Areal variation and change in the phraseology of contemporary German

Abstract

Areal variation and change in phraseology is still a remarkably underdeveloped area of research. Past studies of areal phraseology have either been restricted to small localities and regions, or have required considerable effort in data collection. There is a complete lack of studies on phraseological change in contemporary German. Recent research projects on German areal linguistics have used internet surveys, as in the case of the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA) 'Atlas of colloquial German' (with data from mostly spoken regional vernaculars), or large corpora, in the case of the Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen (VWB) 'Dictionary of lexical variation in German' and the Variantengrammatik des Standarddeutschen (VG) 'Regional variation in the grammar of Standard German' (with data from written Standard German). These new methods can be used to obtain reliable data on the areal distribution of phrasemes in contemporary German usage with relatively little effort. Moreover, a comparison of recent AdA data with data from the Wortatlas der deutschen Umgangssprachen (WDU) 'Word Atlas of colloquial German', collected in the 1970s and 1980s, can reveal developments in the areal distribution of phrasemes on the level of colloquial speech. This article aims to demonstrate the potential of such research approaches for the study of variation and change in phraseology and will use selected examples from the AdA and the VG for illustration.