Date of Defense
5-29-2012
Date of Graduation
4-28-2012
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Peter Blicke, Foreign Languages
Second Advisor
Paul Johnston, English
Third Advisor
Thomas Kostrzewa, Global and International Studies
Keywords
German; Sociolinguistic studies
Abstract
The German nation has a long history of fragmentation, from the mini-states of the Middle Ages to the eastern and western republics of the recent past. These barriers affected the speech community in particular. Among the various borders that shifted through Central and Eastern Europe for centuries, dialects arose as a result of strong political and cultural identities. Without a strong centralizing force to integrate them, the many communities remained relatively homogenous, which provided fertile soil for unique linguistic development. The most recent partition of East and West scarcely lasted half a century and did not create a discrete speech community on par with the former principalities and kingdoms. The East-West rift in Germany produced a limited impact on the language, which has been rendered largely irrelevant in the post-unification years. In this article, I intend to observe the linguistic divergences that arose in German between the two Cold War Germanys and compare those results with the influence of the dialects on the language in the pre-modern and early modern period to prove that the twentieth century East-West divide bore little lasting significance on the language.
Recommended Citation
Pecinovsky, Logan C., "The Sound and the Fury: Comparative Sociolinguistic Studies in German" (2012). Honors Theses. 2201.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/honors_theses/2201
Access Setting
Honors Thesis-Open Access