Re: [Ietf-languages] Fwd: Proposal for variant language subtags for German dialects

[Hugh Paterson III <[e-mail]>]

I studied German dialects in undergrad before moving on to linguistics in
Mexico and Africa in my masters degree and now I am working on informatics
in Language Archives in my PhD. In the context of my undergraduate degree I
looked mostly at Alemannisch and Schwäbisch.

With regard to the gsw code I would like to point out the following:
[gsw] comes to ISO 639-3 via ISO 639-2, where it's scope of coverage is
defined as including all of allamanic, which would include varieties spoken
in the older district of Baden or the western edge of the current state
Baden-Württemberg.
https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/langcodes-keyword.php?SearchTerm=gsw&SearchType=ALL

For those needing a historical look at some german dialect maps from the
literature an often academically cited blog post of mine uses about 7
examples in two sections:
https://hugh.thejourneyler.org/2012/types-of-linguistic-maps-the-mapping-of-linguistic-features/


First let me say I have no problem codifying things smaller or more
specific than a language. However, I have two ideological problems with
codifying these German dialects. The first is defining what each code
represents if it is more than the speech of a single social class in a
single geographic region such as a town. For example, König 2001 (map on my
website) shows the phonetic variations in the Black Forest area just north
of Schaffhausen. As the map shows, a variety of linguistic areas could be
assumed on the basis of where each isogloss intersects with others.
Therefore my first objection is  the proposal detailed enough here? or why
stop at the proposed level of detail? My second objection/concern is how do
we codify dialects at scale? For example, The Dan language spoken in Cote
d'Ivoire and Liberia has no less than 40 dialects. So are each of those Dan
dialects game for codification here?

Let me say I agree that there needs to be a way for archives to indicate
the speech variety of a linguistic description or an
evidentiary information resource such as a recording. However, should this
be a language code, or should it be a subject tag?


References
Werner König. 2001. dtv-Atlas Deutsche Sprache. München: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN: 3-423-03025-9
Hubert Klausmann, Renate Schrambke, and Konrad Kunze. 1997. Kleiner
Dialektatlas: Alemannisch und Schwäbisch in Baden-Württemberg. Bühl:
Konkordia Verlag.
Map of German Dialects as of 1910. Accessed at:
http://www.zonu.com/Europe/Germany/index_en.html
Martha Shrier. 1965. Case Systems in German Dialects. Language 41.3: 420-38

- Hugh Paterson III



On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 4:55 PM John Cowan <[e-mail]> wrote:

> In my opinion:
>
> For the Central and Upper German varieties, you don't make clear whether
> you are talking about the various Mundarten (e.g. Austrobavarian)  or their
> counterpart regionalects of Standard German (e.g. Austrian and Bavarian
> Standard German respectively).  If the former, you should probably apply to
> the ISO 639-3 Registration Authority to get 3-letter language tags
> assigned, at least for as many varieties as are clearly not mutually
> intelligible with each other or with Standard German.  This is a slower
> process but produces a result more in line with the rest of the world's
> languages.
>
> Varieties that are not separated from Standard German by mutually
> unintelligibility should have the kind of tags you have used, although I
> recommend using "deu" as a prefix rather than the obsolescent "ger".
>
> My understanding is that Low German is (still) a dialect continuum, and so
> it is appropriate to use variant tags beginning with "nds".  High and
> Highest Alemannic variant tags should be prefixed with "gsw".  Whether Low
> Alemannic should also have "gsw" is a question.
>
>
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