Volume 65 (2014): Edition 1 (June 2014)

The article presents the process of creation of German island dialects in Russia and in the USSR. Starting in the second half of the 18th century, people from various German regions, primarily farmers and artisans, migrated to Russia. The authorities most frequently settled them in so-called colonies, or in other words, compact country villages, which were typically separated widely from each other. Germans settled in very large numbers along the Volga, in southern Russia, Crimea, the Caucasus, as well as in the St. Petersburg region, Novgorod, Voronezh and Volyn.

The arrivals from Germany brought with them a wide range of dialects and local varieties. Arriving in the colonies, they most commonly settled down based on their places of origin in Germany, but sometimes by religious denomination or even on the basis of friendships formed on the way to Russia. In this way, the residents of one colony might speak even dozens of substantially different dialects and local varieties. These native varieties of speech mixed together and created a common code, which nevertheless retained archaisms as a result of the lack of contact with the living German language.

Despite the significant degree to which Germans were isolated from Russians, linguistic borrowings from Russian began to appear in their language early on, even during the long journey to the migrants’ new home. Primarily, lexis required for everyday life were borrowed.

The authors of this article, in researching the Soviet variety of German in Russia, observed that the Russicism Arbuse appeared frequently in this variety, yet only rarely - as dictionary entries testify - in German used in Germany. Analysis revealed that Arbuse is one of the earliest and most widely spread Russicisms in the language of Germans from Russia. Likely it is through their particular code that the term made its way into German dictionaries.

Corpus analyses conducted with the help of special tools have become more widely used in all areas of linguistics, including discourse analysis, genre analysis and pragmatics. The paper presents a pragmalinguistic research study of verbs, carried out on a specialized corpus of authentic correspondence of (chains of) Slovene business e-mails, Posle-pis. The corpus tools Oxford Wordsmith Tools 5.0 and Sketch Engine were used for analysis, and the research was followed by a comparison of language use with two Slovene reference corpora FidaPLUS and Gigafida. The study confirms the hypothesis that business discourse via e-mail has inherent characteristics that are shown through the frequency of use of certain verbs and verb forms. Certain forms were also identified which prove the conventionalized language use of business e-mail discourse.

The aim of this paper is to clarify some important features of a specific text genre called essay. There are discussed some strategies according to which we might successfully write and read the essays, instead of analysing a general concept of essay and traditional searching for the necessary and sufficient features. In this contribution the term of essay is divided into two categories named „academic essay” and „classic essay”. T he main part of this paper focuses on the classic essay that is explained by the triangle whose vertices are represented by „factuality”, „authenticity” and „literariness”. It is demonstrated that in this case we might criticise weakened coherence of the text, but just with the regard to the classic essay as a compromise between truth and elegance.

The paper builds on our previous work in the field of bilingual education and/ or the process of natural bilingualisation of Slovak-German bilinguals in Slovak educational diasporas (educational islands) in Austria. Starting point of psycholinguistic testing based on classic American Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test ( PPVT -III in its revised and German version) presented in this paper is the thesis of initial lagging behind of linguistic (lexical, grammatical) competence level of language L2 of bilingual children from preschool age in relation to various sociolinguistic variables, which, however, with age may, under certain favourable conditions nearly equal competence of monolinguals and in the area of reception of language even exceed it. For testing the reception levels of German mental lexicon we used two approximately equally large groups of respondents in a bilingual secondary grammar school in Bratislava and Vienna. The hypothesis of our research was that bilingual Austrian-Czech/Slovak bilinguals from Austria would achieve significantly better results than the Slovak-German bilinguals from Slovakia. The test results, however, surprisingly disproved our hypothesis and want to contribute to the debate on setting minimum standards of language competence of bilinguals as well as on optimisation of conditions of bilingual or monolingual education of not only Slovaks abroad.