Crowd-sourcing approaches to the study of German

The chapter presents and discusses crowdsourcing approaches to the study of variation in German. After a short introduction and a section presenting the specifics of crowdsourcing in linguistic research, some general features of crowdsourcing approaches in variationist linguistics of German will be sketched. The chapter then focuses on methodological issues, such as the motivation of participants, the composition of samples and the general design of projects which collect data using multiple-choice questions/questionnairesand discusses the reliability of ‘big’ data obtained through crowdsourcing. In the final part, selected recent and ongoing projects from the German-language area, Luxembourg and the Alpine regions and their results are presented in an overview. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the major benefits and challenges of crowdsourcing approaches in variationist linguistics.