Sound Change Across Five Generations of Swiss German Dialect Speakers

The goal of this investigation is to study sound change in the dialects of Swiss German over a period of five generations. To this end, we analyze speech data for four phonological variables from two towns (Bern and Münchenbuchsee): nd-velarization (Hund ‘dog’, finden ‘find’, Kind ‘child’), l-vocalization (Himmel ‘heaven, sky’), monophthongization of Bernese (Baum ‘tree’, laufen ‘run’, kaufen ‘buy’, Auge ‘eye’, bauen ‘build’) and Bernese (neu ‘new’, töiff ‘deep’, zwöi ‘two’) in addition to the retraction of mhd. â (Abend ‘evening’, Haar ‘hair’). This study makes use of two datasets. First, a set of unpublished speech data that Paul Zinsli collected in 1971 for three generations of speakers from three social groups in nine towns including Bern and Münchenbuchsee. For each town, four speakers were interviewed for each of the three age cohorts and social groups, resulting in speech data for 36 persons for each town (36=3*3*4). Field workers noted each variant based on an auditory impression. Second, we also make use of elicitation data from two age cohorts that were surveyed in the project Swiss German Dialects Across Time and Space. (SDATS, Leemann et al. 2022). The SDATS project elicited speech data for 1000 male and female speakers from 125 towns in German-speaking Switzerland between 2020–2021, resulting in data for eight speakers from each town. This study will use the comparable data for the towns of Bern and Münchenbuchsee as well as the results for the comparable items noted above. It is then possible to investigate sound change in both apparent and real time over five generations of speakers for these four variables. An initial analysis of the variable nd-velarization in the lexemes Hund ‘dog’ and finden ‘find’ shows contradictory tendencies: Velarization decreases in the syllable coda, while it appears to increase on a syllable border. Literatur Leemann, Adrian, Jeszenszky Péter, Steiner, Carina, Studerus, Melanie & Messerli, Jan (2022). SDATS Corpus – Swiss German Dialects Across Time and Sapce. URL: https://osf.io/s9z4q/ Zinsli, Paul. (1971). Seminar SS 1971: Uebungen zum deutschschweizerischen Sprachleben (insbesondere zum Wandel im Berndeutschen. Bern: Deutsches seminar, abt. Sprache, Lit. u. Volkskunde der deutschen Schweiz