Cyclical change is not exclusive to grammaticalization: A case in point is the secondary pragmaticalization of vocatives such as Germ. Mensch (‘(hu)man’) / Engl. man, or Germ. Alter (‘dude’) / Engl. dude 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.

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.

Many German businesses are switching from the Sie V address for customers to the du 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 Sie or with du. 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 du address facilitates a more positive attitude toward the sales interaction or makes a sale appear more likely.

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.

In T/V languages, address choice is a highly sensitive communicative act. When the social media team of Deutsche Bahn adopted the informal pronoun du (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 Sie on social media becomes associated with the interrelated personae of the ‘boomer’ and the ‘Karen’.

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.

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 and 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 proximity and depth of the lived experience of others (Schutz & Luckmann 1974: 65).

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.

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.

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 (dude, bra, bro), Afrikaans (boet, ou, oukie) and German (Alter, Junge), 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.

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 Sie 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.

Cyclical change is not exclusive to grammaticalization: A case in point is the secondary pragmaticalization of vocatives such as Germ. Mensch (‘(hu)man’) / Engl. man, or Germ. Alter (‘dude’) / Engl. dude 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.

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.

Many German businesses are switching from the Sie V address for customers to the du 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 Sie or with du. 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 du address facilitates a more positive attitude toward the sales interaction or makes a sale appear more likely.

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.

In T/V languages, address choice is a highly sensitive communicative act. When the social media team of Deutsche Bahn adopted the informal pronoun du (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 Sie on social media becomes associated with the interrelated personae of the ‘boomer’ and the ‘Karen’.

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.

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 and 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 proximity and depth of the lived experience of others (Schutz & Luckmann 1974: 65).

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.

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.

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 (dude, bra, bro), Afrikaans (boet, ou, oukie) and German (Alter, Junge), 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.

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 Sie 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.