Juliane Besters-Dilger – författare

Modern contact linguistics has primarily focused on contact between languages that are genetically unrelated and structurally distant. This compendium of articles looks instead at the effects of pre–existing structural congruency between the affected languages at the time of their initial contact, using the Romance and Slavic languages as examples. In contact of this kind, both genetic and typological similarities play a part.

Russian-speaking immigrants residing in the Czech Republic or Germany are faced with the challenge of acquiring the Slavic (Czech) or Non-Slavic (German) language of the new environment. This process is influenced by their native language. The volume empirically analyses the acquisition of a related language compared to that of a non- or distantly related one and explores how the non-homogeneous language of the new environment – situation of diglossia in the Czech Republic, diaglossia in Germany – influences this acquisition. It additionally examines the impact of several sociolinguistic factors on L2 acquisition, especially age.