Joseph Salmons Knihy

This volume presents seventeen articles, revised and expanded from a Max Kade Symposium, on the German language in North America. It includes historical studies (colonial German in contrast with Native American languages, the language of Pietism among colonial immigrants), dialect descriptions (Donau-schwäbisch  in the Midwest, Low German in Kansas, Volga German in Kansas) and investigations into the impact of German on English (German ethnic varieties of English, German in advertising, German loanwords in American English). Research on language maintenance and shift is especially well-represented, with a general theoretical contribution and case studies of Alberta, Black Sea Germans in the Dakotas, and the Amana colonies. Methodological and theoretical issues include case loss and morphosyntactic change (East Franconian in Indiana), a comparative study of German in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as several papers on Pennsylvania German, treating linguistic convergence, language attitudes, and sociolingusitic variation.

"Drawing examples from a range of world languages, this textbook introduces the ways in which speech sounds become different over time. It explores how we produce and hear particular sounds and how overall word shapes and the pronunciation of individual words change. The roles of phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, traditional formal models and recent exemplar-based work in sound change are all examined. In covering both structural and societal issues, the book integrates different kinds of historical evidence and different theories into a coherent understanding of the full process of sound change."-- Page 4 de la couverture

This book provides a detailed introduction to the development of the German language from the earliest reconstructible prehistory to the present day. A key to understanding how any human language works is understanding how that language developed over time. German speakers, as well as language learners and teachers are often puzzled by many questions about the German language: How did German come to have so many different dialects and close linguistic cousins like Dutch andPlattdeutsch? Why does German have 'umlaut' vowels and why do they play so many different roles in the grammar (noun plura