Faculty of Language, Literature and Humanities - German in Multilingual Contexts

KiDKo/E: KiezDeutsch-Korpus/Einstellungen ("attitudes")

Giving Credit

The KiDKo/E corpus is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 with the following reference:

Heike Wiese, Ines Rehbein, Oliver Bunk & Maria Pohle (2012ff): KiDKo/E - A corpus of emails and readers' comments from the public debate on "Kiezdeutsch", a new German vernacular from multilingual urban neighbourhoods ("attitudes"/"Einstellungen" supplement to the KiezDeutsch-Korpus, KiDKo).

Creative Commons License
KiDKo/E - Ein Korpus aus Emails und Leserkommentaren in der öffentlichen Debatte zu Kiezdeutsch ("Einstellungen"-Ergänzung zum KiezDeutsch-Korpus, KiDKo) by Heike Wiese, Ines Rehbein, Oliver Bunk & Maria Pohle is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

KiDKo/E captures spontaneous data from the public discussion on Kiezdeutsch: it assembles emails and readers' comments posted in reaction to media reports on Kiezdeutsch. By doing so, KiDKo/E provides data on language attitudes, language perceptions, and language ideologies, which became apparent in the context of the debate on Kiezdeutsch, but which frequently related to such broader domains as multilingualism, standard language, language prestige, and social class.

Data types

Spontaneous, written productions in the form of:

  • emails
  • online readers' comment on media websites

The emails were mostly sent anonymously, although some contained a sender. Online readers' comments were usually published under self-chosen user names (typically an alias). For KiDKo/E, all data has been anonymised.

Time span covered

KiDKo/E captures emails sent between 2009 and 2012 to H. Wiese. The majority was received in one of the two years, 2009 and 2012, respectively, probably triggered by media reports on a talk on Kiezdeutsch at the "Akademientag", an annual public presentation of the German Academies of Sciences in May 2009, and the publication of Wiese (2012) [H. Wiese, Kiezdeutsch. Ein neuer Dialekt entsteht. München: C.H. Beck.] in early 2012.
Online readers' comments were collected from media websites during the period of January to April 2012, which was characterised by an intense debate on Kiezdeutsch as a deficient way of speaking vs. part of the German dialect landscape. In addition, we included comments from May/June 2009 from the website pi-news ("politically incorrect news"), a right-fringe site that presented news features on this topic at that time that were also referenced in some of the 2009 emails.

Size

64 emails (of which 39 are from 2012)

[The corpus encompasses all negative emails from this period, which make up the large majority of the emails. Additionally in 2012, 12 emails were received with positive statements and/or questions on research results, which often contained descriptions of personal experiences with details that made it difficult to anonymise.]

1,367 readers' comments

Sources for readers' comments

Readers' comments are from media websites. Except in one case (The Economist, UK), these are media from Germany, which yield a broad cross-section:

  • 14 print media
  • 4 internet-based news sites
  • 1 website for a public TV news program

with the following target audiences:

  • general audience:
    • 6 national newspapers and magazines: FAZ, Focus, Spiegel online, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesschau, The Economist
    • 4 regional dailies: Der Westen, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Rheinische Post/rp-online, Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitung
    • 4 tabloids: Die Welt, Berliner Kurier, BILD, shortnews
  • university students: UniSpiegel
  • Turkish-German community: Deutsch-türkische Nachrichten
  • right-fringe groups: Deutschland-Echo, pi-news
  • self-appointed "language guardians": Deutsche Sprachwelt

The data is distributed as follows (absolute numbers in brackets):

  number of sources number of comments
general audience (Germany) 65% (13) 34% (469)
national news media 25% (5) 8% (112)
regional dailies 20% (4) 8% (107)
tabloids 20% (4) 18% (250)
general audience (UK) 5% (1) 7% (97)
student-targeted 5% (1) 21% (287)
Turkish-German 5% (1) 3% (41)
right-fringe 15% (3) 23% (309)
"language guardians" 5% (1) 12% (164)

Access to the corpus

The corpus is available online via the Hamburger Zentrum für Sprachkorpora (HZSK).

You can download the data as simple table using this link.

ANNIS User Guide:
If you want to view all entries of the corpus, enter the following search expression: Autor_in=/.*/
(This yields as a search result all emails and comments of all authors in the corpus.)

References