German Dialects Research Articles

Historische Mündlichkeit.

The article demonstrates how to reconstruct an oral historical variety by using modern methods. The phonetic-phonological phenomens of the Regional High German in the 19th century are presented for Segeberg (a town in the North Low German dialect area). Afterwards, the spatial structures of this historical prestigious variety are analysed using statistical methods (cluster analysis and implication analysis).

ArchiMob: Ein multidialektales Korpus schweizerdeutscher Spontansprache

Although Swiss dialects of German are widely used in everyday communication, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of transcribed spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for dialectological, historical and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source, and summarise a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to stimulate the use of the corpus for dialectological research.

Form und Funktion der doppelten Negation in deutschen Dialekten, mit einem Schwerpunkt im Oberdeutschen

The article gives an overview of the form and function of negative concord in German dialects (Alemannic, Bavarian, Upper Franconian varieties, West Central German, East Central German, West Low German, East Low German, Silesian, East Pomeranian, Low Prussian), with a focus on Upper German. The study is based on spontaneous speech data from the 1950s until the 1980s and shows that negative doubling and negative spread (in German: ‘doppelte Negation mit Satznegation’ and ‘doppelte Negation ohne Satznegation’) are two different negation types, thus there is no correlation between them as generally assumed (Haspelmath 1997; Zeijlstra 2004). Furthermore negative doubling is not obligatory, but seems to be conditioned by pragmatics.

Der s-Plural im Alemannischen.

It is commonly agreed that the plural -s has become a part of Standard German inflection, yet in dialects such as Alemannic it is often seen as an intruder. We challenge this view based on data from a written survey amongst speakers of Swiss German dialects. Our analysis of pluralised loanwords (e. g. Mango) and abbreviations (e. g. WG ‘flat share’) shows a strong effect of both speakers’ age and grammatical gender that points towards a progressive integration of the plural -s into the dialectal system.
 While masculine and neuter nouns can express number syntagmatically (using articles that differ in singular and plural), feminine nouns rely heavily on suffixes (as the definite article is d’ in both cases). A comparison of the -s plural with traditional dialectal plurals shows clear advantages for -s plurals in both cue strength (output) and scope (input) of the plural schema. We argue that it is due to this that feminine nouns show a significantly higher percentage of -s plurals compared with masculine and neuter nouns in speakers aged 25 and above. The difference disappears for younger speakers while the overall number of -s plurals increases drastically. Combined, we have an apparent time scenario that shows how the -s plural is first borrowed with nouns that rely on overt plural markers, and later spreads to most loans and other words with non-native structure.

Müli, Loui, Rüfi.

Based on the material of the toponomastic dictionary of the Canton of Bern, or Ortsnamenbuch des Kantons Bern (BENB), this article first aims to describe how the final -i in today’s Swiss German dialects, as in müli ‘mill’, is represented in sources from the medieval era until the sixteenth century. It appears that the classical Middle High German -e grapheme is hardly found in our data, while -i is used throughout this entire period and beyond. However, it is shown that this becomes more complex whith respect to noun composition.
 Moreover, the historical relation between the short and long Swiss German forms loui – louene ‘avalanche’ and rüfi – rufene ‘landslide’ is discussed.

Tüen Sie au gern apéröle, käffele oder kungfule?

How can we measure dialectal constructional productivity? Which factors determine degrees of productivity and the acceptability of creative ad hoc coinages in the domain of derivational processes? Based on data from a pilot survey (n=80), we discuss a range of factors influencing degrees of productivity/creativity for the denominal -(e)le-verb pattern (e. g., käffele, apéröle, ipödle, kungfule) in Swiss German dialects. This morphological pattern is currently highly productive, as indicated by substantial numbers of creative ad hoc coinages (oral and written evidence) as well as our participants’ acceptability judgements (for both isolated verbs and verbs in sentences) and their elicited productions (meaning paraphrases and sentence contexts for ad hoc coinages). We discuss different types of evidence for constructional productivity, based on quantitative and qualitative data. Our data indicates that schema-based frequency/familiarity effects and analogy-based pattern extension contribute to the pattern’s productivity. The fact that the verbs’ constructional contexts partly influence their acceptability indicates that the derivational pattern stretches beyond the traditional domain of morphology such that morphological, semantic, and syntactic patterns jointly determine degrees of constructional productivity.

S Doris in däm wisse Fätze.

In various Swiss German dialects, the feminine gender is not the sole possibility when referring to women. Under certain circumstances, the article of female first names can also be neuter, e. g. s Doris. The gender assignment of names is determined by linguistic variables such as morphology or semantics, but also by social factors like age and social relationship. Neuter names have been shown to indicate social relations and encode certain concepts of gender roles in society. Based on data from an extensive online survey and fieldwork conducted in different places of Switzerland, the affective function of the neuter gender in the use of female names is explained. The focus lies on the definite article.

Lörres, Möppes, and the Swiss. (Re)Discovering regional patterns in anonymous social media data

AbstractWe study regional similarities and differences in language use on an anonymous mobile chat application in the German-speaking area. We use a neural network on 2.3 million online conversations to automatically learn representations of words and cities. These linguistic-use-based representations capture regional distinctions in a high-dimensional vector space that can be clustered and visualized to discover patterns in the data. We find that the resulting regional patterns are closely linked to the traditional division of German dialects, even though most of the conversations are written in standard German. The resulting maps correspond to traditional dialect divisions and language-external spatial structures, with a few notable exceptions that can be explained through external factors.Our method also facilitates two qualitative analyses, allowing us to discover geographically-pertinent words for various regional levels, as well as creating regional group-specific style profiles based on various linguistic resources. The results of our study strongly suggest the existence of region-specific patterns of language use (“digital regiolects”) representing distinctive strategies of linguistic stylization in relation to linguistic resources and topics. As a methodological contribution, we show how linguistic theory can drive the application and direction of neural network-based representation learning, and how their judicious application provides the basis for qualitative analysis of large-scale data collections.

Ценностная реализация идиом в контекстах: прагматический аспект

The article deals with the analysis of the German idioms representing values, in particular, describing situations when the great value is attached to something, something is considered valuable and important, has high value, desirable or has no value, the ability to separate valuable things from not valuable is viewed. The results of research allow to reveal the peculiarities of interaction of the inner form and actual meaning in the contexts of use received from the Corpus of the Institute of the German language in Manheim. The pragmatic aspect of the analysis reflected the role and influence of presupposition on semantics of idioms in language space, implicitly expressed opinions of authors and impact on the addressee.

The syntax and semantics of past participle agreement in Alemannic

This paper investigates agreement on past participles in Highest Alemannic dialects of German. We will first show that participle agreement only occurs in contexts where the participle is adjectival, viz., in stative passives and in resultative perfects, but not in eventive perfects. The participles thus pattern with predicative adjectives, which also display agreement in these varieties. In the main part of the paper, we address double compound perfects and eventive passives, which also display agreement on the lexical participle. Even though it is initially not obvious that the participle is adjectival in these cases, we will provide syntactic evidence for their adjectival status. Furthermore, we will pursue the hypothesis that the adjectival head of all agreeing participles is a stativizer, even in the double compound perfect and the eventive passive. At the same time, both the double compound perfect and the eventive passive also clearly have an eventive component. We will model their behavior by treating the participles as mixed categories, viz., as adjectival heads that take a large amount of verbal structure as their complement (VoiceP/AspP). While recent work on German stative passives has argued that even those should be analyzed as containing a substantial amount of verbal structure, the behavior of participles in the double perfect and the eventive passive in the varieties under consideration is clearly different. They thus contribute to the typology of adjectival passives in German and beyond and show that the familiar distinction between ‘adjectival’ and ‘verbal’ participles needs to be further refined.

Albrecht DürersVenexian

AbstractAlbrecht Dürer’s use of ›Italian‹ words in his letters from Venice to Willibald Pirckheimer has commonly been dismissed as a curiosity of little consequence – half-understood mangling of a language of which Dürer had only the crudest grasp. This article brings the first systematic analysis of the entire corpus of such material in Dürer’s writings. It shows that his ›Italian‹ lexis is consistently drawn fromVenexian, the early modern regional koiné of Venice. Its accurately registered, heard forms Dürer transcribes into the orthography of Nuremberg’s written German dialect. Apart from loan words and idioms, the corpus includes loan coinages. For these Dürer draws on terms and concepts fromVenexianto devise or refunction German vocabulary which is highly significant in the evolution of his language of art theory and practice.

Language model adaptation for language and dialect identification of text

AbstractThis article describes an unsupervised language model (LM) adaptation approach that can be used to enhance the performance of language identification methods. The approach is applied to a current version of the HeLI language identification method, which is now called HeLI 2.0. We describe the HeLI 2.0 method in detail. The resulting system is evaluated using the datasets from the German dialect identification and Indo-Aryan language identification shared tasks of the VarDial workshops 2017 and 2018. The new approach with LM adaptation provides considerably higher F1-scores than the basic HeLI or HeLI 2.0 methods or the other systems which participated in the shared tasks. The results indicate that unsupervised LM adaptation should be considered as an option in all language identification tasks, especially in those where encountering out-of-domain data is likely.

Combining n-grams and deep convolutional features for language variety classification

AbstractThis paper presents a novel neural architecture capable of outperforming state-of-the-art systems on the task of language variety classification. The architecture is a hybrid that combines character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) features with weighted bag-of-n-grams (BON) features and is therefore capable of leveraging both character-level and document/corpus-level information. We tested the system on the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) language variety benchmark data set from the VarDial 2017 DSL shared task, which contains data from six different language groups, as well as on two smaller data sets (the Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) Corpus and the German Dialect Identification (GDI) Corpus, from the VarDial 2016 ADI and VarDial 2018 GDI shared tasks, respectively). We managed to outperform the winning system in the DSL shared task by a margin of about 0.4 percentage points and the winning system in the ADI shared task by a margin of about 0.2 percentage points in terms of weighted F1 score without conducting any language group-specific parameter tweaking. An ablation study suggests that weighted BON features contribute more to the overall performance of the system than the CNN-based features, which partially explains the uncompetitiveness of deep learning approaches in the past VarDial DSL shared tasks. Finally, we have implemented our system in a workflow, available in the ClowdFlows platform, in order to make it easily available also to the non-programming members of the research community.

Ratings of Affective and Non-Affective Aspects of German Idioms in Second Language Processing

AbstractIn this paper psycholinguistic and emotional properties of 619 German idiomatic expressions are explored. The list of idiomatic expressions has been adapted from Citron et al. (2015), who have used it with German native speakers. In our study the same idioms were evaluated by Slovene learners of German as a foreign language. Our participants rated each idiom for emotional valence, emotional arousal, familiarity, concreteness, ambiguity (literality), semantic transparency and figurativeness. They also had the task to describe the meaning of the German idioms and to rate their confidence about the attributed meaning. The aims of our study were (1) to provide descriptive norms for psycholinguistic and affective properties of a large set of idioms in German as a second language, (2) to explore the relationships between psycholinguistic and affective properties of idioms in German as a second language, and (3) to compare the ratings of the German native speakers studied in Citron et al. (2015) with the ratings of the Slovene second language learners from our study. On one hand, the results of the Slovene participants show many similarities with those of of the German native speakers, on the other hand, they show a slight positivity bias and slightly shallower emotional processing of the German idioms. Our study provides data that could be useful for future studies investigating the role of affect in figurative language in a second language setting (methodology, translation science, language technology).

An Etymological Dog Kennel, or Dog Eat Dog: Icelandic setja upp við dogg, Engl. to lie doggo, Engl. dog, and Engl. it’s raining cats and dogs

There is a rare slangy British English phrase to lie doggo “to lie hid”. The earliest known example is dated in the OED to 1882. Doggo looks like dog + o (with -o, as in weirdo, typo, and so forth), but a formation consisting of an animal name followed by the suffix -o would have no analogs. Some light on the origin of lie doggo may fall from the Modern Icelandic idiom sitja upp við dogg ‘to sit or half-lie, supporting oneself with elbows’. Doggur, known from texts since the eighteenth century, occurs with several other verbs. Also, sitja eins og doggur ‘sit motionless, look distraught’ and vera eins og doggur ‘to be motionless’ exist. Doggur has nothing to do with dogs, because the Scandinavian word for “dog” is hund-. The origin of the English noun dog is obscure, but, contrary to the almost universal opinion, the word is not totally isolated. In some German dialects, the diminutive forms dodel, döggel, and the similar-sounding tiggel ~ teckel occur. Perhaps dog and its continental look-alikes were originally baby words. The same sound complexes as above sometimes mean ‘a cylindrical object’ (such are Icelandic doggur and Middle High German tocke). Two of the basic meanings of those words were probably ‘round stick; doll’. Although the evidence is late, we can risk suggesting that lie doggo also contains the name of some device that was current not too long ago in the European itinerant handymen’s lingua franca. The overall image looks nearly the same as in the phrase dead as a doornail. In English, folk etymology connected doggo with the animal name and misled even professional lexicographers and etymologists. Finally, of some relevance is the English idiom it rains cats and dogs, whose forgotten earliest form was it rains cats and dogs and pitchforks with their points downwards. Apparently, the original idea was that a downpour of sharp objects fell to the ground.

Tradition et innovation dans le codage de langues en contact dans l’idiolecte d’un marchand juif du XVIII e siècle

The encrypted language of a tradesman at the end of the xviiith century.After going bankrupt in 1776, Solomon Hyman gave to the French court his pocket-book, written in Hebrew characters, which had been travelling with him between Paris and London since 1764. He wrote in it several kinds of lists : the toyware he bought in England, the snuffboxes he had painted in Paris, the bills of exchange he received and the debts he had to pay. The language he uses is near of German, but with specific Yiddish words. The names are from English, the decoration from French and the numbers in Hebrew. Their spelling is often mistaken, because of lack of knowledge, but mainly because of his German accent. Only a few lines are in latin characters.

Da nacionalização à escola bilíngue: reflexões sobre a educação linguística em Blumenau/SC

This work is based on the perspective of language as a right, identity of a speech group, immigrants from Europe in the eighteenth century, as well as their descendants. In spite of the processes of unification of the German language linked to the ideal of nationalization, the first in 1911 (by Orestes Guimaraes), and the second during the Estado Novo (1937-1945), the German language and the Teuto-Brazilian culture are still present in modern times. Starting from a literature review, we aim at understanding the new attempts to rescue the German language, as well as the ethnic-cultural maintenance in Blumenau (SC) from the implementation of a bilingual (Portuguese-German) school. Despite the implementation of the bilingual school as an inclusive linguistic policy that seeks to value the language of a minority (German) group, there are still challenges to be overcome: initial and continuing bilingual teacher education and recognition of the German dialect in use by this community.

Digitising Swiss German: how to process and study a polycentric spoken language

Swiss dialects of German are, unlike many dialects of other standardised languages, widely used in everyday communication. Despite this fact, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for linguistic, historic and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source. This work involved a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to motivate the use of the corpus for digital humanities in general and for dialectology in particular.

Pennsylvania Germans, An Interpretive Encyclopedia, by Simon J. Bronner and Joshua R. Brown, editors.

<i>Pennsylvania Germans, An Interpretive Encyclopedia</i>, by Simon J. Bronner and Joshua R. Brown, editors.

Analyzing rhythmic convergence between two Swiss German dialects

With respect to existing evidence of rhythmic adjustments in response to the interlocutor’s idyosincratic characteristics, in the present study, we test whether interlocutors are likely to mutually adapt their rhythmic characteristics over the course of a conversation or after increased exposure to a dialogue partner. To study rhythmic accommodation, we used a corpus of read speech recorded by 18 speakers of two Swiss German dialects—Grison and Zurich German—before and after performing diapix tasks. The two dialects present crucial differences in the durational characteristics of intervocalic sonorants, vowel in open syllable and vowel in final position, thus creating different rhythm in these two dialects. To determine whether Grison and Zurich German speakers produce the rhythmic contrasts more similarly after the diapix tasks, we measured the Euclidean distance within a pair (ddpair) and within an individual (ddspeak) in three ratio measures devised to capture the durational differences between the two dialects. Preliminary results on ddpair have shown that certain durational contrasts are produced more similarly by certain pairs but more differently by other ones. Ratio measure related to the timing properties of vowels in final position does not change drastically before and after the interaction.