This research area is part of the multifaceted long-term project activities which are bundled in project cluster WBÖ (Dictionary of historical Bavarian dialects in Austria and South Tyrol) at the ACDH-CH. On the one hand, the research area aims at comprehensively investigating the variation and change of Bavarian dialects in Austria over the course of the last approx. 120 years. On the other hand, these dialect-oriented analyses are embedded in the extensive variationist and sociolinguistic activities of the research unit Linguistics at the ACDH-CH, targeting research on language dynamics in Austria – both overarching varieties and languages – at large. From a theoretical-methodological perspective, this research area is located in the fields of dialectology, variationist linguistics and sociolinguistics as well as research on language change and language contact research.
Research activities within this research area “WBÖ – Research” focus numerous aspects: This includes the multidimensional exploration of the various WBÖ material and data, which have been collected and processed since the beginning of the WBÖ activities (cf. research area “WBÖ – Corpus&Infrastructure”). In addition, the historic material acts as diachronic point of comparison with present day linguistic data (from, e.g., the projects SFB “German in Austria” or LexAT) to analyze language dynamics in Austria. Incorporating both linguistic and extra-linguistic dimensions (such as, e.g., areal-horizontal parameters or time) allows for multi-attribute analyses and multi-methodological settings from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Currently, a part-of-speech tagging system is being developed. This includes syntactic annotation of elicited sentences within the WBÖ-document database which will facilitate morphosyntactic analyses of the WBÖ-material and its comparison with present day linguistic data. In general, “WBÖ – Research” includes the following main areas of research
Variation and change of dialects in Austria
Areal-linguistic structures of Austrian dialects
Features of varietal contact and language contact with regard to Austrian dialects
Language dynamics in Austria in the 20th and 21st century (see, e.g., projects “Austriacisms”, LexAT)
The core team of “WBÖ – Research” includes the following staff of the research unit Linguistics: Andreas Gellan, Manfred Glauninger, Agnes Kim, Wolfgang Koppensteiner, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Markus Kunzmann, Alexandra N. Lenz (CO-PI) and Philipp Stöckle (CO-PI).