Chapter published in:
Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Acquisition across the Lifespan
Edited by Anna Ghimenton, Aurélie Nardy and Jean-Pierre Chevrot
[Studies in Language Variation 26] 2021
► pp. 251–276

Chapter 11
The standard-dialect repertoire of second language users in German-speaking Switzerland

| University of Salzburg
The coexistence of dialect and standard language is a pronounced characteristic of everyday life in the Swiss German context. This paper examines the linguistic repertoire of second language users in the Swiss context and how they deal with dialect-standard variation in a structured interview situation with a dialect speaker and a standard language speaker. The data from eight second language users, with English or Turkish as their first language, illustrate different patterns in the use of dialect, standard, and a mixture of both codes. Among the eight selected speakers, high ability to discriminate dialect from standard language can be observed, and only some L2 users show frequent mixing of dialect and standard, which violates the strict separation of the two codes according to L1 speaker norms. Furthermore, the L2 speakers only rarely change their usage of the codes according to their interlocutor. The results reveal that integrating dialect and standard language in the L2 repertoire is challenging. L2 users – depending on their constructed identity within the Swiss German community and influenced by their L1 social categorization of codes – compose their linguistic repertoire with more or less openness to dialect, standard, or integrated use of both codes.
Keywords: standard-dialect variation, linguistic repertoire, German, Switzerland, second language acquisition, code-mixing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Constructing a dialect-standard L2 repertoire in an Alemannic context
    • 2.1The relevance of learning sociolinguistic variation in an L2
    • 2.2Distinguishing dialect and standard language
    • 2.3The ability to align to native speakers and variation in the input
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data
    • 3.3Analysis
      • Transcription
      • Segmentation
      • Annotation
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Patterns of dialect and standard use in elicited free speech
    • 4.2Nature of the code-mixing
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 August 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.26.11end
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