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| Format | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Author, Analytic | de Leeuw, Esther |
| Title, Analytic | New Research: What Happens to German Language After Emigration? |
| Journal Title | German-Canadian Studies Newsletter |
| Date of Publication | Nov. 2010 |
| Volume ID | 15 |
| Issue ID | 1 |
| Location in Work | 2 |
| View Online | http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/german-cdn-newsletter-archives |
| Abstract | The author's research involved two experiments which investigated whether the domain of phonetics can undergo first language (L1) attrition, or be lost, when a second language (L2) is acquired in adulthood in a migrant context. Experiment I investigated the native speech of 57 German migrants to Anglophone Canada and the Dutch Netherlands. The bilingual migrants had grown up in a monolingual German environment and moved abroad in adolescence or adulthood. Their semispontaneous German speech was globally assessed for foreign accent by native German speakers in Germany. It was revealed that 14 bilingual migrants were perceived to be non-native speakers of German. Age of arrival to Canada or the Netherlands and contact with one’s native language played the most significant roles in determining whether the German speech of the migrants was assessed to be foreign accented. Crucially, it was not only the amount of contact, but also the type of contact which influenced foreign accented native speech. Monolingual settings, in which little language mixing was assumed to occur, were most conducive to maintaining non-foreign accented native German speech. These findings prompted Experiment II, in which the speech of 10 German migrants to Anglophone Canada was examined in fine phonetic detail. The participants in this experiment had similarly grown up in a German speaking environment and migrated to Canada in late adolescence or adulthood. Segmental and prosodic elements of speech, which generally differ between German and English, were selected for acoustic analyses. Taken together, these findings challenge the traditional concept of native speech by revealing that indeed native speakers diverge from the norms of native (monolingual) speech. |
| Notes | de Leeuw, Esther (2008) "When your native language sounds foreign: A phonetic investigation into first language attrition." PhD thesis, Queen Margaret University. See: http://etheses.qmu.ac.uk/119/1/119.pdf. |
| Call Number | MKI Periodicals |
| MKI Terms | German Canadians/ Language, German (Canada) -- Dialects/ Research/ Linguistics/ Bilingualism |