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Research results

Establishing and further developing geolinguistics as a method in dialectology can be regarded as one outstanding result of more than a hundred years of work at the institute. It has given linguistics a tool to make large amounts of data available in a clear format for further steps of interpretation – for example, through contrastive comparisons and other mappable data.

The language atlases compiled in Marburg as well as the book series and journals supervised here are testimony to the usefulness of the method of documentation founded by Georg Wenker and the procedures for interpretation developed by Ferdinand Wrede and his successors in the analytical exploration of linguistic reality in its complexity and social impact.

Other institutions’ ongoing application and development of the methods of the “Marburg School,” as the research on the Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas has been called since the time Ferdinand Wrede, should be regarded as a proof of their quality.