German today : an extensive speech data collection in the German speaking area of Europe

Konferenzbeitrag

The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-) standard German spoken by young and older educated adults, and to identify and locate the regional features. To this end, an extensive corpus of read and spontaneous speech is currently being compiled. German is a so-called pluricentric language. With our corpus we aim to determine whether national or regional standards really exist. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus will enable us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in the domain of the German standard language. The main focus of all research questions is on phonetic variation (lexical variation is only of minor interest). Read and spontaneous speech of four secondary school students (aged seventeen to twenty) and two fifty- to sixt-year-olds is recorded in 160 cities throughout the German-speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and word lists, name pictures, translate from English, and take part in a sociobiographic interview and a map task experiment. The resulting corpus will comprise over 1000 hours of orthographically and (in part) phonetically transcribed speech.

Object Details

• Language: Deutsch

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Deutsch ; Standardsprache ; Gesprochene Sprache ; Regionalsprache ; Korpus <Linguistik> ; Gebrauch des Standard-Deutsch

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Knöbl, Ralf ; Kleiner, Stefan ; Brinckmann, Caren ; Berend, Nina
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (when): 2014-07-21

Further information

• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-28919
• Last update: 06.03.2025, 9:00 AM CET