Auf der Suche nach dem verloren gegangenen Wort für Frosch

Abstract

The present paper investigates the use of own and foreign language terms in a German speech island in Russia. The informants living in the Altai Krai have been asked to tell the frog story (Mayer 1969) in their local German dialect. After analyzing the data, one was able to constitute three different groups of speakers. Their repertoires reflected in the predominant use of either Russian, standard German or dialectal descriptions for entities in flora and fauna. In this contribution, I argue that the differences observed are of diastratic nature. Furthermore, I will close with some remarks on the authenticity of the varieties that are to some extent quite distinct.