First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance: The Case of German Jews in Anglophone Countries (Studies in Bilingualism)

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First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance

Studies in Bilingualism (SiBil)

Editors Kees de Bot University of Nijmegen

Thom Huebner San José State University

Editorial Board Michael Clyne, University of Melbourne Kathryn Davis, University of Hawaii at Manoa Joshua Fishman, Yeshiva University François Grosjean, Université de Neuchâtel Wolfgang Klein, Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik Georges Lüdi, University of Basel Christina Bratt Paulston, University of Pittsburgh Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, Oxford Merrill Swain, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Richard Tucker, Carnegie Mellon University

Volume 24 First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance: The case of German Jews in anglophone countries by Monika S. Schmid

First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance The case of German Jews in anglophone countries

Monika S. Schmid Free University Amsterdam

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schmid, Monika S. First language attrition, use and maintenance : the case of German Jews in anglophone countries / Monika S. Schmid. p. cm. (Studies in Bilingualism, issn 0928–1533 ; v. 24) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Language attrition. 2. Language maintenance. 3. Language in contact. 4. Jews, German--English-speaking countries--Languages. I. Title. II. Series. P40.5.L28 S36 2002 306.44-dc21 isbn 90 272 4135 X (Eur.) / 1 58811 190 3 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2002018568

© 2002 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microﬁlm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

In memory of Jack Sanders (1909–1998)

Table of contents

Abbreviations Preface Introduction

xi xiii 1

Chapter 1 Language contact, language change, and language attrition 1.1 Criterion variables: What is lost, and how? 1.1.1 ‘Last in, Wrst out’? — The regression hypothesis 1.1.2 ‘Hostile takeover’? — The interlanguage hypothesis 1.1.3 SimpliWcation? — The language change hypothesis 1.1.4 Universal Grammar? — The parameter hypothesis 1.1.5 Not lost, just mislaid? — The psycholinguistic hypothesis 1.2 Predictor variables — the extralinguistic factors 1.2.1 Individual factors 1.2.2 Community factors 1.3 Research designs 1.3.1 Data collection 1.3.2 Linguistic levels 1.3.3 What is ‘language attrition’?

7 11 12 14 15 17 18 19 19 26 29 30 31 36

Chapter 2 The situation of German Jews — A historical overview 2.1 The situation of German Jews before the Nazi rise to power 2.2 The situation of German Jews under the Nazi regime 2.3 Emigration 2.4 Conclusion

45 46 52 58 61

Chapter 3 The study 3.1 Free spoken data 3.2 Questionnaires 3.3 The informants — Extralinguistic factors

63 64 68 68

viii First language attrition, use, and maintenance

3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3 3.3.4 3.3.5 3.3.6 3.3.7 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2

Age Education Time Gender Contact Autobiographical and historical factors Some hypotheses The corpus — Linguistic factors ‘Interference’ data ProWciency data

68 69 70 70 70 72 77 78 78 82

Chapter 4 Morphology: NP-inXection 4.1 Case 4.2 Gender 4.3 Plural 4.4 Conclusion

85 87 100 113 123

Chapter 5 Morphology II: VP inXection 5.1 Tense 5.2 Number, Person 5.3 Conclusion

127 128 143 146

Chapter 6 Syntax 6.1 German sentence types and verb placement 6.2 Verb placement in English 6.3 German word order in acquisition 6.4 Interferences in the corpus 6.4.1 Verb-subject structures in main clauses 6.4.2 Discontinuous word order 6.4.3 Subordinates 6.4.4 Conclusion

149 151 153 154 157 158 163 177 168

Contents

Chapter 7 Predictor variables 7.1 Independent variables 7.2 Dependent variables 7.2.1 Interference data 7.2.2 ProWciency data 7.3 Analysis of the interference data 7.3.1 Results 7.3.2 Discussion 7.4 Analysis of the proWciency data 7.4.1 Results 7.4.2 Discussion 7.5 Native speaker ratings 7.6 Conclusion

169 169 172 172 173 174 174 185 186 186 186 188 189

Conclusion

191

Notes

193

References

197

Appendix Appendix I: Tables 213 Appendix II: Letter and questionnaire 223 Appendix III: CD and transcripts 229 Index

253

ix

Abbreviations

ACC AGEEMI1 AGEEMI2 ANIM AUX DAT DET DO DWO EMIGRA1

Accusative Age at emigration < 17 years Age at emigration 17 years Animacy Auxiliary Dative Determiner Direct object Discontinuous word order Emigration from Germany between January 1933 and September 1935 (before Nuremberg racial laws) EMIGRA2 Emigration from Germany between October 1935 and November 1938 (before Pogrom) EMIGRA3 Emigration from Germany between November 1938 and August 1939 (before beginning of WWII) EVT Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory GEN Genitive IMPL Implied person (e.g. the noun ‘leg’ implies a person as its owner, whereas the noun ‘car’ does not) IO Indirect object L1 First language L2 Second language LAD Language acquisition device LGCHI Language use with children (self-report data) LGPAR Language use with parents (self-report data) LGSIB Language use with siblings (self-report data) LGSPO Language use with partner/spouse (self-report data) MLU Mean length of utterance NATLGSE Native language of spouse English NATLGSG Native language of spouse German NATLGSN No partner/spouse NOM Nominative NP Noun phrase

xii First language attrition, use, and maintenance

PLU PP SLA SUB SVO UG V2 VS VFIN VINF VP XVS

Plural Prepositional phrase Second language acquisition Subordinate clause Subject — Verb — Object Universal Grammar Verb second Topicalized sentence structure in which the subject appears behind the verb Finite part of verb NonWnite part of verb Verb phrase Sentence structure where a non-subject constituent (X) is topicalized, obliging the subject to appear postverbally

Preface

The idea for this study was conceived when I Wrst, more or less by accident, came across narrative autobiographical interviews with German Jews in California. It was during a term as a visiting lecturer in German at UC Davis in the spring of 1996 that I was present as some of these interviews were recorded. Listening to people relating their lives across a period that had always been history to me was both moving and disturbing. One thing which amazed me were the diVerent attitudes towards ‘being German’ or ‘being Rhenanian’ which I encountered. I recollect, for example, the enthusiastically nostalgic reaction of several people to my using the typically regional greeting “Tschüss” upon leaving. These were often encounters where I could feel an immediate bond having been established on the basis of our common background. On the other hand, I also met people who obviously did not retain any lingering sense of ‘being German’. It was my feeling that there was a correlation between these diVerent attitudes and the degree to which people felt comfortable using the German language. However, I could not establish any pattern beyond that. I looked for an explanation in whether they had been children or adults at the time of their emigration — and failed to Wnd it. I looked for other factors — again without success. I then decided that the subject might bear closer investigation — and that decision eventually ended in this book, a (slightly revised) version of my Ph.D. thesis. I am very grateful for the kindness that many people have shown to me while I was working on that investigation. First of all, I want to express my thanks towards my informants, many of whom I was in close contact with. I was intensely touched by the interest that was expressed, and the generosity and openness all my requests were met with. Secondly, I could never have done this project without the help and support of two people: Prof. Dieter Stein, of the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, and Prof. Kees de Bot, of the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen. They have been unfailingly generous and kind to me, and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Many other colleagues and friends have been kind enough to listen to my ideas and share their thoughts, from which my investigation has proWted

xiv First language attrition, use, and maintenance

enormously. Most of all, I very much enjoyed — and still enjoy — the productive cooperation and exchange of ideas with Barbara Köpke of the Université de Toulouse — Le Mirail. I am furthermore very grateful to Ulrike Altendorf, Alex Bergs, Michael Clyne, Heidrun Dorgeloh, Christine Gunia, Verena Jung, Simone Pesch, Anette Rosenbach, Katrin Schott, Bert Weltens, Richard Young, and Michaela Zitzen for their patience, interest, and insight. Where the historical chapter is concerned, I would especially like to thank Annette Klerks for her helpful comments and support. I am furthermore deeply indebted to Frans van der Slik of the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen for his help with the statistics, and to Iris Guske and Stefanie Schmid, who were kind enough to proofread every page of the manuscript — remaining errors are, of course, mine. I would furthermore like to express my thanks to two institutions: The Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Düsseldorf, who collected the interview corpus on which this project is based and very kindly made it available to me, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, without whose funding the project would not have been possible. I was also deeply touched by the amount of personal support and kindness that was shown to me by many people. One person I would like to mention — and thank — particularly is Theresia Bernstein of the Dept. of English Linguistics at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. Most of all, I want to thank my parents, Gisela Schmid and Dankward Schmid, who have supported me through what in eVect were 32 years of learning and education. It was their love and belief in me, more than anything else, which has made this project possible. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Chris McCully — partner, lover, husband, and best friend — for his love, support, close reading of the text, and insight from the perspective of historical linguistics. Among other things. Thy Wrmness draws my circle just And makes me end, where I begun. (John Donne)

Amsterdam, October 2001

Introduction

I always thought I was a German. It was Hitler who taught me I was a Jew. (Autobiographical interview with Jack Sanders)

On February 16th 2000, the German president, Johannes Rau, gave an address to the Knesset (the Israelian parliament), asking forgiveness for the Nazi crimes. The fact that this address was given in the German language sparked oV a heated controversy in the Knesset, and the speech was boycotted by a number of the members of parliament who felt that “the time had not yet come for German to be spoken in this house”, and even that “an address by a German politician in the German language is deWling the memory of the Holocaust”. Many people felt that, while German was the language of Heine, Benjamin and Einstein, it was also the language of the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17. February 2000). The ambiguity that marks this controversy is an indication of the deeply conXicting feelings that were ingrained in the lives of many of the assimilated German Jews who were forced to emigrate under the Nazi regime. Most of these had, up to the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, lived in a monolingual German environment that was characterized by a very high regard for the German language and culture, by highly patriotic feelings and a by deep sense of identiWcation with their own country. Jewish and German identity were not just two unrelated parts of most peoples’ identity, nor were they even closely linked, but each was an integral part of the other. Being brutally excluded from a society, culture and tradition of which German Jews had formed a part for many centuries gave rise to a conXicting sense of identity — which (among other things) inXuenced the attitude towards and use of the German language in emigration. The present study is an attempt to explore these factors within the framework of L1 attrition. It is based on a corpus of narrative autobiographical interviews with former citizens of Düsseldorf, who emigrated between the Nazi seizure of power and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. These interviews were collected by the Düsseldorf Holocaust Memorial Center be-

2

First language attrition, use, and maintenance

tween 1995 and 1997. The corpus, which consists of 54 interviews of a total of some 270,000 words, is augmented by a questionnaire on language use and language attitudes, Wlled out by the informants. The role of attitude has been an important factor in studies on second language acquisition ever since Gardner and Lambert’s groundbreaking study (Gardner and Lambert 1972). It is generally accepted nowadays that the success of the second or foreign language learning process is to a large part determined by the speaker’s attitude towards this language, and that this attitude is inXuenced by a number of factors comprising the prestige of the language as well as entirely subjective factors. Ever since the mid-seventies, these models of thought have been applied to the study of the survival of minority languages as well. Theoretical frameworks on the basis of social issues as well as ethnicity and ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) have shown that prestige, attitude, and other socioethnic factors very much aVect the chance a minority language has to survive (e.g. Boyd 1986; Dorian 1982; Leets and Giles 1995). This is intuitively convincing, since the likelihood of a minority language being passed on to the next generation is higher if the present generation thinks that it will be useful. However, more recently the question has also been asked whether language attitudes might aVect language maintenance within one generation, whether a negative attitude on the part of the speaker might be conductive to the process of Wrst language attrition. At Wrst sight, this question seems much more diYcult to answer, since it apparently presupposes that such seemingly involuntary processes as forgetting something might at some level be governed by attitudes as well. However, if it is taken into consideration that the attitude a speaker has towards his or her Wrst language might well aVect their everyday behavior, that they might avoid situations in which they have to use this language, it does seem possible that such an eVect might obtain — although the underlying presupposition that the amount of language use correlates with attrition has by no means been proven to this day. Studies on Wrst language attrition have attempted to establish the impact of attitude on the basis of frameworks such as ethnicity and ethnic aYliation (Waas 1996), ethnolinguistic vitality theory (Yaægmur 1997) and social network theory (Hulsen 2000). However, where the results from these studies were quantiWed, they have not proved conclusive. For the present study, therefore, a diVerent approach was taken. The classiWcation adopted is not based on subjective evaluations on the part of the informants, but Wndings from historical research. A commonly accepted

Introduction

framework is taken as the starting-point, in an attempt to analyze the eVect that living — and suVering — through diVerent phases of a historical period had on the proWciency which speakers retain. The study is divided into two parts. The Wrst part examines some theoretical issues. As the Weld of language attrition is entering its third decade of research, it was felt that a re-examination and evaluation of some theoretical and methodological issues was in order. The Wrst chapter therefore gives an outline of the research done in this Weld, outlining the major theoretical frameworks, discussing the selection of linguistic and extralinguistic variables as well as the research designs as they were presented by various studies and summing up the Wndings. The second chapter is a historical outline of the situation of German Jews before and after the Nazi seizure of power as well as of the circumstances of emigration and the situation in emigration. It addresses issues of assimilation and identiWcation with regard to the established German Jewish minority. Based on analyses of the development of persecution during the years before the outbreak of World War II — a process that has been described as ‘cumulative radicalization’ by historians, i.e. a situation where all parts of the national socialist bureaucratic system contributed to the ever increasing severity of persecution of German Jews which culminated in the death camps — it is assumed that pre-war emigrants can be divided into three groups according to the degree of severity of the persecution they were exposed to. The Wrst group comprises the people who left Germany within the Wrst 2 ½ years after the Nazi rise to power, before September 1935, when the Nuremberg race laws were announced. The second group left after these laws were passed, but before the Wrst deportations to Poland in late October of 1938 and, most importantly, before the pogrom on Nov. 9th 1938 that has come to be known as ‘Reichskristallnacht’. The last group left between this pogrom and the outbreak of World War II on September 1st 1939, after which emigration became virtually impossible. Our prediction is that there will be diVerences in the self-report data as well as in the amount of interference in the spoken German between these three groups. The second part of this study presents an empirical investigation conducted on the data. In an introductory chapter on data collection and methodology (Chapter 3) the advantages and disadvantages of the nature of the data under investigation are discussed, and the linguistic (dependent) and extralinguistic (independent) variables to be investigated are established. The linguistic variables have been conWned to the grammatical system, and speciWcally to

3

4


the domain of (inXectional) morphology and syntax. This decision was made on the basis of the hypotheses on language contact and language attrition that this study will be testing. Furthermore, it was felt that native speaker judgements on what is or is not a ‘mistake’ in the speech of an ‘attriter’ were only consistent in those domains. Chapter 4 describes the analysis performed on the linguistic variables. For each variable, this analysis is based on Wndings from acquisitional studies, issues of interlanguage, and previous attrition studies (where such exist). On the basis of these theoretical issues, each section attempts to make predictions about the possible nature of the attrition process, and then proceeds to establish whether these can be borne out by the actual Wndings from the corpus. It is attempted to provide evidence for or against various theoretical frameworks of attrition — for example, Jakobson’s regression hypothesis (Jakobson 1941), which predicts that language loss will be the reverse of the acquisition process. This chapter is based on the corpus of ‘interferences’ found in the data in the domains of inXectional morphology and verb placement. It is important to note, however, that throughout this study the term ‘interference’ should not be read to imply an interlanguage eVect. It is used to describe an utterance that is in some way felt to be deviant by native speakers, without making any prior assumption about the nature of the disturbance that caused this ‘mistake’. Chapter 5 then extends the analysis to include extralinguistic or predictor variables. On the basis of statistical analyses, it is attempted to establish the inXuence of individual factors on the attrition process of speakers. Among these factors are age at the time of emigration, interim use of the language, as well as the degree of ‘traumatization’ and identiWcation conXicts. In order to arrive at a complete and representative picture of individual proWciency, it has been decided not to base this analysis on interference data alone. It was felt that a comprehensive picture of how much or little attrited a speaker’s L1 is could not be gained on the basis of those instances where something ‘went wrong’ to the exclusion of all instances where something ‘went right’. Narrowing the perspective to the mistakes of speakers does not do justice to either the vividness and individuality of their linguistic repertoire or to the creativity of the language contact process that has led to the individual variety over a period of some sixty years of emigration for each speaker. For the purpose of the analysis of the extralinguistic variables, each interview was therefore further analyzed for features like lexical richness and morphological and syntactic complexity. Having taken into account all of these features, however, I realized that as a reader who had no access to the actual recordings, I would still be left with an

Introduction

unsatisfactory impression of the proWciency the individual speakers retained. Gradients of ‘errors’ or ‘morphosyntactic richness’ do not translate directly into a picture of what someone would ‘sound like’. I therefore decided to do two more things: I included a variable which I called ‘native speaker rating’, for which I asked a number of L1 speakers of German to give me their subjective impression of how ‘native-like’ these speakers sounded. And I further contacted my informants again, requesting their permission to use a short stretch of their interview on a CD to be included with this book. I was able to obtain this permission from about two thirds of my informants — to whom I am very grateful. Having lived in such close and intimate proximity with more than Wfty autobiographical narratives for a period of several years has been an immensely enriching experience. I feel intensely privileged to have been granted access to these data, and am very grateful to my informants, who have been more than helpful and kind. I have also, during the course of this work, often felt a deep sense of ambiguity at investigating a phenomenon that would not exist if it had not been for the most atrocious crime of the 20th century. The deep respect and admiration I felt at the courageous and dedicated way every one of my informants pursued the course of their lives in the face of inhuman persecution and overwhelming obstacles has often made me question the justiWcation of dispassionately placing their narratives under the microscope of linguistic investigation sixty years later. However, corresponding with my informants, and being granted insight into the deeply conXicting feelings many of them had or still have towards their native language, convinced me that this was indeed a subject in need of further investigation. Some of the experiences I was allowed to share are these: A married couple who had known each other in Düsseldorf long before emigrating, when they were all but children, state that in more than Wfty years of marriage they never spoke German to each other, not even intimately. While expressing similarly negative attitudes towards German, another informant states that she naturally and without conscious eVort talked and sang to her children and grandchildren in German when they were very small. She goes on to say that “the only thing that will immediately stop my 11 months old twins from crying is when I sing ‘Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf ’.” And another informant says: “Among Jewish refugees like myself we only talk English, since it would seem too intimate to use German.” It thus seemed to me that the language which many of my informants had to reject not only embodied memories of Nazi persecution, but also of being

5

6


loved and being secure within their own family. The loss of this residual part of many people’s childhood is what this study aims to investigate. Towards the end of 1998, while I was writing this study, news of the death of Jack Sanders reached me. Jack Sanders was one of the informants who generously donated the story of their lives to the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Düsseldorf, and his interview forms part of the data base for this study. He was also one of those informants that I was fortunate enough to meet in person. Like all other informants, Jack Sanders appears in this study under an alias name which I chose to preserve anonymity. Since it was impossible to express my gratitude to all of my informants in their real name, I am dedicating this study to him as a representative for all those whose narratives I was allowed to share.

Chapter 1

Language contact, language change, and language attrition

Diachronic linguistics, the perspective on investigation of language that takes into account the dimension of time and the diVering states of a language at diVerent points in time, has been a major Weld in linguistic research for at least the last century. And yet, a close look at research into the domain of language change reveals only that we do not really know how or why it happens. We may speculate, and close and diligent research on a large number of languages and vast amounts of data may eventually substantiate or disprove those speculations. In some areas, there may exist very good reasons even now to accept some of these speculations as the probable truth. But the general picture is still to a large part obscure. The one tenet that seems to be almost universally accepted nowadays is that extensive language contact is conductive to language change. The second half of the last century has seen a constant increase of studies on language contact, a process that was inaugurated with Weinreich’s seminal work (Weinreich 1953). For a large part of that time, such studies were predominantly preoccupied with language change on a societal level; with either the shift of entire communities from one language to the other, resulting in language death, or with substantial changes in the linguistic system(s) of those communities, without ensuing decrease in use. It is only relatively recently that research has become interested in possible changes of individuals’ use of and proWciency in one of their linguistic systems. If we focus on these two phenomena of language shift:1 Language death on the one hand and ‘language attrition’ — i.e. the gradual loss of a language by an individual — on the other, a number of questions immediately present themselves, and the answers might be very similar or very diVerent according to which of the two phenomena we look at: – – –

Can any one language ever be really ‘lost’? How can we measure if and to what degree a language is lost? What is language loss, anyway?

8


On a societal level, the answer to the Wrst question will have to be an unequivocal yes. Languages can and do die out. This is generally an intergenerational process, where one generation fails to pass on the language system either in its entirety or in parts to the next. This is illustrated by Gonzo and Saltarelli’s (1983) ‘cascade’ model, in which each ensuing generation has a smaller linguistic repertoire than the last one, until the language ceases to be spoken. Many linguistic and extralinguistic factors are, of course, involved in this change in language use — the ‘marketability’ of the language probably being one of the more important, but certainly not the only one — and, since every language contact situation is diVerent, it can be argued that no language dies out in quite the same way as any other (see for example the intriguing case of Montana Salish, which — after close contact with English over 150 years — is undergoing language death, but not changing in this process (Thomason 1999)). On the level of the individual, however, the question is much more diYcult to answer. Cases like the one of a California-born third generation Japanese American who thought he knew no Japanese whatsoever, but unexpectedly started to speak in that language when he was age-regressed to under the age of four years under hypnosis (Fromm 1970: 79) give rise to doubts as to whether a language once learned is ever really forgotten. This issue will be discussed in more detail below, but immediately leads up to the next question: How do we know if a language is lost? Again on a societal level, this question is answered most often on the basis of census data. While such data are valuable to gain insights into the domains of life in which language shift occurs as well as into the degree of shift, they are not unproblematic, being based on self-reports rather than observation of linguistic behavior (see Romaine 1989: 25–30). More importantly, however, they do not allow conclusions about the microlinguistic trends operative in language shift. It is not possible to draw any conclusions about what is happening within the language as a system as it falls into disuse on the basis of census data alone. Both kinds of research — societal and individual — therefore have to take into account actual spontaneous and/or elicited data from the endangered language if the researcher wants to tackle the last and arguably most complex of the questions formulated above: What is language loss? What linguistic levels are aVected, and to what degree? Is there a sequence to it that obtains universally? If so, is this sequence the reverse of how languages are acquired? Are languages lost according to the same principles that appear to govern language


change as a whole? And, if so, is this true for loss both on a societal and an individual level? This chapter will outline some of the research that has been done in this Weld, in order to establish hypotheses about the L1 attrition of the speciWc group of speakers studied here. Needless to say, a comprehensive account of research on language contact and language change is beyond the scope of this study. The overview will therefore largely be focused on hypotheses and Wndings in the domain of Wrst language attrition in a second language environment. At the end of this chapter, all of the studies cited in the subsequent sections have been listed in Table 1, giving the languages and linguistic variables under investigation, as well as the theoretical framework that was applied. These details will therefore not be given when the studies are referred to in the text. Language attrition: How, why, what (if any)? Language attrition is a special case of variation in the acquisition and use of a language or languages and can best be studied, described, documented, explained and understood within a framework that includes all other phenomena of language acquisition and use. (Andersen 1982: 86)

The inauguration of language attrition studies is commonly assumed to have taken place in 1980 with the UPenn conference ‘The Loss of Language Skills’. To assume this date as the ‘birth’ of the discipline is justiWed, even though issues like interlanguage eVects in the L1 of immigrants or the role of the individual in language death had received attention before in the works of, e.g., Michael Clyne (1967; 1973). However, there was no integrated framework of quantiWed research into issues of language loss at this point, and most of Clyne’s work is predominantly descriptive. The Wrst decade of research into the study of language attrition after the publication of the UPenn conference volume (Lambert and Freed 1982) was thus characterized by ‘staking out the territory’. This is manifest in the fact that about half the papers published during this time were purely concerned with methodological issues. A seminal paper is Andersen (1982), who took it upon himself to provide the community with a number of research questions and hypotheses on the basis of theoretical issues and Wndings from studies on language contact. His axioms have proved extremely valuable as the Weld enlarged and deepened.2 Further early papers concerned themselves with questions of research design (Clark 1982; Oxford 1982) and the state of the art

9

10


in current research (Freed 1982). The following years saw a host of papers which dealt with (intra- and extralinguistic) factors inXuencing language loss (Lambert 1989; Sharwood Smith 1983), the selection of variables (Hinskens 1986), issues of methodological frameworks (De Bot and Weltens 1991; Davies 1986; Leets and Giles 1995; Seliger and Vago 1991; Sharwood Smith 1989; Sharwood Smith and Van Buren 1991) and central questions on research designs (Jaspaert, Kroon and van Hout 1986; Lambert and Moore 1986; Weltens and Cohen 1989). Towards the end of the Wrst decade, a number of papers were dedicated to summing up and evaluating present and ongoing research (de Bot 1991; van Els 1986; Grendel, Weltens and de Bot 1993; Hagen and de Bot 1990). That same period witnessed a number of comparatively small applied studies or pilot studies on Wrst language attrition in a variety of languages and linguistic contexts, on a variety of linguistic levels and within a variety of (socio)linguistic frameworks and research designs (see Table 1 at the end of this chapter). It was only in the nineties that the Weld was suYciently staked out for a number of larger studies to be conducted on some aspects of language attrition. These studies all investigate L1 attrition from a speciWc explanatory framework. In some of these, the focus is on the intralinguistic situation, i.e. they focus predominantly on linguistic variables and phenomena of interlanguage (e.g. Kaufman 1992; Håkansson 1995), while others investigate the socio- and psycholinguistic determinants of language attrition (e.g. Ammerlaan 1996; Köpke 1999). As frameworks of identity theory gained importance in research on language loss, studies also attempted to incorporate these in data-based studies: Hormann (1994) provided an attempt to operationalize Le Page’s framework of Acts of Identity, while Waas (1996) based her study on the concept of “Ethnic AYliation”, and Yaægmur (1997) investigated language attrition from the point of view of Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory. A related approach was taken by Ricker (1994; 1995; 1997), who investigated aspects of language choice and linguistic behavior of French immigrant women in northern Germany from a cultural and social framework. The following outline of these theories will be structured along the distinction between criterion and predictor variables made by Lambert: Criterion variables are the linguistic factors which are investigated by microlinguistic studies of language attrition. Predictor variables are the extralinguistic factors, those features which do or do not inXuence language skill attrition; comprising among other things an individual’s personal characteristics, her motivation for


the acquisition, retention and use of language skills, the learning context, and the interim use of language, as well as traditional sociolinguistic variables like age, gender, and education (cf. Lambert 1982: 9). In empirical studies of language attrition, predictor variables therefore form the independent variables, while criterion variables form the dependent variables.

1.1 Criterion variables: What is lost, and how? The problem confronting the researcher in bilingualism and Wrst language attrition is to explain how traYc is directed when two language grammars are melded and allowed to intermix. What principles seem to be governing the movement of rules from one language to the other and what determines which factors become changed in the host language and what remains? (Seliger 1989: 173)

Studies into how Wrst language attrition proceeds on the level of the linguistic system have mainly been characterized by the following Wve hypotheses: – – – –

–

Language attrition is determined by the acquisitional sequence (Jakobson’s regression hypothesis (Jakobson 1941)) Language attrition is determined by interlanguage eVects, aspects from the linguistic system of the L2 encroaching on that of the L1 Language attrition is determined by general tendencies of language change, leading to a simpliWcation of the linguistic system Language attrition is determined by principles of Universal Grammar (UG), marked structures will be lost while unmarked structures will be preserved Language attrition is determined by reduced accessibility of information in retrieval processes

The division between these hypotheses cannot be drawn as neatly as this list might lead one to suspect; often theories will overlap and phenomena will show up that can equally well be explained by several of these theories or by an interaction of them. Moreover, some of the theoretical aspects underlying these diVerent hypotheses are related. For example, in the course of the search for universal mechanisms in language, parallels between language change, language acquisition, and (pathological) language loss have been pointed out. This suggests that the evolution of a linguistic system over a long time in a

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language community and over a short time in an individual follow the same principles (cf. de Bot and Weltens 1991). 1.1.1 ‘Last in, Wrst out’? — The regression hypothesis The regression hypothesis has a tradition that goes back far longer than any other theory in language loss: It was Wrst formulated by Ribot in the 1880s, and taken up again by Freud in connection with aphasia (Berko-Gleason 1982: 17). It was Roman Jakobson who in the 1940s integrated it into a linguistic framework, speciWcally in the area of phonology (de Bot and Weltens 1991: 31). The central tenet of this hypothesis is comprehensively summed up by Caramazza and Zurif: The pattern of language dissolution in aphasics is similar, but in reverse order, to the pattern of language acquisition in children. Those aspects of language competence acquired last, or, more precisely, those that are most dependent on other linguistic developments, are likely to be the Wrst to be disrupted consequent to brain damage; those aspects of language competence that are acquired earliest and are thus ‘independent’ of later developments are likely to be most resistant to eVects of brain damage. (Caramazza and Zurif 1978: 145)

The regression hypothesis has been the subject of much debate in research on both pathological and non-pathological loss. Where aphasia is concerned, it has come to be generally accepted that this hypothesis does not provide a conclusive framework. One reason for this is that pathological language loss is usually not a universal phenomenon, depending as it does on diVerent forms of local impairment to the brain (Caramazza and Zurif 1978: 146) and therefore aVecting only speciWc linguistic skills. Even where the language of aphasics does resemble that of children, there is a striking diVerence in the metalinguistic awareness of two groups: While children are apparently content with ungrammatical utterances they produce, aphasics are often painfully aware of their deviances in production from an accepted standard and attempt (albeit unsuccessfully) to correct themselves (Berko-Gleason 1982: 17). Where non-pathological language loss is concerned, it has been speculated that the sequence of L1 acquisition might determine the sequence of attrition (e.g. Andersen 1982: 97; Berko-Gleason 1982: 14; Seliger 1991: 227). The fact that languages are acquired in stages by children has been taken to suggest that language competence is ‘layered’, and that attrition will work its way from the topmost layer to the bottom. (Berko-Gleason 1982: 14; Caramazza and Zurif 1978: 145). A related but slightly diVerent approach is concerned with the


notion of frequency of reinforcement, hypothesizing that it is not what is learned Wrst but what is learned best that is least vulnerable to language loss (Berko-Gleason 1982: 21; Jordens, de Bot, van Os and Schumans 1986: 161; Lambert 1989: 7). The diVerence between these two lines of thought, as well as the major theoretical problem in connection with the regression hypothesis, can be reduced to the two basic competing frameworks in the theory of L1 acquisition: The nativist (or Chomskyan) and the cognitivist (or Piagetian) approach. If the sequence of L1 acquisition is seen as determined by an innate languagelearning capacity developing autonomously (Chomsky 1965: 27–37), then the hypothesis that the loss of this autonomous system will proceed in inverse order appears at least possible. The linguistic system could ‘atrophy’ due to lack of use, and this atrophying process could be the reverse of the acquisitional one. If, on the other hand, the linguistic capacity is seen as being paced by the growth of conceptual and communicative capacities in L1 acquisition then such an assumption would not make sense: In non-pathological language attrition, it is not the conceptual and communicative skills that are aVected, but the lexical and grammatical system. If the cognitive concepts that are seen as the prerequisites for the acquisition of a certain feature — e.g. the concept of singularity and plurality, which the child must have in order to acquire the singular — plural distinction — are not lost again in the same sequence that they were acquired then, there is no reason why the grammatical features that express them should be. Given the extent of the debate on the regression hypothesis, it seems strange that little research in the Weld of attrition has attempted to link acquisitional and attritional sequences. Only two studies have so far compared the sequence of attrition with that of acquisition. One of these is Jordens et al. (1986; 1989), who suggest that, while the regression hypothesis makes predictions that explain the observations on L2 attrition, L1 attrition does not parallel any acquisitional sequence. This Wnding points towards a cognitivist explanation of language acquisition: Since (adult) L2 acquisition is not ‘paced’ by a cognitive development, a ‘last in, Wrst out’ sequence of attrition seems more likely than in the case of L1 attrition (for a discussion of these studies and their Wndings see below). The regression hypothesis was also tested by Håkansson in her study on the L1 attrition of Swedish. Again, her Wndings on the attrition of morphology and syntax did not suggest that the attriters had reached a stage that was found anywhere in studies on the acquisition of Swedish (Håkansson 1995: 163f.).

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Since Jordens et al.’s study is based only on experimental data in one speciWc grammatical Weld (case marking), while Håkansson based her study on written data by early bilinguals, however, these Wndings alone are no suYcient basis for the sweeping rejection of the regression hypothesis often found in literature on attrition (e.g. Sharwood Smith 1989: 186). 1.1.2 ‘Hostile takeover’? — The interlanguage hypothesis The notion that in situations of language contact and ensuing language change the modiWcations that can be observed in the linguistic system of one of these languages are entirely or in parts due to the second language ‘taking over’, encroaching on the Wrst, is fairly widespread and probably true to some extent. In the lexical, or open-class domain, at least, it is hard to see where eVects like code-switching and code-mixing should come from, if not directly from the linguistic system of the L2. In the grammatical system, however, a clear distinction of cases of L2 inXuence from modiWcations within the linguistic system of L1 that are not due to L2 is often problematic. Studies on language death as well as situations of intense language contact, e.g. creolization have often discovered modiWcations within a linguistic system that cannot be explained by interlanguage eVects alone: “Perhaps the errors in a half-forgotten language have a logic of their own too (that is, arise from properties of the language being forgotten or from the structure and order of the forgetting process itself) and are not simple interference phenomena.” (Dorian 1982: 57)

The distinction between externally and internally induced linguistic change in language attrition was made by Seliger and Vago (1991: 10), who identiWed diVerent strategies of linguistic change caused by these two forces. Within this framework, studies of attrition would have to be based on a comparison of linguistic features of both languages, trying to isolate interferences3 that can only be due to interlanguage eVects against mistakes that are clearly internally induced. In this context, the role of contrast between the two languages is clearly a determining factor. However, researchers disagree on the role of contrast in this respect: It has been hypothesized that features that are cognate in L1 and L2 are more likely to be retained while categories that do not have an equivalent in the L2 will be lost both in language attrition and language death (Andersen 1982: 97; Dorian 1982: 153; Lambert 1989: 7; Romaine 1989: 75; Sharwood Smith 1989: 193). On the other hand, Seliger has


hypothesized that at a certain stage in language attrition, due to lack of L1 input, the L2 grammar will become a source of “indirect positive evidence” which will aVect grammaticality judgements in the L1 (Seliger 1991: 237). The two linguistic systems will interact in those domains where both of them contain a rule which serves the same semantic function, and “that version of the rule which is formally less complex and has a wider linguistic distribution […] will replace the more complex more narrowly distributed rule” (Seliger 1989: 173) — a deWnition which would appear to presuppose a situation where the relevant corresponding category is present in L2. In a similar vein, Altenberg, who found more instances of ‘mistakes’ in the domain of plural allomorphs than in the domain of gender marking in L1 attrition of German under L2 inXuence of English, hypothesized that this discrepancy was due to English not having a gender distinction on nouns, thus making it easier for her subjects to keep up this distinction in their L1. She therefore speculates that “L1 and L2 similarity is a necessary condition for transfer” (Altenberg 1991: 203). Unfortunately, the two types of language attrition — internally and externally induced — have not, so far, been systematically explored on the basis of, e.g., research done in language contact studies.4 However, such a study would have to be based on experimental data obtained in a rigorously controlled environment. Data obtained from free spoken discourse oVers diVerent numbers of possibilities for the speaker to make ‘mistakes’ on diVerent types of grammatical features, thus making it impossible to assess the degree of attrition of a speciWc linguistic rule by simple comparison of the frequencies of mistakes. It would also be useful if such a study of individual language loss were to investigate two linguistic systems with a high degree of inXectional variability and a tendency towards synthetic structures, in order to assess the inXuence of variation between L1 and L2. Since, however, the vast majority of studies on language attrition done so far (including the present one) use English — a predominantly analytic language — as one of the contact languages, it is very diYcult to assess the role of interlanguage: Most of the deviant forms produced by language attriters might equally well be due to internally and externally induced linguistic change. 1.1.3 SimpliWcation? — The language change hypothesis Such diYculties in the distinction of processes of interlanguage interference and internal simpliWcation of a system notwithstanding, some processes that were predicted or have been shown to obtain in language attrition are qualitatively

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diVerent from processes that could be explained by interlanguage alone. This, however, does not preclude the possibility that, once gaps in the linguistic system of L1 have been created, L2 elements might move in to Wll the voids thus created. One eVect that has been shown to occur in language loss due to extensive language contact is a reduction in registers. This is due to the fact that in an immigrant setting, the use of a speciWc language will often be conWned to certain situations, e.g. domestic ones (Andersen 1982: 88; Maher 1991: 80). It has also been predicted that the lexicon of attriters will be reduced, and moreover contain only or mainly high-frequency items (Andersen 1982: 94). Where the grammatical system is concerned, a general prediction is that language death as well as language attrition will lead to an overall reduction in morphological complexity, resulting in a more analytical language structure. Features that are considered vulnerable in this respect are multiple case systems and systems with a large amount of allomorphic variation (Maher 1991: 80; Seliger and Vago 1991: 10; Andersen 1982: 97). Further predictions include a trend towards periphrastic constructions, like the development of the go-future (Maher 1991: 80) or do-support. One reason for the development of such quasi-auxiliaries might be that they are characteristic of a more non-standard vernacular, and are therefore concomitant to the reduction in registers immigrant languages often experience. Language loss is thus seen as a form of language change that is speeded up within the individual or within the community. Several studies have borne out some of these predictions (see e.g. Schmidt 1991 on Dyirbal under the inXuence of English; Dorian 1982 on East Sutherland Gaelic under the inXuence of English; and Håkansson 1995 on the L1 attrition of Swedish in English/Swedish or French/Swedish bilinguals). An interesting hypothesis that has hitherto gone uninvestigated predicts a reduction in morphological distinctions that is dependent on the amount of vital information they contribute to the discourse and suggests that distinctions will be maintained if their loss would result in frequent loss of information (Andersen 1982: 97; Lambert and Moore 1986: 180). This hypothesis presupposes a high awareness of the morphological and functional complexity of the attriting language by the attriter, and it would therefore be interesting to see if it can be veriWed. It should be noted that the distinction between the interlanguage hypothesis and the simpliWcation hypothesis is very hard, if not impossible, to draw. Analytical structures are not forcibly the outcome of language change eVects, since they can develop even in areas where the contact language has highly developed synthetic structures.


How diYcult it is to clearly draw the distinction between interlanguage eVects and internal simpliWcation is illustrated by the debate on Middle English. The question of whether this was, in fact, a creole language due to highly productive language contact, or whether the rapid loss of inXectional marking was due to language internal mechanisms is widely and controversially discussed in the literature (see e.g. Allen 1997; Bailey and Maroldt 1977; Dalton-PuVer 1995; Danchev 1997; Görlach 1986; Poussa 1982) but as yet remains unsolved. 1.1.4 Universal Grammar? — The parameter hypothesis At a very basic level, the UG approach to language attrition is not unrelated to the regression hypothesis, since it also considers acquisitional factors. It is, however, not so much based on an observable sequence of acquisition but on grammatical reasons for this sequence. The parameter view on language acquisition and language attrition is based on Chomsky’s notion of a UG which contains a set of Wxed principles and certain open parameters which are set during the acquisitional process (Chomsky 1981: 4; Ingram 1989: 64; Seliger and Vago 1991: 12). This theory is complicated by the assumption that certain parameters carry a preferred or unmarked setting, which, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, will be the value assigned to the speciWc feature (Sharwood Smith and van Buren 1991: 25). The parameter view has instigated many studies into Wrst and second language acquisition, with a view to establishing factors such as – – –

are children born with an innate knowledge about universal properties of the linguistic system? if a parameter is set to a speciWc value, can that setting ever be neutralized (e.g. in L2 acquisition, if the settings for L2 diVer from those of L1)? the role of markedness in this context: Can a marked parameter be reset to an unmarked setting in L2 acquisition?

Within the framework of L1 attrition, it has been proposed that this process might involve the ‘unmarking’ of parameters that have been set to a marked value in L1 (Håkansson 1995: 155; Sharwood Smith 1989: 199). However, an alternative view has been proposed by Sharwood Smith and van Buren: Since parameter settings are inXuenced by evidence from input, and since language attrition is characterized by lack of evidence through lack of contact, they assume that marked values in the L1 will persist (Sharwood Smith and van Buren 1991: 26).

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The only study that investigates a speciWc case of language attrition within this theoretical framework is Håkansson’s work on the V2-rule in Swedish. However, she could Wnd no evidence for her subjects coming to prefer an unmarked SVO sentence structure over topicalized VS constructions: The distribution of SVO and VS sentences paralleled that in unattrited monolingual Swedish (Håkansson 1995). 1.1.5 Not lost, just mislaid? — The psycholinguistic hypothesis All of these approaches to language attrition are based on language-internal principles. On the basis of acquisitional or typological features of the languages that are interacting in the contact situation, they analyzed and discussed the changes found in contact varieties. In recent years, however, an approach to language attrition has gained in importance which tries to analyze language attrition in terms of processing and memory retrieval, dealing with more general psychological issues like the accessing and forgetting of information. This approach is based on the growing emphasis on psycholinguistic processes in bilingual speech production at large that the past decade has witnessed.5 For some time now, attrition researchers have attempted to establish whether evidence for attrition is evidence for something being irretrievably ‘lost’ or merely an indication of a temporary problem of accessibility — an issue that is somewhat related to the competence — performance debate in language attrition (see Ammerlaan 1996: 10; de Bot 1996: 583; Hulsen, de Bot and Weltens 1999; Köpke 1999: 84). The question of whether attrition merely aVects procedural knowledge, or whether the actual knowledge of the L1 can become deteriorated (Ammerlaan 1996: 10) — or, on a more general level, whether knowledge once acquired can ever be lost from memory — has not conclusively been resolved, but evidence overwhelmingly points towards what diYculties there are being only temporary (Ammerlaan 1996: 210; de Bot 1996: 584; Köpke 1999: 359).


1.2 Predictor variables — the extralinguistic factors Surely it all very much depends on personal circumstances i.e. background, age, time of emigration amongst others. (Eric Kaufman, Questionnaire)

It is generally accepted that language attrition is only partly determined by internal or intralinguistic factors. SpeciWc features of a certain language may be more vulnerable to attrition than others — a highly developed inXectional system may be subject to ‘mistakes’ in a contact situation more quickly than SVO word order. However, external and social factors also play a role. Such factors comprise the classical sociolinguistic variables like age, gender, education etc., as well as the amount of contact the individual has with the attriting language and the length of her stay in the country of emigration. However, language attrition might also be inXuenced by factors which operate at the level of society, and these are far more elusive to describe, determine, and operationalize. Such factors can largely be subsumed under theories of (ethnic) identity and assimilation. 1.2.1 Individual factors Age Obgleich ich mit 13 ½ Jahren nach England kam; ich konnte kaum ein Wort Englisch, und konnte mich kaum verständlich machen, und hatte deshalb auch etliche Schwierigkeiten; ist Deutsch bis heute meine ‘Muttersprache’. (Even though I was 13 ½ years old when I came to England and hardly spoke a word of English — and had a lot of diYculties because of that — German remains my ‘mother tongue’ to this day.) (Albert L., Questionnaire)

The role of age at the onset of second language acquisition (SLA) has been much debated in the literature on bilingualism, but it seems to be a widely held view that ‘children’ have a greater aptness at acquiring a second language than ‘adults’ (Romaine 1989: 238f.). Neurological approaches to this phenomenon have assumed a ‘critical period’ for language acquisition, which is limited by cerebral factors and lasts from about age three to the onset of puberty. The assumption that “by the time of puberty, a turning point is reached” (Lenneberg 1967: 150)

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is based on observations of recovery from aphasia and of physical changes in the brain (Lenneberg 1967: 142–82). The ‘critical period’ hypothesis for language acquisition in general and L2 acquisition in particular has been contested in some points (cf. Bolotin 1995; Cain, Weber-Olsen and Smith 1987: 333f.; Köpke 1999: 34; Romaine 1989: 238V.). Today, the inXuence of age on second language acquisition is still very much in doubt (Flynn and Manuel 1991: 118), although evidence indicates that at least phonological patterns are very diYcult to acquire after a certain age: Clyne reports that, after age twelve, it is close to impossible to learn a language to the degree that one can be taken for a native speaker (Clyne 1981: 39; see also Flynn and Manuel 1991: 119). Where Wrst language attrition is concerned, however, one immediately relevant factor of age is the level of achievement at the onset of attrition. In the hypothetical case of a child emigrating at age six and not being given the chance to speak her Wrst language from that point onwards, the linguistic abilities of a six-year-old child would obviously have to be the base-line for comparison in a study of language attrition, and it would be foolish to compare her with an attriter who had reached adult age before her emigration. To what degree attrition — as opposed to failure to acquire — is inXuenced by the age at the onset of non-contact beyond this has not been determined so far. There are a number of studies which observe immigrants who had been very young when input in their L1 became reduced (Kaufman and AronoV 1991; Seliger 1991; Turian and Altenberg 1991; Vago 1991. All of these studies investigate children who had been less than six years old at this point). Others use ‘adult’ informants, although the age at which the acquisition of the Wrst language is considered completed varies between 14 (Köpke 1999), 15 (de Bot and Clyne 1989; 1994; Clyne 1973; 1981), 16 (Waas 1996) and 17 years (de Bot, Gommans and Rossing 1991). Köpke is the only one among these researchers who tried to determine the eVect of age on attrition: She divided her informants into two groups (14–25 and 26–36 years at emigration), but this distinction did not show signiWcant eVects on any linguistic level of attrition (Köpke 1999: 203f.).

Education Da ich Akademiker […] bin, war es mir von Anfang meines Studiums (in den zwanziger Jahren) an sehr wichtig, englische wie auch französische Fachliteratur zu lesen.


(Since I’m an academic, it was very important to me from the time I began my studies (in the 1920s) to read English and French texts.) (John Herz, Questionnaire)

Very little research has been devoted to the inXuence of the education level on language attrition. The only studies that included education among their independent variables are those by Jaspaert and Kroon (1989) and Köpke (1999). The results from these two studies are contradictory: In Jaspaert and Kroon’s study, education turned out to be the most important explanatory factor for language loss (Jaspaert and Kroon 1989: 92). They hypothesize that the reason for this inXuence might either be purely material — a higher level of education, on the whole, making for a better Wnancial situation and allowing more trips home — or be linked to a higher familiarity with the written code and thus oVering more chances for contact (Jaspaert and Kroon 1989: 92). A third hypothesis put forward is that “maybe their education provides them with a better insight in the structure of language”, thus making retention easier (Jaspaert and Kroon 1989: 92f.). For Köpke, on the other hand, the level of education did not show signiWcant results for attrition on any linguistic level (Köpke 1999: 204). Yaægmur treats education as an ambivalent factor which might either facilitate the shift to L2 (through better instruction) or be conductive to a higher degree of maintenance of the L1 (Yaægmur 1997: 20). A higher level of education has also been cited by Clyne in explanation of the fact that he found a greater tendency towards maintenance of the L1 in pre-war German emigrants to Australia than in an otherwise comparable group of post-war emigrants (Clyne 1973: 97).

Time Für dreissig Jahre habe ich kein Wort Deutsch gesprochen, nachdem ich auswanderte, aber die Muttersprache vergißt man nie. (For thirty years after my emigration I didn’t speak a word of German — but you never forget your mother tongue.) (Erich E., Questionnaire)

The Wndings from several studies suggest that the time span elapsed since emigration does not inXuence language attrition to the degree one might suspect. In fact, it seems generally agreed nowadays that what attrition of

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linguistic skills takes place does so within the Wrst decade of emigration (de Bot and Clyne 1994: 17). This conclusion is based on two series of tests of German migrants in Australia, which took place in 1971 and 1987 but could not establish any further loss within that sixteen year period (de Bot and Clyne 1994). Furthermore, a study of German migrants in Australia who had emigrated less than 10 years previously did Wnd indications of attrition (Waas 1993). De Bot and Clyne therefore conclude that Wrst-language attrition does not necessarily take place in an immigrant setting and that those immigrants who manage to maintain their language in the Wrst years of their stay in the new environment are likely to remain Xuent speakers of their Wrst language. (de Bot and Clyne 1994: 17)

Gender In many studies on language change and variation, the gender of the informants appears to be an important sociolinguistic variable (e.g. Hudson 1980: 195; Wodak and Benke 1997). However, unlike the other factors considered in this section, such Wndings have validity only within the cultural context of the speciWc situation under investigation and cannot be taken as universal. In a cultural context where women are not expected to work outside the home or to have ties outside their own cultural (or ethnic) community, it would have to be expected that they maintain their native language to a higher degree than men (cf. Yaægmur 1997: 19f.); but a diVerent social setting may produce very diVerent results. Within the context of research on language attrition, gender has not been investigated as an independent variable. The only exception is Köpke (1999) whose Wndings do not show any evidence for a signiWcant inXuence of gender on language attrition of Germans in emigration (Köpke 1999: 203f.). Contact Q: For what other purposes do you use German now? A: Hardly ever, only on visits to Germany or speaking with Germans whose English is worse than my German. (Walther E., Questionnaire) Um eine Sprache richtig ‘zu verstehen’ muss man die Menschen gut kennen, die sie sprechen. (In order to be able to properly ‘understand’ a language you have to know the people who speak it.) (Martin R., Questionnaire)


It seems to be intuitively evident that language attrition might depend to a large degree on the amount of contact that the ‘attriting’ individual has with speakers of the L1. This factor, however, is diYcult to put into quantiWable terms, since it is not discrete. Moreover, it can only be established on the basis of self-report data. Researchers cannot hang a tape recorder around someone’s neck and monitor their linguistic behavior for ten years — even if this were a practical possibility, ethical considerations would forbid it. However, selfreport data from an area that is as emotionally charged as linguistic proWciency might very well be inXuenced more by how a person wishes to view herself than by an accurate assessment of her linguistic behavior. Language attrition has on various occasions been found to be a very sensitive issue for the attriters: Some of the informants indicate that they feel ashamed of what they perceive as their inadequate control over their L1 (Ricker 1995: 110), while others vigorously deny having a ‘language problem’ (Waas 1996: 77). One former citizen of Düsseldorf, on listening to a recording of an interview he had given to the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte some years previously, protested in the sharpest terms possible that this recording was very insulting, saying “I speak German much better than that”. Consequently, someone who feels that her linguistic competence is not what she would like it to be might convince herself that this is due to the fact that she has not used the language, and underrate the amount to which she spoke it. Alternatively, someone who does not want competence in her L1 to be part of her personality any longer might also show a tendency to downplay her use of that language. On the other hand, someone who feels that she still retains perfect control over her L1 might report more use of it than ‘objectively’ true. Bearing in mind these methodological considerations, it has also to be taken into account that ‘contact’ depends on two factors: Opportunity and choice. The Wrst of these factors is largely (though not entirely) outside the individual’s control, the second is not. An immigrant might Wnd herself in a situation where no other speakers of her Wrst language are part of her social environment any longer, so that use of that language in everyday interaction is no longer an option. A less dramatic scenario is that contact is reduced to a small number of people in a certain context, so that language use is conWned to speciWc domains, e.g. the domestic and family one. However, it is also possible that, though the immigrant still has contact with speakers of her L1, she chooses not to use that language in interaction with them. This factor often depends on the prestige of that particular language: Languages that have a high prestige and are considered to have a large

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utilitarian value may be maintained to a higher degree than languages that are associated with stigmatized groups of immigrants (Olsthain and Barzilay 1991: 139). Based on previous investigations of the role of language contact for language attrition, I would like to propose the following taxonomy of L1 use in emigration: – – –

language use with the previous generation (grandparents and parents) language use within the same generation (partner/spouse, friends; also professional use of the language, e.g. by language teachers or translators) language use with the next generation (children)

In most immigrant situations, there is an overall decline of the use of the L1 within these contexts (among others Hulsen, de Bot and Weltens 1999). In many immigrant groups, language maintenance is highest in interaction with the grandparents (Clyne 1981: 26), and most young immigrants both of whose parents belong to the same linguistic group are actively bilingual (Boyd 1986: 107). Language use with a partner with the same L1 or with friends appears to be more governed by choice, and this is the domain where language use is most inXuenced by personal factors such as a wish for assimilation and/or distance towards the ethnic community of origin on the one hand (leading to disuse of the L1) or a wish to maintain the native language. While some studies Wnd that all informants go on using their L1 on a regular basis (de Bot and Clyne 1989: 171 for Dutch speakers in Australia and PfaV 1991 for Turkish children in Germany), others discover a decided preference for the immigrant language with age peers (Boyd 1986: 111). With the next generation, many immigrant groups prefer not to use the L1 (de Bot and Clyne 1989: 171), since it is often felt that being bilingual would be an impediment for children growing up in an immigrant context. The factor of language use within the speaker’s own generation for language attrition is widely under debate, and the inXuence of endogamous or exogamous marriages has been an ambivalent factor in attrition studies: While Yaægmur hypothesizes that a shift to the mainstream language is more likely when members of the immigrant group marry someone from another ethnolinguistic group (Yaægmur 1997: 20), Jaspaert and Kroon found evidence contradicting such a hypothesis: Those of their informants who had married a partner whose did not belong to the group they were investigating (Italians in the Netherlands) actually did better on their tests than those whose partner was


also a native speaker of Italian (Jaspaert and Kroon 1989: 94). Similarly, de Bot and Clyne found that informants whose self-report data stated that their linguistic proWciency had not changed in emigration used their L1 to a signiWcantly smaller degree than those who had reported a change (de Bot and Clyne 1989: 171). Köpke’s analysis of free spoken discourse, on the other hand, did not reveal any signiWcant inXuence of language use on any linguistic level save that of the lexicon (Köpke 1999: 204). These discrepancies are probably linked to the question of whether attrition is due to lack of practice or memory reinforcement — does the linguistic system ‘atrophy’ if it is not used by the speaker? — or whether it is due to lack of conWrming evidence in the input. If the latter could be shown to be the case, a large amount of contact with the L1 in spoken discourse might actually have a detrimental eVect on L1 proWciency: A speaker in emigration might come to lose conWdence in her own L1 competence (Andersen 1982: 112; Gardner 1982: 27), and therefore use ‘deviant’ input from the speech of other immigrants she interacts with as conWrming evidence, not recognizing those interferences as non-native-like structures (Py 1986: 166). A large amount of contact with the L1 through other immigrants might therefore be conductive to a process of attritional language change through a kind of ‘vicious circle’ where speakers come to prefer non-native like structures from the speech of the people they interact with over their own native judgements.

Attitude and motivation Ich liebe meine deutsche Muttersprache und spreche und lese viel deutsch. Je emotionaler der Gegenstand des Sprechens ist, umso mehr neige ich dazu, deutsch zu sprechen. (I love my German mother tongue, and I speak and read German a lot. The more emotional the topic, the more I tend to use German.) (Martin R., Questionnaire)

The role of individual attitudes towards a second language and the motivation for its acquisition has been a central issue in research on SLA and bilingualism for some time. Within this framework, the individual’s motivation in the process of SLA is to a large degree determined by her attitude toward the language communities and her orientation (either integrative or instrumental) toward language study (Gardner and Lambert 1972). This factor is important

25

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in determining whether the outcome of SLA is additive or subtractive bilingualism. Additive bilingualism is a process in which SLA is an enriching experience, adding an L2 without loss to L1 or to the feelings of identiWcation with the speaker’s own cultural community. In subtractive bilingualism, on the other hand, SLA has a deleterious eVect on L1 or on the sense of identiWcation with the learner’s own ethnic community (Gardner 1982: 28). In other words, it is predicted that L1 attrition will to a large part be determined by notions like attitude and identity. Attitude and motivation in SLA are based largely on the individual’s perception of the situation and on how the ‘minority’ group is perceived by the ‘majority’ group. This deWnition takes the factors of attitude and motivation out of the realm of individual factors considered within this section and places it on a societal level. They will therefore be discussed in more detail in the subsequent sections in the context of concepts like identity and Ethnolinguistic Vitality. 1.2.2 Community factors All groups are targets for ascribed identities: Images of themselves pinned upon them by others. The number of diVerent ascribed identities attributed to any group is a function of that group’s social role and social power. (Breakwell 1983: 191)

The process of emigration places an individual in an entirely new context, making a re-evaluation of identity and self-conception necessary. While groups consider themselves as stratiWed, they are often viewed as homogenous from the outside (Breakwell 1983: 191). Thus, while an individual might have perceived herself as belonging to a social class with a certain social prestige while still in the country of her origin, after emigration she may Wnd attitudes towards her inXuenced by stereotyped notions associated with ‘immigrants’ or ‘immigrants of a certain ethnolinguistic background’ (Yaægmur 1997: 31). Almost invariably, the prestige attached to the status of ‘immigrant’ will be lower than that of her former status (Yaægmur 1997: 31). This downgrading by members of the dominant community may instigate a wish for complete assimilation. In order to achieve that, the immigrant may reject her native language in an attempt to acquire a native-like competence of her L2, a foreign accent being one of the more notable indications of her immigrant status. If, on the other hand, she still feels comfortable with or even


proud of her origins, she may wish to be perceived as a member of the community of immigrants from her country of origin, and even ‘Xaunt’ her bilingual competence or non-native command of the dominant language (cf. Giles, Bourhis and Taylor 1977: 323, 331).

Identity I feel that my family did a lot for Germany and for Düsseldorf, and therefore I feel that Germany betrayed me. America is my country, and English is my language. (Gertrud U., Questionnaire)

The role of language within the framework of ethnic identity has been a prominent research topic in recent years. Identity is very closely related to identiWcation, i.e. group membership, and human beings tend to act in a way which is considered accepted behavior for the group they want to belong to (Edwards 1985: 3; Hormann 1994: 15). Group membership is determined by an interaction of complex characteristics, attitudes and behaviors, many of which (e.g. age, sex, ethnicity) are outside the individual’s control. Within this framework, linguistic behavior is one of the more prominent and more immediately noticeable aspects among those the individual does have the power to change. This notion is at the core of, e.g. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s (1985) theory of ‘Acts of Identity’, which is based on the assumption that an individual will conform to patterns of linguistic behavior through which she will resemble that group of people to which she wishes to belong (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 181). This may involve a shift in dialect, register or linguistic system. Language behavior can therefore be considered to be one of the most important markers of identity (Edwards 1985: 96; Giles, Bourhis and Taylor 1977: 325). Obviously, such a pattern of achieving a sense of identiWcation through adaptation of linguistic behavior will lead to complex processes for bilinguals, since groups or individuals they might wish to identify with for various reasons might customarily speak diVerent languages. This is especially true for migrant’s children who use their parents’ language at home and the majority language in school or in contact with other members of the dominant society, so that linguistic behavior is tied up with the language of certain role models (Northover 1988: 204f.). Based on these observations, Ervin-Tripp (1973 [1954]) has for-

27

28


mulated the theory that the diVerent languages of bi- or multilinguals might be associated with diVerent aspects of their personalities, and empirical research has since borne out the assumption that bilinguals’ attitudes, values, and beliefs tend to vary with the language they speak (G. Hermann 1990: 69; J. Hermann 1988: 230; Hull 1991; 1996: 419; Matsumoto and Hull 1994: 92). Language, however, is not only a marker of identity in individuals, but it is often crucial in the sense of group membership that has been called ethnicity.

Ethnicity Ethnicity is rightly understood as an aspect of a collectivity’s self-recognition as well as an aspect of its recognition in the eyes of outsiders. Ethnic recognition diVers from other kinds of group-embedded recognition in that it operates basically in terms of paternity rather than in terms of patrimony and exegesis thereupon. (Fishman 1980: 16)

Language has often been cited as one of the more important, if not the most important, constitutive factors of a concept of ethnicity (Edwards 1985: 6; Fishman 1989: 5; Giles, Bourhis and Taylor 1977: 331; Khemlani-David 1998: 71). This is especially true for minorities, who base their sense of ethnic identity on language to a far higher degree than is usually true for majorities. In mainstream populations, the language of everyday interaction is also the language which embodies cultural heritage (Edwards 1985: 110f.), and as the default will not normally be perceived as salient. Ethnic identities and the symbols through which they are represented diVer widely across cultures and situations (Weinreich 1983: 178), and some ethnic minorities will assimilate quickly into the dominant majority, giving up their own culture and traditions along with their language, while others have a high degree of persistence. One of the frameworks developed in this context is the theory of Ethnolinguistic Vitality (EV) associated with the names of Howard Giles, Richard Bourhis, and Allard Landry, among others. This framework has attempted to operationalize some of the factors which combine to make up ethnic situations, and to establish the degree of what is termed ‘vitality’, i.e. “that which makes a group likely to behave as a distinctive and active collective entity in intergroup situations” (Giles, Bourhis and Taylor 1977: 308). Groups with a high degree of EV are predicted to maintain their language and culture more than groups with negative or inadequate social identity, i.e. a low degree of EV. Factors used to measure this are prestige, demographic


distribution and institutional support through e.g. linguistic clubs, education in the minority language, or prominent representation in the media (Giles, Bourhis and Taylor 1997: 319; Leets and Giles 1995: 39; Yaægmur 1997: 25). While this framework might provide a step towards the operationalization of such complex and elusive factors as ethnicity and identity in language attrition and language death studies, Wndings have not, so far, been able to show that there is any inXuence of EV on language loss. Yaægmur, who has tested EV theory factors for speakers of Turkish in Australia, did not Wnd any signiWcant interaction of vitality factors and language attrition, and states that “a direct relationship between them cannot be concluded” (Yaægmur 1997: 100f.). It appears, therefore, that much further research will have to go into the theory of Ethnolinguistic Vitality if we are to apply this complex framework as an explanatory approach within studies of language attrition.

1.3 Research designs Ultimately, language attrition research should adopt a language use perspective. This would include (1) both comprehension and production, (2) both oral and written use of language, (3) both the traditional linguistic areas of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, on the one hand, and functions […] that we can group under the general category of ‘doing things with language’ (Andersen 1982: 84)

The view on language attrition research expressed in this quote is a very idealistic one; and no study to this date has been able to fulWll all these requirements. Research on language attrition is a priori faced with three major methodological considerations: 1. How shall the data be obtained (free discourse; experiments; elicitations; self reports)? 2. What linguistic features are to be considered? 3. What is to be considered evidence for ‘attrition’? The fact that studies on attrition often have contradictory results, that some researchers claim to have found attrition to a large degree, while others state that they have found virtually none, can almost certainly be put down to varying notions about these issues on the part of researchers.

29

30


1.3.1 Data collection As in any empirical linguistic study, possibilities of obtaining data rank from observing while interfering as little as possible to rigidly controlled elicitation. While most researchers would agree that free spoken discourse will probably give the best representation of an individual’s linguistic proWciency, this method of data collection has several drawbacks. One of them is frequency: If a speciWc linguistic feature is to be looked at, often a very large amount of data will be needed to yield suYcient instances of production of that variable. A second drawback is control: In free discourse, there is no possibility for the researcher to ensure that every subject has the opportunity to produce an equal number of instances of the variable to be looked for. This problem is linked to a third one, namely avoidance strategies: If a speaker feels that she is losing her native competence in any given language, she might cope with this sense of diminished ability by avoiding certain structures; and such strategies are very hard to detect and quantify in free spoken data. A further complication is that being interviewed by a linguist is often not the most conductive situation for the production of free discourse with a low amount of monitoring on the part of the interviewee. If she knows that she is participating in a linguistic experiment conducted by someone who is a native speaker of her language, the probability is that she will feel self-conscious about her perceived diminished competence. Waas, for example, reported that several of her subjects, prior to participating in her experiments, felt a need to ‘brush up’ on their German (Waas 1996: 82). Because of these methodological considerations, few studies so far have relied on interviews alone as their linguistic data (exceptions being de Bot and Clyne 1994; Olshtain and Barzilay 1991); while ‘elicited’ free discourse (through a description of pictures) is often combined with other metalinguistic tests like grammaticality judgements (de Bot, Gommans and Rossing 1991; Köpke 1999; Seliger 1991). Further methods that have been employed to assess attriters’ linguistic performance are explicit grammatical tasks, where speakers are either presented with lexical items and asked to inXect them (Altenberg 1991; Vago 1991) or asked to produce a certain sentence structure (Yaægmur 1997); cloze or editing tests where missing or superXuous items have to be inserted or deleted in a text (Ammerlaan 1996; Jaspaert and Kroon 1989); or Xuency assessments in controlled association, where the speaker is presented with a stimulus and asked to produce as many lexical items as possible within a speciWed semantic Weld (e.g. ‘plants’ or ‘animals’) within a given time span (Ammerlaan 1996;


Waas 1996; Yaægmur 1997). These data are often augmented by self-report data or Can-Do-scales to yield a comprehensive picture of an individual’s control over her language. An integrated methodological evaluation of these diVerent research designs has not, to this date, been performed. Such an analysis is clearly called for, however, since it is not at all evident that attrition will show up to the same degree in these tests, which may account in part for the diVerence in results encountered in language attrition studies. 1.3.2 Linguistic levels In research on language attrition and language shift it is not always clear on what grounds linguistic variables are selected. […] An important criterium for selection in attrition/shift research is the extent to which a linguistic aspect is expected to be representative of part of the language or of the language as a whole, and the extent to which it is expected to be ‘vulnerable’, that is, an early candidate for decay. (Hagen and de Bot 1990: 137)

A second factor which makes studies on language attrition very diYcult to compare is the selection of linguistic variables. Ever since Weinreich’s seminal study on language contact (Weinreich 1953), contact linguistics has attempted to provide a classiWcation of linguistic material in terms of likelihood for transfer. It is generally agreed that there is a cline of ‘borrowability’ within the linguistic system; that lexical items are borrowed more easily than functional or grammatical ones; that nouns are more easily borrowed than verbs and so on (Wilkins 1996).6 In language attrition studies the analysis of variables on any linguistic level furthermore has to make the basic distinction between ‘what is lost’ and ‘what is retained’. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that it is necessary to treat these two issues as two sides of a single coin. Any study that focuses merely on ‘what is lost’, i.e. on ‘mistakes’ in the speech of an attriter, fails to take into account avoidance strategies that she might have developed in order to deal with her reduced capabilities. If these strategies are perfected in a simpliWcation of the linguistic system, her speech might very well show up little or no ‘interferences’ at all, and the emerging picture might be skewed if ‘deviant’ utterances are all that is considered.

31

32


Lexicon The Wrst area is that of quick retrieval of appropriate vocabulary and idiomatic phrasing in on-going speech production. (Andersen 1982: 114)

Where lexical items are concerned, ‘interferences’ of several types can occur. The Wrst and surely most widespread of these is the use of L2 items in L1 discourse. This is a frequent feature in the discourse of bilinguals, especially with other bilingual interlocutors, and it is very doubtful whether simple codeswitching can be considered evidence for attrition. Much work has gone into reasons for and constraints on code-switching and a discussion of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this study. SuYce it to say that the use of L2 items does not necessarily license the conclusion that the speaker has ‘lost’ the corresponding L1 item (Romaine 1989: 143) or even that she cannot access it within the time span allocated for that task in on-line discourse; she might also feel that the L2 item is for some reason more ‘appropriate’, ‘sounds better’ or is more salient. Some pragmatic functions of code-switching — such as providing ‘local color’ or Xagging quotations — have been pointed out by Appel and Muysken (1987) and Romaine (1989: 160V.), they will not be considered further here. A second area in which the lexicon may be aVected in language attrition is that of speciWcity of meaning. This can manifest itself in diVerent ways. One of them is what has been called ‘(semantic) extension’ (Romaine 1989: 56), ‘semantic transfer’ (de Bot and Clyne 1994: 20) or ‘loanshift’ (Haugen 1953). In this type of interference, the meaning of a word from the base language is extended so that it corresponds to that of another language. This corresponds to overgeneralizations, as in the case of selectional restrictions. Consider the case of English take and break: In some cases, the German equivalents of these verbs, nehmen and brechen respectively, are adequate translations, and in others they are not, as is illustrated by English to take a sandwich and German ein Brot nehmen, but English to take a picture and German *ein Foto nehmen (→ ein Foto machen). Tests have shown that such selectional restrictions are vulnerable to language attrition (Altenberg 1991: 198f.). In some cases, these transfers extend to composite items, yielding what has been called a ‘calque’, i.e. a morpheme-by-morpheme translation, as in the case of English look after which is translated to German nachschauen ‘look up’ and used instead of the semantic equivalent sich kümmern (Clyne 1981: 32).


A further type of mistake that sometimes occurs in the speech of attriters is that an L1 word which is homophonous to an L2 item with a diVerent meaning is used in inappropriate contexts (Romaine 1989: 56). An interesting example of such an interference can be found in the data used for the present study, where two informants used German zerstreuen (‘scatter’) in the sense of English destroy, instead of the appropriate German zerstören (Gertrud U., p. 3; p. 13; Victor S., p. 6). Interferences of all these types are easily spotted and analyzed in attrition studies, since they show up on the ‘surface level’ of utterances. Much less easy to Wnd is evidence for a predicted reduction of the vocabulary, i.e. a loss in lexical richness. It has often been hypothesized that this will be one of the most prominent characteristics of an attriter’s speech (Andersen 1982: 94; Grendel, Weltens and de Bot 1993: 59; Olshtain 1989: 162; Olshtain and Barzilay 1991: 146; Yaægmur 1997: 9). Several studies have attempted to Wnd evidence for or against such a reduction. The hypothesis that it will manifest itself Wrst in low-frequency, highly marked lexical items (Andersen 1982: 94) was tested through a retelling of a picture-book (the ‘Frog story’) and an analysis of overgeneralized use of frequent, general terms in situations where a more speciWed term is required provided evidence to support this hypothesis (Olshtain and Barzilay 1991; Yaægmur 1997). A further test that has been conducted in this framework is Fluency in Controlled Association (Waas 1996; Yaægmur 1997). Since both these tests establish lexical richness in a speciWc Weld only, a broader approach would be desirable. This could be established through type/ token ratios of a larger stretch of discourse or (ideally) through an analysis of the distributional frequencies of the tokens used in native speech. This is extremely tedious and time-consuming work, which may account for the fact that only one study to this date has conducted such an analysis on the data collected (de Bot and Clyne 1994). This study did not Wnd any signiWcant reduction of lexical richness in the vocabulary of the informants (de Bot and Clyne 1994: 24).

33

34


Morphology Probably a rather universal principle of language change and decay is that a decrease in morphological complexity is compensated by an increase of syntactic diVerentiation. (Hagen and de Bot 1990: 143)

Where language attrition in the domain of morphology is concerned, the predictions and hypotheses appear to be fairly speciWc. They include – loss of case-marking – loss of gender marking and the adjective/noun congruence – reduction in allomorphic variation – a movement from inXectional devices and allomorphic variation towards more regularized or analytic forms – a trend towards periphrastic constructions (e.g. from an inXected future tense to a go-future) – grammatical relations tend to be encoded less by bound morphemes and more by lexemes (cf. Andersen 1982; Hagen and de Bot 1990; Maher 1991). The selection of these features is largely based on observations from language contact, language change and language/dialect death (Hagen and de Bot 1990). Studies on language attrition in these domains have produced conXicting Wndings. While Altenberg (1991) and Håkansson (1995) found substantial interferences in allomorphic reduction and gender marking in German and Swedish L1 attrition, the study on German case marking conducted by Jordens et al. (1986; 1989) showed up hardly any signs of attrition. Similarly, Köpke’s bilingual informants only produced marginally more errors in the domain of case marking than her monolingual control group, while interferences in other morphological domains seem to diVer to a larger degree from the data of non-attriters (Köpke 1999: 189f.). De Bot and Clyne mention having found an overgeneralization of the -s plural allomorph for nouns requiring an -en plural and a slight tendency to overgeneralize the neuter in L1 attrition of Dutch in contact with English (de Bot and Clyne 1994: 21, 23), but do not give frequencies. The domain of morphology is probably the linguistic level on which it is hardest for the attriter to develop avoidance strategies. While it might be conceivable that an attriter might come to prefer intransitive over transitive verbs and arrive at an overall less complex argument structure than a non-


attriter, it is hard to conceive of a strategy that would reduce inherent inXectional categories like gender and plural morphology (on the distinction between inherent and relational inXection see below). It is therefore far more likely that the regular or more frequent instances of inXection, e.g. the regular plural allomorph -s in English or the most frequent gender of nouns, will be overgeneralized, resulting in ungrammatical structures.

Syntax With severely restricted contact, there is severe reduction in the syntactic devices available; and the greater the access to and interaction with Xuent speakers, the more elaborate the syntactic devices the learner acquires. In situations conductive to language attrition, the same consequences of restricted use of a language would be expected. The number and variety of syntactic transformations would decline gradually in favor of a small number of more widely productive devices. (Andersen 1982: 99)

The assumption that word order is a domain which is vulnerable to a simpliWcation process in language attrition seems intuitively convincing: Many languages oVer their speakers the possibility to express what they want to say in structures with a variation in complexity, e.g. hypotactical structures with a large number of embedded clauses vs. a straight paratactical construction. The information load more complex structures carry is generally comparatively low, and a trend away from more elaborate constructions — e.g. avoidance of embedded clauses — will often not result in ungrammatical utterances. Given these presuppositions, it seems strange that syntax in L1 attrition has hardly been explored to this date. The only studies that have investigated this feature in detail are Yaægmur’s investigation of Turkish relative clauses and Håkansson’s study of the V2-rule in Swedish. Yaægmur found the late-acquired complex Turkish forms of relative clauses to be most vulnerable to language loss among the features he investigated (Yaægmur 1997: 95), while Håkansson’s data contained only three violations of the V2-rule in Swedish, all of them occurring in the data from one informant. Furthermore, she found that the distribution of VS and SVO structures almost exactly paralleled that in monolingual Swedish (Håkansson 1995: 160). It therefore seems that more work will have to be done on syntactic variation in language attrition. Such studies cannot conWne themselves to

35

36


violations of syntactic rules, but have to draw up a ‘complexity index’ for sentences used grammatically so that an overall picture of syntactic change in attrition can be obtained. 1.3.3 What is ‘language attrition’? Hypothesis 1a: An LA [language attriter]’ s use of language X will be signiWcantly restricted in comparison with an LC [linguistically competent individual]’ s use of the same language and the LA’s earlier use of language X when he was an LC (if he indeed was an LC at one time). Hypothesis 1b: An LA will exhibit (through self-report, ethnographic study, etc.) a lack of adherence to the linguistic norm adhered to by an LC, both speakers of the same language X. (Andersen 1982: 91)

One of the main reasons why the results from studies of language attrition often seem conXicting is that there is no agreed-upon and testable deWnition of what, exactly, counts as ‘attrition’. There are several ways in which the “signiWcant restriction” and “lack of adherence to the linguistic norm” proclaimed by Anderson have been attempted to be established. One obvious way to achieve this is to collect data from a monolingual control group and test whether the language use of (presumed) attriters and non-attriters shows any statistically signiWcant diVerences (Andersen 1982: 85; Jaspaert, Kroon and van Hout 1986; this approach was taken e.g. by Köpke 1999; Yaægmur 1997. Ammerlaan (1996) used subjects with a shorter emigration span as a control group). Secondly, data from attrition studies have sometimes been compared to data gleaned from statistical analyses of the distribution of the variable under investigation in ‘normal’ language data (e.g. Håkansson 1995). However, the majority of studies done on language attrition so far does without comparisons of this kind. Such an approach tacitly assumes the ‘mistakes’ that occur in the language of attriters to be “competence errors”, while non-attrited speakers language only contains “performance errors” which “are not representative of their ordinary language use, and which can be corrected by them if they are asked to do so” — slips of the tongue. (Poulisse 1999: 1). However, even studies which adopt a comparative perspective often leave us with an unsatisfactory picture of an ‘attriter’. Even if the study can establish that subjects who have lived in an L2 environment for a certain length of time have statistically signiWcantly more errors in free speech than the monolingual


control group (as was the case, for example, in Köpke (1999)), it is often not clear to what degree these errors make the speech ‘sound’ non-native-like or impede communication. A second major problem in language attrition studies is that of dialectal or sociolectal variation in the L1. No study so far has been able to collect data from language attriters who originate from the same region and social class in their country of origin. If the informants come from diVerent dialectal regions or social groups in their country of origin, utterances may show deviations from the standard which the researcher is unable to recognize as being part of the informant’s L1 variety. Since no native speaker can be assumed to be proWcient in all varieties of her L1, the possibility that the attriter produces structures which are unacceptable to the researcher but may be acceptable in the informant’s variety cannot be ruled out. The fact that any classiWcation of such structures as ‘interferences’ or ‘mistakes’ will yield a skewed picture of some individuals’ attrition process leads directly to the next methodological problem in research on language attrition: What is to be counted a ‘mistake’? Most researchers have made these judgements exclusively on the basis of their own native speaker intuition (with the exception of Köpke, who had every utterance judged by seven competent speakers of German, and classiWed those structures as errors that were objected to by at least two of these judges (Köpke 1999: 163f.)). As anyone who is familiar with literature on language attrition will conWrm, native speaker judgements vary to the degree that almost no study will not contain at least some examples that were classiWed as ‘mistakes’, but will appear perfectly acceptable to other people who are competent speakers of the language under investigation. Although this possibility can never be ruled out — unless one were to use a potentially inWnite number of judges — it can at least be minimized if the data under investigation is rated by native speakers other than the researcher herself. A fourth issue was pointed out above: The overwhelming majority of language attrition studies have concentrated on ‘what is lost’ to the exclusion of ‘what is retained’. This, again, is a factor that may potentially give a biased picture of an individual’s proWciency: Speakers who are prepared to take more risks by using complex structures will potentially make more ‘mistakes’ than speakers who accept that their control over their L1 is not what it was and consequently use a simpliWed variety. This means that a study of L1 attrition that wishes to come up with a comprehensive picture of the linguistic proWciency of the group under investigation cannot do without an in-depth analysis of factors such as lexical richness and morphological and syntactic complexity

37

38


of the total data under investigation, or at least part thereof. These methodological considerations leave us with the following demands for language attrition studies: 1. Comparison of the data to non-attrited speech, either from a monolingual control group or from existing statistical analyses of the language under investigation 2. Exclusion of the possibility of dialectal or sociolectal variety within the group of attriters under investigation 3. ClassiWcation of ‘mistakes’ from the data collected by more than one judge 4. Establishment of a ‘linguistic complexity index’ to augment the data on ‘what is lost’ by ‘what is retained’ In addition, it might be valuable to have free spoken data collected from the attriters subjectively rated by native speakers in order to establish to what degree the data sound ‘native’ or ‘foreign’ — based on features such as accent, sentence structures or lexical choices. Such intuitive judgements might provide us with valuable insights into the perception of attrited proWciency. If these data are combined with the overall rate of mistakes, it is possible that a ‘tolerance saturation point’ might be established, i.e. the overall frequency of mistakes up to which listeners are prepared to accept a speaker as native. A further issue that has been widely debated in the literature on language attrition is whether attrition is a phenomenon of performance or competence (de Bot 1991: 63f.; Köpke 1999: 105V.; Seliger and Vago 1991: 7; Sharwood Smith and van Buren 1991: 19; Sharwood Smith 1983: 49). Can the linguistic system an individual has acquired actually be changed in the attrition process, or is the larger number of mistakes found in the speech of attriters merely a surface phenomenon? However, it is hard to see how this is to be established. It would seem that there is no way to test whether an attriter is actually unable to produce a certain structure any longer. While the hypothetical case of all the data collected from one speaker exclusively containing misapplications of a certain rule might point strongly towards her having lost that rule entirely, there would still be no conclusive evidence that she does not, on occasion, apply it correctly. The actual Wndings from language attrition studies, however, are nowhere near this point: There is not a single case where any individual made any mistake in all possible cases, and most of the time the overwhelming majority of structures are correct. It appears, therefore, that there is a host of methodological issues within the study of language attrition which is worthy of further consideration and development.

L1:German L2:English

Clyne 1968

30

21

de Bot, Gommans and L1:Dutch Rossing 1991 L2:French

Dorian 1982

L1:East Sutherland Gaelic L2:English

45

lexicon, morphology

overall competence

translation from English

interview; grammaticality judgements

lexicon, morphology, interviews; syntax

self evaluation

overall competence

45

descriptive

descriptive

sociolinguistic questionnaire; Cloze test; verbal Xuency self evaluation

acceptability judgements; grammatical tasks

descriptive

lexicon, syntax

lexicon

language use

lexical retrieval

lexicon; morphology

Elicitation method

not spec.

50

not spec.

76

de Bot and Clyne 1994 L1:Dutch L2:English

L1:German L2:English Clyne 1981 L1:German L2:English de Bot and Clyne 1989 L1:Dutch L2:English

L1:Finnish and others 700 L2:Swedish

Boyd 1986

Clyne 1973

L1:Dutch L2:English

Ammerlaan 1996

2


Altenberg 1991

n of Subjects Linguistic levels

Languages

Language attrition studies — an overview

Study

Table 1.

language shift

sociolinguistic (contact with L1 and time since emigration)

comparison with 1971 study: time factor

reversion; critical threshold

sociolinguistic description of German in Australia

sociolinguistic

sociolinguistic/ psycholinguistic

interlanguage

Theoretical framework

Reversion occurs, loss does not get worse (p. 167) No attrition since 1971: attrition happens in Wrst decade (p. 27) Amount of contact and time matter, but time matters only when there is few contact (p. 94) Loss of allomorphic variation and vocabulary (p. 56)

Rapid shift to Swedish in 2nd generation (p. 113)

Attrition is most likely to occur where L1 and L2 are similar (p. 204) Access problems are temporal (p. 210)

Results

Language contact, language change, and language attrition 39

Languages

L1:Breton L2:French

L1:Spanish L2:French

L1:Swedish L2:English/French

L1:Finnish L2:English

L1:Pennsylvania German L2:English

L1:Dutch L2:English

Study

Dressler 1991

Grosjean and Py 1991

Håkansson 1995

Hirvonen 1995

HuYnes 1991

Hulsen 2000

morphology, syntax

syntax semantics

morphology, syntax

90 (30 from lexical access each generation)

32

Elicitation method

Theoretical framework pathological vs. non-pathological

naming; word matching

phonology: reading list; minimal pairs; morphology: translation descriptive

essays

social network theory, EVT

extralinguistic: sectarian vs. non-sectarian informants

UG and markedness

attestation judgeInterlanguage ments; grammaticality judgements

phonology, morphology, morphophonology

18 (phon.) phonology, 29 (morhp) morphology

5

15

not spec.


Results

More convergence in non-sectarian communities (p. 135) Productive skills decrease within generations, receptive skills are largely unchanged. Retrieval diYculties, not ‘loss’ as in

Both types have reduction but not simpliWcation; unmarked structures are preserved better than marked; dysfunctional language production and insecurity (p. 109) Some contact structures are accepted, but Spanish structures have higher acceptability (p. 59) VS is unaVected, morphology strongly aVected by L1 attrition (p. 164) Language attrition is systematic (p. 192)

40 First language attrition, use, and maintenance

L1:Russian L2:Finnish

L1:Linguistic enclaves in US L2:English

Leisiö 2001

Maher 1991

159

60

L1:German L2:English/ French

not spec.

Köpcke 1999

L1:German L2:Dutch

Jordens et al. 1986; 1989

1

1

L1:Dutch L2:English

Jaspaert and Kroon 1992

30

Kaufman and AronoV L1:Hebrew 1991 L2:English

L1:Italian L2:Dutch

Jaspaert and Kroon 1989

overall competence

morphosyntax — interlanguage

overall competence

lexicon

case marking

loanshifts

overall competence

overview of studies

picture description; sentence generation; grammaticality judgements informal interviews

spontaneous data

incomplete sentences

correction; editing; lexicon and comprehension test letters to the Netherlands

language change

interlanguage eVects and psycholinguistic models of bilingual production Interlanguage

interlanguage

‘linguistic’ and ‘cognitive’ assumptions are tested: regression vs. Zubin’s egocentricity scale

sociolinguistic

Attrition is due to retrieval problems, not to actual loss (p. 359) Attrition is determined by social factors and linguistic similarities between system, similarity is conductive to change, (p. 248) SimpliWcation in lg. death, not necessarily consequence of interlanguage eVects (p. 57)

L2 loss conWrms regression hypothesis, L1 loss does not. Little overall attrition found (de Bot, p.c.) Idiosyncratic system emerges (p. 187)

‘erased from memory’ (p. 188) Much less attrition found than expected (p. 95) Little erosion found (p. 146)


L1:English L2:Portugese

L1:English L2:Hebrew

L1:Polish, Armenian, Russian, Tamil, Kabardian L2:English

L1:Spanish L2:Swiss French

L1:Boumaa Fijian L2:Standard Fijian

L1:Dyirbal L2:English L1:Portugese L2:Dutch/French

Major 1992

Olshtain and Barzilay 1991

Polinsky 1994; 1997

Py 1986

Schmidt 1991

Schmidt 1991

L1:English L2:Hebrew

L1:Danish, L2:English

Seliger 1991

Søndergaard 1996

Schoenmakers-Klein Gunnewiek 1998

Languages

Study

89

1

40

not spec.

20

not spec.

30

15

5

picture retelling (frog story)

word lists to elicit voiceless stops

Elicitation method

prestige of attriting language

interlanguage

Theoretical framework

intuitive judgements on how ‘Xuent’ speaker is

morphology

Semantics, morphosyntax

morphology

phonology; morphology

free discourse

correction task; matching task (word to picture),picture naming; translation free discourse; metalinguistic tests

descriptive

sentence translation

psycholinguistic

sociolinguistic: simpliWcation;

sociolinguistic

syntax (pro-drop, translation; agreement, resumptive grammaticality pronouns) judgement; narrative; ProWciency Wrst assessed by how many of 100 basic items speaker can translate communicative descriptive role of input competence

lexicon

phonology


Attrition is not unlike acquisition (p. 239) Attitude/ ‘Danishness’ main factor (p. 554)

Mutual interaction of L1 and L2 can aVect L1 (p. 204) Attrition leads to problems in vocabulary retrieval (p. 150) Attrition phenomena on diVerent levels of the linguistic system correlate with each other (1994: 274; 1997: 401) Evidence for restructuring of the system (p. 171) Dialect features are weakening in younger speakers (p. 117) Allomorphic reduction (p. 124) All tasks: there is little or no loss (p. 163)

Results

42 First language attrition, use, and maintenance

L1:Russian L2:English

L1:Hungarian L2:Hebrew


L1:Turkish L2:English

Turian and Altenberg 1991

Vago 1991

Waas 1996

Yaægmur 1997

40

86

1

1

lexicon, syntax

overall competence

morphophonology

overall competence

paradigm elicitation (subjects presented with nominal and verbal stems and asked to inXect them) Can-do scales; selfreports; Xuency test in controlled association (FiCA) (naming animals) Questionnaires; CanDo Scales; Controlled Lexical Naming; Relativization Production

free spoken data

Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory (EVT)

sociodemographic key variables: citizenship and ethnic (non) aYliation

language change

compensatory strategies

Sociodemographic variables signiWcant; but L1 attrition in L2 environment is inevitable (p. 171) EVT does not provide explanation (100f.)

The same compensatory strategies are used in L1 attrition and L2 acquisition (p. 216) Rule simpliWcation, reordering, loss and lexical restructuring (p. 249)


Chapter 2

The situation of German Jews A historical overview

The present study attempts to analyze language attrition within the historical context surrounding the massive persecution and emigration of German Jews from Germany under the Nazi regime. During the second half of the 20th century, the words ‘German Jews’ have nearly always been equated with ‘victims of Nazi persecution and genocide’. The horror at the extent of organized mass destruction thus blocks out the perspective on the fact that Jews have formed a vivid and lively part of German society and culture ever since written records exist. In a sense, this very view perpetuates the anti-Semitic perspective, since it only looks at German Jews in the situation where they were marginalized and excluded from a culture of which they formed and still form an integral part. Just how far removed from historical fact such a perspective is can only be understood if the events of those twelve years are not looked at in isolation. To understand the situation of German Jews within German society, the developments of at least the past centuries have to be taken into account. Needless to say, the extremely complex history of German Jews cannot be gone into in any kind of detail within the scope of this study. This overview is merely to be seen as an introduction, and will be conWned to those aspects pertinent to understanding the historical and cultural background of the informants on whose speech data this investigation is based.

46


2.1 The situation of German Jews before the Nazi rise to power The destruction of the European Jews between 1933 and 1945 appears to us now as an unprecedented event in history. Indeed, in its dimensions and total conWguration, nothing like it had ever happened before. […] Yet if we analyze that singularly massive upheaval, we discover that most of what happened in those twelve years had already happened before. The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend. (Hilberg 1961: 3)

The Wrst methodological diYculty in an outline of the history of ‘German Jews’ is the deWnition of the geographical area under investigation. Since early modern times, there was no such geographical, political or administrative unity as ‘Germany’. Instead, there were a host of scattered principalities, each with its own jurisdiction. While there were often general trends to be identiWed in legal or political behaviors or decisions at certain periods in time, therefore, it is hard to describe such overall developments with any amount of precision. Decisions taken, regulations enforced, and laws passed often show variation both chronologically and in their contents. The present overview will therefore focus on the situation in the Rhineland with special emphasis on Düsseldorf and disregard such matters of variation for the sake of clarity. While Jews in the Rhineland were Wrst mentioned as early as in the 4th Century AD, a consistent picture only emerges with records from the 11th century onwards (AschoV 1998: 17f.). In the Middle Ages, they were not merely a religious community, but a political body that was viewed as an entity from the outside, as evidenced by the fact that taxes were imposed on the community as a whole, not on individuals (AschoV 1998: 36), and that there was even a certain amount of legal autonomy within the community (Zittartz 1998: 97). At this point as well as during the centuries that followed, there was a rigorous separation and segregation between the Jewish and the Christian communities, based largely on the rigid rules of the Ständegesellschaft — a society characterized by classes or ‘estates’ separated from each other in political, legal, and social terms. The rigidity of these estates, membership of which was determined by birth, made social mobility all but impossible. The practice of most professions required membership in a guild, to which Jews were not admitted, so their professional opportunities were largely limited to trading or unskilled labor.

The situation of German Jews

The restrictions placed upon Jews went beyond exclusion from most professions and the imposition of special taxes. After most of the large Jewish communities had been dispersed in the late 15th and early 16th century, the vast majority of towns either did not tolerate Jewish settlement at all, or only within a rigidly deWned quota (Zittartz 1998: 79). Many towns only granted rights of entry during the daytime and under strictly enforced restrictions, while those Jews that were permitted settlement in the towns were often charged exorbitant taxes for the privilege (Zittartz 1998: 83). This practice of expulsion from towns and restriction in professions led to a large number of impoverished rural settlements, often close to the larger towns or cities so that tradespeople and laborers could conduct their business during the day and leave again at nightfall, as they were required to do. These segregational policies led to a Wrm sense of unity and solidarity within the community or the family. While a society that is structured in rigid layers is limiting possibilities for personal achievement and social mobility, at the same time it has the beneWt of providing the individual with the security and stability of knowing exactly his or her place and social networks within that society. The value and importance of those networks is thus reinforced immensely, especially within those groups that are kept on the margins of society. It was only towards the end of the 18th century and the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment that these restrictions to the Jewish communities began to be somewhat lifted. During this period, the traditional view of humans being put in their speciWc station through God’s will was gradually replaced in favor of a philosophy that saw man as essentially capable of reason, and therefore of education and improvement. All human beings were to be considered equal, which led to a criticism of legal and social injustices determined by the accident of birth. The drawback of this egalitarian philosophy is that the recognition of a capacity for ‘improvement’, i.e. integration and acculturation into the dominant society, often translated into the expectation or even obligation for that assimilatory process to be performed. As long as a person or a group of people were considered to be on the margins of society because they were born into this station through the will of God, while they were unable to change their status as outcasts, they could also not be held responsible for their misfortune. But once those same people were oVered the possibility of integration through achievement and adaptation, they were expected to avail themselves of it. In the words of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt:

47

48


Jews are to be transformed into human beings. It is bad enough that Jews exist in the Wrst place; and it is therefore necessary that they be made into human beings, i.e. into enlightened human beings. (Arendt 1959: 19, my translation)

During most of the 18th century there was a Werce and passionate public debate on granting Jews legal equality. The Wrst reforms towards an equal status came from France, where Jews had acquired civil rights equal to those of the non-Jewish population in 1791 from the revolutionary parliament (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 141). Through the Napoleonic wars, these reforms inXuenced the legislative in some parts of Germany that were under temporary French rule. But such laws remained fragmented, with a large amount of regional diVerences, and even in those parts where equality had been achieved or almost achieved under French occupation there were roll-backs. But the demand for Jewish emancipation remained a central issue of liberal politics, and the Rhineland was the Wrst of the Prussian provinces to introduce full equality in 1843. Other provinces followed suit, but it was only with the foundation of the German Reich in 1871 that all restrictions to legal and civil rights based on religion were abolished nationwide (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 142V.). However, the changes in the legal system which, over the course of the 19th century, gradually paved the way towards nationwide equality in 1871 were often made and taken in the spirit of ‘educational’ measures with a view more to ‘improving’ than to ‘liberating’ the Jewish population, i.e. under an increasing pressure for acculturation (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 145f.; Volkov 2000: 19). This process of acculturation which, during the 18th century, brought about the loss of Yiddish as the language of communication among the indigenous German Jews (while still being used by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; Best 1973: 39; Simon 1993: 10) was accompanied by a less rigid observation of religious rules, such as the prohibition to work on the Sabbath or the strict regulations for the preparation of food. On the one hand, these rules were becoming more and more diYcult to observe as the contact with the non-Jewish population increased. The observation of the Sabbath and of religious holidays, for example, would have entailed a substantial loss in business for Jewish tradespeople (especially since it was made compulsory at the beginning of the 20th century for shops to be closed on Sundays), and was all but impossible for children who attended Christian schools, as was becoming more and more common during the 19th century (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 169; Sparing 1997a). On the other hand, religious diVerences as well as dogmatic prescriptions were decreasing in over-


all importance during and after the Enlightenment, as a more rationalist and scientiWc view of the world became predominant. Two other factors played a large role in this development of a more liberal religious trend. The legal equality, which among other things encompassed freedom of movement, as well as the social and economic changes within the larger societies, caused a strong general movement towards the towns, especially the commercial centers like Köln and Düsseldorf. Within those larger, urban communities, the social pressure to observe cultural and religious rules was far less than it had been in the smaller, more rural congregations (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 157). Towards the end of the 19th century, this trend was reinforced by large migrations of Eastern European Jews in the wake of epidemics, famine and pogroms. These migrants were subsumed under the term Ostjuden, ‘Eastern Jews’, which referred not only to their countries of origin, but conveyed a large number of stereotypes, among them cultural inferiority (evidenced among other things through their use of Yiddish, which was widely viewed as a degenerated dialect of German), poverty, and religious orthodoxy (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 195f.; Sparing 1997b: 156). The large number of Ostjuden within the Jewish community — after World War I, their proportion among most of the larger parishes in Prussia averaged 23% (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 196) — served to reinforce the tendency for acculturation among the established and assimilated German Jews. The apparent ‘diVerence’ and ‘strangeness’ of some of these migrants, which was evident not only from their outward appearance and adherence to orthodox religious rules but also from their language, was often even a source of embarrassment, and while the parishes made every eVort to give them what support they could, there was a clear wish for distance (Benz 1994: 18; Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 199; Volkov 2000: 59). The attitude of the assimilated Jews was such that in some way we were ourselves ‘anti-Semitic’ towards those Jews (Ostjuden) who were still living in a sort of Ghetto, and who were represented in almost every town, as in the ‘Wallstraße’ in Düsseldorf. They were looked down upon, we made fun of their Yiddish accents and their habits — not a very noble attitude to take. (Herz 1984: 41, my translation)

Both the small range of professional choices that was open to the Jewish population for many centuries and the pressure to assimilate were at the heart of German-Jewish identities in the late 19th and early 20th century. On the one hand, the segregation of the past centuries had led to very real diVerences in the social structure of the Jewish and the mainstream population: The percentages

49

50


of workers, artisans or farmers among them were extremely low, while there was overrepresentation of tradespeople as well as a growing number of doctors, lawyers and judges (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 213V.; Sparing 1997c: 167f.). This social stratiWcation fed directly into anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jew as a ‘parasite’ on the ‘truly hard-working’ members of society. The gradual weakening of many social, legal and cultural borders that had so far ensured the segregation of the established Jewish minority did not lead to a disappearance, but merely to a transformation of anti-Jewish stereotypes. It was with the economic crisis of the late 1870s that the new type of this phenomenon which has been labeled ‘anti-Semitism’ emerged. This was no longer based on the purely religious foundations which had so far stigmatized Jews as the ones who had murdered Christ, who were ‘ritual murderers’ of small Christian children, and who poisoned wells. It was the outcome of an antimodernistic trend among those who encountered diYculties through the loss of the perceived securities engendered by the more rigid system of estates and guilds, and who identiWed Jews as not only the beneWciaries but also the instigators of these changes (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 143). At the same time, as theories of evolution, inheritance, and ‘race’ became the prominent object of the natural sciences, this economically motivated anti-Semitism also acquired a racist component (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 183). It can be seen, therefore, that the loss of importance ascribed to religion during the 19th century was not accompanied by a similar loss, but by a transformation of the separateness and distinctness of the Jewish community, both in self-perception and in how they were viewed from the outside. Judaism gradually became to be viewed as a socio-cultural category, instead of a purely religious one, while also — towards the end of the 19th century — acquiring a basis in racist theory. These tendencies in anti-Semitic sentiment, which gained ground and support from large parts of the population in the last two decades of the century, led to the foundation of various Jewish organizations and societies, with a view to Wghting the more blatant manifestations of anti-Semitism. The most prominent among these was the society of German citizens of Jewish denomination (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens). This society, which was founded in 1893, was a typical example of a platform where those Jews who did not wish to invest their energies in activities of a purely denominational character could take a stand against anti-Semitism and for a proud and modern German-Jewish identity (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 180f.). Similar tendencies were to be observed in Jewish student-, women-, and youth-organiza-


tions, societies for Jewish history and literature, and sports clubs (cf. Klerks 1997: 116V.; Zielke 1997: 130). Some of these organizations were founded as a reaction against the non-Jewish counterparts that did not admit Jews (particularly fraternities), but all of them served to propagate an understanding of a Jewish identity that was deeply rooted in German culture and history.1 It seems puzzling that, while many of the acculturated German Jews were unreligious to the point that they did not even keep the High Holidays, but celebrated Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, they still retained this feeling of Jewish identity. A large part of this was, of course, due to anti-Semitic pressures from the outside. These were to become even more virulent after World War I. Before the outbreak of this war, the social situation of German Jews looked like the outcome of a very successful process of acculturation. Legal (if not actual) equality had been achieved, and — some anti-Semitic outbreaks notwithstanding — Jews were Wrmly established within the society. The majority of them belonged to the upper middle classes or to what has been called Bildungsbürgertum, a moderately wealthy, well-educated background with a penchant for classical education and a very high regard for German culture and literature (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 192). The outbreak of WWI in August of 1914 and the attending surge of patriotic enthusiasm at Wrst seemed to be a source of hope for the Wnal achievement of total equality; and a large number of Jewish volunteer soldiers, doctors, and nurses joined the forces. But as the rapid victory that had been counted on in the early months of the war kept dwindling from sight and the years of war dragged on, bringing poverty and frustration, anti-Semitism again gained in power. Jews were identiWed as the convenient scapegoat for the fact that victory had not been achieved, and (unsubstantiated) rumors that Jews were evading service spread (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 192V.). The resentment at Germany’s eventual loss of the war in 1918 and at the Versailles peace treaties gave even more strength to these attitudes and fed them all through the relative prosperity of the early 1920s and the generally more liberal climate of the Weimar Republic. Again, these and similar anti-Semitic attacks only served to emphasize collective eVorts among the Jewish community to establish themselves as an integral part of German society, while preserving a positive sense of Jewish identity. In 1929, the Rabbi of Düsseldorf, Max Eschelbacher, mentions such instances of anti-Semitic slander and propaganda, and states:

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52


All that is behind us, forgotten like a nightmare. We have always lived in good understanding with the non-Jewish community; and the occasional anti-Semitic attacks could never change that. (Eschelbacher 1929: 8, my translation)

Towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the social stratiWcation of the acculturated Jewish minority was very similar to what it had been around the turn of the century. In Düsseldorf, more than half of the community were engaged in trade; and most of the larger stores as well as the big department stores were owned by Jews. In addition, Jews were overrepresented among the academic professions, such as doctors, lawyers or engineers (Benz 1994: 16; Sparing 1997c: 170). The Jewish community enjoyed relative prosperity, notwithstanding the depression of the late 1920s. Due to this depression, however, anti-Semitic attitudes again became virulent, even before the Nazi rise to power on January 30th 1933. Anti-Semitism, segregation and discrimination of the Jewish population were thus not Nazi inventions. Attitudes of this kind have existed in Germany and elsewhere ever since there are records of Jewish minorities. It was whenever times got rough — through wars, economic crises, political upheavals — that participants in the struggle for power would exploit these underlying sentiments for their own purposes, picturing Jews as the scapegoats for whatever events caused or were held to have caused the current crisis, and antiSemitic attacks gained in intensity once more. 2.2 The situation of German Jews under the Nazi regime The steps of the destruction process were introduced in the following order: At Wrst the concept of “Jew” was deWned; then the expropriatory operations were inaugurated; third, the Jews were concentrated in ghettos; Wnally, the decision was made to annihilate European Jewry. (Hilberg 1961: 31)

The persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime was not a process that started immediately and in full force after the Nazi seizure of power (Machtübernahme). The process of erosion of legal and civil rights that eventually culminated in the genocide was a gradual one. As one of the informants for this study put it in her interview: Between thirty-three and thirty-eight, each day would bring something new, atrocious and scary, and Düsseldorf was one of the leading communities where meanness was concerned, absolutely. (Thea S., p. 7, my translation)2


Nevertheless, Jewish life in Germany was aVected almost immediately after the Nazi takeover. During the Wrst year and a half, eVorts were mainly targeted at the exclusion of Jews from many domains of public life and the limitation of their professional and educational opportunities. Within weeks of the Machtübernahme, boycotts of Jewish stores were organized, and Düsseldorf was among the very Wrst towns where such boycotts took place on March 10th 1933. The procedure on such occasions followed a routine that was quickly established: SS- or SA-men took their posts outside the shops, the shop-windows were disWgured and besmirched, and customers entering the shops were abused and sometimes photographed to have their pictures published in local newspapers or prominently displayed on trees or lantern-posts. On several occasions there was also abuse or violence towards the shopkeepers as well as vandalism. After such boycotts had been conducted in various towns and cities, the leadership of the party ordered a nationwide boycott for April 1st 1933, which was accompanied by articles and advertisements in newspapers, admonishing the ‘Aryan’ population not to take their business to Jewish shops (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 230; Sparing 1997c: 171V.). These attempts to drive Jewish merchants out of business were accompanied by other measures like the prohibition for Jewish butchers to enter the slaughterhouses (Sparing 1997c: 172). The boycott of April 1933 was not only targeted against Jewish shops, but speciWcally against doctors and lawyers. One of its objects was to further the preparations for the ‘law for the re-establishment of the professional civil service’ (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums; Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBl) 1933: 175V.), which stated that all civil servants of ‘non-Aryan descent’ were to be retired, unless they had held their positions since before August 1914 or were the fathers or sons of soldiers who had died in World War I (Hilberg 1961: 54; Walk 1981: 12). One of the consequences of this law was that Jewish doctors, lawyers and judges lost their licenses (Woelk 1997a: 61; 1997b: 176). Furthermore, in September of 1933, a law was passed which obliged everyone who held any kind of artistic profession (this included musicians and actors, but also shop-window decorators) to join a trade association or ‘chamber’, membership in which was granted only to ‘Aryans’ (Reichskulturkammergesetz, Sept. 22nd 1933, RGBl 1933: 661f.; cf. also Hilberg 1961: 58). Another step towards the exclusion of Jews from public life was the ‘law against the overcrowding of German schools’ (Gesetz gegen die Überfüllung deutscher Schulen und Volksschulen) which was passed on April 25th 1933

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(RGBl 1933: 225; Walk 1981: 18), and stated that no public school or university was to have a percentage of Jewish pupils exceeding 1.5%. In the wake of this law, anti-Semitic attacks against Jewish children — both from teachers and other children — increased dramatically (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 241; Sparing 1997a: 109), so that a large number of Jewish schools were founded from October 1933 onwards. In Düsseldorf, a Jewish school was opened in April 1935 (Sparing 1997a: 110). Several of the informants for this study report how the situation in the common schools became more and more unbearable, as the following story of a young girl illustrates, who was thirteen in nineteen-thirty-three when the Nazi rise to power took place. After the Wrst boycotts and public demonstrations against Jews, her parents sent her to England for a year, after which she had to come back to Germany, in the summer of 1934. She went back to the same school she had been to before, and the Wrst thing that happened was that one of the teachers entered class, lifted his hand and said, ‘Heil, deutsche Mädchen’ (Heil, German girls), and the class answered ‘Heil Hitler’. She realized that this was a daily ritual but was at a loss how to react. The teacher noticed that she had not answered with the class, and immediately asked her whether she was a German girl. She says that she was in a terrible conXict on how to answer that question, since she had learned that her ‘Germanness’ was not what it had been, and she also realized that the teacher had only asked the question in order to cause her this exact conXict. Some time later, she and two friends had been cited in the class-diary for some kind of trivial mischief, and the next day, her teacher made the three of them stand up in front of the class and told them “You’ve got to understand that you Jews are guests here in Germany, you don’t belong, and you should behave accordingly.” She says: that was very very painful, although I knew her attitude towards us, but to tell us something like this, in front of the entire class — I mean, I was fourteen at that time, that is a diYcult age in any case, even without this kind of baiting, and I must say, I was very hurt, it is exactly as if love had died, and that was the point where I realized that our love aVair with Germany was over. (Lola R., p. 9, my translation)

It was thus at a very early stage of the Nazi regime that anti-Semitism came to pervade almost every aspect of daily and public life for the Jewish population, not only because of the laws and regulations that were passed but also through the changes in behavior, the open aggression, of large parts of the non-Jewish population. At this stage, however, many people still felt that all this would soon blow over, that it could not possibly get any worse than it already was.


Those who did emigrate during this early period usually did so because they belonged to one of the (comparatively small) professional groups for whom the continuation of either their occupation (e.g. as doctors, lawyers, or artists) or of their education (at universities) had become impossible (Hilberg 1996 [1992]: 138). It was in September 1935 that the persecution entered a new and more radical stage, as the Nuremberg racial laws (Nürnberger Rassengesetze) were passed: The ‘citizenship law’ (Reichsbürgergesetz; RGBl 1935: 1146), the ‘law for the protection of German blood and German honor’ (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre; RGBl 1935: 1146f.) augmented in October 1935 by the ‘law for the protection of the genetic health of the German people’ (Gesetz zum Schutze der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes; RGBl 1935: 1246f.). These laws were fundamental to the subsequent measures of persecution in that they made a clear and basic distinction between the rights of ‘people of German or related blood’ and ‘people of foreign blood’, namely Jews, Gypsies, Blacks etc. The citizenship law essentially established two classes of citizenship on the basis of this ‘racial’ distinction, assigning those who were not considered ‘Aryans’ an inferior status, resembling that of foreigners. This status laid the foundation for literally hundreds of subsequent laws and regulations that were speciWcally discriminatory against these groups. This distinction between ‘races’ was applied in the other two laws mentioned above, in that ‘Aryans’ were no longer allowed to marry or have sexual relations with ‘nonAryans’, and infractions of these laws were deWned as ‘racial disgrace’ (Rassenschande), a criminal oVence. This, then, was the Wrst clear move away from civil equality and towards a strict segregation of the entire Jewish population. It also stigmatized Jews in a way they had never been singled out before: They were now deWned and discriminated against not as a religious minority, but as a race. So far, baptism had always been at least a theoretical way out. But in the commentaries to the Nuremberg laws, the deWnition of who was Jewish was not based on whether or not they belonged to a Jewish parish, but on whether their grandparents had. Some other consequences followed directly from these laws. For one thing, Jewish men were no longer allowed to directly employ ‘Aryan’ woman under 45 years, e.g. as housemaids or doctor’s assistants (Hilberg 1961: 46). The exceptions that had been made in 1933 for those civil servants who had lost a father or a son in WWI or fought themselves were also taken back, which was a terrible blow for all those who had so far believed that their patriotic deeds as soldiers for their country would make them exempt from persecution.

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Since the Nuremberg laws had created a special status for Jews, local and regional legislative and administrative bodies were now free to pass their own laws and regulations, restricting Jewish rights and movements more or less as they pleased. Even though the Nazi state was a rigidly centralist organization, local administrations as well as the suborganizations of the party were encouraged to use their own initiative in such matters. In Düsseldorf, Jewish participation in daily life became restricted in many areas. To cite only a few examples, from early 1936 onwards Jews were no longer permitted to use public swimming pools, and newspapers protested against their use of the public ice rink (Walk 1981: 154; Zielke 1997: 136). In June 1936 is was decreed that Jews were no longer to be admitted to the town hospital (Walk 1981: 166). The subsequent two years were characterized by a gradually but continually increasing persecution and exclusion from public life, but there were no really radical and drastic changes at this time. In the course of the next few years the machinery of destruction was turned on Jewish ‘wealth’. In increasing numbers, one Jewish family after another discovered that it was impoverished. […] The Jews were deprived of their professions, their enterprises, their Wnancial reserves, their wages, their claims upon food and shelter, and, Wnally, their last personal belongings, down to underwear, gold teeth, and women’s hair. We shall refer to this process as ‘expropriation.’ (Hilberg 1961: 54)

It was only in 1938 that the climate changed substantially. This was a process that began with the Anschluss on March 12th, the date when Austria became a part of Germany, and with the attending surge of nationalist and anti-Semitic feelings. One month later, Jews were forced to declare all property exceeding 5,000 Reichsmark. This was part of the ‘Four-Year-Plan’ (Vierjahresplan), by which from 1936 onwards the government had attempted to render Germany again a nation capable of going to war. The Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, General Field Marshal Hermann Göring, was given authority to dispose of all Jewish property as he saw Wt ‘in accordance with the necessities of German economy’ (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 235). And then, in late 1938, the persecution gained intensity with two events. The Wrst of these was the deportation of all Jews of Polish citizenship to Poland, subsequent to a declaration by the Polish government that all citizens who had not been to Poland for more than Wve years would lose their status as citizens on October 31st. On the night of October 28th 18,000 Polish Jews all over Germany were therefore rounded up, allowed ten minutes to pack some basic necessities, put on trains and quite literally dumped in the no-man’s-land on


the German-Polish border, where they were left in camps that had been hastily stamped from the ground. They stayed there for almost a year (Eschelbacher 1998 [1939]: 34–39; Sparing 1997b: 163f.). Among the deported were the parents of Herschel Grynzpan, a German Jew living in Paris. On November 7th 1938, he shot a member of the German embassy, vom Rath (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 245), whose death gave a convenient excuse for the pogrom of Nov. 9th, which has come to be known under the cynical name of Reichskristallnacht. In what was later portrayed to be ‘spontaneous uprisings’, organized groups of mainly SA-men (storm troopers) but also civilians destroyed more than 1,000 synagogues and 7,500 houses, apartments and businesses during that night. 91 people were killed according to oYcial records, the actual numbers are almost certainly far higher than that. More than 30,000 were arrested and taken to the concentration camps Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau. In Düsseldorf alone, seven people were murdered, and some seventy were hospitalized. About 80% of Jewish shops and homes were demolished, and the synagogue was burned down (Suchy 1989: 62). 200 people were arrested, most of whom were deported to Dachau a week later (Suchy 1989: 137). This was a turning point. It was no longer a matter of laws and regulations, virtually everyone who experienced this night now knew that there was an immediate threat to their lives. After Nov. 9th 1938, the segregation of Jews took on a new force and pace. On Nov. 12th, the ‘decree for the Wnal elimination of Jews from the German economy’ (Verordnung zur endgültigen Ausschaltung der Juden aus dem deutschen Wirtschaftsleben) provided the basis for the liquidation of all Jewish businesses. On the same day, a decree was passed, obliging the shopkeepers to pay for all repairs, while at the same time conWscating all insurance payments. In addition, a ‘Wne’ of 1 billion Reichsmark was imposed on the German Jews in ‘atonement’ for the death of vom Rath (Eckert 1985: 239). Jews were no longer permitted to attend theatres, cinemas, concerts or expositions (Walk 1981: 255). After the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1st 1939 that started World War II, the Jewish population was quickly stripped of what remaining rights they had. They lost all professional opportunities. Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend non-Jewish schools. Jewish men were compelled to do forced labor. Jews were made to give up their houses and apartments and live in special ‘Jewish houses’ (Judenhäuser). They no longer had the right to read the daily newspapers, own a radio or a telephone or even use public telephones. They were only allowed to do their shopping at special times. And from

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September 19th 1941 onwards, they had to wear the ‘yellow star’ that marked them as Jewish in public. In October 1941, deportations to Poland started (Rieker and Zimmermann 1998: 250). On January 20th 1942, in a committee-meeting that has come to be known as Wannseekonferenz, 15 high oYcials decided on how to organize and administer the deportation and genocide of European Jews.

2.3 Emigration So I got on the train, I had my suitcase […] and I put it up in the luggage net. And I knew I’d never see my parents again. And we stood and talked on the platform, until the train came, and I got on and said, thank God, it’s over. Finished, the chapter on Germany is closed, the chapter on parents is closed, I never want to think about it again — don’t forget, I was still wearing my iron suit, you know, nothing could touch me any more. So I sat down on the seat, but the train didn’t start. Then they called for me to go to the window and wave to my parents. That was the hardest thing I ever did. It had all been closed, you know, I had Wnished with it, I had drawn a line. So I had to get up and go back. Walk through that line. So I waved until the train started, then I sat back down and drew another line. (Ruth K., p. 46)

Until the outbreak of World War II, the ever-intensifying process of the persecution of German Jews was designed to force as many of them as possible to emigrate. These eVorts were connected with the phase of persecution that, according to Hilberg (1961), was characterized by expropriation: While the pressure on the Jewish population to emigrate was continually heightened, laws and regulations made it increasingly diYcult for emigrants to take anything with them. The Wrst step in this direction was taken more than a year before the Nazi seizure of power on Dec. 8th 1931, when a ‘Xight tax’ (ReichsXuchtsteuer) was decreed. This decree imposed a tax of 25% on emigrants whose property exceeded 200,000 RM (this allowance was lowered to 50,000 RM in May 1934) or who had an annual income exceeding 20,000 RM (Eckert 1985: 128; Hilberg 1961: 90; Walk 1981: 81).


In addition, from 1934 onwards, the amounts of foreign currency that emigrants were allowed to transfer were continually lowered, and from Oct. 1935 onwards, other assets like foreign stocks or bonds could only be exported if it could be shown that they had been the property of the emigrant since before 1933 (Walk 1981: 70; 84; 136; 203). Any property that remained in Germany was converted to ‘Sperrmark’ and could only be liquidated under speciWc circumstances and at a tremendous loss which rose from 48% in 1934 to 90% in 1938 (Eckert 1985: 129). In this and a host of other ways, it was ensured that any loophole for the transfer of property would be sealed. Later on, the export of valuables like jewelry or even furniture was restricted; in 1937, it was decreed that such items could only be taken if a ‘reasonable’ sum was paid in recompensation (Walk 1981: 208). In 1939, this ‘reasonable’ sum was Wxed at 100% of the price of any item that had been the property of the emigrant for less than one year (Walk 1981: 291). No jewelry or other valuables could be taken any longer, with the exception of one set of silver cutlery per person, a wedding ring and a watch (Walk 1981: 274). In other words, this legislation made increasingly sure that those people who did manage to leave Germany would do so quite literally with the clothes on their backs and nothing else. Anything that was left behind was eventually appropriated by the state. This legislation not only increased the diYculties involved in taking the decision to emigrate. While the idea of starting an entirely new life in a diVerent country was overshadowed by the knowledge that this would be in entirely impoverished circumstances, the practical diYculties involved in getting a visa were also increased. None of the potential countries of emigration were enthusiastic at the thought of taking in a large number of refugees that were absolutely destitute, so one of the main problems in getting a visa e.g. for the USA was to Wnd someone who would give an aYdavit, aYrming the emigrants would not become a Wnancial burden to the state (Benz 1994: 29; Eckert 1985: 188). Professional qualiWcations were an added problem. For many professional groups, among them doctors and lawyers who were overrepresented among the Jewish population, emigration entailed a loss of their licenses, which were only reinstated at large cost and eVort. These diYculties were compounded by language barriers. The history of Jewish emigration from Germany, as well as the history of Jewish life under the Nazi regime, can therefore be divided into fairly clear-cut

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phases. In Wrst phase, between 1933 and Sept. 1935, relatively few people emigrated, and those who did were largely convinced that the Nazi regime would soon blow over, upon which they would be able to return to Germany. During this time, emigration was comparatively easy. Since there was only a small number of people applying for visas, the quotas of countries like the US were never Wlled, and taking money and part of their belongings with them was still possible. With the Nuremberg laws, this changed, and the growing number of refugees seeking to emigrate met with a decrease in the willingness on the part of other countries to take in increasingly more and increasingly impoverished German Jews. The Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria in March 1938, caused the number of people seeking to emigrate to increase immensely almost overnight. At the same time, the US now subsumed both Austrian and German refugees under the German quota, so that visas all of a sudden became very diYcult to obtain, especially since Jewish passports often were no longer extended by the German government, making the holders of such passports stateless (Göpfert 1999: 41; Sherman 1973: 17f.). Furthermore, Great Britain re-introduced obligatory visas for German and Austrian citizens in Mai 1938, and anyone wanting to emigrate had to get a work permission prior to applying for a visa (Göpfert 1999: 48; PHILO-Atlas 1938: 75). After the Pogrom of Nov. 1938, virtually everyone left was making huge eVorts to emigrate — to anywhere. However, the lists of applicants for visas had already become so long and the procedures so diYcult that it was mainly those who had already started the procedures long before that who eventually were successful (Göpfert 1999: 41f.) A very special case of emigrants were the 10,000 children of under 17 years who were brought to England in the time between the Pogrom and the outbreak of World War II. These transports were initiated by Jewish organizations in co-operation with the British government. The organizations took care of formalities like passports, visa, and host families or homes where the children were to live after their emigration (Göpfert 1999). Most of the children who went on one of the Kindertransporte never saw their parents again.


2.4 Conclusion The later the date at which the attempt to emigrate was successful, the larger were the Wnancial sacriWces that had to be made, but also the psychological burdens that the victims had to carry. (Benz 1994: 12)

As shown in the above sections, historical approaches to the study of the persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime have identiWed diVerent periods of time in which the extent and intensity of the persecution diVered. The Wrst period comprises the time from the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 to the issue of Nuremberg racial laws in September of 1935. For the Jewish population, this time was characterized by the belief that the Nazi regime could not last. Some anti-Semitic demonstrations like the boycotts and professional restrictions notwithstanding, during this time the German and Jewish parts of people’s identities were still reconcilable. Those who emigrated within this Wrst period mainly did so for professional reasons. They were not subjected to the full range of humiliation and marginalization that the later emigrants had to endure. The second period extends from September 1935 to November 1938. As was shown above, after the Nuremberg laws had laid down a clear ‘deWnition’ of non-Aryans as well as the basis for their legal marginalization, this period was characterized by a host of petty regulations designed to make everyday life more diYcult; by increasing anti-Semitic attacks from the mainstream population; but also by expropriation and a growing impoverishment of the Jewish population. Jewish life in Germany during this time became very diYcult, especially for children and adolescents who were being made to feel inferior and marginalized at every step. The terror of November 9th 1938 marks the beginning of the third period. It was on this date that the Jewish population realized that they were in immediate and real danger of their lives; that they were essentially outlawed. It is at least possible that the widening gulf between the German-Jewish population on the one hand and the non-Jewish German population on the other not only inXuenced the feelings of identity but also of identiWcation through language. Those German Jews who emigrated at an earlier stage of the Nazi regime potentially retained the feeling of identiWcation with the German culture, while it was made clear in no uncertain terms to anyone who stayed longer that they were not to be considered or consider themselves ‘German’.

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One of the aims of the present study will therefore be to establish whether qualitative or quantitative diVerences in loss or maintenance of the German L1 can be found between informants who belong to these diVerent emigration groups.

Chapter 3

The study

The present study examines language use and language loss of a group of 54 German-Jewish emigrants. It will attempt to establish the inXuence of extralinguistic (autobiographical) factors on language attrition, as well as look at intralinguistic determinants for language loss. The informants for this study are all German Jews who were forced to emigrate under the Nazi regime. They left Germany between 1933 and 1939 and have lived in anglophone countries (England and the USA) ever since. All of the interviewees were born or grew up in Düsseldorf between 1905 and 1930, where they lived in a monolingual German environment until the time of their emigration, when they were between eight and thirty years old. The interviews were collected by two historians as part of an Oral History project by the Düsseldorf Holocaust Memorial Center (Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Düsseldorf). First contact was made with the informants by means of a letter from the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte, asking them whether they would be willing to contribute the story of their lives to the documentation of the center. This, of course, constitutes what amounts to a pre-selection of the subjects, since a large number of the people who received this letter never answered. It is, of course, not possible to make any valid claims about the situation of those who chose not to answer, but the fact that none of the people who consented to give an interview had, for example, been to one of the concentration camps implies that many of the people who went through the worst situations do not feel ready to talk about their experiences even now — apart from the fact that very few people survived the camps at all. Interestingly, the one person in my sample who had been to a camp was not among those originally approached by the memorial center, since he was not from Düsseldorf, but from Köln1: It was his Düsseldorf-born wife who received the original letter. Since he was present when the interview with his wife was recorded, he eventually started to talk about his experiences as well. The informants for this study form a relatively homogenous group as far as their social background is concerned; almost all of them come from families that belonged to a moderately wealthy, well-educated background.

64


This homogeneity may seem surprising at Wrst sight, but it is explicable if one considers the enormous diYculties, Wnancial and otherwise, involved for German Jews when they made the decision to emigrate. Taking anything with them became progressively diYcult and expensive in the years after the Nazi rise to power, and by the time the extent of the danger became obvious to most, the costs of a visa alone had risen far beyond most people’s means. Therefore, for people who did not have the necessary money, knowledge and connections, after a certain point in time, emigration was no longer possible. Since all of the informants belonged to this class of well-educated, middle class assimilated German Jews, they also all lived in a monolingual German environment. Yiddish had been abandoned in this group of society around the end of the 18th century. There were still speakers of Yiddish in Düsseldorf in the 1920s and 30s, but those were mostly people who came from an Eastern European background (Sparing 1997: 156; see also above Section 2.1). Since all informants are from the same geographic region and a similar sociological background, it can be assumed that both dialectal and sociolectal variation within the sample is comparatively small. For the purpose of this study, an ‘alias’ name was chosen for each of the interviewees, in order to grant them anonymity. There is only one exception to this: Prof. Dr. John H. Herz will be referred to by his real name, since his autobiography has been used among the historical literature this study is based upon, and since there are overlaps between this autobiography and his interview. He therefore kindly gave me permission to use his real name instead of an alias. For the other informants, I collected Wrst names from announcements of marriages, engagements, or Bar-Mitzvahs from the Jewish community newspaper (Gemeindezeitung für den Synagogenbezirk Düsseldorf) of 1935 and 1936, and then added a randomly selected last initial.

3.1 Free spoken data The study is based on a corpus of 54 narrative autobiographical interviews. Such interviews are not based on a Wxed catalogue of questions that would prejudice the subject’s selection of what he or she considers important enough to recount (Vorländer 1990: 15). As far as possible, topic management is left to the interviewee, as is the choice of the language (the two interviewers in this case are both native speakers of German with a sound, albeit decidedly nonnative, command of English) and the setting of the interview. The interviewer

The study

meets the interviewee in a location of his or her choosing (most commonly the home of the person who is interviewed, but in some cases interviewees preferred a public place, e.g. a restaurant). The interview itself is preceded by a period of informal conversation in order for both interviewer and interviewee to become acquainted and feel at ease with the situation. Only then will the interviewer take out the tape recorder and ask the informant to tell the story of his or her life. From this point onward, topic management is left to the informant. These interviews contain a wealth of information that is invaluable for any socio-linguistic study, since most relevant information on age, education, social and family background and so on is contained in the database itself. Furthermore it is the interviewers’ aim to establish a relationship with the interviewees prior to the interview in order to put them at ease and ‘get a feeling’ for the situation. This is necessary since otherwise they run the risk of putting the interviewee in a situation where serious re-traumatization might occur. A side-eVect of this interview technique is that the interviews contain spontaneous speech with a low degree of monitoring. The fact that the interviews analyzed in this study were not, initially, collected with a view to linguistic investigation and analysis is a clear advantage. When potential attriters are contacted by someone they know to be a linguist — even if the object of the investigation is not clearly stated — they often become self-conscious about their linguistic abilities even beyond the ‘normal’ scope of the observer’s paradox. In the present study, the linguistic interest in the data was only expressed to the subjects after all of the interviews had been conducted, through a letter describing the research topic for this investigation and asking permission to use their interview for these purposes. The actual interview situation was therefore free from demands upon the proWciency in German, and it was clear to the interviewee that she or he was free to use whichever language she or he felt more comfortable in, or switch as was suited to the situation. In order to enable readers to form their own impression on the diVerent varieties spoken by the informants, it was further decided to include an AudioCD with this book, containing excerpts from those interviews for which permission to do this was obtained from the informants. The transcripts of these segments, together with an English translation, can be found in Appendix III.

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Language use in the interview As a very Wrst step, all of the interviews were analyzed for use of English and German lexical items. In order to do this, all ‘hedges’ like ahem, äh etc. were eliminated from the database, as well as ‘false starts’ of words. In addition anything that was said by the interviewer was eliminated. English and German lexical items were then counted. Needless to say, there were instances where the decision of whether a lexical item was English or German was problematic, especially at switching sites, as in the following example (underlined elements are English items, elements in italics are dubious items): aber all the same Maureen is auf eigene Faust every year in december when die holidays in Afrika sind nach Amerika gekommen, hat gekuckt, was die Mode war, damals hat sie Kleider gemacht, nicht nur Hosen, jetzt macht sie nur noch Hosen. ‘but all the same, Maureen came on her own every year in december when there are holidays in Africa to America, to look, what the fashion was, back then she made dresses, not only pants, now she makes only pants’ (Alice L., p. 6.)

In this case, is was regarded as a reduced pronunciation of German ist and counted as a German item. Similarly, die was regarded as a German article on the basis of its pronunciation. Since, however, the overall number of such questionable cases was very small and the distribution in groups of interviews that are overwhelmingly predominant in one of the two languages is very clearcut, it was felt that the relatively small amount of such cases did not seriously aVect the overall classiWcation. This yielded the following distribution: Table 2. Distribution of German and English in the database n German words English words

205,297 64,107 269,404

% 76.2 23.8

A closer look at the interviews showed that the overwhelming majority of the interviews used one language absolutely predominantly: Only seven of Wftyfour informants used more than 10% of the non-predominant language (see Table 3). In the majority of the interviews it is thus not a problem to clearly identify the base language.

The study

Table 3. Distribution of German and English over the interviews % of English

n

< 3% 3–10 % 25–71 % 91% > 99 %

30 5 7 1 11

In order to make sure that the German language system is actually the dominant one in the context of the interview, all interviews which contained more than 10% of English items were excluded from further analysis. This reduced the corpus to 35 interviews and a total of 173,585 spoken German words.

Analysis of the corpus After the corpus was transcribed (orthographically), the 35 interviews to be included in the study were analyzed by two native speakers of German: The author of this study and one of three student assistants. All instances where something was felt to be clearly ‘deviant’ by both these native speakers were classiWed as ‘interferences’. The instruction to the judges was to apply an ‘in dubio pro’ approach, i.e. to include only such cases that they felt could not occur in native speech; and to ignore ‘false starts’, i.e. instances that eventually were produced correctly. The interferences were classiWed into categories according to the linguistic level. In order to make among-subject comparisons possible, the frequencies of mistakes of each type were standardly converted to a ratio per 1,000 spoken German words in the interview (e.g., an informant who made a total of 5 mistakes on case marking over an interview 5,000 words in length would have a frequency of 1 case-marking mistake per 1,000 words in that category). In addition to this analysis of ‘mistakes’, an in-depth analysis of lexical, morphological, and syntactic complexity was conducted on each interview (see below). To get an impression on how ‘native-like’ each speaker still sounded, thirteen native speakers of German were asked to listen to a one-minute excerpt from each interview and ‘rate’ the speakers on a scale of 1 (perfectly native-like) to 3 (non-native-like). On listening to the same segments a second time (after having rated all speakers), the judges were asked to reconsider the rating on the basis of the informants’ accent, Xuency, vocabulary, and sentence construction.2

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3.2 Questionnaires The corpus of spoken data is augmented by a questionnaire that was sent to the interviewees in both English and in German. It contained questions on the learning situation and on interim language use and self-evaluation (see Appendix II). Of the 54 questionnaires that were sent out, 43 were returned. An additional three questionnaires were returned unanswered because the recipient was deceased. The number of subjects who gave an answer to the questions on language use with parents, siblings, partners or spouses and children vary, since some of them did not have siblings, never married or had children, or emigrated without their parents. Such self-report data can be problematic. Just how problematic is illustrated by a Wnding from two of the questionnaires: One of the questions asked was how often the informants used German with their siblings (possible answers being ‘always’, ‘frequently’, ‘seldom’, or ‘never’). To this, one informant replied that he ‘always’ used German with his only sister. This same sister, however, stated that she ‘never’ spoke German to her brother (Walther E. and Käthe S., Questionnaire).

3.3 The informants — Extralinguistic factors Since this study used data that were collected not for the purpose of a linguistic analysis but for historical documentation, a random distribution of those extralinguistic factors that are considered to inXuence language attrition could not be ascertained, nor could those factors be controlled. 3.3.1 Age The fact that the interviews on which this study is based were recorded after up to sixty-Wve years after the time of the emigration implies that all informants were relatively young when they emigrated, none of them being over thirty years old. The youngest informant whose interview contained less than 10% of English items and was therefore included in the analysis was eleven years old at emigration. As was stated above, the age at which Wrst language acquisition is to be considered completed by attrition studies varies between 14 and 17 years. For

The study

the purpose of this study, informants were grouped into those who were sixteen years and younger (AGEEMI1) and those who were seventeen years and older at the time of emigration (AGEEMI2). This classiWcation yielded a relatively even distribution of informants and data. Table 4. Distribution of informants and data among age groups # of informants AGEEMI1 AGEEMI2

(sixteen years and younger) (seventeen years and older)

18 17

# of German words 87,149 86,436

3.3.2 Education The factor of ‘education’ is particularly hard to deWne in any clear-cut terms for the informants under investigation. As was pointed out above, during the Nazi regime German Jews were progressively barred from schools and institutions of higher education. These restrictions were introduced within the time span of only a few years, as were restrictions placed upon professions. Taken together with the growing pressure to emigrate, many people and especially younger people experienced radical interruptions in their education and professional lives. Many children and adolescents, for example, who had been attending one of the high schools in Düsseldorf, were forced to leave those schools and attend the Jewish middle school. … but then when I was ten years old and was supposed to go to high school — that was in 1936–I couldn’t go; and so I went to a catholic school […] but I could only stay there for a little more than a year, when the nuns were no longer allowed to have a school, so I went to the Jewish school. (Gertrud U., p. 1, my translation)

For others, the educational perspectives changed at a somewhat later stage, as was the case for Hans L. who left High School very shortly before the Abitur since Jews were no longer admitted to universities, and started an apprenticeship as a pharmacist. In the same vein, in the country of emigration the primary preoccupation was usually simply to earn a basic living. Prior schooling and education were often useless since the qualiWcations were not accepted. Many people therefore took whatever job they could get, but a large number of these later either went back to school or college to get additional qualiWcations (Walther E., Lotte A.) or achieved some kind of informal qualiWcation through voluntary work or correspondence classes (Irma M., Liesl R.).

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It was therefore felt that a classiWcation of the informants into groups according to the level of education would not do justice to the diverse, highly colorful and individual biographies. 3.3.3 Time Since all informants for this study emigrated during the Nazi regime, the time periods they spent in emigration are fairly similar. Two of the informants originally emigrated to Palestine while one emigrated to Colombia, but all of them have been living in an English-speaking environment since at least the early 1950s, i.e. for a minimum of 45 years. Since previous studies suggest that whatever attrition occurs does so within the Wrst ten years, ‘time’ was not included as an independent variable for this study. 3.3.4 Gender The only study so far to investigate the inXuence of gender on language attrition is Köpke (1999), who failed to Wnd any signiWcant correlations whatsoever. Since her subjects are from a similar cultural background to the informants investigated here, it was decided not to investigate the inXuence of gender in the present study. 3.3.5 Contact In order to ascertain how much contact the informants had with their L1, this study had to rely mainly on self-report data, which may not be an entirely reliable guide to actual language use. However, it is impossible to gain a more objective insight into actual language use. These self-report data are collected either from the questionnaires or from statements in the interview, as in the following example: I: Q: I: Q: I:

… we never spoke German. Not even with your husband? No, never. not with each other not with each other, no, it was ah partly because of the war, you couldn’t speak German then. (Lotte A., p. 9)

A number of the informants likewise give World War II as a reason for not using German, especially in public. This was partly due to a certain fear of hostility on

The study

the part of other people, but often a growing resentment towards Germany on the part of the emigrant herself would also play a role. This attitude is most radically expressed by Berta D., who categorically states in her questionnaire: “When the war broke out, 6 months after my arrival in England, I vowed I would not speak, write nor read German ever again.” Many other informants express similarly negative attitudes towards the German language, e.g.: When I was a child I hated speaking German because I was ashamed of being diVerent from the other children. As an adult I had such animosity towards Germany because of its slaughter of Jews, that I would not let my children take German in high school even though they wanted to. I was insistent as a child that my parents, who did not speak English, learn English immediately. For most of my life my brother and I spoke only English to our parents. (Kläre S., Questionnaire)

The questionnaire which was sent to the informants inquires about use of German with the previous generation (parents), within the same generation (siblings, spouse) and with the next generation (children). As was expected on the basis of Wndings from other studies, there is a continuous decrease of use of German between those generations. For the purpose of the following table, the responses to the question on use of German with the partner or spouse were eliminated for those cases where the native language of the spouse was not German. Table 5. Self-reports on language use (in % of total responses) Use of German with Parents with Siblings with Partner/Spouse with Children

Always

Frequently

Seldom

Never

47.2 11.1 11.5 5.4

13.9 11.1 23.1 2.7

19.4 41.7 38.5 18.9

19.4 36.1 26.9 73.0

An interesting Wnding here is that almost two thirds of the informants who were married to a native speaker of German report that they seldom or never used German with him/her. This is a very striking contrast to self-report data from in other studies, e.g. Hulsen, de Bot and Weltens (1999), where 62.5% of the Wrst generation informants with a Dutch speaking partner reported they used a mix of both languages (interpreted by the researchers on the basis of their Wndings as an interlanguage variety with Dutch as the base language), and 29.2% reported they used a variety of Dutch (Hulsen, de Bot and Weltens 1999: 225).

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It will have to be established whether a (reported) more intensive use of German in emigration has any inXuence on language attrition, i.e. whether people who report they use German seldom or never have a larger number of ‘mistakes’ than those who report a frequent use. 3.3.6 Autobiographical and historical factors Historical analyses of the Nazi regime commonly make a qualitative distinction between progressively more radical phases of persecution (see above, Chapter 2). It was therefore decided to divide the informants of this study into three groups, based on the date of their emigration. –

–

–

Emigration group 1 (emigra1) comprises the people who left Germany within the Wrst 2 ½ years after the Nazi rise to power, before September 1935, when the Nuremberg race laws were announced. Emigration group 2 (emigra2) left after these laws were passed, but before the Wrst deportations to Poland in late October of 1938 and, most importantly, before the Pogrom on Nov. 9th 1938. Emigration group 3 (emigra3) left between this pogrom and the outbreak of World War II on September 1st 1939, after which emigration became virtually impossible. This group also comprises one informant who survived the war in Auschwitz, was liberated in January of 1945 and subsequently went to the United States.

It is predicted that the larger amount and higher degree of persecution suVered by those who emigrated at a later date will have led to a growing resentment of Germany and the German language that might have adversely aVected language retention. The distribution of informants and data across age- and emigration groups is relatively even, apart from the fact that emigration group 1 comprises only half as many informants as the other two emigration groups. Table 6. Distribution of informants among emigration and age groups EMIGRA1 EMIGRA2 EMIGRA3

ageemi1

ageemi2

4 7 7

3 7 7

7 14 14

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Attitudes and motivation In the historical chapter above (Chapter 2) it was attempted to give an impression of Jewish life in Germany before and during the Nazi regime. While German Jews often identiWed closely with German culture, there was a sense of exclusion from German society. One linguistic indicator of association with or dissociation from a certain group of people is the use of the Wrst person plural pronoun we. In order to get some insight into how this pronoun was used on the part of the interviewees, a survey was conducted on all 54 interviews. All instances of this pronoun (and any of its inXected forms in either English or German) were counted. From this count, instances which did not include the speaker were eliminated. Such uses were to be found in direct quotes, as in ex. (1) (1) Dann haben sie gesagt: ‘Wo ein Kind ist, zerstreuen wir nicht’ ‘Then they said: “We will not destroy anything where there is a child.”’

The remaining 2,935 instances of the use of we were analyzed on the basis of who was included with the speaker in the use of this pronoun. This yielded the following classiWcation: 1. Inclusion of family Under this heading, all references to parents, siblings, and other people who formed part of the informant’s family when he or she was a child are subsumed. Examples of this are (2) where the speaker talks about her experiences in the pogrom of Nov. 9th 1938 and (3).This category also includes reference to the family the interviewees had later in life, i.e. to their spouse, children, in-laws etc., as in ex. (4). With 2160 tokens, this category comprises more than 73% of all occurring items. Some examples are: (2) Und dann haben wir nicht versucht, zu schlafen, das ging nicht, aber wir lagen halt da zusammen, bis es […] Licht wurde, und wir sahen, was mit unserem Heim gemacht worden war. ‘And we didn’t attempt to go to sleep, we couldn’t, but we were lying in bed together until it got light and we could see what had been done to our home.’ (3) Q: A: ‘Q: A:

Und Sie hatten noch einen Bruder oder noch eine Schwester? Beides, also wir waren unserer viere And you also had a brother or a sister? Both, we were four of us’

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(4) und während des Krieges noch gegen Ende des Krieges haben wir geheiratet ‘And we got married during the war, towards the end of the war.’

2. Inclusion of Jewish Germans This category comprises all instances where the 1st person plural pronoun refers to people who are either explicitly designated as being Jewish in the text, as in ex. (5), or where it is clear from the context that they were, as in ex. (6) where a former teacher of the Jewish school in Düsseldorf is talking about himself and his colleagues, and ex. (7) where a former pupil of that school refers to herself and her classmates. This category comprises 449 tokens or 15% of the total number of items. (5) daß wenn die Leute einmal an der Macht sind, die Situation für uns Juden aussichtslos ist ‘that once these people are in power there is no perspective any longer for us Jews’ (6) aber wir hatten natürlich die Aufgabe, in einer jüdischen Schule auch jüdische Erziehung zu leisten ‘But of course in a Jewish school we had the task to convey some Jewish education’ (7) Aber die jüdische Schule war- es war schön für mich, da zu sein, weil die Kinder, weil wir alle jüdischen Kinder zusammen sein waren ‘But the Jewish school was — it was nice for me to be there, because the children, because we were all Jewish children’

3. Inclusion of non-Jewish Germans This category comprises those cases where it is either explicitly stated or clear from the context that the person or some persons included in the reference are not Jewish. Ex. (8) is the only example found where a speaker who did not attend the Jewish school refers to himself and his classmates by the inclusive pronoun, whereas in (9) the speaker is talking about his former best friend who later on joined the SS and stopped speaking to him. In this category only 25 tokens were found, which is less than 1% of all items. (8) mein Mathematiklehrer, wie wir in der Prima waren, hat er gesagt ‘My maths teacher, when we were in the Prima [the last year of high school] he said…’ (9) wir haben sehr viel voneinander gehabt, wir waren sehr eng befreundet ‘we were very fond of each other, we were very close friends’

The study

4. Inclusion of Germans of unspeciWed background Wherever inclusive reference was made to people the speaker had known in Germany and it was unclear whether these people where Jewish or not, those instances were counted in this category. Such instances add up to 56 tokens, or less than 2%. Since this category depends on the absence of any clear reference in the context, it was not possible to Wnd examples which would illustrate this. 5. Other This category comprises references to people the speaker knew in emigration (162 tokens or 5.5%), deictic reference to the context of the interview, as exempliWed by ex. (10) (24 tokens or 0.81%) and general statements, as in ex. (11) (59 tokens or 2%). (10) Ja, wo sind wir jetzt? ‘Yes, where are we now?’ (11) Schopenhauer bezeichnet als Glück das Unglück, dem wir entgangen sind. ‘Schopenhauer says that fortune is the misfortune which we escaped from.’

In order to establish whether continued exposure to the radicalizing antiSemitic persecution under the Nazi regime had aVected the informants’ identiWcation pattern, the distribution of categories 1–4 across emigration groups was calculated (see Figure 1). What is immediately striking is the amazingly low number of occurrences where the speaker uses the inclusive pronoun to refer to herself and non-Jewish Germans. This points to a very clear sense of identiWcation with German Jews and disassociation with non-Jews. These Wndings conWrm an impression gathered from the interviews: If, for example, the speaker attended the Jewish school in Düsseldorf, she may occasionally use ‘we’ to refer to herself and her classmates — if she didn’t, she doesn’t. It is also striking that data from interviewees who emigrated at a relatively early point in time contain a much larger number of occurrences where it could not be determined whether the referent of the deictic pronoun was Jewish or not, which supports the hypothesis that ‘being Jewish’ became a progressively more salient factor as persecution got to be more radical. (Interestingly this factors appears to have evened out in the country of emigration, where all groups refer more frequently to people of unspeciWed background than to people for whom this has been made explicit.) This again points towards the conclusion that ascribed identity, i.e. stereotyping that is brought

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90.00 80.00 70.00 60.00 50.00 40.00 30.00 20.00 10.00 0.00

EMIGRA1

EMIGRA2

EMIGRA3

Family %

72.59

84.35

85.24

Jewish Germans %

20.78

14.04

13.14

Non-Jewish Germans %

1.13

1.11

0.56

Unspecified %

5.51

0.49

1.05

Figure 1. Use of 1st person plural pronoun

to bear against a group from outsiders, may be a factor that is constitutive for identity to a higher degree than acknowledged identity, i.e. the sense of ‘belonging’ a group holds for itself. To further assess the informants’ attitudes towards German, the questionnaires contained an open question, “Is there anything else you would like to tell me about how you feel about English or German?” The answers to these questions were analyzed for ‘neutral’, positive or negative comments. Neutral comments: “I consider myself a balanced bilingual” (Heinz F.) “I like reading German and English books equally well” (Martin R.)

Positive comments: “I love my German native tongue, and I speak and read German a lot. The more emotional the topic I talk about, the more I’m inclined to use German.” (Max M.) “I like reading German newspapers, and watching German TV… all said and done, it is still my old ‘native tongue’.” (Albert L.)

The study

100.00 80.00 60.00 40.00 20.00 0.00

EMIGRA1

EMIGRA2

EMIGRA3

7.69 53.85 38.46

9.09 77.27 13.64

35.00 55.00 10.00

% neg. % neutral % pos.

Figure 2. Attitudes towards the German language

Negative comments: “For a long time, I did not wish to speak German, I felt that I wanted to cut myself oV, from Germany and its language.” (Hedwig Kaldenbach) “When we were young we found it very oVensive (abstossend sounds better) to speak or even listen to German.” (Charlotte G.).

The distribution of positive, negative, and neutral comments across the emigration groups is shown in Figure 2. EMIGRA3 has by far the highest amount of negative and the lowest amount of positive comments, supporting the initial hypothesis that this emigration group would have suVered most in its identiWcation structures. 3.3.7 Some hypotheses In view of the theoretical frameworks described in Chapters 1 and 2 above as well as of the description of the sample under investigation here, the following hypotheses pertaining to language attrition in the present corpus were formulated:

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Hypothesis 1 (Age): Informants in AGEEMI1 (age at emigration sixteen years or younger) will have more interferences and a reduced lexical and grammatical repertoire compared with informants in AGEEMI2 (age at emigration 17 years and older). Hypothesis 2 (Use): Informants who report little use of German in emigration will have more interferences and a reduced lexical and grammatical repertoire compared with informants who report more use of German. Hypothesis 3 (Identity): Informants who emigrated at a later date will have more interferences and a reduced lexical and grammatical repertoire compared with informants who emigrated at an earlier date. The following sections will try to establish whether evidence in support of any or all of these hypotheses can be found. Since all the data gathered in the course of this project are from informants who emigrated, it was not possible to Wnd a comparable monolingual control group. As a base line for comparison, the free spoken data which Köpke (1999) gathered from her monolingual German control group as well as the data from her L2 English group of L1 German attriters will be given for the linguistic factors wherever possible.

3.4 The corpus — Linguistic factors In order to gain an impression of the extent of a person’s language attrition, it is necessary to conduct both an analysis of the ‘mistakes’ she makes within a given stretch of discourse and of the linguistic material that she has used correctly. For the purpose of the present study, analyses in both these domains have been performed. In the following, the corpus of ‘mistakes’ that was collected will be referred to as ‘interference data’, while facts and Wgures on the correct use of the linguistic system are called ‘proWciency data’. 3.4.1 ‘Interference’ data One of the Wrst methodological diYculties researchers on language contact phenomena are faced with is a terminological one. While the use of the term ‘interference’ often appears slightly infelicitous, since it tacitly implies that the phenomenon under investigation is the outcome of one language encroaching upon the other — an assumption that has by no means been established so far

The study

— the apparently obvious label ‘mistake’ goes very much against the grain. Evidently, if language attrition is to be considered a phenomenon of language contact — and what else could it be? — the prescriptive attitude implied through this term is inappropriate. Language attrition might equally well be viewed as a creative process leading to a new variety of the language(s) of an individual. For the purpose of this study, the term ‘interference’ will therefore be used to designate any kind of utterance that deviates from an assumed norm of a monolingual standard. ‘Interference’ thus means any kind of disturbance in the production of an utterance, but makes no preliminary claims as to the origins of that disturbance — whether it is an eVect of interlanguage, of internal language change, or of momentary inaccessibility of some part of the linguistic system. This understanding of the term ‘interference’ is based on Weinreich’s deWnition: “Those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals” (Weinreich 1953: 1). The point of reference for this ‘deviation’, as was mentioned above, is the native speaker judgement of two researchers who independently analyzed the corpus under investigation. This analysis yielded a total of 3,736 tokens, which were then classiWed into the following domains:

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Table 7. A taxonomy of interferences Domain

Type

Examples

Lexicon

Code-Switching

“…mein Vater had more dates than mein Bruder und ich zusammen” (‘my father had more dates than my brother and I together’) “…von der russischen Army…” (‘of the Russian army’) “…wie hieß es education, how does that…” “…und dann haben sie nicht das Schlafzimmer *zerstreut” (‘and then they didn’t destroy the bedroom’) *Hochschule (‘high school’)

Semantics

Function words

Morphology

Single item lexical transference/borrowing Lexical access problems Transfers of an English word to a homophone or partsynonym in German Calque (morpheme-bymorpheme translation) Dropping of articles (e.g. in front of streets or months) Deviant use of prepositions Case Gender Plural Verb phrase morphology

Morphosyntax

Syntax I

‘Structural borrowing’ (a German verb is used with the argument structure of its English equivalent) Analytic vs. synthetic negation Order of adverbials (place before time) Order of IO/DO

Syntax II

Verb-subject structures in main clauses (German as a V2 language) Discontinuous word order (Vfin-X-Vinf) Verb-Wnal placement in subordinate clauses

“Die Synagoge war *in Ø Kreuzstraße.” (‘the synagogue was on Kreuzstraße’) “…sie konnte *für ein ganzes Jahr nicht schlafen…” (‘she couldn’t sleep for a year’) “das tut *mein Herz gut” (‘how it pleases my heart’) “…*eine englisches Mädchen…” (‘an English girl’) “zwei *Festschrifte” (‘two Festschrifts’) “…meine Großeltern kamen dann und *sind bei uns *gewohnen.” (‘my grandparents came and lived with us’) “Darum *war ich erlaubt zu der Schule zu gehen.” (‘therefore I was permitted to go to that school’) “…es war *nicht eine sehr freie oder gute Zeit für mich.” (‘it was not a very free or good time for me’) “…und so ??in Kansas City war ich in neunzehnhundertachtundvierzig” (‘and so I was in Kansas City in nineteen-forty-eight’) “…man hat ??seinen seinen älteren Bruder ihm nachgeschickt” (‘his older brother was sent after him’) “…und dann den nächsten Tag *mein Vetter und seine Familie kamen.” (‘and then the next day my cousin and his family came’) “…ich war inzwischen *geworden fünfunddreißig Jahre” (‘in the meantime, I was thirty-Wve years old’) “…ich glaube, daß Hannelore Philipp in dem Bild da bei der jüdischen Schule vielleicht *war in meiner Klasse.” (‘I think Hannelore Philipp, on that picture of the Jewish school, may have been in my class’)

The study

In addition, there were a small number of structures that were clearly felt to be deviant, but proved impossible to classify under any of these categories. Such instances were classiWed as ‘not reconstructible’. (12) du kannst zwei Jahre Ferien auf eins schieben März am Ende des des einen Jahr der Anfang ist das andere Jahr, kannst du nach Bangladesh (Ruth K., p. 38) ‘you can take the vacation from two years in one year, March at the end of one year the beginning is the other year, then you can go to Bangladesh.’

The classiWcation of the interferences across these domains yielded the following distribution: Table 8. Distribution of interferences across the corpus Domain

n

Lexicon 1,519 Semantics 500 Function words 534 Morphology 559 Morphosyntax 175 Syntax I 151 Syntax II 276 (Not reconstructible) 22 Total 3,736

% 40.66 13.38 14.29 14.96 4.68 4.04 7.39 0.59

Since it is the aim of this study to test some of the hypotheses that have been put forward to explain language attrition, such as the regression hypothesis or theories on interlanguage, it was felt that some of these domains would have to be excluded from the in-depth linguistic analysis. Predictions on language attrition are often made on the basis of either acquisitional data (the regression hypothesis) or of general properties of the linguistic system(s) involved. For that reason, it was decided to limit the analysis in the present study to those interferences that occur in the grammatical system — i.e. the interferences in the domains of inXectional morphology, morphosyntax, and syntax. Within those domains, the investigation was limited to those linguistic factors for which studies on L1 and — ideally — L2 acquisition could be used as a basis for comparison. The analysis of interferences found in the corpus under investigation therefore comprises the following linguistic variables:

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1. Morphological variables a. Case marking b. Gender marking c. Plural marking d. Verb phrase morphology 2. Syntactic variables a. Verb second placement in XVS structures b. Discontinuous word order c. Subordinate clauses These structures will be explored in more detail below, in an attempt to account for the Wndings on interferences from the corpus. For each of the variables under investigation, a brief description of its structure and function within the grammatical system of German will be given, followed by Wndings from L1 and L2 acquisition and language attrition. These Wndings will then be applied to the Wndings from the corpus, to see whether any patterns can be established. 3.4.2 ProWciency data The Wgures of interferences from the data of each informant were augmented by some Wndings on overall language use. In the domains of lexicon and morphology, this analysis was conWned to a stretch of 1,000 spoken German words from each interview (the only interview that contained less than 1,000 words was analyzed in its entirety). Hesitation markers, code-switches, and false starts had been eliminated from these stretches of text. This analysis was conducted on the basis of the hypotheses put forward by Andersen (1982). Where the lexicon is concerned, Andersen predicts that: Hypothesis 2a

An LA [language attriter] will have a smaller number and a smaller variety of lexical items available to him than a comparable LC [linguistically competent individual] in the same language.

Hypothesis 2c

What lexicon the LA has retained will be of common, highlyfrequent, unmarked lexical items; the gaps will be of less-common, low-frequency, highly marked items.

As a Wrst step, a type-token analysis was conducted on this corpus of 34,814 words. In order to do this, each word was reduced to its lexicon entry form, in order to ensure that tokens with diVerent morphological markings (e.g. singu-

The study

lar and plural forms of nouns or present and past forms of verbs) would not be counted twice. Proper names and numerals were not considered. In this way, a type-token ratio was established for each informant. In order to test the hypothesis that an attriter’s lexicon will consist of common, high-frequent items, the frequency of all of the content words contained in this type-token analysis in monolingual German was established on the basis of two frequency dictionaries (Meier 1967; RuoV 1981). The frequency values given by these two sources were converted to the same base and averaged for each item, and a mean frequency index was established for the use of content words of each speaker. Within the domain of morphology the same 1,000 word stretch of text was analyzed for case marking on NPs. In the domain of syntax, it was felt that the analysis could not be conWned to only a stretch of text from each interview, since syntactic complexity depends to a large degree on the speech situation and stylistic variation. Each interview was therefore analyzed in its entirety for the frequency of the following syntactic structures: – – –

Verb second placement in XVS structures Discontinuous word order Subordinate clauses

The Wndings gathered from the analysis of lexical, morphological, and syntactical complexity of each speaker’s data described in this section could not be compared against Wndings from a control group, since Köpke (1999) — whose monolingual control group is used as reference point for the Wndings on interferences — has not conducted any such analysis. The analysis of proWciency data will therefore have to be conWned to an intergroup comparison within the sample.

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Chapter 4

Morphology: NP-inXection

Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which oVers Wrm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, ‘Let the pupil make careful note of the following EXCEPTIONS.’ He runs his eye down and Wnds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. (Mark Twain, The Awful German Language)

The morphological system of German is highly complex and intertwined, both in the domains of np and vp inXection, and the frustration experienced by the L2 learner described in Mark Twain’s essay The Awful German Language has a very clear ring of authenticity about it. Not only are a range of varying syntactic and semantic functions encoded inXectionally, and various functions are conXated into a single morpheme, but the assignment of inXectional categories is frequently based on rules that appear anything but transparent; and Twain’s complaint that “there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it” is often accurate. As a (comparatively) free word order language, German encodes argument roles, but also number and gender by morphological means, and np inXection depends not only on these categories, but varies according to the deWniteness of the noun. For the purposes of this chapter, two basic types of inXection have to be distinguished: Inherent and relational or contextual inXection. Inherent inXection marks properties whose domain is the inXected word itself (Anderson 1985: 172), i.e. which is not required by the syntactic context (Booij 1996: 2). Inherent inXectional properties may either be required for all instances of a lexeme, e.g. in the case of gender, which has to be marked on all words within that lexeme’s paradigm, or they may contribute further to the meaning of a word and not be required in all instances of its realizations, e.g. in plural

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marking. (Anderson 1985: 172V.; Booij 1996: 2; Stump 1998: 26f.). Relational categories, on the other hand, are dictated syntactically by the function a word occupies within a larger structure: A noun […] may be singular or plural on its own account, as it were, but it can only be a subject or an object, etc., by virtue of its position in some syntactic construction. An indicator of such position is the formal reXection of a relational category. (Anderson 1985: 172)

The paradigm example of a relational category is that of case marking. Another issue to be borne in mind in an investigation of language attrition within the domain of morphology is that inherent inXectional properties are usually triggered by one element within the phrase (the head) and then extended by agreement to the other elements. Anderson (1985: 173f.) has argued that, in a Latin phrase such as bonos ¿ libros ¿ (‘good books’, acc), where both adjective and noun are inXected for accusative, masculine and plural, the adjective can be argued to be part of the object of the sentence in the same way the noun is and therefore carry the accusative marker in its own standing, as it were. On the other hand, there is nothing either inherently masculine or plural about ‘good’, so the adjective acquires these properties only by agreement with the head of the phrase. Agreement can therefore be seen as an asymmetrical category, where one element (the ‘target’) depends on another (the ‘controller’) for some of its morphosyntactic properties (Corbett 1998: 191; Stump 1998: 22). Since there certainly is a fundamental diVerence between inherent and relational inXection, one might hypothesize that language attrition may be inXuenced by this distinction. However, given the nature of the data under observation in the present study, the possibility of drawing any such conclusion appears highly doubtful: The distribution of elements and categories within this kind of free, largely unmonitored discourse type, varies according to style, topic etc., and consequently so does the frequency of opportunities to produce a deviant instance of any of the categories under observation. However tempting it may seem, therefore, to draw quantitative comparisons between the types of ‘mistakes’ observed, such conclusions have to be left to studies which are rigorously controlled both in the nature of the material and in the choice of the subjects. That notwithstanding, there are several factors which may inXuence attrition in the domain of German morphosyntax of the informants:


–

–

The communicative function: Some of the categories that will be investigated in this chapter contribute more to the content of the utterance than others. Structures which carry a comparatively high functional load are, for example, case and plural marking, while gender marking does not make any change in the propositional content of an utterance and therefore has a low functional load. It has been hypothesized that distinctions which contribute more to the content of an utterance will be less vulnerable to attrition, since their loss would result in frequent misunderstandings (Andersen 1982: 97f.). Interlanguage eVects: Some of the categories that will be investigated here are also encoded by morphological means in English (e.g. number and tense) while others are not (e.g. case and gender). It has been hypothesized that L2 grammar will encroach on the L1 system to a higher degree if the corresponding category is also present in L2 (Altenberg 1991).

In an evaluation of the attritional process, these functions will therefore have to be considered.

4.1 Case Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing ‘cases’ where I am master of it, a seemingly insigniWcant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. (Mark Twain, The Awful German Language)

Cases and case marking in general and the German case system in particular are areas on which more research has been conducted from a theoretical as well as contrastive, acquisitional and attritional perspective than on almost any other feature investigated in this study. The German case system is an especially fruitful area of investigation in order to gain insight into the mechanisms of language acquisition and attrition since 1. it is a grammatical system which encodes syntactic (assignment of syntactic relations such as subject and object), semantic (assignment of semantic roles such as agent, patient, experiencer etc.) and pragmatic (encoding of features such as ego-nearness, saliency etc.) information (Clahsen 1984: 16), in

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other words, it is a syntactic-morphological system that serves a cognitive purpose (Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 182) 2. it can be shown to be acquired in a Wxed sequence in L1 acquisition (see among others Clahsen 1984; Tracy 1984; Mills 1985; Clahsen, Eisenbeiß and Vainikka 1994). Studies of case marking can therefore give insights into the cognitive principles that govern acquisition and attrition of both L1 and L2. This comprises the cognitive and functional principles that govern case assignment in German, the means used to encode the same information in English, and the sequence of acquisition and loss of case marking.

Cognitive and functional principles in German case marking The most comprehensive account of the cognitive and functional forces governing German case marking can be found in Zubin (1975; 1977; 1979). He establishes that case assignment is based on principles of perception and experience. Since the attention span of human beings is selective and limited, and since information about other human beings is processed more readily than information about non-humans (Zubin 1979: 470f.), features such as topicality, salience, agentivity and what has been termed “ego-nearness” play an important role for grammatical encoding. Within this framework, it is Zubin’s hypothesis that in German the nominative is used to indicate the speaker’s focus of interest, while the oblique (dative and accusative) is used for entities that are not the speaker’s focus of interest (Zubin 1979: 474). ‘Focus of interest’ is a rather broad term that has been linked to such notions as topicality and topic persistence (Givón 1990: 907V.; for a discussion of notions of topicality and related issues see Schmid 1999: ch. 2), agentivity (Zubin 1975: 1) and role- or referential prominence (Schachter 1977). However, neither topicality and the related concepts of role- and referential prominence1 nor agentivity are consistent forces governing the subject selection process: While the entity that carries the highest degree of local salience is often put in the nominative, this is not invariably the case (Zubin 1979: 478) and while the degree of agentivity can determine subject selection, in speciWc cases the agent can be placed in the oblique (i.e. in passive sentences). Ertel (1977) therefore concluded that subject selection is determined by an egocentric bias, a factor which often coincides with the aforementioned features of topicality, since human beings “usually talk about themselves” (Ochs and SchieVelin 1983: 164); and agentivity, which is “a human characteristic par


excellence” (Jordens 1992: 141). It appears that, when there is a conXict here, ego-nearness is the overriding factor in case assignment (Jordens 1992: 141). Zubin has therefore developed the following egocentric scale: Speaker (ego)

>

hearer > other > inanimate person concrete

> abstract

and stated that “[g]iven the choice of focusing interest on one of several entities in an event, the speaker will chose the entity closest to ego on the scale.” (Zubin 1979: 478). The further from the speaker’s ego an entity is in competition with other participating entities, the more likely it is that it will be placed in the accusative, while ‘intermediate’ entities will more likely than not be placed in the dative in German. The entity that is most ego-near will typically be selected as the subject and placed in the nominative (Zubin 1979: 495).

The representation of the functions of German case marking in English Languages which do not have the morphological means of case assignment have to rely on other features to encode the syntactic functions, semantic roles and pragmatic information such as ego-nearness and role and referential prominence which in German are carried by morphology in interaction with the syntactic system. In English — which does not have any morphological diVerentiation between nominative and dative/accusative except in pronouns — these features are encoded by morphosyntactic means such as word order or deWniteness. Except in highly marked contexts, subject, indirect object and direct object are encoded by word order. There is a strong tendency in present-day English to place the subject in sentence-initial and the object in sentence-Wnal position. Since the topical sentence-initial position in unmarked sentences in English is reserved for the subject, and since topicality is strongly linked to referentiality (Givón 1991: 354), another grammatical feature that is linked to the subject function is that of deWniteness (Jordens 1992: 153). The close link which holds in English between the sentence-initial position, the subject function and pragmatic information such as topicality and salience has been discussed in detail and will not be explored further here (for an overview of these notions as well as of marked syntactic structures which exploit this principle see Schmid 1999: ch. 2 and 3). SuYce it to mention that the interaction of such principles as ego-nearness and the subject function appear to operate to the degree that even highly grammaticalized non-canonical sentence structures like wh-clefts which place the relative pronoun refer-

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ring to the object of the sentence before the subject in most cases tolerate only inanimate NPs as the focus (Prince 1978: 885). It seems possible, therefore, that entities which successfully compete with the subject for the salient sentence-initial position have to have some non-subject-like characteristic. In other structures, such as Left-Dislocations, this dilemma is resolved by the pronominal copy in the position where the Left-Dislocated NP would appear in an SVO-sentence. If the referent is animate, this pronoun is unambiguously marked for case, making its non-subject status clear.

German case in L1 acquisition Given the complex cognitive functions that case marking encodes it can be assumed that the appearance of morphological case marking in Wrst language acquisition will be linked to or paced by the cognitive development involved in mastering these functions. Semantic roles have been described as higher abstractions over a linguistic level of representation which are not given pre-linguistically as semantic primitives and are therefore diVerentiated only gradually in the process of L1 acquisition (Tracy 1984: 280). This, however, does not explain the broad variation of age at the time case distinctions make their appearance across languages — the fact that, for example, German children appear to productively use all cases only by the end of their third year, while Turkish children have mastered their case system at age two (Clahsen 1984: 14; Tracy 1984: 285; Jordens, de Bot, van Os and Schumans 1986: 167). Three factors are seen as central to why German case marking is acquired relatively late: 1. The German case system is complex and often ambiguous, since case is morphologically encoded together with number and gender. Except for the dative suYx -m there is no suYx which unambiguously and exclusively encodes one case. In addition, there is a large amount of homonymy (the nominative and the accusative are homonymous in the feminine and the neuter in the singular and in all genders in the plural). This complexity may be partly responsible for the relatively late acquisition of German case marking compared with languages that have a more transparent system, such as Turkish (Clahsen 1984: 2, 26; Tracy 1984: 287; Mills 1985). 2. German case marking is most often marked on the pronoun and/or article and on the adjective (if one is present within the NP) and only in rare cases on the noun itself. This means that the acquisition of the dative and the accusative can only start when the child language already contains deter-


miners and pronouns (Tracy 1984: 285; on the acquisition of determiners see Müller 1994; Clahsen, Eisenbeiß and Vainikka 1994).2 3. The cognitive functions the German case system encodes are shared by other features of the morphosyntactic system. In the early stages of L1 acquisition, before the appearance of case distinctions, the subject is invariably placed before the verb while other nominal constituents can appear after the verb. The necessity to morphologically diVerentiate subject and non-subject only arises with the acquisition of V2 and structures such as topicalization, when syntactic relations are no longer determined by verb placement alone (Clahsen 1984: 17; Tracy 1984: 302). This is linked to a cognitive development which allows for more than two arguments for a verb (Tracy 1984: 302) and for a diVerentiation of the semantic functions of these arguments (Clahsen 1984: 21). L1 acquisition of German case marking, which is conditioned by these factors in interaction with the cognitive principles underlying case assignment outlined above, has been shown to proceed in three stages: 1. No case marking: nominal constituents are not marked for case, the determiner and pronominal category are absent 2. Case-neutral marking: unmarked forms are overgeneralized to dative and accusative contexts 3. Case marking: This is the stage where case-marking appears. In stage 3a, the accusative is overgeneralized to dative contexts. This leads to a binary system in which the nominative encodes the subject and the accusative the non-subject. In stage 3b, accusative and dative are diVerentiated correctly and semantic roles are acquired (Clahsen 1984: 14, 21; see also Collings 1990: 39f; Tracy 1984: 285).3 There are diVerent hypotheses on why children overgeneralize accusative forms to dative contexts but not vice versa. Clahsen ascribes this to an overgeneralization of the pragmatic function: On Zubin’s egocentric scale, nominative and accusative occupy polar positions, which is why the accusative is easier to access as the opposite of something already known. The intermediate function of the dative is harder to access and therefore acquired later (Clahsen 1984: 24).

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German case in L2 acquisition The acquisition of case marking in German L2, in contrast to L1, does not proceed parallel to some kind of cognitive development. It has therefore been assumed that speakers will draw on their native speaker intuition for the assignment of case roles in situations where they do not have access to the underlying grammatical rules. For native speakers of English, this predicts that the sentence-initial position will be linked to the nominative and the sentenceWnal position to the accusative. It is also predicted that deWniteness will play a role here, since presence or absence of deWniteness are linked to topicality which, in English, is strongly connected to the subject function (Jordens 1992: 153). Accounts of the acquisition of German L2 case marking on the basis of Zubin’s egocentric scale have been carried out by Jordens (1983a; 1983b; 1985; 1992) and Jordens, de Bot and Trapman (1989) who tested for the inXuence of a number of features that were designed to operationalize this scale. Since these studies rely largely on grammaticality judgements, Zubin’s Wrst three categories (speaker/hearer/other person) were conXated to the single criterion of Animacy. This category was then augmented by animate or inanimate entities which imply “an entity that is closer to the speaker’s ego” than any other entity referred to in the sentence (Jordens 1992: 144f.), e.g. part of a person’s body, someone’s property, achievement or activity; a social group that the implied person is a member of; or a human being that the implied person is personally or functionally related to (Jordens 1992: 146).4 In addition to these features which seem to play a cognitive role for the assignment of syntactic and semantic relations across languages, the factor of deWniteness was tested for, which in some languages, like English, is linked to the subject function while in others, like Dutch, it is mainly related to identiWability, i.e. topicality (Jordens 1992: 170). The Wndings presented in these studies show that for both Dutch and English L1 learners of L2 German the factor ‘implied person’ has a strong eVect on the acceptance of nominative vs. accusative in incomplete sentences (headline constructions): Both groups prefer the nominative for entities which do not imply a person that is closer to the speaker’s ego and the accusative for entities which do (Jordens 1983: 119; 1992: 158; Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 196f.). The factor ‘deWnite’ (def), on the other hand, is only signiWcant for English L1 learners of German, who prefer the nominative for deWnite entities and the accusative for indeWnite entities in keeping with the strong link between referentiality and the subject function in their L1 (Jordens 1992: 164f.). In determinerless entities, which are “unspeciWed with respect to referential prominence” (Jordens 1992: 165), case marking is


apparently dependent on the factor ‘± implied person’ (impl) (Jordens 1992: 164f.). For the factor ‘animacy’, no interaction with case marking could be detected (Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 198). In addition to these factors, L2 acquirers show a marked preference for the nominative, which was far more pronounced than in similar studies of L1 learners and attriters.

German case in L1 attrition In order to test whether the attrition of German case marking is the reversion of its acquisition (the ‘Linguistic Hypothesis’ based on Jakobson’s regression theory) or is governed by cognitive principles (the ‘Cognitive Hypothesis’) a study of learners and attriters of L1 and L2 German was conducted by Jordens, de Bot and Trapman (1989). The Linguistic Hypothesis predicted that in attrition the case system would Wrst be ‘binarized’, conXating all functions of the oblique into the accusative, and then be further reduced to use of the nominative only. (Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 181f.). The Cognitive Hypothesis predicts that L1 attrition will be governed by the cognitive factors of ego-nearness in interaction with syntactic and morphological factors, since “mistakes will occur as a result of the speaker’s tendency toward a one-to-one relation between the cognitive and linguistic systems” (Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 183). SpeciWcally it was predicted that postverbal NPs which require the nominative, like rhematic subjects or predicate nominals, would be assigned the accusative, while preverbal entities requiring the oblique, like left-dislocated or topicalized objects, would be placed in the nominative. In addition, the cognitive factors that had been shown to inXuence case marking in L2 learners were tested for L1 attriters. It was established that the factor ±impl inXuences case assignment in L1 attrition in the same way it does for L2 speakers: There is a preference towards the accusative with entities that are +impl and towards the nominative with entities that are — impl (Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 191). The factor def, on the other hand, inXuenced case marking diVerently for L1 speakers of German than for native English L2 learners: For deWnite entities, the accusative was preferred while there was no preference for either case in indeWnite entities. (Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 197). Overall, these studies have established a tendency for L2 learners and attriters to assign cases largely on the basis of cognitive principles in interaction with intuitions from their L1. L1 attriters, on the other hand, largely base case

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assignment on the semantic function of the entities, reserving the accusative for the patient. (Jordens, de Bot and Trapman 1989: 194).5 Köpke found signiWcant diVerences in the amount of errors made in the grammatical domain between her L2 English group and her monolingual German control group (1999: 188). However, signiWcance levels were not calculated for the speciWc error types, and she only gives absolute Wgures for these. In the domain of case marking, her L2 English group has a total of 11 interferences, which converts to a frequency of 0.65 interferences/1,000 spoken words, while her control group has 7 interferences or 0.45 per 1,000 words (Köpke 1999: 189).

Case marking interferences in the corpus The corpus contained 142 instances of interferences in the domain of case marking, or 0.82 interferences per 1,000 words. 13 of these instances were not well-formed case forms for the items in question and could therefore not be classiWed. The remaining 129 instances were distributed as follows: Table 9. Interferences in the use of cases Case used nom gen dat acc nom/acc*

nom.

Case required gen dat 1

4 5

3 6

9

10

22

26 11 59

acc 26 1 24

51

49 1 31 37 11 129

*These were cases where, due to homonymy of nominative and accusative the case used could have been

either.

The linguistic hypothesis A Wrst observation concerning ‘mistakes’ in case assignment in the sample is that, in contrast to the Dutch L2 learners of German observed in Jordens (1985), who did not produce dative forms in accusative contexts, our informants used all cases except the genitive in all contexts: Nominative in dative contexts: (13) und so sind sie zu unser Haus gekommen ‘and so they came to our house’ (Ernst L., p. 20) (14) mit zwei KoVer ist sie weg ‘she left with two suitcases’ (Liesl R., p. 10)


Nominative in accusative contexts: (15) Sie hat geheiratet ein Mann, der ein Schriftschreiber war ‘she married a man who was a writer’ (Irma M., p. 5) (16) wir hatten großen Respekt vor alle Lehrer ‘we had great respect for all the teachers’ (Erich E., p. 8)

Dative in nominative contexts: (17) Maschinen die den Metzger brauchen ‘machines that butchers use’ (Gertrud U., p.2) (18) und so ist meinem Vater entgangen, daß sie ihn nicht ins Konzentrationslager gebracht haben ‘and so my father escaped being taken into a concentration camp’ (Alice J., p. 6)

Dative in accusative contexts: (19) muß ich auf dem Datum gucken ‘I have to check the date’ (Thea S., p. 4) (20) hat die Lehrerinnen meinen Eltern angewiesen ‘the teachers told my parents to…’ (Berta D., p. 7)

Accusative in nominative contexts: (21) und äh da ich möblierte Herr war, und niemanden hatte den mich versorgte, ging ich ins Krankenhaus ‘and since I was renting a furnished room and had no one to take care of me, I went into hospital’ (Albert S., p. 1) (22) und hatten jeden hundert Dollar- hundert Franken in der Tasche ‘and we each had a hundred dollars — a hundred francs in our pocket’ (Ernst L., p. 29)

Accusative in dative contexts: (23) sondern nur da- von den sprechen, ä- was ähm ich erlebt habe ‘but only talk of what I myself witnessed’ (Max M., p. 4) (24) jeden Tag, um ihn etwas zu kochen ‘every day to cook for him’ (Gertrud U., p. 5)

This would point to the conclusion that there is no overall reduction of the case system where the dative is lost Wrst and a binary system emerges, as the regression hypothesis predicts (Jordens, de Bot, van Os and Schumans 1986: 171).

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In order to gain further insight into use of case, a stretch of 1,000 German words from each interview6 was analyzed for case marking (see Table 3, Appendix I). In order to see whether variation within overall case marking could be correlated with attrition in the domain of case marking, the interviewees were classiWed into three groups, according to how many interferences in the domain of case they had per 1,000 German words. The Wrst group comprises those twelve interviewees who had less than 0.42 interferences/1,000 words, the second group of twelve subjects had less than 0.93 and the third group of eleven subjects had between 0.93 and 5.34 interferences. The intergroup comparison shows hardly any variation in the overall use of case. Table 10. Overall use of case by number of interferences nom s.d.

interferences/1,000 words

%

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