Lexical variants in the digital archives of the East-Belgian newspaper GrenzEcho:A pilot corpus study

Against the backdrop of the pluricentricity of German, this paper deals with standard variation at the lexical level in the German-speaking Community of Belgium, also known as East Belgium. After a short discussion of some important concepts such as standard varieties, variants, variables and language centres, a pilot corpus study conducted in the digital archives of the East-Belgian newspaper GrenzEcho will be presented. The aim of this study is to determine the occurrence of potential East-Belgian variants in the newspaper, as well as their frequencies of use as compared to other lexemes.