Gebrauchsstandard in der deutschen Alltagssprache: Eine integrative Modellierung räumlicher und sozialer Variation

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 heartily 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 variation patterns in colloquial German. Specifically, we analyze ten phonetic 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.