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Tyrolean Dialect Archive

The Tyrolean Dialect Archive is part of the Department for German Studies at the University of Innsbruck. Here, dialect evidence from 120 communities in North and East Tyrol, systematically collected by trained explorers from the early 1970s to 2011, is stored and presented in the form of a digital language atlas. On the one hand, the archive sees itself as a research institution in which dialect material from the Tyrolean region is collected, archived, scientifically evaluated and published, and in which young scientists are promoted. On the other hand, we regard the holdings, which have only come into being with the help of the population, as a mission: they are to be made accessible to the public again in an understandable manner by means of a digital language atlas and thus contribute to the reflection on linguistic-cultural peculiarities and historical contexts, to the creation of identity and to the transmission of immaterial cultural heritage.

The approximately 300,000 documents, all of which are available in written form, were put down in the phonetic script Teuthonista, a font developed and used primarily for dialectological purposes, which is capable of representing the smallest differences in sound by means of special characters and diacritics, i.e. dots, ticks and dashes above and below the base characters. We also set ourselves the task of converting these documents into a digital form by developing the font Antonia Phonetic together with the graphics office florianmatthias and the font experts Typejockeys. The novelty of this unicode-based font is, on the one hand, that it can display several diacritics above and below each other in a visually appealing way. On the other hand, the characters are composed by simply sequencing the single characters (ə̤̃́ = ə + ◌̃ + ◌́ + ◌̤), whereby the intuitive keyboard layout allows an extremely efficient input of the documents.

Anyone who would like to take a look at our holdings is – after making an appointment – cordially invited to do so.