The borrowing scale

Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 74-76) developed a borrowing scale that shows a hierarchy of structural features that are borrowed by a language in a certain order. It suggests that with an

increasing amount of “cultural pressure” and contacts with speakers of the superordinate language, certain features are borrowed before the others. This scale is presented below:

1) Lexical borrowing only. Casual contacts result in lexical borrowings only with a rule that non-basic vocabulary is borrowed before basic vocabulary. Content words are being borrowed for cultural and functional rather than typological reasons.

2) Slight structural borrowing. Slightly more intense contact causes slight structural borrowing. At this stage, some functional words such as conjunctions and various adverbial particles may be borrowed in addition to minor phonological, syntactic, and lexical semantic features. New phonemes may occur in loanwords only.

3) More intense structural borrowing. More intense contact brings slightly more structural borrowing which includes function words (prepositions, postpositions), personal and demonstrative pronouns, and low numerals. Derivational affixes of borrowed words may be added to native vocabulary. Inflectional affixes may occur but they will be confined to borrowed items. On the phonological level, it may include phonemicization of previously allophonic alternations and adapting stress rules. On the syntactic level, some switches other than SVO to SOV can be found, e.g., borrowed postpositions in an otherwise prepositional language and vice versa.

4) Moderate structural borrowing. Strong cultural pressure leads to moderate structural borrowing. Introduction of new distinctive features in contrastive sets that are represented in native vocabulary; new syllable structure constraints; a few natural allophonic and automatic morphophonemic rules (palatalization or final obstruent devoicing). Fairly extensive word order changes. Inflectional affixes, new cases may be borrowed.

5) Heavy structural borrowing. Very strong cultural pressure results in heavy structural borrowings and concerns major structural features that cause significant typological disruption: phonetic changes (habits of articulation, including allophonic alternations); changes in word structure (changing from flexional to agglutinative morphology).

Both in the Wenker sentences and in free speech, lexical borrowings constitute the largest part of all instances of interference. No evidence exists of phonetical, morphological, or syntactical changes in the Milberger dialect caused by the Russian language. Thus, it can be argued that the influence of Russian on the Volga German dialects before 1876 did not extend past the first stage of this scale that presupposes a “minimum of cultural pressure”.72

Even though Georg Dinges claimed to have found over 800 Russian loan words that were borrowed before 1876, those words could have been occasional borrowings that could be spread unevenly between the colonies. It is hard to imagine that such a large number of loanwords could be lost so fast after settlers came to the United States.

The English influence can be placed at stage two (“slight structural borrowing”), even though some prepositions (“of” and “for”) occurred in the speech of the informants, which Thomason and Kaufman attribute to stage three.

3.6 Conclusion

In a language contact situation, language loss is not uncommon. However, some languages vanish and others continue to be maintained in similar socio-linguistic circumstances. In Milberger, various factors lead to a terminally endangered (moribund) state of the dialect that it

72

Under “cultural pressure” authors understand “any combination of social factors that promotes borrowing, e.g., prestige or economic forces that make bilingualism necessary” (77).

is experiencing today. Following the model proposed by Sasse, I explored the extralinguistic factors (External Setting) that triggered and later supported the process of language decay in Milberger. These factors included WWII, mobility of young people, increasing amount of mixed marriages, and renunciation of the church services in German.

In terms of cause and speed, the language loss situation in Milberger can be classified as a gradual language shift, a process that usually starts with bilingualism and ends in a replacement of one language with another, as exemplified in the model put forward by Boni. Even though Boni‟s classification was intended for the relationship of German and Russian in a bilingual situation on the Volga, the same steps would be relevant in a description of the Milberger dialect. Bilingualism in Milberger is accompanied by a special type of diglossia that is common for sectarian communities - a complimentary distribution of the dialect and the standard German, as it was acquired at Sunday school and in church. Multiple examples show that knowledge of Standard German interferes with informants‟ speech, causing frequent occurrence of non- dialectal forms. Example of Informant 4, who learned dialect without being exposed to the “church language”, showed that her language was free of instances of the High German interference, such as “ending -n in verb infinitives and past participles or “correct” plurals. In a situation of a language contact, interference is inevitable. According to Thomason and Kaufman, it is triggered by the extralinguistic factors, such as length of contacts, accessibility of another language, its prestige, cultural pressure, etc. First instances of interference between languages occur on a lexical level in a form of loanwords and loan shifts (e.g., loan translations and semantic borrowings).

Dinges claimed that he found around 800 Russian words that entered the Volga German dialects before 1876. However, the longest list of Russian borrowings collected by Judge Ruppenthal in

Russell, Kansas (1913) contains around 50 words. Some of these words, however, might have been part of the dialect prior to the immigration, since a few of them were documented in Grimm‟s German Dictionary or in paperwork produced by German Chancelleries, and many existed as Russian borrowings in Baltic German in the 18th century. Thus, Germans might have borrowed even fewer words on the Volga than previously suggested.

The borrowing scale proposed by Thomason and Kaufman places the amount of cultural pressure that German experienced in Russia at the beginning stage, when only vocabulary is borrowed from one language into another. Interference from the English language expectedly exceeded the lexical level and can be placed at stage two, where languages borrow “minor phonological, syntactic, and lexical semantic features”.