We investigate a seemingly counterintuitive result of language contact: the maintenance of old German features in the Cimbrian variety of Lusérn, supported by contact with Romance. The sibilants of Lusérn Cimbrian exhibit to date a three-way distinction similar to Old and Middle High German while the German mainland dialects, including Standard German, reduced it to a two- way distinction. We show that the maintenance of the third, typologically marked sibilant in Cimbrian is due to the existence of a phonetically similar sibilant in the neighbouring Romance dialects - even though in these varieties it is embedded in a two-way distinction similar to Standard German.

Die Sibilanten des Zimbrischen: Konservativität durch Sprachkontakt

Birgit Alber;Stefan Rabanus
2018-01-01

Abstract

We investigate a seemingly counterintuitive result of language contact: the maintenance of old German features in the Cimbrian variety of Lusérn, supported by contact with Romance. The sibilants of Lusérn Cimbrian exhibit to date a three-way distinction similar to Old and Middle High German while the German mainland dialects, including Standard German, reduced it to a two- way distinction. We show that the maintenance of the third, typologically marked sibilant in Cimbrian is due to the existence of a phonetically similar sibilant in the neighbouring Romance dialects - even though in these varieties it is embedded in a two-way distinction similar to Standard German.
2018
Contact-induced language change; Cimbrian; Italian; German; Dialectology
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11562/973873
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