The Language Beyond the Wall: On the Sovietisation of the German Language in the ‘ex-DDR’ (1945-1989)

Abstract

In the four decades of division between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), processes of differentiation took place on ideological, political, economic and sociocultural levels. These processes were also reflected in the language and autonomous linguistic development of the two nations. Despite the many features that remained common at the level of the morphosyntactic structures, basic vocabulary and compositional norms, the GDR, under the influence of the Russian language and Marxist-Leninist doctrine, started to move in an autonomous direction – above all in relation to the development of the part of the lexicon most strongly linked to ideology. This was put into practice through a myriad of neologisms, foreignisms, structural calques and semantic adaptations, and through the recovery of terms that before 1933 had been used in environments related to Communism, the use of which strongly increased in the Democratic Republic.