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Volkmar Hellfritzsch / Herbert Steinmüller: Der Dialektologe Emil Gerbet (1867-1919)

The present article deals with the biography and the academic achievements of the German dialectologist Emil Gerbet (1867–1919), whose work on the dialect of the Vogtland area, which was done at the turn of 20th century, is of fundamental importance.

Gerbet was born as the son of a small farmer in a remote village and he showed an early interest in the speech and traditions of the rural population of his native region. After taking his school-leaving examination in Plauen, he studied Germanic Philology, Modern Languages and Education at the University of Leipzig from 1889 to 1894. Here he was greatly influenced by his renowned teacher Eduard Sievers, the founder of articulatory phonetics, who directed his interests towards Linguistics. Gerbet’s doctoral thesis was about the dialect of the Vogtland. This work was highly regarded. His examiners described it as a significant contribution to the study of dialectology. From 1897 to 1919, when he committed suicide, presumably as a result of nervous disorder and exhaustion, Gerbet held various teaching posts in Aue, Glauchau and Werdau, small towns in south-western Saxony not far from his native Vogtland. In this period, he elaborated his earlier findings about the phonological isoglosses separating the central Vogtland dialect from its regional subsystems and from the dialects of the neighbouring regions. In 1908, Emil Gerbet’s "Grammatik der Mundart des Vogtlandes" ("Grammar of the Vogtland Dialect"), his principal work, was published. In this book, he described the dialect of the Vogtland as East Franconian, but with Upper German elements from the Upper Palatinate in the south and Upper Saxon-Thuringian elements in the north.

Though he followed strictly Neogrammarian principles, Gerbet was not unthinkingly dogmatic in his adherence to them. In many ways, he was a scholar who was open for more forward-looking approaches. In this context, we can mention his interest in word-geography, in the history of the dialects, in sociolinguistic problems (the expansion of colloquial speech) and in the role of settlement patterns, as well as his consistent utilization of onomastic material, especially place-names. Gerbet was an active fieldworker and regularly went on walking tours in the region. He also encouraged local authors writing in authentic dialect. By such measures, he defended the dialect against those who watered it down through their own spoken usage and through pseudo-poetry.

Emil Gerbet’s fundamental research in dialectology prepared the way for his successors, who, under the guidance of Theodor Frings (Leipzig School) and particularly in the nineteen-thirties, opened up new directions of research.