Seminar I Mapping Swiss German: Creating a Dialect Atlas in the Digital Age

The Swiss German Dialect Atlas is the first major, corpus-based documentation of how Swiss German dialects have change across regions and generations. Drawing on speech data from more than 1,000 speakers, the project combines traditional dialectological elicitation with digital methods such as smartphone-based surveys and online interviews. In this talk, I will outline the methodological framework and present selected findings on phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic variables. I’ll also introduce CURLEW (Census of Urban and Rural Language in England and Wales) – a new project led by David Britain, Paul Foulkes, David Willis, and myself, funded jointly by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Building on approaches developed for the Swiss German Dialect Atlas, CURLEW will conduct the first large-scale, systematic dialect survey of England and Wales in over 75 years. The project is set to begin in autumn 2026, with positions to be advertised in the coming months.