Slavic and German in Austria. Methodical approaches to the reconstruction of historical language contact and its influences on German in Austria
Abstract
Slavic and German in Austria. Methodological approaches to the reconstruction of historical language contact and its influence on German in Austria.
Due to a long history of mutual language contact, Slavic languages are believed to have considerably influenced the attitudes towards multilingualism in Austria as well as German in Austria. This paper introduces the methodological toolkit of two projects that shed light on various aspects of the topic and exemplifies their approaches by the example of Southern Moravia.
One study establishes a way to identify places with a high degree of societal multilingualism based on census data and correlates them with information on the activity of cultural societies. The other focuses a Czech intentional construction including the verb to go, which is claimed to have been replicated by German dialects in Southern Moravia and neighboring Lower Austria.