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Folge 2: Wird in Hannover das beste Hochdeutsch gesprochen? – Mythos Stadtsprache Hannover
In this episode, Dr. Ariane Walsdorf (Leibniz researcher and science communicator) interviews Dr. François Conrad and Stefan Ehrlich of the DFG project “Hannover’s City Dialect”.
This episode is dedicated to something that belongs to the oldest monuments of human history: our language.
Language is not just a means of communicating, it is also a medium for constructing cultural identity. It says something about our life and our society. As linguists in Leibniz University Hannover’s German Department, the interview guests, Dr. François Conrad and Stefan Ehrlich, know a great deal about language. In their project Hannover’s City Dialect, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), they are investigating the widespread myth, in circulation for approximately the last 200 years, that the “best” High German is spoken in and around Hannover.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also championed quality control and improvement of the German language – long before there was consistent spelling and pronunciation. He advocated for a German cultural and standard language which would also be internationally competitive. The focus of his interest was primarily the connection between language training and the development of intelligence: language, he said, shapes not only the way we think but also what we think.
Has Hannover’s High German changed since Leibniz’s time? What does High German actually mean? And do people from Hannover really speak the purest High German?
Kontakt
Dr. Ariane Walsdorf
Referat für Kommunikation und Marketing
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Welfengarten 1
30167 Hannover
30167 Hannover
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Dr. Ariane Walsdorf
Referat für Kommunikation und Marketing
Phone
