Standard German Research Articles

The Affricate tsch in the Variants of German: Structure of Words – Structure of Vocabulary

Historically, the German affricate /tʃ/ is an orphan in the German sound system: it has no regular historical sources in older stages of German. Synchronically, in the codified present day standard German vocabulary, it is rather marginal. In dialectal vocabularies, however, words containing /tʃ/ are fairly frequent. In a few cases, /tʃ/ can be traced back to isolated combinatory sound developments. In most cases, however, the origin of/tʃ/ is sound symbolistic word creation or word variation, primarily by onomatopoeia (sound iconism), but also by expressivity (saliency iconism). It is no coincidence that /tʃ/ is so much more frequent in dialectal vocabularies than in standard German. Dialectal vocabulary with words containing /tʃ/ is focussed on everyday experience and is characterized by creativity, irregularity, expressiveness and affectivity, factors that are closely interlinked with each other and essential features of the “language of immediacy” (‘Nähe-Sprache’), i. e. the form of language that is used in intimate personal communication. The diaphasic markedness of /tʃ/ in German explains why it is unfamiliar to the codified standard German, which in principle represents the language of distance.

Фонетические и просодические особенности немецких диалектов в сравнении с литературным немецким языком (на материале кулинарных рецептов)

This article is devoted to the study of the linguo-culture of Russian Germans. The urgency and relevance of the topic motivated by modern realia and language problems at the present stage are shown. The linguistic significance of the study is due to the issue of preserving the linguo-culture, traditions and national identity by Russian Germans. Assimilation processes take on an irreversible character, and continuity in generations is lost. This is reflected in the loss of traditional culture elements and the language of the Germans as well as the perception of the culture- and languagerelated character / specificity of a foreign language environment. Despite the fact that the dialect has been lost by the younger generation, culinary traditions have proven to be one of the most stable elements of the culture of Russian Germans. Cooking recipes are a unique source for studying the phonetic and prosodic features of German dialects. The paper concentrates on the phonetic and prosodic characteristics of the German dialects in comparison to the standard German language (based on the cooking recipes of Russian Germans). For this reason, special attention is paid to the results of the electro-acoustic analysis. The authors calculated and analyzed average values for the basic prosodic characteristics. The material of the study was audio recording of the cooking recipes read by dialect and native speakers. The study of the dialects made it possible to detect deviations from the norm of the standard German language at the phonetic and prosodic levels: shift of vowel and consonant sounds, verb reduction, increased duration of the utterance, comparatively high intensity, relatively smooth movement of the pitch frequency with a decrease toward the end of the phrase. The analysis allowed us to determine key prosodic features of the German dialects (based on the cooking recipes) and map out aspects of their future studying.

LINGUISTIC INTERFERENCE IN GERMAN-UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE IN BUKOVINA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The article is devoted to the language interference study in German-Ukrainian discourse in the early twentieth century, which is based on a comprehensive language analysis of changes in German in the Franz Porubski work "Rund um den Rathausturm und den Pruth", published in 1906. Almost 150 years of German coexistence with other languages, such as Ukrainian, Romanian, Polish, Yiddish and Russian, made its adjustments in the reproduction and language use at that time. The locals knew at least two or three languages, and since German was the state language, it penetrated mostly through the bureaucracy, conscription, press and literature. The beginning of the last century is also characterized by the fact that in Chernivtsi city started developing literary activity. Many authors were multilingual, so the interference phenomena penetrated into their works. The speaker's attempt was to make his own statements based on the native language rules and structure and to establish inappropriate connections between the two languages led to interference. Researchers consider it at the grammatical, lexical and phonological levels. The interlinguistic interference intensity depends on subjective and objective factors that do not affect it. Changes in the Bukovinian Germans speech were due to their long stay in a foreign environment and limited use of their own language. Changes took place at almost all language levels, which influenced the Bukovinian German development. Interference at the lexical level was especially noticeable. German was diluted with local realities, everyday words and interjections. A large part of the borrowed interjections were Ukrainian or Bukovinian equivalents, they were so widespread that they almost replaced the standard German ones. There was also a literal tracing of foreign phrases or morphological changes of different parts of both languages in one expression or sentence.

Die Vokalqualität von Schwa im Schweizerdeutschen

Observations in specialist literature as well as the perception of lay people suggest that in Swiss German dialects in general and even more so in the dialects of Central Switzerland the unaccented vowel in words such as macha (‘make’), which is here referred to as schwa, is not a completely central vowel corresponding to [ə] but is closer to [ae] or [ɛ]. In order to verify whether these observations are correct, recordings from Central Switzerland and Zurich were analyzed and later also compared to recordings of speakers from Germany speaking Standard German. The results show that speakers of both Swiss German dialects pronounce schwa with a more open quality than the speakers from Germany. The analyses of different factors reveal that for the Swiss but not for the Germans the degree of openness of schwa correlates with a more deliberate articulation. It can, therefore, be assumed that the Swiss German schwa’s target is not a completely central but rather a slightly open vowel. Furthermore, in the dialects of Central Switzerland the vowel is articulated with more spread lips than in Zurich German. Nevertheless, the formant values lead to the conclusion that the Swiss German schwa is still fairly central and does not overlap with any front vowels. It is most precisely represented by the phonetic symbol [ɜ].

Tangram adlı ders kitabının plurizentrik öğeler perspektifinde incelenmesi

Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit einer Analyse des Lehrwerks “Tangram“ unter dem Aspekt der Plurizentrität des Deutschen und Landeskunde. Die deutsche Sprache ist eine plurizentrische Sprache. Diese soll einerseits eine Vielfallt für Deutsch, andererseits eine Behandlungsebene im Rahmen der methodischen und didaktischen Vermittlung der deutschen Spracheim Fremdsprachenunterricht betrachtet wird. In diesem Zusammenhang beschäftigen wir uns mit den folgenden Fragestellungen: Welches Deutsch und wie viel Plurizentrik soll im Fremdsprachenunterricht den Deutschlernenden beibringen? Denn wir gehen davon aus, dass die Antworten dieser Fragen dienen sollen, ein respektvolles Verständnis für die Unterschiede des deutschsprachigen Raums zu schaffen. Eine Suche nach der Beantwortung dieser Fragestellungen wird mit Hilfe einer Lehrwerkanalyse gezielt und davon ausgehend besteht die Arbeit aus zwei Teilen, in denen „Plurizentrität“ auf theoretischer und praktischer Ebene erläutert wird. Im theoretischen Teil werden die wichtigsten Grundlagen und Termini des Konzepts „Deutsch als plurizentrische Sprache“ seine sprachdidaktischen Schlussfolgerungen und auch seine Umsetzung im Unterricht erläutert. Im praktischen Teil wird die Umsetzung des plurizentrischen Ansatzes und landeskundliche Anregungen in Tangram 1B nähergebracht sowie auch kurze Beschreibung des Aufbaus und Konzept von Tangram geliefert. Wir hoffen, dass diese Lehrwerkanalyse unter den oben genannten Aspekten einen bedeutenden Beitrag zur Auswahl des Lehrwerkes im DaF Bereich leisten kann.

Linguistic discrimination across neighbourhoods

This paper reports on the effects of foreign accents and names on the chance of receiving an apartment viewing in the city of Bremen in Germany. Almost 300 phone calls were placed in four different city districts with a Turkish, USAmerican and German name and accent and a Turkish name and Standard German. The analysis shows intra-urban differences: in the more prestigious neighbourhood, Turkish-accented callers had significantly lower chances of getting a viewing. In all but one city district, the Standard German callers received the most viewing appointments, and the American English-accented callers had more chances than the Turkish callers speaking Standard German. A discourse analysis of an excerpt from an apartment application conversation shows how power relations are reproduced at a discourse level. Overall, this study confirms that gatekeeping selection processes via linguistic profiling can lead to the maintenance of ethnolinguistic boundaries and segregation within the city.

Bilingualism and the Serbo-German Bilingual Community of Serbs in Ingolstadt

In this study we represent the bilingual language situation in the ethnolinguistic community of Serbs in Ingolstadt, recorded over the period of time from 2010 until 2013. The paper also addresses the occurrences of bilingualism and diglossia in the context of contact linguistics, their classification, as well as the samples of bilingualism in the researched corpus, with the accompanying phenomena of language contact. The obtained cross-section of the sociolinguistic and linguistic situation of the researched ethnolinguistic community, as well as the research results, refer to the specific community and specific corpus. Nonetheless, obtained results with certainty allow introspect into the life cycle dynamics tendency for the Serbo-German bilingual communities. Reflecting upon the research results we may conclude that our investigated sample, which can expand onto the entire research corpus, can be regarded as being almost in the second last phase of the language change process. A rather significant part of the corpus in the further development of the language change process would certainly be the third generation of working migrants. Further direction of the bilingual community development will most likely be dependent upon this generation, as well as other accompanying factors.
 In the researched sample we can observe different percentual representation of balanced bilinguals and dominant bilinguals, as well as passive and receptive bilinguals. The fact that there is a significant percentual presence of passive and receptive bilinguals among the third group of migrants explains the situation that one part of the second generation of working migrants in the researched community is powerless before the pressure of social networks, economic and social relations that we find in the social majority group. They abandon teaching their children the Serbian language, and they perceive the German language as the capital asset through which those who belong to the third generation of working migrants can gain top positions in the education system and in the market as well.
 In the language practice of bilingual speakers there is the phenomenon of language contact from the first to the third generation, specifically in the occurrence of transference (mixing of two language systems on the basis of phonetics, morphology, syntax) or in code switching (mixing of two languages from the communicative aspect). Transference, as a phenomenon in the direct and indirect language contact, may have multiple results which will be considered in future papers on the issue of language contact phenomenon.
 Finally, under the environmental effect (standard German language, German dialects), as well as the effect of different language community dialects the members of the first generation of working migrants come from, a new language is developed. This new language cannot be called the Serbian language spoken by the Serbs in the homeland but namely we propose a new term Serbian diaspora language in Germany. This language as such is then transferred onto the new generations and/or its use declines in one and sustains in other domains. Ultimately, at the end of this process, as many contact linguistic researches have illustrated, an inevitable situation may occur where a life cycle of the bilingual community might come to an end and there might be a complete language change of the minority with the majority community.

Jojo Rabbit

Jojo Rabbit Benjamin Franz Jojo Rabbit 2019 Written and Directed by Taika Waititi Distributed by Fox Searchlight www.foxsearchlight.com/jojorabbit 108 minutes From the opening bars of the Beatles German language version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (Ich möchte deine Hand halten), you know you are in for a genre-blending, mind blowing snarky pop powered treat. Jojo Rabbit is candidly Taika Waititi's latest offering in his quest to supplant all his predecessors as the master of satire. A pastiche of several directors' worth of style and trademarked signatures, Jojo Rabbit is a wonderful dark comedic satire set during the last days of the Third Reich. Adapted from the novel, Caging Skies (Christine Leunen 2008), Jojo Rabbit seeks to present us a totalitarian, fascist regime as we have rarely experienced it before: through the eyes of an 11-year- old boy. Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is a standard issue German blonde with piercing blue eyes. A genetic affirmation of the Aryan supremacy of Germans, Jojo automatically skewers that impression by proving to be your standard issue outcast and runt. While he may present the features the Fuhrer was most impressed with, he in no way impresses anyone as a stalwart Aryan hero. In his first major sequence, Jojo manages to stab himself with his knife, fail to kill a rabbit, and injure himself recklessly flinging a lit grenade, only to have it ricochet and severely scar and deform his perfect little alabaster body. Despite these many setbacks, Jojo does have a few things going for him: his ever supportive mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson); his best friend, Yorki (Archie Yates); and his imaginary friendship with The Fuhrer himself, Adolf (Taika Waititi, in a comedic tour de force performance). Between these three relationships, Jojo manages to develop the sense of self necessary to stay alive during the most precarious and risky time in Berlin. If it wasn't for the Jew hiding in the wall behind his dead sister Inge's bedroom (very capably portrayed by Thomasin McKenzie), Jojo's life would be about as perfect as life in a city running out of food can be. It's this off relationship, Jojo coming to grips with Elsa, the Jewish girl in question that powers the drama of the film. After all, while Jews are meant to be rounded up and shot, if one were discovered to be helping a Jew in any way, they too would be eliminated. You may be wondering at this time, how such a dark premise can be lightened with laughter. This is the special alchemy of Waititi. Waititi very wisely did a deep study of Berlin during the war years. He has clearly examined the Nazi structures, and how the Third Reich functioned. In this way, he is able to extract the most ridiculous, surreal behaviors of the Nazis and create a farcical absurdity to the otherwise deadly serious setting. Hunting lore instructs a beast is at its most dangerous when it's cornered, and several times in the cinematic text, we learn the Russians, English, and Americans are all converging on Berlin. However, for most of the people Jojo interacts with, this prospect of imminent invasion feels a little bit distanced; it's removed from the immediate concerns of discovering treacherous Germans and making preparations for a siege of their fair city. During the war years, Berlin was very lovely. In his film, Waititi chooses to paint the German capital with the bright pastel colors of the Wes Anderson palate. In fact, most dialogue scenes are shot [End Page 34] directly head-on, with the forced perspective famed in all Anderson films. Further, the entire soundtrack is a mix tape of popular rock songs translated to German. This deepens the extensive cribbing of Anderson's signatures, but also makes a grand Germanic context for the film. It is especially noteworthy, despite the predominantly German and American cast, every character speaks with a perfectly clipped High German accent. It's a moment of revelatory wonder. Finally, a film set in Eastern Europe, and not one character sounds in any way English, American, or even Kiwi. Great props must be extended for the...

Geschriebener Dialekt in Südtiroler Facebook-Texten

This case study deals with the reflexes of unaccentuated, word-final Standard German -er in multisyllabic words, attested in German Facebook texts written by South Tyrolean Facebook users with German as (one of) their first language(s). After preliminary considerations for the analysis of written language and a presentation of the corpus, linguistic data will be related to metadata on texts and users, taking spatial, social and situational criteria into account, in this way assigning particular variants to particular varieties.

Das Augenblickchen und das Stückelchen.

This study deals with the diminutive suffixes -chen and -elchen in the Moselfranconian base dialects on both sides of the Luxo-German state border. It covers the entirety of the state of Luxembourg as well as the Moselfranconian dialects of German within the area of investigation of the Linguistic Atlas of the Central Rhine (MRhSA). The study examines the Wenker questionnaires from the end of the 19th century that were collected by Georg Wenker and John Meier as well as a second and third series of data in the form of Wenker questionnaires that were collected in the 1920s by Richard Huss and data from the MRhSA collected in the 1980s. Building on Edelhoff (2016), who analyses the development of diminutive plurals and plural diminutives in German and Luxemburgish dialects, and Edelhoff (2017a, 2017b) this study provides a closer look on the forms of the diminutive suffix in the singular, particularly of the two lexemes Augenblickchen ,moment.dim’ and Stückchen ,piece.dim’. It is not only a matter of general concern to show the spatial distribution of the suffix forms ‑chen and ‑elchen in the base dialects, but it attempts to shed some light on language-dynamic processes taking place. Specifically, this involves taking a closer look at the following questions: 1) Can language change in the direction of the prestige variety of Central Luxemburgish on the Luxemburgish and in the direction of Standard German on the German side of the state border be shown, in the sense of the Language Dynamics Approach (Schmidt/Herrgen 2011)? 2) Can Edelhoff’s (2016) constatation that the state border has become a dialect border with regard to the use of the diminutive plural suffix also be demonstrated for the diminutive singular suffix variants ‑chen and ‑elchen? 3) Is there geolinguistic evidence for the thesis that the morphological variant ‑elchen is a fusion of the suffixes -lein and -chen? This article provides a preliminary answer to these questions and sketches some lines of inquiry for future research.

Grenzüberschreitende Identitäten im badischen Oberrheingebiet: Unterschiede in der Konstruktion sprachlicher und regionaler Verbundenheit mit dem Elsass

Based on a qualitative analysis of 127 sociolinguistic interviews with speakers of Alemannic from 22 villages and towns along the Franco-German border at the Upper Rhine in Baden (Germany), this contribution investigates the construction of trans-border identities. The paper explores how Badeners perceive the relationship with Alsace (France) with regard to three thematic fields: 1) regional ties with Alsace, 2) language choice in communication across the border, and 3) comprehension of the Alsatian dialect.
 Two factors are shown to play a major role for the construction of trans-border identities. First, identities vary between regions, which can be explained by historical differences, especially with respect to political circumstances. The closer the historical relationship between the respective region and Alsace, the stronger the trans-border identity. Second, there is an influence of the geographical distance to the border. The closer a village is located to the border (the Rhine), the stronger the (self- and other-)ascription of linguistic and regional ties to Alsace.
 Furthermore, analysis reveals a correlation between the perception of regional ties to Alsace and language choice in trans-border communication: Persons who construct a shared regional cohesiveness across the border tend to use the Alemannic dialect when interacting with Alsatians, whereas persons who do not perceive such a cohesiveness mainly use Standard German or French.

Alemannisch und der Deutschunterricht.

In this contribution, I describe the evolution of the role that Alemannic dialects and Standard High German play in the Swiss German educational context. Drawing on a content analysis of a collection of school-related documents from 1950 to 2014, I describe the change in the roles attributed to dialects and the standard language, respectively. The task of German-language education shifts from the two-fold goal of teaching standard-language literacy and cultivating the “pure” dialect in the 1950s to a clear prioritization of standard language skills both in orality and in literacy towards the end of the twentieth century. I discuss these changes in relation to the backdrop of the media discourse on identity, language, multilingual education, language norms, and other social issues such as migration.

Competing norms of standard pronunciation. Phonetic analyses on the ‹-ig›-variation in Austria

AbstractThis paper focuses on phonetic variation within the standard German language register of Austria. While the norm status and a high socio-symbolic value are attributed to certain lexical variants of standard language in Austria, the norm and usage status of characteristic phonetic properties remain unclear, due to lack of empirical analyses. By investigating the relation between standard language norms and “standard usage” (Gebrauchsstandard) in Austria, our study aims to close this research gap by using the example of unstressed ‹-ig›. The analyses are based on data gathered from 52 speakers from two generations, covering all Austrian dialect regions. Elicitation settings varied from strongly standardized tasks with a graphic or visual stimulus (reading aloud tasks, picture naming tasks) to translation tasks (translation from dialect into standard) with oral stimuli. The results demonstrate that although ‹-ig› is predominantly pronounced like [ɪk], (socio-)linguistic factors as phonetic context, part of speech, setting, gender and regional background influence the ‹-ig›-variation. In total, the data suggest that German speaking Austrians are situated in a conflict between transnationally diverging norms and intra-nationally varying model speakers of German.

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.

Wat mutt, dat mutt*

Abstract The squib investigates the dialectal distribution of the Dutch construction type het kan/mag/moet, lit. ‘it can/may/must’, where a modal verb occurs ‘independently’ with an eventive subject and no infinitival complement. The construction is shown to be widely attested not only in traditional dialects of Dutch, but also in Frisian, Low German, and Afrikaans. We suggest that the construction, which does not occur in standard German or English, is an areal feature shared by the West Germanic vernaculars of northwestern Germany and the Low Countries, including the South African ‘side branch’ Afrikaans.

Systematic Interpretation and the Re-systematization of Law: The Problem, Co-requisites, a Solution, Use

A renewed search for legal certainty is a reaction to the preponderance of judge made law, which has been in turn prompted by the democratic deficit of the EU and the impact of Anglo-American law. The problem is that the search is oblivious to both systematic interpretation and the need of re-systematization of law. The paper defines systematic interpretation, relates the definition to standard French and German conceptions, indicates the room for systematic interpretation in Anglo-American laws, and states prima facie reasons for a re-systematization of law as a prerequisite of systematic interpretation. The problem cannot be appreciated outside its proper context. It is a disregard for causation and evaluation. Hence the paper outlines Aristotle’s understanding of causation and evaluation in his presentation of phronesis, reconsiders continental European legal thought in the light of Aristotle’s presentation, and offers policy-oriented jurisprudence as a remedy to the deficit of evaluation and causation in European legal thought. A solution to the problem offers a typology of criteria and clarifies positive and fundamental legal concepts, positive and fundamental criteria of systematization, and the place of criteria in knowledge of law. The usefulness of the criteria is demonstrated by a common approach to the systematization of law and an alternative diagnosis of a defect of systematization diagnosed by an authority in history and philosophy of law rather than legal theory.

Oral proficiency development of K-4 learners of the Swiss two-way immersion program FiBi (Filière Bilingue) in a highly multicultural context

ABSTRACT The Filière Bilingue (FiBi) is a Swiss public two-way immersion program integrating French-speaking, German-speaking and allophone learners (having neither French nor German as an L1) in each class. Located in the bilingual city of Biel/ Bienne, the diglossic situation represented by the use of Swiss German and standard German results in francophone students learning both the dialect and the standard language up to a certain degree. In school, standard German is gradually introduced and exclusively used to teaching from Grade 1 on. Our longitudinal study reports findings from statistical analyses of FiBi learners’ oral proficiency development in French and German (n = 138) and their monolingually taught peers (n = 94) by means of 1173 interviews during their first four years (K-4). Findings show that FiBi learners’ performance in their registration language is significantly higher than in control classes during Kindergarten. Allophone learners’ performance of both groups impressively increases but FiBi allophone learners’ performance appears to be significantly higher compared to their monolingually taught peers. Regarding the partner language, performance in French of K-4 German-speaking FiBi learners impressively improves. Probably due to the diglossia, performance in German of French-speaking FiBi learners also significantly increases although less impressively. To conclude specific pedagogical implications are discussed.

Diglossia and Local Identity: Swiss German in the Linguistic Landscape of Kleinbasel (Asian Perspectives)

The city of Basel is situated in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, in the geographic triangle of three countries: France, Germany and Switzerland. Everyday urban life is characterised by the presence of Standard German and Swiss German as well as diverse migrant languages. Swiss German is ‘an umbrella term for several Alemannic dialects’ (Stepkowska 2012, 202) which differ from Standard German in terms of phonetics, semantics, lexis, and grammar and has no standard written form. Swiss German is predominantly used in oral forms, and Standard German in written communication. Furthermore, an amalgamation of bilingualism and diglossia (Stepkowska 2012, 208) distinguishes the specific linguistic situation, which indicates amongst other things the high prestige of Swiss German in everyday life. To explore the visibility and vitality of Swiss German in the public display of written language, we examined the linguistic landscape of a superdiverse neighbourhood of Basel, and investigated language power and the story beyond the sign – ‘stories about the cultural, historical, political and social backgrounds of a certain space’ (Blommaert 2013, 41). Our exploration was guided by the question: How do linguistic artefacts – such as official, commercial, and private signs – represent the diglossic situation and the relation between language and identity in Kleinbasel? Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study, a corpus was compiled comprising 300 digital images of written artefacts in Kleinbasel. Participant observation and focus group discussions about particular images were conducted and analysed using grounded theory (Charmaz 2006) and visual ethnography (Pink 2006). In our paper, we focus on signs in Swiss German and focus group discussions on these images. Initial analyses have produced two surprising findings; firstly, the visibility and the perception of Swiss German as a marker of local identity; secondly, the specific context of their display.

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.

Debunking “pluri-areality”: On the pluricentric perspective of national varieties

AbstractPluricentric approaches to international varieties have been a mainstay in English dialectology since the 1980s, often implied rather than expressed. What is standard lore in many philologies is today questioned in one philology, however. This paper assesses the pros and cons of the so-called “pluri-areal” perspective, which has in the past few years become prominent in German dialectology. Intended to replace the pluricentric model, “pluri-arealist” perspectives affect the modelling of German standard varieties in Austria and Switzerland, among others. Attempting to falsify claims on both sides, this paper argues from an English-German comparative perspective that the idiosyncratic treatment of national varieties in one context is a problem that threatens the unity of the field regarding how the standard is seen in relation to other varieties. It is shown that the base of the “pluri-areal” paradigm is an a-theoretical perspective of geographical variation that adheres implicitly to aOne Standard German Axiom. This meta-theoretical paper suggests three principles to prevent such terminologically-fuelled confusion henceforth.