Phonological, morphological and lexical variation in spoken German language

Livia GYULAI

(University of Szeged, Department of General Linguistics)
gy.livus@gmail.com

 

Keywords: German; variation; pluricentric language; pluriareality

The aim of my research is to observe phonological, morphological and lexical variation across different national varieties of the general German language based on Stephan Elspaß and Robert Möller's "Atlas zur deutschen Alltagsspache" (http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/). In a pluricentric framework I analyse the German (spoken in Germany) variety as a dominant, and the Swiss and Austrian ones as non-dominant varieties.

In the first part of my paper I expose the theoretical background concerning the pluricentric features of German with the help of two studies: one of them was written by Michael Clyne (2000), the other by Regula Schmidlin (2001). Both authors acknowledge German as a pluricentric language in many aspects, but I study only three aspects of the variation of German. These three aspects are the phonology, morphology and lexicon of these varieties.

The second part of my study is the practical chapter, because at this point I analyse concrete examples from the spoken German language with respect to the varieties mentioned above. My examples from the spoken language are from Elspaß and Möller's "Atlas zur deutschen Alltagsspache" (http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/). The collection presents a lot of variants of standard expressions also on maps, so the reader can see where the different variants are used. The data came from native speakers who filled in questionnaires according to their dialects.

Finally, let me summarize the findings of my research. I analysed different expressions from spoken German language to see how variation works on different levels of the language. As the primary result of my study I could observe that there is a lot of phonological variation in the German language. This kind of variation can be found in the case of almost every example I analysed. However, it seems that morphological variation is quite rare, in spite of the fact that German is an inflected language. Finally, the most instances of variation manifest themselves on the lexical level. As far as dominant and non-dominant varieties are concerned, I differentiated these according to my findings geographically: non-dominant varieties (Swiss and Austrian German) often constitute one unit because very often the Swiss and the Austrian variants are the same. Another important finding is that the borderline which separates the variants geographically seems to be within Germany: it runs along the cities of Mainz and Würzburg. This finding suggests that the pluricentricity of the German language is not necessarily to be understood to mean plurinationality, but rather pluriareality in a large number of cases, since the borderlines that separate the individual varieties do not necessarily co-occur with the political borders. This is also completely in line with what — among others —one of the authors of the aforementioned atlas argues (cf. Elspaß et al 2017:5), and should not be seen as an argument that excludes the concept of the pluricentricity of the German language, but rather as one that refines it.

Bibliography:

Clyne, Michael (2000): Varianten des Deutschen in den Staaten mit vorwiegend deutschsprachiger Bevölkerung. In: Sprachgeschichte: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung, hg. v. Werner Besch et al., 2. Aufl., Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 2, Berlin: de Gruyter, Bd. 2, 2008-2016.

Elspaß, Stephan und Robert, Möller (o.J.). Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA). http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/

Elspaß, Stephan / Christa Dürscheid / Arne Ziegler: Zur grammatischen Pluriarealität der deutschen Gebrauchsstandards — oder: Über die Grenzen des Plurizentrizitätsbegriffs. In: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 2017. Thematisches Sonderheft: „Das Deutsche als plurizentrische Sprache. Ansprüche — Ergebnisse — Perspektiven", hg. von Heinz Sieburg und Hans-Joachim Solms, 69-91.

Schmidlin, Regula (2011). Die Vielfalt des Deutschen: Standard und Variation: Gebrauch, Einschätzung und Kodifizierung einer plurizentrischen Sprache. Studia Linguistica Germanica 106. Berlin: de Gruyter.