Language choice and language contact in print advertisements for Russian-speaking immigrants in Germany

Abstract

This study aims to analyze linguistic contact in a written language on a sample of advertisements for Russian-speaking immigrants in the German city of Nuremberg, where there is a well-developed infrastructure for Russian-speaking immigrants, including the availability of periodicals. The study has the following research questions: What functions do Russian and German, as well as other languages, perform in advertisements in periodicals for Russian-speaking immigrants? Is there a correlation between the subject matter of the ads and the language or languages used? What phenomena of language contact found in the spoken language of Russian-speaking immigrants are characteristic of advertisements? A corpus consisting of 443 advertisements, obtained through continuous sampling from periodicals, was collected for the study. The analysis revealed that Russian, German, English, Ukrainian, and Latin fulfil specific functions in the advertisements. It was found that, depending on the subject matter, advertisers choose a particular language or language combination for their ads. At the lexical and morphosyntactic levels were identified borrowings from German and English, entirely or partially grammatically integrated into Russian, and cases of code-switching between Russian and German. Thereby, the study highlights one aspect of the linguistic situation of the Russian-speaking community in Germany and may implicitly serve to assess the vitality of the Russian language in Germany.

Keywords

• multilingualism
• print advertising
• russian-speaking immigrants in germany
• code-switching
• borrowings