Pragmatic Variation in Greeting and Farewell Formulae in Rural Austria

Abstract

Greeting and farewell formulae are highly conventionalized routines that index social relations, regional norms and situational formality. This paper investigates pragmatic variation in greetings and farewells in rural Austria, focusing on age, region, setting and prosodic design. We analyze greeting and farewell formulae and metalinguistic comments produced by 152 adults from 13 rural locations across two project phases. The dataset combines spontaneous interactions with controlled elicitations in two greeting experiments contrasting a formal urban service encounter and an informal local dialect encounter. In spontaneous greetings, the supraregional call formula hallo predominates and is significantly rarer among older speakers. Across age groups, participants strongly preferred grüß Gott in the formal urban store scenario and griaß di in the informal local bakery scenario. Pronominal address is largely avoided, with T forms restricted mainly to western locations and familiar contexts. Prosodically, participants use [ˈhalo] and [haˈloː] at similar rates, whereas interviewers strongly favor the marked variant [haˈloː], suggesting different interactional roles in greeting management. Older speakers produce significantly more metalinguistic comments, revealing a mismatch between politeness ideologies and recorded practice. Overall, the findings reveal age-graded and context-dependent patterns of pragmatic variation in rural Austria.