On the role of historical newspapers in disseminating foreign words in german

Newspapers became extremely popular in Germany during the 18th and 19th century, and thus increasingly influential for modern German. However, due to the lack of digitized historical newspaper corpora for German, this influence could not be analyzed systematically. In this paper, we introduce the Mannheim Corpus of Digital Newspapers and Magazines, which in its current release comprises 21 newspapers and magazines from the 18th and 19th century. With over 4.1 Mio tokens in about 650 volumes it currently constitutes the largest historical corpus dedicated to newspapers in German. We briefly discuss the prospect of the corpus for analyzing the evolution of news as a genre in its own right and the influence of contextual parameters such as region and register on the language of news. We then focus on one historically influential aspect of newspapers – their role in disseminating foreign words in German. Our preliminary quantitative results indeed indicate that newspapers use foreign words significantly more frequently than other genres, in particular belles lettres