Submitted Abstract
The publication was accepted as a doctoral thesis (under the supervision of Professor Dr. Thomas Klein) by the University of Bonn in 2009.Its main objective is an corpus-based analysis of the consonant system of the earliest Moselle Franconian charters. In comparison to the Ripuarian, the smaller Central Franconian dialect area, the Moselle Franconian has been disregarded for a long time. One of the reasons for this fact might be the small number of existing manuscripts, especially from the Middle High German period. This makes the early charters of the 13th and 14th century the more valuable for a linguistic analysis.A corpus of 162 mediaeval charters with 71.000 words has been built up. The brevity of the texts is one of the reasons for the concentration on the consonantal subsystem, which is more stable than the vocalic subsystem. The charters are spread all over the large Moselle Franconian area including Luxembourg in the west and Wildenburg in the northeast. Some charters in the north and south belong to transitional spaces. Both old similarities with the Ripuarian in the north and the growing influence from dialect areas in the south can be observed clearly in the consonantal writing system (for example in the increasing use of instead of