Letters, as a text genre structured by certain norms of language use, offer insight into the range of variability within clearly-defined structures. Our letter corpus consists of c. 380 letters written between 1859 and 1915 by... [ view full abstract ]
Letters, as a text genre structured by certain norms of language use, offer insight into the range of variability within clearly-defined structures. Our letter corpus consists of c. 380 letters written between 1859 and 1915 by (mainly male) members of a Mennonite congregation part of whom lived in Pennsylvania and, following migration from c. 1800 onward, part in Ontario. All letters were addressed to the same person, a bishop of this congregation whom the writers knew in person.The letters are framed by opening and closing formulas, and their contents include religious and theological topics as well as family news, remarks on the weather and on agricultural topics.They show variation at the level of language choice (English, German, Pennsylvania German), of graphemics, and of script (German current vs. Roman script), including numerous language contact phenomena blurring the borders between the languages involved.
In our paper, we investigate the interaction of different layers of language affiliation, focussing on the graphemic patterns, the spelling and form of names and dates, the use of certain formulaic expressions, and the choice of script, all of which shift and switch between English and German to varying degrees. This linguistic variation is being related to the writers’ origin in either the USA or Canada. The earliest letters of this corpus date from a time roughly two generations after the beginning of migration to Ontario, that is, after the geographical split of the community. We suggest that this separation resulted in diverging patterns of language choice and in (small) linguistic changes. A first preliminary investigation showed, for example, that German is chosen more often in letters from Ontario than in those from Pennsylvania.
An investigation of these data helps to shed light on processes of language shift (from German to English) and language change (diverging developments after migration). The letters are generally written in an informal style; they are written continuations of oral exchanges. The letters’ obvious divergence from normative rules in either English or German makes them highly valuable for an investigation of actual language use (including reflections of oral language practices), language variation and language change.
