ABSTRACT

Martin Luther is significant in German political and cultural history in two respects. He was the founder of the Reformation and, as a figure who communicated his opinions to the masses, had far-reaching – if still hotly debated – effects on the development of the German language from the early sixteenth century onwards. From the viewpoint of language history, both factors – historical/biographical and linguistic – must be seen as interlocking. In this respect, even the accident of Luther’s place of birth is of some linguistic importance. Born in Eisleben (1483), brought up in Mansfeld, and educated in schools in Magdeburg and Eisenach and then at the university of Erfurt where he took holy orders before moving to Wittenberg to teach Bible exegesis, Luther spent his formative years flitting back and forth across the CG–LG border: ‘Luther hat sozusagen links und rechts der nd.-hd. Sprachgrenze gelebt […] Diese “Mittellage” ist wichtig für seine eigene Spracherfahrung wie auch für seine spätere Sprachwirkung’ (Tschirch 1989: 107f.). In other words, Luther had an ear for linguistic difference and an awareness of the need to communicate in a way that could be widely understood. Moreover, his place of birth placed him within the radius of a dominant ECG-EUG written Sprachlandschaft (see 18.6 and 22.5–6), which put him immediately into the linguistic mainstream of his time and meant that he did not have any major dialectal barriers to overcome (as if, say, he had been born in the Northern LG or Alemannic region).