Original scientific paper
Croatian as a second language in Germany: German with Croatian words?
Jochen Raecke
Abstract
In the last three decades, a group of young people, whose parents emigrated from Croatia, have grown up in Germany. Their knowledge of their parents’ language is extensive, but there are some peculiarities in their speech that they all have in common. In their essays written in Croatian, appearing regularly are sentences such as `Kad ja prošle godine u Hrvatskoj bio...' or `Ja sam je pitala, što ona poslije predavanja radi'. They are word for word translations or transformations of the German equivalents: ``Als ich voriges Jahr in Kroatien war, and 'Ich habe sie gefragt, was sie nach der Vorlesung macht''. One could say they look like examples of German with Croatian words. However, on closer examination two questions arise: why is the German word order imitated, while morphology as a rule is not affected. What is the reason that the pronouns are not dropped? It is often said that language learning is based on imitating the speech of the parents, but why do then young Croatians born and raised in Germany imitate only the words and morphology in the speech of their parents, and not the pronoun dropping or word order?
Keywords
Croatian as L2; bilinguality and foreign language; language & parole
Hrčak ID:
10910
URI
Publication date:
27.2.2007.
Visits: 3.773 *