Asymmetry in action. The sociolinguistics of lexical change in Austrian German

Rudolf Muhr (Graz University, Austria)

Abstract

This paper is a report on some selected results of a pilot study on lexical and grammatical change in Austrian German (AG). The thirty lexical and grammatical items which the participants were asked to classify into three categories (unknown, known but not personally used and known and personally used) were chosen from large studies on AG published in the 1960ies and 1970ies. The informants were students and their family members. The results showed that there are several lexical items which are just about to disappear or about to become relict forms. Other items are used in parallel with the ones and a very few native items seem to gained in use by native speakers of AG. In many cases the changes can be traced back to the direct influence of TV series and the dubbing of American films and TV-series into German German (GG) which for many AG speakers acts as a prestige form. The influence is especially strong in the youngest generation (< 25 years of age) and in many cases it only seems a matter of another generation that many AG word will have disappeared through intense language contact via TV and other sources.

1. Introduction

This paper presents a first report on an ongoing research project on language change/shift in Austria. The main objective of the project is to find out what kind of changes are going on and what the background and the forces behind the changes are. The background of the project is the observation that due to strong language contact via satellite-TV, other electronic media and the internet Austrian German (AG) has come under strong pressure from German German (GG) which acts as the lending variety while AG is the receiving variety. This has led to angry comments in letters to the editors of newspapers and on websites where people expressed their frustration about the changes. The topic is highly controversial as many young Austrian urban middle class speakers have a tendency to pick up certain lexical items and pronunciation features of GG origin. They are presumed to be symbol of "modernity" and "progressiveness". The phenomenon of language contact via TV and internet is quite young and can be traced back to the early 1980ies when the co-operation between Austrian and German TV-stations begun (Muhr, 2003). Discussions with students of mine and personal observations showed a generation gap between the 3-25 years old and the population older than that. The research therefore concentrates on recent changes in the youngest age group and in the lexicon of AG as this is the linguistic structure speakers are most aware of.

2. General methodology

2.1 The survey

A survey was designed to elicit data. It focused on university students and their relatives as this would show the language change within families and by that safeguard the homogeneity of the data. As second reason was the fact that most students come from urban middle class families where - according to my observations - the changes in the lexicon have been strongest. The survey (see screenshot) was first handed over to participants on printed copies and later put on the web which allowed many more people to access the survey.

The data of the survey came from papers and publications on lexical differences between AG and GG which had been published in the 1960ies and 1970ies. The works of Rizzo-Baur (1962) and Valta (1974) were of particular importance as both are based on a corpus of newspapers and other texts of their time. They contain a list of several hundred lexical items which differed either in respect to their denomination, their semantics, morphology and/or pragmatic use.

Important criteria for choosing an item were that it should belong to the vocabulary of everyday language. Candidate words should not be too infrequent in use and preferably there should be some evidence that the use of the item was undergoing changes. I looked through these lists and chose thirty items which covered the following lexical fields and linguistic phenomena: (1) furniture and household goods (5 items), (2) food stuff and expressions related to it (3 items), (3) names of meals and months (2), (4) modal adverbs and modal particles (3), (5) Verbs (5), (6) morphological variants of adjectives (1), (7) use of prepositions (5).

It was quite difficult to find items which suited all three criteria because many expressions had come completely out of use and seemed outdated even to me (age group 5 = 50 years and more). Others were rather specific in meaning and use which made it very likely that they were not known to younger people. And many expressions had simply come out of use because the objects or circumstances to which they were connected no longer existed. Finally the following list of 30 items (lexical, morphological and morpho-syntactical) emerged. The information about ongoing changes in use came from personal observations and discussions with students and other people pointing me to differences in usage. The following table gives an overview about the selected items:

The lexical and grammatical items were embedded in simple sentences showing two alternative expressions / structures of AG and GG origin in order to disambiguate the meaning of the item in question (see the following excerpt from the questionnaire) .

[The lamp is standing on the night table ...]

The informants were asked to choose between three answers: (1) I don’t know the item; (2) I do know the item, but don’t use it personally; (3) The item is known to me and I used it. I have used this kind of answers successfully in other surveys before. The data collected in this way do not answer the question how often an item is "really" used by the participants. They rather represent the specific language knowledge and personal assumptions about the participant’s own language use and are as such evidence about attitudes on language use. Apart from statistical data derived from large language corpora - such attitudinal data are at present however the only source to gather knowledge about ongoing language change.

2.2 The participants

The participants were students of mine and their relatives. The students were asked to give the questionnaire to their parents, grandparents and their brother and sisters. This proved to be highly rewarding as it led to additional information which emerged from discussions between the generations. This pilot study will be continued on a larger scale collecting data from all over Austria. The pilot group whose results are reported here consisted of 65 informants which predominantly came from provinces situated in the centre of Austria (Carinthia, Styria, Upper Austria, Salzburg, Burgenland). The participants were classified into 6 age groups: (1) 3-15, (2) 15-35, (3) 25-35, (4) 35-50, (5) 50-65, (6) 65 and more. The results of two adjacent age groups were put together in order to achieve higher ratings and by that allow tests of significance. In most cases there were no significant results on the level of p=0,05 as the cells were not filled with enough respondents. It will be shown that the factor "age" is significant yielding a number of clear results.

3. Some selected results

(1) Expressions for vegetables: Paradeiser / Tomaten and Häuptelsalat / Kopfsalat

The AG word "Paradeiser" for "tomato" is one of the so called shibboleth features of AG. It has been gradually replaced by the GG word "Tomate" due to the spread of huge supermarket chains and the internationalisation of trade in the past 25 years. "Paradeiser" has never been very much in use in the West of Austria where "Tomate" has been predominant. This might be due to the early start of tourism in the alpine areas in the late 1890ies. The second pair of words is "Häuptelsalat" / "Kopfsalat". Here again the change can be traced back to the influence of large supermarket chains were the GG word according to my personal observations came into use on price tags and labels in the mid 1990ies.

1.1 The data for "Paradeiser" vs. "Tomate"

The results show that in age group one and two 76,5 % say that they know the word "Paradeiser", but don't use it personally and only 23,5% say that they still use it. No participant said that he/she doesn't know the word. The results of the age groups 3-6 are just the opposite as two thirds (63,3%) say that they still use the word "Paradeiser" and one third says that they don't. If one takes the detailed results of the age groups 3+4 and 5+6 into consideration it turns out that the break in use for "Paradeiser" must have taken place between age group five (50-65 years old) and four (35-50 years old). This coincides with the rapid economic recovery in the 1960ies, the emergence of the first supermarket chains and the increasing number of German tourists in Austria which presumably led to a gradual adaptation in the use of certain gastronomic expressions. The data for "Tomate" show that the language shift is even stronger than the data for "Paradeiser" alone would have suggested. In the age groups 1+2 almost 100% (97,1%) say that they use "Tomate". And even in the oldest age groups (5+6) an average of 83,3% say that they use this word. It can be concluded from these figures that the AG expression "Paradeiser" is due to disappear in the next generation.

1.2 The data for "Häuptelsalat" vs. "Kopfsalat" [head of lettuce]

The data show that this pair of words is rather different in several aspects. Surprisingly enough, 17% of the youngest age groups say that the don't know the word "Häuptelsalat". Reasons for that might be that young people these days are not very much involved in running a household and in preparing meals and therefore simply did not come in touch with the term. Contrary to that no member of the same age group indicated that they didn't know the alternative word "Kopfsalat". This and the fact that 88,6% of this group say that they use the newly imported word instead of the native one, rather points to the fact that the language shift has been even more dramatic as in the case of "Paradeiser/Tomate". This is supported by the other figures for the age groups 3-6 with only 30% on average using the new word and 93,3 % the old word. Even though half of the age groups 1+2 declared that they still used the native word, the high numbers for the new word and the large difference in use in comparison to the other age groups shows that within one generation almost a complete replacement of a lexical expression for an everyday food stuff has taken place.

2. Expressions for household goods and parts of clothing: "Häferl" vs. "Tasse" [mug/cup] and "Zippverschluss vs. "Reißverschluss" [zip]

With "Häferl" and "Tasse" there is not only a difference in use but also a difference in style and semantics involved. Usally a "Häferl" is a kind of cup which in BE usually is called a "mug" - which (according to Wikipedia)

"is a sturdily built type of cup often used for hot beverages, such as coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. The mug often contains a larger amount of fluid and is usually used in less formal settings than the smaller, more refined cup. In polite society, a tea cup is the preferred method of serving tea and sometimes coffee (then called a coffee cup).(1)

The use of "tea cup" in "polite society" instead of a "mug" is also the case in Austria. However in informal speech of close relationships a "coffee cup" might also be called a "Häferl", whereas the term "Tasse" is usually reserved for smaller cups in a more refined design and used in formal encounters. In cafes, coffee is always served in "Kaffeetassen" [coffee cups] and not in "Kaffeehäferl" [coffee mugs]. In order to avoid this semantic muddle, the words were embedded in a interrogative sentence: Wo sind die Kaffeehäferl? / Kaffeetassen? [Where are the coffee mugs / coffee cups?] which implies that the person who asks is close to the addressee. It has to be noted that "Häferl" is diminutive of "Hefen" which is etymologically akin to "Hafner" - potter - the person who produces pots made of clay.

The second pair of words is actually consisting of a hybrid loan word [Zippverschluss] and its loan translation [Reißverschluss]. The loan "Zip" was imported into German with the good itself which was invented some time between 1851 and 1912(2). The original word was "Zip" and not the hybrid form. This is also documented by the fact that it dispersed into most languages of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The loan translation [Reißverschluss] seems to have come up before World War II (see the results).

2.1 The data for "Häferl" vs. "Tasse"

Different from the first two pairs of words, it is interesting to see that the use of "Häferl" seems to have increased in the youngest generations (1+2) by 52,4% compared to the other generations (3-6). A look at the data of age group 5+6 shows that only a third (33,3%) uses this word whereas 66,7% say that they know this word but don’t use it.

Another interesting data is the use of "Tasse" which seems to have risen between the oldest generations (83,3%) and the succeeding ones (3+4) which use the word by 91,7% whereas the youngest ones show about the same data as the generation of their grand parents. This rise might be partly explained by a relatively low number of informants for this age group but is on the other hand conformant to the data of "Häferl".

It can be concluded that this pair of words seems to have undergone a language shift towards the AG word although the alternative word is still strongly used by all age groups. The fact that "Häferl" is now used by half of the youngest age group indicates that the stylistic difference between both words seems to have been levelled and "Häferl" has lost its stigmatisation as informal non-standard word.

2.2 The data for "Zippverschluss" vs. "Reißverschluss"

Contrary to the data of case 2.1, the form "Zippverschluss" seems to have come completely out of use and been totally replaced by "Reißverschluss". Only the a third of two oldest age groups report that they use the word, two thirds however say that the know the word but don’t use it. 91,7% of the youngest generations (1+2) say that they use "Reißverschluss" and only 5,7% (two informants out of thirty five) say that they still use "Zippverschluss". Four participants of this age group say that they don’t know the word at all. The data across all age groups show that only 15,4% still use "Zippverschluss" but 91,7% use "Zippverschluss". It can be assumed that "Zippverschluss" already started to get out of use in the 1930ies and 1940ies.

3. Expressions for meals and time of day: "Nachtmahl vs. Abendessen" [dinner/supper] and "in der Früh vs. "am Morgen" [in the morning]

The traditional expression for "dinner" in AG is "Nachtmahl" (literally: night meal) whereas "Abendessen" has been in use too but mainly in written language. "Nachtmahl" also seems to be marked for usage in non-urban parts of Austria. The increase in use of "Abendessen" could be connected to an increase in TV-watching, higher education levels and more access to and use of written language due to the emergence of the internet and computers. Another case is "in der Früh" which is under pressure from "am Morgen". The use of this expression for the interval between sunrise and about 8-8.30 a.m. is very recent and can be attributed to language contact via TV. It was restricted to Northern Germany and not even in use in the southern parts of the country and until the 1990ies more or less unknown in Austria.

3.1 The data for "Nachtmahl" vs. "Abendessen" [dinner/supper]

The data for this pair of words show that both the native and the new expression are well known in all age groups and that there seems to be a replacement taking place only among the youngest age groups as 91,4% of them prefer to use "Abendessen" and only 17,1% of the same group. The age groups 3-6 prefer the use of "Abendessen" by 82,7% but 43,3% still use "Nachtmahl" in parallel. This number is constant across all age groups as there is no difference between the oldest age groups and the younger ones. Here again the native AG word seems to be bound to disappear within one generation.

3.2 The data for "in der Früh vs. "am Morgen" [in the morning]

The AG native form "in der Früh" is used by 100% of the youngest age groups and scores very high in all other groups. It is however interesting to see that the figures of age 3+4 are the lowest for "in der Früh" but highest for "am Morgen" (25%). It seems that this the middle-aged generations are more inclined to follow the zeitgeist which calls for the use of newly imported lexical forms.

How new "am Morgen" is, can be seen from the very low scores of age group 1+2 (5,7%). According to my observations the new form is heavily used on popular radio stations and it only seems to be a matter of time until this is picked up by the public.

4. Expressions which are direct loans from GG introduced via advertisements and TV-series: "Wimmerl" vs. "Pickel" [spot/pimple] and "der Akt" vs. "die Akte" [file]

The choice between "Wimmerl" and "Pickel" can directly traced back to the introduction of a dermatological ointment called "Clearasil". It was introduced in the 1980ies by massive sales promotion on Austrian TV and radio using the newly introduced opportunity for showing commercials and broadcasting them on public radio which had been forbidden before. The commercial promised relieve from pimples by a refrain which run something like: "Weg, weg, Clearasil und die Pickel sind weg! [Away, away, Clearasil and the pimles go away!]. As far as I can remember the commercial was played on radio and TV incessantly for at least ten years. The repetitions and the catchy tune used in the commercial has imprinted the product and the word in the memories of the Austrian population ever since.

The other pair of words "Akt" vs. "Akte" has its origin in the famous Americian TV-series "The X-files" which was first shown on Austrian TV in 1992. It was dubbed in Germany and the title was translated as "Die AKT E X" and not as it would be in AG until then "Der AKT X". In AG official court documents (files) are still called "der Akt sg. / die Akten pl." whereas in GG they have always been called "die Akte sg. / die Akten pl.". There is a difference in gender (masculine vs. feminine) and morphology as the GG word has an ending in -e. It must be pointed out that there is quite a number of nouns which all show this difference (Schranken/Schranke, Eck/Ecke etc.). This phenomenon was called the "Lutherian -e" and marked a dividing line between the conservative Catholic Austrian and the modern Protestant areas of the former Holy Roman Empire.

The TV-series turned out to be immensely popular and its introduction coincided with the appearance of a new life style magazine (News). It instantly picked up the expression "Akte" as this would convey modernity and progressiveness. Since then there is a split in the AG usage of "Akt" and "Akte" in AG as the older form is still used in the judicial domain, whereas the newer GG form has come into use in newspaper language and in certain social groups as the following data will show.

4.1 The data for "Wimmerl" vs. "Pickel"

The data of "Wimmerl" vs. "Pickel" show - different form the other lexical items - that the AG lexical form is still heavily used by the youngest age group (54,3%), even though only 11,4% of the same group say that they know the new form but don't use it. The change in usage is not very strong in the other age groups as 83,3% say that the still use the AG and only 26,7% the GG expression. If one compares the data of the two oldest groups with 94,4% using "Wimmerl" and the two youngest groups (54,3%) there is however a drop in use by about 45% within a period of 25 years. The use of "Pickel" on the other hand differs by 22,2:88,6%. This shows that the replacement is now practised by almost the whole of the youngest generation. It can be assumed that will only take another generation until the AG word becomes a relict form.

4.2 The data for "Akt" vs. "Akte"

Here again the changes are dramatic. If one takes into consideration that the GG form "Akte" only came into use in AG in 1992, the data of the youngest generation (15,6:88,6%) show that the AG form has almost been completely replaced by the GG form within a small period of 14 years.

Strangely enough the older age groups also show relatively high figures for the GG loan word (> 40%). I can only be assumed that this is directly linked to the immense popularity of the TV-series "Die Akte X" [The X-files] which has been shown on Austrian TV ever since 1992 and by that seems to have came into general use in all generations.

5. Some verbal expressions which are also direct loans from GG introduced via TV: "verkühlen" vs. "erkälten" [to catch a cold] and "angreifen" vs. "anfassen" [to touch]

The native AG word for "to catch a cold" is "verkühlen". It is partly replaced by the GG word "erkälten" which came up with TV commercials for medicaments promising relief for that kind of illness. As commercials for medicaments return seasonally every year, the loan word became widely used by being repeated again and again. This is shown by data from internet searches on different Austrian search machines (see Muhr, 2003). They returned 902 documents for "erkälten" and only 158 documents with the word "verkühlen". The data from the survey show however that the changes don’t seem to be that dramatic as the users of the internet might suggest.

The second pair of verbal expressions undergoing changes is "angreifen" vs. "anfassen". The meaning of the AG word is in GG represented by two words: "anfassen" [to touch] and "angreifen" [attack]. The two words are only partly synonymous. There have been several reports about Austrians and Germans struggling with misunderstandings caused by this pair of words. Here again the only possible source for the change is language contact via TV, dubbed films, children cassettes and audio books solely presented in GG.

5.1 The data for "verkühlen" vs. "erkälten" [to catch a cold] and "angreifen" vs. "anfassen" [to touch]

The data show that 100% of the youngest and the oldest generation indicate that they use "verkühlen", but only 75% of the middle generation aged 25-50. This is supported by the data for "erkälten" where again the middle generation show the highest scores (41,7%), whereas the oldest (11,1%) and the youngest generations (18,2) score considerably lower. If one takes into consideration that this loan has been introduced in Austria at about the same time as "Pickel" some 25 years ago, it is difficult to see why there is such a difference in use between the two pairs of words.

5.2 The data for "angreifen" vs. "anfassen" [to touch]

In the data for "angreifen" show that the use of it is high in all generations (75-88,9%). Here again the middle generation (75%) and not the youngest one shows the lowest amount of use of the traditional AG expression. The data for "anfassen" are conformant to the ones of "angreifen". There is only a slight rise in usage between the oldest age groups (5+6) by 22,2% and the youngest 36,4%. It can be assumed that the double meaning of the AG word serves in some way as a protective shield against the radical replacement of the word as it has to serve two semantic functions.

6. Changes in morpho-syntactic structures: The use of the local prepositions "bei" and "an" in prepositional phrases functioning as local and directive adverbial arguments.

One of the differences between AG and GG which has not been very much dealt with is the use of different local prepositions like "bei" and "an" indicating the local vicinity to an object or person by being in vertical contact with it. In AG one could say "Ich gehe gerade bei der Kirche vorbei." [I am just passing (at) the church."] whereas in GG the usual way to express this would be "Ich gehe gerade an der Kirche vorbei." The local contact between the two objects/persons is not immediate but symbolic. The survey also comprised tests with sentences containing both prepositions expressing immediate contact between the two objects. The sentence to test this use of the prepositions was: "Karl ist gerade bei/an uns vorbeigegangen." [lit.: *Charles just passed (at) us.] and: "Er hat das Kind bei/an der Hand gehalten." [lit.: *He held the child at its hand.]. As the data show substantial differences in use have taken place in AG between the two meanings of the prepositions.

6.1 The data for "bei uns vorbeigegangen" vs. "an uns vorbeigegangen" [to pass sb.]

The data show that a very high number of informants in all age groups uses the preposition "bei" to express local directive vicinity between two adjacent objects. And there is little difference in use between the older age groups and the younger ones. Only the middle aged groups have again the lowest scores which seems to be a trend and obviously needs further research to explain this difference. The use of this preposition seems to be quite stable if one also takes the figures for the second preposition "an" into consideration. Although 44% of the youn­gest generation say that they also use "an" in this context, there is only a small rise of 13 points in use between the oldest and the youngest age groups. The data nevertheless reveal substantial differences between the use in context 6.1 and 6.2 which makes it reasonable to assume that in contexts where direct contact is expressed by use of the preposition "bei" the change has gone much further than in the context with no direct contact. It is difficult to see what the reasons for this exactly are. To clarify this more more research is obviously necessary.

6.2 The data for "bei der Hand halten" vs. "an der Hand halten " [to hold sb. hand]

The data for this semantic variant (direct contact with the object) are quite different from 6.1 as the youngest generations by 87% of the participants seem to have replaced the AG form by the GG form. This is supported by high scores for the older age groups for "an" which obviously use both forms in parallel (66,1%). It looks as if the form itself differs strongly in semantic content from 6.1 otherwise the strong differences across all age groups are not explicable.

7. Summary

This study presented selected data from a pilot study on lexical and morpho-syntactical changes which have reached the level of linguistic awareness of many Austrians. Most of them can be traced back to language contact via the electronic media, to contact via trade and commerce and to contact via tourism. The results are quite adverse as certain AG words like "Paradeiser" [tomato], "Zippverschluss" [zip] and "Nachtmahl" [dinner] are about to disappear or become relict forms by the fact that the youngest generations (< 25) hardly use them any more. The most striking case turned out to be the change in use of "Akt" to "Akte" which has been virtually replaced within the short period of 14 years since the TV-series bringing about the loan word was first shown on Austrian TV. Other AG expressions like "Wimmerl" [pimple], "Häuptelsalat" [head of lettuce] and "Häferl" [mug/cup] seem to be in a state of transition as they are used in parallel with the loan word from GG. A third group of expressions like "in der Früh" [in the morning], "angreifen" [to touch/to attack], "verkühlen" [to catch a cold] seem to be quite untouched by the loan words and are strongly used in all generations. A look at morpho-syntactic changes showed that changes in the use of local prepositions are under way but differing in extent depending on the semantic content of the preposition in the specific syntactic context.

Even though the sample is quite small, it can be concluded form these results that there are substantial changes in the lexicon of AG going on which in many cases have led to a partial or even complete replacement of native AG expresssions. Only two cases have been found where the use of the AG form seems to have increased in the youngest generation. In all other cases the GG variant has gained massive increases in use.

The data demonstrate (a) the enormous power and influence TV watching has these days on the development of languages and language communities and (b) that changes can be very fast if the loan words are presented to the language community often and if they are loaded with positive social-symbolic meaning at the same time.

© Rudolf Muhr (Graz University, Austria)

NOTES

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mug&oldid=58790126

(2) http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rei%C3%9Fverschluss&oldid=17642896 / ririmayer.ch - the zipper story

REFERENCES

Muhr, Rudolf (2003): Erdäpfelsalat bleibt Erdäpfelsalat? Das Österreichische Deutsch. Sein sprachpolitische Situation. In: Busch, Brigitta / de Cillia Rudolf (Hrsg.) (2003): Sprachenpolitik in Österreich. Eine Bestandsaufnahme. Peter Lang Verlang. Franfurt/M. 196-226.

Muhr, Rudolf (2003): Language change via satellite. The influence of German television broadcasting on Austrian German. In: Journal of historical Pragmatics 4:1 (2003), 103-127.

Rizzo-Baur, Hildegard (1962): Die Besonderheiten der deutschen Schriftsprache in Österreich und in Südtirol. (Duden-Beiträge, Heft 5). Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. (veraltet)

Valta, Zdenek (1974): Die österreichischen Prägungen im Wortbestand der deutschen Gegenwartsprache. Prag. masch. (E) (Ü)

1.4. Reproduktionen und Innovationen in Sprache und Kommunikation verschiedener Sprachkulturen / Reproduction and Innovation in Language and Communication in different Language Cultures

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