Variation in Alemannic. Geo-linguistic and dialectometrical studies of the historical dialect in Baden and Alsace on the basis of the rediscovered questionnaires of F. Maurer

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Peter Auer; Professor Dr. Alfred Lameli
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 452440801

In this project we suggest to investigate systematically and for the first time the early 20th century dialects of one part of the historical German language area from a social dialectological perspective, using dialectometrical methods. The empirical basis will be a set of approximately 2500 dialect questionnaires, recently rediscovered at Freiburg university. The questionnaires result from a survey conducted under the direction of Friedrich Maurer in 1941 in the entire ‘Gau Baden-Elsass’. We intend to digitize the full set of data and use the data for research in the following three areas: (1) From a dialectological point of view, the material offers rich possibilities of investigating the spatial structuring of the dialects at the time, for instance the impact of the Rhine border and the (still poorly understood) structure of the Alemannic-Franconian transition area. The material is suited for both the analysis of individual dialect phenomena and for aggregated data analyses; by comparing it with older and more recent data it allows the precise reconstruction of dialect change in the last century. (2) The survey included social parameters of the respondents (such as, in addition to age and occupation, their mobility) and the survey sites (e.g., the proportion of farmers and workers). The aggregated data therefore make it possible to test socio-dialectological hypotheses on the geographical distribution of linguistic innovations and thus on language change, which cannot be tested with other historical dialectological data sets. (3) In addition, the questionnaires offer, for the first time, the possibility of studying the reliability for the indirect survey method by comparison with the data of the Deutscher Wortatlas, which was conducted at the same time and in the same sites using the identical survey method (appr. one third of the lexical queries overlap). The project can therefore make an important methodological contribution to an empirically oriented diachronic dialectology. The survey’s metadata also allow testing the impact of the precise way in which the school teachers provided the questionnaire responses (response by the teacher himself, response by the pupils, response by older villagers). The digitized materials will be freely available to other researchers. In the long term, the data will become part of an information system in which they will be linked to other data sets from south-west Germany and Alsace.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants