The German Influence on Kahubian and its Confrontation with the Polisch Influence

The German influence on Kashubian and its confrontation with the Polish influence By Vladislav Knoll The theme of this dissertation is the evolution of the presence of the language contact phenomena in a particular example of a contact situation on the Slavonic-Germanic linguistic border in the 20th century. The research is based on the analysis of Kashubian according to the following three aspects: the extent of the Germanic (both Low and Literary German) interference in Kashubian, the diachronic view consisting in the evaluation of the impact of a rapid sociolinguistic turn (change of the 'High' Language from German to Polish) and the birth of a literary language seen from the point of view of contact linguistics. The study is divided into two main parts. The first half of the study is dedicated to a deep analysis of both the morphosyntactical and the lexical influence of German in Kashubian based on a corpus of a written record of spoken language from c. 1900. The second half of the study discusses the analyses of the presence of contact phenomena (described in the first part of the essay) in the selected literary works covering the period from the late 19th century up to the present day. The outcome of the dissertation is the identification and description of the fate of the German..