Polyglossia through the Prism of Exoglossic Nature of the German Literary Language Development

Abstract

The article offers an overview of exoglossic situations in the German literary language history, which resulted in exoglossic stratification of the system, presented by foreign lexis layers at the lexical-semantic level of the German literary language, defined as exoglossic strata herein. Strata are “imprints" of the borrowings wave, which intensity is directly proportional to a scale of lexical-semantic groups, thus representing an exoglossic influence. The largest of them includes "imprints" of so-called exoglossia cases in the German language history. The well-known examples of exoglossia are Latin, French and British-American, the latter is still ongoing. State of the language idiom after several exoglossic influences is defined as polyglossia. Evidence of the German literary language functioning in the exoglossic context is discussed. Method of diasystematic analysis of languages and linguistic forms was used for the description. It involves the allocation of diaphastic, diastratic and diafunctional aspects, acting simultaneously as exoglossic aspects. Most arguments are concerning the tendencies in the German literary language system, fixed within the exoglossic language situation in Germany since 1945. The most obvious evidence of exoglossic development in the considered language system is the asymmetry of borrowed and autochthonic language material, which conditions have situationally specified and stylistically differentiated use of the contacting languages – English and German - within the language situation in Germany.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1s1p500