Language and Identity in Historical Caucasian German

Varieties of German outside the German-speaking area in Europe are often in close contactwith surrounding languages and differ from Standard German with respect to variouslinguistic phenomena. We present a study on a diasporic variety of German spoken in theSouth 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, socialand political development as a migrant community is taken into account, as it plays a crucialrole for the multilingual settings, the speakers' multilingual competence and their languageattitudes (which in turn influence their language use).In our study, we take a historical perspective on Caucasian German, investigating contactphenomena from Russian in the Kaukasische Post, a German language newspaper publishedin Tbilisi/Tiflis (Georgia) between 1906 and 1922. Linguistic contact features serve toposition Caucasian German in its specific sociohistorical and geographic setting. We showhow this is achieved in different sections of the newspaper, with a special focus onadvertisments. To support and enrich our analyses, we also consider discussions on languagepolicies that were in place at the time, for example with respect to the role of German as asubject and a medium of instruction in local schools.In our conclusion, we discuss in what ways the analyzed data offer insight into languageattitudes and identity matters of the historical Caucasian German speech community.