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Varieties of German outside the German-speaking area in Europe are often in close contact with surrounding languages and differ from Standard German with respect to various linguistic phenomena. We present a study on a diasporic variety of German spoken in the South Caucasus region (primarily in Georgia), a historically well established settler variety, which until recently had been assumed to be obsolete since WW II. In this contact variety, interaction with the Russian language plays an important role historically and up until today. The language use of this community can only be understood if its complex historical, social and political development as a migrant community is taken into account, as it plays a crucial role for the multilingual settings, the speakers' multilingual competence and their language attitudes (which in turn influence their language use). In our study, we take a historical perspective on Caucasian German, investigating contact phenomena from Russian in the Kaukasische Post, a German language newspaper published in Tbilisi/Tiflis (Georgia) between 1906 and 1922. Linguistic contact features serve to position Caucasian German in its specific sociohistorical and geographic setting. We show how this is achieved in different sections of the newspaper, with a special focus on advertisments. To support and enrich our analyses, we also consider discussions on language policies that were in place at the time, for example with respect to the role of German as a subject and a medium of instruction in local schools. In our conclusion, we discuss in what ways the analyzed data offer insight into language attitudes and identity matters of the historical Caucasian German speech community. ; Varietäten des Deutschen außerhalb des europäischen Sprachraums stehen oft in engem Kontakt mit den umgebenden Sprachen und unterscheiden sich in Bezug auf verschiedene sprachliche Phänomene vom Standarddeutschen. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht eine Varietät des Deutschen aus dem Südkaukasus (v.a. Georgien), die ...
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