Zur geolinguistischen Erkundung des Atlas zur Salzburger Alltagssprache (ASA): Erste Ergebnisse zu einem zentralen Sprachraum Österreichs.

This chapter is concerned with the application of geolinguistic methods to ‘messy’ data in dialectology. It presents data from an ongoing project, the ‘Atlas of Colloquial German in Salzburg’ (Atlas zur Salzburger Alltagssprache, ASA), which collected data on language use via an online survey similar to the ‘Atlas of Colloquial German’ (Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache, AdA). The questionnaire consisted of 76 items, all of which were presented in a situational context. The goal of the project is to provide a first detailed description of everyday German in the federal state of Salzburg, ranging from more dialectal to standard variants. The present study provides first results and identifies areas with similar diatopic variation in Salzburg via a cluster analysis and a model of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) of a total of approx. 10,000 data sets. So-called ‘Regional Spatial Planning Areas’ (Planungsregionen) prove to be a relevant category in order to account for diatopic variation in the state of Salzburg, with a cluster of more traditional, dialect-oriented areas in the south, a ‘regiolectal’ central area, and a northern urban area encompassing the capital Salzburg City and oriented towards standard German. The chapter shows that even with anonymous and ‘uncontrolled’ data collections the two methods offer a suitable approach towards identifying (geo)linguistic areas (via clustering) as well as transition areas. Ultimately, these methods may prove useful not only for the dialectology of German but for other languages as well.