Peter Honnen

Who is Peter Honnen?

Peter Honnen is a German linguist and specialist researcher of the languages of the Rhineland. He was born in Rheinhausen, Germany.

For years he worked as a scientific staff member at the section for language research of the Institute of Regional Studies and Regional History in Bonn-Endenich. The institute is run by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland, a body of municipal self-governance, the main seat of which is in Cologne-Deutz. Peter Honnen is the author or a coauthor of numerous books about the regiolect, the dialects, isolated languages, and special languages, such as cants, in the Rhineland. He contributed to the development of the Rheinische Dokumenta in the early 1980s. That is a simple phonetic script based on the Latin alphabet, specially suited for documenting the languages spoken locally inside the villages, towns, and quarters of the big cities of a wide region of Western Germany from the German lower Rhine area in the North to the Southern Palatinate in the South, and about. He has taken part in various publications about dialects in the Rhineland as a consultant. He was a corroborator, or the sole author, of more than 80 dictionaries of some Rhinelandic dialect versus Standard German. He is the head editor, and project leader, responsible for the Cooperative Dictionary of the Rhinelandic Colloquial Language, that the institute is collecting evidence with to research and document the newest developing features of the Rhinelandic Regiolect from a broad crowd of volunteer sources.