Austrians can use a dialect app to compare themselves and make an important contribution to research at the same time. A linguist from Tyrol is also involved in the university project.
Would you like to examine your own dialect, compare it with others in your region and at the same time make a valuable contribution to linguistics? Then download the free Austrian dialect app – OeDA for short – on your iPhone or smartphone from the Apple or Google App Store.
The project, which involves Tyrolean linguist Philip Vergeiner together with his colleagues Stephan Elfreude and Dominik Wallner, was launched at the Department of German Studies at Paris-Lodron University in Salzburg. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF through the “Top Citizen Science” program.
“You will be rewarded immediately if you participate”
“Everyone can participate. The app is very easy to use. You can tap, type, or record dialect expressions. The highlight of the app is that you are immediately rewarded for participating. After each question round you can view and sometimes even listen to the results of a question round on a map of Austria in the app. In this way, similarities and differences between dialects from different regions and generations become immediately apparent,” Elfreude explains.
Round of nine completed in two minutes
And this is how it works: in the “Collect” menu item, users or participants can record their language use. “A self-admission consists of eight questions and one special king question. Such a round of nine takes less than two minutes.” Via the ‘Compare’ button you can display the collected results of all question rounds via a filter function and thus find out similarities and differences yourself.
“Most projects investigate rural dialects”
As Vergeiner explains: “Our goal is to find out which dialect form the majority of people in Austria currently use. “This is surprisingly poorly researched because most projects only investigate the particularly conservative dialects of people in rural areas.”
Source: Krone
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