German island dialects in Western Siberia

German island dialects in Western Siberia are specific mixed formations developing over a long period of time in the foreign-language environment in the process of intensive contact with the Russian language. A comprehensive study of the sound structure, vocabulary and grammar of the German dialects is carried out here followed by the allocation of the distribution of individual lexical units, phonetic and grammatical phenomena in some places densely populated by Russian Germans in the Altai. Among the studied material there are no dialects that fully coincide with those currently existing in Germany, there are also no dialects that would exactly repeat any dialects of the parent colonies in the Ukraine and the Volga region. Language features of the researched island German dialects are manifested in the conservation of the old forms and preservation of primordial phenomena as a consequence of isolation from the source language community, in parallelism of the development of many processes in the Russian-German dialects, which are explained by intense interdialectic contacts, in a significant simplification of the grammatical system and a large number of borrowings from the Russian language as a result of its prolonged and strong impact on the island dialects. Mixed dialects of immigrants from the former Black Sea Catholic colonies show phonetic features of the western South German, partly southwestern Middle German dialect area. For dialects with the features of the western South German dialect area, it is characteristic to preserve the three-member paradigm opposing the nominative, dative and accusative cases of nouns. The special features of morphemics of adjective declension in the German dialects of the Altai are the ending -i in the strong forms of the feminine, the preservation of the old short form of the adjective, along with inflectional forms, a complete unification of the weak declension endings, and the convergence of the strong declension of adjectives with the weak declension. Loss of the preterite in varying degrees is common to all groups of island Upper German dialects under consideration. In the "Catholic" group of dialects only the preterite indicative form of the verb sein is represented. The studied dialects preserved the old forms of double perfect and pluperfect. The conjunctive forms represent preterite forms and pluperfect. Widespread are combinations of the infinitive with the auxiliary verb tun in the conjunctive preterite. Only auxiliary and modal verbs preserved the inflected forms of the conjunctive preterite. In the vocabulary of the island dialects there still are some words and expressions peculiar only to certain areas of Germany. Under the influence of the Russian language in the conditions of long-term isolation from the source language community a considerable number of borrowings penetrated in the island dialects from the language of the environment.

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