Variation as a Sign of a Minority Language’s Vitality? Postcolonial Self-Conceptualizations in Namibian German Loan Word Phonology

References –

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 Abstract –

Remarkably, and in apparent contrast to only forming a small part of the population, the German-speaking community in Namibia continues to exhibit stable linguistic vitality since the beginning of German settler colonialism in the late 19th century (e.g., Wiese et al. 2017; on the colonial history of German in Namibia, see Deumert 2009; 2018). To date, members of this minority use German in various domains of everyday life next to English and Afrikaans (for a descriptive overview of Namibian German, see Shah 2007; Zimmer 2021). Institutional and language political efforts as well as census, questionnaire and corpus data overall suggest a high probability of ongoing language maintenance (Zappen-Thomson 2019; Zimmer forthc.). This constitutes a special case among non-sectarian German-speaking minorities out of Europe which in general show a tendency to undergo language shift (e.g., contributions in Plewnia & Riehl 2018).
In my paper, I address the question how this vitality may relate to language variation in Namibian German (NG) with a mixed-method study on a salient NG feature, the phonological integration of loan words. In a spirit of third wave variationism (cf. Eckert 2012), my approach consists of (1) a quantitative corpus study in DNam (Zimmer et al. 2020), a freely accessible transcribed and tagged corpus of spoken NG, and (2) a qualitative analysis of interview data on speakers’ perception and attitudes that guides the interpretation.
Based on borrowings used in DNam, I selected segmental and phonotactic features for analysis, e.g., postalveolar approximant [ɹ], dental click [|], [s] in environments where Standard German has [ʃ], etc. The analysed 1,827 tokens show variation between transference and integration in every examined feature except [|] (e.g., al[ɹ]right vs. al[ʁ]ight, [s]tory vs. [ʃ]tory etc). A mixed multifactorial regression analysis reveals that different factors significantly increase the likelihood of phonological integration, such as stylised language use and male speaker gender.
My sociolinguistic interpretation of these findings draws on semiotic concepts of identity and social meaning as linguistic-interactional constructs (cf. Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Eckert 2008). The results suggest that the examined phenomena serve as strategies of indexing identity-relevant categories in the postcolonial, post-apartheid context of Namibia. I argue that phonological integration is part of speakers’ metalinguistic idea of prototypical NG language use and auto-stereotypes that are rooted in the community’s settler-colonial ancestry (cf. Schmidt-Lauber 1998). A different role appears to be assumed by urban adolescent speakers’ transference of clicks, which may serve as an index of a pluralist, pan-namibianist mindset and a distancing from the racist hegemonies of colonialism and apartheid.
In line with Zimmer (forthc.), I argue that this diversity of self-conceptualisations constructed in NG interaction forms an indicator of linguistic vitality. Additionally, I propose that the investigated phenomena exemplify a well-established idea that this is rendered visible through variation (e.g., Abtahian 2019). In sum, my paper aims to show how language variation, metalinguistic ideas and identity construction all come together to mirror the linguistic vitality of minorities in postcolonial settings.