The Sociolinguistic Situation of Low German on the Island of Pellworm
Abstract
Despite the influence that the spread of Standard German and the decline of the Hanseatic League has had on Low German, this linguistic variant has the status of "regional language" since 1998. Spoken in a large part of northern Germany, this paper pursues two objectives: to know the scope of use and to discover the speaker’s perceptions about this variant on the island of Pellworm. The results show that the situation of Lower German has improved in recent years. It has been observed that this is due to the emotional feature of the language, as well as to the feeling of identification that the speakers themselves attribute to it. Participants agree in that they can express themselves better in this language than in German and that they use it mostly in familiar environments.
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