Open Access

"Standard language" is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers. This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed "standard usage". It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project "Variation in Spoken German", Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of "standard usage" in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of "standard usage" inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.

Ph@ttSessionz and Deutsch heute are two large German speech databases. They were created for different purposes: Ph@ttSessionz to test Internet-based recordings and to adapt speech recognizers to the voices of adolescent speakers, Deutsch heute to document regional variation of German. The databases differ in their recording technique, the selection of recording locations and speakers, elicitation mode, and data processing. In this paper, we outline how the recordings were performed, how the data was processed and annotated, and how the two databases were imported into a single relational database system. We present acoustical measurements on the digit items of both databases. Our results confirm that the elicitation technique affects the speech produced, that f0 is quite comparable despite different recording procedures, and that large speech technology databases with suitable metadata may well be used for the analysis of regional variation of speech.

By evaluating two corpora containing linguistic data on spoken standard language usage (with a total of 770 speakers), the current range of variation of lexical stress in loanwords will be analyzed. In doing so, the focus will be on the age and background of the speakers to be able to document processes of linguistic change and regionalisms. Regarding the phenomenon studied here, it becomes apparent that more detailed and multicausal separate analyses are required to interpret the results conclusively in spite of an overall trend that was at irst convincing (and that would support the theoretical assumptions concerning the loanwordʼs age and the source language inluencing the rate of assimilation). The results of the individual analyses contradict the assumed “overall trend”. One of the corpora was collected by experienced ield workers, while the other was collected by students. By comparing both corpora, some light can be shed onto the question as to what extent “undirected” and less rigidly collected data can support or complement more extensive and costly research projects.