This collection provides a broad account of variationist sociolinguistic research on varieties of German, with the goals to encourage greater geolinguistic diversity in the field and to expand our understanding of language variation and change.

James M. Stratton is an Assistant Professor of German and Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in language variation and change in Germanic languages, both past and present, with a particular emphasis on lexis and discourse-pragmatics.

Karen V. Beaman is a lecturer and post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests concern language variation, coherence, and change, with particular focus on how factors of identity, mobility and social networks affect change.

Contents

List of Contributors

Foreword

Sali A. Tagliamonte

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Variationist sociolinguistics: Theoretical and methodological foundations

James M. Stratton and Karen V. Beaman

SECTION 1: Bridging German dialectology and German variationist sociolinguistics

Chapter 2

The social versus the regional: A multivariate analysis of (morpho-)syntactic variation in Austria's rural dialects

Philip C. Vergeiner, Lars Bülow, and Stephan Elspaß

Chapter 3

Dialect maintenance in German Alemannic and the role of pro-Alsatian attitudes and orientations

Peter Auer, Martin Pfeiffer, Göz Kaufmann, and Julia Breuninger

Chapter 4

Sociolinguistic variation in a non-native variety of Swiss German: Romansh migrants in the city of Berne

Andrin Büchler

SECTION 2: Diving into social-discursive functions

Chapter 5

Fei schee: The social meaning of intensifier use in Swabian

James M. Stratton and Karen V. Beaman

Chapter 6

Subjunctive and diminutive use as politeness strategies in German in Austria: Comparative evidence from sociolinguistic interviews and conversations among friends

Katharina Korecky-Kröll and Anja Wittibschlager

Chapter 7

A socio-stylistic analysis of variation in support verb constructions in a corpus of spoken German

John D. Sundquist and Colleen Neary-Sundquist

Chapter 8

Sociolinguistic variation in German: The case of the modal particles halt and eben

Oliver Bunk, Antje Sauermann, and Fynn Raphael Dobler

SECTION 3: Merging historical and sociolinguistic perspectives

Chapter 9

Variation in an Austrian winegrower's nineteenth-century chronicle

Anna D. Havinga and Simon Pickl

Chapter 10

Socio-historical data and the need for representative historical corpora

Katrin Fuchs

AFTERWORD

Chapter 11

Looking forward: German-centered variationist sociolinguistics in the 21st century

Barbara Soukup

Index