‘From above’, ‘from below’, and regionally balanced

In this chapter, we report on an ongoing project on a corpus of German in the long nineteenth century. Similar to other historical corpora of German (and unlike existing corpora for the nineteenth century), the Nineteenth-Century German Corpus will focus on regional variation. In addition, it will account for an increasing demand for register variation, e.g. by considering formal as well as informal ‘oral’ texts. Thus, text genres ‘from above’, such as regional newspaper texts, and ‘from below’, such as private letters, are incorporated. Three case studies of variation in nineteenth-century grammar will demonstrate the benefits of such a corpus design for the study of language continuity and language change.