The development of the written German language in Austria from the 16th to the 18th century

The Austrian German is a variety of the German language with its own history. Until the midst of the 18th century there existed two different forms of written language: a middle and northern one, based on the eastmiddlegerman form of the reformatoric works of Martin Luther, which was completed by the grammarians of the 16th and 17th century, and a southern form, based on the chancellery of the emperor Maximilian I. The result was a splitting of the written German language since the period of reformation and counter-reformation in a northern "protestant" form and a southern "catholic" one, especially in Austria and Bavaria. We want to analyze the southern uppergerman form of the written language in its characteristic parts of graphemics, morphology and syntax. Our materials are printed texts from Vienna, as the cultural centre of Austria and from Linz, Salzburg, Graz, Klagenfurt and Innsbruck as the main towns of the provinces, and in comparison texts from Munich and Passau in Bavaria. The period between 1530/40 and 1760/70 is divided into 8 sections from 30 to 30 years. As the syntactic differences are not so obvious in time and area, we reduce the sections to 60 years and the localities to Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck and Munich. On the other hand, here we compare religious and profane texts because we expect differences in syntactic constructions. Only on the margin we consider the lexicon, which was normed after our period since the end of the 18th century. As the result of our research we expect the knowledge of the until unknown development of the uppergerman written language in Austria from the 16th to the 18th century according to its graphemics, morphology and syntax. This is an important contribution to the history of Austrian German.

The aim of the project was to analyze the developments of the written German language in Austria in the period between 1530 and 1760 with regard to graphemics, morphology and syntax and to compare them with developments in Bavaria in the same period. The assumption was that on one hand the Bavarian Upper German variant of the official language of the Court of Emperor Maximilian I still is noticeable. On the other hand we assumed the influence of the Protestant East Central German variant based on Martin Luther. As a consequence a new Upper German written variety emerged. At the same time this written variety was ideologically instrumentalized in the denominational conflicts between Catholics and Protestants during the period of Counter Reformation. The analysis is based on religious and secular texts of the following eight synchronic cross-sections in sequences: 1520/30, 1560/70, 1600, 1630, 1660, 1690, 1720/30, 1750/60. For each cross-section we analyzed texts, which were published in the Austrian printing centers Wien, Graz, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Linz and the Bavarian München and Passau. The corpus for the graphemic analysis consists of 1856 pages, transcribed manually and stored in a data base for the analysis. Paul Rössler did the graphemic analysis, looking at the following features: concerning the vowel system the maintenance and distinction of Middle High German (MHG) : ei as Early New High German (ENHG) spelling : in contrast to the merger into ENHG ; just as the MHG diphthongs ie - uo - üe and the MHG long vowels i - u - ü into ENHG distinguishing spelling - - <üe> : - - <ü> in contrast to merging ENHG - - <ü>; the development of the undefinite article and the numeral ein/ain; the keeping of MHG u - ü before nasals or its lowering into ENHG o - ö ; the lack of the umlaut of u and au before some consonants respectively its mutation; derounding of umlaut and hypercorrect rounding. Concerning the consonant system Mr. Rössler analyzed the use of k, ck and kh, ckh; the keeping of initial p instead of b; the use of f and ff in medial and final position. One of the significant analyzed morphologic features was the development of the inflexional -e in nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs, regarding the word formation the appearence of the variant derivational suffix -nus/-nüs/-nis, as well as the different realizations sein/seind/sind in 1st ps.pl.pres. of the auxiliary verb sein and the negation nit/nicht. We can derive from the analysis that until 1560 the Upper German basis was by and large retained and East Central German features could enter to a very little extent. In the second half of the 16th century the latter appear much more frequently, whereas in the first half of the 17th century the Upper Central German variety becomes dominant again as a result of the Counter Reformation with its rejection of the Protestant East Central German variety. The second half of the 17th century is characterized by an increase of East Central German features. Nevertheless a lot of Upper German features were retained until the middle of the 18th century. Finally, in 1750 empress Maria Theresa introduced a language reform based on the ideas of Gottsched. Thomas Brooks did the syntactic analyses. In order to draw a comparison with the East Central German (ECG) variety, he added for each synchronic cross-section two ECG texts, looking at the following features: parataxis and hypotaxis, extended participial and adjectival attribute, position of finite verbs in subordinate clauses, verbal frames, selected conjunctions in subordinate clauses, as well as rare appearences of multiple negation, tun- periphrasis and syntactic noun anticipation. According to the particular feature, it surprisingly turned out that there are significant differences between Upper German and East Central German regarding geographical expansion and written dialect, type of text and style. Alltogether the analysis of the team resulted in the latest findings of the written German language in Austria at the crossing between ENHG and NHG. The results probably will be published in three volumes.