Areal microvariation in German-speaking conurbations (Ruhr Area, Berlin, and Vienna)

This article focuses on spatial and social variation in the colloquial everyday speech of three German-speaking urban areas. The basic question is whether geographical variation (of the kind that is commonly observed in studies on dialect variation in large areas) is detectable in the reported everyday speech of the spatially much smaller, but denser urban areas as well. To this end, we use methods from quantitative dialectology to examine the patterns of variation in the Ruhr Area, Berlin, and Vienna. The respective analyses of the spatial patterns of 245 linguistic variables from a total number of 4,251 informants yield clear – but remarkably distinct – patterns of areal variation for each of these three urban areas. To account for those differences, social variables are factored in.