Letters home: German-American Civil War soldiers’ letters 1864–1865

Phillipp Schneider, German-American Civil War soldier and resident of Wisconsin since the age of 9, wrote 45 letters from March 1864 to August 1865, totaling ca. 22,500 words. I analyze these letters from a sociolinguistic perspective, considering both the unique mix of German and English usage and the socio-historical implications surrounding the letters. These are supplemented for comparison with two letters written by German-American Heritage German speaker and soldier, Jacob Goelzer, who wrote to Schneider’s sister twice in 1864. I describe the importance of when and under what circumstances these letters were written, and I also delineate instances from the letters of how the dominant community language, English, has influenced the German used and compare the use of German and English.

Shedding New Light on the Evaluation of Accented Speakers: Basic Mechanisms Behind Nonnative Listeners’ Evaluations of Nonnative Accented Job Candidates

The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.