Lecture: "Mapping German Dialects: Georg Wenker's Sprachatlas and its Successors" with Jürg Fleischer

Between 1879 and 1888, Marburg librarian George Wenker sent language questionnaires to all schoolmasters in the German Empire, using 40 sentences that were later named after him. From some of the nearly 50,000 returned questionnaires, he began to hand-draw the detailed "Sprachatlas des deutschen Reiches," which - with the advent of digitization - has finally become accessible in the 21st century. Juerg Fleischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at Philipps University of Marburg, Germany