Based on about 250 narrative interviews, the article describes the language biographies and cultural identities of Jewish emigrants from German speaking countries in Israel, 60 years after the cultural break of Nazi persecution. It focuses on the influence of external factors (like family-background in Europe, forms of settlement, partnerships, friends, jobs etc. in the new surroundings) on the acquisition of Hebrew and the maintenance of a mostly very educated and correct German in the 1st generation. Additional analyses illustrate the interdependence of language attitudes and abilities in the 2nd generation, who often acquired German as children in the family, but were ashamed of it during their adolescence.

Each natural language is constantly developing as long as it is used. But the development clearly shows that not everything from the language disappears completely. Many words cease to be independent and start existing as elements of compounds, as prefixes or suffixes without their independent meaning. The lost vocabulary, however, leaves traces in the language. Where can we find them? They can be found in compounds, proper nouns, names of professions, job, places etc. as well as fixed idioms.

The aim of this paper is semantic classification of German loan words in the Polish language at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th century. Its research body is the press, published in the period 1890–1910 in Cracow, in the former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. This is the time in which Galicia as a part of Austria-Hungary enjoys since 1873 under Polish leadership the complete autonomy. The influence of German is no more as strong as in the pre-autonomous period but it is still there. It comes over in the form of foreign words, borrowings and more or less successful translation loans, which, although constructed of native lexemes of Polish, show their German origin clearly. The paper tries to show which areas of daily life were subject to the greatest influence of German vocabulary and the ways how the assimilation took place.

The article examines the topology of space in Volker Kutscher’s historical crime novel „Die Akte Vaterland“ (2012). Drawing on Jurij Lotman’s structural-semiotic approach to literary space the article focuses on two pivotal topologies: the topology of nature and civilization as established through the perspective of the ambivalent figure Topala and the national topology. While the prologue of the novel seems to point at the possible existence of a place outside of national membership, the epilogue finally denies spaces which are deprived of the national(ist) topological order.

The contribution examines how the paradigms of historical, conflict, contact and ecolinguistics respectively shed different light on the relation between German and French as neighbouring languages. Historical linguistics sees the neighbourly language contacts as the result of bellicose and societal interferences; conflict linguistics centres on tensions and dominance behaviour between governments and linguistic enclaves or linguistic minorities. Contact linguistics takes account of the fact that any change in neighbourly language situations could also be seen as the result of conflict-free societal changes. Ecolinguistics follows this perspective on frame conditions – instead of historically important events – still more thoroughly, and its research focus on „linguistic landscape“ exposes bilingual landscapes as compensation for the loss of bilingualism. The survey shows after all that conflict linguistics is not the only fertile description of neighbourly language relations.