Attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch: From miners’ slang to Ruhrpott love?

Abstract

Given the body of research exploring regional vernaculars in Germany, it is somewhat surprising that the regiolect spoken in the Ruhr Area, the largest conurbation in Germany and home to 5.1 million inhabitants, has received only modest attention. This is true for linguistic studies and especially true for sociolinguistic studies investigating language attitudes towards Ruhrdeutsch (but see Bellamy 2016; Ziegler et al. 2017). Aiming to fill this gap and explore changes in language attitudes over time, this paper asks if the valorisation of Ruhrdeutsch has changed in recent years, namely, if Ruhrdeutsch has been ideologically upgraded from a low-status and stigmatised variety (Mihm 1997) to a variety serving as a regional symbol for all social groups. The empirical investigation is based on a stancetaking approach and relies on a corpus of narrative interviews with informants of different linguistic repertoires and age groups.