Kiezdeutsch is a variety of German spoken primarily by youth in urban spaces in which a high percentage of the population is multilingual and has an immigration background.

[6] Heike Wiese argues that Kiezdeutsch should be considered a "new dialect" due to its use amongst youth of various ethnic groups in urban areas with high proportions of immigrants.

[7] This has been critiqued by Germanist Helmut Glück, who argues that a dialect always refers to a historically rooted way of speaking characteristic of a particular region (rather than with a particular ethnic and age groups).

He draws comparisons to Ruhrdeutsch, influenced by Polish immigration, and claims Kiezdeutsch is similarly most appropriately labelled a sociolect.

Instead, among its speakers, Kiezdeutsch is a single piece of a large spoken repertoire that also includes formal manners of speaking such as Standard German.

[10] One of the most prominent features of Kiezdeutsch is the use of shortened nominal phrases (without articles or prepositions) as place and time markers:[11] "Gehst du heute auch Viktoriapark?"

However, a similar phenomenon occurs in standard German in informal spoken contexts (for instance, in the region of Berlin shortened nominal phrases are regularly used to designate public transit stops).

[12] Functional words and inflectional endings, particular those that can be inferred, are often shortened or dropped:[13] "Ich habe eine Blase am Fuß.

(emphasizing "aus Schöneberg")[7] "Die hübschesten Frauen kommen von den Schweden, also ich mein, so blond so."

Sociolinguistic themes such as group-specifics, identity construction, and media stylization are addressed in Inken Keim's study of the speaking patterns of a bilingual German-Turkish group of girls in Mannheim,[16] Heike Weise's essays on the construction of social groups,[10] and the work of Peter Auer,[17] Jannis Androutsopoulos,[2] and Helga Kotthoff[18] on the adoption of Kiezdeutsch amongst monolingual speakers and its medial transformation.

[20] In the area of application, there are multiple studies on Kiezdeutsch use in schools, particularly suggestions for integrating it into German language instruction.

[22] Syntactic studies are often concerned with the third-position placement of verbs in imperative sentences as well as shortened nominal and prepositional phrases.

The corpus, which is freely accessible and online, is based in part on audio recordings of youth in a multiethnic neighborhood (Berlin-Kreuzberg) amongst their friend circle during their free time.