The LangGener Polish-German corpus of speech by bilinguals – selected phenomena of language contact and sociolinguistic aspects.
Anna Zielińska (Institute of Slavic Studies PAS), Anna Jorroch (University of Warsaw), Felicja Księżyk (University of Opole), Irena Prawdzic (Institute of Slavic Studies PAS), Michał Woźniak (Institute of Polish Language PAS)
This talk aims to present selected phenomena of language contact in Polish and German utterances of bilingual people who were interviewed as part of the creation of the Polish-German bilingualism corpus, as well as to discuss some aspects of their language biographies.
The corpus was built on the basis of recordings made in two generational groups differentiated due to sociolinguistic factors. The common features defining speakers from each of the groups are both their bilingualism and their region of origin. The country of residence and the order of language acquisition differ.
People belonging to the group called the Polish Generation (GP) live in Poland in the areas that were joined to Poland after the Second World War. They were born before 1945, in the German Reich. After the shifting of the borders to the west in 1945, these people found themselves living in a new country, and for this reason, learned Polish.
People belonging to a group called Generation Germany (GN) live in Germany. They were born in Poland after the Second World War in the same areas in local families (so not in resettled families). Their socialization took place in Polish, and they learned German after emigration.
The corpus will enable investigation of the differences in the use of morphosyntactic constructions, resulting from linguistic contact, by people from two generations in both languages. It is also a tool for researching language biographies and the relationship between biographies and the use of language.
The corpus consists of 78 hours of interviews conducted with 58 speakers (30 speakers from GP and 28 from GN) in Polish and German. It is a multimodal specialized corpus, with grammatical and sociolinguistic annotation.
The presentation was created as part of a research project entitled “Generational diversification of language: morphosyntactic changes caused by Polish-German linguistic contact in the speech of bilingual people” financed from the funds of the National Science Centre, project number 2016/23/G/HS2/04369, affiliated at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
The meeting takes a hybrid form, with participation possible in the room in IJP PAN as well as via Zoom.
To participate in the meeting virtually please fill in the form: https://forms.gle/4K1MJ7V9JW8MDKmq7
The meeting will be recorded and later made available on our YouTube channel.