“For Your speech betrays you …” Language and Denomination 500 Years after the Reformation

• Applicant: Dr. Anna-Maria Balbach
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 410899976

Christianity has been influencing the German language since its beginning (BLANK 1998, LASCH/LIEBERT 2017). Recent research on the Early Modern period has demonstrated that the establishing of different denominations influenced the German language in a special way (BREUER 2012). Catholics refused the widespread use of east middle German the dialect of Martin Luther and his German Bible translation as a “heretical” dialect. In contrast, Catholics used the upper German dialect, even if they did not live in upper Germany. This led to distinct Catholic and Protestant differences of language use on the lexical, syntactical, and text structural level at least until the late eighteenth century (BALBACH 2014, MACHA 2014). But what happened to those differences? Studies of the plurality of linguistic forms of expression have yet to investigate denomination as a factor of variation in modern day German language. A survey of the year 2014 at the University of Muenster has shown that also modern Catholic and Protestant texts are still using specific language use and different text structures according to their denomination. There has been no linguistic investigation until now. This project aims to analyze Catholic and Protestant language use in today’s religious radio broadcasts. Therefore, a corpus of daily Catholic and Protestant broadcasts for young people and for older people will be analyzed on several linguistic levels.Initial results show that confessional language use can be seen especially on the lexical level. Quantitative analyses by the analysis tool AntConc (ANTHONY 2017) show significant differences regarding vocabulary in the Protestant and Catholic texts. Words occurring with high frequency in the Catholic corpus seem to occur less frequently in the Protestant corpus, and vice versa. We followed up with a qualitative analysis (FUNK 1995) and are able to show a distinct religious lexicon in each confession. We also analyzed collocates of the word ‘God’ (BUBENHOFER/SCHARLOTH 2015, BUBENHOFER 2009). In the Catholic corpus, ‘God’ is collocated with other (religious) nouns, such as “Gottesdienst” (mass service), “Gottes Geist” (Holy Spirit), and “Hochzeit” (wedding). In the Protestant corpus, the collocates are verbs and put God in the role of the agent. Findings about different topics and text structures also prove confessional differences and will be presented on the poster. Connecting these grammatical, lexical, and structural results, our linguistic analyses reveal confessional differences in form and substance which lead to different styles (AUER 2012) of radio broadcasts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants