Die Schweizer Wenkersätze

Abstract

Georg Wenker, a librarian and a specialist in German Studies of the Marburg University initiated the Linguistic Atlas of the German Language, having started a distribution of a questionnaire composed of sentences with the most striking phonetic and grammar features of the German language. He sent it to elementary teachers who were to translate Wenker's sentences to the dialects they spoke. As a result of responses, dialect borders of the German language were defined - first within Germany, then in the other German-speaking states. In the 1930s those questionnaires, after some changes, got to Switzerland. Having doubts about the method chosen by the researcher and the reliability of the materials received, Wenker's questionnaires were subjected to strong criticism and set aside for a long time. However, Wenker's material is of great interest for researchers, including the Syntax of dialects. Syntactic phenomena are defined in this paper, the study of which became possible due to the questionnaires (by comparison with other sources). Also preliminary results of the analysis of the Swiss questionnaires were presented from the syntactic point of view.