German Dialects and Social Perceptions

Interviews

Main Results by City Maps and Surveys Interviews Wittenberg

While the map diagrams and surveys were directed towards the study of people's perceptions of German dialects, the intent of the interviews was to obtain short examples of each dialect. In every city that I visited, I found two or three people that claimed to be native speakers of the city's dialect who were willing to be interviewed. The interviews were very short and consisted of three parts: in the first part I asked the permission of my respondent to use this interview for my project. In the second part, I asked for a few typical words or phrases of the dialect in question. In the third part, I asked the respondent to pronounce the following German phrase in their dialect:

This sentence was chosen because it would presumably remain relatively unchanged in terms of basic vocabulary from dialect to dialect (although it turned out that some Southern German dialects use different words for the days of the week). Responses to my request often belied people's definition of dialects. For Berlinerisch and Sächsisch, respondents often told me that the words are the same as in High German, while for Schwäbisch and Bayrisch people rarely made this comment. Berlinerisch and Sächsisch are distinguished more by phonological differences, whereas Schwäbisch and Bayrisch have more lexical and syntactic variations in comparison with High German.

Below are sound clips of the German sentence Montags gehe ich in den Park und lese in each dialect:

An example interview:

Main Results by City Maps and Surveys Interviews Wittenberg