Diatopische Variation im Standarddeutschen historisch betrachtet

Abstract There is but little research on the diatopic variation within historic standard German. This article presents a variational analysis of frequent lexical items, Jänner / Januar (›January‹), Samstag / Sonnabend (›Saturday‹), and heuer / dieses Jahr (›this year‹), in both orthographic codices 1870–1990 and standards of usage in newspapers 1870–1950. This is complemented with further genre-sensitive evidence from the historical DTA/DWDS corpora as well as a discussion of methodological challenges, such as a balanced corpus design and the scarcity of sources 1950–1990. The findings underscore the early significance of diatopic variation in the standard lexicon and call for more nuanced diachronic analyses.