Including Swiss Standard German in GermaNet

GermaNet (Henrich and Hinrichs, 2010; Hamp and Feldweg, 1997) is a comprehensive wordnet of Standard German spoken in the Federal Republic of Germany. The GermaNet team aims at modelling the basic vocabulary of the language. German is an official language or a minority language in many countries. It is an official language in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, each with its own codified standard variety (Auer, 2014, p. 21), and also in Belgium, Liechtenstein, and Luxemburg. German is recognized as a minority language in thirteen additional countries, including Brasil, Italy, Poland, and Russia. However, the different standard varieties of German are currently not represented in GermaNet. With this project, we make a start on changing this by including one variety, namely Swiss Standard German, into GermaNet. This shall give a more inclusive perspective on the German language. We will argue that Swiss Standard German words, Helvetisms, are best included into the already existing wordnet GermaNet, rather than creating them as a separate wordnet.