Geschichte und Gegenwart der kaschubisch-polnisch-deutschen Sprachkontakte

This contribution examines various aspects of historical and contemporary language contacts between Kashubian, Polish and German (and its dialects), which are excellent examples of heterogeneous and correlated processes, mechanisms and tendencies with phylogenetic, contact-induced and normative background. Beginning with a wide historical context of language contact, which has been illustrated with lexemes of particular language contact stages and which can be characterized mainly with the phenomena of diglossia and triglossia, the survey concentrates on the contemporary, normative status of German loanwords. On the basis of the investigated corpus, which has been collected from newer dictionaries of Kashubian, various tendencies in the language norm of contemporary Kashubian have been analyzed. These involve, above all, the processes of the substitution of assimilated German loans with native equivalents and their positioning in the hierarchy of a given lemma’s equivalents.