WP104 From feature ‘pool’ to ‘pond’: The ecology of new urban vernaculars

This paper investigates systematic patterns in a new urban vernacular from Germany, ?Kiezdeutsch?, sug-gesting that what we find here is not a mere accumulation of features, but that the feature pool available in linguistically diverse contexts can support something like a feature pond: a rich ecology of connected and in-teracting elements that form a system in its own standing. I develop such a perspective for Kiezdeutsch, characterising it as a new German dialect, and investigate what this perspective can give us. Taking a closer look at some Kiezdeutsch phenomena from such a ?dialect? point of view, we find a dominance of language-internal motivations, rather than contact-induced effects, suggesting that new urban dialects might offer us a special means of access to internal tendencies of language variation and change.