Wie viel grammatische Variation vertragen DaF-Lernende?

The contribution investigates the question as to what extent grammatical variation should be taken into account in the didactics of German as a foreign language. Relevant factors are foremost the frequency of the specific variation, its cognitive relevance, its acceptability in standard language, and its potential difficulty for foreign learners. On the basis of a corpus of ten didactic grammars, a large range of variational phenomena are discussed: on the word level are considered nominal gender, nominal plural, verbal subjunctive (Konjunktiv II), nominal and verbal inflectional classes; on the phrase level, prepositional government and position; on the clause level, various form of agreement, mainly between subject and predicate/predicative (number, gender, case). It has emerged that didactic grammars often ignore variation. But even if grammars devote attention to variation, they lack adequate explanations and the phenomena included often do not have didactic relevance. In sum, grammars describe variation as isolated cases constituting a factor of disturbance, and not as an intrinsic part of every language, a sociolinguistically complex system in constant diachronic transformation.