Rhenish interactive dictionary
The Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR) started the web-based Rhenish interactive dictionary at the end of February 2007 to research and document the Rhenish region . Organizationally, it is part of the Linguistics Department at the Institute for Regional Studies and Regional History (formerly: Office for Rhenish Regional Studies - ARL), where it is editorially and linguistically supervised. An external company is responsible for the technical implementation.
The concept was announced back in 2005, still under the original name of the interactive dictionary of the Rhenish colloquial language , and should first go online in autumn 2006.
The Rhenish Join-in Dictionary is not to be confused with the Rhenish Dictionary .
The website
In addition to some explanations, notes on usage and a " Word of the Month " section, which is added almost every two months , the website contains four main areas:
- Read.
- You can read like a printed book. The page design is also relatively close to that of a print. The keywords are listed alphabetically, related words appear in the alphabet under the corresponding main keyword. There is a separate page for each initial letter, which, however, far exceeds the size of a printed page.
- Scroll.
- When using the “Browse” function, the vocabulary is made accessible using several keyword lists, each of which includes a part of the alphabet. Choosing a word leads to that keyword only on a page, as described in the next section.
- Search.
- You can display the last 50 new entries or search for a specific word. Then you get a selection list with articles in which this word occurs, be it as a keyword or in an example sentence or an excerpt of the material collected so far only on this word. On the page with the search results, it is also possible to enter additions or comments or clarifying examples. These comments appear immediately on the website under the actual article. Over time, they will be incorporated into the articles editorially.
- Participate.
- If a word is missing, you can use the menu item "Participate" to access an input form, which you can use to send an e-mail to the editorial team and tell them what you can contribute to this word and its explanation.
Both example sentences and the regional origin of words , expressions and ways of speaking as well as the speaker / writer are asked. This information, like the names of the contributors, is voluntary. A registration is neither necessary nor possible, and one can assume that single mistake and errors detected in essays by the editors and are screened out. In doing so, numbers of the mentioning and distribution of individual words will probably be collected, as in the previous regular surveys via questionnaires . At the moment, no numbers are given on the interactive dictionary websites, for example how often a certain word is used. However, it can be seen that the processing of the submissions takes weeks and months to come, so that a correspondingly high participation can be assumed. This is also supported by the list of writers who agreed to their naming, which has grown from zero to around 600 names in the first six months of its existence.
classification
Even if the concept of the interactive dictionary is based on contributions from voluntary writers, it is not a pure Web 2.0 application with user-generated content , as there is an editorial team that bundles and summarizes contributions. In this respect, this project is similar to the Duden , which also observes current language usage and documents it editorially. Unlike there, publications in books and magazines are not evaluated, but rather voluntary information provided by the speakers about their everyday language.
Research areas and methodology
The everyday language spoken in the Rhineland is documented.
With “Rhineland” is meant: the Lower Rhine , the Ruhr area , the Bergisches Land , the central Rhineland , the Eifel and the Hunsrück . This roughly corresponds to the western central and northern parts of the former Prussian Rhine Province .
With "everyday language" is not the many, usually as dialects designated original local languages meant, even if they still determine everyday communication here and there, but rather the regional Rhine vernacular, a relatively recently formed, more or less dialect-influenced version of the standard German with In some cases clear regional differences, which are, however, considerably smaller than among the so-called dialects (compare also dialects in North Rhine-Westphalia and dialects in Rhineland-Palatinate )
The fact that their German deviates significantly from standard German and other regional lectures of the German language is often only perceived and consciously reflected on by some of the actual “Rhenish” speakers in the study area. Contributions show that the contributors to the dictionary seem to belong to the latter part of the population, which could raise methodological questions, as well as the fact that a spoken language should be documented with written contributions that do not, or at best rather inadequately, such deviations from Standard German imaging assets that are in the area of pronunciation move or extended prosody, that is A-prosody , sentence accent , intonation , word stress , rhythm and pitch accents , and the vowel - colorings , and so forth.
The spelling is left to the participants and, at least in the example sentences, the editors, at best, tentatively unify them. It thus reflects individual preferences and, to a limited extent, regional differences in pronunciation as well as linguistic registers . Sound recordings are currently not used in the interactive dictionary.
Scientific background
In his previous academic work, the language department of the ALR under Fritz Langensiepen and later Georg Cornelissen had, in addition to extensive work on dialect research , increasingly researched and documented the regional and colloquial language in the Rhineland, which has replaced the original dialects as everyday language since the Second World War to have. For this purpose, regular questionnaires on specific, pre-selected topics were carried out over the years , which among other things resulted in current word distribution maps. Parts of the research results were documented on the institute's website.
The interactive dictionary is the first attempt to replace or supplement such scientific surveys of a large number of volunteers with permanent observation and collection of data. It is hoped that the number of individuals in the survey will also be increased considerably, while at the same time, the fact that information is electronically available from the start can reduce the manual recording effort of the evaluation.
There is no information available to date as to whether the quality of the results may not suffer as a result of the anonymized recording on the Internet . According to editor Peter Honnen , experiences with topic-centric wikis such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary helped start the hands-on dictionary experiment by showing that useful information can be gathered on the web. Furthermore, the reception of the publications of the Department of Linguistics and the increasing number of people from the Rhineland participating in the questionnaire by e-mail made this step seem sensible.
