Dörte Hansen-Jaax
Transfer bei Diglossie
This book treats a number of aspects of the interaction between Low German and High German in Germany, and between immigrant Low German and English in the USA.
A great many aspects of language interaction are the focus of discussion. Both the structural and the pragmatic aspect (motivations and causes) of several types of interference are treated.
It appears to be problematic to describe the code-switching corpus within either the Variationist Model (a linear model) by Poplack, or the MLFM (an insertional model) by Myers-Scotton. It is shown that the borderline between code-switching and borrowing is often quite fuzzy.
Native speakers of Low German are distinguished from L2 speakers, the latter using more High German influences. The phenomenon of 'Analogiebildungen' (conversions) is a phenomenon that enables the formation of Low German word forms from the High German lexicon. For L2 speakers it is used as a learning strategy, but it is also commonly found amongst native speakers.
Although in-group use of High German and conscious code-switching are highly stigmatized, the lexico-grammatical influence of the dominant language is overall abundant. The linguistic distance between Low German and High German is growing smaller. The Low German system has become a dynamic, rather than a static one, because of the freedom to use High German interferences, but there are still some markers of Low German that function as identifiers of its separate linguistic system.