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This paper elaborates a theme at the interface between linguistics and literature on the case example of a novel which belongs to the immigrant literature as part of the contemporary Austrian literature. The Croatian author Ana Bilic describes in her first novel written in German language Das kleine Stück vom großen Himmel (The small part of the big sky) published in 2002 the love relationship between a Croatian unnamed female student and the Austrian student Ernst which takes place in Vienna. The unusual thing in this novel is the fact that in numerous sentences and passages the author uses a strange German language which is characterized by interference mistakes, or to be precise a Croatian-German language variation which more or less differs grammatically and lexically from standard German language. In the paper this consciously alienated language is being investigated concerning the influence of the Croatian mother tongue of the author, but also concerning common mistakes while learning German language. The paper also analyses the motivation of Ana Bilic for such in the context of immigrant literature unusual language use, which is also connected with the plot of the novel. Thus qualitative as well as quantitative methods of analysis are being used, whereby the former ones refer to the content and the latter ones to the frequency of interference mistakes in the book. The interference mistakes belong on one side to the fictional (text-internal) world and on the other side to the factual (text-external) level, because they reflect the plot of the book and establish on the level of content and language a connection between the first-person narrator and the author, who also had to learn German after her arrival to Vienna. As a result of this most interference mistakes appear in the first chapters of the novel, which reflects the first phase in German language learning of the female narrator. Further on in the novel the quantity of the mistakes decreases parallel to the rising foreign language abilities of the narrator, which holds true for the less frequent language acquisition and competence mistakes. The aim of the Ana Bilic is obviously to show by means of the plot and the language use the mechanisms and the process of foreign language acquisition, whereby she makes an innovative contribution to the contemporary German-speaking immigrant literature