The Brit who dares to pen the definitive dictionary of Bavarian dialects
Tall, bespectacled Professor Doctor Anthony Rowley has the patient, slightly weary air of someone who has had to answer the same question over and over again, and yet his position is undoubtedly unique—at least to outsiders. It is just too tempting not to enquire how a born and bred Yorkshireman came to be writing the definitive dictionary of Bavarian dialects. There is nothing, apparently, in Rowley’s background, which could have predisposed him for this unusual task. Born in Skipton, a small town in North Yorkshire, England, Rowley attended the local grammar school and nurtured a passion for trains in his early teens. After studying German and Linguistics at Reading University near London, Rowley came to Germany, first spending time in Regensburg, where he met his wife, then moving on to Bayreuth to complete his doctorate. By this time he was firmly entrenched in the world of dialects. His dissertation was on the tiny German-speaking enclave of Fersental in Italy, three villages whose inhabitants still speak an ancient form of German. Rowley has, as he puts it rather dryly, “remained partial” to the language spoken in Fersental and is currently working on a grammar and school dictionary of the dialect. The genial professor began his job compiling Bavarian dialects at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1988, and with the help of three (Bavarian) research assistants has now arrived at the letter B. While this may seem like slow progress, Rowley points out that gathering and sorting the information is an enormous task, and, anyway, the project is long term and the date set for completion is 2060! “I’m not sure I’d want to finish it,” he says, grinning mischievously. Rowley also brushes off any suggestion that a Bavarian could be doing the job more quickly. “My predecessor was local and hadn’t made much progress when I took over the job.” In fact, being an outsider seems to be a prerequisite in the world of language research: a few doors along from Professor Rowley’s office at the Akademie, a dictionary of Tibetan is being compiled by a German editor. The walls of Anthony Rowley’s office are lined with somber-looking black boxes of index cards and books, every surface is overflowing with paper and on the wall beside his desk hangs a large oil painting of J. A. Schmeller, who wrote a similar lexicon in the 19th century, but Rowley’s approach to his work is not that of a stuffy academic. “What I like best is to go out and do field work, when we actually have the chance to talk to people and ask questions about their dialect.” Then he adds, in a characteristically self-deprecating manner, “I do have the typical linguist’s problem though. I’m always listening to how people say something and not to what they’re actually saying.” The dictionary, which is being published annually as it progresses—each volume is about 100 pages in length—not only covers dialects but includes interesting aspects of local folklore, such as games or farming implements that have been lost or forgotten. This encyclopedic approach sometimes produces interesting cross-cultural references. Unfortunately when Rowley’s two teenage daughters pointed out that the second of the Harry Potter books, The Chamber of Secrets, features the basilisk, a creature of fable which is also part of Bavarian mythology, their discovery was too late to be included in the dictionary. Rowley, who commutes to his office on Marstallplatz everyday from Augsburg, seems to have found his niche here in Bavaria and says he has no plans to go home in the near future. “I’m too expensive for them anyway,” says the professor, referring to the meager pay awarded to many academics in Britain. So, for the next few years at least, visitors to the Akademie can expect to find this amiable Brit working away in his office on the second floor. Asked if he has found any favorite words or expressions in his research so far, Rowley concedes a predilection for “nasty little prepositions” before adding, with a twinkle in his eye, that “the word ‘Arsch’ doesn’t have many meanings but there are so many turns of phrase which include the word that it takes up two pages in the dictionary!”