Reviews
These two volumes complete Eichhoff’s work on German dialect geography, which he started in 1977-1978 with the publication of volumes 1 and 2 of the Wortatlas der deutschen Umgangssprachen. The two new volumes, which comprise a total of 141 maps, are based on a new set of data mainly collected shortly before the Wende (i.e., in the late 1980s) in the total area in which German is spoken as a first language, but they follow the methodology of the previous volumes in all but small details. This means that data collection was done through a questionnaire on an onomasiological basis, mainly (and in the GDR exclusively) by the indirect method (mailing); that the net of elicitation points was only slightly changed (by the addition of Luxemburg and one additional point in South Tyrol, making a total of 404 points altogether); and that informants were middle-aged (born after 1945) urban speakers who were asked to report on their “everyday language.” Thus, the atlas clearly aims to give a picture of “real German” as it is spoken today, in contrast to the archaizing and retrospectively oriented methodology of traditional dialect atlases. While this aim continues to be exceptional in linguistic atlas work (where the methods and research interests of the first half of the twentieth century still prevail in Germany), other features of Eichhoff’s atlas are quite conservative (as was already noted by Markey in a review of the first volume in 1978). He is not interested in social variability or age grading, the elicitation points are treated as homogeneous (with only one questionnaire per town), and the ways in which the results are represented in the maps follow the traditional pattern (which, however, is handled with perfection by the author). This is surely legitimate, but it would have been useful to document (if not control) the informants’social background in order to understand which part of the German speech community is actually portrayed.