Cross-linguistic vowel variation in trilingual speakers of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German

Abstract

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.

Using Mahalanobis Distances to Investigate Second Dialect Acquisition: A Study on Quebec French

“…Other parameters could have been utilized, in particular formant dynamics, given that phonetic diphthongization is common in some contexts in Quebec French as mentioned above ( Dumas, 1974 , 1987 ; Leblanc, 2012 ; Riverin-Coutlée & Roy, 2020 ; Santerre & Millo, 1978 ; Walker, 1984 ; etc. ), and also that formant dynamics may contribute to maintaining contrasts in crowded vowel spaces ( Peters et al, 2017 ; see also Nearey & Assmann, 1986 ). This is a limitation to our study that could launch future work with tremendous potential.…”

Operation LiLi: Using Crowd-Sourced Data and Automatic Alignment to Investigate the Phonetics and Phonology of Less-Resourced Languages

“…Several studies therefore propose to tackle this question by investigating a limited number of languages, with contradictory outcomes. On the one hand, a study on American English, Greek and German (Jongman et al 1989), another study on French and two dialects of Arabic Al-Tamimi and Ferragne ( 2005), a third one on three German languages (Peters et al 2017) and a fourth one on Quebec French and Inuktitut (Larouche and Steffann 2018) provide support in favor of the ISH. On the other hand, studies on English and Spanish (Bradlow 1995), on English, Spanish and French (Meunier et al 2003), on five dialects of Catalan (Recasens and Espinosa 2009), on five dialects of Chinese (Lee 2012) and on three German languages (Heeringa et al 2015) do not provide evidence in favor of the ISH, which can however be due, for the last three at least, to the genetic and typological closeness of the languages under survey and probable diglossy of the speakers tested.…”