Time: Wednesday, 07 September, 18:00-19:30

Place: Chamber Music Hall, A11 0-011

Lecturer: PD Dr habil. Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers, Free University of Berlin

Summary:

At the end of the Second World War, the flight and expulsion of the German-speaking population from the Central and Eastern European settlement areas set in motion an unprecedentedly large immigration movement towards the West in the space of just two years. Most of the approximately 12 million people who had to leave their old homeland at that time were settled in the north of what would later become the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. To this day, the mass immigration of foreigners is often blamed for the fact that the traditional - Low German - dialects were abandoned in northern Germany and High German quickly gained the upper hand in language usage.

However, interviews with contemporary witnesses in Mecklenburg show that, on the contrary, the immigrant expellees learnt the Low German dialect of the long-established local inhabitants in northern Germany to a large extent in order to be able to communicate with them. As a result of the arrival of the expellees, Low German even gained a large number of new speakers. Many immigrants obviously saw the acquisition of the dialect of the region of immigration as a way of familiarising themselves socio-culturally with their new living environment and making themselves at home there linguistically. The lecture examines the extent to which expellees learnt Low German and sheds light on the framework conditions and motives for learning Low German. The study is based on 90 interviews with contemporary witnesses and language tests conducted in the Rostock area between 2010 and 2015.