“Language mixing”: Lexical borrowing in Wisconsin Heritage German

Résumé

The current work examines evidence of lexical borrowing in two different audio corpora of Wisconsin Heritage German, one from 1948–1949, and the other from 2012. Six speakers across both corpora show a high rate of retention of inherited, “core” terminology, with the majority of borrowings occurring in instances where English loans fill a semantic gap in speakers’ German lexicon. The study shows first, that changes to the heritage language lexicon in a language contact context are infrequent, overall; and second, that English-origin lexemes are attested often enriching and expanding the heritage lexicon, with additional changes showing semantic shift of inherited terminology in a new environment. These data support previous work on the stability of heritage languages across generations, even through the final generation of speakers, with changes to the lexicon over time occurring in ways consistent with other contact and bilingual settings.