The aim of this study was to investigate vowel and consonant quantity in Finnish, a typical quantity language, and to set up a reference corpus for a large-scale project studying the diachronic development of quantity contrasts in German varieties. Although German is not considered a quantity language, both tense and lax vowels and voiced and voiceless stops are differentiated by vowel and closure duration, respectively. The role of these cues, however, has undergone different diachronic changes in various German varieties. To understand the conditions for such prosodic changes, the present study investigates the stability of quantity relations in an undisputed quantity language. To this end, recordings of words differing in vowel and stop length were obtained from seven older and six younger L1 Finnish speakers, both in a normal and a loud voice. We then measured vowel and stop duration and calculated the vowel to vowel-plus-consonant ratio (a measure known to differentiate German VC sequences) as well as the geminate-to-singleton ratio. Results show stability across age groups but variability across speech styles. Moreover, VC ratios were similar for Finnish and Bavarian German speakers. We discuss our findings against the background of a typology of vowel and consonant quantity.
This study investigated a sound change in progress by which the Central Bavarian dialect feature of complementary length between consonant and the preceding vowel is giving way to the unrestricted combination possibility of long (Vː) and short (V) vowels with following longer fortis (Cː) and shorter lenis (C) stops, respectively. This 2 × 2 system is also found in the standard variety of German. While previous studies have regarded any such findings of convergence toward Standard German as being a result of language contact, the present study specifically tested the possibility of fast-speech-induced hypoarticulation being a system-internal driver of this change. The focus of this study was on acoustic cues to the postvocalic stop. Following the apparent-time paradigm, acoustic analyses of 10 younger and 10 older dialect speakers revealed that (1) younger dialect speakers produced both VC and VːCː (both formerly illegal in the dialect), but (2) older dialect speakers produced only VːCː sequences with duration patterns similar to those of the control group of 10 Standard German speakers. Analyses of various dependent variables further showed (3) the (apparently) delayed emergence of aspiration as an additional cue to the fortis–lenis contrast in Western Central Bavarian particularly in younger dialect speakers, (4) no considerable effect of speech rate on the dispersion of and overlap between any of the four vowel-plus-stop combinations, and (5) the irregular spread of this change that appears to be gradual. As such, the findings support a model of linguistic change that also accounts for gradual changes in dialect borrowing.
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