Language geography

The language geography (also areal linguistics, areal of Latin, an area of ​​distribution on ) connects as a branch of linguistics, dialectology with the geography and examines linguistic phenomena in terms of their geographical distribution. The focus of the research are phonetic- phonological, morphological and lexical issues. Serve as a basis collections of oral and written surveys and freely spoken texts; the research results are presented in language atlases in the form of maps, in which the dialectal profile of a number is represented by survey locations. It takes into account historical, cultural, social, and contained also in the language itself factors.

History

The German research direction established itself after Ferdinand Wrede (1863-1934) at the German Linguistic Atlas ( DSA) worked, specializing mainly on the development of dialect maps illustrating the extent and limitation of the dialects. 1908 gave Wrede the series " German dialect geography " out.

The language geography examined systematically and according to maps oriented the local spread of linguistic individual characteristics. These include the use of certain words, sounds and word endings. Prior to the field studies, the linguists have developed special questionnaires that they presented to the dialect speakers to answer. The "ideal dialect speakers " were older, born in each village and raised people who lived withdrawn possible and thus had little contact with the world outside the village for all European evaluations.

Designation

The term areal linguistics was trying the linguistic results of the research diatopischer features of language, linguistic differences between individual regions to unite in itself. The terminological approach failed, however, because the historical ways of speaking and writing styles of the individual dialects, additional features have, which were not considered. It is Diastratie (of the social environment dependent characteristics, such as slang ) and Diaphasie ( from the concrete speech situation -dependent features, such as registers). The study of these phenomena was thus called also dialect geography.

Recent research

Especially in recent years, gaining this sub-discipline of dialectology, which is sometimes equated with this, important. The language typology needs new methods to answer both new and old questions. The language geography to create help to distinguish the random distributions of structural distributions, for example, and to explore the similarity and affiliation factors of languages.

A new issue raised, which employs the Sprachgeografen, is whether there is such a thing as a linguistic "Areal Europe ". It is explored which parameters can determine this and whether Europe can be divided into a linguistic center and a periphery.

Dialect Cartography

The dialect Cartography originally served to illustrate the research findings. The results obtained have been mapped, summarized the cards to language atlases. The lines in the Linguistic Atlas mark, the boundary between two versions of a linguistic feature ( isogloss ). On the other hand, there were significant differences in the published structures, which were based on the differing data collection: The German Linguistic Atlas contains data collected from 1876 to 1939. The data published only in excerpts 1926-1956 to 129 cards contain about 50,000 data points. The 1902-1910 Jules Gilliéron published Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF ) refers to the period 1897-1901 and shows the extent of the dialects on the basis of 638 measurement points on 1421 cards.

So the French Atlas relatively few measurement points but had (villages ), for a comprehensive list of questions, and appeared to thick folios, each issue offered a single card on which the questions were displayed in the phonetic notation. The German Atlas, in turn, was based on a very large measuring point density and a relatively concise questionnaire. Therefore, the works appeared as symbolically encoded single tickets for unfolding. Core point of Wrede's work was firstly illustrate contemporary dialect relationships, on the other hand, the description of the historical and synchronous changes in the dialects. So added the designated as lautgeografisch German Linguistic Atlas soon as a specified wortgeografisch German word atlas to determine dialect- related training room closer. The first linguistic atlas of English-speaking published Hans Kurath ( for New England ).

Both ALF and DSA were milestones, as both facilities enabled groundbreaking findings on history and structures of the relevant language areas. Of course, the atlases could only illustrate a small part of the extensive data collected material, for they were involved in a two-dimensional matrix ( number of measurement points × individual cards ). Making matters worse was that the cards could not be evaluated as a unit, but always isolated from each other. Since the dialect geography only explored the spatial distribution of the dialects, they did not consider dialect- related events such as Diastratie, Diaphasie, or Diatopie ( comparison of individual regions themselves ). With regard to the analysis and visualization diatopischer features makes since the 1970s Dialektometrie Protect Help: New computer-assisted method made ​​it possible to build ( × measurement points atlases ) the necessary matrix and, for example, to evaluate by numerical taxonomy, Taxometrie, automatic classification as a unit and as a means of modern imaging techniques to illustrate cumulative function graphs.

The corresponding special cognitive needs of linguists heuristic processing and presentation from calculated Dialektometrie results, the computerized cartography remains a particular challenge. Linguistics is not finished with the evaluation of the obtained in this way and expected insights both in the dialect geography, as well as in the name of teaching ( onomasiology ), which in turn analyzes the data to date. In addition, the Dialektometrie holds an interdisciplinary joint function and population genetics, human geography, ethnography, transport geography, historical geography and anthropology along- with extensive data.

Swell

• Helmut Glück ( Hrsg.): Metzler Lexikon Sprache. 4th edition; Publisher J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar, 2010, ISBN 3-476-02335-4
• January Goossens: areal linguistics. In: Encyclopedia of Germanic linguistics. 2nd edition. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1980, p 445-453. ISBN 3-484-10391-4