Diatopic Lexical Variation in Modern German: A Comparison of Linguistic Maps from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache with Lexical Frequency Data from DWDS Corpora

This article investigates methodological questions of diatopic lexical variation in Modern German through a comparative study of empirical data sources. We contrast lexical frequency data from three written corpora on the DWDS corpus query platform—the ZDL-Regionalkorpus, the Webmonitor-Korpus, and the Regionalliteratur-Korpus—with linguistic maps from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA), a resource that documents speaker attitudes towards spoken German every-day language. Our goal is to determine to what extent regional distributions of lexical variants in the AdA compare to the DWDS corpora, and to analyse where these distributions converge and diverge based on data and text type. This is demonstrated through four empirical case studies examining synonyms for ‘Saturday’ (“Samstag”/“Sonnabend”), ‘comma’ (“Komma”/“Beistrich”), ‘bicycle’ (“Fahrrad”/“Radl”/“Velo”), and ‘lift’ (“Aufzug”/“Fahrstuhl”/“Lift”). The results indicate that the general regional distribution of lexical variants in the AdA is largely replicated in the DWDS corpora. Moreover, the corpus data typically show the co-occurrence of several variants in the same region, while speaker attitudes documented in the AdA tend to be more uniform. Finally, different text types represented in the corpora can yield different frequency ratios in specific regions, a finding explained by presumed differences in target audiences and the variable use of regiolectal or dialectal language.