Dominik Banhold Sprachnorm, Sprachbewertung, Sprachlehre

About this book deutsch english

A language contains different language variants (e.g. ich fragte vs. frug, die Bogen vs. Bögen, runder vs. ründer, unser vs. unsrer) the language users face. This fact is due to historical developments of a language and lead to the understanding in linguistics that a language is a diverse and complex system consisting of different varieties next to a standard variety. This understanding is of special importance when it comes to grammars or dictionaries that intend to codify the norms of a standard variety.

This book is an analysis of historical German school grammars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and it looks at the way how these codex texts depict morphological variants. The questions asked deal with the quantity of morphological variants included in these codex texts and then concentrate on how variants are marked by the grammarians. Apart from lists of markers that reveal the prescriptive metalanguage of school grammars this work also presents answers to questions touching upon correlations between evaluations and contextualizations in these texts (such as Are dialectal variants bad variants? Are colloquial variants stigmatized?).

The study thus meets the ongoing interest of linguistic research in the younger history of the German standard language. Dealing with language variants in school grammars, it is not only a methodically innovative research study but also offers interesting insights into historical grammar teaching.