Abstract There is but little research on the diatopic variation within historic standard German. This article presents a variational analysis of frequent lexical items, Jänner / Januar (›January‹), Samstag / Sonnabend (›Saturday‹), and heuer / dieses Jahr (›this year‹), in both orthographic codices 1870–1990 and standards of usage in newspapers 1870–1950. This is complemented with further genre-sensitive evidence from the historical DTA/DWDS corpora as well as a discussion of methodological challenges, such as a balanced corpus design and the scarcity of sources 1950–1990. The findings underscore the early significance of diatopic variation in the standard lexicon and call for more nuanced diachronic analyses.
Niehaus et al. (Tue,) studied this question.