Intonational variation in Swiss German

The present study offers preliminary results on the intonation of Swiss German dialects spoken in Berne, Brig, and Zurich. In following a predominantly phonetic approach, the comparison of the subjects from each location allows for a distinction between region-specific and individual intonational characteristics; while the comparison between the different recording locations offers insight into the geolinguistic structure of intonation. Following the extraction of time-related parameters as well as the fundamental frequencies, intonation models for each subject as well as for each recording location are created. The primary goal is to analyse the nature and the extent of global as well as local intonation units present in the subjects at hand. This work delves into a largely untouched area of Swiss German geolinguistics and sheds light on the state of intonational variation in Swiss German and also discusses some of the possible reasons for variation in intonation in the examined dialects.