| Professor Dr. Wolfgang Näser |
The German dialects or Mundarten are as old as interesting. They are vivid
and
colurful, powerful and expressive of all sorts of utterances, be it grief
or
joy, humour or the philosophy of life. Initiated by the second sound shift
progressing north like a tidal wave three main regions were formed with a
lot of
local dialects in each of them. In 1300 Hugo von Trimberg first tried to
classify
areal languages. In the 16th century Luther's regional variant became
normative
and the prototype of our present-day standard German. As independent systems
all
dialects are equivalent so each of them hypothetically could have been
chosen as
the standard language. A hundred years ago there was the saying that German dialects were
dying out but they have remained alive and active as bases of
regional cultures, traditions, and identities; up to now they have been present in the media and
there
is a high-level German dialect poetry, too. What we know about dialects,
their
features and their classification we owe to Georg Wenker and linguistic
geography which initiated complex dialect atlases all over the world. 19th
and
20th century linguists tried to form paradigmatic systems and theories on
the
rise and types of dialects. On the other hand a dialect can be understood
and
detected only when it is acoustically perceived, which I
will
demonstrate using historical and present-day samples in this lecture. |