Areas of Responsibility

• Data Collection
• • data collection by means of the direct survey method (audio recording with professional recording equipment) on location by a trained field worker
  • 150 locations, spread out as homogenously as possible (cf. Current State of Progress)
  • representative groups of speakers from three generations:
    – two policemen (45–55 years of age) who work in an emergency call center
    – one infromant above the age of 65 (farmer or tradesperson)
    – one grade of secondary school of approximately 20 years of age
    REDE only collects data from males (extralinguistic variable: "gender"). This stems from the fact that in the generation of 45–55 year olds, almost only male police officers work at the emergency call center. The project Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland (SiN) uses a complementary informant selection, and only investigates the language of females.
  • recording situations:
    – translation of Wenker sentences in an individual's strongest base dialect and best Standard German
    – reading aloud the fable "The Northwind and the Sun" in an individual's best Standard German
    – interview about linguistic usage and biography with a trained field worker
    – conversation with a friend
    – emergency call conversation
• Data Preparation
• • orthographic transcription of the recordings by student assistants
  • fine-grained phonetic transcription of select extracts according to the IPA
  • entry of the interviews and various transcriptions into a database
  • integration of extracts of the recordings and transcriptions into the REDE information system SprachGIS by the research groups Data Integration: Audio and System Development
• Data Analysis
• • qualitative and quantitative variable analyses
  • dialectality measurements (phonetic distance measurements)
  • statistical methods