of ethnic Germans in Russia is a specific event in the history of Russia and Germany: On July 22, 1763, Catherine II (1762–1796) , who came from Germany, issued an invitation manifesto, which foreign settlers received a number of Promised privileges, which, however, was not consistently observed. The German settlers were u. a. Religious freedom, exemption from military service, 30 years of tax exemption and local self-government promised. The colonist families were given 30 hectares of land. Between 1764 and 1767, around 30,000 Germans emigrated to Russia for the first time; the majority went to the Volga region near Saratov . The Volga colonies are the oldest and largest area of ​​German immigration. A second area lies on the Black Sea (under Tsar Alexander I , 1803-1823) and includes southern Ukraine, Crimea and so-called Bessarabia (the area between the rivers Dniester and Prut in parts of present-day Moldova and Ukraine ) and Transcaucasia . The German settlers on the Black Sea later established new settlements in the Don region, in the North Caucasus and in the North Ukraine (around Kharkov and Kiev ). A later immigration area is Volhynia (now a landscape in northwestern Ukraine), settled under Nicholas I and Alexander II (1830-1870). Further settlements were formed in the Urals , Siberia and Central Asia (including the Caspian Sea ).

The exploration of the German language islands by Viktor Schirmunski

160 years after the first German immigration to the Volga, the Soviet-Russian dialectologist Viktor Schirmunski mentioned that there are around 2,000 German villages with around 1,600,000 inhabitants in Russia. As early as 1930, Schirmunski compared the German-speaking islands in Russia with a "linguistic laboratory [...] in which we can follow developments over a short period of 100 to 150 years on the basis of historical evidence [...]" and compared the language of the German settlers to the The Neva near Saint Petersburg, in southern Ukraine and Transcaucasia, and on the Dnieper (Ukraine) were thoroughly dialectologically analyzed.

These settlement areas - in the early research history a distinction was made between mother and daughter colonies - were very far apart. The individual German-speaking islands had little contact with one another. Today, for example, Transcaucasia, the southern main chain of the Greater Caucasus, belongs to the countries of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, while the Dnieper flows through what is now Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Schirmunski was well aware of this problem. "The German villages in Russia generally do not form a linguistically coherent area, but usually appear as scattered language islands in a foreign-language environment," wrote Schirmunski in 1930. The various dialects that the settlers had brought with them from the German countries were often spoken in the individual villages . Over time, the settlement dialects mixed, while in some villages only Swabian, Hessian or Palatinate were spoken. The native language of the settlers is also their lingua franca, which is spoken among themselves on a daily basis. In addition, they know the German written language of the 19th century, which penetrates as a dialect colloquial language through school and church lessons, and the Russian language, whose knowledge is also constantly present through school and dealing with neighbors. In certain regions, other neighboring languages ​​such as Ukrainian, Tatar and Georgian can also be used. The level of knowledge of the contact languages ​​varies greatly depending on the area and cultural conditions.

Language situation since the Second World War

With the attack by the German Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the language island societies were de facto dissolved by the Soviet authorities from one day to the next.

Language contact research on spoken German in Siberia

As part of the research project “Syntax in Language Contact. Spoken German in the Krasnoyarsk Region (Siberia) ”, research trips from Gothenburg University to the Krasnoyarsk region were carried out in 2008 and 2010 in order to collect linguistic data on the German spoken in Siberia today. In cooperation with the Russian State University of Education V. P. Astafjew ​​in the regional capital Krasnoyarsk , interviews with four informants were recorded audiovisually. It should be experienced what it is like when you speak your language only in close family circles, without personal reference points to the country of origin.

Special features of the Siberian German spontaneous language

The following excerpt is from the first conversation with the two informants (Emma and Maria, photo 2010).

Note that some simplifications have been made, e.g. For example, all word forms are written in lower case and the orthography norm is always deviated from if the pronunciation of the informants clearly differs from standard German, which depends solely on the discretion of the transcribers . This means that an interpretation is already carried out in this phase of data processing. You can also find information on the non-verbal behavior of the interviewees:

C. Can you say again in which year you were born and where?
E. will it look?
C. <laughs> yes it all goes in there
M. i'm haas maria un thirty-seven
C. Yes
M. born
E. vintage
C. Vintage yes <lughs>
M. un born in engels <fiddles with the teabag> yes
C. and you have here? How long have you been living here now?
M. at forty-one I'll be there in the village
C. Aha
E. a, i sibirje sin me from one hundred percent
C. Yes
E. there
C. and
E. and the creep has started
C. yes <turned to E> do you want to say your name again?
E. emma, i was born in engels
C. mm
E. Un to sibirje jekomm <coughs into the microphone> I am I was eight years old
C. mm
E. And we suspected in minusinske, minusinske we suspected najn month, a vot potom they have na sever with the whole family
kak in the trud army was mer
C. mm
E. and we were there for eleven months
C. mm
E. a potom sever
M. <to E> otkuda eleven months
E. <insistent> I minu ... net, minusinsk, v minusinske in <shaking head> on the sever
M. on the sever we were from forty-two to nine ... you came back in forty-eight
E. Net a yes govorju from there as we were there in that in the yakutsk
M. <Query> v minusinske?
E. there, nje v minusinske, in the kak že ego ... v bratske, where he was ... muder was, aj nikolina
M. bylo ...
E. also on the sever
C. is it very far away?

Emma and Maria speak completely impartially. Both dialectal and contact language elements (here Russian) naturally mix in the speech. The informants are not aware that some of them speak Russian. “We speak German,” they say several times.

The use of Russian words and word forms is particularly striking. The geographical names are used in Russian: engels, sibirje, minusinsk, yakutsk, bratsk and nikolina . The Russian word sever , in German the north , is used with the Russian preposition na . The place Minusinsk is also connected with a Russian preposition - v minusinske and with a Russian case ending (-e , Russian prepositive ). The ending - je in sibir (Russian for 'Siberia') is a borrowing from German, as is trudarmee (mixture of Russian trud 'work' and army ).

Russian discourse particles such as a (but), kak (like), potom (after) and otkuda (where from) are used in the dialogues. But there are also grammatical peculiarities that reflect their origin in German dialects as well as in the Russian language. In addition to innovations in word formation (e.g. Russian-German mixtures of word forms such as trudarmee above ) there are also typical features in the sentence structure, such as peculiarities in the word order. This includes the forehead position of the finite verb in declarative clauses and the exclusion of parts of sentences from the verb frame (see dialogue: un we warned in minusinske, we warned najn month ). The temporal determination najn month is outside the scope , we suspected . It is a typically bilingual dialogue that can also be observed in Europe when multilingual people are talking. There are, however, some crucial differences in language development that have developed differently from the current immigrant dialects in Europe. A main peculiarity is that the Russian-German contact variety has developed in a Russian-speaking environment for almost 200 years, largely isolated from the development in the standard German language, and that this development is now in a kind of final phase.

Corpus linguistic data collection from Siberian German

On the basis of the field studies , two electronic corpora of spontaneously spoken German in Siberia were developed at the University of Gothenburg . The corpora Siberian German and Siberian German Women are designed as a material basis for contact linguistic research, but they also provide an insight into today's Russian German for a broader group of users. The corpora contain a total of approx. 52,000 word forms and are partially annotated - words of Russian origin, finite and infinite verb forms.  

The sub-corpus Siberian German Women consists of conversations with four informants who were born in the Soviet Volga Republic between 1927 and 1937. They talk about their childhood on the Volga, their deportation to Siberia and their everyday life in the Siberian village today. The corpus consists of a total of 16,000 words. The sub-corpus Siberian German consists of dialogues by five other speakers from the Krasnoyarsk area, which were transcribed by Russian colleagues in Krasnoyarsk, and comprises 34,000 words.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Valentina Djatlova: German and Russian as the language of Russian Germans today . In: U. Ammon, D. Kemper (ed.): German language in Russia. History, present, future prospects . 2012.
  2. ↑ Viktor Schirmunski: Linguistic and ethnographic studies on the old German settlements in the Ukraine, Russia and Transcaucasia . First published by Zentralvölkerverlag of the Soviet Union: Moscow 1928 (All-Ukrainian department at the Presidium of the ZVK Charkow). Ed .: Claus Jürgen Hutterer. Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-88356-079-0 , p. 21-22 .
  3. ↑ a b Viktor Schirmunski: Linguistic and ethnographic studies: on the old German settlements in Ukraine, Russia and Transcaucasia . Ed .: Claus Jürgen Hutterer. Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-88356-079-0 , p. 113 .
  4. ↑ Viktor Schirmunski: German dialects on the Neva . Part 1 (dialect description) comes from Alfred Ströhm. In: Teuthonista . tape 3 , 1926, pp. 39-62 .
  5. ↑ Viktor Schirmunski: The Swabian dialects in Transcaucasia and southern Ukraine . In: Teuthonista 5 . 1928, p. 38-60 .
  6. ↑ Viktor Schirmunski: The northern Bavarian dialect from Jamburg on the Dnieper (Ukraine) . In: History of the German language and literature . tape 55 , 1931, pp. 243-282 .
  7. ^ Peter Rosenberg: The language of the Germans in Russia. Retrieved March 29, 2019 .
  8. ^ Christiane Andersen: Syntax in language contact. Spoken German in the Krasnoyarsk region (Siberia). Retrieved March 29, 2019 .
  9. ^ A b Christiane Andersen: The Status of Russian German in Siberia. A Case Study of Four Women Living in the Region of Krasnoyarsk (Russia) . In: Dublin Institute of Technology . 2016, doi : 10.21427 / d7059b .
  10. ^ Christiane Andersen: Nachfeld in contact. A corpus examination on Russian Germans in Siberia. In: Gothenburg Working Papers on Linguistics 6. 2016, accessed on March 29, 2019 .
  11. ^ Christiane Andersen, Markus Forsberg, Alexander Pankow: Siberian German. In: Korp. Språkbankens konkordansverktyg, University of Gothenburg. 2012, accessed March 29, 2019 (English, Swedish).