Youth language(s) in Austria

Describing German youth language in its written or spoken form is a very active research area in Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland, while the research on youth language is de facto non-existent in Austria. The investigation of age-related language variants concerning the interaction of different speech styles, varieties and (foreign) languages appears to be an urgent desideratum in Austria. Hence, the conceived project deals with youth language(s) in Austria from a sociolinguistic (language variants) and pragmatic perspective and delivers analyses of grammatical as well as prosodic phenomena in oral utterances of young people in Austria. Their language usage is regarded as a part of regional and mother tongue language competence. Since there is a great influence of dialect competence on conversations among young people in Austria, the project incorporates a dialectological perspective and takes also into consideration phenomena concerning language change associated with human migration particularly emerging in urban areas characterized by higher population density and multi-ethnicity. The hereby presented research project focuses on three central aims: In the first place, private conversations between young people on the one hand and for contrastive analyses conversations between adults on the other hand will be documented in several urban cities and rural towns/villages in Austria. Those recordings will be the components of a corpus of spoken German language, which will be balanced against diatopic varieties and will be made accessible to the scientific community after having finished the project. Secondly, as a sociolinguistic aim, the survey and description of age-related language variants is pursued with special focus on the interaction of youth speech styles and dialectal language use. Thirdly, the project will serve a didactic aim: Its results will be reanalysed with regard to teaching methods and its outcome will have further application to teaching German to native speakers as well as to non-native speakers (teaching German as second/as a foreign language).

Over the last decades youth languages have become an internationally established scientific field. Until 2013, when the FWF-Project Youth Language(s) in Austria started as the first part of a long-term project, there was no systematical approach about language usage of adolescents in Austria. To fill this gap the first subproject (On interaction of dialect and age-preferential language usage among young speakers in urban areas [P 25683-G23]) describes language usage of Austrian teenagers, whereby the focus lays on spoken everyday communication among friends in urban areas. Complementarily to the analyses concerning urban areas the second subproject will focus on communication among youths (age: 13-19 years) in rural areas. The collected data will be compared with the findings from the urban areas to obtain a comprehensive picture of youth speech styles and age-preferential language use in Austria. Conversations among adults (age: 40-60 years) are used for comparison. The linguistic description focuses grammatical (e.g. preposition drop) and prosodic characteristics (e.g. intonation, tone, stress) within the youth communication and points out, how often youth-related specifics occur and what purposes they serve within the social interaction. In part I of the project the urban areas in Austria the influence of spoken standard German on the language usage of youths with regard to dialect leveling has been a major aspect. Since it is assumed that there is more (Bavarian and Alemannic) dialect influence on language usage in smaller towns and villages than there is in urban areas, for further analyses aspects of regional language usage and the influence of dialects in rural areas are taken into special consideration.. The conversation recordings needed for data analysis have been collected in the urban areas of Austria and also already in some rural ones. The recordings of the urban areas are transcribed, anonymised, annotated and analyzed for linguistic purposes. Together with the subcorpus from the second subproject they will build a comprehensive corpus of Austrian youth languages. After finalizing the second project part and with that the project as a whole the corpora will be open to the scientific public via an online platform. Furthermore, the results and selected parts of the language data and analyses are edited for didactic use in classes teaching German as a first, second and foreign language. Through this, a deeper understanding and an intensified working with authentic spoken language in the classroom is possible. For now the data and the analyses of the first project part are organized and edited for publication and dissemination.