Suchergebnisse

Biographical note: Stefan Engelberg ist Professor für Germanistische Linguistik an der Universität Mannheim und Leiter der Abteilung "Lexik" am Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim. Doris Stolberg ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Projekt "Lexikalischer Wandel unter deutsch-kolonialer Herrschaft" am Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim.

Between 1884 and 1900, Germany established protectorates in large areas of the South Pacific. The authorities assumed that the linguistically extremely diverse areas would pose communication problems. Thus the question arose whether German should become the lingua franca in the South Pacific. After a controversial discussion; the German government implemented language policies to promote the German language in the colonies. This chapter shows why, on the one hand, German language policies were doomed to failure and why, on the other, they unintentionally supported other linguistic developments such as the introduction of borrowing from German into indigenous languages, the development of German settler varieties, and the spread of pidgin languages.