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20. „Deutsch heute“ und der Atlas zur Aussprache des deutschen Gebrauchsstandards
... This tendency toward a merger of the two vowels depends on several factors. The most important factor is the regional origin of the speaker: we know that /ɛː/ is (largely) replaced by /eː/ in northern Germany (e.g., Ramers, 1988;Kohler, 1995;Ternes, 1999; for empirical studies, see König, 1989;Kleiner, 2011;Elmentaler and Rosenberg, 2015). In one study, only minor acoustic differences between the two vowels were found, which can be attributed to the fact that most speakers investigated in this study were from northern Germany (Simpson, 1998). ...
... Most other acoustic analyses show differences in the pronunciation of the two vowels for speakers from different regions in Germany (Sendlmeier and Seebode, 2006;Schoormann et al., 2019;Predeck et al., 2021). Results from the acoustic analysis of the corpus German Today (Kleiner, 2011(Kleiner, , 2015 exhibit the tendency toward a merger in northern and eastern Germany as well as in Austria, while the south-west of Germany and Switzerland maintain a distinction (see Frank, in preparation). Critically, we find variation in each region, thus no region exhibits a complete merger in production. ...
... The second factor is the degree of formality in a speech situation, that is, the vowels are distinguished more clearly in formal speech (Stearns and Voge, 1979;König, 1989;Kleiner, 2011). Elmentaler and Rosenberg (2015), however, found no significant differences between reading pronunciation, interviews, and informal conversations among family and friends in northern Germany. ...
A person’s first language (L1) affects the way they acquire speech in a second language (L2). However, we know relatively little about the role different varieties of the L1 play in the acquisition of L2 speech. This study focuses on German (L1) learners of English (L2) and asks whether the degree to which German speakers distinguish between the two vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in their L1 has an impact on how well these individuals identify /æ/ and discriminate between the two English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/. These two English vowels differ in both vowel quality and duration (/æ/ is longer than /ɛ/). We report on an identification and a discrimination experiment. In the first study, participants heard a sound file and were asked to indicate whether they heard “pen” or “pan” (or “pedal” or “paddle”). The stimuli differed from each other in terms of both vowel quality (11 steps on a spectral continuum from an extreme /æ/ to an extreme /ɛ/) and duration (short, middle, long). In the second study, participants had to signal whether two sound files they were exposed to differed from each other. We modeled the percentage of /æ/ (“pan,” “paddle”) selection (identification task only, binomial logistic regression), accuracy (discrimination task only, binomial logistic regression), and reaction time (identification and discrimination tasks, linear mixed effects models) by implementing the German Pillai score as a measure of vowel overlap in our analysis. Each participant has an individual Pillai score, which ranges from 0 (= merger of L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) to 1 (=maintenance of the contrast between L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) and had been established, prior to the perception experiments reported here, in a production study. Although the findings from the discrimination study remain inconclusive, the results from the identification test support the hypothesis that maintaining the vowel contrast in the L1 German leads to a more native-like identification of /æ/ in L2 English. We conclude that sociolinguistic variation in someone’s L1 can affect L2 acquisition.
... This comparison makes it evident that there is variation in the geometry of the vowel space as well as in the size of the vowel space. It also suggests that there is regional variation in Standard-intended German speech -that is, Standard German as performed regionally [4,7,8]. Moreover, the analyses [5,11,12,14,15] document stylistic differences and [18] shows that speech rate affects articulation accuracy in many ways. ...
... The data are part of the "Deutsch heute" corpus from the Institute for German Language (IDS) [1,7]. For this study the Aesop fable The North Wind and the Sun was used as reading material. ...
... Therefore, we only measure the vowel space for long vowels in the area between /iː/, /eː/, /aː/, and /oː/, marked in Fig. 2 in grey. The exclusion of /ɛː/ is not of great concern for this analysis, since there is a tendency for /ɛː/ and /eː/ to merge as /eː/ in the north of the German-speaking area and in Austria [7]. If /ɛː/ were taken into account, the vowel spaces would no longer be directly comparable. ...
Acceleration of speech rate is often said to be correlated with a reduction of the vowel space. However, a monocausal explanation of the vowel space reduction by speech rate is surely too simplistic. With our regionally balanced database of a German text read in two reading tempi we present geolinguistic maps of • the different sizes of the vowel space and • different changes of the sizes of the vowel space when comparing normal and accelerated speech rates. These maps for the normal reading tempo show regional patterns of vowel space sizes for the long and short vowel system. Accelerating speech rate affects the vowel space size in regionally specific patterns. In addition, increasing reading tempo shows a surprising general effect: initially large vocal spaces are reduced while initially small vocal spaces are enlarged. Interestingly, vowel space size and change due to accelerating reading tempo does only limitedly reflect traditional dialect regions.
... The realization of the long vowel -ä-in stressed syllables as [e:] or [E:], 4 and the realization of the word ending -ig as [Iç] or [Ik], vary regionally, occurring roughly in the North and South of the German-speaking region of Europe, respectively (Kleiner, 2011). 5 The Standard German variants of each pair are [E:] (predominant in the South) and [Iç] (predominant in the North; cf. ...
... This contrast also occurs word-initially, but we only take word-medial occurrences into account in this study. 5 Note that for Austria [e:] is more common in the East, whereas [E:] is typically encountered in the West(Dudenredaktion, 2015;Kleiner, 2011). ...
Phonetic accommodation refers to the phenomenon that interlocutors adapt their way of speaking to each other within an interaction. This can have a positive influence on the communication quality. As we increasingly use spoken language to interact with computers these days, the phenomenon of phonetic accommodation is also investigated in the context of human-computer interaction: on the one hand, to find out whether speakers adapt to a computer agent in a similar way as they do to a human interlocutor, on the other hand, to implement accommodation behavior in spoken dialog systems and explore how this affects their users. To date, the focus has been mainly on the global acoustic-prosodic level. The present work demonstrates that speakers interacting with a computer agent also identify locally anchored phonetic phenomena such as segmental allophonic variation and local prosodic features as accommodation targets and converge on them. To this end, we conducted two experiments. First, we applied the shadowing method, where the participants repeated short sentences from natural and synthetic model speakers. In the second experiment, we used the Wizard-of-Oz method, in which an intelligent spoken dialog system is simulated, to enable a dynamic exchange between the participants and a computer agent — the virtual language learning tutor Mirabella. The target language of our experiments was German. Phonetic convergence occurred in both experiments when natural voices were used as well as when synthetic voices were used as stimuli. Moreover, both native and non-native speakers of the target language converged to Mirabella. Thus, accommodation could be relevant, for example, in the context of computer-assisted language learning. Individual variation in accommodation behavior can be attributed in part to speaker-specific characteristics, one of which is assumed to be the personality structure. We included the Big Five personality traits as well as the concept of mental boundaries in the analysis of our data. Different personality traits influenced accommodation to different types of phonetic features. Mental boundaries have not been studied before in the context of phonetic accommodation. We created a validated German adaptation of a questionnaire that assesses the strength of mental boundaries. The latter can be used in future studies involving mental boundaries in native speakers of German.
... Pferd > ferd, Pfeffer > feffa. Kleiner (2011ff.) rechnet diesen Prozess "zu den bekanntesten Variationsphänomenen im deutschen Gebrauchsstandard". ...
... en von Vokal-und Konsonantenqualitäten, Rhythmus, Akzent und Sprechgeschwindigkeit etc.Der "Atlas zur Aussprache des deutschen Gebrauchsstandards (AADG)", der seit 2011 laufend erweitert wird, zeigt sehr anschaulich, dass es nicht nur im Dialekt-Standard-Kontinuum regionale Variation gibt, sondern auch im Bereich der Standardaussprache selbst (vgl.Kleiner, 2011ff. bzw. http:// prowiki.ids-mannheim.de/bin/view/AADG/WebHome). 17 Basis für den Online-Atlas ist das Datenkorpus "Deutsch Heute", das auch die Grundlage für den neuen Ausspracheduden(Kleiner, Knöbl & Mangold, 2015) darstellt. Es handelt sich also nicht um die Festlegung eines idealtypischen Standards, an dem die Sprecher_innen dann gemes ...
„Die ist aber lütt!“… „Untermerzbach ist, wo die Hasen Hosn und die Hosen Huesn heßn.“… Äußerungen wie diese, bei denen manche Sprecher_innen des Deutschen zweimal hinhören müssen, bringen Deutschlernende in verschiedenen Lebenskontexten, vor allem in der Schule, in Schwierigkeiten. Hier setzt dieser Materialband an und schärft mithilfe von empirischen Beispielen und eigens formulierten Leitfragen und Unterrichtsprinzipien das Bewusstsein von Lehrenden und Lehramtsstudierenden für die Vielfalt der sprachlichen Variation im Deutschen.
Vorgestellt werden linguistische Grundkonzepte und Begriffe, Phänomene und Unterrichtsbeispiele sowie die damit verbundenen Herausforderungen; auch die Variation, die durch den Kontakt zu Migrationssprachen entsteht, wird berücksichtigt. Fragen von Zugehörigkeit runden die Perspektiven des Materialbands ab: Wer wird mit welchem Sprachgebrauch ausgeschlossen oder einbezogen?
Der Band bietet Lehrenden aller Unterrichtsfächer in nahezu allen Bildungsinstitutionen von der Elementarstufe bis zum tertiären Bereich nützliche Hinweise für die Gestaltung der Unterrichtskommunikation und die Vermittlung des Deutschen unter Berücksichtigung der Variation des Deutschen, auch im Sinne der „Durchgängigen Sprachbildung“.
... The realization of the long vowel ⟨-ä-⟩ in stressed syllables as [e:] or [E:], 3 and the realization of the word ending ⟨-ig⟩ as [Iç] or [Ik], vary regionally, occurring roughly in the North and South of the Germanspeaking region of Europe, respectively (Kleiner, 2011). 4 The Standard German variants of each pair are [E:] (predominant in the South) and ...
... This contrast also occurs word-initially, but we only take word-medial occurrences into account in this study.4 Note that for Austria [e:] is more common in the East, whereas [E:] is typically encountered in the West (Dudenredaktion, 2015;Kleiner, 2011). ...
The present study investigates whether native speakers of German phonetically accommodate to natural and synthetic voices in a shadowing experiment. We aim to determine whether this phenomenon, which is frequently found in HHI, also occurs in HCI involving synthetic speech. The examined features pertain to different phonetic domains: allophonic variation, schwa epenthesis, realization of pitch accents, word-based temporal structure and distribution of spectral energy. On the individual level, we found that the participants converged to varying subsets of the examined features, while they maintained their baseline behavior in other cases or, in rare instances, even diverged from the model voices. This shows that accommodation with respect to one particular feature may not predict the behavior with respect to another feature. On the group level, the participants of the natural condition converged to all features under examination, however very subtly so for schwa epenthesis. The synthetic voices, while partly reducing the strength of effects found for the natural voices, triggered accommodating behavior as well. The predominant pattern for all voice types was convergence during the interaction followed by divergence after the interaction.
... Additional corpus resources hosted by the Archiv für gesprochenes Deutsch include the Deutsch heute ('German today') Corpus, a large resource comprising transcribed recordings made from 2006 to 2009 of mainly young people from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tirol, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein (Kleiner, 2015), and the FOLK corpus (Forschungs-und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, 'Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German', Schmidt, 2014b), which contains transcripts and audio or video of 400 naturalistic speech events from a total of 1,294 speakers, recorded in a variety of contexts in the years 2003-2021. Transcripts have been manually prepared according to the conventions of Conversation Analysis, both in dialect and standard orthography, and metadata include information about speakers, interaction context, and location. ...
This report describes the Corpus of German Speech (CoGS), a 56-million-word corpus of automatic speech recognition transcripts from YouTube channels of local government entities in Germany. Transcripts have been annotated with latitude and longitude coordinates, making the resource potentially useful for geospatial analyses of lexical, morpho-syntactic, and pragmatic variation; this is exemplified with an exploratory geospatial analysis of grammatical variation in the encoding of past temporal reference. Additional corpus metadata include video identifiers and timestamps on individual word tokens, making it possible to search for specific discourse content or utterance sequences in the corpus and download the underlying video and audio from the web, using open-source tools. The discourse content of the transcripts in CoGS touches upon a wide range of topics, making the resource potentially interesting as a data source for research in digital humanities and social science. The report also briefly discusses the permissibility of reuse of data sourced from German municipalities for corpus-building purposes in the context of EU, German, and American law, which clearly authorize such a use case.
... As far as phonetic/phonological differences between Austria and 133 Germany are concerned, previous research has highlighted the language usage of young speakers with 134 a higher level of education. The most comprehensive documentation of the "usage standards" of this 135 group of speakers to date is the "Deutsch heute" ("German today") corpus of the Institute for the 136 German Language (Kleiner 2015). Transcriptions and instrumental-acoustic analyses of selected 137 sound phenomena based on this corpus are published in the "Atlas zur Aussprache des deutschen 138 Gebrauchsstandards" (AADG, "Atlas on the pronunciation of everyday Standard German" see Kleiner 2012. ...
This article focuses on the perception of standard varieties produced by Austrian and German TV newscasters from the perspective of listeners from both countries, Germany and Austria. Thus, the paper's sociolinguistic scope is located in the pluricentric realm. It assesses (the perception of) standard language variation on fine phonetic levels. In addition to naturally produced stimuli (read sentences), “intermediate” samples were generated by means of a two-step interpolation procedure: First, the symbolic phone sequences were aligned with a Levenshtein-distance algorithm. Second, a phone-level Dynamic-Time-Warping (DTW) algorithm was applied to align the two utterances on a frame level, taking phoneme boundaries into account. Additionally, the spectrum and the fundamental frequency (F0) contour of the utterances was manipulated to be either interpolated or fixed to a given speaker. This procedure allowed for assessing these features’ contribution to listeners’ judgments of whether a given utterance sounds as if spoken by a speaker from (rather) Germany or (rather) Austria. Results of the judgment task showed that the interpolated samples were perceived in a continuous fashion, similarly by both groups, and with overall greater reliance on spectral than F0 information. These findings suggest that even fine phonetic differences between Standard German from Germany and Austria are recognized and evaluated by listeners from both countries. An overall bias towards perceiving all speech samples as closer to the listeners’ own national standard points to a factor of familiarity with one's own and uncertainty towards the ‘foreign’ standard. The similar degree of this bias indicates that both groups have similar levels of familiarity with their own and uncertainty about the other standard variety.
... In the minimal pair elicitation context, the vowels tend to be more distinct than in other contexts [seeFigure C].MethodsSPEAKERS• 828 speakers of Standard German, two generations, corpus Deutsch heute / German Today(Kleiner, 2015) PROCEDURE • Reading of a wordlist, analyzed so far:• /εː/: 23 words for the older generation, 15 words for the younger generation • /eː/: 13 words for both generations Pillai score (green = merged, red = distinct) mapped for all speakers ...
... The individual realizations of h-ä-i and h-igi are auditorily categorized as [eː] Kleiner, 2011). 5 However, Kiesewalter (2019) has shown that the respective non-standard forms are perceived as subjectively corresponding to the standard (for [eː]; predominant in the North and Eastern Austria) or only slightly dialectal (for [ɪk]; predominant in the South) by native listeners of German. ...
We present a Wizard-of-Oz experiment examining phonetic accommodation of human interlocutors in the context of human-computer interaction. Forty-two native speakers of German engaged in dynamic spoken interaction with a simulated virtual tutor for learning the German language called Mirabella. Mirabella was controlled by the experimenter and used either natural or hidden Markov model-based synthetic speech to communicate with the participants. In the course of four tasks, the participants’ accommodating behavior with respect to wh-question realization and allophonic variation in German was tested. The participants converged to Mirabella with respect to modified wh-question intonation, i.e., rising F0 contour and nuclear pitch accent on the interrogative pronoun, and the allophonic contrast [ɪç] vs. [ɪk] occurring in the word ending 〈-ig〉. They did not accommodate to the allophonic contrast [ɛː] vs. [eː] as a realization of the long vowel 〈-ä-〉. The results did not differ between the experimental groups that communicated with either the natural or the synthetic speech version of Mirabella. Testing the influence of the “Big Five” personality traits on the accommodating behavior revealed a tendency for neuroticism to influence the convergence of question intonation. On the level of individual speakers, we found considerable variation with respect to the degree and direction of accommodation. We conclude that phonetic accommodation on the level of local prosody and segmental pronunciation occurs in users of spoken dialog systems, which could be exploited in the context of computer-assisted language learning.
... Local and regional dialects were not included in the investigation. Results are successively published as linguistic maps in the Atlas zur Aussprache des deutschen Gebrauchsstandards (Kleiner, 2011ff.). 2. In the project Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland ('Language variation in northern Germany'), at 36 locations in northern Germany 144 women representing three generations were recorded in different situations. ...
The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the ‘dialect-standard’ landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociolinguistic histories, as well as on previously unexplored sociolinguistic situations. The contributions all share the twin characteristics of (a) robust scrutiny of structural variation and its links to both structural-systemic parameters and extralinguistic variables and (b) nuanced approaches to macro- and micro- level categories, with the requisite theoretical and methodological fine-tuning. While focusing on different languages/language groups, the papers in this volume share the common foci of bringing together structural and sociolinguistic considerations and of the concomitant necessary revisiting of methodologies. The data and analyses presented yield a firmer and more nuanced understanding of the dynamic permutations of cross-dialectal and dialect-to-standard convergence and the formation of intermediate varieties in different yet comparable contexts.
... A number of speech corpora can be found that contain German speech samples and even some of regionally accented speech with a fairly large number of speakers. Two such corpora are "Regional Variants of German 1" (RVG) [22] and "Deutsch Heute" (DH) [23], both of which we used for this contribution. ...
... Wie auch in der Aussprache, in der Lexik und in der Grammatik, wo die diatopische Variation sowohl auf dialektaler als auch auf standardsprachlicher Ebene schon gut dokumentiert ist (vgl. Kleiner 2011;Ammon, Bickel & Lenz 2016sowie Elspaß, Dürscheid & Ziegler 2017, ist auch im Kommunikationsverhalten davon auszugehen, dass diatopische Varianten -pointiert gesagt -nicht an den Landesgrenzen Halt machen, sondern über großräumige Gebiete (Areale) hinweg auftreten. Das heißt aber auch: Wenn in der linguistischen Kulturanalyse überindividuelle sprachlich-kommunikative Muster untersucht werden, die sich in statistisch signifikanter Weise areal unterscheiden, dann muss diesem Umstand in der kulturanalytischen Beschreibung dieser Muster Rechnung getragen werden. ...
Wahrend in der Aussprache, in der Lexik und in der Grammatik die diatopische Variation auf dialektaler und standardsprachlicher Ebene schon gut dokumentiert ist, gibt es nur wenige Untersuchungen zur Arealitat pragmatischer Aspekte. Der Beitrag berichtet von den ersten Ergebnissen eines diesbezuglichen Forschungsvorhabens und legt den Schwerpunkt auf einen Vergleich Zurich - Berlin. Nach einigen grundsatzlichen Uberlegungen zur interpersonalen Pragmatik und Arealitat kommunikativer Muster wird die Frage diskutiert, welche Erhebungsmethoden geeignet sind, um Variation in diesem Bereich systematisch zu erfassen. Sodann wird am Beispiel einer Stichprobenuntersuchung in Berliner und Zurcher Backereien aufgezeigt, welche Beobachtungen sich bereits auf schmaler Datenbasis anstellen lassen. Dabei liegt der Schwerpunkt auf einem kommunikativen Muster, das aus kulturanalytischer Sicht besonders interessant ist: das Grusen und Verabschieden. Abschliesend wird dafur pladiert, die Pluriarealitatsforschung und die interpersonale Pragmatik enger miteinander zu verknupfen.
... 14 Vgl. zum Deutsch heute-Korpus zusammenfassend auchKleiner (2015). Projekt (Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland),15 das von 2007 bis 2013 von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft gefördert wurde. ...
Despite the rapidly growing body of research on sound symbolism, one issue that remains understudied is whether different types of sensory information interact in their sound symbolic effects. The experimental study reported here consisted of two tasks and focused on one such potential interaction: size associations and cuteness. First, a forced-choice task was conducted in which size ratings were elicited for pseudowords containing different vowels and consonants. The pseudowords were introduced as names of alien creatures, which were used as visual stimuli in the experiment. Second, the cuteness of alien creatures was assessed in a judgement task. Both tasks were completed by the same group of German speakers. In line with previous research, /aː/ was associated with largeness and /iː/ was associated with smallness. Further, we found that cuteness modulates size associations in /aː/ and /iː/. For /aː/ judged size increased, while for /iː/ judged size decreased with increasing cuteness. Regarding consonants, we found that /ʁ/ evoked higher size associations than other consonants under investigation. Interactions of cuteness and consonants did not reach significance. Our findings call for the integration of other possible factors and features that might show sound symbolic effects or interactions with such in sound symbolism research.
This paper presents observations on the phonetic realisations of the German particles ja � �yes� and naja � approximately �well�. As part of a large-scale study on the particle ja, we identified numerous instances in the dataset that had been orthographically transcribed as ja, but were phonetically realised as [nja]. Using phonetic and functional parameters, we explore the question whether these instances can be attributed to either the lexeme ja or naja. While phonetic measurements yield ambivalent results, analyses of pragmatic parameters such as function and turn position seem to indicate that [nja] was predominantly intended to be ja, although some functional differences between ja and [nja] could also be identified.
This article derives a terminological distinction for lenition that describes the historical-dialectal part as the product of lenition and distinguishes it from the recent phonetic part as the actual process. The data used here are part of the two-tempo reading material from the Deutsch heute-Corpus of the IDS Mannheim. Thereby, duration measurements for the bursts of the velar stops /k/ and /g/ are performed in initial syllable position. These measurements are visualized in geophonetic maps to illustrate the spatial dimension of the tempo contrasts between fortis and lenis and the acceleration effects within these categories.
Results:
(1) The speakers store phonetic residues of the categorical fortis-lenis-distinction of their regional variety also in their standard intended variety.
(2) Acceleration effects differ both between fortis and lenis as well as spatially.
Themenheft "Corona-Diskurse in und über Österreich"
Wiener Linguistische Gazette, Heft 90/2021. Open Access: https://wlg.univie.ac.at/aktuelle-ausgabe/abstracts-ausgabe-902021/
Die Frage, was Sprecherinnen und Sprecher von ihrer eigenen Sprache wissen und wie sie ihr gegenüber eingestellt sind, wurde von der Forschung von einigen Seiten beleuchtet. Allerdings steht bisher eine gemeinsame theoretische wie empirische Basis noch aus. Der vorliegende Sammelband gibt deshalb einen Überblick über die aktuellste Forschung auf dem Gebiet der Laienlinguistik und versammelt Beiträge mit neuen theoretischen Impulsen, innovativen methodischen Ansätzen sowie praktischer Forschung.
p>Although dialect use has declined massively over the past 100 years in large parts of the German-speaking countries, there is still a considerable areal diversity overall. Even the written standard language is characterised by diatopic heterogeneity on various levels – pronunciation, lexis, grammar, pragmatics. This is even more true for spoken everyday language, which, depending on the country and area, may be more dialectal, regiolectal, or near-standard in the German-speaking countries. This paper focuses on lexical variation and presents data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA) from online surveys conducted over the last 17 years; some of these data is compared with older data from the Wortatlas der deutschen Umgangssprachen (WDU) collected in the 1970s. The approx. 600 maps of the AdA produced so far document, on the one hand, a surprisingly clear preservation of older regional contrasts in the distribution of diatopic variants, as already known from earlier dialect atlases. On the other hand, the AdA maps show a multitude of newer cases of regional diversity, which were hardly or not at all known before and which are thus not listed in codices or studies on the lexis of contemporary German. The paper shows that even variants for modern concepts are often not uniform across regions but can have distinct regional emphases. Finally, the question of dominant areal structures in present-day lexical variation of German will be addressed.</p
Gerade wenn es um die Gewinnung und eine erste Bewertung von Forschungsdaten geht, ist derzeit oft vom Übergang zu citizen science die Rede. Nachdem dieses Konzept zunächst in den Lebenswissenschaften eine größere Rolle gespielt hat, findet es sich neuerdings auch in Teilen der Sprachwissenschaft. Viele einschlägige Initiativen schließen an die Tätigkeiten an, bei denen sich auch traditionell schon die professionalisierte Wissenschaft der Hilfe der ‚Laien‘ bediente, sie können allerdings jetzt die in ungeahntem Ausmaß gewachsenen Möglichkeiten elektronischer Kommunikation und elektronischen Daten-Managements nutzen. Das digitale Interagieren erweitert die Möglichkeiten der als beteiligte „Laien“ gesehenen Personen aber doch so sehr, dass sich auch qualitativ ein neues Verhältnis zwischen den am Forschungsprozess Beteiligten entwickelt. In diesem Beitrag wird diskutiert, welche Folgen diese Veränderung für die wissenschaftliche Praxis, aber auch für das Verständnis des Konzepts „Wissenschaft“ hat. Especially when it comes to the collection and initial evaluation of research data, the transition to citizen science is often mentioned. After this concept played a major role in the life sciences, it is now also found in parts of linguistics. Many relevant initiatives follow on from the activities in which even professionalised science traditionally used the help of 'laymen', but they can now make use of the possibilities of electronic communication and electronic data management, which have grown to an undreamt-of extent. The digital interaction, however, expands the possibilities of the persons seen as participating "laymen" to such an extent that a new relationship between the participants in the research process develops qualitatively as well. This article discusses the consequences of this change for scientific practice, but also for the understanding of the concept of "science".
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 that was fronted in the SSG variety of either dialect. Additionally, the Bern SSG <ä> was produced as both [┋ː] and [ӕː], while was realised more in the back.
This paper examines the role of dialect contact in the emergence of Namdeutsch (i.e. a variety of German spoken by about 20,000 Namibians today). In order to show that German speakers of different regional origins interacted with each other in the former colony of German South West Africa, a concrete setting is reconstructed on the basis of historical sources and information on geographic distributions of surnames. Subsequently, it is shown that phenomena can be found which are usually regarded as the result of dialect contact and thus contribute to the emergence of new varieties: levelling, interdialect developments, reallocation and focusing. It is argued that dialect contact is a third cause of language change which is central to German in Namibia along with borrowings from the main contact languages English and Afrikaans and the elaboration of internal tendencies of German.
The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the ‘dialect-standard’ landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociolinguistic histories, as well as on previously unexplored sociolinguistic situations. The contributions all share the twin characteristics of (a) robust scrutiny of structural variation and its links to both structural-systemic parameters and extralinguistic variables and (b) nuanced approaches to macro- and micro- level categories, with the requisite theoretical and methodological fine-tuning. While focusing on different languages/language groups, the papers in this volume share the common foci of bringing together structural and sociolinguistic considerations and of the concomitant necessary revisiting of methodologies. The data and analyses presented yield a firmer and more nuanced understanding of the dynamic permutations of cross-dialectal and dialect-to-standard convergence and the formation of intermediate varieties in different yet comparable contexts.
Cambridge Core - European Language and Linguistics - The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics - edited by Michael T. Putnam
Tempo of speech and phonetic reduction are closely related and differ in their spatial distributions. The SpuRD-project (Sprechtempo und Reduktion im Deutschen) focusses on this web of relationships and their spatial variation for the whole German-speaking area in central Europe. Using standard-intended reading material in normal and fast reading tempi, an array of reduction phenomena is analysed to find whether they are caused by tempo or whether they are independent variants of a limited linguistic area. The results reported here show on a macroscopic level that the spatial distributions of temporal characteristics such as the duration of articulation and the degree of segment reduction do not coincide everywhere, but have independent distribution areas especially at a higher tempo. That means that articulation rate is composed of regionally varying temporal and segmental features. For explanations of this macroscopic variation the material is analysed with regard to particular microscopic variation with independent spatial distributions.
The questions of how speaking rate and phonetic reduction are correlated as well as how they interact in linguistic space are still unanswered up to this date. The project speaking rate and phonetic reduction in German (Sprechtempo und Reduktion im Deutschen SpuRD) aims to answer these questions by using reading material from the Deutsch heute corpus of the Institute for German Language (Institut für Deutsche Sprache IDS).
With these data HAHN/SIEBENHAAR (2016) detected a gradual slope from south to north of the German speaking area for articulation rate (AR). The detailed analysis shows that this slope in AR has different substructures due to regional differences in the interplay of average articulation duration (AD) and segment deletion.
Following these findings, the present article focuses on regional patterns of segmental reduction by analysing the realisation of the schwa in final syllables between nasals. For the presented spatial patterns of schwa reduction the (East) Upper German Area stands out particularly as exceptionally resistant against schwa reduction in several ways.
In the Southern-Bavarian variety of Tyrolean, laryngeal contrasts undergo a typologically interesting process of neutralization in word-initial position. Contrast between voiced and voiceless stops is observed in word-medial, intersonorant position and is neutralized, as in most German varieties, word-finally. Neutralization occurs to some degree also in absolute word-initial position, where usually languages tend to preserve contrasts (Beckman 1998). We undertake an acoustic analysis of Tyrolean stops in word-initial, word-medial and word-final contexts, as well as in obstruent clusters, investigating the role of acoustic parameters (VOT, prevoicing, closure duration and F0 and H1-H2* on following vowels) in implementing contrast, if any. Results show that stops contrast word-medially via [voice] (supported by the acoustic cues of closure duration and F0) and are neutralized completely in word-final position and in obstruent clusters. Word-initially, neutralization is subject to inter-and intraspeaker variability and sensitive to place of articulation, with labials being more often neutralized than velars and velars more often than alveolars. Variability of the process can be interpreted either as the effect of an ongoing sound change in the Bavarian dialect area or as the influence of the contact languages of Tyrolean, Middle Bavarian and Northern Italian varieties. Aspiration plays no role in implementing laryngeal contrasts in Tyrolean. A phonetic event similar to aspiration is found only in (neutralized) word-final contexts, where it is interpreted as a correlate of the task of word-list reading.
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