Documentation and description of the Palatinate speech island dialect on the Lower Rhine.

Basic data for this project

Description

For the last 260 years, the Rhenish-Franconian dialect of Palatinate emigrants has survived in exile in the three Lower Rhine villages of Pfalzdorf, Louisendorf and Neulouisendorf. Even though the speech island dialect was initially capable of competing with the neighbouring Lower Franconian dialects, the present sociolinguistic situation is characterized by a gradual shift towards spoken varieties of Standard German. While a first documentation and a dialect-geographical classification already exist, neither the published data nor the grammatical analyses meet the current standards of comparative dialectology or general linguistics. The present project therefore has two aims. First, the existing corpus will be expanded in order to compile a representative language documentation. Secondly, a grammatical description comprising the phonology, morphology and syntax of the dialect will be written. The data expansion will primarily target the publication of speech samples from different speaker generations and text genres. The grammatical description, on the other hand, will focus on linguistic phenomena enabling a comparison with older language stages, the original Palatinate dialect and the Lower Franconian contact variety.