Abstract

This article provides the first empirical study on the spelling of the Volga German variety in Argentina, which is still one of the first graphemic language contact studies. On the basis of translation sentences from Spanish collected in the province of Buenos Aires among 36 Volga-German speakers, the grapheme-phoneme correspondences used by the writers in writing down their primary spoken variety are investigated and interpreted in the light of language contact. The results show a visible orientation towards the Spanish writing system in various aspects. Subsequently, two complementary approaches for analyzing the inter- as well as intraindividual spelling variation in the data are presented with initial findings. Overall, a considerable amount of variation is evident, but its controlling factors are still unclear. The present study also provides an empirical foundation for orthographical debates about Volga German in Argentina. This seems necessary because orthographic norms, if they are to have a chance of being applied, must not be detached from the actual writing intuition of the speakers.