Linguistic Characteristics of German in Namibia - a corpus-based Overview

This paper describes and analyses the language use of the German-speaking minority in Namibia, which has its roots in migration in the course of colonisation (Deutsch-Sudwestafrika `German South-West-Africa'; 1884 -1915). Today, this community comprises about 20,000 people. The analysis is based on data taken from a systematically compiled corpus. The results are described in two main parts of the paper: Firstly, a broad overview of characteristics in phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and (lexical) semantics is given, including information on the frequency of the variants studied. Secondly, selected phenomena are treated in some detail in order to shed new light on more general characteristics of German in Namibia. Several aspects that have significantly influenced the language use are discussed. These include: borrowings and language contact (especially with Afrikaans and English), language-internal tendencies, and dialect contact within the German-speaking community.