Is "nach dem Osten" always incorrect (or "regional")?

Question

In the Duden article "nach", we read:

Bedeutungen, Beispiele und Wendungen

1c. zu … hin, in

Grammatik: räumlich

Gebrauch: landschaftlich

Beispiele

• nach dem (in den) Süden fahren
• nach (zur) Oma gehen

Does it mean that "nach dem Osten" is always incorrect, or at least "landschaftlich"? I ask this question because "nach dem Osten" is in many (apparently serious) books available on Google books. Perhaps it was correct some decades ago?

Edit: As I thought, "landschaftlich" means "regional". It seems to me that a "landschaftlich" use is somewhat less correct than an universal use. In a State document, for example, one shouldn't expect a word used in a regional meaning. That's the reason of my question.

Edit: To make my question clearer : according to Duden, "nach dem Osten" is "landschaftlich" when used in the meaning of "in den Osten". But perhaps there are cases when "nach dem Osten" is used in another sense than "in den Osten". If I'm not wrong, "nach Osten" doesn't have exactly the same meaning as "in den Osten". Thus "nach Osten" is not regional (correct me if I am wrong). So I wonder if "nach dem Osten" can be used exactly in the same meaning as "nach Osten", and thus (in this hypothesis) whithout regionalism. For example, I presume that the famous expression "Drang nach Osten" is not a regionalism. But we also encounter "Drang nach dem Osten" : is that a regionalism ?

Answer 1

A »Landschaft« is a "landscape" or a "scenery", but it also can mean "region" or "territory".

So the derived adjective »landschaftlich« in most contexts means "scenic", but when used in dictionaries it means "regional". And this again means, that this word or phrase is common (and correct) in some regions, while it is less often used (and therefore considered to be incorrect) in other regions.

This means:

A sentence like

Jürgen geht nach seiner Oma.

will be spoken by native speakers in some regions, and in this region this is considered to be correct, because everybody understands this sentence, and because everybody in this area uses this construction.

But in other regions people will tell you, that this sentence is grammatically wrong. They will tell you, that

Jürgen geht zu seiner Oma.

is the only correct possibility to describe this action. And they are right in their region. In their region nobody uses this construction, and so no one has heard this construction before, and because this construction is not a member of the set of common grammatical constructions, it is considered to be wrong.

What should you learn from this?

When you travel through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, South-Tyrol (in Italy), Belgium and Luxembourg, you will enter larger or smaller regions where people speak German in a little different way than elsewhere. What you hear there can be a dialect, colloquial speech or the regional version of standard German. This classification is very often unclear. But you can assume, that printed texts (for example in newspapers) that are not made for artistic purposes (like poems or lyrics of songs) are always written in standard German. So, when you find a phrase frequently used in a communal newspaper, then you can consider, that it is correct, at least in the region where this newspaper is available. And this allows you, to use this phrase in this region too, because it is absolutely correct there.

But when you plan to publish something, that will be read in the complete German language area, then you should use only phrases and constructions, that are well known and in daily use everywhere. In this case you should avoid anything that is marked as landschaftlich in a dictionary.

Answer 2

Contrary to our beloved book of reference in (nearly) all matters life, the Duden, I would not classify

nach dem Osten ziehen (or whereever)

as a landschaftlich expression. First, the idea of Landschaften where people maintain peculiarities of language is on the decline as, first, people have gotten more mobile, and second, even those who keep sitting in their places of birth or childhood are more often than not connected to a nation-wide or even global stream of communication, so that those landschaftlich Elements are fading away.

Rather I would classify nach dem Süden ziehen (or whereever) as being part of certain registers of language, especially

• poetry

• old-style / historic / retro

• humouristic purposes

That means: you can use this expression today, but you should know where.

In everyday communication, business communication, science and research, media communication etc. it would be unusual or even involuntarily funny.

Other than with compass directions, expressions such as

nach Oma gehen [Standard: zu or zur]

nach Aldi gehen [Standard: zu or zum]

are rather markers of certain social milieus (usually on the lower end of formal education achievements), although here indeed it is possible that there are still some landschaftlich spots on the map where this may be regular, unmarked use in everyday communication. But you should avoid it, unless you really know what you do - and where.