183032231 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code TAR 7 Eb 15 9789027243188 06 10.1075/tar.7 DG 002 02 01 TAR 02 2405-9269 Topics in Address Research 7 01 tar.7 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/tar.7 1 B01 Heinz L. Kretzenbacher Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. Heinz L. Kretzenbacher The University of Melbourne 2 B01 Horst J. Simon Simon, Horst J. Horst J. Simon Freie Universität Berlin 3 B01 Christa Dürscheid Dürscheid, Christa Christa Dürscheid Universität Zürich 01 eng 280 vi 273 + index LAN009030 v.2006 CFG 2 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.DISC Discourse studies 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.GERM Germanic linguistics 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.HL Historical linguistics 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.PRAG Pragmatics 06 01 The forms of address in German and their usage have been debated for centuries, and the discussion about is ongoing both in academia and in the wider public. This collection is a showcase of the current and emerging research for an international audience. The scope of topics in this volume covers German forms of address from the 15th to the 21st centuries, from northern Germany to southern Africa, from face-to-face communication to online chatting, and from private discourse to service encounters. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, the individual contributions draw upon historical philology-based linguistics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, as well as metapragmatic, interactional, multilingual, and pluricentric perspectives. 46 01 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 47 Open access -- this title is available under a CC BY license. For full details, see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/tar.7.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027237866.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027237866.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/tar.7.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/tar.7.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/tar.7.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/tar.7.hb.png 10 01 JB code tar.7.prelim i iv 4 Prelim pages -1 10 01 JB code tar.7.toc v vi 2 Table of contents 0 10 01 JB code tar.7.01kre 1 10 10 Chapter 1 1 A01 Heinz L. Kretzenbacher Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. Heinz L. Kretzenbacher 2 A01 Horst J. Simon Simon, Horst J. Horst J. Simon 3 A01 Christa Dürscheid Dürscheid, Christa Christa Dürscheid 10 01 JB code tar.7.p1 Section header 2 10 01 JB code tar.7.02dam 12 46 35 Chapter 3 1 A01 Antje Dammel Dammel, Antje Antje Dammel 2 A01 Melitta Gillmann Gillmann, Melitta Melitta Gillmann 20 cyclicity 20 discourse marker 20 interjection 20 pragmaticalization 20 vocative 01 Cyclical change is not exclusive to grammaticalization: A case in point is the secondary pragmaticalization of vocatives such as Germ. <i>Mensch</i> (‘(hu)man’) / Engl. <i>man,</i> or Germ. <i>Alter</i> (‘dude’) / Engl. <i>dude</i> into discourse markers and interjections, going along with the renovation of new vocatives. General terms of person reference are a recurrent source, expressivity due to social indexicality is the driving force starting the cycle. Advanced stages show routinization and bleaching, most importantly, dereferentialization and illocutionalization. We describe bridging contexts with extensive functional overlap as well as newly developed prototypical functions using examples from contemporary and historical corpora of spoken and written German. Syntactical disintegration and functions of social, affective, and discursive alignment constitute features shared across all stages. 10 01 JB code tar.7.03vos 47 72 26 Chapter 4 1 A01 Lena Vosding Vosding, Lena Lena Vosding 20 15th and 16th century 20 Benedictine nuns 20 Latin 20 letter collection 20 Middle Low German 01 This chapter describes forms of address in a late medieval collection of letters from the Benedictine nuns’ convent of Lüne in Lower Saxony (North Germany). After an introduction to the source, the theoretical coordinates for the forms of address and the senders’ self-designation are defined. This is followed not by a statistical analysis of counted pronoun forms, but rather an example-based presentation of pronouns, adjectives, and nouns used in letters on different topics. The main focus is on Middle Low German but as the nuns used Latin as well, both languages have to be considered together. The varied forms of address reveal considerable information about the nuns’ interpersonal connections with their social environment and also a complex system of pronoun usage. 10 01 JB code tar.7.p2 73 1 Section header 5 10 01 JB code tar.7.04kre 74 92 19 Chapter 6 1 A01 Heinz L. Kretzenbacher Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. Heinz L. Kretzenbacher 2 A01 Susanne Hensel-Börner Hensel-Börner, Susanne Susanne Hensel-Börner 20 customer 20 pronominal address 20 sales encounter 20 service encounter 01 Many German businesses are switching from the <i>Sie</i> V address for customers to the <i>du</i> T address. For our experimental study, we produced short videos showing simulated initial phases of service encounters in a car dealership, a bank, and a sports footwear shop. Each video had two versions, with the salesperson addressing the customer either with <i>Sie</i> or with <i>du</i>. The quantitative evaluation of the survey shows different perceptions of the address forms in the videos both regarding the different industries represented in the videos and regarding gender, age group, and education level of respondents. It does not support the view that <i>du</i> address facilitates a more positive attitude toward the sales interaction or makes a sale appear more likely. 10 01 JB code tar.7.05str 93 114 22 Chapter 7 1 A01 Philipp Striedl Striedl, Philipp Philipp Striedl 20 (im)politeness 20 advice literature 20 online user comments 20 stereotype 20 variational metapragmatics 01 Stereotypes are socially constructed knowledge resulting from cognitive mechanisms that ascribe properties to social groups. I analyse stereotypical representations of forms of address in metapragmatic discourse. The study is empirically based on manually selected and coded excerpts from Austrian, German, and Swiss etiquette guides, advice literature and online user comments to newspaper articles. Focusing on accounts about the use of T/V pronouns, names and titles, I discuss social and geographic categories (e.g., female superior, Swabia), typical attitudes, and evaluations that discourse participants associate with forms of address. By applying concepts from cognitive science, I aim to contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary methodology for the emerging domain of variational metapragmatics. 10 01 JB code tar.7.06tru 115 131 17 Chapter 8 1 A01 Naomi Truan Truan, Naomi Naomi Truan 20 boomer, Karen 20 characterological figure 20 enregisterment 20 persona 20 T/V forms 01 In T/V languages, address choice is a highly sensitive communicative act. When the social media team of Deutsche Bahn adopted the informal pronoun <i>du</i> (T form) on Twitter, reactions were strongly polarized, ranging from enthusiasm to sharp rejection (Truan 2022). This chapter connects two sociolinguistic phenomena often studied separately: forms of address and stereotypic personae. I argue that T/V forms operate as first-order indices, linking linguistic choice to social personae: the V form indexes deference and adherence to unmarked politeness norms, while the T form indexes more relaxed internet communicative practices. Once these associations become metapragmatically noticed and commented upon, second-order indexicality emerges. Through processes of enregisterment (Agha 2003, 2005), T and V forms eventually become objectified and linked to recognizable stereotypes. In this case, defending the formal <i>Sie</i> on social media becomes associated with the interrelated personae of the ‘boomer’ and the ‘Karen’. 10 01 JB code tar.7.p3 133 1 Section header 9 10 01 JB code tar.7.07dza 134 156 23 Chapter 10 1 A01 Minka Džanko Džanko, Minka Minka Džanko 20 Conversation Analysis 20 Ethnographic Discourse Analysis 20 face-threatening actions 20 institutional conversation 20 nominal terms of address 01 By employing Conversation Analysis (Sacks et al. 1974) and Ethnographic Discourse Analysis (Deppermann 2000), this chapter examines the use of nominal terms of address by doctors, driving instructors, and university professors. These professionals perform similar communicative tasks, including opening and closing conversations, requesting and providing knowledge, and ensuring interactional progressivity through knowledge transfer. Based on 34 recorded conversations, the chapter analyzes nominal address terms in situations requiring subjective, theoretical, or practical knowledge of co-participants. The analysis shows that driving instructors and doctors utilize nominal terms of address in a potentially berating manner when faced with significant threats to the lives of co-participants or others. 10 01 JB code tar.7.08bau 157 175 19 Chapter 11 1 A01 Nathalie Bauer Bauer, Nathalie Nathalie Bauer 20 digital interaction 20 Interactional Onomastics 20 nominal address 20 sequential analysis 20 vocatives 01 This chapter explores the use of onymic vocatives in informal text-based WhatsApp chats. Based on an interactional analysis of 108 extracts from dyadic German chats, it shows that vocatives are used systematically in this digital environment and recur in specific positions within both postings <i>and</i> sequences, a feature largely overlooked in previous research. Depending on their position, vocatives serve different communicative functions, including interaction organization and relationship building. Overall, by establishing a direct connection to the interlocutor, vocatives play a pivotal role in a communicative ecology that differs considerably from face-to-face interaction in terms of both the <i>proximity</i> and <i>depth of the lived experience of others</i> (Schutz &#38; Luckmann 1974: 65). 10 01 JB code tar.7.09dro 176 197 22 Chapter 12 1 A01 Pepe Droste Droste, Pepe Pepe Droste 20 face-to-face interaction 20 multimodality 20 personal name 20 summons 20 vocative 01 The central site in which persons are summoned by name is co-present interaction. Based on video and audio recordings of non-elicited interactions among co-present speakers of German, this chapter explores how participants use their co-participants’ names to establish mutual attention. Adopting multimodal Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, it offers a fine-grained analysis of how summoning by name is embedded to different degrees within sequential and material contexts, and how names and embodied resources are accountably arranged to build summonses. The analysis demonstrates that bodies are crucially involved in this organization, and that participants adapt their summonses to situational and material contexts. The study advances address research by offering insight into context-sensitivity of address terms as a resource for social action. 10 01 JB code tar.7.10dum 198 221 24 Chapter 13 1 A01 Irem Duman Çakır Duman Çakır, Irem Irem Duman Çakır 2 A01 Ulrike Freywald Freywald, Ulrike Ulrike Freywald 20 (pro)nominal address forms 20 German 20 language contact 20 Turkish 20 urban market 01 This chapter investigates the structure and usage of nominal and pronominal forms of address at a much-frequented, linguistically diverse street market in Berlin. This hotspot of urban multilingualism shows particularly interesting ways of address as people make use of manifold linguistic resources available at the market. Drawing on different empirical methods and types of data, including ethnographic data from participant observation, findings from focus group discussions, and audio and video recordings of sales interactions, we show in which ways selecting forms of address and switching between them are central to sellers’ and visitors’ strategies for co-constructing individual identities, marking in-group and out-group status, modulating relationships between interlocutors, and expressing different forms of belonging, whether ethnically, socially, spatially, or linguistically grounded. 10 01 JB code tar.7.p4 223 1 Section header 14 10 01 JB code tar.7.11rad 224 248 25 Chapter 15 1 A01 Henning Radke Radke, Henning Henning Radke 2 A01 Arjen P. Versloot Versloot, Arjen P. Arjen P. Versloot 20 Afrikaans 20 English 20 Namdeutsch 20 Namibia 20 Namibian German 20 Vocatives 01 This chapter argues that multilingual vocatives allow speech communities to index both interconnectedness with others and autonomy as distinct entities because loanwords often undergo semantic, phonetic and pragmatic change. Therefore, we present a comprehensive overview of nominal vocatives in Namibian German (NG), a minority variety of German in Namibia. NG speakers use vocatives from English (<i>dude, bra, bro</i>), Afrikaans (<i>boet, ou, oukie</i>) and German (<i>Alter, Junge</i>), and innovate cross-linguistic multi-vocative constructions as ingroup address forms. Nominal vocatives, traditionally associated with male speakers, are repurposed to express group identity and linguistic creativity. Drawing on written CMC data (2011–2018) and spoken FTF data (DNam corpus, 2018), we examine their multimodal use and loanword change to show how NG indexes both connection and autonomy. 10 01 JB code tar.7.12rie 249 273 25 Chapter 16 1 A01 Marie A. Rieger Rieger, Marie A. Marie A. Rieger 20 dialect 20 identity 20 pluricentricity 20 South Tyrol 20 websites 01 German is one of three official languages in the Italian province of South Tyrol. Within the German language group, the picture is further complicated by the coexistence of spoken dialects and the written standard. The study presented here examines address on (German-language) South Tyrolean commercial and institutional websites. It is shown that the formal <i>Sie</i> address is still the standard form in service provider-customer interactions on the 146 websites examined. However, non-pronominal strategies are used on hotel websites in particular to reduce social distance, while the sporadic T forms on the one hand form local clusters and, on the other hand, together with dialectal elements, can also be seen as identity markers. 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 02 December 2026 20261215 2026 John Benjamins B.V. 02 WORLD 13 15 9789027237866 01 JB 3 John Benjamins e-Platform 03 jbe-platform.com 09 WORLD 10 20261215 01 627032230 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code TAR 7 Hb 15 9789027237866 BB 01 TAR 02 2405-9269 Topics in Address Research 7 01 tar.7 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/tar.7 1 B01 Heinz L. Kretzenbacher Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. Heinz L. Kretzenbacher The University of Melbourne 2 B01 Horst J. Simon Simon, Horst J. Horst J. Simon Freie Universität Berlin 3 B01 Christa Dürscheid Dürscheid, Christa Christa Dürscheid Universität Zürich 01 eng 280 vi 273 + index LAN009030 v.2006 CFG 2 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.DISC Discourse studies 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.GERM Germanic linguistics 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.HL Historical linguistics 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.PRAG Pragmatics 06 01 The forms of address in German and their usage have been debated for centuries, and the discussion about is ongoing both in academia and in the wider public. This collection is a showcase of the current and emerging research for an international audience. The scope of topics in this volume covers German forms of address from the 15th to the 21st centuries, from northern Germany to southern Africa, from face-to-face communication to online chatting, and from private discourse to service encounters. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, the individual contributions draw upon historical philology-based linguistics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, as well as metapragmatic, interactional, multilingual, and pluricentric perspectives. 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/tar.7.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027237866.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027237866.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/tar.7.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/tar.7.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/tar.7.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/tar.7.hb.png 10 01 JB code tar.7.prelim i iv 4 Prelim pages -1 10 01 JB code tar.7.toc v vi 2 Table of contents 0 10 01 JB code tar.7.01kre 1 10 10 Chapter 1 1 A01 Heinz L. Kretzenbacher Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. Heinz L. Kretzenbacher 2 A01 Horst J. Simon Simon, Horst J. Horst J. Simon 3 A01 Christa Dürscheid Dürscheid, Christa Christa Dürscheid 10 01 JB code tar.7.p1 Section header 2 10 01 JB code tar.7.02dam 12 46 35 Chapter 3 1 A01 Antje Dammel Dammel, Antje Antje Dammel 2 A01 Melitta Gillmann Gillmann, Melitta Melitta Gillmann 20 cyclicity 20 discourse marker 20 interjection 20 pragmaticalization 20 vocative 01 Cyclical change is not exclusive to grammaticalization: A case in point is the secondary pragmaticalization of vocatives such as Germ. <i>Mensch</i> (‘(hu)man’) / Engl. <i>man,</i> or Germ. <i>Alter</i> (‘dude’) / Engl. <i>dude</i> into discourse markers and interjections, going along with the renovation of new vocatives. General terms of person reference are a recurrent source, expressivity due to social indexicality is the driving force starting the cycle. Advanced stages show routinization and bleaching, most importantly, dereferentialization and illocutionalization. We describe bridging contexts with extensive functional overlap as well as newly developed prototypical functions using examples from contemporary and historical corpora of spoken and written German. Syntactical disintegration and functions of social, affective, and discursive alignment constitute features shared across all stages. 10 01 JB code tar.7.03vos 47 72 26 Chapter 4 1 A01 Lena Vosding Vosding, Lena Lena Vosding 20 15th and 16th century 20 Benedictine nuns 20 Latin 20 letter collection 20 Middle Low German 01 This chapter describes forms of address in a late medieval collection of letters from the Benedictine nuns’ convent of Lüne in Lower Saxony (North Germany). After an introduction to the source, the theoretical coordinates for the forms of address and the senders’ self-designation are defined. This is followed not by a statistical analysis of counted pronoun forms, but rather an example-based presentation of pronouns, adjectives, and nouns used in letters on different topics. The main focus is on Middle Low German but as the nuns used Latin as well, both languages have to be considered together. The varied forms of address reveal considerable information about the nuns’ interpersonal connections with their social environment and also a complex system of pronoun usage. 10 01 JB code tar.7.p2 73 1 Section header 5 10 01 JB code tar.7.04kre 74 92 19 Chapter 6 1 A01 Heinz L. Kretzenbacher Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. Heinz L. Kretzenbacher 2 A01 Susanne Hensel-Börner Hensel-Börner, Susanne Susanne Hensel-Börner 20 customer 20 pronominal address 20 sales encounter 20 service encounter 01 Many German businesses are switching from the <i>Sie</i> V address for customers to the <i>du</i> T address. For our experimental study, we produced short videos showing simulated initial phases of service encounters in a car dealership, a bank, and a sports footwear shop. Each video had two versions, with the salesperson addressing the customer either with <i>Sie</i> or with <i>du</i>. The quantitative evaluation of the survey shows different perceptions of the address forms in the videos both regarding the different industries represented in the videos and regarding gender, age group, and education level of respondents. It does not support the view that <i>du</i> address facilitates a more positive attitude toward the sales interaction or makes a sale appear more likely. 10 01 JB code tar.7.05str 93 114 22 Chapter 7 1 A01 Philipp Striedl Striedl, Philipp Philipp Striedl 20 (im)politeness 20 advice literature 20 online user comments 20 stereotype 20 variational metapragmatics 01 Stereotypes are socially constructed knowledge resulting from cognitive mechanisms that ascribe properties to social groups. I analyse stereotypical representations of forms of address in metapragmatic discourse. The study is empirically based on manually selected and coded excerpts from Austrian, German, and Swiss etiquette guides, advice literature and online user comments to newspaper articles. Focusing on accounts about the use of T/V pronouns, names and titles, I discuss social and geographic categories (e.g., female superior, Swabia), typical attitudes, and evaluations that discourse participants associate with forms of address. By applying concepts from cognitive science, I aim to contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary methodology for the emerging domain of variational metapragmatics. 10 01 JB code tar.7.06tru 115 131 17 Chapter 8 1 A01 Naomi Truan Truan, Naomi Naomi Truan 20 boomer, Karen 20 characterological figure 20 enregisterment 20 persona 20 T/V forms 01 In T/V languages, address choice is a highly sensitive communicative act. When the social media team of Deutsche Bahn adopted the informal pronoun <i>du</i> (T form) on Twitter, reactions were strongly polarized, ranging from enthusiasm to sharp rejection (Truan 2022). This chapter connects two sociolinguistic phenomena often studied separately: forms of address and stereotypic personae. I argue that T/V forms operate as first-order indices, linking linguistic choice to social personae: the V form indexes deference and adherence to unmarked politeness norms, while the T form indexes more relaxed internet communicative practices. Once these associations become metapragmatically noticed and commented upon, second-order indexicality emerges. Through processes of enregisterment (Agha 2003, 2005), T and V forms eventually become objectified and linked to recognizable stereotypes. In this case, defending the formal <i>Sie</i> on social media becomes associated with the interrelated personae of the ‘boomer’ and the ‘Karen’. 10 01 JB code tar.7.p3 133 1 Section header 9 10 01 JB code tar.7.07dza 134 156 23 Chapter 10 1 A01 Minka Džanko Džanko, Minka Minka Džanko 20 Conversation Analysis 20 Ethnographic Discourse Analysis 20 face-threatening actions 20 institutional conversation 20 nominal terms of address 01 By employing Conversation Analysis (Sacks et al. 1974) and Ethnographic Discourse Analysis (Deppermann 2000), this chapter examines the use of nominal terms of address by doctors, driving instructors, and university professors. These professionals perform similar communicative tasks, including opening and closing conversations, requesting and providing knowledge, and ensuring interactional progressivity through knowledge transfer. Based on 34 recorded conversations, the chapter analyzes nominal address terms in situations requiring subjective, theoretical, or practical knowledge of co-participants. The analysis shows that driving instructors and doctors utilize nominal terms of address in a potentially berating manner when faced with significant threats to the lives of co-participants or others. 10 01 JB code tar.7.08bau 157 175 19 Chapter 11 1 A01 Nathalie Bauer Bauer, Nathalie Nathalie Bauer 20 digital interaction 20 Interactional Onomastics 20 nominal address 20 sequential analysis 20 vocatives 01 This chapter explores the use of onymic vocatives in informal text-based WhatsApp chats. Based on an interactional analysis of 108 extracts from dyadic German chats, it shows that vocatives are used systematically in this digital environment and recur in specific positions within both postings <i>and</i> sequences, a feature largely overlooked in previous research. Depending on their position, vocatives serve different communicative functions, including interaction organization and relationship building. Overall, by establishing a direct connection to the interlocutor, vocatives play a pivotal role in a communicative ecology that differs considerably from face-to-face interaction in terms of both the <i>proximity</i> and <i>depth of the lived experience of others</i> (Schutz &#38; Luckmann 1974: 65). 10 01 JB code tar.7.09dro 176 197 22 Chapter 12 1 A01 Pepe Droste Droste, Pepe Pepe Droste 20 face-to-face interaction 20 multimodality 20 personal name 20 summons 20 vocative 01 The central site in which persons are summoned by name is co-present interaction. Based on video and audio recordings of non-elicited interactions among co-present speakers of German, this chapter explores how participants use their co-participants’ names to establish mutual attention. Adopting multimodal Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, it offers a fine-grained analysis of how summoning by name is embedded to different degrees within sequential and material contexts, and how names and embodied resources are accountably arranged to build summonses. The analysis demonstrates that bodies are crucially involved in this organization, and that participants adapt their summonses to situational and material contexts. The study advances address research by offering insight into context-sensitivity of address terms as a resource for social action. 10 01 JB code tar.7.10dum 198 221 24 Chapter 13 1 A01 Irem Duman Çakır Duman Çakır, Irem Irem Duman Çakır 2 A01 Ulrike Freywald Freywald, Ulrike Ulrike Freywald 20 (pro)nominal address forms 20 German 20 language contact 20 Turkish 20 urban market 01 This chapter investigates the structure and usage of nominal and pronominal forms of address at a much-frequented, linguistically diverse street market in Berlin. This hotspot of urban multilingualism shows particularly interesting ways of address as people make use of manifold linguistic resources available at the market. Drawing on different empirical methods and types of data, including ethnographic data from participant observation, findings from focus group discussions, and audio and video recordings of sales interactions, we show in which ways selecting forms of address and switching between them are central to sellers’ and visitors’ strategies for co-constructing individual identities, marking in-group and out-group status, modulating relationships between interlocutors, and expressing different forms of belonging, whether ethnically, socially, spatially, or linguistically grounded. 10 01 JB code tar.7.p4 223 1 Section header 14 10 01 JB code tar.7.11rad 224 248 25 Chapter 15 1 A01 Henning Radke Radke, Henning Henning Radke 2 A01 Arjen P. Versloot Versloot, Arjen P. Arjen P. Versloot 20 Afrikaans 20 English 20 Namdeutsch 20 Namibia 20 Namibian German 20 Vocatives 01 This chapter argues that multilingual vocatives allow speech communities to index both interconnectedness with others and autonomy as distinct entities because loanwords often undergo semantic, phonetic and pragmatic change. Therefore, we present a comprehensive overview of nominal vocatives in Namibian German (NG), a minority variety of German in Namibia. NG speakers use vocatives from English (<i>dude, bra, bro</i>), Afrikaans (<i>boet, ou, oukie</i>) and German (<i>Alter, Junge</i>), and innovate cross-linguistic multi-vocative constructions as ingroup address forms. Nominal vocatives, traditionally associated with male speakers, are repurposed to express group identity and linguistic creativity. Drawing on written CMC data (2011–2018) and spoken FTF data (DNam corpus, 2018), we examine their multimodal use and loanword change to show how NG indexes both connection and autonomy. 10 01 JB code tar.7.12rie 249 273 25 Chapter 16 1 A01 Marie A. Rieger Rieger, Marie A. Marie A. Rieger 20 dialect 20 identity 20 pluricentricity 20 South Tyrol 20 websites 01 German is one of three official languages in the Italian province of South Tyrol. Within the German language group, the picture is further complicated by the coexistence of spoken dialects and the written standard. The study presented here examines address on (German-language) South Tyrolean commercial and institutional websites. It is shown that the formal <i>Sie</i> address is still the standard form in service provider-customer interactions on the 146 websites examined. However, non-pronominal strategies are used on hotel websites in particular to reduce social distance, while the sporadic T forms on the one hand form local clusters and, on the other hand, together with dialectal elements, can also be seen as identity markers. 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 02 December 2026 20261215 2026 John Benjamins B.V. 02 WORLD 01 JB 1 John Benjamins Publishing Company +31 20 6304747 +31 20 6739773 bookorder@benjamins.nl 01 https://benjamins.com 01 WORLD US CA MX 10 20261215 01 02 JB 1 00 135.00 EUR R 02 02 JB 1 00 143.10 EUR R 01 JB 10 John Benjamins Publishing Company +31 20 6304747 bookorder@benjamins.nl 01 GB 10 20261215 02 02 JB 1 00 113.00 GBP Z 01 JB 2 Casemate Academic 610-853-9131 610-853-9143 Girard.Kratz@casematepublishers.com 01 https://benjamins.com 02 US CA MX 10 20261215 01 gen 02 JB 1 00 176.00 USD