Namibian German has an interesting status among German contact varieties outside Europe. It has its roots in colonisation, but is used by a speech community with German ancestry who live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from typical (post-)colonial varieties, and makes it more similar to “language island” varieties of German. However, unlike either of these types – and more similar to the situation within Europe than those – German in Namibia is linguistically vital, it is acquired by children, and also used in public domains. This means that we find not only a number of interesting contact phenomena, but also systematic register differentiation. In our paper, we compare language use in informal and formal settings, address the status of informal vernaculars in speakers’ broader linguistic repertoires, and discuss how standard language ideologies pan out in this setting where German is not the national majority language, and how they interact with markers of local, Namibian identity
