Dictionary of the Banat German dialects
In the dictionary of the Banat German dialects , the vocabulary of the German-speaking Banat Swabians in today's Romanian Banat including the Arad district is scientifically recorded in its phonetic, grammatical and meaningful peculiarities.
type
The dictionary is a large-scale dictionary that treats the different dialect types of the Banat.
- Middle German dialects. The Central German group is divided into Moselle and Rhenish Franconian and these again into fescht and fest dialects, some of them with Bavarian influences.
- The Upper German dialects are divided into Bavarian and Franconian- Alemannic dialects, whereby the Bavarian dialects are divided into northern and southern Bavarian dialects. The second group includes the East Franconian festive, the South Franconian fescht dialect and the high Alemannic dialect of Zădăreni (Saderlach).
The dictionary paints a picture of the close mutual linguistic interdependence of the German-speaking minority with the dialects of the resident Romanians, Hungarians and Serbs, which means that the work is also relevant for Romanian, Hungarian and Serbian linguistic research.
History, sources and material base
The working group for dialect research, founded in 1956 at the Philological Faculty of what was then the Timișoara University of Education , today's West Timișoara University , began its first surveys in the summer of 1957. In addition to teachers, students and German teachers who had studied in Timișoara increasingly participated in the recordings. The questionnaires comprised the 44 Wenker sentences with some additional lexical questions, the 200 words from the questionnaire of the German word atlas , about 300 questions in a questionnaire developed by Johann Wolf about the Banat peculiarities in vocabulary, phonetics and grammar, and questionnaires from Maria Pechtol on conjugation of the verb and by Peter Kottler on the use of nouns, by Hans Gehl on customs in the course of life and the year cycle and finally the questionnaire of the Atlas of the Languages of Europe . The dialect archive was also supplemented by individual recordings of the students in their hometowns. Numerous diploma theses with dialectological topics, written by the graduates, were excerpted by the students, with the emphasis on words beginning with the letters A - F. The collected Banat folk art and the Banat dialect literature were also excerpted. By 1985, more than 300,000 pieces of paper had been collected with sound variants and sentence references for the individual keywords. Up to 1991 173 theses had been written on Banat German dialects from 86 localities.
Inadequate funding and insufficient material base, as well as the departure of many Germanists from Timișoara after the Romanian Revolution in 1989 delayed the publication of the dictionary. After trial publications in 1997 and 2002, the first volume of the dictionary was published in 2013.
Publication status
Dictionary of the Banat German dialects. Founded by the Temeswar Chair for German Studies. Volume I ff. IKGS Verlag, Munich 2013 ff.
- Volume I (A – C) 2013
literature
- Ileana Irimescu: Dictionary of the Banat German dialects. Preliminary studies, basics and sample articles. Kaiserslautern 1997.
- Introduction. In: Dictionary of the Banat German Dialects, Volume I (A – C), edited by Peter Kottler, Ileana Irimescu, Alwine Ivanescu, Eveline Hancu and Mihaela Sandor. IKGS Verlag, Munich 2013, page IX – CXXXV.
Web links
- banater-schwaben.org , various articles on the dialect in the Banat.