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Purschke, Christoph. 2011. Regionalsprache und Hörerurteil. Grundzüge einer perzeptiven Variationslinguistik. Stuttgart: Steiner (Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. Beihefte. 149).

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The federal state of Hesse is characterised by its special linguistic situation: in no other federal state in Germany are so many dialect areas located next to each other in a relatively small area. According to the dialect classification by Wiesinger (1983), the Middle German dialect areas of Central, East and North Hessian as well as Rhenish Franconian (a very small part in the east of Hesse is classified as Thuringian) and the Low German dialect areas of Eastphalian and Westphalian are found in the area of today's federal state of Hesse. The language border between the Low German and Middle German language areas, the so-called Benrath line (also known as the maken/machen line), runs right through the middle of Waldeck-Frankenberg, a district in northern Hesse. Dialects north of the line have the original /k/ in words like maken (‘to make’), while those in the south have the innovative /x/ (machen). The language border in northern Hesse coincides with old tribal borders between Saxony and Franconia (cf. Stracke 1909, 250). Nowadays, the majority of speakers in Germany use an intermediate speech style ranging between base dialect and Standard German, the so-called ‘regiolect, in their day-to-day communication (Kehrein 2019, 150). In times of dwindling dialect competence and high mobility the question arises as to whether and to what extent this historical dialect border persists in the modern border of the regiolect.

For this purpose, near-standard speech recordings were collected in the North Hessian and Westphalian language areas (cf. Purschke 2011, 162–163 on the method for collecting spontaneous speech recordings). Four recordings were made per dialect area.
Then 80 listeners from the same language areas as the recordings were asked in an online questionnaire where they thought the voices were from. Besides entering a different region or selecting “I don’t know”, the participants could choose from suggested towns and regions on either side of the Benrath line. Therefore, this study contributes to research on identifying perceptual isoglosses that can help us better understand how linguistic borders are perceived and constructed in speakers' minds. In addition to the perception task, a questionnaire asks for socio-demographic data and dialect competence as well as speaker judgements about one's own language use and language attitudes. These judgments can give hints to language change in progress as studies in the field of perceptual dialectology have shown (cf. Anders 2010; Purschke 2011; Kleene 2020).

Preliminary results of the perception test show that all listeners clearly recognize their own regional accent (< 80%). The other recordings cannot be reliably localized.