TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wiese, Heike
T1  - Grammatical innovation in multiethnic urban Europe : new linguistic practices among adolescents
N2  - This paper discusses a phenomenon that has recently been observed in areas with a large migrant population in European cities: the rise of new linguistic practices among adolescents in multiethnic contexts. The main grammatical characteristics that have been described for them are (1) phonological/phonctic and lexical influences from migrant languages and (2) morpho-syntactic reductions and simplifications. In this paper, I show that from a grammatical point of view, morpho-syntactic reductions are only part of the story. Using 'Kiezdeutsch' as an example. the German instance of such a youth language (which may be the one with most speakers), I discuss several phenomena that provide evidence for linguistic productivity and show that they evolve from a specific interplay of grammatical and pragmatic features that is typical for contact languages: grammatical reductions go hand-in-hand with productive elaborations that display a systematicity that can lead to the emergence of new constructions, indicating the innovative grammatical power of these muitiethnolects.
Y1  - 2009
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/31079
UR  - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841
SN  - 0024-3841
ER  -