Collective identity construction as a discursive action is highly dependent on language use. Migration settings offer a wide range of linguistic repertoires to fall back upon in order to mark identity. While the ‘majority’ language is usually neutral in this sense, the use of the ‘minority’ or the heritage language, defined as a language “other than the dominant language (or languages) in a given social context” (Kelleher 2010, 1), can act as a specific means of identity construction. Moreover, the heritage language acts as a vehicle for transmission of collective memory which is also central in the process and will thus be discussed in this paper. These questions will be analysed by drawing on the results of an empirical study carried out in 2010 in Volga German communities in Argentina.
Resumen: El presente artículo se centra en los elementos léxicos rusos del discurso de los alemanes del Volga en Argentina. Para ello se analizan los datos recogidos durante el estudio de campo realizado en el contexto del doctorado de la autora (cf. Ladilova, 2013). Después de una breve introducción teórica a los estudios de contacto lingüístico, el artículo ofrecerá una visión general sobre el contexto sociohistórico del grupo en cuestión. Luego se analizarán los eslavismos encontrados en el estudio en cuanto a su semántica y su adaptación fonética y morfológica a la variedad alemana hablada por los alemanes del Volga en Argentina. En total, este estudio aporta más de 100 nuevas unidades léxicas desde el ruso hasta el estado actual de la investigación sobre la influencia del ruso en la variedad alemana Volga en Argentina. Palabras claves: contacto lingüístico -migración -alemanes del Volga -influencia del ruso -prestamosRuso en el habla de los alemanes del Volga en Argentina Artículo de Investigación http://revistas.userena.cl/index.php/logos/index Issn Impreso: 0716-7520 Issn Electrónico: 0719-3262Este trabajo se encuentra bajo la licencia Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Russian in the speech of Volga Germans in ArgentinaCitación: Ladilova, A. (2019). Ruso en el habla de los alemanes del Volga en Argentina.
The present paper explores three situations of conversational humor in which not only gesture and prosody but also code-switching play a role in the process of co-construction of humor among participants in an intercultural interaction. Despite the long tradition of studying humor in interaction, there has been little research so far which includes gesture – especially manual gesture – from an embodiment perspective and concurrently draws attention to the intercultural impact of humor, including moments of code-switching. By looking at multi-party interactions between German and Brazilian speakers from a multimodal perspective, we will show how different semiotic resources such as gaze, posture, head and hand gesture, as well as prosody and code-switching are displayed in order to construct humor. Our aim is to reveal the interplay and complexity of the communicative resources in the co-construction of humor by presenting three examples with different degrees of successful humor: While the conversational humor is only understood by the German co-participants in the first example, in the second example, the humor is co-constructed successfully by the German and Brazilian participants. Yet the last example reveals that the humor is understood by everybody but taken up differently what could also be related to the institutional context in which the sequence is embedded.
Just like many other German communities in the Americas the Volga Germans in Argentina have been able to maintain their initial dialectal variety of German until today. It has been passed on mostly orally, has only covert prestige and functions as an ethnic identity marker for the speakers. As opposed to that the language of the majority population (Spanish in the case of the Volga Germans in Argentina) has overt prestige and objective value for everyday life. Also the standard variety of German is perceived as objectively useful, e.g. for the future career. At the same time, the variety of German spoken by the community is perceived as incompatible with standard German: The speakers of the dialect often think that their knowledge of the dialect is more an obstacle for learning standard German than a help. Nevertheless, there have already been initiatives in Argentina of developing and implementing dialect-based standard German classes, e.g. by Arndt Schmidt in his program for training teachers in the Volga German village in Santa Maria in the province of Buenos Aires. The present article will discuss the question of German classes for dialect learners, give a short overview of the sociolinguistic situation of Volga Germans in Argentina and make a proposal of a heritage-dialect based standard German teaching program. Keywords
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