When the Germans invaded Russia were there significant numbers of either Russian speakers amongst their ranks or German speakers amongst the Russian populace? What about when they invaded France?
Similarly, when the Japanese invaded much of East Asia what would have been the lingua franca for administration?
I recommend Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the World, which goes into this type of question (lingua francas / imperial languages) in a lot of depth. I can’t help much with the actual question. I know that prior to WWII, there were a lot of German-speakers in parts of Russia, but I couldn’t say whether there was much contact between them and the Nazi government. In general, invading armies communicate pretty well with pidgins and once the conquest is a fait accompli, there’s more incentive for bilinguals to smooth the way. For Japan, I imagine that the Japanese were familiar with literary Chinese, as many other places would have been, but I don’t know what language they actually used.
Excellent, I’ll order that book. I’m interested in it in the general sense as much as the specifics. Thanks for your help.
re German troops in the Soviet Union: a significant number of senior German officers had spent time training there and would have picked up some Russian.
French would have been spoken by a large part of German soldiers with higher secondary education.
People learn the basics of a language very quickly under those circumstances. One way they learn (in the last 100 years or so) is through training materials like this German phrase book for US troops in Germany.
You might want to do some reading on the Volga Germans. They had lived in Russia for generations, and were recognized as a separate ethnic group with their own autonomous region. They, along with the Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, and Balkars, were suspected of treason by Stalin and deported en masse to the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan as the German army advanced into the Soviet Union. They didn’t do so well in deportation; it’s yet another sad episode in Soviet history.
During perestroika and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of them resettled in Germany with the assistance of the German government.
I highly recommend that book also. There’s a staggering amount of fascinating information in it, and I enjoyed it so much I’ve read it twice. So far. It’s actually called “Empires of the Word” - a very easy title to misread or mistype.
It addresses the question of what set of circumstances leads a country to adopt the language of colonists or invaders (for example Spanish in Puerto Rico, or Latin in France), and what different circumstances lead to the colonist’s language finding no foothold, and being quickly forgotten (for example Spanish in Guam, or Latin in Britain).