Open Access

Peter Meyer, Doris Stolberg

• Within the project Lexical Dynamics of German Varieties in Contact at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS), lexical structures of German varieties spoken outside Central Europe's main German-speaking area are analyzed through corpus-based linguistic methods. A central question is whether lexical changes arise predominantly from particular language constellations or more broadly from general contact conditions. In addition, borrowability across word classes is investigated. This paper introduces a web-based research and analysis platform currently under development. It allows linguistic researchers to annotate corpus data flexibly, produce structured lexicographic documentation, and interactively explore linguistic phenomena. Content is presented through systematically interconnected units covering individual lexical items, word combinations, and abstract lexical patterns (e.g., discourse markers, modal particles, auxiliary selection). Navigation is facilitated by full-text searches and a thematic tagging system. The individual units of information provide dynamic access to corpus excerpts, query results, and interactive statistical analyses.