Cover not available
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
References (43)
References
Auer, Peter. 2013. Ethnische Marker im Deutschen zwischen Varietät und Stil [Ethnic markers in German between variety and style]. In Arnulf Deppermann (ed.), Das Deutsch der Migranten (Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache 2012), 9–40. Berlin & Boston, MA: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2017. Doing difference aus der Perspektive der Soziolinguistik – an einem Beispiel aus der Lebenswelt von ‘Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund’ [Doing difference from the perspective of sociolinguistics – an example from the lifeworld of ‘adolescents with a migration background’]. In Stefan Hirschauer (ed.), Un/doing Difference. Praktiken der Humandifferenzierung, 287–‍306. Weilerswirst: Velbrück Wissenschaft.Google Scholar
. 2020. Dialect (non-)acquisition and use by young people of migrant background in Germany. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Auer, Peter & Vanessa Siegel. 2021. Grammatical gender in the German multiethnolect. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 33(1). 5–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brugman, Hennie & Albert Russel. 2004. Annotating multi-media/multi-modal resources with ELAN. In Maria Teresa Lino et al.. (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04). Lisbon: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar
Bücker, Tanja. 2007. Ethnolektale Varietäten des Deutschen im Sprachgebrauch Jugendlicher [Ethnolectal varieties of German in the language use of adolescents]. Studentische Arbeitspapiere Sprache und Interaktion (SASI) 9. Münster: Centrum Sprache und Interaktion. [URL]. (13 May, 2022.)Google Scholar
Conrad, François. 2021. Regional differences in the evolution of the merger of /ʃ/ and /ç/ in Luxembourgish. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dirim, İnci & Peter Auer. 2004. Türkisch sprechen nicht nur die Türken: Über die Unschärfebeziehung zwischen Sprache und Ethnie in Deutschland [Not only the Turks speak Turkish: On the fuzzy relationship between language and ethnicity in Germany]. Berlin & New York, NY: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dogil, Grzegorz. 1993. Phonologische Nachbarschaft trotz akustischer Ferne. Untersuchungen zur /ç/ – /x/-Neutralisierung im Saarland [Phonological neighbours despite acoustic distance. Studies on the neutralisation of /ç/ – /x/ in Saarland]. In Maria Bonner & Max Mangold (eds.), Nachbarschaften: Thematische und systematische-Festschrift für Max Mangold zum 70. Geburtstag, 57–66. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag.Google Scholar
Duran, Daniel & Peter Auer. (submitted, a). The vowel space of multiethnolectal (Stuttgart) German.
. (Submitted, b.) Plosive voicing in multi-ethnolectal Stuttgart German.
Flipsen, Peter, Lawrence Shriberg, Gary Weismer, Heather Karlsson & Jane Mc Sweeny. 1999. Acoustic characteristics of /s/ in adolescents. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42(3). 663–677. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Forrest, Karen, Gary Weismer, Paul Milenkovic & Ronald N. Dougall. 1988. Statistical analysis of word-initial voiceless obstruents: Preliminary data. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 84(1). 115–123. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Fox, John & Sanford Weisberg. 2019. An {R} companion to applied regression, 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [URL](13 May, 2022.)Google Scholar
Freywald, Ulrike, Katharina Mayr, Tiner Özelik & Heike Wiese. 2011. Kiezdeutsch as a multiethnolect. In Friederike Kern & Margret Selting (eds.), Ethnic styles of speaking in European metropolitan areas, 45–73. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Matthew, Paul Barthmaier & Kathy Sands. 2002. A cross-linguistic acoustic study of voiceless fricatives. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 32(2). 141–174. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Hall, Tracy Alan. 2014. Alveolopalatalization in Central German as markedness reduction. Transactions of the Philological Society 112(2). 143–166. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harrington, Jonathan. 2010. Phonetic analysis of speech corpora. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Haußmann, Michael. 2012. 44 Prozent der Stuttgarter Kinder und Jugendlichen leben in reinen Migrantenhaushalten. Statistik und Informationsmanagement Monatshefte 2012(3). 97–98.Google Scholar
Heidelberger Forschungsprojekt ‚Pidgindeutsch‘. 1975. Sprache und Kommunikation ausländischer Arbeiter [Language and communication of foreign workers]. Kronberg: Scriptor.
Herrgen, Joachim. 1986. Koronalisierung und Hyperkorrektion: Das palatale Allophon des /ch/-Phonems und seine Variation im Westmitteldeutschen [Coronalisation and hypercorrection: The palatal allophone of the /ch/ phoneme and its variation in West Central German]. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. (18 May, 2022) DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoole, Philip, Noel Nguyen-Trong & William Hardcastle. 1993. A comparative investigation of coarticulation in fricatives: Electropalatographic, electromagnetic, and acoustic data. Language and Speech 36(2–3). 235–260. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Jannedy, Stefanie & Melanie Weirich. 2014. Sound change in an urban setting: Category instability of the palatal fricative in Berlin. Laboratory Phonology 5(1). DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
. 2017. Spectral moments vs discrete cosine transformation coefficients: Evaluation of acoustic measures distinguishing two merging German fricatives. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142(1). 395–405. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Jannedy, Stefanie, Melanie Weirich & Louisa Helmke. 2015. Acoustic analyses of differences in [ç] and [ʃ] productions in Hood German. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow. [URL]. (13 May, 2022.)Google Scholar
Jannedy, Stefanie, Norma Mendoza-Denton & Melanie Weirich. 2019. Social capital and the production and perception of fine phonetic detail in Berlin. In Theresa Heyd, Ferdinand von Mengden & Britta Schneider (Eds.), The sociolinguistic economy of Berlin, 125–144. Boston, MA & Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Jongman, Allard, Ratree Wayland & Serena Wong. 2000. Acoustic characteristics of English fricatives. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 108(3). 1252 DOI logo. (18 May, 2022.)Google Scholar
Kassambara, Alboukadel. 2020. ggpubr: “ggplot2” based publication ready plots. [URL]. (13 May, 2022.)Google Scholar
Keim, Inken. 2002. Sozial-kulturelle Selbstdefinition und sozialer Stil: Junge Deutsch-Türkinnen im Gespräch [Sociocultural self-definition and social style: Young, female German-Turks in conversation]. In Inken Keim & Wilfried Schütte (eds.), Soziale Welten und kommunikative Stile. Festschrift für Werner Kallmeyer zum 60. Geburtstag, 233–259. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
. 2007. Die ‚türkischen Powergirls‘. Lebenswelt und kommunikativer Stil einer Migrantinnengruppe in Mannheim [The ‘Turkish power girls’. Lifeworld and communicative style of an immigrant group in Mannheim]. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Kisler, Thomas, Uwe Reichel & Florian Schiel. 2017. Multilingual processing of speech via web services. Computer Speech & Language 45. 326–347. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Maniwa, Kazumi, Allard Jongman & Travis Wade. 2009. Acoustic characteristics of clearly spoken English fricatives. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125(6). 3962–3973. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Robinson, Orrin W. 2001. Whose German? The ach/ich alternation and related phenomena in standard and colloquial. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Shadle, Christina H. & Sheila J. Mair. 1996. Quantifying spectral characteristics of fricatives. Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP ’96). 1521–1524. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Siegel, Vanessa. 2020. Multiethnolektale Syntax. Artikel, Präpositionen und Pronomen in der Jugendsprache [Multiethnolectal syntax. Articles, prepositions and pronouns in adolescent language]. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Tertilt, Hermann. 1998. Turkish Power Boys. Ethnographie einer Jugendbande [Turkish power boys. Ethnography of a youth gang]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Watson, Catherine I. & Jonathan Harrington. 1999. Acoustic evidence for dynamic formant trajectories in Australian English vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106(1). 458–468. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Weirich, Melanie, Stefanie Jannedy & Gediminas Schüppenhauer. 2020. The social meaning of contextualized sibilant alternations in Berlin German. Frontiers in Psychology 11. 566174. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Wiese, Heike. 2009. Kiezdeutsch [Hood German]. Munich: Beck.Google Scholar
Wiese, Heike & Ulrike Freywald. 2019. Regionalsprachliche Merkmale in jugendsprachlichen Praktiken im multilingualen urbanen Raum [Regional characteristics of adolescent speech in multilingual urban space]. In Joachim Herrgen & Jürgen Erich Schmidt (eds.), Sprache und Raum. Ein internationales Handbuch der Sprachvariation. Band 4: Deutsch (HSK 30.4), 995–1012. Berlin & Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Winkelmann, Raphael, Klaus Jaensch, Steve Cassidy & Jonathan Harrington. 2021. EmuR: Main package of the EMU Speech Database Management System.Google Scholar
Zahorian, Stephen A. & Amir J. Jagharghi. 1993. Spectral-shape features versus formants as acoustic correlates for vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 94(4). 1966–1982. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar
Zharkova, Natalia. 2016. Ultrasound and acoustic analysis of sibilant fricatives in preadolescents and adults. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139(5). 2342–2351. DOI logo(18 May, 2022)Google Scholar