It also offers perspectives for future research. Intonatorische Verfahren im Deutschen und Italienischen: It transpires that speakers modify the intonation contours of referential utterances to accord with the logic of their intended speech actions. The regulated procedures used to this end are described in an intonation model tracing the production of a target contour as a context-sensitive process. The matching of the intonation procedures with the action-logic categories selected for comparison reveals a high degree of identity between German and Italian. Distinktionen und Synkretismen im Minimalsatz hochdeutscher Dialekte by Stefan Rabanus Book 11 editions published between and in German and held by 97 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.
To reduce investigation of this insight to manageable proportions, researchers have traditionally concentrated on the 'deepest' dialects. But it is increasingly apparent that, although most people still speak with a distinct regional coloring, the new mobility of speakers in recently industrialized and postindustrial societies and the efflorescence of communication technologies cannot be ignored. This has given rise to a reconsideration of the relationship between geographical place and cultural space, and the fundamental link between language and a spatially bounded territory.
An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation seeks to take full account of these developments in a comprehensive, theoretically rich way. The introductory volume examines the concept of space and linguistic approaches to it, the structure and dynamics of language spaces, and relevant research methods. Invited Lecture, University of Cambridge. A new lens for understanding hybrid cultural identities, University of Oxford.
Regional Varieties, language shift and linguistic identities. Association of German Studies, University of Edinburgh. Language Apocalypse — Concerns about Dialect Survival in the 19 th -century. International Conference on Minority Languages. Society for Germanic Linguistics, Banff, Canada. Loetz , University of Zurich.
Organiser and chair of the Linguistic Panel. Germanic Languages and Cultures PI: University of Ulster, Belfast. Organiser of the linguistics panel and local general organisers.
University of Bristol, external funding: Sekretariat Adresse und Anfahrt. Invited submission to Germanistik in Ireland. Projektwebseite Sprachkonflikte in Schleswig-Holstein im A history of the Irish Language. A history of teaching modern languages. Modern Language Review c. Journal of Sociolinguistics b. Jaffe, Alexandra et al.
Orthography as social action. The Modern Language Review a. The Modern Language Review b. Historical Sociolinguistics — Socio-historical linguistics b. Historical Sociolinguistics — Socio-historical linguistics a. The Modern Language Review Studies in Language Vol. Morpho-syntactic stigmatisations from - Death of a Written Dialect. Conferences, Workshops, Lecture Series and Summer schools. Changes of the vowel and consonant system, which had separated OHG from Low German, continued in its regional variants throughout the Middle Ages until a relative stability was reached in the 17th century.
In grammar, the system of tenses and moods continued the development of periphrastic forms of main and auxiliary verbs to express perfect and pluperfect tenses and passive: In the fields of warfare, chivalry, and luxury goods, many words were borrowed from Old French or Provencal; e. From the 12th to the middle of the 14th century, the German-speaking population increased considerably in density and territorial extension.
German princes expanded their realms into Slavonic lands and founded new towns and villages in great numbers, sometimes by invitation of the local rulers. A rather stable German linguistic territory was formed and existed more or less until the first half of the 20th century. This also led to a shift of the influence of the eastern linguistic varieties on the development of German, as documented among others in legal documents for which an increasing number of chanceries Kanzleien.
German During the 16th century, the development of German towards a standard language made remarkable progress. Two factors were of importance: The use of the printing press with movable metal types invented by Johannes Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg, at the middle of the 15th century and the rise of printing houses in several cities around the beginning of the 16th century helped to spread the reformation, including its Calvinistic denomination, all over central Europe. Linguistically this affected, among others, the northern German regions, where East Central German gradually displaced Low German as the standard language of religion and administration.
Protestant pastors preached and prayed in the Lutheran variety of German. The Low German printing centres eventually turned to printing the German texts in their East Central variety. The decline of the Hanse. In the German-speaking South, which had in great part remained catholic excluding the reformed cantons of Switzerland, there were also tendencies of standardizing the written language in a variety sometimes called Common German Gemeines Deutsch.
However, this variety became more and more influenced by the East Central German. Despite these tendencies, the regional and local varieties of the spoken language remained in use, and they did so more or less until the 20th century. In EMHG syntax, the position of the finite verb in main and dependent clauses 2nd and last position, respectively , which is characteristic for Modern German sentences, was stabilized.
Besides Latin that was still the language of education and — in the catholic regions — of the church, now the. The 18th century, finally, brought about an evening out of regional differences of the standard and the establishment of the use of German in all functional domains.
Its use as a medium of literature was strengthened. Among other influences, the exhortations of Leibniz to use German in science and politics, the provocative use of German instead of Latin by the university professor Christian Thomasius , and the terminological work of the philosopher Christian Wolff paved the way for German as the medium also for education, philosophy, science, and public administration.
The further linguistic development favoured the Eastern High German, though some regional differences of the standard have been preserved up to the present. Towards the end of the century, philosophers such as Kant and Herder, writers such as Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, and the many other authors of novels, journals, newspapers, almanacs, and yearbooks could develop their own linguistic creativity on the basis of an established standard language and, thus, became models for the language use of the educated classes. The passive understanding of the.
German standard language improved during the 19th century with the introduction of general mandatory school education in the various German-speaking states, and, consequently, the alphabetization of the majority of the population rose. The standard language was also stabilized and strengthened by dictionaries and grammars that appeared in the course of the 19th century.
As a grossly simplifying illustration of the formal changes of German since the 9th century, here are several short excerpts from different German translations or adaptations of the bible Luke 2. Middle High German Matthias von Beheim, Since the middle of the 20th century, the lexical borrowing from English, that started earlier, has increased considerably.
Symptomatic is the exchange of old loan words from French by anglicisms; e. After earlier futile attempts, a standard orthography was finally resolved at the 2nd Orthographic Conference in Berlin and was officially introduced during the following years into the schools and the public administration of all German-speaking states and regions.
Changes of this norm were proposed and discussed again and again. In , a revised norm was agreed upon by the authorities of the participating countries and regions and — after some slight revisions — officially accepted and introduced into the schools in On demand of the actors of the many theatres in the German-speaking area, there were also attempts to standardize the pronunciation of spoken German towards the end of the 19th century.
In , Theodor Siebs presented. His norm, which was mainly based on the Northern German articulation of the standard language, did not gain the supra-regional acceptance outside the theatres that he had hoped for; however, in a moderate form, the Siebs norm still has some influence on the pronunciation of radio and TV speakers in Germany. In Austria and Switzerland, the orthoepic norms for public use of the standard language differ slightly from the German one. Swiss German is especially determined by a diglossia of the Swiss variety of standard German for written communication Schriftdeutsch and oral use in certain formal situations, on the one hand, and the oral use of the local or regional Alemannic dialect varieties for all other occasions, on the other hand.
The Austrian pronunciation dictionary and the Austrian pronounciation database were published in German is the only national language in Austria, Germany, and Liechtenstein.
Dialectal varieties of German are being used in the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine. The present extension of the German-speaking area in Europe is a result of centuries of territorial developments changes. This area had its largest extension after the expansion and colonisation of German-speaking settlers and migrants in the 13th and 14th centuries. Despite political, military, and economic actions and changes, this area remained more or less constant until the Second World War.
The German-speaking population of the lost regions was forced to move west into the remaining parts of Germany and into Austria. Germany was divided from until The three larger German-speaking countries are immigrant countries with an increasing number of speakers of migrant languages. In Germany, large immigrant communities exist from Turkey about 2 million speakers , former Yugoslavia 1 million , Italy, and Greece. In Austria, both Turkish , speakers and the languages of former Yugoslavia ,, speakers are the most widespread immigrant languages.
So far, none of the migrant languages has gained the status of an acknowledged minority in any of these three. German countries even though their number of speakers surpasses by far the number of the acknowledged minorities. In Germany, five languages share the status of minority or regional language: In Austria, there are six acknowledged minority languages: Switzerland has no acknowledged minority languages but has four national languages German, French, Italian, and Rumantsch. Contrary to Switzerland, which is a multilingual country, both Austria and Germany must be considered as more or less monolingual because of the small number of indigenous minority language speakers , in Austria, , in Germany.
Since German is spreading across the national borders of several countries it is, therefore, considered as a pluricentric language cf. Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, and Belgium are seen as semi-centres because German is not their only official language, they have very few speakers and, they have little or null influence on the general norm of German. The language situation of the national varieties of German NVG is marked by a strong asymmetry.
Germany has about 82 million speakers, Austria 8. The semi-centres have no more than , speakers. The asymmetry is also felt through the influence of TV programmes that can be received via satellite and are viewed in most households in the German-speaking areas. The NVG of German also differ in the way they use the standard language and pan-regional or regional varieties.
The north of Germany uses little or no regional varieties in everyday speech. The regional linguistic identity of the speakers is linked to the specific linguistic variety of the Bundesland federal state or even smaller geographical units. Generally, regional varieties are receding and are being replaced by pan-regional varieties. Carinthia in the south and Tyrol in the west are marked by a strongly regional language form of the Bavarian language type. Vorarlberg, on the other hand, as linguistic region belongs to the Alemannic dialects of German.
Typical for the use of the varieties in the eastern parts. The different regional accents and varieties in Austria have different social prestige. On the lower end of the scale are the Viennese and the Carinthian variety; the varieties of Tyrol and Salzburg are on the upper end. The usage of non-standard varieties in everyday speech situations is normal across all social groups and not socially marked. There is, however, a strong urban-non-urban difference in prestige with non-urban varieties being marked as lower in prestige.
No social group has chosen the Swiss German standard language as the norm for everyday conversations. Swiss German speakers speak vernacular and write in standard language — a situation sociolinguists call medial diglossia. There is no interlanguage between both varieties, and there are only a few domains where the Swiss standard variety is used: In everyday conversation, Swiss German speakers, therefore, use their local variety irrespective of their social status. The NVG are marked by differences on all levels of the linguistic system. There are also differences on the level of pragmatics.
The most striking differences concern the lexicon with lexical fields like food, household goods, furnishing, institutional and legal terminology, etc. The following are some examples for trinational lexical parallel forms with every country having an expression of its own for the same content. There are also binational parallel forms with one country having an expression of its own and the two other countries sharing a common expression.
There are also parallel forms that show only minor differences but are fist candidates to cause problems as they are often assumed to have been a case of misspelling. Pension is in GG restricted for the old age pension of civil servants but not in the two other countries. There are only few differences in syntax. There are also differences in the use of preterit tense and past perfect tense.
There are also substantial differences in pragmatics with Germany and Switzerland showing a high level of directness in conversation, whereas in Austria indirectness, negative politeness, and face saving are important.
In Austria, the teaching of GFL already gained importance in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had 14 official languages but at the same time insisted that all citizens had to learn German alongside their native language The main formal development, which resulted in the morphophonemic separation of the High German varieties from the other Germanic 4 German languages, was the High German sound shift, that is, the gradual change of certain Germanic phonemes into phonetically related ones. Volume 35 Issue 3 Dec , pp. Checkout Your Cart Price. Historische, regionale und funktionale Variation Berlin— New York: Several other consonants also have a limited distribution.
This is also shown by speech-act realisations of requests and apologies. The realisations of apologies of GG are explicit and short. AG apologies are accompanied by long explanations and a tendency to avoid the direct acceptance of responsibility. They are, on the other hand, more hearer-oriented than the GG speakers who prefer a speaker-or object-oriented position. In requests, AG speakers tend to use more modal verb questions, with the verb in the conjunctive, explicit speech act markers bitte , and realisations in the indicative or imperative.
Modal particles like ja, doch, mal, eben, gerade are important politeness markers in GG conversation, but not in AG and only in a reduced way in SG. There are also differences in the use of address forms, the use of academic and specific professional titles which are preferred by AG, but not by GG and SG speakers. A comprehensive overview on substantial lexical differences can be found in Ammon et. Lexical and pragmatic differences are found in Muhr und Schrodt: There are striking differences in the function German has for the identity of the citizens of the three German-speaking countries.
For most Germans, being a German native speaker is an important if not essential part of their personal and national identity. This was even the case when there were two German states: Both defined themselves as German states and German as their national language. The Austrian identity is quite different: Here the citizens define themselves primarily by being members of this nation and not as being the native speakers of a certain language.
The reason for the rejection of the languagebased identity is that this would inevitably undermine the independence of. Austria as a sovereign nation. This has not been wanted ever since , but it has happened before in when Austria was annexed to Germany. The Swiss identity is still different. It is, on the one hand, firmly linked to one of the four national languages of Switzerland culture-based identity and, on the other hand, also linked to the nation as a whole state-based identity.
Institutions and Language Planning. There are no official normative institutions for the German language. Switzerland does not have its own German dictionary; instead, the German German dictionaries are used. In Germany, several institutions divide among themselves functions comparable to those of a language academy. The Goethe-Institut is primarily concerned with the spreading and promoting German in non-German-speaking countries on behalf of the German government.
Thus, it is promoting and regulating language norms via teaching materials and language tests due to its importance as a language testing institution for the German language in Germany. Results are among others a grammar of German in 3 volumes see Zifonun, Hoffmann, Strecker et al.: The IDS is also renowned for the large language corpora that have been collected during the past 40 years. Two other centres for lexicographical description of German are the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie and the Projekt Wortschatz at the University of Leipzig.
German , the larger publicly financed language institutions joined in a network called Deutscher Sprachrat German Language Council with the aim to raise general language awareness in Germany There are two research units of Austrian German.