Language and Identity

The Archive for Spoken German in Mannheim boasts over 15,000 recordings so that future generations can hear how different German sounded in different regions and parts of the earth.

A discussion with a class of schoolchildren in Berlin? Reflections on matrimony taped in Göttingen? Observations on pickling sauerkraut, baking bread or slaughtering hogs, on Easter and Christmas, fairs and weddings – picked up in every region of Germany? The Archive for Spoken German (Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch – AGD) has amassed a phenomenally wide range of spoken German.

Based on history: an archive with tradition

The bulk of today's collection comes from the German Language Archive (DSAv), which was founded in Berlin in the early 1930s by Eberhard Zwirner, a phonetician and neurologist. After having been almost completely destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944, it was rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1973 was incorporated into the Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim. Since then, the collection of recordings and transcriptions has not stopped growing, and today the library is maintained in a modern Archive for Spoken German.

A mass of sounds in different collections

The collection, which now boasts around 16,300 sound documents, started out as a series of recordings of German dialects commissioned throughout Germany by Eberhard Zwirner between 1955 and 1960. More than 5,000 such oral specimens were gathered in roughly a thousand mainly rural localities in West Germany, Vorarlberg (province in the west of Austria) and Liechtenstein, in Alsace and The Netherlands. They also included dialects spoken in the former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line.

In 1992, in the wake of German reunification, a collection from the East German Academy of Sciences in East Berlin was integrated into the Archive. The recordings, totalling more than 393 hours, were made from 1960 to 1964 at 440 locations in East Germany.

Today, the Archive is responsible for a vast array of items grouped into 38 sections. Besides the sound recordings, which have a total duration of around 4,400 hours, the collection also includes some 900 video recordings and in the region of 6,650 transcripts. In addition to the audio recordings of sundry dialects, there are sound documents on colloquial language and standard pronunciation. The varieties of German from abroad include the idioms of Brazilian, Russian and Romanian Germans as well as those of German immigrants in Israel and North America.

Some of the recordings in the Archive, moreover, are arranged by specific types of verbal interaction: consultations, biographical accounts, arbitration and judicial proceedings, TV interviews, conflict discussions between mothers and their teenage daughters etc.

Digitalization: convenient access to the archives

Since the mid 1990s, the now historic archives have been undergoing a process of digitalization. For one thing, this was necessary to conserve the material: after all, tapes are not very durable. For another thing, the digital medium allows a wide public to access these invaluable spoken-word recordings.

Many of the library's recordings (and transcriptions thereof) are now available online through the Gesprochenes Deutsch (i.e. “spoken German”) database. The database was developed with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the "Archives as a Source of Research – Acquisition and Development" programme. Though for reasons of privacy the bulk of the collection is still reserved for scholarly research, some of it is nonetheless accessible for everyone to read and listen to.

Key function: preserving cultural memory

For years researchers have been alarmed at the gradual extinction of numerous dialects spoken only in very small areas and by a small number of people. Higher levels of education, increasing urbanization and the influence of the mass media are often responsible for the disappearance of local dialects. The Archive for Spoken German in the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim cannot keep them from vanishing, to be sure, but at least from being forgotten.