Der Wortschatz zwischen Variation und Kontakt. Eine Korpusuntersuchung zur lexikalischen Entlehnung im Plain Deitsh

Pennsylvania German (PDC) is a (West) Germanic language which emerged around 1800 among the German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania and is currently spoken in various US states and Canada. PDC evolved under the decisive influence of partially overlapping processes of language contact and language variation: on the one hand, the immigrant groups came from different Upper and West Central German dialect areas, which led to dialect levelling with partial retention of areal variation; on the other hand, the English language was present in the linguistic ecology from the very beginning and caused language contact phenomena such as lexical and structural borrowings. This study focuses on the language variety used in conservative religious communities (‘plain’ or ‘sectarian’ PDC), which has so far been poorly normalised and standardised. Using a written-language translation corpus from 2017–2020, the lexicon is analysed with regard to the quality and quantity of lexical loans from the contact language English and their integration at different language levels. This includes the question of whether loanwords follow different grammatical rules than the original vocabulary.