The urban vernacular of Hanover

• Applicant: Dr. François Conrad
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431328772

A popular myth states that the German variety spoken in Hanover (Low Saxony) presents the “purest” Standard German. While this myth has been in existence for about 200 years, synchronic empirical linguistic evidence for a variety close to German Standard in Hanover is missing. This project analyses the varieties spoken in Hanover, including the former urban dialect ‘Hannöversch’, from the perspective of urban sociolinguistics. It examines the language of 108 persons (i.a. three generations, two educational backgrounds, male/female) with regard to Standard and non-Standard elements in a range of experimental settings. In parallel, it collects metalinguistic data such as familiarity and attitudes concerning these varieties and concerning specific regional or local features. Besides an in-depth language biographical interview it includes perceptual dialectological tests to evaluate and describe the subjective perspective on the urban vernacular. The project “The urban vernacular of Hanover” thus analyses for the first time the myth of the purest German from the point of view of variationist sociolinguistics, perceptual dialectology, language biography and language ideology, combining newly collected linguistic data from the speakers of Hanover with language attitudes and evaluations and further metalinguistic assessments. This second project phase evaluates and analyses the data collected in the first project phase – delayed by the corona pandemic – and gives an exhaustive answer to the question whether the myth is pure fiction or linguistically grounded reality.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Peter Schlobinski