Variation is now taken seriously in almost all linguistic sub-disciplines and studied as a phenomenon in its own right; this is only true to a limited extent in graphemics. In particular, there are hardly any relevant studies available on written Standard German. Yet graphemic variation is particularly important for practical reasons as well, as it should form the basis for the formulation of the standard. This project systematically investigates graphemic variation using a corpus of A-level examination papers from the last 90 years. This text type has three advantages: Firstly, the authors are highly educated, fully-fledged writers who – at least within an institutional context – are unlikely to receive any further training in orthography. Secondly, the influence of writing aids can be controlled in this text type. In contrast, texts written on a computer are potentially corrected by word-processing programmes, in some cases even automatically; texts that are published are potentially edited by final editors or proofreaders. Thirdly, A-level examination papers have been produced under very similar conditions for decades. A total of 1,397 A-level examination papers have already been compiled; these are now being digitised, processed and annotated morphologically and syntactically.

The project has three main objectives:

• Firstly, the aim is to record synchronous graphemic variation. The result will be an overview of the areas in which variation occurs and the extent to which it is evident.
• Secondly, the diachronic development of this variation is to be described.
• Thirdly, the aim is to create a corpus that can be used to address these objectives and which is versatile for further research. A secondary objective is to investigate the relationship between variation in usage and the prevailing standard.