Joachim Steffen.  Vereinzelte Sprachinseln oder Archipel? Die
Mennonitenkolonien in Belize im englisch-spanischen Sprachkontakt
(Band 1: Textband), vol. 1; (Band 2: Karteband), vol. 2.  Kiel
Westensee-Verlag, 2006.  lxxxiv + 213 pp (vol. 1); Maps. 229 pp.
(vol. 2).  EUR 79 (paper), ISBN 978-3-931368-69-2.

Reviewed by Göz Kaufmann (Dept. of Germanic Philology, University of
Freiburg, Germany)
Published on H-GAGCS (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Daniel Nützel

Some Considerations about Representativity and Statistical Analyses

Joachim Steffen's study deals with the linguistic situation of six
Mennonite colonies in Belize. Until now, hardly any research on the
contact between this multilingual minority group and this even more
multilingual majority society has been carried out. There is Robert
B. LePage and Andrée Tabouret-Keller's groundbreaking work _Acts of
Identity_, but their study concentrates on possible focusing
processes in a postcolonial society, mentioning the Mennonites only
en passant.[1] Steffen's main interest is to find out whether the
Mennonite colonies in Belize should be regarded as one speech
community (_Archipel_) or as several more or less unrelated language
islands (_vereinzelte Sprachinseln_). On the one hand, one might
think that the differences between the Mennonite colonies are much
smaller than those between them and their non-Mennonite neighbors; on
the other hand, the contact of some Mennonite colonies with
non-Mennonite groups seems more intense than that among the Mennonite
colonies. The interesting question is whether geographical closeness
(and possible frequent contacts) or historical and ethnic bonds are
more decisive for the linguistic future of these colonies. To answer
this question, Steffen gauges especially the influence of English and
Spanish on the Low German vocabulary. The extent of this influence
can be seen as a function of the intensity of contact with
non-Mennonite groups.

Steffen presented 107 linguistic concepts to twenty-six informants.
He used descriptive paraphrases for each concept and asked the
informants which word they would use in Low German. In addition, he
offered the informants alternative words and asked whether they knew
them. Steffen's basic hypotheses are that the origin of the lexical
influence depends on the region where the colonies are situated, that
is, whether their environment is rather Spanish or rather English;
and the amount of the influence of the foreign elements depends on
the level of social openness of the colonies. Not surprisingly,
Steffen can verify these hypotheses, and this can be seen as proof
for an ongoing process of diffusion threatening the colonies' status
as an archipelago.

After the general grounding, Steffen's study starts with an
introduction to the basic facts about Belize. Following some remarks
about Mennonite history and the languages used by them, he dedicates
thirteen pages to their current living conditions in Belize. Steffen
then turns to theoretical aspects of language contact. There are some
weak points in his discussion, however: it would, for example, have
been important to include a clearly stated definition of "linguistic
archipelago." Such a definition is needed to answer the central
question of the study. The next section on methodology is rather
short. As both the Mennonite community and Belize constitute
linguistic contexts of extreme complexity, and as the lexicon can be
both highly volatile (as a non-core area of language) and highly
stable (as a symbol of ethnicity), the transmission of Steffen's
research objectives into a manageable research methodology would have
needed more space. There are also structural flaws in this section:
for example, Steffen introduces the diatopic-kinetic dimension, which
he covers with two informants, but in the rest of the book he hardly
comes back to these informants. On page 69, Steffen starts with the
analysis of his results. He first covers every colony separately with
regard to language competence, use, and attitudes, and then deals
with selected lexical concepts. A chapter entitled "Statistical
Analysis" deals with the similarities and differences between the
colonies and between age and gender groups. After this, a phonetic
phenomenon in six Spanish words is analyzed . Since the connection of
this phenomenon to the Low German vocabulary is unclear, at best, I
will not comment on this section. Steffen's text ends with a summary
of his results and some final considerations. The bibliography and an
appendix conclude the first volume. The second volume presents the
maps one expects in dialectological studies of this kind. Some maps
represent the informants' answers to questions about language
competence, use, and attitudes, and the others represent the answers
to the types of questions elicited in the lexical part of the
questionnaire.

Steffen locates his study within the field of pluridimensional
dialectology. Compared to traditional dialectology, in which
frequently just one informant represents each variety analyzed,
pluridimensional dialectology constitutes a step forward toward
linguistic reality. Including different gender, age, and social
groups, the results of pluridimensional studies tend to be more
representative. Taken further in this direction, pluridimensional
dialectology will become more and more indistinguishable from
variation studies. Thus, dialectology, which started as a discipline
within historical linguistics, may one day become a proper subfield
of sociolinguistics. Steffen works with four informants per locality,
using gender (male/female) and age (younger/older) as additional
variables. If he had just raised the number of informants, thereby
gaining a certain measure of representativity, one might have been
more lenient in the following evaluation. But Steffen loses this
advantage by comparing not only the colonies, but also gender and age
"groups." In doing so, he reverts to the unsatisfactory relation of
one informant per (sub)group.

Joachim Herrgen suggests a solution for the problem of
representativity: "Die Erhebung objektiver Daten zum
Variationsspektrum muß sich hingegen auf Teilaspekte beschränken.
Als sehr ergiebig hat sich hier ... der Verzicht auf die diatopische
Variationsdimension erwiesen.... Soll hingegen bei pluridimensionalen
Ansätzen die Diatopik berücksichtigt werden, so ist es unabdingbar,
die areale Kontrastierung zu beschränken, indem nur Teilareale
untersucht werden, nicht alle Teilgegenstände der Sprache in den
Blick genommen werden oder die Untersuchung auf wenige variative
Register beschränkt wird."[2] Although Herrgen's citation refers to
objective and not subjective language data, we can apply his approach
to the present case. As Steffen's basic research interest is diatopic
in nature, on the one hand, he cannot concentrate on just one colony
(_Verzicht auf die diatopische Varietätendimension_). On the other
hand, he also cannot reduce his research object (_nicht alle
Teilgegenstände der Sprache_), because he analyzes only the
influence on the Low German lexicon. Therefore, the only way out for
Steffen would have been to increase the number of informants. That he
did not do this can only surprise the reader, given that
sociolinguistic research has been underway now for forty years and
that we find variation even in the world's most conservative speech
communities. Besides this, one would expect the informants to share
all relevant social characteristics. Although one can support
Steffen's decision not to include social class in the Mennonite
context, this does not mean that he can neglect social
characteristics wholesale. Steffen's older women are all housewives.
Among his six younger female informants, however, one finds a school
teacher and a secretary, that is, women working in professions
strongly connected to language. As these two informants come from
Blue Creek and Spanish Lookout, two colonies that Steffen describes
as rather modern and open and in which he sees fewer gender
differences, this fact is rather problematic. And sure enough, they
are the only female informants claiming a higher Spanish competence
than their male peers. In terms of age, three of the four subgroups
show an unproblematic age spread. The older men, however, show a
spread of twenty-seven years, and it is questionable whether a
forty-six-year-old man can be compared with a seventy-three-year-old
man.

In spite of this, one could still accept Steffen's arguments if his
informants were analyzed as individual speakers and not as
representatives for (subgroups of) speech communities. Although
Steffen is aware of this problem, he writes about the linguistic
behavior of different groups, of younger and older generations, or of
wholesale colonies. Moreover, a formulation such as "_die Hälfte der
Befragten_" might mislead the reader, who may be surprised to learn
that "half of the informants" means two informants (p. 97). The most
problematic point, however, is Steffen's use of the word
"statistics." On page 60, he speaks of a "statistical comparison" and
later uses such formulations as "_signifikant [sic!] niedrigeren
Wert_" ("significantly lower value") or "_statistische Unterschiede_"
("statistical differences") (pp. 155, 159). His section VII.10 is
even entitled "_Statistische Auswertung_" ("statistical analysis" [p.
153]). The problem with this is that Steffen does not submit his data
to a single statistical test. He uses only means, a rather rough
measure without much analytical value. This deficit turns many of
Steffen's conclusions into mere speculations, especially when small
differences are used to support far-reaching arguments. On page 161,
Steffen writes that the older generation has a slightly higher level
of knowledge of Spanish lexemes than the younger generation (45
percent and 42 percent); he calls this result "_nennenswert_" ("worth
mentioning").

In spite of his evaluation, we are faced with a serious problem.
David Sankoff writes: "Typically, however, standard deviation of
occurrence rates within sociodemographic groups are large, say about
20%, so that 40 or 50 speakers per group might be necessary to assure
that a 10% difference is statistically significant (according to a
95% test for significant differences between two means). As for the
occurrence rates within linguistic contexts, to prove that a rate of
50% is significantly greater than one of 40%, several hundred tokens
may be required per context."[3] Steffen compares two groups of
twelve informants, each falling short of the number of informants
Sankoff requires. As for tokens, we cannot make any claims because
Steffen does not mention the number of tokens on which he bases his
comparisons. In any case, to make a difference of 3 percent
significant, one needs not "several hundred," but several thousand
tokens. In a Chi-Square-Test-Simulation using four thousand tokens
(two thousand for each group), Steffen's 2-3-array (two groups, three
levels), and the distribution of the example in question, Pearson's
measure does not even reach the level for a statistical tendency
(p<0.1). Therefore, as we do not know the number of tokens, we do not
know whether Steffen's conclusion is based on a significant
difference. But even if the difference were significant, it would
only mean that six older men and six older women from six rather
different colonies know on average 3 percent more Spanish lexemes
than six younger men and six younger women. Would that make the Low
German of the older generation more Spanish in any noticeable way?
And more importantly, why does Steffen analyze "older" and "younger"
generations as independent variables, even though they are not
connected to the question as to whether a linguistic unity exists
among the Mennonite colonies in Belize? With regard to statistical
analyses, there are even more dubious cases: Steffen also calls a 1
percent gender divergence (75 percent and 74 percent) in the
spontaneous usage of Low German lexemes a difference (albeit a
minimal one).

It might also have been interesting if Steffen had compared his
results with Göz Kaufmann's study about the Mennonites in North
America.[4]  With respect to Kaufmann's chapter about the Mennonite
lexicon, Steffen states that a comparison was not possible because
Kaufmann's lexical study formed only part of his research and
therefore was not very extensive. This judgment is correct with
regard to the number of concepts (twenty-eight compared to 107), but
it is a little rash with respect to the number of tokens analyzed.
Kaufmann analyzes 3,864 tokens of spontaneous answers (138 informants
and twenty-eight concepts), while Steffen analyzes roughly 3,000
spontaneous tokens (twenty-six informants and 107 concepts, multiple
answers possible). A comparison would also be possible because
twenty-four of Kaufmann's twenty-eight concepts can be found in
Steffen's book. With regard to the concept "airplane," for example,
it is interesting that Steffen elicited the "old-fashioned" word
"_Loftschepp_" seven times (20 percent of his thirty-five tokens). In
the Mexican and US-American colonies, this type occurred in only 7.2
percent of the answers (ten of 138 tokens; cf. Kaufmann, p. 352),
showing the more traditional linguistic situation of the Belizean
colonies. Besides this, Steffen elicited the word "tie" six times
(22.2 percent of twenty-seven tokens), while this type is used only
twice in the Mexican colony (3.1 percent out of sixty-four tokens)
but twenty-six times in Texas (35.1 percent of seventy-four tokens;
cf. Kaufmann, p. 353), thus showing the strong English influence both
in the United States and in Belize.

Turning to methodology, we notice that a more extensive and
problem-oriented discussion of the central issue of Steffen's study
is missing: what exactly constitutes a loan word? Steffen does
mention different approaches to this problem, but he does this
without giving the reader clear criteria for his categorizations.
Besides this, the few rules he mentions are not applied consistently.
To cite just one problem: Steffen represents the Low German
pronunciation of _store as store_ but uses _Korr_ for the Low German
pronunciation of _car_. Was there not a single case of an English
pronunciation of _store_? With regard to the concept _car_, the
English type _car_ is extant. And does it make sense to count a word
as English that the speakers themselves do not consider a loan word?
And why does the Low German pronunciation of _store_ count as an
English loan word whereas _Korr_, the Low German pronunciation of
_car_, counts as Low German? And finally, following Steffen's
reasoning, one wonders why _Schemmadaun_ ("suitcase"), clearly a
Russian loan word, counts as Low German.

For a study working with "statistical" analyses, the virtual absence
of tables is also somewhat unusual. Such tables could have been used
to illustrate how many English and Spanish loan words each informant
used. We do not find this information in the book. In section VII.10,
Steffen analyzes his results from the perspective of the language of
origin, that is, he lumps together all Spanish, English, and Low
German types, analyzing the informants' knowledge and usage of these
types separately for each language. Thus we learn how often the
English and Spanish types were used absolutely with regard to
semantic categories, but not with regard to the informants. Such a
measure would be necessary for comparing the English and Spanish
influence on the Low German vocabulary in the colonies and for
answering the study's fundamental question. The absence of this kind
of analysis might result from Steffen's use of maps as the main way
of representing his results. Due to the design of his questionnaire,
Steffen had to use several maps, one for each type, in order to
represent the answers to a single concept (e.g., vol. 2, maps 71-73).
An absolute measure of the foreign influence in the lexicon also
would have facilitated the analysis of the relationship between this
influence and the informants' language competence, use, and
attitudes, a goal Steffen mentions on page 60. The first thing that
draws the reader's attention in this respect is the striking
similarity between Steffen's rather short sociolinguistic
questionnaire and the section of Kaufmann's (pp. 345-346)
questionnaire that deals with language competence and language use.
Steffen does not mention Kaufmann's questionnaire in this section,
though. He relates these questions (in a non-statistical way; cf. for
a statistical approach Kaufmann, section 6.4) to the results of his
lexical study and to some of the language competence and use data
(e.g., in sections VII.2-VII.7). Once again, however, he is writing
about groups instead of individual informants. Furthermore, many
interesting connections between language use and language attitudes
are not mentioned. I found it very intriguing, for example, that
Mennonite women, who have hardly any contact with Spanish speakers,
use as many Spanish words as men (cf. also Kaufmann, pp. 181-184).
This is a striking example of women using the symbolic power of a
language in spite of restrictions against the interaction with
speakers of this language, that is, without the existence of one of
the riders LePage and Tabouret-Keller mention as necessary for
second-language learning, namely "his [her] _opportunities_ for
learning are adequate."[5]

In concluding this review, I would like to say that Steffen succeeds
in bringing us closer to interesting and extremely complex language
contact situations. One should also not forget that approaching and
describing these predominantly conservative and closed communities is
a difficult and laudable task in itself. Unfortunately, I am not
equally enthusiastic about the analytical parts of his study. A more
qualitative approach based on Steffen's participant observation may
have been more fruitful, because whenever one has the impression that
this kind of observation serves as the basis for his arguments,
Steffen's  conclusions become more convincing. The somewhat
superficial use of Claude Lévi-Strauss's distinction of different
types of societies also points in the direction of a more
ethnographic approach. But Steffen has chosen a quantitative approach
and, in light of this, one must conclude: both with regard to the
question of representativity and the statistical analyses of his
data, Steffen falls short of the current state of the art.

Notes

[1]. Robert B. LePage and Andrée Tabouret-Keller, _Acts of Identity:
Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity_ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 65.

[2]. Joachim Herrgen, "Die Dialektologie des Deutschen," in _History
of the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution
of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present_, ed.
Sylvain Auroux, E. F. K. Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and Kees
Versteegh (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 1513-1535,
1529.

[3]. David Sankoff, "Problems of Representativeness," in
_Sociolinguistics:_ _An_ _International Handbook of the Science of
Language and Society_, ed. Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J.
Mattheier, and Peter Trudgill (Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 2005), 998-1002, 1000.

[4]. Göz Kaufmann,_ Varietätendynamik in Sprachkontaktsituationen:
Attitüden und Sprachverhalten rußlanddeutscher Mennoniten in Mexiko
und den USA_ (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 1997), section
6.3.1.5. See also Göz Kaufmann, "Des Plattdeutschen Wanderjahre oder
die lexikalischen Folgen der mennonitischen Flucht nach Amerika," in
"_Standardfragen_"_: soziolinguistische, kontaktlinguistische und
sprachgeschichtliche Aspekte, Festschrift für Klaus J. Mattheier zum
60._ _Geburtstag_, ed. Jannis Androutsopoulos and Evelyn Ziegler
(Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2003), 139-160. All subsequent
references to Kaufmann refer to the former (1997) work.

[5]. LePage and Tabouret-Keller, _Acts of Identity_, 115.

Citation: Göz Kaufmann. Review of Steffen, Joachim, _Vereinzelte
Sprachinseln oder Archipel? Die Mennonitenkolonien in Belize im
englisch-spanischen Sprachkontakt (Band 1: Textband), vol. 1; (Band
2: Karteband), vol. 2_. H-GAGCS, H-Net Reviews. November, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24935

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