Pre-boundary lengthening (PBL), the increase in duration of segments preceding a prosodic boundary, has been suggested to be a universal phenomenon that is implemented in language-specific ways. So far, research has focused on differences in the implementation of PBL across languages but never within languages. Simultaneously, PBL has mainly been investigated experimentally, while the need for analyzing speech corpora, not designed for studying PBL, rather than speech obtained in laboratory settings has been distinctly expressed. The present study investigates regional variation in PBL in German, viewing the implementation of PBL from a horizontal perspective, i.e. between different German dialects, and from a vertical perspective, i.e. between each dialect and Standard German. Data from a corpus designed to investigate segmental characteristics of German dialects, containing dialect-and standard-targeted speech, were analyzed for PBL. Results reveal differences in PBL from a horizontal and vertical perspective. The dialect data show regional variation in PBL while the standard-targeted data approach PBL-patterns such as observed for Standard German.