6533b7d6fe1ef96bd1267309

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Dialektmerkmale des Deutschen in den sprachbiographischen Interviews der bilingualen Oberschlesier

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The article is based on language biographies which come from the interviews conducted as part of the German-Polish project LangGener with native inhabitants of the former German territories of today’s Poland. Out of 124 recordings, 20 linguistic biographical interviews with respondents from Upper Silesia were subjected to analysis where special attention was paid to the features of Silesian German dialects occurring in them. Even though the Silesian linguistic landscape is now considered by researchers to be a historical object of studies due to the shifting of borders after World War II and the accompanying population exchange, the article shows that the linguistic material currently obtained in the LangGener corpus also reveals residual dialectal features of the Silesian German dialects. Contrary to the common view that Upper Silesian German differs from standard German primarily by features resulting from linguistic contact, it has been proved that changes resulting from linguistic contact do not always have the only or the greatest potential to explain some phenomena occurring in the Upper Silesian German of the surveyed informants. Numerous features can be classified as signs of dialectal continuity.