Cooperative Dictionary of the Rhinelandic Colloquial Language
Encyclopedia
The Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR), a public body of municipal self governance of the Rhineland
in West of North Rhine-Westphalia
in Western Germany
, runs a project they call Cooperative Dictionary of the Rhinelandic Colloquial Language, or in German. It is a means of linguistic
research, organizationally and scientifically under the auspices of the Bureau of Research and Documentation of the Rhineland, in German Amt für rheinische Landeskunde (ARL).
The Project started an interactive world wide web
site towards the end of February 2007, although it had been publicly announced in 2005 already to become available in fall 2006. The technical aspects of the site are handled by an external contractor. Content and conceptual matters are handled directly by the ARL.
The website both documents and collects data on the current colloquial language
use in the Rhineland region
, where some 15 million speakers live. They are using a quite distinct variety of German
when speaking colloquially. This project is the first if its kind replacing interwievs with individual speakers, or questionnaires, by an interactive web application quasi anonymously collecting scientific evidence about a contemporary language.
Participants are asked to submit words, and sample sentences. Optionally, they should also enter their regional background, e.g. the town or village where they live, or the region within which a word or expression is being used. They are under no obligation to do so, but they can enter their names for publication, and e-mail addresses, which are alway kept confidential and not published. There is no login and no identity check. False impersonations are generally possible, but pretty pointless. The list of contributors having agreed to have their names mentioned grew from none to about 600 in the 1st half year once the website was online. Submissions take several days to weeks, occasionally months, to be incorporated in the dictionary by the editors who read, filter, and process them.
Even though the cooperative dictionary conceptually builds upon volunteer contributions, it is not a commonplace Web 2.0
type of website, since there is a board of editors collecting and condensing contributions, and editing them, before they get published. The project in a way works similar to the most popular German Duden
editors, who are watching and observing the use of written Standard German
, reporting their findings in the form of a printed dictionary. The cooperative dictionary only focuses on the spoken language, and on a much smaller region, so instead of new books, magazines, and papers, they evaluate voluntary statements of speakers about their everydays colloquial language use.
The definition of Rhineland thereby includes the Lower Rhine region
of Germany, the Ruhr Area
, the Bergisches Land
, the so called Central Rhineland around the big cities Aachen
, Bonn
, Cologne
, Düsseldorf
, the more rural Eifel
and Hunsrück
regions, plus some small stripes alongside the borders. This coincides approximately with the North and Central of the former Rhine Province
of the former Prussia
n reign. Its northern areas are covered by the more modern term of Meuse-Rhine area
.
The term colloquial language does explicitly not mean the many local languages, which in Germany commonly are referred to as "dialects", even if they still dominate everydays communication here and there. It rather means a common regional colloquial language
, also termed a Regiolect, which has developed very recently as a kind of dachsprache enveloping the older local languages. It is more or less influenced by the so called dialects, but in itself a variant of Standard German
or High German, which incorporates several mild, globalized and unified localisms. It does have subregional variations itself, but these are less, and almost always ubiquitously comprehended, as opposed to the local languages, which are far more diverse, and most often largely mutually incomprehensible, when geographically somewhat distant.
Regiolect speakers very often are not aware that their spoken language, and its use, deviate quite a lot and to a large extent from Standard German. Only a part of the Rhinelanders consciously reflect what those differences are. Contributions show that likely this relatively small group tends to make submissions to the Cooperative Dictionary project. This may lead to questions about the methodical rigor of the project. Similarly, documentiong a spoken language with currently only written evidence created by people who are not educated in this field, using an undocumented unstandardized writing system, is posing questions. The currently used writing style is hardly suited to document most of those deviations from Standard German, which are not part of Standard German, and not occurring in Standard German, in the realm of accent
and prosody
at large, such as type A prosody, melody of speech, phonetic intonation
, word accent
, rhythm, tonal accents, timbre
and vokal colors, and so on.
Orthography
is mainly left to the contributors. Editors at best only slightly unify writing in sample sentences. Thus orthography reflects both individual preferences and to some extent regional differentiation of speech and intonation, too. Also linguistic registers
can show this way.
Currently, the Cooperative Dictionary does not use sound recordings.
s" in Germany.
Since the 1970s they put an additional focus on the supra-dialectal regional language variety
and colloquial language
of the Rhineland. These, after World War II
, had gradually begun to replace the older local languages (dialects) in large areas causing a notable shift of everydays spoken language.
In order to research and document the colloquial language of the Rhineland in various publications, regular polls were made over the years, always asking for both specific and more general linguistic information on language use from a large number of volunteers via pre-compiled questionnaires focusing of varying types of information. So, among many others tasks, new maps of word use could be drawn and published, and both stability, and movement, of several isoglosses could be shown. In part, research results were published on the ARLs website, too.
The Cooperative Dictionary is the first attempt to replace, or supplement, such scientific polls of a larger number of volunteers by an ongoing monitoring and surveillance of linguistic evidence. The makers hope to increase the number of individuals in their probe while at the same time, since data is being collected electronically from the very beginning, decrease labour and manual work needed for data entry and, in part, analysis, compared to the previous, predominantly paper based work.
There are no published indications regarding the quality of the data collected anonymously over the internet. Editor Dr. Peter Honnen
points out that past observations of wiki
s dedicated to collect information of a specific kind, such as Wikipedia
, and Wiktionary
, in part helped the Cooperative Dictionary of the Rhinelandic Colloquial Language on its way by proving that useful data could be colleced cooperatively in the internet. Also reception of the publications of the linguistics section of the Amt für Rheinische Landeskunde on the web, and the growing number of Rhinelanders participating in polls sending their questionnaires by e-mail did lend themselves to support an online project.
Rhineland
Historically, the Rhinelands refers to a loosely-defined region embracing the land on either bank of the River Rhine in central Europe....
in West of North Rhine-Westphalia
North Rhine-Westphalia
North Rhine-Westphalia is the most populous state of Germany, with four of the country's ten largest cities. The state was formed in 1946 as a merger of the northern Rhineland and Westphalia, both formerly part of Prussia. Its capital is Düsseldorf. The state is currently run by a coalition of the...
in Western Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, runs a project they call Cooperative Dictionary of the Rhinelandic Colloquial Language, or in German. It is a means of linguistic
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
research, organizationally and scientifically under the auspices of the Bureau of Research and Documentation of the Rhineland, in German Amt für rheinische Landeskunde (ARL).
The Project started an interactive world wide web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
site towards the end of February 2007, although it had been publicly announced in 2005 already to become available in fall 2006. The technical aspects of the site are handled by an external contractor. Content and conceptual matters are handled directly by the ARL.
The website both documents and collects data on the current colloquial language
Colloquial language
Colloquial language, especially in philosophy of language, is natural language which, among other properties, uses colloquialisms. In the field of logical atomism, meaning is evaluated differently than with more formal propositions.-See also:...
use in the Rhineland region
Rhineland
Historically, the Rhinelands refers to a loosely-defined region embracing the land on either bank of the River Rhine in central Europe....
, where some 15 million speakers live. They are using a quite distinct variety of German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
when speaking colloquially. This project is the first if its kind replacing interwievs with individual speakers, or questionnaires, by an interactive web application quasi anonymously collecting scientific evidence about a contemporary language.
Website
The cooperative dictionary website has several pages describing what it is all about, how to use it, and such. It has an editorial-like "featured word of the month" series of articles with is added to every six or seven weeks. Its main areas are:- Read (German: ) – allows reading the dictionary pretty much like a printed copy. Page layout resembles print. Catchwords are sorted alphabetically. Related words appear under their associated main catchwords. Each initial letter starts another page, only page size exceeds normal sheet length by far, meanwhile.
- Page (German: ) – The paging function permits access to individual words through a set of keyword lists, each covering a portion of the alphabet. Keywords link to the individual pages on words in the format, that also the search function presents.
- Search (German: ) – There is a simple and a slightly more sophisticated search form, supporting limited fuzzyness and wildcards. They usually yield two word lists of links to pages on individual words. One list has catchwords only, the other occurrences in sample sentences presented with arbitrary catchwords. Any such word page presents the data already collected and edited for the word, and, usually, related words, and sample sentences demonstrating its use in everyday colloquial speech. After that, there is a form, where additional comments can be made by users. Submitted comments appear on the page at once, they are visible for everyone. Editors incorporate comments into word articles every now and then, and delete comments that are done.
- Contribute (German: ) – Missing words, expressions or phrase constructs, as well as any sort of information, can be entered into an online form here. Along with the submitters e-mail address (optional) and town, city or region (optional), everything is send per e-mailE-mailElectronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
to the team of editors. Submissions are usually integrated into the dictionary within several weeks.
Participants are asked to submit words, and sample sentences. Optionally, they should also enter their regional background, e.g. the town or village where they live, or the region within which a word or expression is being used. They are under no obligation to do so, but they can enter their names for publication, and e-mail addresses, which are alway kept confidential and not published. There is no login and no identity check. False impersonations are generally possible, but pretty pointless. The list of contributors having agreed to have their names mentioned grew from none to about 600 in the 1st half year once the website was online. Submissions take several days to weeks, occasionally months, to be incorporated in the dictionary by the editors who read, filter, and process them.
Even though the cooperative dictionary conceptually builds upon volunteer contributions, it is not a commonplace Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
type of website, since there is a board of editors collecting and condensing contributions, and editing them, before they get published. The project in a way works similar to the most popular German Duden
Duden
The Duden is a German dictionary, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880.Currently the Duden is in its 25th edition and published in 12 volumes, each covering different aspects like loan words, etymology, pronunciation, synonyms, etc...
editors, who are watching and observing the use of written Standard German
Standard German
Standard German is the standard variety of the German language used as a written language, in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas...
, reporting their findings in the form of a printed dictionary. The cooperative dictionary only focuses on the spoken language, and on a much smaller region, so instead of new books, magazines, and papers, they evaluate voluntary statements of speakers about their everydays colloquial language use.
Subject of research and methods of assessment
Subject matter of research and documentation is the spoken colloquial language of the Rhineland'.The definition of Rhineland thereby includes the Lower Rhine region
Lower Rhine region (Germany)
The Lower Rhine region or Niederrhein is a region around the Lower Rhine section of the river Rhine in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany between approximately Neuss and Düsseldorf in the South and the Dutch border around Emmerich in the North...
of Germany, the Ruhr Area
Ruhr Area
The Ruhr, by German-speaking geographers and historians more accurately called Ruhr district or Ruhr region , is an urban area in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With 4435 km² and a population of some 5.2 million , it is the largest urban agglomeration in Germany...
, the Bergisches Land
Bergisches Land
The Bergisches Land is a low mountain range region within the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, east of Rhine river, south of the Ruhr. The landscape is shaped by woods, meadows, rivers and creeks and contains over 20 artificial lakes...
, the so called Central Rhineland around the big cities Aachen
Aachen
Aachen has historically been a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost town of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, ...
, Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
, Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
, Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
, the more rural Eifel
Eifel
The Eifel is a low mountain range in western Germany and eastern Belgium. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate and the south of the German-speaking Community of Belgium....
and Hunsrück
Hunsrück
The Hunsrück is a low mountain range in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is bounded by the river valleys of the Moselle , the Nahe , and the Rhine . The Hunsrück is continued by the Taunus mountains on the eastern side of the Rhine. In the north behind the Moselle it is continued by the Eifel...
regions, plus some small stripes alongside the borders. This coincides approximately with the North and Central of the former Rhine Province
Rhine Province
The Rhine Province , also known as Rhenish Prussia or synonymous to the Rhineland , was the westernmost province of the Kingdom of Prussia and the Free State of Prussia, within the German Reich, from 1822-1946. It was created from the provinces of the Lower Rhine and Jülich-Cleves-Berg...
of the former Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
n reign. Its northern areas are covered by the more modern term of Meuse-Rhine area
Meuse-Rhine Euroregion
The Meuse-Rhine Euregion is a Euroregion created in 1976, with judicial status achieved in 1991. It comprises 11.000 km² and has around 3.9 million inhabitants around the city-corridor of Aachen-Maastricht-Hasselt-Liège...
.
The term colloquial language does explicitly not mean the many local languages, which in Germany commonly are referred to as "dialects", even if they still dominate everydays communication here and there. It rather means a common regional colloquial language
Dialectology
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...
, also termed a Regiolect, which has developed very recently as a kind of dachsprache enveloping the older local languages. It is more or less influenced by the so called dialects, but in itself a variant of Standard German
Standard German
Standard German is the standard variety of the German language used as a written language, in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas...
or High German, which incorporates several mild, globalized and unified localisms. It does have subregional variations itself, but these are less, and almost always ubiquitously comprehended, as opposed to the local languages, which are far more diverse, and most often largely mutually incomprehensible, when geographically somewhat distant.
Regiolect speakers very often are not aware that their spoken language, and its use, deviate quite a lot and to a large extent from Standard German. Only a part of the Rhinelanders consciously reflect what those differences are. Contributions show that likely this relatively small group tends to make submissions to the Cooperative Dictionary project. This may lead to questions about the methodical rigor of the project. Similarly, documentiong a spoken language with currently only written evidence created by people who are not educated in this field, using an undocumented unstandardized writing system, is posing questions. The currently used writing style is hardly suited to document most of those deviations from Standard German, which are not part of Standard German, and not occurring in Standard German, in the realm of accent
Accent (linguistics)
In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation.An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside , the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language In...
and prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
at large, such as type A prosody, melody of speech, phonetic intonation
Intonation (linguistics)
In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. Intonation, rhythm, and stress are the three main elements of linguistic prosody...
, word accent
Accent (linguistics)
In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation.An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside , the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language In...
, rhythm, tonal accents, timbre
Timbre
In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...
and vokal colors, and so on.
Orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
is mainly left to the contributors. Editors at best only slightly unify writing in sample sentences. Thus orthography reflects both individual preferences and to some extent regional differentiation of speech and intonation, too. Also linguistic registers
Register (linguistics)
In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal...
can show this way.
Currently, the Cooperative Dictionary does not use sound recordings.
Scientific background
In its scientific work of the past, the linguistic section of the ALR, first under Dr. Fritz Langensiepen, later under Dr. Georg Cornelissen, originally mainly researched the local languages, which are collectively called "dialectDialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s" in Germany.
Since the 1970s they put an additional focus on the supra-dialectal regional language variety
Dialectology
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...
and colloquial language
Colloquial language
Colloquial language, especially in philosophy of language, is natural language which, among other properties, uses colloquialisms. In the field of logical atomism, meaning is evaluated differently than with more formal propositions.-See also:...
of the Rhineland. These, after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, had gradually begun to replace the older local languages (dialects) in large areas causing a notable shift of everydays spoken language.
In order to research and document the colloquial language of the Rhineland in various publications, regular polls were made over the years, always asking for both specific and more general linguistic information on language use from a large number of volunteers via pre-compiled questionnaires focusing of varying types of information. So, among many others tasks, new maps of word use could be drawn and published, and both stability, and movement, of several isoglosses could be shown. In part, research results were published on the ARLs website, too.
The Cooperative Dictionary is the first attempt to replace, or supplement, such scientific polls of a larger number of volunteers by an ongoing monitoring and surveillance of linguistic evidence. The makers hope to increase the number of individuals in their probe while at the same time, since data is being collected electronically from the very beginning, decrease labour and manual work needed for data entry and, in part, analysis, compared to the previous, predominantly paper based work.
There are no published indications regarding the quality of the data collected anonymously over the internet. Editor Dr. Peter Honnen
Peter Honnen
Peter Honnen is a German linguist and specialist researcher of the languages of the Rhineland. He was born in Rheinhausen, Germany....
points out that past observations of wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
s dedicated to collect information of a specific kind, such as Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, and Wiktionary
Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...
, in part helped the Cooperative Dictionary of the Rhinelandic Colloquial Language on its way by proving that useful data could be colleced cooperatively in the internet. Also reception of the publications of the linguistics section of the Amt für Rheinische Landeskunde on the web, and the growing number of Rhinelanders participating in polls sending their questionnaires by e-mail did lend themselves to support an online project.