„regionalsprache.de“

The “Competence Center for Electronic Indexing Processes in the Humanities” at Trier University cooperates with the Marburg research center “German Language Atlas”. Since the beginning of 2008, the major humanities project to research the German regional language has been underway, which the Federal-State Commission, as sponsor of the Academies of Science, will fund with 14 million euros over a period of 19 years. The “regionalssprache.de” project was applied for by the “Deutscher Sprachatlas” research center at the Philipps University in Marburg in cooperation with the Trier “Competence Center for Electronic Indexing and Publication Processes in the Humanities”. The Trier University President Prof. Dr. At the working meeting at the beginning of the week, Peter Schwenkmezger emphasized that “this collaboration particularly emphasizes and sharpens the humanities research profile of Trier University”.

The aim of the "regionalssprache.de" project is to collect and comprehensively analyze regional language variations in Germany. Traditional dialects are dying out, according to the observation of linguists, but standard German is by no means taking its place as previously assumed. Rather, the majority speaks a regionally colored language that alternates between local dialects and supra-regional high-level language. Comprehensive documentation and analysis of the development of these regional languages ​​is the ambitious undertaking of the project. For this purpose, a research platform will be created on the Internet, which opens up linguistic change by merging dialectological, sociolinguistic and variation-linguistic information.

The Trier subject Older German Philology and the Competence Center under the direction of Prof. Dr. As a cooperation partner, Claudine Moulin represent the dialect lexicographical and linguistic historical components of the large-scale project by researching language variants from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Trier linguists have shown themselves to be potent cooperation partners in several ways. You have not only digitized a number of regional-language dictionaries of the southwest - such as the Palatinate and Rhenish dictionary - and linked them together with other dictionaries in an electronic network. The competence center also has many years of developed expertise in the humanities use of modern electronic technologies. As the Marburg project manager Prof. Dr. Jürgen Erich Schmidt emphasized that both research groups involved are among the “pioneers” in this field.

The first results of the research cooperation are already available on the Internet: At www.diwa.info you can research the maps of the Palatinate Dictionary digitized and processed in Trier together with the huge inventory of maps of the Digital Wenkeratlas and use them for comparative research.

Contact and information
Prof Dr Claudine Moulin
University of Trier
FB II, Older German Philology
Competence center for electronic cataloging and publication processes in the humanities
Tel. 0049- (0) 651-201-2305 or -2321
Email: moulin [at] uni-trier.de (moulin[at]uni-trier[dot]de)