Ruhrdeutsch is a regional variety spoken in the Ruhr Area, a polycentric and densely populated metropolitan region in the northwest of Germany with 5.1 mio inhabitants. Set in a culturally highly diverse area, it is one of the lesser researched regional varieties in Germany and not much is known about its evaluation and prestige. While some researchers point out that Ruhrdeutsch has been stigmatized for a long time (Mihm 1985), others like Bellamy (2016) note a tendency to revaluate Ruhrdeutsch. As these studies are based on rather small sets of data, this paper aims at a corpus-based investigation of the valorization of Ruhrdeutsch. Taking recent conversation-oriented developments in attitude studies into account (Tophinke/Ziegler 2006, 2014; Liebscher/Dailey-O'Cain 2009; König 2014), we adopt an interactional approach to explore how Ruhrdeutsch is perceived and to what extent it is associated with prestige. For the purpose of investigating the local and dynamic construction of attitude expressions, narrative interviews were conducted (N=130) with informants without and with a migration background (mostly Turkish and Arabic) to also give voice to those migrant groups who have shaped and are still shaping the social makeup of the Ruhr Area. Following the turn from attitude to stance, from the subjective to the intersubjective dimension, stance-analysis is employed (cf. Du Bois 2007; Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018; Imo/Ziegler 2022). The stance heuristic provides a fine-grained analytical tool for describing the dialogic character of attitude expressions and for investigating the different ways in which attitudes are encoded as epistemic, affective, deontic and/or style stances. The general aim is to identify patterns of stance-taking towards Ruhrdeutsch and how they relate to socio-demographic characteristics of the informants in order to answer the question whether Ruhrdeutsch is becoming socially accepted.
References
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