Koloniale und Postkoloniale Linguistik / Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics (KPL/CPL)

The contributions in the edited volume deal with different aspects of language contact which were hitherto not or not sufficiently considered in linguistic research.

The impact of the colonial languages Polish and German on the structures of the written varieties of Latvian is surveyed and compared. The opposite case – the impact of indigenous languages of Nigeria and Ghana on the colonial language English – is scrutinized from the perspective of the nexus of language and culture. Language contact in a diasporic context is examined in the case study on Jordanian Chechen. The effects of language contact on the lexicon and grammar of Basque are analyzed. In the in-depth study on Maltese adpositions, the influence of the contact language Italian is a central theme. The morphosyntax of place names is analyzed for the contact languages which typically arise in colonial contexts – Pidgins and Creoles. In the typological study dealing with areal phonology, languages of Europe are investigated revealing that the role of language contact is crucial for the distribution of phonological phenomena.

The novel nature and new strands of research in the contributions call for further investigations and form a new component in language-contact theory.

For European colonialism, hierarchically classifying people and cultures was a means of self-legitimation. Between the natural and cultural space, however, the landscape, too, was subject to Eurocentric attributions. The author examines the toponymic classificators to describe the specific characteristics of colonial spatial perception and the significance of topographical classes for colonial expansion.

The topic of the volume is the contrast between borrowable categories and those which resist transfer.

Resistance is illustrated for the unattested emergence of grammatical gender, the negligible impact of English and Spanish on the number category in Patagonian Welsh, the reluctance of replicas to borrow English but. MAT-borrowing does not imply the copying of rules as the Spanish function-words in the Chamorro irrealis show.

Chamorro and Tetun Dili look similar on account of their contact-induced parallels. The languages of the former USSR have borrowed largely identical sets of conjunctions from Russian, Arabic, and Persian to converge in the domain of clause linkage.

Resistance against and susceptibility to transfer call for further investigations to the benefit of language-contact theory.

In the Americas, both indigenous and postcolonial languages today bear witness of massive changes that have taken place since the colonial era. However, a unified approach to languages from different colonial areas is still missing.
The present volume studies postcolonial varieties that emerged due to changing linguistic and sociolinguistic conditions in different settings across the Americas. The studies cover indigenous languages that are undergoing lexical and grammatical change due to the presence of colonial languages and the emergence of new dialects and creoles due to contact. The contributions showcase the diversity of approaches to tackle fundamental questions regarding the processes triggered by language contact as well as the wide range of outcomes contact has had in postcolonial settings.
The volume adds to the documentation of the linguistic properties of postcolonial language varieties in a socio-historically informed framework. It explores the complex dynamics of extra-linguistic factors that brought about the processes of language change in them and contributes to a better understanding of the determinant factors that lead to the emergence and evolution of such codes.

Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) is the only German-based creole language. This contact variety arose at the beginning of the twentieth century at a Catholic mission station in the former Pacific colony of German New Guinea. It is now critically endangered with fewer than 100 speakers alive today. This book reconstructs the origin and development of Unserdeutsch and relates it to relevant linguistic discourses.

This study examines colonially motivated street naming processes during the German Reich. It collects and analyses name structures and discursive functions in terms of the colonizing certainties that they verbalised. By combining innovative onomastics and discourse linguistics, this volume is the first to record and discuss global histories of entanglement using the example of the naming of public space in the German metropolis.

Die koloniale und postkoloniale Toponomastik verortet sich an der Schnittstelle von Koloniallinguistik und Onomastik. Toponyme eignen sich in besonderer Weise für die Versprachlichung von Herrschaftswünschen und -ansprüchen und die Fixierung von Macht durch Sprache. Toponymische (Um-)Benennungen waren Teil des Sprachhandelns der Kolonisatoren sowohl im kolonisierten Raum als auch im Ausgangsgebiet der Kolonialmächte. In den hier zusammengestellten Beiträgen werden unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Mikrotoponymen und Urbanonymen zwei übergeordnete Fragestellungen bearbeitet:

• Auf welche Weise und in welcher Form spiegeln Benennungen und Umbenennungen eine koloniale Weltsicht wider?
• Wie tragen Praktiken der Benennung und Umbenennung zur Fixierung einer kolonialen Weltsicht bei?
• Wie werden sie andererseits funktionalisiert, um zu Dekolonisierungsprozessen beizutragen?

Der Band bietet einen breiten Einblick in aktuelle Forschungsthemen der kolonialen und postkolonialen Mikrotoponomastik. Er zeigt sowohl die interdisziplinären Verbindungen des Forschungsgebietes, z. B. zu Geschichte und Kartographie, als auch vielfältige Fokussierungen in Bezug auf koloniale, kolonial intendierte und postkoloniale Kontexte.

For the better understanding of the cultural and linguistic impact of colonialism on the shaping of the world as we know it today it is necessary to take account of the Europeanization of the map of the extra-European countries.
To achieve this goal Comparative Colonial Toponomastics (CoCoTop) investigates the place names which were coined in the era of colonialism in the erstwhile possessions of European colonizer nations. This edited volume offers new insights into the toponomastic manifestations of Danish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish colonialism. The focus is on hitherto unexplored macrotoponyms and microtoponyms. Their structural and functional aspects are described. They are linked to the colonial history of the various nations involved. A general toponomastic framework beyond CoCoTop is presented additionally. Several of the papers mark the starting point of recently initiated new research projects.
The volume is of special interest to onomasticians, scholars working in colonial and postcolonial linguistics, and historians of colonialism.

The contributions of this volume offer both a diachronic and synchronic approach to aspects relating to different areas of colonial life as for example colonial place-naming in a comparative perspective. They comprise topics of diverse interests within the field of language and colonialism and represent the linguistic fields of sociolinguistics, onomastics, historical linguistics, language contact, obsolescence convergence and divergence, (colonial) discourse, lexicography and creolistics.

This work is devoted to all questions related to place names in colonial contexts. It applies a combination of structural, functional, and discourse-oriented approaches to address the complex diversity of global colonial toponomastics from a linguistic perspective. Using selected case studies, it offers an introduction to this new research field within colonial linguistics.

In this edited volume, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and ethnographers examine the relationship of language to (post)-colonialism and present multifaceted perspectives. A broad range of topics are addressed, including colonial era communication, language attitudes, how geographical entities are named, language policies, the role of European standard languages in post-colonial settings, and the development of secret languages.

Obwohl die Bedeutung von Benennungspraktiken bei der Aneignung kolonialer Räume unumstritten ist, liegen sprach- oder literaturwissenschaftliche Detailanalysen dieser Prozesse bisher nur verstreut vor.
Diese Lücke versucht der interdisziplinär angelegte Band zu schließen, indem er Formen und Funktionen der (post-)kolonialen Raumaneignung vermittels sprachlicher und literarischer Praktiken untersucht. In linguistischer Perspektive sind dabei Benennungspraktiken und -muster des kolonialen place-making zentral. Von Interesse sind alle Formen kolonialtoponomastischer Raumaneignung bzw. -besetzung. Aus literaturwissenschaftlicher Sicht ist von Bedeutung, wie die zeitgenössische koloniale Literatur in Romanen, Zeitschriften und Reisebeschreibungen die diskursive Praxis der Bezeichnung von geographischen Einzelheiten fremder Territorien mit deutschen Namen als koloniale Aneignungsakte performativ begleitet und umsetzt. Die postkoloniale Literatur der Gegenwart greift diese Prozesse der Überschreibung indigener Zeichen mit kolonialen reflektorisch auf, häufig unter Rückgriff auf die historischen Texte des Kolonialismus.

Research in Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics has experienced a significant increase in contributions from varying fields of language studies, gaining the attention of scholars from all over the world.

This volume aims to showcase the variety of topics relevant to the study of language(s) in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts. A main reason of this variety is that the new paradigm invites and necessitates research on different subject matters such as language typology, grammar and cross-linguistics, meta-linguistics and research on language ideology, discourse analysis and pragmatics.

The contributions of this volume are selected, peer-reviewed papers which were partly invited and partly given at the First Bremen Conference on Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics, held in September 2013.

Colonial linguistics is an emerging research paradigm, which for the first time systematically addresses the collection, classification, and interpretation of all linguistic phenomena related to colonialism. The discipline emphasizes a multidisciplinary perspective, as documented by the essays in this anthology by linguists and historians.

The edition of the Bremen Book Catalogue on “Colonialism” provides access to an important source of German colonial history by means of facsimile reproductions, introductory texts, commentaries and indexes. It is the result of a cooperation of the Bremen research project “Language in Colonial Contexts” and Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen.

The notion of empire is associated with economic and political mechanisms of dominance. For the last decades, however, there has been a lively debate concerning the question whether this concept can be transferred to the field of linguistics, specifically to research on situations of language spread on the one hand and concomitant marginalization of minority languages on the other. The authors who contributed to this volume concur as to the applicability of the notion of empire to language-related issues. They address the processes, potential merits and drawbacks of language spread as well as the marginalization of minority languages, language endangerment and revitalization, contact-induced language change, the emergence of mixed languages, and identity issues. An emphasis is on the dominance of non-Western languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and, particularly, Russian. The studies demonstrate that the emergence, spread and decline of language empires is a promising area of research, particularly from a comparative perspective.

A lot of what we know about “exotic languages” is owed to the linguistic activities of missionaries. They had the languages put into writing, described their grammar and lexicon, and worked towards a standardization, which often came with Eurocentric manipulation. Colonial missionary work as intellectual (religious) conquest formed part of the Europeans' political colonial rule, although it sometimes went against the specific objectives of the official administration. In most cases, it did not help to stop (or even reinforced) the displacement and discrimination of those languages, despite oftentimes providing their very first (sometimes remarkable, sometimes incorrect) descriptions.

This volume presents exemplary studies on Catholic and Protestant missionary linguistics, in the framework of the respective colonial situation and policies under Spanish, German, or British rule. The contributions cover colonial contexts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia across the centuries. They demonstrate how missionaries dealing with linguistic analyses and descriptions cooperated with colonial institutions and how their linguistic knowledge contributed to European domination.

"Oceanic Voices - European Quills" celebrates the linguistic historiography of two Oceanic poles. The northwest Pacific's Chamorro of Guam and the Northern Marianas was the first (16th century), and the southeast Pacific's Rapanui of Easter Island one of the last (19th century) of the Austronesian tongues to inspire linguistic investigation within greater Oceania. These pioneering efforts are honored in nine articles which document, translate, chronicle, describe and analyze the earliest relics from these two island cultures. This collection of articles reveals fundamental insights not only into earlier stages of both Chamorro and Rapanui but also into the very discipline of linguistic historiography in one of Earth's humanly richest and most fascinating regions.

The relationship between language and colonialism is increasingly focussed in linguistic research in the German-speaking academic landscape. The present volume reflects different areas of research in colonial linguistics: the investigation of language contact in colonialism, the analysis of colonial discourse(s) and colonial attitudes towards languages and societies, the reconstruction of consequences and effects of colonial language policies and language politics, and the historiography of contemporary linguistic research. This volume centers in particular on the exploration of contacts between languages within colonial power structures. Among the languages in focus are Swahili, Chamorro, Tok Pisin, languages of North America, Micronesia and northeastern New Guinea, as well as contact varieties of German in New Guinea and Namibia.

The papers assembled in this collection deal with the early linguistic sources on the languages of the Philippines and Micronesia. Tagalog, Bikol, Cebuano, Iloko, Chamorro and sundry languages of the area and beyond are featured in the papers. The focus is on the first descriptive work devoted to these languages and subsequent early treatments and their potential interdependency. Several papers also address the issue of how "modern" the early grammarians of Philippine languages were and to what extent they did typological linguistics avant la lettre. The collection is a pioneer contribution to the history of descriptive linguistics in Southeast Asia and the West Pacific. Moreover it offers a window to the past for the interested members of the modern speech communities of the languages covered by the papers.

This edited volume highlights various aspects of a hitherto neglected research topic. During the relatively short period of German colonialism (1884-1918/20) in Africa, China and Oceania, literally hundreds of texts were produced which treat of the indigenous languages of the German colonial empire. Many of these texts have never appeared in print. The contributions are indicative of the wealth of interesting insights (the historiography of) linguistics will gain from a thorough-going (re-)appraisal of the linguistic efforts of missionaries, state employees, military personnel, merchants, settlers, travelers and other individuals during the German colonial rule (and the revanchist inter-war period). The volume marks the beginnings of a new collaborative research program, viz. Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics. The scholarly articles assembled in this volume discuss various topics related to languages such as Chamorro, Chuuk, Ewe, Ewondo, Kanuri, Khoekowap, Nauruan, Weskos. The role of German in Kiautschou is focused upon, too. The colonialist ideology is traced in the typical examples used in grammar books of the indigenous languages in the African colonies of imperial Germany. The volume addresses a readership with an interest in the history of descriptive linguistics and field-linguistics, language typology, and language ideology.