Methods in Audiovisual Dialectology in a Bilingual Context

Abstract

Today's rapid technological developments have encouraged a much wider range of approaches to observing, portraying and interpreting objects of research in many different disciplines. Thanks to dramatic advances in digital and film technology, dialectology has also seen the number of interdisciplinary approaches increase since the second half of the 1980s. Communication and data capture technology enable researchers to exploit multimedia to present language maps, spoken dialects and individual linguistic phenomena on video, film and in the internet. Portraying the general context of linguistic and social interaction in film means that dynamic/visual elements are included in multidimensional space and time alongside the spoken text, making it possible to observe and research the objects being investigated from a more profound perspective (Maurer-Lausegger 2006:283). As Hess-Uiltich points out (I 987:220f.), studies on the complementarity of language and image, sound and music, and verbal and non-verbal codes in films and on TV have revealed that these intermedial relationships between symbols are usually too complex to be quantifiable in static and statistical terms but have to be evaluated in a dynamic and functional manner. The additional visual-contextual information provided by audiovisual media in contrast to sound alone can be very informative and sometimes even essential when working on an interpretation.