The sixteen chapters comprising this book on the Bay Area German Linguistic Fieldwork Project offer over twenty-five years of research into the changing language of native speakers and first-generation American-German speakers residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1984 the principal project investigator, Irmengard Rauch, together with students of Germanic linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has elicited and analyzed an array of linguistic phenomena that include politically correct (PC) German, the German language of vulgarity and civility, and the grammar of e-mailing and texting German as well as that of snail-mail German. Comparison data were also gathered from Berlin in the case of the PC German and from Bonn in the case of the vulgarity/civility project. In recording the sounds of spoken German in the Bay Area, the BAG fieldworkers interviewed not only German-speaking adults but also first-generation German-speaking children (yielding a «Kinderlect») to compare with the spoken English of both of these groups. Still other studies focus on the interplay among gesture, emotion, and language; canine-human communication; the architecture of the lie; and the architecture of the apology. Chapter one details the modus operandi of the BAG research project. This book is useful for the study of the sociolinguistics of German, English-German bilingualism, general linguistics, and the methods of linguistic fieldwork.

Contents: Contrastive Linguistics, Linguistic Fieldwork, and the Bay Area German Project - BAG Pilot Study - Is There an Aspect Distinction in Certain German Strong/Weak Verb Alternations? Evidence from German in the San Francisco Bay Area - Bilingual Pragmatics: Evidence from the San Francisco Bay Area German Project - BAG IV: Phonological Interference - English Phonetic Contrasts - BAG V: PC German - BAG VI: Toward a Grammar of German E-Mail - BAG VI-2: Toward a Grammar of German Snail-Mail - On the German Language of Civility/Vulgarity: Evidence from the San Francisco Bay Area - On the German Language of Civility/Vulgarity: Evidence from Bonn - BAG VIII: Emotion, Gesture, Language - BAG 9: Toward the Architecture of the Apology - BAG X: Toward the Architecture of the Lie - BAG XI: Toward Human : Canine Communication - BAG XII: German Netspeak/Textspeak.