The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German (original) (raw)
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Journal of Linguistic Geography
This paper investigates German /l/-vocalization in the dialect region of South/Central Bavarian. In Austria, /l/-vocalization is said to be restricted to Central Bavarian, constituting the most salient dialect feature. However, its existence within the transition zone of South/Central Bavarian, including the urban and surrounding area of Graz, is often assumed. By analyzing natural speech data of different age groups from Greater Graz in a formal and an informal communication situation, we see that /l/-vocalization is already a well-established phenomenon, whereby the older age-group vocalizes considerably more often than the younger one. This suggests that /l/-vocalization serves as a sociolinguistic rather than a dialect marker indicating regional identity.
2019
Since the turn of the millennium, the emergence of so-called (multi-)ethnolects has been observed in different cities of German-speaking Switzerland. This way of speaking differs significantly from traditional Swiss German dialects. However, a sociophonetic investigation of these varieties is lacking for the time being. The present study provides an acoustic analysis of plosive voicing in two groups of Zurich German speakers. Traditional Swiss German dialects are reported to show a contrast between two categories of homorganic plosives (fortis vs. lenis) which is based on closure duration, but not on voicing. We compared the proportion of voicing in lenis plosives of 20 speakers with a multicultural and of 10 speakers with a monocultural background. Our results support the view that multicultural speakers of Zurich German do indeed use voiced lenis plosives as a sociophonetic marker, whereas monocultural speakers adhere to the traditional fortis-lenis pattern.
Typically, modern dialects show contact-induced rather than endogenous phonological change, i.e. a given dialect absorbs features of other varieties of the same language with which it is in contact, often replacing the dialect's own sounds. In most cases, this process is lexicalised, i.e. it proceeds word by word, although the entire sound structure of the variety may be affected in the end. One of the unresolved questions of research on phonological dialect change is the nature of the spread of these changes. In principle, they can be due to horizontal (neighbouring dialects) or vertical contact (the standard variety or other forms with a wider range influence the dialects in the area "below" it). This paper discusses some quantitative measures used to estimate the magnitude of the two alternative forms of the propagation of a change, and reports some findings for the traditional dialects of southwest Germany in the last century. On the basis of a large corpus of spontaneous speech, we present an aggregated analysis using statistical correlations and a mixed logistic regression model.
This paper deals with the question of how areas with different syntactic variability can be identified. It uses data from the Syntactic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SADS) which uses multiple informants in each survey location. As a starting point the well-known doubling construction with the verb aafange 'begin' is used to illustrate how the different regions differ with respect to inter-personal variation and how the different variants can be mapped in terms of predominance, i.e. to what extent they co-occur or compete with the other variants. As a quantitative measure, the intensity value of the dominant variant (i.e. the agreement rate between those informants providing the dominant variant as their variant) is used as the basis to create a so-called "variation index". This technique is applied to a larger set of SADS data, and the results are mapped onto the survey points indicating the syntactic variability for each location. To assess the validity of the method, several subgroups are created which turn out to correlate with the whole data set at a significant level. By performing a hot spot analysis, regional clusters of high/low syntactic variability can be identified.
Wiener Linguistische Gazette, 2020
Dass die Alemannischen Dialekte (ALM) die Vokalqualität des Schweizer- hochdeutschen (SHD) prägt, wurde bereits mehrmals untersucht. Hingegen liegen noch keine systematischen Studien über die dialektale Prägung der Vokal- und Konsonantenquantität im SHD vor. Diese Studie erforscht deshalb bei vier Dialekten, wie sich ALM auf die Länge der Vokale (V) und Konsonanten (K) in den jeweiligen SHD-Varietäten auswirkt. Segmentdaueranalysen zweisilbiger Wörter mit kurzen/langen V/K zeigten, dass (1) die vier Dialekte im Prinzip das gleiche V/K-Quantitätssystem aufweisen (trotz z.T. unterschiedlicher Verteilung der Vokalquantitäten bei bestimmten Wörtern) und dass dieses System auch im SHD angewendet wird. (2) Statistisch signifikante Dauerunterschiede in den regionalen SHD-Varietäten wurden nur bei Wörtern gefunden, bei denen ein phonologischer Quantitätsunterschied zwischen den ALM- und SHD-Äquivalenten vorliegt. Diese Unterschiede sind jedoch nicht dialektspezifisch, sondern können bei allen Dialekten mit diesen Quantitätsunterschieden vorkommen.
Regional Variation of /r/ in Swiss German Dialects
Interspeech 2018
German-speaking Europe is known to feature substantial regional variation in the articulation of /r/. According to historical surveys, this is particularly true for the most southwestern fringe of the region, i.e. German-speaking Switzerland. Large-scale, multilocality studies that show an updated picture of regional variation in this region are lacking, however. To this end, we coded /r/s of almost 3,000 speakers from 438 localities on a predominantly auditory basis, using data crowdsourced through a smartphone app. We report substantial regional variation, with uvular articulations especially dominant in the Northwest and the Northeast and alveolar-particularly tapped-articulations prevalent in the Midlands. We further provide exemplary evidence of an urban ([ʁ]) vs. rural stratification ([ɾ]) in the Northwest. This contribution further discusses (a) issues related to the coding of /r/, given the volatile articulatory and acoustic properties of /r/s and (b) the benefits and pitfalls of the crowdsourcing methodology applied more generally.
Dialectologia et Geolinguistica
German-speaking Switzerland can certainly be regarded as one of the liveliest and at the same time best researched dialect areas in Central Europe. It is all the more surprising that dialectometric analyses in this area have only recently been performed and none of them included an investigation into the level of syntax. In this paper we pursue two goals: First, we present digital data that has been made available in recent years on the basis of the
(2019) Reduction and persistence of phonological dialect features in German (Preprint)
Like in most European speech communities, the loss of rural dialects and the emergence of regional varieties could also be observed within the German speaking area since at least the 19 th century. Previous research on mechanisms influencing the selection process of dialect features was mainly carried out on a theoretical level. This paper aims at contributing an empirical component by presenting the results of a study with focus on selection mechanisms of phonological dialect features in southwest Germany. It will be argued that similarity to the standard, geographical spread, grammatical function and frequency are factors of major importance regarding the chance of survival of dialect features during their transition from rural dialects to regional standard contexts. Of the seven phonological phenomena analysed, in the end only one clearly remains: /s/-palatalisation. Interestingly, this feature does not necessarily possess positive social salience, but is apparently hard to abandon for speakers from the Southwest.
Journal of Linguistic Geography
Using data from a Swiss German dialect syntax survey, this study aims to explore, in a spatially differentiated manner, the correlation between dialectal variation and geographic distances. A linguistic distance was expressed by a measure aggregated from 60 survey questions. To operationalize the possibility of language contact, Euclidean distance, as well as travel times in 2000, 1950 and 1850 between survey sites were used. Going beyond previous work by others, we also explore the covariation of geographic and linguistic distances at the local level, focusing on spatial subsets and individual survey sites, thus being able to paint a more differentiated picture. With the diverse physical landscape of Switzerland making an impact on potential language contact, we find that travel times are a better predictor than Euclidean distance for the syntactic variation in Swiss German dialects. However, on the local scale the difference is not always significant, depending on prevalent topogr...