regionalsprache.de (REDE)

The aim of the project regionalsprache.de (REDE) is to remedy two of the most serious desiderata in the long history of German language research: Firstly, although the basic German dialects have been intensively researched for 180 years (Schmeller 1821), there are no comprehensive descriptions of the "modern regional languages", i.e. the linguistic variation areas that represent the spoken everyday language of most language users today. Secondly, there is no information structure that allows the numerous research materials and results of the past to be directly linked to each other and to newly document modern regional languages, and to be analytically integrated. The aim of the project is therefore to systematically catalogue the modern regional languages of German for the first time.

This comprehensive goal is divided into two sub-goals:

1. Establishment of a research-oriented information system on the modern regional languages of German, in which the immense data sets of dialectological, sociolinguistic and variationist linguistic research available to date are bundled, correlated and thus made available to researchers for systematic comparative analyses and to the public as a source of information.

2. Initial documentation and analysis of the variationist structure and dynamics of the modern German regional languages. For this purpose, the variation space that characterises these modern regional languages and which is constituted by the elements “regional accent” (closest to the standard), “dialect” (furthest from the standard) and an intermediate variety complex, is documented and analysed. 

The technical basis and data foundation of the project is the "Digital Wenker Atlas", the online publication of the oldest and, in terms of data volume and local network density, still largest language atlas in the world. The online publication, which has been in development since 2001, is internationally regarded as the most technically advanced and linguistically best developed language atlas. On this basis, the "regionalsprache.de” (REDE) project aims to linguistically explore the entire spoken language system of a cultural language and comprehensively document it in its vertical, spatial and temporal dimensions.