INTONATIONAL AND TEMPORAL FEATURES OF SWISS GERMAN

Adrian Leemann & Beat Siebenhaar
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern

ID 1468
[full paper]

The study examines the timing of 10 speakers and the intonation of 6 speakers of two Swiss German dialects. Results show that the relative mean duration of segments and final lengthening are only similar in the two dialects observed. A crucial difference is that Valais speakers generally speak at a faster rate. In terms of intonation, the Valais produce more accent commands than the Bernese; largely due to stressing more lexical words than the Valais. Phrase accents are fairly weak as opposed to standard German. The study shows phonetically motivated differences in Swiss German dialectal prosody.