2024/12/19 by Ehrlich, Stefan, Conrad, François
#830 #Hannoverismus #Hanoverism #Muttersprache #Perzeption #Sprachideologie #Sprachmythos #Sprachwissen #language ideology #language myth #metalinguistic awareness #perception #representative survey #repräsentative Umfrage
paper · doi:10.15488/18281
For more than 200 years, Hanover (Lower Saxony, Germany) is known as the locus of the »best« or »purest« articulation of the German language. It is a common belief amongst the German speaking community that the Hanoverians speak a variety of High German close to the standard. This paper presents the results of the first representative survey about the dissemination of this »Hanover- myth«, conducted in October 2020 as a part of the project »Die Stadtsprache Hannovers« (›The urban vernacular of Hanover‹, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG). This survey not only focuses on the loci of the »best High German« but also on possible regions without dialectal interferences in standard performance and the geographical poles of comprehensibility to get a bigger picture of lay speaker’s conceptualization of High German standard. The results of the representative survey indicate that the language myth of the »purest« German in Hanover is alive: The capital of Lower Saxony indeed is widely considered as the focus point of standard localization by lay speakers all over Germany. The findings further show that the German standard variety is highly conceptualized by phonetic-phonological factors. Regionally and socially determined differences in concepts and localization appear as well, which are also discussed.