This collaborative and interdisciplinary research project addresses a pivotal question in linguistics: what makes a variety a variety and what distinguishes it from other varieties? Specifically, it explores what makes varieties — such as dialects — coherent and distinct linguistic entities. To this end, a group of researchers from diverse disciplines and universities, specialising in various fields of linguistics, have collaborated to address this issue. The researchers involved in this project hail from a diverse range of academic backgrounds, including but not limited to the fields of computational linguistics, natural language processing and artificial intelligence research, quantitative linguistics, phonetics and speech processing, psycholinguistics, contact linguistics, dialectology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

You can get an overview of the researchers involved here: People
You can find an overview of the individual projects here: Projects

DETAILED SUMMARY OF THE PROJECT

A fundamental question in the field of linguistics pertains to the definition and distinction of linguistic varieties, including dialects and standard languages. The present project aims to address this question through an empirical lens, utilising the concept of lectal coherence.

The concept of lectal coherence can be applied both to the use of language and to the language system. Coherence in language use is about how similar (or dissimilar) individual speakers or groups of speakers from various language regions behave in certain contexts and situations, e.g. linguistic features (variants) can co-occur in recognisable patterns in a geographical region and/or social situation in particular contexts of use. Lectal coherence aligns with the fundamental principle of “ordered heterogeneity” or “structured variation” (Weinreich et al. 1968), linking language variation to speech communities. As Guy & Hinskens (2016:2) state, “the orderly variables that define the community should collectively behave in parallel.” This means that speakers’ choices between variable linguistic forms are systematically constrained by linguistic and social factors, reflecting underlying grammatical systems and social organization (Bayley 2013:85). One major goal of this project is to empirically investigate the co-occurrence and co-variation conditions, i.e. the coherence, of the language use of different groups of speakers in the German-speaking world in order to draw conclusions about the key characteristics of varieties. Coherence in the language system is about the extent and regularity with which linguistic features or structures within a particular variety are systematically related to each other, i.e. about how linguistic features or structures (variants) associated with certain groups of speakers and/or contexts of use are stable and functionally unambiguous. Varieties such as dialects, sociolects, and standard languages are often defined by specific sets of linguistic structures and co-occurrence patterns across all linguistic levels.

Regional varieties of German provide an excellent case for studying lectal coherence due to the language’s rich regional variation and social differentiation. While significant research has explored distinguishing varieties, empirical studies focusing on internal unity through lectal coherence remain scarce. Although the focus of this project is on German varieties, its findings aim to have broader implications. The goal is to empirically operationalize lectal coherence and statistically test it across all linguistic levels to better understand language variation and change.