Nils Langer

The German-Speaking World is an accessible textbook that offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in the world. This new, second edition has been fully revised to reflect the many political and social changes of the last 20 years including the impact of technology on language change. It continues to combine text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems. Key features of this book: Informative and comprehensive: covers a wide range of current issues Practical: contains a variety of graded exercises and tasks plus an index of terms Topical and contemporary: deals with current situations and provides up-to-date illustrative material Thought-provoking: encourages students to reflect and research for themselvesThe German-Speaking World is the ideal textbook for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics.

The German-Speaking World is an accessible textbook that offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in the world. This new, second edition has been fully revised to reflect the many political and social changes of the last 20 years including the impact of technology on language change. It continues to combine text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems. Key features of this book: Informative and comprehensive: covers a wide range of current issues Practical: contains a variety of graded exercises and tasks plus an index of terms Topical and contemporary: deals with current situations and provides up-to-date illustrative material Thought-provoking: encourages students to reflect and research for themselvesThe German-Speaking World is the ideal textbook for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics.

This book is a contribution to the history of non-standard or "bad" German. The origin and development of standard German was a complex process and many factors were involved in the selection, non-selection and de-selection of variants, as well as the initial promotion of certain varieties of German to supraregional status. The interest here is in non-selection and de-selection of variants and so the study focuses especially on questions such as: Why were certain constructions ignored in the formation of standard German grammar and why were others explicitly judged ill-suited for inclusion in the prestige variety? Who was responsible for these stigmatisations and what reasons were given? And finally, how was the knowledge that one shouldn't use particular constructions transmitted to the language users? At the heart of this study are case studies of 11 morphosyntactic features of "bad" German as found in a selection of texts produced by norm makers, from 1600 to 2005, all of them salient "Zweifelsfalle" of modern German."

The auxiliary do (tun) is one of the most-discussed constructions in West Germanic. In German, there is a striking opposition between modern standard German, where the construction is virtually ungrammatical and considered to be "sub-standard" by most speakers, whilst, as this book shows, the construction is attested in all modern dialects as well as historic stages since 1350. In answering why auxiliary tun is ungrammatical in modern standard German, it is shown that the stigmatization of tun was caused by prescriptive grammarians in the 16th-18th century. Furthermore it is shown that the stigmatization of tun as "bad" German occurred in clearly discernible stages, from bad poetry (1550-1680), to bad written German (1680-1740) and finally to "bad" German in general (after 1740), thus providing evidence that the history of the standardization of German needs to take into account direct metalinguistic comments from prescriptive grammarians. The effectiveness of linguistic purism is also shown by evidence from two other constructions, namely polynegation and double perfect.