Our project focuses on the investigation of linguistic phenomena concerning the use of routine formulas, politeness particles, speech act realizations (e.g., complaints or requests) and salutatory behaviour. The overarching aim is to work out how the variation in this phenomenon area is distributed geographically and how the prevailing public assumptions about communicative patterns relate to the language use data. To this end, data from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland will be collected in the five subprojects P1 to P5 and compared with attributions from the media discourse. The findings from the studies are to be utilized both on a theoretical level (especially for pragmatics and pluri-reality research) and with regard to methodology. The dialog with other disciplines (e.g., sociology and psychology) will also be fruitful. Another explicit aim of the project is to influence the public discourse on the basis of facts.

Although there are a large number of empirical studies on areal language variation in the German-speaking region, these have mainly focused on pronunciation, lexis and grammatical phenomena, but not on the pragmatic dimension. The project closes this gap and provides the public discourse on communicative differences in German-speaking countries with a broad empirical foundation. A study of this kind, at the interface between variationist linguistics and pragmatics, has not been carried out before. This is in stark contrast to the great public interest in this topic, which is reflected in numerous media reports, interviews and blog posts.

Our project is a trinational WEAVE project and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, No. 465122891), the Austrain Science Fund FWF (No. I 5448) und the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF, No. 202352).