KLAUS GEYER

University of Southern Denmark in Odense

Research areas: language variation, substandard varieties, digital pragmatics, media linguistics, gender linguistics, German as a foreign language, professional communication, audiovisual translation.

DOI: doi.org/10.35321/all83-12

WHAT CAN BE LEARNED FROM DIALECT LANGUAGE GUIDES FOR NON-SPECIALIST DIALECTOLOGY AND NON-SPECIALIST LINGUISTICS

What can be learned from dialect phrase books assigned to non-specialist dialectology and linguistics

ANNOTATION

Phrase books for travellers or merchants have been typically oriented towards standard varieties and good language use. Dialectal phrase books are a relatively young phenomenon, at least as far as German is concerned. They seem to fulfil a different purpose than regular phrase books do: They are not made (and bought) for easing communication with people, whose language one does not master sufficiently, but merely for entertainment. This article examines, how dialectal phrase books on a macro scale as well as in detail make use of folk linguistic attitudes and believes to fulfil this function.

KEYWORDS: phrase books, dialectal phrase books, folk dialectology, folk linguistics, German dialects.

ANNOTATION

Phrase books for travellers or merchants were generally written in the standard and correct language. Dialect phrase books are a relatively new phenomenon, especially in German. It would seem that their purpose, too, differs somewhat from that of ordinary phrase books, since the former are not published (and sold) to facilitate communication with

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people who have not mastered the language sufficiently well; rather, they are oriented towards the reader’s positive emotional state. This article analyses how, from a macrolinguistic perspective, dialect phrase books make extensive use of folk-linguistic attitudes in the hope that they will fulfil the aforementioned function.

KEYWORDS: phrase books, dialect language guides, folk (non-specialist) dialectology, folk linguistics, German dialects.

1. INTRODUCTION

Language guides for travellers and merchants have existed for many hundreds of years, but it was only with the emergence and development of educational and leisure tourism that they developed into a stable text type—whose basic structures and thematic design can nevertheless be traced back from the present day to the early models. Modern language guides generally focus on standard varieties. Colloquial language or slang is included only exceptionally. A special group of language guides consists of dialect language guides, which have been brought onto the market by a few publishers for several years now. At first glance, dialect language guides seem very similar to the familiar language guides for standard varieties; however, closer examination reveals a substantial difference in function: while standard language guides primarily serve as aids to communication, dialect language guides seem to be intended above all to entertain. A whole range of aspects can be identified that make the text type dialect language guide a worthwhile object of study for non-specialist, or perceptual, dialectological and, more generally, non-specialist linguistic research.

This article is based on a broad understanding of non-specialist linguistics.^¹ According to Niedzielski, Preston (2000: viii), laypeople and non-specialists are to be understood within the concept of Folk Linguistics as “those who are not trained professionals in the area under investigation”—with language as the object, this means the overwhelming majority of a speech community. Language is particularly well suited to engagement by laypeople, since it is quite readily accessible, directly and without special equipment or specialist knowledge, and is virtually omnipresent. Members of speech communities have their own ideas and opinions about language and languages, even if these may in some places be shaped by strong, school-mediated notions of norms and correctness. Notwithstanding this, the conceptions

^¹ For more detail on this, see Geyer 2021.

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of language held by laypeople constitute an extremely relevant field of research for linguistics. Non-specialist linguistics in the sense used here encompasses two things: on the one hand, it is the study of language by laypeople—concerning data, methods, hypotheses, analyses and interpretations, not meeting the prevailing standards of linguistics, often driven more by an evaluative than by an epistemic aim—and generally for laypeople. On the other hand, non-specialist linguistics also encompasses the study of this view of language by (academic) linguistics. The concept of folk etymology, for example, in which “historical linguistics expresses [...] amateurish false etymologising, in contrast to scholarly etymology, with a pinch of arrogance” (Augst 2002: 144), is thus to be understood as genuinely non-specialist-linguistic.^² The numerous name books that are intended to support parents in choosing a seemingly suitable first name—often on the basis of its “actual”, that is, historical, meaning—for their child should also be mentioned (e.g. Weitershaus 2004). The most prominent non-specialist-linguistic subject area for German, however, concerns aspects of language contact, language variation and language change, and their evaluation. These include, for example, discussions of Anglicisms, somewhat earlier of spelling reform, and currently of gendering in language. Changes are generally evaluated negatively. In addition to numerous communication and style guides^³, instructions on linguistic correctness and its limits, on supposed language “logic” or popular language “errors” play a major role in non-specialist linguistics. On the research side concerning laypeople’s views of language, alongside Antos’s (1996) foundational study for German, the works of Preston (since 1982) on non-specialist or perceptual dialectology should be mentioned above all, particularly the two pioneering volumes of the Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology (Preston 1999 and Long, Preston 2002). For German, Hundt (1992) made an inspiring contribution at an early stage. Non-specialist dialectology has by now also reached smaller speech communities; see, for example, Aliūkaitė et al. (2017) for Lithuanian. Non-specialist dialectology thus constitutes a central area of non-specialist linguistics.^⁴

² Augst (1975, 2002) discusses the fact that so-called folk etymology is linguistically quite revealing and has its place within a “synchronic etymology”.

³ See also Strauss’s (2018) study of rhetoric guides.

⁴ In recent years, further linguistic disciplines have been examined with regard to their non-specialist-linguistic concepts; see Albury (2014) on language planning and language policy, and the contributions in Hardy, Herling & Patzelt (2015) on non-specialist-linguistic discourses about language on the

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Dialect language guides do not yet seem to have been studied from a non-specialist-linguistic perspective, although, as will be shown below, this is a worthwhile undertaking.

The article is structured as follows: the following Section 2 examines the text type language guide. Section 3 turns to the Kauderwelsch dialect guides published by Reise Know-How, which form the database for the analysis. They are examined from a non-specialist dialectological perspective (Section 4). Section 5 presents a microanalysis of a selected dialect guide (“Franconian—The German of the Franks”) as an example. Finally, Section 6 summarises the results and offers an outlook.

2. DIE TEXTSORTE SPRACHFÜHRER

Language guides are to be regarded as a relatively young text type that only began to establish itself in connection with travel guides (e.g. Baedeker) during the rise of tourism in the mid-nineteenth century—and as one that, as Nadobnik (2019: 415) conjectures, might soon become superfluous again because of translation apps and similar aids.

A brief look at historical precursors reveals remarkable structural continuity. According to Shaik (2014), the Dunhuang manuscripts from the late tenth century of our era contain conversational assistance for travellers on the Silk Road and for (Buddhist) pilgrims in the languages Chinese, Sanskrit and Saka (an Eastern Iranian language). The Kasseler Glossen from the beginning of the ninth century are even somewhat older, with the language pair Latin and Old High German in the Bavarian dialect. They contain, for example, the following passage, which from today’s perspective concerns regional culture (Glück 2002: 68):

The Romans are foolish, the wise are few; wisdom is scarce. In Romanian they have more foolishness than wisdom. Fools are wise, the wise are fools; little is wisdom among the fools, much folly they possess, then wisdom

‘The Welschen are foolish, the Bavarians are clever. There is little cleverness among the Welschen; they have more foolishness than cleverness’

(French-speaking) Internet or Cruz-Ferreira (2011), or Pasquale (2011) and Pasquale & Preston (2013), on non-specialist-linguistic conceptions of first- and foreign-language learning and teaching.

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The Altdeutschen Gespräche, “a kind of conversation booklet containing German inn dialogues with translations into Latin” (Glück 2002: 68), date from the end of the ninth century.

A central role in the development of the text type language guide is played by the frequently cited (e.g. Hendricks 2014: 29; Gernentz et al. 1988: 21–23) Italian-German language book Liber in volg a ro by Georg von Nürnberg, who was thus also the first known DaF teacher by name, as Eder (2010: 57) emphasises. Written for Italian merchants in contact with High German, it consists of three parts: at the beginning are words and expressions arranged by subject area, followed by a list of verbs with particular inflectional forms, and finally two “trade dialogues” (Pausch 1972: 37). Later, already printed works for learning German clearly follow the structure of Georg von Nürnberg’s language guide (cf. Glück 2002: 419f.).

In modern times, from the nineteenth century onwards, the name Baedecker came to stand for the beginnings of the democratisation of travel. It created an entirely new demand for travel guides, through which aids to linguistic communication also gained importance. In 1836, the Baedecker publishing house published The Traveller’s 2019 Manual of Conversation in English, German, French and Italian for the first time; in 1864 editions for German- and French-speakers followed, and in 1883 a Kurzer Leitfaden der russischen Sprache nebst Gesprächssammlung und Vocabular (French edition Manuel de langue russe 1893, English Manual of the Russian Language 1914) (cf. Hinrichsen 1983, 1991). It remains a distinctive feature of the 1879 Baedecker guide Schweden und Norwegen nebst den wichtigsten Reiserouten durch Dänemark; Handbuch für Reisende that it contained from the outset a section “On Danish-Norwegian and Swedish language instruction: grammar, idioms, vocabulary for travel use”, as is still generally the case with modern travel guides.

Specialised language guides are not only a relatively young text type; they have also scarcely been studied to date, at least from a linguistic perspective. An exception is the recently published work by Nadobnik (2019), which focuses on a comparison of German and Polish language guides but nevertheless also offers a whole series of important observations on the text type in general.

Incorporating digital technical possibilities, Nadobnik defines the language guide broadly as a reference work suitable mainly for travel (or for other communication purposes, including autonomous learning) (most often as a paperback, but also in the form of data and/or audio media such as an iPhone app or a

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MP3 file) containing patterns for linguistic action in typical everyday situations (along with other information, including pronunciation, grammar and regional culture, and also word lists or a dictionary) for anyone with no or only limited foreign-language knowledge (Nadobnik 2019: 141).

Irrespective of their material medium, the following may, following Nadobnik (2019: 135), be regarded as constitutive elements of a language guide: 1) an introductory section with an introduction and table of contents, and 2) patterns of communicative acts (model sentences, dialogue sequences, dialogues) as the core element. Further central elements are 3) a vocabulary in the form of word lists or small dictionaries (in writing and, where appropriate, also in pictures), 4) a concise grammar, and 5) information on pronunciation, conveyed either a) as a transcription of pronunciation by means of transliteration or phonetic transcription and/or b) demonstrated using audio media such as audio cassettes, CDs or MP3 files. In addition, there are 6) graphic elements such as maps, illustrations, photographs, tables and picture plates for showing things, on the one hand, and 7) other elements such as model texts for letters or information on regional and cultural matters, on the other.

The following section now presents the Kauderwelsch language and dialect guides.

3. KAUDERWELSCH LANGUAGE AND DIALECT GUIDES

3.1. Kauderwelsch Language Guides

The Kauderwelsch language guides published by Reise Know-How are to be viewed in the context of the emergence of individual backpack tourism in the 1970s, when travellers with small budgets but a great interest in the people and everyday culture—and not primarily in the high-cultural sights—of the supposedly exotic countries they visited had to recognise the uselessness of conventional travel and language guides.

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After several precursors in the author group “Globetrotters write for globetrotters”, the first travel guide was brought onto the market in 1981, and shortly afterwards, from 1983, the first Kauderwelsch language guide, the volume “Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia)”, was also published. The choice of the designation Kauderwelsch for the series may initially seem surprising, since, for example, the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (dwds.de) gives ‘confused and incomprehensible, faulty language’ as the meaning of Kauderwelsch, while the Duden Online Dictionary (duden.de) gives ‘language or manner of speaking mixed from several languages and incomprehensible’; in the publishing series, however, the negative denotation and connotation (dwds.de: “derogatory”) are turned to the positive in the sense of: ‘The linguistic result of an attempt to communicate with people whose language one does not know’.^⁵

Currently (July 2020), the language-guide series comprises 248 volumes, offered as A6-format paperbacks of 120–160 pages at prices usually below 10 euros. The language guides are also available electronically in PDF format and are largely supplemented by accompanying audio material consisting of sound files of the example words and sentences provided in writing. According to the publisher, the series comprises 137 “official languages” (see kauderwelsch sprachführer), with a highly diversified range for pluricentric languages with large speech communities: 18 titles for Spanish, 14 for English, 12 for Arabic, 7 for French; there are also 18 language guides for German as a foreign language, 11 slang language guides, several culinary language guides, and the Dialect series—for German dialects.

The Kauderwelsch phrasebooks describe themselves, as can be inferred from the introduction to the volumes (here, as an example, vol. 54 Lithuanian from 1999), as “speaking guides,” with whose help one can learn to “really speak and understand” the language of the “people on the street” (Jähnert 1999: 6). It is emphasized that little importance is attached to teaching or formulating grammatical rules. Grammatical phenomena are designated using the Germanified terms familiar from German primary-school instruction: 1st, 2nd etc. case (for nominative, genitive, etc.), prefix and suffixes (where prefixes and suffixes are meant), prepositions (for prepositions), participles (for participles)

⁵ The etymology of Kauderwelsch has not been definitively established: the second component—welsch for ‘Romance’—is unproblematic, unlike kauder-. Possible meanings offered for the latter are the Rhaeto-Romance of the population of Chur (Upper German Kauer), who were supposedly known for their work as itinerant merchants and peddlers, or kaudern in the sense ‘to speak indistinctly, to gobble (like a turkey)’ (cf. Kluge 1989; Duden 2014).

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etc., a practice that only superficially makes the subject matter more accessible. Avoiding supposedly difficult foreign words is purchased at the cost of conceptual confusions such as tense and time or gender and sex, etc. A remarkable linguistic feature of the language guides is the word-for-word translation of the example phrases and sentences provided: the source language is presented in semi-bold type without segmentation of units below the word boundary; below it comes a line with lexical and grammatical glosses of the words, and finally a line with an idiomatic translation into German; cf. the following example from Jähnert (1999: 74):^⁶

Ar gālima rūkýti?

FW possible smoke?

May I smoke?

This clarification of linguistic structures without explicit metalinguistic information, for example in the form of grammatical rules, is intended to enable users of the language guides to form new sentences independently with the help of the vocabulary, following existing patterns.

3.2. Kauderwelsch Dialect Guides

For the Kauderwelsch ^{Dialektführer} series, essentially the same structural and design principles apply as for the language guides; only the glossing is omitted, presumably because it is not considered necessary. The target group is identified as “newcomers”, who are to be given access to the dialects’ “foreign-sounding sounds and expressions”. That the guides are less a communication aid for interacting with the long-established inhabitants than a medium with an entertainment function is made clear above all by the repeated references to the concepts of “humour”, “linguistic delicacies” and “imagery-rich language” / “language as a worldview”; cf.

^⁶ FW in the gloss stands for ‘question word’ (question particle); the diacritics ˜ and ´ are not normally written; they indicate the location and type of the word accent.

^⁷ It should be explicitly noted that other publishers also offer similar products; see, for example, the series “Langenscheidt humorous language guides: [X] for beginners” (with [X] = Bavarian, Swabian, Ruhrpott, Saxon, Franconian, Kölsch, Baden); “My first 270 words in [X]” (with [X] = Saarland, Bavarian, Hessian, Swabian, Franconian, Swiss German, Kölsch, Trier); from Anaconda Verlag, Cologne; “Polyglott dialect guides: [X]” (with [X] = Bavarian, Swabian) from Gräfe und Unzer, Munich.

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the description of the series, which is revealing from a non-specialist-dialectological perspective (exemplified by kauderwelsch bairisch, the online information accompanying Kölbl 2009):

Kauderwelsch Dialect presents German dialects and regional speech varieties. The original words, idioms, wordplays and sayings found in every regional variety, the people’s particular humour and their way of speaking—all this makes a region colourful and interesting. Thanks to the simple phonetic spelling, even an inexperienced person can learn almost any dialect. A dialect, however, is never merely another way of speaking; it also reflects another way of thinking, feeling and living. For this reason, after a brief introduction to phonetic and grammatical peculiarities, Kauderwelsch dialect guides focus directly on regionally typical phrases and idioms. The informal sayings and linguistic delicacies reveal the charm of this mostly imagery-rich colloquial language.

The Kauderwelsch Dialekt series currently comprises 13 volumes (as of July 2020). These cover large parts of the German-speaking area. In their titles, they use partly designations familiar in dialectology (e.g. Saxon, Bavarian), and partly non-specialist-linguistic designations (e.g. Ruhr German), the latter especially when a dialect region is referred to by the designation of its urban centre (e.g. Kölsch, Berlin dialect); the boundaries with the urbanolect are not always clear, however. From a dialectological perspective, this almost inevitably leads to inaccuracies: thus, Volume 106 “Bavarian” deals only with Bavarian in Bavaria, not with Bavarian in the dialectological sense, which extends far beyond Bavaria to the east and south; Viennese (Vol. 78) belongs to the Bavarian dialect area, as does Tyrolean (Vol. 236). Volume 186 “Franconian” deals with East Franconian, that is, the dialect spoken in the region known as Franconia in northern Bavaria, but not with Rhine Franconian, Moselle Franconian, Central Franconian or Lower Franconian. Volume 116 calls Alsatian the “German of the Alemanni”, although Volumes 71 “Schwiizertüütsch” and 127 “Swabian” also concern Alemannic dialect regions. Nevertheless, the designations for the dialects are to be understood as salient in non-specialist linguistics, as discussed in the following Section 4. For most speakers of German, the designation Kölsch can certainly be located and associated with an idea more easily than the (academic) dialectological designation Ripuarian.

From the perspective of reception, it is interesting which dialects appeared first in the series and which were added later. This may certainly also be connected with coincidences such as the availability of suitable authors in

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this context; nevertheless, it is striking that the German dialects outside the Federal Republic⁸ are dealt with first: Swiss German (under the title Schwiizertüütsch) as the variety most difficult to understand from the average West German perspective, Saxon as the stereotypical representation of “GDR German”, and Viennese as representative of German in Austria. From the perspective of reception, it is also interesting which volumes have undergone particularly many new editions, that is, have been particularly successful.⁹ These are the volumes Schwiizertüütsch, Wienerisch, Plattdüütsch and Bairisch, which have had the most new editions; they have, however, all been on the market for a long time. Table 1 provides an overview of the volumes in the Kauderwelsch Dialect series.

Table 1: Overview of the volumes published in the Kauderwelsch Dialect series.

Title Volume no. First publication year current ed. Schwiizertüütsch – the German of the Swiss Confederation 71 1993 14th ed. 2014 Sächsisch – the true German 74 1992 8th ed. 2012 Wienerisch – The other German 78 1992 11th ed. 2019 Kölsch – the German of the cathedral city 105 1996 4th ed. 2009 Bairisch – the genuine Standard German 106 1997 9th ed. 2019 Elsässisch – the language of the Alemanni 116 2001 1st ed., out of print Plattdüütsch – The genuine North German 120 1998 9th ed. 2017 Schwäbisch – the German of the Ländle 127 2000 6th ed. 2011 Berlinerisch – the German of the capital 139 2001 3rd ed. 2006, out of print Ruhrdeutsch – the language of the Ruhr region 146 2001 6th ed. 2014 Fränkisch – the German of the Franconians 186 2005 6th ed. 2015 Hamburgisch – the language on the Elbe and Alster 227 2013 2nd ed. 2017 Tirolerisch – the language of the mountain people 236 2019 1st ed.

Two further phrase books from the publisher’s program are of interest here. However, they were not published in the Kauderwelsch Dialect series, but among the regular phrase books. This is particularly surprising in the case of volume 229 “Österreichisch – the German of the Alpine country” (1st ed. 2016), since, unlike “Schwiizertüütsch” as another national variety of German, this volume does not appear as a dialect in the Kauderwelsch Dialect series, but as a language among the Kauderwelsch phrase books.

⁸ Note that the publisher Reise Know-How is based in Bielefeld.

⁹ However, no information is available about the size of the print runs.

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By contrast, it corresponds to language-political expectations that volume 104 “Lëtzebuergesch – Wort für Wort” (1997, 6th ed. 2018) is included in the series of phrase books.

4. KAUDERWELSCH DIALECT AND THE SALIENCE OF GERMAN DIALECTS

The lay-linguistic dimension of the Kauderwelsch dialect guides will be developed in this section with the help of an expanded concept of salience. Salience as a “subjective-attitudinal variable” (Lenz 2014: 89) can be defined, following Kerswill and Williams (2002: 81), as “the property of a linguistic item or feature that makes it in some way perceptually and cognitively prominent”; the concept of salience is therefore generally applied only to individual linguistic features. Here, however, it will be applied to entire bundles of linguistic features, namely to dialects identified by lay people. It has been repeatedly confirmed in relevant studies that, for lay dialectological or linguistic observers, certain units (i.e. dialects) are perceptually and cognitively prominent that differ in part from those prominent to experts; moreover, the dialect inventories created by lay dialectological or linguistic observers are distributed spatially differently from those represented by isogloss-based¹⁰ dialectological maps, as shown by correspondingly drawn dialect maps (cf. e.g. Hundt 2010).

The following three studies are intended to demonstrate the correspondence between the dialect designations in the titles of the Kauderwelsch series and salient lay-linguistic concepts.

The first study to be mentioned is an investigation into the popularity or unpopularity of German dialects, conducted by the Institute for Demoscopy Allensbach (Allensbach 2008). Respondents were asked to select a maximum of three items from a list of 17 dialect designations. The list contains the following dialect designations, here in the order of the most popular dialects:¹¹

¹⁰ Sinnvoller wäre es an dieser Stelle von Heteroglossen da sprechen, da Verschiedenheit und nicht Gleichheit angezeigt wird; vgl. Sihler (2000: 170; Hervorhebung im Original): „The technical name for the line demarcating the distribution of a linguistic trait is isogloss. This is an unfortunate coinage for what is intended […], and occasionally nowadays one sees the term heterogloss instead“.

¹¹ The order of the least popular dialects does not differ substantially (apart from the position of Sächsisch)—an indication that what is at issue is not popularity, but familiarity.

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Bayerisch – Norddeutsches Platt – Berlinerisch – Schwäbisch – Rheinländisch – Hessisch – Sächsisch – Fränkisch – Pfälzisch – Badisch-Alemannisch – Westfälisch – Mecklenburgisch – Ostpreußisch – Thüringisch – Saarländisch – Schlesisch – Pommerisch List 1: Dialect designations in Allensbach (2008), in order of most popular dialects

In the modified List 2, italics highlight those dialect designations that also occur in the Kauderwelsch Dialekt series; here, the designation Bayerisch in Allensbach is regarded as equivalent to Bairisch in Kauderwelsch, likewise Norddeutsches Platt and Plattdüütsch, and Westfälisch and Ruhrdeutsch.

Bayerisch (Bairisch) – Norddeutsches Platt (Plattdüütsch) – Berlinerisch – Schwäbisch – Rheinländisch (Kölsch) – Hessisch – Sächsisch – Fränkisch – Pfälzisch – Badisch-Alemannisch – Westfälisch (Ruhrdeutsch) – Mecklenburgisch – Ostpreußisch – Thüringisch – Saarländisch – Schlesisch – Pommerisch List 2: Dialect designations in Allensbach (2008), in order of most popular dialects, compared with the designations of the Kauderwelsch Dialekt series; correspondences in italics

Thus, among the Kauderwelsch inventory, Hamburgisch, Schwitzertüütsch, Wienerisch, Tirolerisch, and Elsässisch are absent from Allensbach (2008). On the one hand, these are dialects located outside Germany and therefore play no role in Allensbach’s study.^¹² On the other hand, the absence of Hamburg(er)isch may be due to its being understood by Allensbach as a standard variety rather than as a dialect.

The second study, entitled “How People in Germany Think about Language” (Gärtig, Plewnia, Rothe 2010), contains, among many other aspects, a section (3.3) on sympathy for regional varieties. Unlike Allensbach, respondents here were to use designations of their own choosing.^¹³

^¹² The situation outside the Federal Republic of Germany also applies, however, to the dialects Ostpreußisch, Schlesisch, and Pommerisch offered for selection by Allensbach, i.e. to dialects representing the German-speaking area before the end of the Second World War, which may appear rather irritating. In the absence of speakers, these dialects are scarcely known any longer in any case and therefore regularly appear at the end of the selection lists in Allensbach’s study: respondents select—whether popular or unpopular—only those dialects with which they can associate some conception.

^¹³ The question in the questionnaire reads: “25) Regardless of whether you perhaps speak a dialect or Platt yourself: Are there types of dialect or Platt that you find particularly appealing?”

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The results show the following dialect designations in List 3, again with Bairisch as the most popular dialect at the top (Gärtig, Plewnia, Rothe 2010: 159):¹⁴

Bavarian – North German / Low German – Swabian – Saxon – Berlin dialect – Hessian – Cologne dialect – Rhenish Low German – Low German – Hamburg dialect / Hanseatic – Franconian – Baden dialect – Palatine – Ruhrpott – Alemannic – other dialects in Bavaria – Austrian – Frisian dialects – Thuringian – Westphalian Low German – Saarland dialect – Swiss German – […]

List 3: Most appealing dialects according to Gärtig, Plewnia, Rothe (2010)

Comparison with the designations of Kauderwelsch Dialekt produces the following overview (List 4); once again, italics highlight those dialect designations that also occur in the Kauderwelsch Dialekt series; here too, certain designations are regarded as equivalent: Norddeutsch / Platt with Plattdüütsch and Ruhrpott with Ruhrdeutsch.

Bavarian – North German / Low German (Low German) – Swabian – Saxon – Berlin dialect – Hessian – Cologne dialect – Rhenish Low German – Low German – Hamburg dialect / Hanseatic – Franconian – Baden dialect – Palatine – Ruhrpott (Ruhr German) – Alemannic – other dialects in Bavaria – Austrian – Frisian dialects – Thuringian – Westphalian Low German – Saarland dialect – Swiss German – […]

List 4: Most appealing dialects according to Gärtig, Plewnia, Rothe (2010), compared with the designations of the Kauderwelsch Dialekt series; correspondences in italics

The status of Alemannisch is unclear once again, since from a dialectological perspective it quite certainly also includes Elsässisch. Furthermore, compared with Kauderwelsch, Wienerisch is missing—which could, however, be subsumed under Österreichisch—as is the touristically relevant Tirolerisch (also

Which ones are these? (multiple answers possible)” (Gärtig, Plewnia, Rothe 2010: 281; emphasis in the original).

A shortened version (cf. Gärtig, Plewnia, Rothe 2010: 158), in which the detailed list reproduced here with 40 designations is reduced to 13 (in each case including the entries “none” and “all”), suddenly shows “Norddeutsch” as the most popular dialect. What has all been subsumed under “Norddeutsch” remains opaque, however. The percentages given in Gärtig, Plewnia, Rothe (2010) nevertheless suggest that, in addition to “Norddeutsch / Platt,” the dialects designated “Platt,” “Hamburgisch / Hanseatisch,” “Friesische Dialekte” (!), “Hannover,” “Mecklenburger Platt,” “Norddeutsch, nicht Niederdt.” and “Friesisch” (!) are included in the collective category Norddeutsch, which appears doubtful particularly because of the mixing of Low German and High German varieties.

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Österreichisch?). Apparently, German respondents do not make excessively fine-grained distinctions among dialects outside Germany.

The most detailed results are provided by Hundt’s (2010) study, which, unlike the two aforementioned studies, is not representative but exploratory. Participants from five German cities (Dresden, Erlangen, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Kiel), representing different dialect areas, were asked to draw dialect regions on a map of Germany and then name the dialect regions. This yielded 71 different (lay) designations (with at least five mentions), of which the first 22 (with a mention frequency > 10%) are listed in List 5 (cf. Hundt 2010: 196, 201f.):

Bayerisch – Sächsisch – Schwäbisch – Berlinerisch – Plattdeutsch – Schweizerdeutsch – Hessisch – Fränkisch – Norddeutsch – Österreichisch – Kölsch – Badisch – Hochdeutsch – Thüringisch – Ruhrpottdeutsch – Saarländisch – Rheinländisch – Alemannisch – Friesisch – Wienerisch – Hamburgerisch List 5: Most frequently mentioned dialect designations according to Hundt (2010)

The comparison with the designations in Kauderwelsch, again assuming equivalent designations (Bayerisch ~ Bairisch, Plattdeutsch ~ Plattdüütsch, Schweizerdeutsch ~ Schwitzerdütsch, and Ruhrpottdeutsch ~ Ruhrdeutsch), is shown in List 6:

Bayerisch (Bairisch) – Sächsisch – Schwäbisch – Berlinerisch – Plattdeutsch (Plattdüütsch) – Schweizerdeutsch (Schwitzerdütsch) – Hessisch – Fränkisch – Norddeutsch – Österreichisch – Kölsch – Badisch – Hochdeutsch – Thüringisch – Ruhrpottdeutsch (Ruhrdeutsch) – Saarländisch – Rheinländisch – Alemannisch – Friesisch – Wienerisch – Hamburgerisch List 6: Most frequently mentioned dialect designations according to Hundt (2010), compared with the designations of the Kauderwelsch Dialekt series; correspondences in italics

In this study, participants made a series of distinctions such as Bayerisch (Oberbayerisch, rank 26 vs. Niederbayerisch, rank 29) or Fränkisch (Mittelfränkisch, rank 31, Oberfränkisch, rank 32, and Unterfränkisch, rank 37), which are oriented toward the names of the so-called administrative districts in the federal state of Bavaria as administrative units below the state level and are expressly not dialectological designations. It is also worth mentioning that Tirolerisch and Elsässisch are even found in Hundt’s (2010) study, at ranks 48 and 51, respectively.

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As a result of this comparison, it can be stated that Kauderwelsch has apparently selected dialect designations that are salient in lay dialectology for its dialect phrase books. The nonstandard spelling—as in Plattdüütsch and Schwiizertüütsch—probably serves, above all, to mildly exoticize the dialects in a way that promotes sales. Such exoticizations will also play a role in the following analytical section.

5. EXAMPLE ANALYSIS: “FRÄNKISCH – THE GERMAN OF THE FRANCONIANS”

This section presents an exemplary analysis of one of the Kauderwelsch dialect guides, volume 186 “Fränkisch – das Deutsch der Franken” by Jens Sobisch, specifically its 3rd edition from 2007; the volume comprises 144 pages. The author of the volume under examination is himself a speaker of Fränkisch and has already appeared as the author of language guides (Spanish in Cuba) and travel guides (Cuba) published by Reise Know-How Verlag. He is not a linguist, however, but a lawyer, which corresponds to the general concept of the phrase books. The Kauderwelsch dialect guides are not merely written by lay people for lay people; their distance from the specialist field is even explicitly highlighted as positive, by noting that they dispense with “long-winded scholarly linguistic treatises” (Sobisch 2007: 5).

A look at the reception shows that the booklet’s presentation and content appear to have been well received by buyers. An overview of the available reviews on amazon.de (as of June 30, 2019) demonstrates this.^¹⁵ Eight reviews are available here, all rating the dialect guide five out of five stars. They are pseudonymized below in ascending chronological order as (R1) through (R8), and reproduced without altering their spelling:

(R1) AK2 December 25, 2018 great recommendable

(R2) M January 5, 2016 Practical In this book one finds very many Franconian terms translated into Standard German. A challenge for non-Franconians and amusing reading for Franconians.

^¹⁵ With Amazon reviews, caution is undoubtedly warranted because the authorship cannot be verified, etc. In my view, however, there are no indications of fabrication among the eight reviews at hand.

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(R3) AK1 June 18, 2014

A little Kauderwelsch...... in Franconia never hurts. By the way, Franconia is the other Bavaria—the region that always feels, in my opinion unjustifiably, disadvantaged. The little book is supposed to bring me to “Upper Bavarian” eye level with Franconians. Almighty, indeed!;-)

(R4) D January 17, 2014

I’m a Franconian myself and it made me laugh—a great gift—wonderful excursions into the many regions of Franconia—the “Fränkisch” is laugh-until-you-cry funny—almost everything is exactly as described in the book!!!

(R5) M August 27, 2013

well researched, small format, and a great gift The booklet—it is indeed pocket-sized—is well organized and really contains many Franconian idioms and should provide plenty of amusement. I was genuinely surprised by how many familiar idioms I found in it. In addition, the book contains interesting information about Franconia and even includes songs. Friends from other regions in particular will have a lot of fun with the book or regard it as an indispensable aid;) The price is truly fair, and the well-researched booklet is worth every cent. It is a great gift for friends or relatives from outside the region.

(R6) TS 13. November 2012

Great gift for non-Franconians I bought the book as a “gag” for my new acquaintances. They come from the north and I am from Upper Franconia, so there are still a few “communication difficulties” here and there;-); it was a huge hit as a gift!

(R7) A September 19, 2011

“a great gift idea for newcomers” “we” = my colleagues and I gave this little book as a birthday present to a new colleague from Dortmund who had recently moved to Nuremberg! She was absolutely delighted and has already read it eagerly! But even for someone from Franconia, it is very amusing reading:-)

(R8) SW January 18, 2007

Five Stars Plus + I would not have thought that one could be informed about our Franconian vernacular in such an entertaining way! The author knows how to present the Franconians and their dialect with the optimal dose of satire!! Therefore: Five Stars Plus +

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Three observations stand out particularly in the evaluation: The actual function of a phrase book, i.e. assistance with communication, is addressed only in R6 (“communication difficulties” with “new acquaintances”—although this is ironized, as indicated by the smiley:)) and R7 (“new colleague who recently moved to Nuremberg [...] from Dortmund”), and is mentioned in passing in R2 (“challenge for non-Franconians”) and R5 (“friends from other regions”). The humoristic content is plainly foregrounded; cf. R2 “amusing reading,” R4 “laugh-until-you-cry,” R5 “plenty of amusement,” R6 “gag,” R7 “very amusing,” R8 “dose of satire”; the use of the (stereo)typical Franconian dialect expression “Allmä́chd na!” (‘Good heavens’, R3) likewise occurs humorously, as the winking smiley;-) makes clear. Moreover, the dialect guide is apparently used less for personal reading than as a gift (R4, R5, R6, R7), and in this capacity is evaluated very positively, cf. “great” (R4, R5), “wonderful” (R5). The dialect phrase book thus appears to be a hybrid text type in which the entertainment function is central, supplemented by cultural and linguistic information. This largely corresponds to the self-description on the book flap (emphasis in the original):

Fränkisch is more than a language—much more! Despite all the regional differences in the language, the Franconians share one characteristic: They always express directly what they want and mean—and often rather heartily and directly. Far removed from clichés, a genuine Franconian takes a tour through the land of the Bocksbeutel, which is also called “Bavaria’s better half.” More than 1,000 words and idioms from everyday Franconian vocabulary, arranged in a practical way and explained vividly, help dispel comprehension problems and offer an amusing insight. (Sobisch 2007, book flap)

The “amusing insight” is essentially constituted by a strategy—or, better, since this does not necessarily occur consciously, by practices—that can be termed alienation (cf. Maas 1989; Geyer 2013) or exoticization and that operates, among other things, at the level of orthography.

As is generally the case for dialects of German, no established or even standardized orthography exists for Fränkisch (East Franconian). Dialect authors, columnists, songwriters, and other interested parties must therefore develop their own orthographies for the respective dialect. Since the primary aim is to accentuate phonetic peculiarities, one generally encounters so-called shallow, i.e. strongly pronunciation-oriented, orthographies (cf. Seifart 2006). In his dialect guide, Sobisch uses

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Fränkisch as its inventory of symbols the inventory of Standard German, merely expanded by the symbol <å>, which represents cardinal vowel 6 /ɔ/.

The most prominent phonetic characteristic of East Franconian is the absence of fortis plosives, except for /k/ at the beginning of a word before a vowel (e.g. Kerwa ‘Kirchweih’). Thus, there are for the most part only lenis or lenitized plosives, written as <b, d, g>, often in— from the perspective of Standard German—unusual clusters. As in Standard German, the shortness of a vowel is indicated in the syllable coda by (at least) two following consonant symbols, including geminates, occasionally, though not consistently, also in loanwords that do not follow this pattern in Standard German, cf. Babbriga ‘Paprika’.

Lenis spelling is also applied in the syllable onset after <s> /ʃ/. Compared with Standard German, this contains no additional or divergent phonetic information, since no fortis plosive occurs there either, but it produces—particularly in combination with the trigraph <sch> for /ʃ/—a graphematic alienation: Schdern ‘Stern’, schbilld ‘spielt’.

Although the graphematic symbol inventory may thus largely coincide with that of Standard German, the combinatorics of the symbols do not, and the phoneme–grapheme correspondence also repeatedly diverges. This is particularly evident in assimilations and elisions, which are effectively spelled out—another indication of a shallow orthography; cf. e.g. Semf ‘Senf’, schdriggn ‘stricken’ (though not schdriggn with velar plosive <ng>) or gfalln ‘gefallen’; by contrast, Jammerlabln (and not Jammerlabbm ‘Jammerlappen’) without an assimilated bilabial plosive <m> in the coda (103).

:/ŋ/ is usually, and particularly also in contact with velar obstruents, rendered with the digraph <ng>, e.g. lachng ‘lachen’, dringng ‘trinken’ (here with an obvious misspelling <nngng>, 22).

A further example of alienating spelling is provided by abbreviations with syllabic letter names spelled out, such as Be-Dse ‘PC’; here, Peh-Zeh would likewise be odd Standard German. Finally, mention should be made of the spelling <äöü> for the diphthong <eu> in words such as Lichebäöüd l ‘Lügenbeutel’ or Schbordsfräöünd ‘Sportsfreund’, which is neither phonetic nor standard-compliant.

Alongside graphematic alienation, another form, based more on style, should be mentioned. It consists in rendering a dialectal expression in the translation line in an elevated style. The stylistic discrepancy creates an impression of the dialect’s (supposed) colloquialism or particular crudeness. The following example illustrates the phenomenon, representative of an entire series of similar expressions; an adequate translation would be, for example, ‘When the trumpeter plays, you think a dog is howling.’:

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When the tin fiddler plays, you think a dog is howling.

This trumpeter’s playing reminds one of a howling dog.

At the level of content, the strong stereotyping in the direction of folklorization stands out, serving the humorization addressed, for example, in the book flap. The thematic chapters in particular display a disproportionate focus on the themes or situations of the pub and card games, as well as swear words and curses. Overall, however, the macrostructure of the dialect guide follows the conventional pattern of the text type and, in the thematic chapters, actually exhibits considerable overlap with those in the first part of Georg von Nürnberg’s phrase book from 1424. The volume begins with an introduction to the language or dialect, containing information about where and by how many people the dialect is spoken and how its internal division is structured.

This is followed by a chapter on writing or orthography and pronunciation, followed by an overview of grammar, understood as morphosyntax. All these chapters bear headings in the dialect (e.g. Kadde vo Frangn ‘Map of Franconia’, Wie mer’s schbrichd ‘How one speaks’). The main part consists of thematic chapters on greetings and farewells, family and kinship, numbers and days of the week, and the topics of work, being on the road, The Body, shopping, eating and drinking, weather, etc. These thematic chapters are likewise provided with headings in the dialect (e.g. Sävus! Un Adele ‘Servus! And farewell’ for greetings and farewells, Di buggliche Bagaasch ‘The hunchbacked rabble’ for kinship). Each contains short dialogical question-and-answer sequences and small word lists; they are often supplemented by humorous (inter)cultural information and observations. At the end of the booklet there are two word indexes (one dialect–Standard German and one Standard German–dialect), bibliographical references for further reading, and information about the author (Der, wo’s gschriem häd ‘The one who wrote it’).

The fact that the volume contains a series of inconsistencies, contradictions, and errors, which underscore its amateur-linguistic provenance, will be mentioned here only in passing (for more detail, see Geyer 2021). The confusingly inconsistent spelling of ‘innkeeper’ as Wed (24), Wädd (50), and finally Wärd (53) may serve as an illustration.

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6. RESULTS AND OUTLOOK

The present investigation of the Kauderwelsch dialect phrase books in general, and of the “Fränkisch” dialect guide as an example, has shown dialect phrase books to be a relevant object of study for a folk-linguistic examination on several levels: At a general level, the selection both of the dialects and, in particular, of the dialect designations for the Kauderwelsch dialect phrase books displays clear parallels with the inventories of various perceptual-dialectological studies on the mental structuring of the dialect landscape by members of the German speech community. Thus, dialects and dialect designations that are salient in folk-linguistic terms are addressed. The exemplary analysis reveals a humorous stereotyping or folklorization of the dialect in terms of content. Moreover, the spelling of the dialect in particular is characterized, as a non-normed domain, by practices of alienation or exoticization. At the metalinguistic level, the distance from disciplinary expertise, alongside everyday expertise, is explicitly emphasized. All this leads to a very positive evaluation of the dialect phrase book as a medium of entertainment from the perspective of buyers or recipients, while existing shortcomings in the specialist-linguistic presentation of the dialect, such as inconsistencies, contradictions, and errors in its representation, recede into the background.

In this article, only one dialect guide could be analyzed in some detail. Without a doubt, broadening the empirical basis would be desirable, for example by extending the study to further dialects, to similar products from other publishers, and indeed also to other media. In addition to audio material relating to dialect phrase books, amateur videos on YouTube, for example, suggest themselves here in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the interaction between amateur dialectology or folk linguistics and dialect phrase books.

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What can be learned from dialect phrase books associated with amateur dialectology and folk linguistics

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes certain links between dialect phrase books and amateur (folk) linguistics or dialectology. Phrase books traditionally adhere to the standards of the norm-based language, whereas dialect phrase books are a fairly new phenomenon, at least in German. Although speakers of all German dialects may understand the norms of Standard German and do their utmost to speak Standard German with people for whom a particular dialect is unfamiliar, it is unclear whether their communicative purpose, like that of other phrase books, is the same—namely, whether they facilitate travelers’ communication with speakers of a particular language (or dialect). Usually prepared by unqualified amateurs, dialect phrase books that contain amusing, entertaining stories and/or elements of folklore are more oriented toward readers who use or at least have some knowledge of the dialect. This assumption is discussed in greater detail in the article, taking as the basis of analysis the characteristics of dialects, general and specific text structures, linguistic aspects, the manner in which dialects are presented, and finally cultural elements characteristic of the area in which the relevant dialect is spoken. This makes it possible to understand, from the perspective of folk linguistics, the conception of the dialect analyzed and the ideas conveyed in dialect phrase books.

Received 17 August 2020.

KLAUS GEYER

Institute of Language and Communication University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55 DK-5230 Odense M [email protected]

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