This exploratory study examines utterance-level prosodic features in spontaneous, predominantly non-standard conversational data from six different regional linguistic areas in Germany, focusing on their region-specific characteristics. Based on the results, the study evaluates whether hypotheses can be formulated regarding a yet-to-be-established prosodic dialect classification and whether such a classification would align with traditional dialect geography, which is primarily based on segmental features. The analysis is conducted on purely spontaneous speech data from the REDE project, considering the utterance-global features F0--mean-mean, F--range-range, F0--standard deviation (SD), the steepness of global pitch movements (A), temporal 0 duration (t), and articulation rate ( (syl/sec (syl/sec). Statistical methods are applied to assess the speaker-and region-specific significance of individual features as well as their phonetic interrelations. Post-hoc cluster analyses of the results suggest a division into three macro-regional groups: Low German, a combined group of Central German and Eastern Upper German, and, finally, Western Upper German (Lower Alemannic), whose previously recognized prosodic distinctiveness is reaffirmed, positioning it as a separate category outside the Upper German and overall German clusters within the Federal Republic of Germany.
A variety of Portuguese and German-speaking language repertoires have been in contact in Southern Brazil since the 19th century. In this paper, we analyze meta-linguistic stances towards languages (German, Portuguese) or dialectal and regional varieties (e. g., Hunsri ckisch, Westfalisch) in sociolinguistic interviews (dated 2017 and 2018) recorded with speakers based in seven localities in Rio Grande do Sul. In their meta-linguistic stances, the informants perform constructions of belonging, using ideological features of mono-and multilingualism as well as ethical and socio-cultural values as means of distinction and adequation. Social categories such as nationality, Christian confession, or urban vs. rural environment are activated as additional factors in stances towards languages and varieties.
The article maps the regional and sociolinguistic distribution of the rounded allophone [Y] in preceding labial contexts (T[Y]sch `table, St[Y]ft `pen, st[Y]mmt `right' and before /r/ ([Ye]gendwie `somehow, K[Ye]che `church' in Northern Germany using a broad linguistic corpus from the DFG project Die Stadtsprache Hannovers (n = 9,110 test words, n = 11 collection sites). In the generational comparison within the framework of the apparent-time approach, the rounded variant of /I/ is expanding significantly, reaching levels in the younger generation of over 70 percent. The innovation, led by men, can increasingly be considered constitutive for the Regional High German in Northern Germany. The acoustic evaluation of /I/ in the context before /r/ results in an additional, slowly spreading allophone with the centralized long monophthong [s:].
By means of a corpus drawn from the currently sixteen and a half volumes of the Schweizerisches Idiotikon and its sources, covering the period from the 13th to the 21st century, the first part of the paper records the hitherto little-known frequency of the gerund in Swiss German of the late Middle Ages and the EarlyModern Period as well as reconstructing the areal distribution in Swiss German dialects between 1700 and 1950. In the second part, the development of the repeatedly changing and newly forming gerundial morphology on the territory of present-day Switzerland and the Northern Italian Walser villages from the High Middle Ages to the present is analysed.
This study focusses on special forms of the infinitive in certain constructions in Central and Southern German dialects-on the one hand forms without n-ending, on the other prefixed forms. Topics are the origins and possible interdependence of prefixed and suffixless forms and the syntactic status of two different forms of dependent infinitive: n-less and totally without ending. Specific inflexional and syntactic properties of the totally suffixless forms lead to the suggestion that they no longer qualify as verbs.
This article deals with subject doubling (SD) in Saurian, a variety spoken in a language island in northern Italy, and with the question of whether this phenomenon is due to language contact with the Romance contact varieties. We define SD as the co-occurrence of a subject clitic and an overt subject (lexical NP / subject pronoun) in a syntactic and/or prosodic unit. Based on a data corpus consisting of written and spoken data, we argue that SD in Saurian is the result of a convergence process.
With the aim of reconstructing historical spatial structures of German, an ontology-based linguistic spatial analysis of German surnames was carried out. The data basis of the analysis is the data set of the German Surname Atlas (DFA). The procedure resorts to an ontology-based data structuring, which relates the graphemes of the surnames to sound features and classifies them with respect to historical reference sounds. The analysis is carried out by means of cluster analyses, which provide information about the spatial structure of the surnames as representatives of late medieval sound development states. The analysis of subsets of the data set, which are limited to selected historical sound classes, provides insights into the spatio-temporal development of individual sound changes. As case analyses, the schwa apocope and the consonant shifts of the West Germanic plosives are presented as central sound changes of German language history.
