Abstract

Taking its cue from data elicited in a questionnaire, translation samples and transcribed interview recordings, the paper undertakes a first and provisional analysis of a language variety developed by young Namibian refugee children during their 1979-1989 exile in the German Democratic Republic: Oshideutsch. The aim is twofold: first, the contribution seeks to describe Oshideutsch‘s key characteristics as an argot drawing on the source languages of (mainly) German and Oshivambo. Second, it pinpoints Oshideutsch within the concepts of current linguistic subdiciplines such as sociolinguistics (more specifically, argot research), contact linguistics, and postcolonial language studies. With regard to the latter, the paper strives to establish Oshideutsch as a case in point of a ‘migratory language’ whose speakers (and thus, whose scope and outreach) have up to the present day effectively been covering a space spanning from Germany to Namibia.