Atlas of historical German dialects in the territory of the Czech Republic
The Atlas of Historical German Dialects in the Territory of the Czech Republic (ADT) is an international joint project of scientists and universities in the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria. The immediate project goals are
- Research and documentation of the German dialects of Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia by interviewing people from the German-speaking population who remained there after the Second World War, as long as this is still possible
- special consideration of Czech influences in the German dialects and thus linguistic documentation of the coexistence of Germans and Czechs
Research situation
The area of today's Czech Republic represented an area of intensive linguistic contact between German and Czech until 1945. The vocabulary is processed by the Sudeten German dictionary . However, a detailed linguistic and geographical description of the German dialects in the Bohemian countries never came about. What was impossible between 1945 and 1989 due to the political situation has become possible since the fall of the Wall in Eastern Europe, and the remaining German-speaking population in the Czech Republic is numerically large enough to justify a large linguistic survey . In any case, this is the knowledge from the dialect recordings made in the Czech Republic from Bavaria and Austria - within the framework of the Bavarian Language Atlas and the Language Atlas of Upper Austria - in the Czech Republic.
Research goal
The primary goal is to document and describe the German dialects of the Czech Republic as they are still tangible with their last speakers. The German language in the Czech Republic can be expected to become extinct within the next few years. The language of the remaining German native speakers is largely conservative to archaic, mostly unchanged from 1945. For linguistics, ie in particular German dialect research, research into neighboring German dialects, which represent older states of one's own dialects with a time lag, is of great importance for research into these one's own dialects.
method
The company ADT sees itself in the tradition of the so-called "Upper German small room atlases", the method tested and applied there is adopted as well as most of the long-established questionnaire. In Upper Germany, German linguists have been working on dialectological atlas companies for over 50 years. These language atlases are collected, including all grammatical levels, through direct on-site surveys and with a narrow local network. The questionnaire used for this is adapted to the specific situation in each case, and a separate questionnaire was created for the ADT project, based on the one used for the Bavarian Language Atlas and the Language Atlas of Upper Austria (SAO). Adjustments were necessary primarily because the area under investigation of the ADT also includes Central German dialects and the Czech-German language contact should be appropriately addressed. The questionnaire for the ADT exists as a 2-volume questionnaire with 2960 questions for full recordings and as a short questionnaire with 865 questions for short recordings.
The investigation area is divided into 600 grid squares using a precisely defined grid, in each of which a picture is to be taken. A full recording is only planned for every fourth location. The survey is carried out by trained linguists who record the responses of the informants in a variant of the Teuthonista transcription and record parts of the interview on DAT cassettes.
The surveys began in 2001 and were largely completed in 2010. The publication will take place in the following years.
Web links
http://www.uni-regensburg.de/sprache-literatur-kultur/germanistik-sw-2/projekte/adt/index.html