INTERACTION OF CULTURES IN THE SLENG OF MODERN GERMAN YOUTH

Abstract

. The object of consideration in the paper is an actively studied language phenomenon, called Kiezdeutsch – imitation of the wrong language of migrants. Today scientists are discussing various aspects of Kiezdeutsch: the reasons for its appearance, its status and features. Media shows contribute to its further development into a kind of secondary and further into a tertiary version of the language, which is no longer used by migrants and fashionable media figures, but simply by German teenagers. The birthplace of Kiezdeutsch are Kiezes, the quarters of large cities where migrants of several generations are concentrated – from the first migrant workers from Turkey to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were already born in Germany, as well as new-wave migrants with Arab and Slavic origin. The language of communication in the Kiez was originally a German-Turkish hybrid, a certain Turkish slang. Currently, Kiezdeutsch has gone beyond the migrant quarters and has turned into a new version of urban slang – schoolchildren, students, not only ethnic Turks, but also native German speakers are now willing to practice imitating a foreign accent and distorting the structure of the German sentence and the grammatical forms of its components, creating in this way some ethnolectic variation of the German language, possessing a certain subcultural prestige. The new slang has specific features at all levels of the linguistic system, due to the interaction and interpenetration of coexisting cultures, nations and languages in Germany. Under the influence of the language of ethnic micro- and macro-formations, the German literary language, according to researchers, is actively “drifting” to an unreliable and unflagging morphological system, becoming dependent on the context. Such development is also predetermined by the influence of the English language, new forms of virtual communication (twitter, facebook, etc.). The ethnic affiliation of the Kiezdeutsch, fundamentally important at the first stage of the formation of the phenomenon, has faded into the background today, becoming only the source and thematic background of slang making.