Vowel quality in four Alemannic dialects and its influence on the respective varieties of Swiss Standard German

Abstract

Despite being one of the official languages in Switzerland, the phonetic properties of Swiss Standard German (SSG) have been studied insufficiently. Regarding Alemannic (ALM) dialects, most of the available phonetic studies have dealt with consonants rather than vowels. To counteract this general lack of research, this study investigates the long-vowel inventories of four ALM dialects as well as their respective SSG varieties regarding vowel quality. The aim of the study is twofold: on the one hand, it provides the first comparative acoustic analysis of ALM and SSG vowels; on the other hand, it investigates to which extent interference from ALM dialects determines the vowel qualities of SSG varieties. To this end, four male and four female speakers from Bern, Chur, Brig, and Zurich were recorded producing each vowel three times, which resulted in a corpus of 1632 tokens. The results show that ALM vowel quality is basically transferred to the SSG varieties in two dialect regions: Chur and Brig. Instead, in the SSG varieties spoken in Bern and Zurich certain vowel qualities did not match the ALM ones, mostly for <a> that was fronted in the SSG variety of either dialect. Additionally, the Bern SSG <ä> was produced as both [┋ː] and [ӕː], while <o> was realised more in the back.

Investigating speaker individuality in the Swiss Standard German of four Alemannic dialect regions: Consonant quantity, vowel quality, and temporal variables

“…Region specificity of ALM and SSG vowel qualities as well as the way in which they interrelate were examined in Zihlmann's (2021) study. As for ALM, it was reported that GR high vowels tended to be pronounced less on the periphery compared to the other dialects.…”

“…Its realisation of /eː øː oː/ tended to be lower than elsewhere, while its /ɛː/, orthographically represented by <ä>, showed instances of being produced as either [eː], [ɛː], or [aeː] with much interspeaker variation observed. As the results are based on mean values per dialect region, it is unclear whether Zihlmann's (2021) insights are region-specific or speaker-specific, however.…”

“…By focusing on the phonetic level, this study explores speaker individuality in spoken SSG while keeping in mind the ALM dialect situation in Switzerland. The corpora used for the analysis consist of data collected for three previous studies that assessed dialect-specific ALM influences on SSG vowel and consonant quantity (Zihlmann, 2020a), SSG vowel quality (Zihlmann, 2021), and SSG temporal features (Zihlmann, 2020b). As in all studies intradialectal interspeaker variation had been observed, the current study will deal with speaker individuality in three features that showed statistically significant interdialectal differences.…”

Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German?

“…To do so, we analyze data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with 16 speakers from the city of Biel/Bienne that incorporated free conversation, two reading tasks, and a translation task (dialect to standard). In the analysis, we focus on the phoneticphonological variables /k/, /ç/, /aː/, and /ε-εː/, for which variation in spoken Swiss Standard German has already been amply demonstrated (e.g., Bülow, Büchler, Rawyler, Schneider, & Britain, 2021;Christen, Guntern, Hove, & Petkova, 2010;Hove, 2002;Siebenhaar, 1994;Zihlmann, 2021).…”