Cooperative Dictionary of The Rhinelandic Colloquial Language - Subject of Research and Methods of Assessment

Subject of Research and Methods of Assessment

Subject matter of research and documentation is the spoken colloquial language of the Rhineland'.

The definition of Rhineland thereby includes the Lower Rhine region of Germany, the Ruhr Area, the Bergisches Land, the so called Central Rhineland around the big cities Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, the more rural Eifel and Hunsrück regions, plus some small stripes alongside the borders. This coincides approximately with the North and Central of the former Rhine Province of the former Prussian reign. Its northern areas are covered by the more modern term of Meuse-Rhine area.

The term colloquial language does explicitly not mean the many local languages, which in Germany commonly are referred to as "dialects", even if they still dominate everydays communication here and there. It rather means a common regional colloquial language, also termed a Regiolect, which has developed very recently as a kind of dachsprache enveloping the older local languages. It is more or less influenced by the so called dialects, but in itself a variant of Standard German or High German, which incorporates several mild, globalized and unified localisms. It does have subregional variations itself, but these are less, and almost always ubiquitously comprehended, as opposed to the local languages, which are far more diverse, and most often largely mutually incomprehensible, when geographically somewhat distant.

Regiolect speakers very often are not aware that their spoken language, and its use, deviate quite a lot and to a large extent from Standard German. Only a part of the Rhinelanders consciously reflect what those differences are. Contributions show that likely this relatively small group tends to make submissions to the Cooperative Dictionary project. This may lead to questions about the methodical rigor of the project. Similarly, documentiong a spoken language with currently only written evidence created by people who are not educated in this field, using an undocumented unstandardized writing system, is posing questions. The currently used writing style is hardly suited to document most of those deviations from Standard German, which are not part of Standard German, and not occurring in Standard German, in the realm of accent and prosody at large, such as type A prosody, melody of speech, phonetic intonation, word accent, rhythm, tonal accents, timbre and vokal colors, and so on.

Orthography is mainly left to the contributors. Editors at best only slightly unify writing in sample sentences. Thus orthography reflects both individual preferences and to some extent regional differentiation of speech and intonation, too. Also linguistic registers can show this way.

Currently, the Cooperative Dictionary does not use sound recordings.