More than Dialect Relics: Regional Variation in Contemporary German

Abstract

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.