Bernese German in the pre-modern prison: language(s) and linguistic history in early modern Bern
The Bernese tower books record crimes of the past. They were mainly created in the early modern period and consist of interrogation records from Bern's Käfigturm, which are now generally available for public inspection in the State Archives of the Canton of Bern. At first glance, it is therefore surprising that neither (legal and social) historical nor historical-sociolinguistic research has benefited from this wealth of sources to date. However, given the size of the corpus (at least 250,000 pages) and the fact that the handwriting of the former Bernese town clerks can only be deciphered by experienced readers, the lack of comprehensive research on the Bernese Tower Books is not surprising. In addition, there is practically no research not only on the source itself, but also on the language of writing in early modern Switzerland and on the history of language in the city-state of Bern.
The proposed Early Postdoc.Mobility project (title: Bernese German in the pre-modern prison: language(s) and language history in early modern Bern) will for the first time conduct in-depth research into linguistic variation in Bernese German and Bernese language history on the basis of around 20 criminal case files (approx. 300 pages) from the Bernese Tower Books. The aim is to clarify whether a chancery language was written in Bern in the early modern period, how it was presented, how and whether dialectal variation manifested itself in the written language at the time and whether the written language used can be compared with other cases from German-speaking countries.The Bernese German dialect of the time will also play a role:What did it look like?Is it possible to grasp it at all and, if so, what does it teach us about the history of the Bernese language?A unique feature of this project is that the influence of the respective town clerk on the written dialect can also be included in the investigations.
Thanks to the records in the Bernese Easter Books, the identity, origin and education of the respective town clerk can be traced.
From autumn 2020, parts of the Bern Tower Books will be digitised using new methods of digital humanities and prepared for analysis (use of so-called ScanTents for digitisation, automatic manuscript recognition and machine-readable transcription using Transkribus). This enables an extremely time-efficient approach, so that results from the project can already provide initial answers to the questions posed above in selected publications during and, above all, after its duration.
The results of the project represent a desideratum in several respects:Firstly, for the first time it will be possible to make statements about a written variety used before the introduction of Standard German and, secondly, the results will ideally complement our knowledge of local language history.The fact that Swiss German dialects allow a glimpse into the linguistic past of their respective regions is nothing new, but this project will make it possible for the first time ever to look so far back into the dialect/writing tradition of the early modern period.
Youth language in the Canton of Berne (completed)
Although youth language has not yet been categorised as a uniform age-related phenomenon, it is an attractive field of research in sociolinguistics. Youth language combines linguistic variation of a standard language with the social factors of age, gender, level of education, regional origin and migration background. Youth language has also given rise to research into de-ethnicisation.
This investigates why young people without a multicultural background also use the ethnolect elements used in youth language.In Germany, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain in particular, research into youth language is increasing, and corpora on youth language are already available in some cases.
As a multilingual country, Switzerland is an ideal breeding ground for the development of ethnolects and youth languages. Despite this, only a few studies have been carried out on these two areas to date, most of which are small-scale pilot studies that are not followed up after completion.
The first corpus on youth language in Switzerland is to be created at the University of Bern between 2019 and 2022. This corpus will be available to the international research community and will enable systematic sociolinguistic and social anthropological studies on a diastratic-diaphasic variety for the first time.
Further information on the project and access to the database: www.jugendspracheschweiz.com
Gvätterlisch or spiusch? Dialect change and dialect variation in the Bernese Mittelland (completed)
This dissertation project aims to uncover and analyse dialect change and dialect variation in the Bernese Mittelland on the basis of the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz (SDS) and the Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches (DSA).
For comparison with the data from the two language atlases, new data on 120 variables was collected at 20 locations in the Bernese Plateau and visualised in dialect maps. Unlike in the language atlases, however, not only NORMs were included in the analyses, but people from 3 different generations (young-middle-aged) and one occupational group (farmers). The aim of the project is to document dialect change in apparent and real time and to show the external and internal linguistic reasons for these change processes.
The publication of the work is expected in 2024.
