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Living with L: H-Speakers’ Perceptions of the L-Variety in Northern Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2012

Heiko Wiggers*
Affiliation:
Wake Forest University
*
Department of German and Russian, Wake Forest University, P.O. Box 7353, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA, [[email protected]]

Abstract

Based on two sociolinguistic field studies from 2003 and 2009, this paper discusses the language attitudes of High German speakers (H-speakers) toward Low German (the L-variety) in the county of Bentheim, a diglossic speech community in northwestern Germany. While language attitudinal studies are largely absent from the sociolin-guistic corpus in Germany and from Low German research altogether, diglossic studies largely focus on the L-variety and its speakers and evolution. This paper is one of the first attempts to analyze the H-speakers’ perceptions and evaluations of the L-variety over a longer period of time within the fields of diglossia and Low German.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2012

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