de Stoiber Edmund und Fischers Helene.

In rural speech communities, where locals know each other, dialectal and unofficial names in which the surname precedes the first name (der Müller Peter, (s) Müllers Peter) are used to refer to absent referents. The occurrence of these forms is highly pragmatic and determined by the degree of familiarity of referent, speaker and hearer. Also, they are only used within the respective speech communities. It is all the more surprising to find these reference forms in internet forums, social media and online newspapers, where they refer to prominent figures. This study explores diatopic as well as diaphasic variation of the structure surname + first name in the German webcorpus DECOW16b, and shows that while, especially referring to Bavarian celebrities, it is used to express familiarity with the referents and to present them in private rather than professional contexts, it can also mark depreciation and a denial of professionality. The latter applies to politicians in particular, while sportspersons are generally depicted positively. The use of dialectal register on the internet can be interpreted as a form of enregisterment, transferring the most prominent pragmatic conditions for surname + first name in dialectal registers to new contexts. Since the respective forms are used by speakers of other registers, we also find sociolinguistic crossing.