15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


The Pronunciation of Loanwords in German

Reinhold Greisbach

Universität Frankfurt a.M., Germany

The pronunciation of foreign words offers a specific problem if these words contain sounds uncommon to the sound system of the borrowing language. Different strategies of adaptation of these words are possible. In an experimental setup, 60 native speakers of German were recorded to evaluate performance on nasal vowels in words of French origin and with the voiced palato-alveolar affricate in English words. The retainment and replacement of these sounds showed a significant difference with regard to 3 factors: origin of the words, age and educational background of the German speakers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Greisbach, Reinhold (2003): "The pronunciation of loanwords in German", In ICPhS-15, 799-802.