Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 72

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Orð og tunga
regional distribution be coincidental: In fact, Negele's data from her
corpus studies on nineteenth and twentieth century colloquial Ger-
man, mainly based on the emigrant letter and the Pfeffer corpus (cf.
fig. 4 and 5, from Negele 2012:121-2, maps 21 and 22), confirm that the
present-day north-south division in the preferred use of discontinu-
ous pronominal constructions in standard German echoes the distri-
bution in nineteenth as well as twentieth century colloquial German.
4.3 Lexical variation: Sonnabend and Samstag 'Saturday'
Our last case study looks at a prominent instance of lexical variation
in standard German, the different names for the last day of the week.
The largest dictionary concerned with regional lexical variation in
standard German is the Variantenwörterbuch ('dictionary of [stand-
ard German] variants', Ammon, Bickel & Ebner et al. 2004). For the
variable 'Saturday', it states that Sonnabend is the common variant
in northern Germany (ibid.:653, 724), while Samstag is used in cen-
tral and southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with the latter
variant expanding more and more into the centre and to the north
(ibid.:653).
Again, our data from the Variantengrammatik corpus draw a some-
what different picture (cf. Fig. 6). Although the Variantemvörterbuch's
statement (and codification) can be confirmed in general, the corpus
study renders one notable difference. In central Germany the usage of
Sonnabend is very much restricted to the middle-east. (There are a few
instances of Sonnabend in newspapers from Luxemburg, central-west
Germany and even southern Germany, but the respective absolute
numbers are so low that they would not show up in the columns of
our map, cf. fig. 6.)
This areal distribution in figure 6 is repeated in the other three cor-
pora, the Pfeffer Corpus and the two historical corpora for (standard
and non-standard) 19,h century German. Thus, the overall picture can
be interpreted as another case of 'variational continuity'. (This time,
however, both variants were and are marked as standard German by
the codices.)
The areal (and non-pluricentric) continuity probably reaches back
to the Early Modern period. The structure of this variable might be
explained by usage conventionalized in times when denomination
was a strong factor in the division of regions, as the Sonnabend-area