Our German

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Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German)

Spoken in

Papua New GuineaPapua New Guinea Papua New Guinea , Australia
AustraliaAustralia 
speaker 100+
Linguistic
classification
Official status
Official language in -
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

crp

ISO 639-3

uln

Our German (also Rabaul Creole German ) is the language of the minority of Rabaul -Kreolen and the world's only ISO-coded, German -based Creole language . Originally developed in Papua New Guinea during the German colonial era and after the emigration of most speakers, it is now predominantly (over 90 percent of all speakers) in eastern Australia , Unserdeutsch is now practically extinct: the language is still spoken by around a hundred people today. Since there are only old speakers, the disappearance of Unserdeutsch is only a matter of time. Australian speakers of Unserdeutsch now live scattered around cities on the east coast, but communicate with one another in closed groups of social networks. It is estimated that fewer than ten Unserdeutsch speakers live in Papua New Guinea today.

All current speakers speak at least two other languages ​​besides Unserdeutsch, usually English and Tok Pisin .

Emergence

Unserdeutsch originated around 1900 near today's provincial capital Kokopo , which was then called Herbertshöhe and was the seat of the governor of German New Guinea . On the outskirts of the city was the Catholic Sacred Heart Mission Vunapope , in which mixed-race children of European- Melanesian origin were taught standard German . The mothers of the children were mostly local women; the fathers came from Asia or Europe, mostly from Germany . They were civil servants, traders, and adventurers. Outside of class, the children mixed the rudimentary German they had learned with Tok Pisin, which was already widespread at the time, although this was forbidden as a school language. The result was a mixed language whose vocabulary can essentially be traced back to German, but whose grammar can be traced back to Tok Pisin. Even after the end of the German colonial administration, the Vunapope mission station remained in German hands with German as a school subject and even partly as the language of instruction. Since the children who developed Unserdeutsch often kept to themselves as mixed-race children and got married, they passed their Unserdeutsch on to the next generation and Unserdeutsch became the Creole language. After Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia in 1975, most of the Unserdeutsch speakers decided to take on Australian citizenship and to emigrate to Australia and especially to Queensland, since offices and posts in their homeland were to be filled by indigenous Papuans.

There are no standardized written documents for this language, as this language is only spoken, not written.

Linguists at the University of Augsburg (meanwhile: University of Bern ) began to research our German linguistically in 2014.

grammar

Nouns in Unserdeutsch have no gender. The article is always called “de”, for example de man, de woman, de house. The plural of a noun is formed by prefixing the word “all”: “all women”, “all boys”. Question words (interrogative pronouns) can be at the end of the question sentence (“Du geht wo?”). Words from Tok Pisin and English are rather sporadically adopted, for example “to pick up” for “to pick up”. Unserdeutsch is a strict SVO language .

Planned languages ​​as alternatives

At the beginning of the twentieth century were as an international means of communication or for use in the German colonies world German and colonial German as planned languages developed, but did not find any more widespread.

literature

  • Péter Maitz u. a .: De boy, de mädhen, de coconut . In: research. The magazine of the German Research Foundation. Issue 4/2017, ISSN  0172-1518 , pp. 16-21.
  • Péter Maitz: Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German). A forgotten colonial variety of German in the Melanesian Pacific. In: Alexandra N. Lenz (Ed.): German Abroad - Perspektiven der Variationslinguistik, Sprachkontakt- und Multilingualism research. V & R unipress, Göttingen 2016, pp. 211–240.
  • Stefan Engelberg: The German Language in the South Seas. Language Contact and the Influence of Language Politics and Language Attitudes . In: Mathias Schulze u. a. (Ed.): German Diasporic Experience. Identity, Migration, and Loss. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo 2008, ISBN 978-1-55458-027-9 , pp. 317-329.
  • Susanne Mühleisen: Emil Schwörer's "Colonial German" (1916). In: PhiN 31/2005 (essay on Unserdeutsch and other varieties).
  • Craig A. Volker: The rise and decline of Rabaul Creole German, Language and Linguistics in Melanesia . In: John Lynch (Ed.): Oceanic studies: proceedings of the first international conference on oceanic linguistics. Australian National University, Canberra 1996, ISBN 0-85883-440-5 .
  • Craig A. Volker: Rabaul Creole German Syntax. In: Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Hawaii 21/1989, pp. 153-189.
  • Peter Mühlhäusler: Tracing the roots of pidgin German. In: Language and Communication 4 / (1) / 1984, pp. 27-57, ISSN  0271-5309 .
  • Peter Mühlhäusler: Comments on the “Pidgin German” of New Guinea. In: Carol Molony, Helmut Zobl , Wilfried Stölting (Eds.): German in Contact with other Languages. Scriptor Verlag, Kronberg 1977, ISBN 3-589-20551-2 , pp. 58-70.

Web links

Wiktionary: Unserdeutsch  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) on the website of the Institute for German Studies at the University of Bern, accessed on March 11, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c Joachim Mohr: “You go where?” In: Der Spiegel . No. 8/2016, February 20, 2016, p. 51.
  3. ↑ a b Matthias Heine: How children from New Pomerania invented a language. Welt online , April 3, 2016, accessed December 14, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Felix Zeltner, Erol Gurian: We are the last drops of the Germans in the South Seas. ( Memento of December 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: mare , No. 83, December 2010 / January 2011, pp. 40–49.
  5. ↑ Petra Lambeck: Creole language Unserdeutsch - “Hey Alfons, you go where?” Deutsche Welle , June 10, 2009, accessed on November 12, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Hans Kratzer: Island State Papua New Guinea (sic!) - They speak Unserdeutsch. Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 29, 2014, accessed on November 12, 2015 .
  7. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 30, 2015, p. 6.