Abstract
The artistic freedom of authors is generally regarded as a disturbing factor in dialectology and historical linguistics (see Ebert 1978: 6, Glaser 1997: 15). For the investigation of historical oral communication, the preferable data are functional and not fictional texts. Artistic licence, however, is far more useful than commonly known. This paper shows how literary texts can be used both for linguistic history and for research on language contact. The data base includes poetic texts – predominantly plays – of the German-language literature of the 19th century, in which Jewish figures are characterized linguistically by using imitations of Yiddish. These imitations are a creative product of the contact between German and Yiddish and, in the artificial space of poetic language, exhibit reflexes of natural language structures.
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