Measuring attitudes towards standard German and German dialects: Results of recent representative survey data from Germany

Abstract

Like all modern Western societies, Germany is a multilingual country. While German is the most widely spoken language, both as a first language and as an everyday language, residents who do not have German as their first language but another language (or several other languages) and/or who use another language (or several other languages) in their everyday life besides, are estimated to make up about 20 percent of the total population (Stickel 2012: 235). Reliable data on the languages spoken in Germany and the number of their speakers are not available because there is no language census in Germany. But even if a certain public awareness of the presence of other languages has developed in recent decades, primarily due to an increasing multilingualism resulting from various forms of migration (the autochthonous linguistic minorities are less significant in terms of numbers), Germany is still ‘conceptually monolingual’, meaning that the majority view of the language situation in Germany is shaped by the tradition of the European concept of the nation-state, where language and statehood are closely linked. In Germany, German is spoken, that is the consensus – even without a corresponding provision in the Constitution. There is also a consensus that the kind of German that is used in realms like administration, legal affairs, schooling, and the media, is the standard variety. Further, there seems to be a kind of pragmatic concurrence or opinion within the language community about what this standard variety is like, so that – apart from the spelling, for which there is an official regulation – a detailed definition of what is standard does not seem ideologically required. Although a certain amount of variation (pluricentric as well as pluriareal) has been attested within the standard – as documented, for example, by the Dictionary of Varieties (Variantenwörterbuch, Ammon, Bickel and Lenz 2016), the Grammar of Varieties (Variantengrammatik, Dürscheid Elspaß and Ziegler 2018) or the Atlas for the Pronunciation of the German Usage Standard (Atlas zur Aussprache des Deutschen Gebrauchsstandards, Kleiner 2011 et seq.), this variation does not seem to call into question the hypostasized concept of a standard as such, in the common mind. However, the subject of this article is not the issue of the (many) forms of the standard variety, but rather the question of what status this standard has regarding the reality of language use, and what attributions to it are made by speakers. The material this report is based on is a new nationwide representative survey; core information on the data set used is provided in the next section. Then the results of the survey are presented as they relate to the dialectal competence of the respondents and their everyday language use; the following section shows how standard German and some of the regional varieties of German are assessed by the respondents. The report concludes with a summary of findings.