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

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, 4 male and 4 female speakers from Bern, Chur, Brig, and Zurich were recorded producing each vowel three times, which resulted in a corpus of 1,632 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 was produced as both [ɛː] and [æː], while was realised more in the back