14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Regional Variants of German: Categories of Pronunciation Deviation from Standard German

Susanne Burger (1,2), Daniela Oppermann (3)

(1) Interactive Systems Laboratories, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
(2) University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany
(3) University of Munich, Munich, Germany

This analysis describes categories of pronunciation variants we found in the transcription of monologues recorded for the RVG1 corpus (Regional Variants of German). Our results indicate that transcriptions on orthographic level provide useful information on regional variations of standard German. The pronunciation variants can be categorized into assimilation, enclitics, and types of single phoneme modification. Using detailed speaker data, additionally collected in RVG1, the distribution of variations over geographical areas could be displayed for each category. We found the most frequent number of deviations from standard German in the southern German speaking regions.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Burger, Susanne / Oppermann, Daniela (1999): "Regional variants of German: categories of pronunciation deviation from standard German", In ICPhS-14, 1589-1592.