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Part of
The Continuity of Linguistic Change: Selected papers in honour of Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda
Edited by Matilde Vida-Castro and Antonio Manuel Ávila-Muñoz
[Studies in Language Variation 31] 2024
► pp. 79–99

Chapter 4
Coronalisation in the German multi-ethnolect

Evidence for regional differentiation?

| Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg , Germany
| Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft , Germany

We investigate coronalisation, i.e. the fronting of the palatal fricative /ç/, in the multi-ethnolect spoken by young people in the city of Stuttgart. In contrast to a previous study on the Berlin multi-ethnolect, which claims a merger of /ç/ with /ʃ/, we only find a weak and unstable tendency among our speakers to reduce the difference between the two dorsal fricatives /ç/ and /ʃ/, as compared to a group of similar speakers living in a relatively monoethnic neighbourhood. Depending on the phonetic measurements used, this tendency mostly remains below the threshold of significance. We discuss two interpretations of these findings, one linked to the ambient German dialects, the other postulating the beginning of regional differentiation between the German multi-ethnolects.

Keywords: (German) multi-ethnolects, coronalisation, dorsal assimilation in German, regional differentiation in multi-ethnolects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Phonological and social-dialectological background
  • 3.Previous work on multi-ethnolectal coronalisation
  • 4.Data
  • 5.Methods
  • 6.Results
  • 7.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.31.04aue
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