Faculty of Language, Literature and Humanities - German in Multilingual Contexts

The KiezDeutsch-Korpus

The KiezDeutsch-Korpus (KiDKo) provides data on Kiezdeutsch, including conversations among adolescents, graffiti, and contributions to the public discussion on Kiezdeutsch, plus three supplementary corpora with spoken and written text productions.

The corpora KiDKo/Mu and KiDKo/Mo

KiDKo/Mu and KiDKo/Mo are the core corpora of KiDKo. They were developed in a project of the collaborative research centre Information Structure (SFB 632) at the University of Potsdam from 2008 to 2015 (project B6; PI: Heike Wiese; research associates: Ulrike Freywald, Ines Rehbein, Sören Schalowski).

KiDKo/Mu and KiDKo/Mo are multi-modal digital corpora of spontaneous discourse data from informal, oral peer group situations among adolescents in multiethnic (Mu) and monoethnic (Mo) neighbourhoods communities.

KiDKo/Mu and KiDKo/Mo contain audio data from self-recordings, with aligned transcriptions (i.e., at every point in a transcript, one can access the corresponding area in the audio file). The corpus provides parts-of-speech tags as well as an orthographically normalised layer (Rehbein & Schalowski 2013). Another annotation level provides information on syntactic chunks and topological fields.

KiDKo/Mu is the main corpus, with spontaneous conversations between young people from a multiethnic community (Berlin-Kreuzberg).

KiDKo/Mo is a complementary corpus with spontaneous conversations between young people from a monoethnic community with comparable socio-economic indicators (Berlin-Hellersdorf).

KiDKo/Mu and KiDKo/Mo offer an empirical resource for research in domains such as:

  • Kiezdeutsch as a multiethnic dialect of German
  • youth language in urban areas
  • linguistic developments in contemporary German
  • informal language use

Go to KiDKo corpus

KiDKo/LL: a corpus on Linguistic Landscapes

The corpus KiDKo/LL ("KiDKo/Linguistic Landscapes") assembles visual data from public space. Under the title "From the ’Hood With Love", this corpus provides photos of written language productions from neighbourhoods where Kiezdeutsch is common among adolescents. Examples are love notes on walls, park benches, and playgrounds, graffiti in house entrances, and scribbled messages on toilet walls.

Go to the KiDKo/LL corpus

KiDKo/E: a corpus on attitudes (Einstellungen)

The corpus KiDKo/E ("KiDKo/Einstellungen" ‘attitudes’) provides data on language attitudes, perceptions, and ideologies from the public discussion on Kiezdeutsch. KiDKo/E contains emails from 2009 through 2012 and readers’ comments posted between January and April 2012 on media websites.

Go to KiDKo/E

Supplementary corpora on oral and written text productions

In addition to KiDKo proper, there are three supplementary corpora that provide elicited data from Kreuzberg and Hellersdorf adolescents as well as data from Turkish learners of German from Turkey, which allow such further comparisons as oral vs. written, spontaneous vs. elicited, and German as a first/second/foreign language:

  1. "Frog Story" corpus
  2. "Linguistic Repertoire" corpus
  3. "QUIS" corpus

Go to supplementary corpora on oral and written text productions

People who are or have been involved in the process of building KiDKo and its supplementary corpora:

  • Oliver Bunk
  • Fynn Dobler
  • Ulrike Freywald
  • Sophie Hamm
  • Banu Hueck
  • Anne Junghans
  • Jana Kiolbassa
  • Julia Kostka
  • Marlen Leisner
  • Nadine Lestmann
  • Katharina Mayr
  • Tiner Özçelik
  • Charlotte Pauli
  • Gergana Popova
  • Ines Rehbein
  • Nadja Reinhold
  • Franziska Rohland
  • Sören Schalowski
  • Kathleen Schumann
  • Kristina Tjona Sommer
  • Emiel Visser