‘Bad language’ as a Concept in German Folk Linguistics

Dr Winifred Davies and Dr Nils Langer (Bristol) were awarded £105,000 by the AHRB to investigate: The history and current status of ‘bad language’ as a concept in German folk linguistics.

This project traced the development of negative value judgements about a certain number of morphological and syntactic features in German, from the seventeenth century to the present, in order to establish how consistent the stigmatisation has been/is.

The project consisted of two major parts: analyses of the concept of ‘bad language’ (a) in contemporary German and (b) in the seventeenth century, both using morpho-syntactic features as the focus of data collection.

This was the first project to trace the history of the stigmatisation of a number of features rather than to concentrate on one or two constructions or on whole varieties; it also broke new ground by tracing that history over a long period of time and by tracing the transmission of value judgements from the codifiers to the ‘authorities on the norm’, whose influence on linguistic norms is probably more important than that of the codifiers, since the former mediate the codex to others.

The findings are published as The Making of Bad Language: Lay linguistic stigmatisations in German, past and present (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang 2006).