Ongoing Dispersion of Austrian Standard German Front Vowels: A Sociolinguistic Study (original) (raw)
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The reversal of the BÄREN/BEEREN merger in Austrian Standard German
2014
In language change, a reversal of a merger is generally considered to be impossible, since after two sounds have become fully merged, they are no longer distinct, so no phonetic or phonological cues exist that could reverse this process. This article investigates such an 'impossible' merger reversal: the split of the Bären vowel (orthographically represented by <ä> or <äh>) and the Beeren vowel (orthographically represented by , or in Austrian Standard German. We investigated a corpus of spoken data, measured the acoustic properties of the vowels, and determined the degree of the merger (by computing Pillai scores) for younger and older speakers. It turns out that the two sounds were formerly merged, but currently a split can be observed as an ongoing process. This paper argues that language contact with Standard German as it is spoken in Germany motivates the ongoing reversal. Since the Bären vowel is also subject to substantial variation in German Standard German, in order to get the split right, Austrian speakers are likely to invoke orthographical knowledge. We will consider the mental representations of this sound, including the graphemic representations from an Exemplar-theoretical viewpoint.
In the present study we compare the acoustic realizations of stressed and unstressed vowels in disyllabic words in nucleus position in Standard Austrian German (SAG) and Standard German German (SGG). Results show that there are significant differences in the degree of reduction of the unstressed vowel. In SGG, the unstressed vowels are reduced to a higher degree than in SAG. SAG unstressed vowels preserve a full vowel quality [ɛ]. Other acoustic cues analyzed in the present study (f0, duration and intensity) showed less significant differences between the two language varieties. However, SGG speakers tend to make use of intensity to cue stress, whereas SAG speakers prefer to cue stress by duration. Moreover, we could find a different distribution of f0-patterns. SAG speakers prefer to have lower f0-values on the stressed vowel than on the following unstressed vowel, whereas the reverse pattern can be observed in SGG, where speakers produce higher f0-values on the stressed than on the unstressed vowel. Additionally, we could observe gender-specific preferences in the deployment of acoustic parameters. Female speakers differentiate stressed and unstressed syllables to a higher degree by duration and intensity than male speakers.
Vowel change in English and German: a comparative analysis
2018
English and German descend from the same parent language: West-Germanic, from which other languages, such as Dutch, Afrikaans, Flemish, or Frisian come as well. These would, therefore, be called “sister” languages, since they share a number of features in syntax, morphology or phonology, among others. The history of English and German as sister languages dates back to the Late antiquity, when they were dialects of a Proto-West-Germanic language. After their split, more than 1,400 years ago, they developed their own language systems, which were almost identical at their earlier stages. However, this is not the case anymore, as can be seen in their current vowel systems: the German vowel system is composed of 23 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs, while that of English has only 12 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs. The present paper analyses how the English and German vowels have gradually changed over time in an attempt to understand the differences and similarities found in their current vow...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2017
The present study compares the acoustic realization of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German vowels by trilingual speakers in the Saterland. The Saterland is a rural municipality in northwestern Germany. It offers the unique opportunity to study trilingualism with languages that differ both by their vowel inventories and by external factors, such as their social status and the autonomy of their speech communities. The objective of the study was to examine whether the trilingual speakers differ in their acoustic realizations of vowel categories shared by the three languages and whether those differences can be interpreted as effects of either the differences in the vowel systems or of external factors. Monophthongs produced in a /hVt/ frame revealed that High German vowels show the most divergent realizations in terms of vowel duration and formant frequencies, whereas Saterland Frisian and Low German vowels show small differences. These findings suggest that vowels of different languages are likely to share the same phonological space when the speech communities largely overlap, as is the case with Saterland Frisian and Low German, but may resist convergence if at least one language is shared with a larger, monolingual speech community, as is the case with High German.
Cross-linguistic vowel variation in Saterland: Saterland Frisian, low German, and high German
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015
This study investigates the vowel space of trilingual speakers of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German. The three vowel systems show differences in the number of distinct categories but share the majority of vowel qualities. The speakers were instructed to read vowels of all three languages in a /hVt/ frame. We examine whether the dispersion and size of the vowel space as well as interlanguage variability of individual vowels correlate with the number of vowel categories. Additionally, systematic cross-linguistic differences were measured regarding duration and mid-vowel F1 and F2. High German monophthongs were found to be produced with longer and more variable duration. Moreover, High German monophthongs were produced with smaller F1 and larger F2 values than the respective Saterland Frisian and Low German categories. These results suggest that the subjects may use the same base-of-articulation for Saterland Frisian and Low German but not for High German.
Monolingual and trilingual production of Northern Standard German vowels
2016
Studies on vowel productions of speakers from bilingual communities report L1-L2 interactions but also monolinguallike realizations ([1], [2], [3]). Where the languages differed in communicative range and size of the speech community, monolingual-like productions of early bilinguals were found in the languages with the wider communicative range and larger speech community. We compare the acoustic realizations of Northern Standard German (NSG) vowels in monolingual speakers from Hanover, representing the larger speech community of Northern Germany, and in trilingual speakers from the Saterland, speaking the local variant of High German, Low German, and Saterland Frisian. To examine whether the NSG vowels of the Saterland speakers approached the vowels of the monolingual speakers in terms of spectral and durational features, we elicited all stressed NSG monophthongs in /hVt/ context. Our data show an orientation towards the larger speech community of Northern Germany in the production...
Language Variation and Language Change Across the Lifespan: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives from Panel Studies, In: K. V. Beaman and I. Buchstaller (eds.), 2021
This chapter explores the extent to which phonetic environment, lexical frequency, and social factors interact and incite or impede sound change over the lifespan of the individual. The corpus consists of sociolinguistic interviews with 20 panel speakers of Swabian, an Alemannic dialect spoken in southwestern Germany, from two different communities, Stuttgart and Schwäbisch Gmünd, first recorded in 1982 and again in 2017. We investigate the modern standard German diphthong [ai] which evolved from two different Middle High German (MHG) phonemes, /i:/ and /ei/. We use generalised additive mixed-effect models to investigate to what extent F1/F2 trajectories in the vowel space differ in lemmata originating from the two MHG phonemes based on the Total Euclidean Distance Squared (TEDS). In addition to voicing effects, we find that an interaction between community, lexical frequency, and indexicalities of Swabian identity affects the degree to which the two diphthongs are merging, or at le...
Selected Problems in Germanic Phonology: Production and Perception in Sound Change
2018
Author(s): Estes, George Alexander | Advisor(s): Rauch, Irmengard | Abstract: This dissertation investigates three sound changes in the early history of Germanic with an approach grounded in phonetics. Historical phonology has traditionally focused on the articulatory aspects of change (e.g., Hoenigswald 1960; King 1969). However, more recent work in phonetics on sound change has emphasized the acoustic and auditory aspects of sound change, alongside the articulatory (e.g., Beddor 2009; Blevins 2004; Ohala 1981). The present work has two goals: first, to advance the state of research on the sound changes in question; and second, to show how the findings of modern laboratory phonetics can complement the study of historical phonology.In Chapter 2, I review past approaches to sound change, as well as more recent work in phonetics. In Chapter 3, I consider OHG i-umlaut, a longstanding problem in the field. Although umlaut-type changes are common in Germanic, and other types of vowel har...