Die Verschriftungen in der Dialekterhebung Friedrich Maurers in Baden und im Elsass als Evidenz für die Verbreitung der Standardlautung

Abstract This paper examines the development of lay transcriptions of base dialects within a period of 50 years in the early 20th century in the Upper Rhine area in Alsace and Baden. I argue that the spread of spoken standard German can be documented by the development of these transcriptions. In alignment with Ganswindt (2017), it is assumed that the still not widespread standard competence at the beginning of this period is reflected in ‚misspellings‘ in the transcriptions of the dialect, since the Standard German grapheme was associated with the phonetics of the regional standard. The lay transcriptions of the Upper German delabialization by the participating teachers from Friedrich Maurer’s indirect dialect survey from 1941 and the survey of the so-called Wenkeratlas from 1887/88 serve as data. A place-by-place comparison via vector maps allows to localize variation patterns. It can be shown that the ‘misspellings’ – i. e. rounded variants in the area of delabialization – are scattered throughout the area and significantly decrease in time as the spoken German standard is spreading. This is especially the case in the area of Baden, where the amount of ‘misspellings’ diminishes from about 30–60 % to 5–30 %. In Alsace, on the other hand, the amount of ‘misspellings’ is generally much lower and consequently the decrease is as well. I argue that the reason for the difference between transcriptions from Baden and Alsace is to be found in the different repertoire structures with a diglossia with two written standard languages – French and German – in Alsace.