Siegerländer Sprachatlas

Abstract

Linguistic atlases contain sketched linguistic maps providing detailed overviews of various dialectal phenomena in a particular region. The aim of this thesis is to map and to analyze the phonetic geography of the Siegerland, a Western German area. The audio files, collected within the frame of the SiSAL project (Siegerländer Sprachatlas) between 2011 and 2013, serve as the basis. Primarily, in order to specify the individual phonetic characteristics, vowels and also partially consonants of the Middle High German reference system are used. In a contrastive approach, the analogies to older linguistic maps of the Siegerland and the description of the phonetic characteristics in adjacent dialect areas are discussed. For this purpose, maps from the Digitaler Wenker-Atlas (DiWA), the Siegerländer Wörterbuch (SiWöb), and entries from dictionaries of the surrounding areas under consideration are used for illustration. The linguistic atlas enables to draw conclusions as to whether a homogeneous “Siegerländer Platt” (the local dialect) exists and to what extent neighboring dialects have an impact on its linguistic usage. The present print medium is a supplement to the digital version of the SiSAL (accessible via www.mundart.sisal.uni-siegen.de).