New light on old data

Georg Wenker’s South Jutlandic questionnaires as a contact linguistic resource

Abstract

Georg Wenker’s Linguistic Atlas of the German Empire is a classic dialect-ological project from the late 19th century, in which data was collected from (almost) all school districts throughout what was then Germany. The data is still used in German dialect research, and all questionnaires have in recent years been published digitally. Less well known is that the material not only contains questionnaires representing German dialects, but also data representing the minority languages spoken within the then German borders. Among these are also Danish, i.e. South Jutlandic, data from a total of 287 school districts in the former Duchy of Schleswig, today divided between Denmark and Germany. Traditionally, the Danish dataset has not been considered particularly interesting by Danish dialectologists, mainly because it was thought to be tainted with methodological artefacts, consisting as it does of written translations from Standard German into the dialects. Deviations from the expected Danish grammar have thus often been explained with priming effects in the translation process. However, recent research has shown that the data can nevertheless be used for studies of authentic language contact phenomena, i.e. German-influenced features in South Jutlandic dialects. The present article discusses the South Jutlandic data from a contact linguistic perspective. This entails both a methodological discuss¬ion and four short case studies of selected grammatical features. The studies show, firstly, that the data should be considered a valuable documentary resource that is well-suited for contact linguistic analyses. Secondly, they demonstrate that German-influenced grammatical features, to a certain extent, have to be considered authentic and firmly established in nineteenth-century South Jutlandic.