Abstract
In this article, we present systematic studies of two kinds of language varieties for their comparison and documentation. To analyse geographical varieties of German, the annotated Korpus Südtirol in the framework of the C4 initiative is used. The comparison toolkit Vis-À-Vis semi-automatically extracts varieties’ particularities in order to support and reduce linguists’ manual work, combining quantitative methods with qualitative ones. In the related project KoKo, written text corpora of German-speaking learners of three different areas in Italy, Austria, and Germany are compared. The analyses focus on the use of different varieties of German in an educational setting as well as on determining linguistic and sociolinguistic factors influencing the students’ writing competences. We describe our corpus linguistic methods and tools as well as some first results on different levels of linguistic description.