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Digital Hessian Language Atlas (DHSA)

The Digital Hessian Language Atlas presents the linguistic areas of the German federal state of Hesse with the media-covered and linguistically progressive “Rhenish Franconian” in the south and its very conservative, partly also archaic dialects in the center and in the north in a way that combines clarity and scientific exactness. The core is formed by phonetic maps, which contrast two series of dialect surveys and thus show the dynamics of the Hessian dialects in the last 135 years: Georg Wenker’s 1880 survey covering every school village is illustrated in the form of colorful area maps, while the second survey of the same material with a more widely meshed network of villages is illustrated by loudspeaker icons that can be pressed and activated (“talking language atlas”). The phonetic maps are supplemented by maps of the most important peculiarities of grammatical forms in the Hessian dialects and by linguistically historically informative vocabulary maps.

Tutorial: How do I operate the DHSA?