Nachbarsprachen: Historio-, Konflikt-, Kontakt- oder Ökolinguistik?

The contribution examines how the paradigms of historical, conflict, contact and ecolinguistics respectively shed different light on the relation between German and French as neighbouring languages. Historical linguistics sees the neighbourly language contacts as the result of bellicose and societal interferences; conflict linguistics centres on tensions and dominance behaviour between governments and linguistic enclaves or linguistic minorities. Contact linguistics takes account of the fact that any change in neighbourly language situations could also be seen as the result of conflict-free societal changes. Ecolinguistics follows this perspective on frame conditions – instead of historically important events – still more thoroughly, and its research focus on „linguistic landscape“ exposes bilingual landscapes as compensation for the loss of bilingualism. The survey shows after all that conflict linguistics is not the only fertile description of neighbourly language relations.