Ein Wörterbuch der nationalen und regionalen Varianten der deutschen Standardsprache

tandard German is a pluricentric language with several varieties. It is used as a solo-official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, South Tyrol, East Belgium and Luxembourg. The differences are especially evident in the lexicon. Up to now, the lexicographic focus as to Standard German pluricentric varieties has mainly been on the southern variants of the German speaking area, which have been considered as peripheral or as dialect variants. However, variants only used in Germany (or Northern Germany) have implicitly been assumed to be used by alls peakers of German. In the course of this year, a dictionary of the national and regional variants of Standard German will be published (de Gruyter 2004). The dictionary is based on the concept of pluricentricity. It covers the most frequent and important current national and regional variants of Standard German not only of the southern areas, but of the whole German speaking area. In this paper, we present the empirical foundations of the dictionary, the methodical procedure of the lemma-selection and the structure of the dictionary entries. Our paper is introduced by some historical remarks on the development of German as a pluricentric language. It will be concluded by a discussion of the practical relevance of this dictionary especially as far as teaching of German as L1 and L2 is concerned.