U niversal D ependencies for the A lemannic A lsatian Dialects (2025)

Abstract: We present the first corpus of Alsatian Alemannic dialects following Universal Dependencies (UD) guidelines, a project which already covers many of the world’s languages. Standard languages are represented to a greater extent than non-standard varieties in UD, and our corpus contributes to closing the gap in the lack of resources for Alsatian dialects by presenting the first UD treebank for these dialects, which are spoken in Northeastern France. Our corpus is annotated both with part-of-speech tags and dependency information, as well as French glosses and German lemmas, containing in total 975 sentences and 19,286 tokens, spanning over various text genres. In this article, we present our data, details of the annotation process, as well as some specific syntactic phenomena which differentiate and situate Alsatian with regards to both Standard German and some other German non-standard varieties. The addition of this corpus to the UD project allows for a higher visibility of the Alemannic Alsatian dialects in linguistic research, and provides a valuable resource for research in many fields, including NLP, syntax and comparative Germanic linguistics.

## introduction the project of universal dependencies (ud) @xcite has the goal of providing crosslinguistic annotation guidelines and treebanks for linguistic research. as of march 2025, there are 296 treebanks in 168 languages available as part of the ud project. while some non-standard german and germanic varieties are represented (see section 2), there is currently no ud treebank for alsatian, an upper german dialect spoken in the east of france. to address this gap in research, we present the first ud treebank of alemannic alsatian dialects, ranging over different source texts and genres. this article will present our work and our corpus, and describe annotation guidelines for some phenomena found in alsatian. we will first provide a background for the alemannic alsatian dialects and available ud resources for nonstandard german varieties (section 2). we will then provide more information about our data and the annotation process (section 3), and provide examples of some syntactic phenomena in alsatian and related annotation decisions (section 3.3 and 3.4). ## alsatian and related languages in ud the terms 'alsatian', in alsatian 'elsässisch, elsassisch', marginally 'elsässerdytsch', and in french 'alsacien' are hypernyms which refer to all the alemannic and franconian dialectal varieties spoken in the alsace region in northeastern france. these terms are used by the alsatian population itself, whether they speak alsatian or not. there is no widely used written standard for alsatian. various spelling systems have been developed and proposed, to make it possible for all speakers to write in their own variety of alsatian with shared grapheme to phoneme rules. however, most speakers are not familiar with these spelling systems, and there is thus a lot of variation in how speakers write alsatian, depending both on the specific variety they speak and on the degree of influence of french and standard german spelling @xcite . the linguistic terms used to refer to this group of dialectal varieties, e.g. 'rhine franconian' or 'low alemannic', have been chosen by linguists in reference to the alemanni and frankish tribes who settled in alsace and in the surrounding areas during the 5 th century and who were speaking germanic languages. it is the descendants of those germanic varieties which are still spoken in alsace nowadays, as well as in the surrounding regions in germany and switzerland. as shown in figure 1 , the different upper ger-man dialects spoken in alsace are: we present the first corpus of texts in the alemannic alsatian dialects annotated following ud guidelines. it is the second corpus for alemannic in general, after the swiss german corpus. ## corpus data the data for our corpus comes from different sources, spanning different genres of texts, as summarised in texts annotated in phase 2 are all translations, usually from french, and sourced from the parco-lab parallel corpus @xcite . some of the texts in the corpus were professionally translated, while others were translated by a member of the project. both before and during the annotation process, annotators identified and discussed germanisms in the texts, i.e. forms influenced by standard german which are not part of the traditional alsatian norm, but that can be used by some speakers nowadays in what we call the modern alsatian norm. in the texts annotated by a member of the project, such forms were replaced with an alsatian form judged more accurate with regards to traditional use, and it is the corrected sentence which was annotated. in texts which were professionally translated and transcripts of spoken language, the original version was kept in the #text_origin metadata and the corrected sentence was indicated in the #text metadata, as was done in the low saxon corpus @xcite . ## conclusion we have presented our corpus of alemannic alsatian dialects annotated following universal dependencies guidelines, which is the first one for this dialect. the corpus was pre-annotated using a variety of tools, and annotated by two annotators, while creating and further developing annotation guidelines for alemannic alsatian dialects. while many aspects of alsatian grammar are similar to standard german, a few specificities were identified and presented in this article. some syntactic phenomena and annotation decisions for alsatian were presented and compared to the existing literature and resources on ud corpora for bavarian, low saxon, and luxembourgish, german varieties related to alsatian. the corpus described