Corpus of German dialects in Altai
The article is devoted to the research project "Corpus of German dialects in Altai", that is being carried out by the staff of the dialectological laboratory of the German Language Department at the Altai State Pedagogical Academy, with the financial support of the Russian Humanitarian Scientific Foundation. The purpose of the project is to create a multimedia text corpus of German dialects in Altai, which will form an idea about the features of German dialects in the island-wide region and would be used as a basis for their linguistic characteristics. Creating the text corpus of German dialects in Altai will significantly expand the realm of island dialects research, it will comprehensively help to describe the currently existing and extinct German dialects in Altai and to save the irreplaceable national culture of the Russian Germans. By carrying out a comparative analysis of the structure, content and layout of language corpora at the Institute of German Language in Mannheim, which represent the German varieties in Germany and abroad, the author considers in the same light the Corpus of German dialects in Altai, outlining the proposed structure of the Corpus, characterizing the empirical material on which the main phases of work are based and outlined. The main idea of the Corpus is to cover all Upper and Low German dialects presented in the Altai region and to give evidence about their phonetic, grammatical and lexical features, possibly reflecting gender and age. The empirical basis for creating the Corpus was the material collected by the staff of dialectological laboratory of the German Language Department at the Altai State Pedagogical Academy in annual dialectological expeditions in the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century in the German villages of the Altai region. As far as the studied dialects of the Altai are unwritten, the key role in collecting the material is played by the recordings of spontaneous monologues and dialogues of the informants. The article provides a brief overview of the software available to the researchers involved in corpus linguistics, and determines the most appropriate tool to create the Corpus of German dialects in Altai. The program EXMARaLDA has been selected as such a tool, it was developed by the Hamburg University and the Institute for German Language in Mannheim, especially for construction and management of corpus of spoken language. At the moment the work is at the stage of filling media corps with audio recordings and texts.