0. Einleitung

Language Shift Revisited. Linguistic Repertoires of Jews in Low German-Speaking Germany in the Early 20th Century: Insights from the LCAAJ Archive

“…These claims were generally supported by the linguistic analyses conducted on the data collected (Albert 2000, Betten 2000b, Kossakowski 2000, Mauser 2000, Weiss 2000), confirming Betten's main hypothesis of the standard-orientation of the spoken language applied in the interviews. These findings are backed up by the extensive transcriptions from the interviews, published in Betten 1995 and Betten & Du-nour 2000.…”

“…At the same time, a different line of research has suggested that during the 1920s and 1930s, Jews in the German-speaking countries predomi-nantly spoke a supralectal form of German (Freimark 1979, Lowenstein 1980, Betten 1995, Betten & Du-nour 2000). Whereas the majority of German-speakers spoke a dialect and wrote standard German, which they only learned when they started to attend primary school, the Jewish communities modeled their spoken language on the written standard during and after the shift away from Western Yiddish.…”

“…A closer look at Betten's informants shows that 53 percent of them came from cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, 20 percent from towns with a population between 5,000 and 50,000, and 27 percent from villages and small towns with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants (Betten 1995). In 1910, 53 percent of the overall Jewish population in Germany lived in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants; 31.8 percent in towns with fewer than 20,000 (Lowenstein 1983, Schmelz 1989:24).…”