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21. Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA)
... Additionally, in northern Germany, halt is not considered kalt 'cold' but wertneutral 'more neutral' without emotional value. Figure 8.1 illustrates the distribution of halt and eben according to the Atlas der Deutschen Alltagssprache (Elspaß & Möller, 2003ff.). 186 Oliver Bunk et al. ...
... The map suggests that halt predominates in the south, with exceptions in east Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern Alsace (see Elspaß & Möller, 2003ff.). However, in northern Germany, both particles are reported to occur, with some areas preferring halt over eben. ...
... Geographic distribution of halt and eben(Elspaß & Möller, 2003ff.) <https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/halt-eben/?ch ...
... The data for the present study result from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache ' Atlas of Colloquial German' (AdA; Elspaß & Mö ller, 2003; see also Pickl, Prö ll, Elspaß, & Mö ller, 2019), the largest and longest running linguistic atlas of contemporary colloquial German in the German-speaking world. The data are collected in approximately annual to biannual intervals via online surveys in German-speaking regions (i.e., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and the German-speaking parts of northern Italy, eastern Belgium, and the Alsace and Lorraine regions in eastern France). ...
While dialectal variation is often investigated from a geographical angle, there exists substantial variation both within the community and individual. The aim of the present article is to investigate the extent to which spatial, occupational, and age-related factors are associated with the diversity of linguistic variants reported per informant at a given locality. Drawing on colloquial language data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache ' Atlas of Colloquial German, ' we found that informants from southeastern Germany and Austria reported familiarity with more variants. Moreover, we multifactorially operationalize occupational complexity, a variable that can capture the effects of different communicative, technical, and physical skills required in a job (via the Dictionary of Occupational Titles). Bayesian multilevel modeling revealed that informants in occupations involving physical precision work and communicative complexity reported less familiarity with variants, and that younger informants were familiar with a wider range of variants.
... Historically, nee [ne:] ('no') has its roots in LoG (nēn in Middle LoG; see Kluge and Mitzka 1960, 506). However, today, it is used as a supraregional response token (Elspaß and Möller 2004; see also Imo 2017 andDeppermann et al. 2024 on nee in HG data). As for nä ('no'), there are no empirical studies on its regional distribution or variety-based specifics. ...
This article examines request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in Low German (LoG) conversation, a dialect variety of German. The study is based on both a quantitative analysis of 200 RfC instances and a qualitative analysis of selected excerpts in the framework of conversation analysis (CA). As for the question design of RfCs, declarative and phrasal formats, as well as modulations and tags prevail in the LoG data. Concerning the response design, LoG is characterized as a polarity system in which language contact with the high variety plays a decisive role in the answer possibility space. In particular, High German response tokens are predominantly used as unmarked response types, while LoG response tokens are deployed as marked types. Moreover, LoG seems to be a language between the poles of token- and repeat-type languages. Full repeats index different degrees of ‘markedness’ in LoG interaction. Contrary to previous studies on polar answers, repeats in LoG are frequently deployed as unmarked responses in subordinate lines of actions. Repeats are also used as more marked answers after understanding displays. This article attempts to stress the importance of investigating non-standard languages and variety contact in CA, thereby addressing the monolingual bias in research on polar questions.
... The am-construction consists of the preposition am (an ('on, at') + dem ('the-m/n-dat')) in combination with the copula sein ('to be'), and a nominalized infinitive of the relevant verb (Krause 1997: 53), as in (4) In fact, according to Elspaß (2005: 82), "the am-construction [is …] common in almost the entire [German] language area" (translation mine [MB]) and stud- ies have shown that the am-progressive is present, if not prevalent, in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (cf. Reimann 1996;Krause 2002;Elspaß & Möller 2011;Pottelberge 2004). That being said, Krause (1997: 51f.) admits that, while the am- construction is not purely restricted to certain regional or colloquial contexts, there continues to be regional and stylistic differences pertaining to the am-con- struction and the use of the am-construction is still generally associated with spo- ken language (Duden 2005: 434). ...
... This construction has recently received much attention, in part because of the belief that "the development and current spread of the am-progressive serves as an example of a grammaticalization process that is happening before our eyes" In fact, according to Elspaß (2005: 82), "the am-construction [is …] common in almost the entire [German] language area" (translation mine [MB]) and studies have shown that the am-progressive is present, if not prevalent, in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (cf. Reimann 1996;Krause 2002;Elspaß & Möller 2011;Pottelberge 2004). That being said, Krause (1997: 51f.) admits that, while the amconstruction is not purely restricted to certain regional or colloquial contexts, there continues to be regional and stylistic differences pertaining to the am-construction and the use of the am-construction is still generally associated with spoken language (Duden 2005: 434). ...
The last three decades have seen the emergence of Construction Grammar as a major research paradigm in linguistics. At the same time, very few researchers have taken a constructionist perspective on language contact phenomena. This volume brings together, for the first time, a broad range of original contributions providing insights into language contact phenomena from a constructionist perspective. Focusing primarily on Germanic languages, the papers in this volume demonstrate how the notion of construction can be fruitfully applied to investigate how a range of different language contact phenomena can be systematically analyzed from the perspectives of both form and meaning.
... Au cours des dernières années, divers projets de crowdsourcing ont été mis en place pour la collecte de données linguistiques grâce à des applications web, comme Le Français de nos régions (Avanzi et al. 2016) pour les aires francophones de l'Europe et du Canada, L'Atlas der deutschen Alltagssprache (Möller et Elspaß 2015) pour la variation régionale de l'allemand, l'enquête Harvard Dialect (Vaux et Bert 2013) pour la variation régionale aux Etats-Unis, VerbaAlpina (Krefeld et Lücke 2014) pour les dialectes parlés dans les Alpes, et plus récemment, les sites jumeaux tonaccent / dindialäkt, mettant l'accent sur la perception de l'accent suisse en français et dans les dialectes suisses allemands (Goldman et al. 2018a). ...
La plateforme de production participative (crowdsourcing) Donnez votre Français à la Science (DFS) vise à collecter des données linguistiques en mettant l’accent sur la variation en français européen. Les données recueillies dans le cadre d’un projet de production participative sont utiles pour une meilleure connaissance des différents usages de la langue, mais cela permet également de tisser des liens entre communauté scientifique et grand public en rendant ces derniers acteurs de la recherche et en les encourageant à suivre les enquêtes à venir. Les deux principales activités décrites ici sont : 1. une étude linguistique sur la connaissance de la variation lexicale régionale avec une rétroaction immédiate et 2. un système de géolocalisation des locuteurs, à savoir un quiz dont l’objectif est de deviner l'origine géographique du participant sur la base de la comparaison de ses réponses aux données précédemment recueillies dans d’autres enquêtes. Les évolutions de la plateforme, en cours de développement, sont également évoquées en conclusion.
... can be used (see Elspaß and Möller 2008 for more information on existential constructions in German). The English translation in each case is 'There are many hotels here.' ...
The purpose of this study was to thoroughly investigate morphosyntactic variation in the subject-verb agreement system in educated Jamaican English (JamE) and to shed light on the complex net of factors that determine this variation.
After a short overview of the historical development of English in Jamaica and the sociolinguistic conditions that led to the emergence of the standard-creole continuum characterising the present language situation, chapter 2 summarizes recent research into linguistic variation in New Englishes in general and JamE in particular. Chapter 3 is devoted to a theoretical overview of previous research into subject-verb agreement, with a focus on grammatical (e.g. subject type and subject number) and situational factors (e.g. formality and mode of production) that potentially influence agreement.
On the basis of the Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English (ICE), subject-verb agreement with lexical verbs and with the exceptional verb be is analysed quantitatively and qualitatively across three spoken registers differing in their relative levels of formality. The results are then compared to those obtained from a parallel analysis of three written registers of similar formality levels (chapter 4).
The investigation focuses particularly on the nature and extent to which Jamaican Creole (JamC) exerts influence on JamE through language contact, and on how this influence depends on the formality of the situation and the mode of production (i.e. spoken or written). The analysis shows that creole influence varies with formality and that this results in a high degree of complexity in the subject-verb agreement system in Jamaican English, as described in detail in this chapter.
For a part of the phenomenon under investigation - namely agreement in existential there + be constructions - this work also offers inter-variety analyses on the basis of further ICE-corpora (GB, Singapore, India) as well as an American corpus (Santa Barbara Corpus). This comparative study in chapter 5 indicates that the frequency of (non-) agreement in such existential there constructions is closely tied to grammatical factors and that differences in frequencies can be attributed to the type of variety (L1 versus L2) rather than to substrate influence.
Chapter 6 extends the focus in a two-pronged fashion. First, it provides a typological discussion of structures that can be used as alternatives to there + be constructions to express existence, e.g. locative and possessive constructions. Second, the focus of the investigation is shifted to the respective substrates in Jamaica, India and Singapore, in order to identify the most commonly used existential expressions. This is followed by a corpus analysis of the relevant existential constructions in the four ICE-Corpora (the American corpus is excluded due to a lack of comparability), in order to uncover substrate influence on the respective varieties. The corpus analysis shows strong preferences in the individual varieties of English for different constructions which can be unequivocally attributed to contact influence from the corresponding substrate languages. With regard to the contact varieties (JamE, Indian English, Singapore English) the influence of the respective contact language appears in the preference of alternative existential constructions (e.g. with have) rather than in the frequency of (non-) agreement in there + be constructions.
While previous dialectometric analyses of colloquial German have explored the spatial distribution of variants in order to sketch a picture of how German-speaking areas are linguistically structured, there have been no investigations into the extent to which reported everyday language use converges to or diverges from the standard language. What is more, dialectological perspectives have largely neglected the role of social factors such as age, gender, and mobility on patterns of language variation in colloquial German in lieu of strictly examining geography as a predictor for differences in the spatial distribution of variation in everyday language use. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile dialectometric and sociolinguistic perspectives by examining, in an integrative manner, the influence of social and spatial variables in predicting differences in patterns of variation in colloquial German. Specifically, we analyze ten phonetic-phonological variables from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (‘Atlas of Colloquial German’) and address the question of where informant reports of colloquial German resemble (non-)standard language. To do so, we employ generalized additive mixed-effects models (GAMMs), which can simultaneously detect underlying (non-)linear aggregate geographical patterns and identify the relative importance of social predictors. Our results indicate that geography is the strongest predictor of differences in colloquial German, and that the interaction between age and gender most notably affects the number of (non-)standard variants informants report for their respective locality. Methodological implications for applying GAMMs to the investigation of social and spatial variation are discussed.
Zusammenfassung
Der vorliegende Beitrag präsentiert die Ergebnisse einer Pilotstudie zur dialektometrischen Auswertung von Material des „Wörterbuchs der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich“ (WBÖ). Dabei handelt es sich ursprünglich um eine Sammlung von ca. 3,6 Millionen Handzetteln aus der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, von denen ein Großteil in den letzten Jahrzehnten digitalisiert wurde und mittlerweile als XML/TEI-Datenbank vorliegt (vgl. Bowers & Stöckle 2018).Der Beitrag verfolgt dabei zwei Ziele: Zum einen soll das WBÖ-Material vorgestellt und insbesondere kritisch im Hinblick auf seine Verwendbarkeit für dialektometrische Analysen diskutiert werden. Da die Daten für ein Wörterbuchprojekt erhoben wurden und daher anderen empirischen Standards entsprechen als etwa Sprachatlas-Daten, besteht eine Herausforderung in der Aufbereitung und Evaluation des Materials. Das zweite Ziel besteht in der Präsentation der dialektometrischen Analyse und der sich daraus ergebenden dialektalen Raumstrukturen. Diese sollen mit bekannten traditionellen Einteilungen der bairischen Dialekte (vgl. z. B. Wiesinger 1983a), aber auch mit neueren alltagssprachlichen Gliederungen (vgl. Pickl et al. 2019) verglichen und dabei sowohl methodisch als auch sprachgeographisch verortet werden.
Cet article vise à documenter la variation lexicale au sein de l’espace francophone en Suisse. En utilisant des méthodes issues des humanités numériques et des enquêtes participatives en ligne, des données ont été collectées pour analyser l’utilisation de certaines lexies dans le langage quotidien des locuteurs de français en Suisse romande et plus spécificiquement en Valais. Les résultats ont été interprétés à travers la création de cartes de chaleur, illustrant la vitalité des différents phénomènes lexicaux et leurs zones de prévalence. Cette approche méthodologique novatrice offre une perspective précise et détaillée sur la dynamique lexicale au sein de la communauté linguistique romande. L’analyse des cartes s’effectue à plusieurs niveaux. On examinera d’abord la variation lexicale d’un point de vue cantonal, en se penchant sur les lexies préférées dans chaque canton. Puis, on approfondira davantage en explorant les différences au sein même des cantons, mettant en lumière la variation lexicale intracantonale. Cette approche multicouche permet une compréhension approfondie des tendances lexicales à l’échelle cantonale, tout en révélant les nuances intracantonales qui contribuent à la richesse et à la diversité linguistique observée dans la Suisse francophone.
The Alpine region stands out in the German-speaking world for its well-preserved traditional dialects, which continue to play a significant role in daily life. However, the vast geographical range of the Alpine region and the limitations imposed by national and regional borders have hindered comprehensive investigations of the entire Alpine area. To overcome these obstacles, this study utilizes crowdsourcing data from the VerbaAlpina project to investigate phonological and morpho-phonological variation in the German-speaking Alpine region. Although the data were collected in a written form and with a focus on lexical variation, it is shown that the data contain detailed phonological information. By using multivariate dialectometric measurements (i.e. factor analysis [FA]) based on 19 (morpho-)phonological variables (comprising 8,582 tokens), the study explores the geolinguistic structures of the German dialects in the Alpine region. The results confirm, on a general level, the validity of the traditionally established dialect classification. However, the findings also reveal previously underrated border effects, in particular for Bavarian dialects along the German-Austrian border, which are argued to be the outcome of divergence processes. Hence, the study highlights the importance of cross-dialectal and cross-national perspectives in understanding dialect variation and emphasizes the value of crowdsourcing data for dialectological research.
Introduction. The study attempts to reveal the role of the dialect as a linguo-cultural phenomenon through the prism of its semantics. The lack of studies on dialects from the linguo-cultural point of view – modern cultural linguistics is mostly focused on standard languages and national cultural codes – determines the novelty and relevance of this issue. Methodology and sources. The research content consists of more than 100 Bavarian and Swabian dialect words which reflect culture specifics of each region, selected from the 20th- 21st centuries fiction, regional media materials and local advertising by using the systematic sampling method. To identify the regional culture specifics, the study provides a two-level method, based on the analysis of lexicographic sources and results of the interview and questionnaire of 66 respondents. The updated range of denotative and connotative meanings of each lexeme is considered within 10 thematic groups.Results and discussion. It has been found out that the researched dialects clearly reflect the South German regional tradition and history which can be traced in the semantics of the dialect words. Despite the globalization, a partly similar historical development of the two regions, as well as the belonging of the Bavarian and Swabian dialects to the same dialect continuum, the analysis of the dialect semantic structures within thematic groups revealed some similarities and differences which lead to conclusions regarding the specifics of the South German linguo-cultural code.Conclusion. It has been concluded that the further study on linguistic variety from the interdisciplinary point of view, including cultural linguistics and pragmatics, allows to better understand the role of dialect in modern communication.
This publication demonstrates the validity of crowdsourced data by comparing the crowdsourced data from the VinKo project with traditionally collected data from the AThEME project. Both datasets target the non-standard language varieties of the South Tyrol, Trentino, and Veneto regions in northeastern Italy. Three different morphosyntactic phenomena are discussed, each relating to a particular language variety, providing evidence that the crowdsourced data is of comparable quality to the traditionally gathered data and has the added advantage of yielding a larger overall dataset covering a denser location network.
The city as a complex socio-cultural structure plays a central role, economically, administratively as well as culturally. Factors such as higher population density, a more expansive infrastructure, and larger social and cultural diversity compared to rural areas have a substantial impact on urban society and urban communication. Focusing on the latter, the contributions to this volume discuss the characteristics and dynamics of urban language use, considering aspects such as contact, variation and change, as well as identity, indexicality, and attitudes, but also spatial factors including mobility, urbanisation/counterurbanisation, and diffusion processes. The collected articles provide an update of ‘first wave’ approaches of variationist sociolinguistics, but also establish a connection to ‘third wave’ research for readers from a broad range of fields, especially sociolinguistics, variationist linguistics, and dialectology. The book presents modern methodological and conceptual ideas and a wealth of new findings but also serves as a reference work, combining theoretical discussions with results from recent empirical studies.
p>This paper gives an insight into grammatical developmental tendencies in contemporary German by way of examples. After a discussion of important technical terms (like developmental tendencies, developmental tendencies ), several tendencies are described.
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p>Although dialect use has declined massively over the past 100 years in large parts of the German-speaking countries, there is still a considerable areal diversity overall. Even the written standard language is characterised by diatopic heterogeneity on various levels – pronunciation, lexis, grammar, pragmatics. This is even more true for spoken everyday language, which, depending on the country and area, may be more dialectal, regiolectal, or near-standard in the German-speaking countries. This paper focuses on lexical variation and presents data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA) from online surveys conducted over the last 17 years; some of these data is compared with older data from the Wortatlas der deutschen Umgangssprachen (WDU) collected in the 1970s. The approx. 600 maps of the AdA produced so far document, on the one hand, a surprisingly clear preservation of older regional contrasts in the distribution of diatopic variants, as already known from earlier dialect atlases. On the other hand, the AdA maps show a multitude of newer cases of regional diversity, which were hardly or not at all known before and which are thus not listed in codices or studies on the lexis of contemporary German. The paper shows that even variants for modern concepts are often not uniform across regions but can have distinct regional emphases. Finally, the question of dominant areal structures in present-day lexical variation of German will be addressed.</p
Smartphone apps are ubiquitous: in 2018 in Germany alone, 79% of the population owned a smartphone. Virtually everyone in this cohort always carries with them a recording device and a notepad (i.e., a screen), two essential tools that linguists typically use in the field. In the present contribution we discuss how linguists can harness this ubiquity of linguistic tools in the population to capture language variation and change, illustrated through apps that were developed for German-speaking Europe. We present four apps ( Dialäkt Äpp, Voice Äpp, Grüezi Moin Servus , and Deutschklang ) that were developed to (a) engage with the public and (b) to collect linguistic data. We discuss opportunities (e.g., the multimodality of said devices), as well as challenges (e.g., maintenance, updating and the costs involved therein). Finally, we present new findings that have emerged from working with this new paradigm and speculate about future directions and developments in using smartphone apps to collect linguistic data.
This paper presents the project Stimmen fan Fryslân ‘Voices of Fryslân’. The project relies on a smartphone application developed to involve local communities in the creation of speech corpora, particularly of lesser used languages. This paper lays out the scientific and societal context of the project, showcases the smartphone application and gives an overview of the results from the project that attracted more than 15,000 users. Some key methodological issues are considered, and the paper discusses the role of smartphone technology for citizen science in minority language areas while also showing new maps with distributions of lexical and phonological variation in Frisian.
This chapter focuses on spatial and social variation in the colloquial everyday speech of three German-speaking urban areas. The basic question is whether geographical variation (the kind that is commonly observed in studies on dialect variation in large areas) is detectable in the reported everyday speech of the spatially much smaller, yet denser urban areas as well. To this end, we use methods of quantitative dialectology to examine the patterns of variation in the Ruhr Area, Berlin, and Vienna. The respective analyses of the spatial patterns of 245 linguistic variables from a total number of 4,251 informants yield clear – but remarkably distinct – patterns of areal variation for each of these three urban areas. To account for those differences, social variables are factored in.
Research on regional linguistic variation typically involves data collection in the field. This process itself can take up several months if not years. In the present study we demonstrate how we can use web interactives in collaboration with media outlets for a fast gathering of regional, sociolinguistic data. In collaboration with SPIEGEL ONLINE and Tagesanzeiger, we developed a web interactive that predicts users’ regional backgrounds from within German-speaking Europe. More than 1.9M people have participated in the interactive, more than 770K users have provided metadata. Said metadata allowed us to capture regional variation in language as of today, which we can compare to historical survey data–enabling us to track the evolution of German in Europe over the past 40 years. We report on regional levelling of lexical variants, a process which appears to be particularly prevalent in the northern parts of German-speaking Europe. We further found an effect of (former) national and regional borders on language use. This innovative paradigm allows us to collect sociolinguistic data of an unprecedented scale–at the same time it presents significant challenges, both of which–benefits and challenges–will be discussed in this contribution.
What almost all accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the written form of a language as “a significant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language” (Haugen in Am Anthropol 68:922–935, 1966a; Haugen, in: Bright (ed) Sociolinguistics, The Hague: Mouton, 1966b: 929; cf. also Haugen, in: Asher (ed) The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, Pergamon, Oxford, 1994: 4340), and while print certainly constitutes an important instrument for the dissemination of codified norms, it remains to be established what role hand-written texts played in standardisation processes. In nineteenth-century Europe, mass-literacy, which is generally seen as a precondition of standardisation processes, was only possible because large parts (or even the majority) of the population learnt to write (and read) hand-written texts. In the vast volume of private texts that were produced during the various wars and emigration waves of the nineteenth century, not only codified norms, but also (regional) norms of usage were widely transmitted. Private letters and diaries, in particular, have proved to be a valuable text source for the investigation of such norms and their diffusion (cf. Elspaß, in: Hernández-Campoy, Conde-Silvestre (eds) The handbook of historical sociolinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2012). With examples from a corpus of German emigrant letters, the present contribution will try to demonstrate that grammatical norms of usage which were literally not visible in printed texts at the time, but which are now considered standard, formed part of the standardisation process of German.
This paper surveys the emergence of the category humanness in the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Alemannic (southwest German) dialects. The first part shows that some Alemannic dialects have developed a human/nonhuman distinction in the 3rd person singular neuter personal pronoun: a marked form encoding the human direct object has emerged. The emergence of this form can be explained by the differential object marking hypothesis. The second part reports on a pilot study of the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Sense Alemannic on the basis of new data. In this dialect, humanness is distinguished not only in the neuter but also in the masculine and feminine. Additionally, some instances are observed that violate the differential object marking principle. Thus, both principles (humanness marking and the differential object marking) form part of the grammar, but the latter one may be violated.*
Pluralismus oder Assimilation? : zum Umgang mit Norm und arealer Sprachvariation in Deutschland und anderswo / Péter Maitz ; Stephan Elspaß. - In: Kommunikation und Öffentlichkeit / Susanne Günthner ... (Hrsg.). - Berlin u.a. : De Gruyter, 2012. - S. 41-58. - (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik ; 296)
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