The Pomeranian Dictionary

The eventful history of the Pomeranian Dictionary, which returned to the University of Greifswald in 1999, stretches far back into the 20th century and tells of ups and downs, losses and new beginnings.

Founded by Wolfgang Stammler in Greifswald in 1925, this large-scale dictionary is dedicated to recording and documenting the vocabulary of the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects of Pomerania and thus fills a last blank spot on the map of dialect dictionaries, which today cover almost the entire German-speaking world. 
The first major turning point for the project was the Second World War, which led to the loss of almost all of the material that had been collected up to that point. For example, the majority of the archive holdings that had been moved to Lübeck in 1945 were lost. Only by chance was it possible to save at least some of the archive notes, which were kept in the private home of the then director Kurt Mischke near Greifswald and were initially used in the post-war period as writing paper for the village population and school children. 
A new start was therefore unavoidable and was instigated and pushed ahead from 1947 onwards under the leadership of Hans Friedrich Rosenfeld. Staff members sent out questionnaires, interviewed countless dialect speakers and made tape recordings. These efforts led to a rapid growth of the archive, which, by the end of the 1960s, had reached the impressive figure of approx. 1.2 million records, despite the difficulties in finding sources from the former Hinterpommern ("Farther Pomerania"). These records are the most important basis for compiling the approximately 60,000 word articles for the PD. The slips of paper filled in by the contributors are DIN A7 in size. The following link provides a small selection of them for the lemma ‘Schnack’ (empty talk, gossip).

However, the political situation in the GDR was disadvantageous for the dictionary right from the start. In the end, all work on the ‘Low German Dictionary’, renamed in 1952, had to be cancelled in 1969. This seemed to seal its final demise. It is only thanks to the skill of the director of the PD from 1967, Renate Herrmann-Winter, that the archive holdings were able to remain intact in Greifswald. German Reunification then offered the opportunity to re-establish the project. In 1992, the centre was initially re-established at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, and custody was transferred completely to the State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1999, finding its new and at the same time old home at Greifswald's Alma Mater. 
The first volume (A-K) of the two-volume dialect dictionary, which was published in individual instalments by Akademie-Verlag in Berlin (edited by Renate Herrmann-Winter and Matthias Vollmer), was completed at the end of 2007. In the meantime, twelve instalments of the second volume (L-vullstännig) have already been published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Where possible, maps supplement the individual entries, whereby 14 phonetic maps alone for the first volume represent important aspects of the phonetic geography of Pomerania and at the same time reduce the burden of information on the word entries. A word map and a phonetic map can be viewed by clicking on the following link.