Open Access

Heidrun Kämper, Rainer Perkuhn

• As a category of reflection, ‘authenticity’ is of great interest in linguistics, because language is ‘the central medium for the communicative production of authenticity’, which is itself always located between the poles of the truth and that which is portrayed (Felder and Gardt 2016: 2020). To be sure, authenticity is always generated linguistically and discursively; ‘acts of authentification’ (Authentisierungsakte) invariably stand at the end of a negotiative process. This imbues the authentic with a special relevance, as is demonstrated by the many works that have presented and described the concept of authenticity in the arts, science, economics, and politics. Against this backdrop, linguistics has a unique importance for addressing the concept of authenticity. To the extent we can assume that reflection on language as a system and structure did occur until the end of the early modern era, the question of the genuine, authentic, and original aspects of language is a topic that has determined the empirical research paradigm of linguistics since the early modern era. Depending on the research subject, a universal status is attributed to these linguistic data, as is evidenced by analysis undertaken since the end of the early modern era concerning the origin, age, and makeup of the German language. Evaluative attributions such as eigentlich (authentic) and grundrichtig (thoroughly correct) are the words of reflection that correspond to authentisch (on this, see Riecke 2018). The present essay examines the postulate of authenticity in the context of developments in empirical linguistics, in which ‘authenticity’ has a completely different function – namely, a documentary one – in contrast to developments that assess a language in general based on an imagined ideal. This documentary function is clarified by means of three linguistic methods. First, it shows how word usage is documented in ‘citation lexicography’; second, it demonstrates the extent to which linguistic data have the status of authenticity in corpus and discourse linguistics; and, finally, it asks how ‘authenticity’ and ‘authentic’ are used in ordinary language today, in part to demonstrate the opportunities offered by such discourse analysis.