• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 797

Part of Session 101: Sociophonetic research in emerging varieties (Other abstracts in this session)

Sociophonetic aspects of Swiss German ethnolects

Authors: Schmid, Stephan
Submitted by: Schmid, Stephan (Universität Zürich, Switzerland)

Since the year 2000, mass media in German-speaking Switzerland have reported the emergence of new ways of speaking among youngsters with an immigrant background. Due to the strong immigration from the former republic of Yugoslavia, such ethnolectal speech has sometimes been referred to as 'Jugotüütsch' or 'Balkan-Slang', labels that derive from hetero-representations and underpin the multi-ethnic character of the emerging varieties; not much is known about the auto-representations of the speakers, but it is reasonable to assume that these ways of speaking do not signal adherence to any specific ethnic group, but rather express a more general identity (immigrant vs autochthonous). Sociolinguistic research in Switzerland has analyzed the phenomenon in light of the dynamic model proposed by Auer (2003), who distinguishes three types of ethnolects, i.e. primary ethnolects (spoken by second generation immigrants), secondary ethnolects (exaggerated representations of the primary ethnolects in the media), and tertiary ethnolects (style shifts of non-immigrant speakers who use elements of the primary and secondary ethnolects mainly for comical purposes). Indeed, the sociolinguistic dynamics of the emerging varieties in Switzerland resembles to a great extent the ethnolectal chain described for Germany, including common structural features such as morphosyntactic simplification patterns and the use of particular discourse markers.

The sociophonetic features of Swiss German ethnolects are, however, strictly related to the phonological properties of the German dialects spoken in Switzerland. On the segmental level, the emerging varieties are characterized by the absence of at least three typologically marked features of Swiss German that are also lacking in the corresponding immigrant languages (Albanian, Serbian, etc.). Firstly, ethnolects exhibit voiced stops and fricatives instead of the autochthonous unvoiced 'lenis' ([–tense]) obstruents. Secondly, they allow tense fricatives in word-initial position, which are banned by a phonotactic constraint of Swiss German. Thirdly, they tend not to apply the postlexical sandhi processes which typically hinder the perception of word boundaries in Swiss German. As regards prosody, a tendency towards a rather 'syllable-timed' rhythm has been reported, given that unstressed syllables are often less reduced than in traditional Swiss German. All in all, the sociophonetic features of Swiss German ethnolects can be interpreted as the result of a transfer from multiple first languages, but they also reveal a more general mechanism of second language acquisition, i.e. the avoidance of marked structures.

The present contribution illustrates the emergence of these sociophonetic features by means of IPA-transcriptions and the spectrographic inspection of speech samples; also, an attempt will be made to capture the prosodic features of ethnolectal speech by applying 'rhythm metrics' (cf. Fagyal 2010). As regards the general sociolinguistic dynamics of the ethnolectal chain, particular attention is paid to the transitions from the primary to the secondary ethnolects, where a reduction to a few salient traits goes in hand with the articulatory enhancement of these patterns. This raises the more general problem of variation within the different types of (multi-)ethnolects, which can be seen not only as 'emerging varieties', but also as 'styles of speaking' (Kern & Selting 2011).