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As we know, speech perception and production are strongly influenced by sign-specific "socio-pragmatic indexicality" (cf. Purschke 2014), that is, by the mental conceptions (of meaning, style etc.) people associate with individual linguistic features. I assume that, in German-speaking areas, the "subjective (notion of the) dialectality" of a non-standard feature represents a basic form of socio-pragmatic indexicality and is closely connected to language variation and change, in that the more regionalisms are regarded as non-standard features, the more they vary synchronically and diachronically. Following Purschke (2014), I define the subjective dialectality of regionalisms as being based on their feature-specific "salience" and "pertinence", that is, on both the pure awareness and further evaluation of such features as non-standard variants. A discussion of theoretical issues is followed by the presentation of empirical data from a speech perception study (in the style of Herrgen/Schmidt 1985). Scale-based judgments by Northern, Central and Southern German listeners provide evidence about the subjective dialectality of 15 Bavarian regionalisms. They further reveal how subjective dialectality is related to listeners' origins and regional language competence. Comparing the subjective data with two Bavarian speakers' language use reveals the relation between subjective dialectality and synchronic variation in the analysed regionalisms.

The German personal pronoun Ihr is the origin of an interesting difference in the address system of Russian Germans and Germans. Whilst the usage of this pronoun has shifted strongly in the last 100 years in Germany, it has been revealed that Russian Germans still use it in the same way as their predecessors. But since these observations date back more than ten years, the purpose of this study was to explore the current usage of personal pronouns among Russian Germans in the Altai Krai. For that purpose fourteen Russian Germans from the German National District and Barnaul were interviewed. This study combines quantitative and qualitative methods, as each respondent was presented a survey and went through a guided interview. As a result, two decision trees for the interviewed Mennonites on the one hand, and Catholics and Lutherans on the other hand, could be composed. The interviewed Russian Germans obviously still adhere to power semantics in the family, among friends and at work. While the Catholics and Lutherans were still employing Ihr, Mennonites used See in order to formally address one interlocutor. This study has also been able to identify Russian Germans' usage of the German dialect in the family and with friends.