German Dialects Across Situations, Generations, and Regions: The REDE corpus as an Oral Resource for NLP

Hanna Fischer, Alfred Lameli


Abstract
Recent advances in speech and language technologies increasingly rely on large and diverse corpora that represent linguistic variation across dialect regions, communicative situations, and social speaker characteristics. While substantial resources are available for Standard German, comparable spoken corpora for German dialects have so far been largely lacking, limiting the development and evaluation of dialect-sensitive NLP systems. The REDE corpus addresses this gap by providing a methodologically uniform collection of spoken German for 148 locations that systematically covers all major dialect areas in Germany. It comprises contemporary recordings collected in multiple elicitation and interaction settings, capturing variation across speaking styles, situational contexts, and speaker generations. With more than 1,500 hours of speech and rich metadata on regional and social dimensions, the REDE corpus constitutes a large-scale oral resource suitable for both linguistic research and NLP applications. This paper presents the design, structure, and methodological foundations of the corpus and discusses its relevance for current speech technology requirements.
Anthology ID:
2026.dialres-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca
Editors:
Antonis Anastasopoulos, Stella Markantonatou, Angela Ralli, Marcos Zampieri, Stavros Bompolas, Vivian Stamou
Venues:
DialRes | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
144–152
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-dialres-15
DOI:
10.63317/4fe4dkefqah9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanna Fischer and Alfred Lameli. 2026. German Dialects Across Situations, Generations, and Regions: The REDE corpus as an Oral Resource for NLP. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective, pages 144–152, Palma de Mallorca. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
German Dialects Across Situations, Generations, and Regions: The REDE corpus as an Oral Resource for NLP (Fischer & Lameli, DialRes 2026)
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