Since this weekend has turned out to be so bad, here are some links, mostly writing and language related, to take your mind of the bad stuff for a while:
Here is a very informative site, created by a professor of linguistics at the University of Potsdam, about Kiezdeutsch, the German dialect spoken by urban youngsters in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods.
It’s not just urban youngsters either, for that matter. Elements of Kiezdeutsch regularly show up in the speech of my suburban students, probably due to copying the speech patterns of popular comedians and rappers. And one of the my linguistics colleagues at the University of Vechta researched Kiezdeutsch as well, among the rural/small town population of Vechta.
Elizabeth Bear has a beautiful post on art, voice and flaws.
Here is a fabulous post on why Mary Sue/Gary Stu accusations are thrown around far too easily these days from the awesomely named Manly Guys Doing Manly Things. Found via Sam Sykes.
Thanks for the link on Kiezdeutsch–there are several good articles clustered off that link.
It’s intended as an information portal, because the linguistics professor who researches Kiezdeutsch got hate mail from self-proclaimed protectors of the German language.
If you want to know what it sounds like (because Kiezdeutsch really has to heard), here are a few clips:
Short news report
Kiezdeutsch lesson
Comedy skit
Another comedy skit