Effects of mobility and heritage on lay-perceptions of German dialects

Abstract

This study emphasizes the influence of mobility and heritage on lay-perceptions of prominent German dialects. The analysis uncovered important metalinguistic concepts of language regard which play a significant role in non-linguists’ attitudes. The paper draws attention to mobile and nonmobile students’ evaluations of dialect voice samples through qualitative ranking tasks in questionnaires and investigates language ideologies that underlie language attitudes in follow-up interviews. Even though the impact of mobility has been of great concern in transnational studies, traditional dialectology in Germany has often excluded the notion of mobility as an objective of investigation. The results bring non-linguists’ perceptions towards the social relevance of dialectal varieties and Standard German and an overall great language awareness to light. Moreover, dialects were generally perceived as language of the home, with experiences of positive and negative discrimination due to the inability of speaking a local variety. Additionally, the analysis of ranking scales proved the interrelation of correctness, pleasantness, degree of difference and familiarity in lay-evaluations of dialects. Furthermore, the findings identified the relevance of linguistic heritage as an identity-building factor on a dialectal level and suggested that, despite the utilization of dialect stereotyping for localization, respondents opposed to characterize speaker communities based on their attributes connected to their local variety. Therefore, I argue that mobility impacts the self-representation, sense of belonging and linguistic insecurity of respondents and that the young participants are very much aware of dialectal diversity, which they perceived as beneficial and important.