‘Chend’ met <e> – ‘Kind’ mit <e>: using Big Data to explore phoneme-to-grapheme mapping in Lucerne Swiss German

Speakers from the canton of Lucerne are infamous for spelling Middle High German (MHG) as when communicating in written Swiss German, e.g. Kind (‘child’) as . This phenomenon has been examined only impressionistically by phoneticians. This study provides a first account of this peculiarity of Lucerne Swiss German spellers: an analysis of normalised formant frequencies of two underlyingly MHG vowels from 200+ speakers of the Dialäkt Äpp corpus revealed that the Lucerne allophone is in reality [e] for most of the localities examined, which may explain why in vernacular writing, spellers prefer over . Homophony due to this peculiarity can cause misunderstandings in written and oral communication, and possibly has repercussions on the reading and writing development of Lucerne students