Zum variationslinguistischen Verhältnis von Stadt und Land: Ein Beitrag zu einer sprachlichen Raumtopologie am Beispiel Österreichs

In this paper, we explore the geolinguistic relationship between urban and rural areas through the conceptualisation and modeling of spatial topologies. Geolinguistic topologies concern the structure of the mutual linguistic relationship between localities. They can be defined either deductively or on the basis of empirical data and represent the linguistic similarities or distances between localities. We operationalise and apply several such topological models to Austrian data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA), a linguistic atlas documenting colloquial German using crowd-sourcing methods. The results are evaluated on the basis of statistical examination and of visualisations of the topological relationships predicted by the models. It is confirmed that linguistic similarity is determined both by geographical distance and by the distribution of population, but the exact relationship is complex: Not only do smaller geographic distances on the one hand and higher population numbers on the other hand bring about increased linguistic similarity; the relevance of these two factors for linguistic similarity varies with population size, too, such that linguistic relationships between cities are determined more by their size and less by their distance, while for smaller locations the opposite is true. Hence, no single topological model can be identified as superior; instead, the individual models emphasise different aspects of the linguistic relationship between urban and regional language usage.