Areal microvariation in German-speaking conurbations

Description

While many studies on areal variation focus on large regions of countries, research on areal variation on a geographically smaller scale is rare. In this talk, we investigate areal small-scale variation in German-speaking conurbations. By applying quantitative methods to fine-grained data from surveys on colloquial German, we examine the small-scale spatial variation in densely populated urban areas (with a focus on Berlin, the Ruhr region, and Vienna). Small-scale dialectometrical studies (< 20 km) are rare, and the few studies in this field (see especially Stanford 2012) have mostly been limited to cases of strong base-dialectal variation and/or geographic obstacles (e.g. Jeszenszky et al. forthcoming), where substantial systemic differences were to be expected. In our study, however, we employ methods originating in data mining, suitable to detect relatively small amounts of variation (see Pröll et al. 2015). Based on these purely empirical / descriptive results of our study, we will then discuss the issues that arise from them: Do these findings point to the existence of small-scale linguistic areas in urban, or is there no evidence for spatial structures in the linguistic variation in cities? Our concluding remarks will link these results to theoretical models of cities as loci and sources of language variation and change. References Pröll, Simon / Pickl, Simon / Spettl, Aaron / Schmidt, Volker / Spodarev, Evgeny / Elspaß, Stephan / König, Werner (2015): Neue Dialektometrie mit Methoden der stochastischen Bildanalyse. In: Kehrein, Roland / Lameli, Alfred / Rabanus, Stefan (eds.): Regionale Variation des Deutschen. Projekte und Perspektiven. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 173–194. Stanford, James N (2012): One size fits all? Dialectometry in a small clan-based indigenous society. In: Language Variation and Change 24(2). 247–278. Jeszenszky, Péter / Stöckle, Philipp / Glaser, Elvira / Weibel, Robert (forthcoming): Exploring global and local patterns in the correlation of geographic distances and morphosyntactic variation in Swiss German. In: Journal of Linguistic Geography.

Period	1 Nov 2018
Event title	Urban Language Research. Variation - Contact - Perception
Event type	Conference
Organiser	University of Graz
Location	Graz, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International