Zur Vitalität Slavischer Idiome in Deutschland. eine Empirische Studie Zum Sprachverhalten Slavophoner Immigranten

Jorn Achterberg. Zur Vitalttat slavischer Idiome in Deutschland. Eine empirische Studie zum Sprachverhalten slavophoner Immigranten. Slavistische Beitrage, 441. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2005. 315 pp. Bibliography, appendix. euro32, paper.The subtitle of the work under review appropriately delimits the main theme that Jorn Achterberg intends to cover, i.e., the of Slavic languages in He does not have in mind autochthonous Slavic languages in Germany, such as Lower Sorbian or Upper Sorbian, but the linguistic behaviour of Slavic immigrants in a country that has turned into a multilingual country with the largest immigration in Europe during the last 50 years. According to recent statistics (2003), 8.9% of the population of Germany is made up of immigrants; this equates to more than 7.3 million inhabitants. This figure does not include 4.4 million resettled individuals of German descent, especially from Russia. Such a mosaic of immigrants means that about ten million inhabitants of Germany make daily use of a language other than German, thus adding to the use of autochthonous minority languages, such as Serbian and Frisian, as well as the use of allochthonous minority languages, especially Turkish and Russian, in the media and in education.The author points out that while these statistics are well known, little attention has been paid to the phenomenon of multilingualism in Germany. Thus, the goal of his investigation is to present a case study of multilingualism on the basis of the linguistic behaviour of Slavophone immigrants in Germany within a sociolinguistic framework. In his case study, he proceeds from the premise that extralinguistic variables have a more significant effect on language maintenance, shift, and loss than intralinguistic variables. Furthermore, this progression in the degree of maintenance or loss is not necessarily linear, as exemplified by the varying vitality and the revitalization of endangered languages in a diaspora (p. 21).After presenting his goal and sociolinguistic variables in Chapter 1, Achterberg proceeds to a detailed overview of his theoretical and methodological framework in Chapter 2. He argues, for example, that vitality research has a different domain from both migrational linguistics and contact linguistics, since the former takes into consideration additional or different aspects in the description of a language situation. He also notes that the present-day interest in the vitality and revitalization of languages is to be seen as a revival of the ecological concern of the 192Os and 193Os about the variety of cultural species (p. 23). The chapter ends with a discussion of the contribution of Slavic studies to vitality research. The author concludes that in Slavistic research the focus has been on social, political, and economic variables, while the extralinguistic variables have been insufficiently categorized and empirically researched (p. 103). Chapter 2 makes up roughly one third of the entire volume; perhaps this is another example of the common practice in Germany of having doctoral dissertations published without substantial revisions (Achterberg's dissertation was accepted at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg in 2005). Doctoral candidates tend to put all of the consulted literature into the dissertation without due concern for the relevance of various theories to a proposed hypothesis.Chapter 3 is a very brief chapter describing the premises, hypotheses, and variables of the investigation as well as the way the interviews were conducted. …

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