Niederdeutsch in Ostfriesland:Zwischen Sprachkontakt, Sprachveränderung und Sprachwechsel

Low German is a West-germanic language, which is used mainly as a spoken language in the coastal areas of Northwest Germany, North-eastern parts of the Netherlands and along the German coasts of the Baltic Sea. Although still a variety used by millions of speakers, Low German must be counted among the languages threatened by decline if not extinction within the next twenty years because it is no longer used by the younger generations. Apart from the question of whether Low German will survive altogether, the variety is in a process of linguistic change due to the contact situation with the dominant language of the media and almost all written official communications, Standard German. Low German, therefore, is a field for research in all areas of language contact, e.g. codeswitching, language shift, mixed languages or language death. Within Low German, the variety spoken in East Frisia has a distinct history of language contact and language change over the last six hundred years. It is based on a Frisian substratum and has been in close linguistic contact with Dutch since the 16th century.

Past historic in obituaries: chronicle of a death foretold

The French Past Historic (passé simple: PS), as a perfective past, is ideally suited to the obituary genre narrating the highlights of a life in chronological order. However, 20th century linguists have claimed that this tense has become obsolete. It is, therefore, worth exploring the presence of PS in obituaries. This paper explores three types of variation (diachronic, diastratic and diatopic) on a corpus of diachronic 20th century sources, and contemporary Parisian and regional newspapers. The study has noticed a diachronic diminution of the quantitative use of PS and a lesser decline of its functions as a foregrounded tense, and greater vitality in Western and Southern papers. However the geographical factor was less influential than the distribution. The readership may prove decisive as we have seen the most productive uses in the most conservative papers, the most formulaic in the left-wing paper, and the least developed in the populist paper.