University of Calgary Perceptual Dialectology In

Home , Early New High German, Isogloss, Low German, Perceptual dialectology, Standard German, West Germanic gemination

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

PERCEPTUAL DIALECTOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS OF

GERMAN

HENRY LAM

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC, SLAVIC AND EAST ASIAN STUDIES

CALGARY, ALBERTA

MARCH, 2012

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FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

The undersigned certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate

Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled “PERCEPTUAL DIALECTOLOGY IN

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS OF GERMAN” submitted by HENRY LAM in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of MASTER OF ARTS.

Supervisor, Mary Grantham O’Brien, GSEA

Olga Mladenova, GSEA

Yan Guo, Faculty of Education

Date

ii Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to investigate how second language learners of German perceive language variation. A three-part linguistic experiment was carried out on twenty university students to determine their ability to discriminate dialects from the standard language, their understanding of dialects, and their attitudes towards dialects. I found that the discrimination ability of students is generally high, and that language proficiency predicted discrimination ability. Intelligibility was generally poor and was unaffected by language proficiency. Students generally found Low German dialects to be more pleasant than Central and Upper German dialects.

iii

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to thank those who made this thesis possible. I owe my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Dr. Mary O’Brien, for her incredible knowledge, patience, and guidance throughout this whole process. I would also like to thank the members of my thesis committee, Dr. Olga Mladenova and Dr. Yan Guo, for their insight and suggestions, Gisela Engels for her assistance with data analysis, SSHRC for generously funding this project, and all the students who participated in this project. I am grateful for the audio recordings from the Institut für Deutsche Sprache and from the

Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas, with special thanks to Dr. Alexander Werth and Hanni Schnell. Finally, this thesis would not have been possible without the unwavering love and support of my family.

Table of Contents

APPROVAL PAGE II

ABSTRACT ...... III

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... V

LIST OF TABLES ...... VIII

LIST OF FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS ...... IX

LIST OF SYMBOLS, ABBREVIATIONS AND NOMENCLATURE ...... X

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 6

2.1 DIALECTOLOGY IN GERMAN ...... 6

2.2 PERCEPTUAL DIALECTOLOGY ...... 11

2.2.1 Perceptual Dialectology in L1 Speakers ...... 12

2.2.2 Perceptual Dialectology in German L1 Speakers ...... 17

2.2.3 L2 Speakers ...... 25

2.3 DIGLOSSIA ...... 29

2.4 GERMAN DIALECT VARIATION ...... 30

2.5 SUMMARY ...... 35

METHODOLOGY ...... 37

v 3.1 PARTICIPANTS ...... 37

3.2 PROCEDURE ...... 40

3.2.1 Task 1: Dialect Discrimination ...... 40

3.2.2 Task 2: Dialect Intelligibility ...... 55

3.2.3 Task 3: Dialect Attitudes ...... 57

3.3 DATA ANALYSIS ...... 60

3.3.1 Task 1: Dialect Discrimination ...... 60

3.3.2 Task 2: Dialect Intelligibility ...... 62

3.3.3 Task 3: Dialect Attitudes ...... 62

RESULTS ...... 63

4.1 TASK 1: DIALECT DISCRIMINATION ...... 64

4.2 TASK 2: DIALECT INTELLIGIBILITY ...... 67

4.3 TASK 3: DIALECT ATTITUDES ...... 69

4.4 SUMMARY ...... 73

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ...... 74

5.1 TASK 1: DIALECT DISCRIMINATION ...... 74

5.2 TASK 2: DIALECT INTELLIGIBILITY ...... 76

5.3 TASK 3: DIALECT ATTITUDES ...... 79

5.4 IMPLICATIONS ...... 83

5.5 LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT STUDY ...... 85

5.5 OTHER AREAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH ...... 86

5.6 SUMMARY ...... 87

APPENDICES ...... 88

vi APPENDIX A: LANGUAGE QUESTIONNAIRE ...... 88

APPENDIX B: TRANSCRIPTIONS OF WENKERSÄTZE FROM DIALECT DISCRIMINATION TASK

...... 89

APPENDIX C: DIALECT INTELLIGIBILITY AUDIO RECORDINGS ...... 98

APPENDIX D: DIALECT INTELLIGIBILITY MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS ...... 104

APPENDIX E: DIALECT ATTITUDES AUDIO RECORDINGS ...... 107

REFERENCES ...... 113

vii List of Tables

TABLE 3.1: SUMMARY OF LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AND BACKGROUND QUESTIONNAIRE 39

TABLE 3.2: NUMBER OF SYLLABLES UTTERED PER SECOND FOR EACH SOUND FILE IN TASK

1...... 44

TABLE 3.3: SUMMARY OF MAJOR LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STANDARD AND

DIALECT ...... 46

TABLE 3.4: NUMBER OF SYLLABLES UTTERED PER SECOND FOR EACH SOUND FILE IN TASK

2...... 57

TABLE 3.5: NUMBER OF SYLLABLES UTTERED PER SECOND FOR EACH SOUND FILE IN TASK

3...... 59

TABLE 3.6: POSSIBLE RESULTS IN THE DIALECT DISCRIMINATION TASK ...... 61

TABLE 4.1: RESULTS OF THE LANGUAGE PLACEMENT TEST ...... 63

TABLE 4.2: OVERALL DISCRIMINATION PERFORMANCE ...... 64

TABLE 4.3: DISCRIMINATION SCORE BY WENKERSATZ ...... 65

TABLE 4.4: DISCRIMINATION SCORE BY DIALECT GROUP ...... 66

TABLE 4.5: DISCRIMINATION BY DIALECT REGIONS ...... 66

TABLE 4.6: OVERALL INTELLIGIBILITY SCORE ...... 67

TABLE 4.7: INTELLIGIBILITY BY DIALECT REGIONS ...... 68

TABLE 4.8: MEAN RATINGS ON THE UGLY-BEAUTIFUL SCALE ...... 69

TABLE 4.9: MEAN RATINGS ON THE REPULSIVE-ATTRACTIVE SCALE ...... 70

TABLE 4.10: MEAN RATINGS ON THE HARD-SOFT SCALE ...... 71

TABLE 4.11: MEAN RATINGS ON THE TUNELESS-MELODIC SCALE ...... 71

viii List of Figures and Illustrations

FIGURE 1.1: CLASSIFICATION OF SYNCHRONIC DIALECTOLOGY ...... 2

FIGURE 2.1: MODEL OF REGION VARIETIES ...... 18

FIGURE 2.2: ISOGLOSSES OF THE HIGH GERMAN CONSONANT SHIFT ...... 33

FIGURE 3.1 DIALECTS USED IN TASK 1 ...... 47

FIGURE 3.2: ISOGLOSS FOR BEI ...... 48

FIGURE 3.3: ISOGLOSS FOR FRAU ...... 49

FIGURE 3.4: ISOGLOSS FOR WEIN ...... 50

FIGURE 3.5: ISOGLOSS FOR ICH ...... 51

FIGURE 3.6: ISOGLOSS FOR SCHLAFEN ...... 52

FIGURE 3.7: ISOGLOSS FOR FLASCHE ...... 53

FIGURE 3.8: ISOGLOSS FOR NOCH ...... 54

ix List of Symbols, Abbreviations and Nomenclature

Symbol Definition

L1 First language L2 Second language RP Received Pronunciation OHG Old High German MHG Middle High German ENHG Early New High German

x 1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis is a study on how second language (L2) learners of German perceive language varieties. In the German-speaking world, there exists a standard-colloquial- dialect continuum in language. Dialects are the local varieties of language that exhibit variation in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon. Research in German dialectology in the past focused mainly on descriptive dialectology: how dialects differ from one another in terms of their phonology, lexicon, morphology, and syntax. This type of research has been less popular in recent years. Instead, there has been a focus on the sociological and pragmatic aspects of dialectology (Macha 2005). My study in perceptual dialectology will be a contribution to this growing field of sociolinguistics. Perceptual dialectology is a branch of folk linguistics that studies what ordinary (non-linguist) people know, think, and feel about language.

Macha (2005) provides an overview of what has developed in German dialectology research in the past 30 years. He describes the developments and proposes research perspectives within a framework that he calls “new dialectology”. Dialectology research can be divided into 6 different fields: descriptive dialectology, geography of dialects, sociology of dialects, history of dialects, scientific history of dialects, and computer dialectology. Of these fields, the two historical fields can be classified as diachronic dialectology. He also points out that computer dialectology is not necessarily a field of its own, but rather a field that helps to provide new methods of approaching the other fields (with the help of computers). The rest of the fields, then, can be classified as synchronic dialectology. These fields can be divided in the following way. See Figure

1.1, adapted from Macha (2005, p.10).

Figure 1.1: Classification of Synchronic Dialectology

Synchronic Dialectology

Research Goals

System Use

Descriptive Dialect Dialect Dialectology Sociology Pragmatics

Synchronic dialectology can be divided into two fields depending on the research goals: the dialect system itself, and the use of dialects. Research into the dialect system is descriptive in nature. The goal of this area is to describe, in linguistic terms, how dialects differ from each other. In this area of descriptive dialectology, recent research has focussed on suprasegmental features of dialects. These features occur at higher levels

3 above the segment and include the rhythm, stress, and intonation. Traditional research has mainly dealt with the segmental features (the phonology of individual words) and to a certain extent morphosyntactic features (word formation as it relates to the grammar).

However, many Sprachatlasse (language atlases) have already been compiled on German dialects and therefore this area of research has been regressing. Instead, sociological and pragmatic research has been on the rise. Research into the use of dialect concerns itself with the sociology (what groups use dialects in society) and pragmatics (under what circumstances dialect is used). Sociolinguistic research began in the 1970s and pragmatic research in the 1980s. Both of these areas focus on communication in society. Two aspects of this relationship are important to the theory: language in society, and language and situation. In sociological research, one cannot ignore the factor of the individual.

Society is not comprised of a homogenous group of individuals. In other words, a limited number of research subjects may not be representative of dialect use and attitudes in society more generally. In the realm of pragmatic research, there is a similar problem.

The domains and situations of dialect use are multidimensional and are very difficult to study outside of the “natural” environment. Moreover, one situation does not necessarily equate to one language variety. Researchers performing research on dialects spoken have made use of the offenes Sprechermodell (open speaker model). In this model, research subjects must be tested in an environment in which they are free to use any variety they see fit. This often involves the researcher visiting family homes, for example.

I am interested in bringing sociolinguistic research to the level of the L2 learner.

Language variation exists in the real world, and the ability of the L2 learner to recognize this variation and function in this environment can have important implications for

4 language pedagogy. I am also interested in the developing attitudes in the L2 learner towards language variation. Native speakers who have the ability to recognize specific dialects will have certain prejudices and biases that may not exist in the L2 learner. I would like to examine how attitudes of L2 learners compare which those of native speakers.

This thesis will proceed as follows. My literature review will look at some ongoing collaborative research projects in Germany as well as research in each of the different areas of dialectology. I will then focus on literature specifically in the field of perceptual dialectology. Most of the current research in this area has been done with native speakers in various languages but very few studies have been done with L2 learners. Preston (1999, 2002) has edited two volumes of studies on perceptual dialectology, mostly with native speakers. Chapter 3 will describe the methodology for my study that will consist of a linguistic experiment in three parts to evaluate dialect discrimination, intelligibility, and attitudes towards dialects. Students with varying levels of proficiency in the German language (based on a standard language placement test) completed various tasks based on audio-recorded stimuli. The results of their tasks are investigated according to various factors including learners’ level of proficiency, gender, language background, and exposure to language variation abroad. Based on previous research of this sort with L2 learners, it is hypothesized that the students' ability to differentiate dialects in their L2 and their degree of understanding of dialectal speech will be correlated with their level of proficiency. Advanced learners are expected to perform better at differentiation and comprehension than beginner learners. In terms of language attitudes, L2 learners are not expected to display the same biases and attitudes as native

5 speakers in previous studies have been shown to do. In other words, dialects that are stigmatized or held in high prestige by native speakers may not necessarily be similarly rated by L2 learners, who have not yet developed those biases. Chapter 4 will present the results. Chapter 5 will discuss implications of the results, limitations of the project and areas for future research before concluding.

LITERATURE REVIEW

In the first part of this literature review I will look at the traditional areas of

German dialectology research. Some of these are large ongoing collaborative projects.

Others are independent research studies. A general overview of dialectology research is important as these studies have identified those linguistic characteristics of dialects that we can now use to do perceptual studies. The second part will look specifically at studies in perceptual dialectology. This will cover some recent studies in both German and in other languages. The third part reviews studies of dialectology as it relates to L2 acquisition and language pedagogy. The final part will present language variation in

Germany as it relates to my study.

2.1 Dialectology in German

Since the beginning of dialectological research there has been the ongoing question of how to interpret boundaries between dialects. The methods can be divided into two broad categories: the extralinguistic method and the intralinguistic method

(Niebaum and Macha, 2006, p. 99-101). An example of the extralinguistic method is the study of the Ostmitteldeutsch dialectal landscape (Bach, 1969). The use of this method began as early as the first half of the 20th century. It uses mostly extralinguistic factors, such as political borders, religious borders, and geographic borders such as rivers and mountains, to analyze dialect boundaries. These borders are where the dialect makes potential contact with other dialects and languages. The extralingusitic method looks at how these contact areas influence the dialect itself.

An example of the intralinguistic method is analysis of Ostschweizerisch

(Martinet, 1964). This method uses intralinguistic factors such as the phonology, morphology and syntax. The study by Martinet (1964) looks at vowel variation in the eastern Swiss dialect area. The variation of each vowel is mapped out geographically to form an isogloss. An isogloss shows the geographic boundary of a specific linguistic feature. The coincidence of these vowel isoglosses is one way to divide this dialect region.

The example with Ostschweizerisch offers one intralinguistic method of dividing dialects, using vowel phonology. Reichel (2002) presented another perspective of compiling language atlases. She looked at directional adverbs as a method of research to assist with atlas compilation. The specific atlas she examined is the Bayerischer

Sprachatlas, the language atlas of Bavaria. Collecting information for these language atlases involves questions of phonology, lexicon, morphology, and syntax. Her paper focused on locational adverbs. The categorization of these adverbs involves the phenomenon of deixis, in that the meaning of the adverbs is dependent on the reference with respect to the speaker. By overlaying maps delineating these differing deictic adverbs, one can produce an isogloss based on deixis, which she argues plays a larger role in dialect than in the “standard” language. For example, drinnen in the “standard” means inside and does not differentiate speaker perspective. In Bavarian dialect, on the other hand, drina means the speaker is not inside whereas herina means the speaker is also inside.

Besides interpreting boundaries between dialects, there are several other areas of traditional dialectal research. One of these is dialect lexicology (Niebaum and Macha,

2006, p. 114-124). An example of this is the ongoing compilation of the Thüringisches

Wörterbuch (Spangenberg, 1965). This is a dictionary of lexical items specific to the

Thüringisch dialect region. The entries in this dictionary are not just simple translations from dialect to standard and vice versa. Each entry includes detailed information as to the etymology of the word and the geographic distribution. It also provides semantic and syntactic details as well as examples of how the word is used in dialect.

Up until this point, I have only discussed dialects in one dimension, the geographic distribution. This is the first dimension and is also known as the horizontal dimension. However, there is a second dimension to be considered, and that is the vertical dimension, which looks at the social aspects of dialect use. While the first dimension only considers the areal geography of dialect, the second dimension also takes the effect of social groups into consideration (Niebaum and Macha, 2006, p. 125-130).

An example of a project with two-dimensional dialect geography is the Mittelrheinischer

Sprachatlas (Bellman, 1994). This project looks at the second dimension by taking age groups, social class, and profession into consideration. Similarly, Macha (2005) has an ongoing research project where he takes the setting into consideration. He is studying the language use situation in northern Germany (Low German dialect area). He is visiting homes in 54 different towns in northern Germany to study language use “in vivo”. This enables him to examine language use in its native environment. He finds the situation in northern Germany to be similar to the German-speaking part of Switzerland in that given a certain situation, an individual will either choose to use a dialect or a standard variety but not both. This is in contrast to southern Germany, Austria, and parts of central

Germany, where there is an integrated use of dialect. Dialectal elements are mixed in with the standard variety.

Syntax is often not thought to vary between dialects as much as other areas of grammar. Niebaum and Macha discuss the lack of research in this area (2006, p. 131-

140). However, a recent example of syntactic research is the Syntaktischer Atlas der deutschen Schweiz (Glaser, 1997). In this project, questionnaires were distributed that asked about sentence structure. This included questions on the use of pronouns, complex verbal constructions such as infinitive clauses, and verb placement in complex predicates and relative clauses. This atlas reports on the distribution of specific syntactic structures in the German-speaking area of Switzerland. This project has expanded the methods used for studying syntactic variation in dialects and has also contributed to the overall understanding of grammar. One study by Abraham (2002) did not examine syntax directly but sentence structure as it relates to function in discourse. His study investigated characteristics in spoken German that differ from written German. He argues that certain structural deviations of spoken dialect as compared to the written standard have a specific discourse function. More specifically, the listener must be able to distinguish discourse functions such as topics (theme) from foci (rheme). One aspect that makes German difficult to parse is the fact that it is a Subject-Object-Verb language.

Placing the finite verb at the end seems to be counter-natural. The study of parsing investigates the linear and cohesive features that facilitate the flow of information in clauses. In written German, the verb final feature poses no problem for the reader since the whole sentence is presented at once. However, spoken German would be more difficult to parse if no structural modifications were made. He argues that the structural

10 modifications in spoken dialect enable easier parsing. For example, in Austrian-Bavarian dialect, dislocation and extraposition share a common discourse function in that they are both thematic. Elements within a sentence are moved, for example to the beginning or to the end, to stress their importance to the listener. Multiple negation, found in Austrian-

Bavarian and the Alemannic dialect, have a similar function of stressing the theme to the listener. This only occurs in indefinite clausal arguments where the negation is incorporated to kein. Because nicht can only occur before definite noun phrases with thematic discourse status and kein before indefinite noun phrases with rhematic discourse status, the double negation in indefinite clausal arguments is another example of discourse function that is necessary to stress the negation of the theme to the listener.

Abraham’s (2002) analysis of the auxiliary verb tun in Upper German shows that tun has the function of separating the discourse categories of theme and rheme. His study shows that certain spoken dialectal features that deviate from the written standard enable an easier flow of information from the speaker to the listener.

All of the above studies are synchronic, meaning they report on findings at one point in time. Historical dialectology, on the other hand, is diachronic. In other words, it looks at the development of a dialect and how it has changed over time (Niebaum and

Macha, 2006, p. 141-147). One example of this is the Historischer Südwestdeutscher

Sprachatlas that looks at the evolution of dialects in southwest Germany (Kleiber, 1979).

Wagener (2002) has an ongoing project at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache that looks at real-time changes in the use of German dialects. The study investigates how the spoken

German of individual speakers in different regions has changed over four decades and how it has changed over several generations. He is currently looking for subjects from

11 the original dialect recordings in the Zwirner Korpus from the 1950s and 1960s. There were over 4000 recordings in this corpus and Wagener predicts that he will find about

1000 of those subjects who are still living today and would be willing to participate in a follow-up interview. Two interviews are conducted with these subjects. The first interview aims to reconstruct the speakers' sociolinguistic biographies based on their life experiences. The second interview focuses on eliciting structures that were produced in the original interviews decades earlier. He is also contacting the children and grandchildren of these original subjects to create a database spanning up to six generations. One example of change that he finds involves the most salient phonological feature of Low German dialects: the retention of the West Germanic voiceless stops /p/,

/t/, and /k/, as in Dorp, dat, and maken. There appears to be a drastic decrease in the production of this dialectal feature. Participants are shifting to the standard variants of

Dorf, das, and machen. This can be viewed as a shift from Low German dialect to the regional spoken standard. This shift in the daily use of Low German has happened in the last decades. His preliminary conclusion is that the German language is shifting from multiple local dialects towards fewer regional varieties. This means that the likelihood that one would encounter full dialect speakers is less common today than in the past.

2.2 Perceptual Dialectology

The preceding section provided a general overview of dialectology in German.

This overview is necessary as it builds the foundation required to perform perceptual studies. The following section reviews studies that belong to the sociolinguistic discipline of perceptual dialectology. This is a branch of folk linguistics that studies what

12 ordinary (non-linguist) people know, think, and feel about language. It is important to identify whether there are differences between people’s perception of a language variety and reality. For example, when a person has an attitude towards a dialect, it is important to distinguish whether they are in fact able to recognize that dialect and are judging that dialect based on its linguistic differences or whether they are judging based on common stereotypes. This can be taken into consideration in language pedgogy. For the first language (L1) classroom, teachers can be educated to use dialect as an adjunct and a learning tool for students as opposed to seeing it as a hinderance to learning the standard language. For the L2 classroom, introducing language varieties (i.e., dialects) can make students aware of this variation and may prevent the students from developing negative attitudes towards non-standard varieties. The first part of this section will involve studies with native speakers of languages other than German. The next part will be German studies with native speakers. The final part will discuss studies with L2 learners.

2.2.1 Perceptual Dialectology in L1 Speakers

The most recent study in perceptual dialectology is one from Pearce (2009). He sent out a questionnaire to 1600 respondents in northeast England. The respondents either completed the questionnaire online or by mail (hard copy). They were provided with a perceptual dialect map that outlined 51 different areas in northeast England. There were three broad areas that were further subdivided into smaller perceptual zones. The

51 areas are either larger centres of population or locations possibly known for salient features. The respondents were asked to evaluate the similarity or difference of the speech in a particular area on a map compared with the speech of their hometown.

Pearce (2009) stressed the importance of “hometown” to mean “probably the place you grew up in”. This was to avoid confusion for those who lived in more than one place.

The respondents rated the areas on a six-point scale on degree of difference (1=exactly the same, 6=completely different). This type of questionnaire survey seemed very practical and efficient and did reach 1600 respondents but, as Pearce points out, is mostly likely skewed to the upper end of the social scale because the majority of questionnaires were completed online. Demographics showed that only about half of the population in this area has internet access. He compared his findings with dialectological and variationist studies, and his results suggest that the informants are in fact responding to

“real” linguistic variation in their judgements. This showed that native speakers are aware of how their language varies geographically even based on a map alone.

Boughton (2006) studied northern urban French pronunciation. As with Pearce's

(2009) study above, she is interested in the folk perception of variation. However, she used authentic voice samples as opposed to the mental mapping that Pearce (2009) and others used. The respondents were from the Pays de la Loire region of northwest France.

The voice samples were scripted speech from the cities of Nancy and Rennes.

Respondents were asked to identify the regional background of the speaker, and whether they thought the voice was of a person of rural or urban origin. They were asked broadly framed questions regarding accent, social class, region of origin, and pleasantness.

Contrary to what Pearce (2009) found, her results indicated that the respondents made generally inaccurate judgements based on social stereotypes. However, they were able to detect some differences between Nancy and Rennes speakers. An interesting result was with the urban/rural perceptions. A standard variety was associated with an urban origin,

14 whereas a non-standard variety was associated with rurality when a regional difference was perceived, but with urbanity if a social class difference was perceived. This points to a binary social meaning of “urban”: higher class with a standard accent or lower class with a non-standard accent. The results show that there is an urban/rural gap between empirical reality and beliefs, which are partially founded on social stereotypes. She poses the question “to what extent is perception reality?” (p. 300). She concludes that folk perceptions may have little basis for empirical reality but nevertheless have considerable impact on language attitudes and behaviour.

Williams, Garrett, and Coupland (1999) looked at language variation in Wales.

They discuss two aspects of dialectology research. Dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics are concerned with the distribution of dialect forms, whereas language attitude studies are concerned with the perceptual reality and beliefs. They argue that an adequate account of social impact would require both dimensions in integrated research designs. Recognition of dialects in general is part of one's sociolinguistic competence.

They discuss the broader issues in terms of the development of attitudes and the relationship between awareness and attitudes. The social significance begins in adolescence, but awareness of language variation begins from primary education. Young adulthood is an interesting developmental period because teenagers are sensitizing themselves to sociolinguistic norms and reappraising their own sociolinguistic identities.

An interesting counterargument is that dialect recognition has no effect on attitude and it is the sounds that trigger evaluative reactions. The authors defined recognition as the

“cognitive mapping of audible speech features onto individuals' records of the usage norms of particular communities” (p. 357). For example, a person can have no

15 knowledge of a language but can differentiate social class based on the sounds. The argument is that phonetic and prosodic realizations allow for interpretation of sociodemographic categories. Nevertheless, they argue, recognizing a dialect is inseparable from affective evaluative processes. Their study looked at young adults' recognition of English dialect varieties in Wales compared to teachers as a control group.

Two stories from each of six regions of Wales were selected as representative, along with

Received Pronunciation (RP) as the standard. The listening tapes with the stories were played in random sequence. The subjects were given a questionnaire evaluating each speaker and where the speaker lived. They were given a choice of seven answers: the six regions plus RP and a blank choice for “don't know” or another answer. Their answers would form the dialectology part of the study. They also evaluated for Welshness and likability. This was devised to evaluate language attitudes. They found that speakers with a dialect more similar to their own were rated higher for likability. They attributed that to affiliation with the in-group community. However, since the recognition rates were generally low for the young adults compared to the teachers, there were “claiming” and “denial” processes at work. Interestingly, the young adult may have misidentified the speaker as the in-group and therefore liked the dialect or misidentified the speaker as the out-group and therefore did not like the dialect. In general, the young adults lacked a unified perspective on awareness and recognition. The general finding that young adults have a lower level of recognition than teachers was accounted for by less exposure to dialects.

Recognition of dialects can play an important role in sociolinguistic research.

Preston (1999) argues that language attitude research must determine where respondents

16 thought regional voices are from, thus integrating dialectology and language attitudes together. Researchers need to know if respondents have a mental construct of a “place” where the voice could be from. For example, if a voice from New England were presented to a Californian and judged to be cold, fast, and intelligent, one can conclude that Californians judged the speaker in that way. However, one cannot determine what

Californians think about New England voices, because they may not agree that the voice is from New England. In fact, they may not even have a concept of New England speech.

Preston (1999) argues that responses to language and language varieties operate along a continuum of awareness. He identifies four relatively independent areas of awareness: availability (attention to linguistic features), accuracy (attention to linguistic facts), detail

(from global to detailed), and control (“imitative” ability). In a previous study, he first had respondents draw maps of the US where they believe language varieties are different.

He then formulated a generalized map with approximate boundaries by overlaying the maps. He asked the first group of respondents to give labels for the different varieties on this isogloss. These descriptors were then presented as pairs in a six-point semantic differential task to the second group of respondents, undergraduate students in Michigan.

For example, one pair was incorrect/correct. The scale went from “a” to “f”, with “a” being strongly agree with the dialect being incorrect and “f” being strongly agree with it being correct. Southern speech was found to have the distinctiveness of being

“incorrect”. The north and south were nearly opposites, the north being highly prestigious and the south highly stigmatized. In this experiment, judges rated regions that are cognitively real. However, instead of using voice samples, he used category names and the outlined region of a map. The question of identification is an open question and

17 has been left for further study. His investigation was on stereotypes, which he claims is one approach to the larger question of identification and attitudes towards regional varieties.

2.2.2 Perceptual Dialectology in German L1 Speakers

The differences between dialect and standard language in German exist along a continuum as can be seen in the model in Figure 2.1, adapted from Spiekermann (2007, p. 120).

Figure 2.1: Model of Region Varieties

d1, d2, d3, d4, d5, d6, ..., dx

r1, r2, r3, r4, ..., ry

rs1, rs2, ..., rsz

nst1, nst2, nst3 st

The true standard (st) on the bottom of the figure is a theoretical construct and does not really exist in a practical sense. The national standards (nst) are the prescribed standards in the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This is what is generally found in written language. From there, the language branches out into regional standards (rs), regional colloquial speech (r), and finally to full dialect (d).

There are no distinct boundaries between varieties in this model. Differentiation along the continuum is dependent on several factors: the communication radius (the geographic area in which the speech is understood), the use of dialectal features, the situation in which it is used, and the linguistic norms. There are two opposing forces in this linguistic continuum with language regulating bodies pushing language use towards the “standard” and sociolinguistic factors such as regional identity pushing language use towards dialect.

It should be noted that other than the national varieties, linguistic boundaries are not necessarily geographically contained by political borders.

Several recent studies have been performed in perceptual dialectology of German.

Before delving into studies on the language attitudes in present-day Germany, I would like to illustrate ways in which language attitudes towards certain varieties can change over time by drawing on an example from German literature. It is interesting to see that even in the field of literature there has been a focus on dialectology. Eckhart’s (2006) study in literature helps to explain how attitudes towards language variation can change over time. Biases often change with a dialect’s wave of prestige or trough of stigmatization. Eckhart (2006) discussed the Saxon dialect in post-wall East German literature. Her paper helps to explain some of the stereotypes of this highly stigmatized dialect and its changing prestige. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, the Saxon dialect was considered to be the “finest German”, partly because it was the heartland of

Reformation. After Saxony lost the Seven-Year War (1756-1763), the shift of power to

Prussia caused characteristics of the Saxon dialect (e.g., the singing intonation and the weak pronunciation of the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, and /k/) to be looked down upon. Since

German reunification, there has been a need to find a regional identity in East Germany.

Two generations of writers have tried to reclaim this identity by exploring local life, which includes the Saxon dialect. They attempt to look at German history with a specific

Saxon perspective. For example, André Kubiczek's novel Junge Talente tells the story of a man from Saxony who moves to East Berlin and avoids speaking because his Saxon dialectal pronunciation would give him away as a foreigner to Berlin. After reunification, Saxons realize that not only the Prussians, but also most Germans look

20 down on them for their dialect and draw conclusions about a supposed Saxon character.

Two generations of Saxon writers from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) celebrate Saxon heritage in their works. The first group clings to their heritage due to emotional self-assurance, while the second group combines regional identification with a political cause.

Some factors than can shift a language variety towards a standard language or towards a dialect along the standard-dialect continuum are power and wealth as illustrated with the previous example with Sächsisch. This literary example shows the relationship between language and power: more prestigious language varieties are those spoken by the elite at a given time. Saxony was once a powerful state and its language variety was considered to be a standard but since Saxony lost power, its language variety has evolved into a stigmatized dialect. This example demonstrates that the more powerful the language community, the higher a chance it has of becoming a standardized form, whereas those varieties spoken by less powerful individuals can become stigmatized. The other relationship is Bourdieu’s (1991) notion of language and symbolic power. The power of one’s words is in his/her language. One who speaks a standard language is likely to get more respect than one who speaks a stigmatized dialect.

On one extreme, a person may have brilliant ideas but has no respect simply because he/she expresses them in a stigmatized dialect. In other words, it may not be that what is being said that is powerful but rather how it is said. The power of one dialect over another depends on which language communities have power and wealth at a given time.

One area of interest then, is the possible change in attitudes about language of

Germans since reunification. Plewnia and Rothe (2009) looked at opinions and attitudes

21 of Germans regarding their own language and its varieties. Communication difficulties and linguistic differences between the east and the west in Germany has become a popular topic since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This study reports on whether there is a difference in attitudes and opinions between people in former East and West Germany.

Forty years of political division left a mental construct that many refer to as the metaphor

“wall in the head”. The researchers surveyed 2000 subjects with a questionnaire containing over 60 questions regarding language. The subjects were asked about many aspects of language including dialects, language use, language change, and foreign languages based on their perception. Plewnia and Rothe (2009) analyzed their data by dividing the subjects into two groups: east and west. Both groups found differences between north and south as well as east and west, but westerners perceived a larger difference between east and west than easterners did. To rate certain aspects of the

German language, the authors used a 5-point bipolar scale of antonym adjectives. For example, one pair of antonym adjectives was beautiful - ugly. The 5-point scale ran from

1-most beautiful to 5-ugliest. In terms of regional variation, the author chose to investigate Bairisch (Bavarian) and Sächsisch (Saxon), two dialects that tend to stand out in popular surveys. While some distinct differences exist between westerners and easterners, the general trend is that there appear to be more similarities than differences in the way they rate their language. The conclusion is that time will eventually even out these differences, and that westerners and easterners will see things from a more unified perspective.

Similarly, Dailey-O'Cain (1999) hypothesized that attitudes toward language variation in Germany are strongly affected by the complex socio-political situation. Her

22 study took place in the summer of 1995, five years after reunification. She gathered data from 2218 informants in 44 different German towns. She asked the informants about language varieties from 34 different regions without an audio stimulus. The informants were asked to rate the correctness and pleasantness of speech on a scale of 1 to 6. She also recorded a conversation with each informant about language attitudes to obtain qualitative data. In her data analysis, she looked at the mean ratings for correctness and pleasantness for northwesterners, northeasterners, central westerners and central easterners. Interestingly, she ignored southerners. In general, she found that westerners think Eastern varieties are less correct but easterners do not perceive much of a difference. This distinction was also supported by the qualitative data. Most westerners also perceive Eastern varieties to be less pleasant. Easterners, on the other hand, perceive differences in pleasantness more along the north-south axis than the east-west axis. In a map task, she presented informants with a map of Germany with only cities labelled on it, and they were asked to draw boundaries where they thought there was a perceivable difference in dialect. This revealed an obvious boundary along the former east-west border. In the qualitative data, westerners cited Eastern varieties as being unfamiliar and that was the main reason that they found them less correct and less pleasant. Easterners did not mention this. They probably had more exposure to Western German varieties through western television and radio. In addition, easterners had a strong motivation to visit the west after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Research with younger subjects might shed light on the developing awareness of language variation and the roles experience and exposure play. Lameli's (2009) study deals with the conceptualization of language distribution in space. The study took place

23 in Kassel in northern Hessen. The subjects were grade 9 high school students between the ages of 15 and 17. A control group consisted of older subjects from a hiking group between 61 and 75 years old. Kassel is a unique location because the city itself is relatively dialect free but sits 30 to 45 km from three different dialect areas: Westfälisch,

Ostfälisch, and Thüringisch. The subjects were first asked to name as many German language varieties as possible. This was done to determine the subjects' general awareness of what language varieties exist. The second part of the study involved listening to audio stimuli and pinpointing on a blank map where they thought the speaker was from based on the dialectal features. In general, the older control group had more knowledge about language varieties and were more accurate in the recognition of dialect.

However, the younger subjects, already at 16 years of age, did have a conceptualization of language variation and distribution in space. They were not as accurate as the older control group. This shows that more experience with dialects improves accuracy in recognition.

Teschke (2009) made use of audio stimuli in her study in a different way. Her study looked at whether identification of regional varieties of German is possible based on intonation alone. Dialectal differences on the segmental level have been widely studied but differences in prosody and intonation less so. In this experiment, urban colloquial speech was collected from the cities of Hamburg, Mannheim, and Freiburg, corresponding to the Low German, Central German, and Upper German dialect areas respectively. Subjects were recruited from these same areas and presented with the de- lexicalized audio stimuli (i.e., stimuli that were filtered to remove segmental information) containing only the prosodic data. The subjects were asked to choose whether they

24 thought the speaker was from Hamburg, Mannheim, or Freiburg based on the prosodic data alone. In the data analysis, the subjects were divided into the Hamburg group, the

Mannheim group, and the Freiburg group. Neither their own regional speech nor the regional speech in the other areas was better recognized. Recognition was generally poor but discrimination appeared to be possible. For example, they were not able to recognize a speaker as originating from Hamburg but they could tell that the speaker’s prosody was different from that of a speaker from Mannheim.

The final study in this section looks at perception of language variation as it relates to language education. Davies (2000) studied the language awareness of teachers in the Central dialect area of Pfälzisch. Since many parents leave it up to educators to teach children the standard language, it is expected that teachers should have a systematic knowledge of the major divergences between the spoken vernacular and the standard.

This is not only necessary to educate the children, but because language also has symbolic and affective meanings, a teacher may harm a child’s self image by expressing negative attitudes towards a non-standard dialect (p. 121). The teacher’s lack of awareness can also create barriers and children may be marginalized. Linguistic variation should therefore be viewed as a potentially valuable resource rather than a detriment to the child’s learning. Children may also be more motivated if they see the standard as an addition to their repertoire rather than a replacement to their vernacular (p.

122). The actual study was a questionnaire distributed to 33 teachers in the Pfälzisch dialect area. There was a series of nine questions divided into four parts. The first part asked about the content of teacher training courses. The second part asked about how well teachers cope when dealing with students who speak non-standard dialects. The

25 third part inquired about using a non-standard dialect as the medium of instruction, and the final part asked about the teachers’ understanding of the basic concepts of sociolinguistics. Sociolinguists view a non-standard dialect as an opportunity.

Specifically, it enables the expression of one’s identity, and multilingualism in general is a valuable resource. The results showed that teacher-training colleges have done little to prepare teachers to address the needs of dialect-speaking students. Linguistics courses are optional, which points to the downplay of the subject’s importance. Lack of preparation means that the treatment of non-standard dialects is sporadic and unsystematic. Unfortunately, the standard enjoys a privileged status and dialect is seen negatively, only for those not proficient in the standard, rather than more positively as an additional variety for their repertoire.

2.2.3 L2 Speakers

As can be seen from many of the studies with native speakers, studies can be performed without any audio stimuli. I am assuming that the same level of dialect awareness and recognition is not possible with L2 learners. Perceptual dialectology with

L2 learners would therefore require some kind of audio stimuli. This is an interesting field because L2 learners have not necessarily developed the same biases and attitudes as native speakers.

Continuing along similar lines as the end of the previous section, I will now report on a study that has language pedagogy implications but this time with L2 learners.

Spiekermann (2007) discusses the variation in the German language with respect to teaching German as a second language in the classroom and looks at a number of

26 sociolinguistic studies he has done in the Freiburg area. Recall his Figure 2.1 on the

German language continuum. He took a diachronic look at regional standard speech in the Freiburg area. He finds that compared to the Pfeffer-Korpus in 1961, there is a general decrease in the use of primary substandard characteristics (mainly phonological variation) but an increase in secondary substandard characteristics (features found in colloquial speech such as shortening and contractions). He then looked at how L1

German and L2 German students at the University of Freiburg judge certain syntactic variants in dialect as compared to the standard. He found that L2 speakers in general judge these variants to be less correct than the L1 speakers. He attributes this to less exposure and awareness to dialectal variation. He concludes that educators of German as a second language should, therefore, keep in mind that German is not one homogenous language, and that the content of courses should be dependent on many factors including the goals of the course, the goals of the students, and the location of the course.

Eisenstein (1986) investigated the role of dialect variation in the acquisition of

American English by adult L2 learners. The first series of experiments looked the learners' developing ability to detect dialect differences. This ability is based on personal experience and plays a crucial role in the development of dialect related stereotypes. The second series of experiments looked at dialect intelligibility. The results have implications on the performance of learners in a real world context. They need to have a sense of specific linguistic and cultural variables to convey meaning accurately and to interpret the language of others. Eisenstein (1986) hypothesizes that the ability to recognize deviance from the norm increases with proficiency. The students' reactions to dialects were assessed through a dialect discrimination task, a speaker evaluation task,

27 and a personal interview. In addition, participants completed an intelligibility task. The three varieties she tested were standard American English, Black English, and New

Yorkese. Seventy-four L2 English subjects were recruited with proficiency levels of advanced beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Native speakers were used as a control group. For the dialect discrimination task, she presented students with 12 sentence pairs: either the same sentence repeated twice in the same dialect or in two different ones, one standard and one non-standard. The students were asked to judge whether the same dialect was heard or whether they were different and if different which one sounded better. She expected that participants would judge the standard to sound better. Overall, the learners' scores were quite high. Differences in the level of proficiency, gender of the listener, and dialect were significant. In the speaker evaluation task, the students listened to a reading of a passage in the different language varieties and were asked to evaluate the speaker on ten different 7-point scales relating to education, economics, social class, and personality traits. They were also asked the likely occupation and the extent to which they would like to associate with the speaker. Four factors emerged: socioeconomics, friendship, personality, and physical appearance. Relative judgements of learners mirrored the native group, and as proficiency increased, negative judgements of non- standard language became more negative. In the personal interview, the tapes were played again and the learners were asked to choose one of ten pictures that best represented the speaker. They were then asked a series of open-ended questions to gain insights into their attitudes. Again, the reactions paralleled those of the native speakers with increasing proficiency. In the intelligibility part, six verbal monologues were played and the learners answered eight comprehension questions each. Black English was

28 consistently more difficult for learners to understand than standard and New Yorkese.

The results showed that dialect differences in the L2 can present problems to the L2 learner including variable intelligibility and negative attitudes towards some varieties.

Second language learners can also encounter problems in the real world when encountering dialect speakers for the first time. Putz (2007) looked at an area in northern

Italy where people speak the German dialect of Südtirol. She discusses understanding, misunderstanding, and not understanding of German dialect expressions. Her study took place in family physician offices in which the doctors speak Italian as their L1 with

German being their L2. Their patients are monolingual speakers of the German dialect.

She argues that in communication, understanding, misunderstanding, and not understanding lie along a continuum without clear boundaries between them. For example, even native speakers of a language do not always have 100% understanding, but they understand enough to continue the conversation. In this example, it is difficult to measure the exact amount of understanding in the conversation. However, she argues that there are certain verbal and non-verbal cues that can be used to analyze the conversation. Since conversation is an interactive process, a listener may explicitly state that he/she has not understood the speaker, for instance. There are explicit and implicit cues to determine not understanding. Her analysis of conversations taking place at medical offices between doctor and patient showed difficulty in understanding between the L1 Italian physicians and the Südtirol dialect-speaking patients. All L2 learners would face the same difficulties in the real world when encountering monolingual dialect speakers.

2.3 Diglossia

Since my study will involve dialect speakers, it is important to discuss diglossia.

Diglossia is a situation in which two language varieties are used in one language community. In the case of the German-speaking regions, I am referring to a “standard” language and a dialect. Diglossia occurs to different extents within the German-speaking region. The German-speaking part of Switzerland is an example of true diglossia. Swiss standard German is used in writing, and Swiss German dialect is used in speaking. As

Macha (2005) noted, the Low German dialect regions is becoming more similar to the situation in Switzerland where dialect is used at home and a regional standard everywhere else. The rest of the German-speaking region including the Central and

Upper dialect areas have dialect characteristics mixed in with the regional standards such that a true diglossia may not exist. The following study looks at the potential difficulties

L2 learners may face in a diglossic environment.

An interesting situation exists for L2 learners in Switzerland where a diglossic environment exists. Dialect is spoken at home and the standard is taught in schools.

Ender, Li, and Straßl (2007) looked at the specific diglossic situation in the German- speaking part of Switzerland. This is an area where a distinct dialect coexists with the standard variety. Ender et al. (2007) developed a language test specifically aimed at primary school immigrant children to determine whether the dialect environment influences their acquisition of written and spoken standard German. Many tests have been developed to evaluate language skills of primary school children but none of them takes into account the influence of a dialect environment. Ender et al. (2007) evaluated two groups of immigrant children aged 9-11 as compared to a native control group. The

30 two groups were L1 Turkish children and L1 Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian children. After a demographic survey and an interview regarding language use in various situations, researchers administered their test to determine whether the dialect influences the morphology and syntax in written and spoken tasks. In general, they found that the immigrant children make more mistakes than the native control group, but the majority of the mistakes appear to be due to L1 influence rather than dialectal influence. Therefore, the diglossic environment does not appear to pose more problems for L2 learners.

2.4 German Dialect Variation

Before looking at specific linguistic features of each of the six dialect regions that

I will be using as stimuli in my experiment, I will first discuss some of the phonological changes that occurred during the evolution of the German language, which affect the geographic distribution of dialect regions that we see today.

One of the most important changes that distinguished Old High German (OHG,

750-1050) from other West Germanic languages was the Second Sound Shift (Die zweite

Lautverschiebung). The voiceless stops [p], [t], and [k] became the affricates [pf], [z], and [kx] when in initial position, medially following a consonant or geminated /pp/, /tt/ and /kk/. Elsewhere, they became the fricatives [f], [s], and [x] (Fagan, 2009, p. 188).

The sound shift began in the southern portion of the German-speaking territory and petered out by the time it reached the Low German area. The affricate [kx] affected only the Alemannisch area. The extent of this shift determines the classification of dialects today as Upper, Central and Low (Fagan, 2009, p. 189). See below for the discussion on classification of modern German dialects.

A sound shift that occurred during Middle High German (MHG, 1050-1350) was the palatalization of [s] to [ʃ]. This also began in the Upper German region and spread northward. The Low German dialects in the north still retain the unpalatalized [s] as in

[s]pitz and [s]tein (Fagan, 2009, p. 196).

During the period of Early New High German (ENHG, 1350-1650), two changes in vowel phonology occurred, diphthongization and monophthongization.

Diphthongization began in the Bairisch area and spread north to the Central dialect areas.

The long vowels /î/, /û/ and /iu/ became the diphthongs /ei/ or /ai/, /au/ and /eu/ or /äu/ respectively (wîn > wein, hûs > haus, hiute > heute) (König, 2007, p. 147). This change did not affect Alemannisch or the Low German dialects. The other vowel change was monophthongization and this affected only the Central dialects. The diphthongs /ie/, /uo/ and /üe/ became the long vowels [iː], [uː] and [yː] (lieb, guot, brüeder > lieb, gut, brüder)

(König, 2007, p. 147).

Today, modern German dialects are classified into Upper (Oberdeutsch), Central

(Mitteldeutsch) or Low (Niederdeutsch) German dialects, as determined by the Second

Sound Shift. Because Low German distinguishes itself from Central and Upper German by displaying a complete absence of this sound shift, Central and Upper German can be grouped together as High German dialects. This shift began in the south and went north.

The shift that reached the furthest north was the shift from [k] to [x]. The ik/ich isogloss delineates this shift. North of this we see the unshifted ik and south of this we see ich in final position. This division is known as the Ürdingen Line (Ürdinger Linie), after the town of Ürdingen where this delineation crosses the Rhine. Medially, the [k] did not spread as far north and this is represented by the maken/machen isogloss. This line is

32 known as the Benrath Line (Benrather Linie), named after Benrath where the line crosses the Rhine. Low German dialects lie north of the Benrath Line. Upper German dialects lie south of the Appel/Apfel isogloss that is the Germersheim Line (Germersheimer

Linie). The Central dialects lie between these two isoglosses (Fagan, 2009, p. 231-232).

The remaining isoglosses seen in Figure 2.2, adapted from Fagan (2009), play a role in dividing dialect areas further (p. 231). Two other sound changes that play a role are monophthongization and diphthongization as mentioned above.

Figure 2.2: Isoglosses of the High German Consonant Shift

Key:

1. ik/ich isogloss (Ürdingen Linie)

2. maken/machen isogloss (Benrath Linie)

3. Dorp/Dorf isogloss (Eifel Barrier)

4. dat/das isogloss (Hunsrück Barrier)

5. Appel/Apfel isogloss (Germersheim Line)

6. Pund/Fund isogloss

Upper German dialects lie south of the Appel/Apfel isogloss or Germersheim

Line. These dialects underwent the full extent of the Second Sound Shift as commonly illustrated by the words ich, machen, Dorf, das, Apfel, and Pfund (Fagan, 2009, p. 233).

They can be divided into three areas: Alemannisch, Fränkisch, and Bairsch. I will only be discussing Alemannisch and Bairisch here because I chose them as stimuli for my experiment. Both Alemannisch and Bairisch were not affected by monophthongization.

They retain the MHG diphthongs (e.g., lieb and guet in Alemannisch, liab and guat in

Bairisch). Alemannisch was also not affected by diphthongization, it retains the MHG monophthongs /î/, /û/ and /iu/. Bairisch, on the other hand, was affected by diphthongization so we do see the diphthongs /ei/ or /ai/, /au/ and /eu/ or /äu/ (Fagan,

2009, p. 235).

Central German dialects lie north of the Appel/Apfel isogloss or Germersheim

Line but south of both the ik/ich Ürdingen Line and the maken/machen Benrath Line.

The Benrath Line is the commonly cited division from Low German dialects. This line crosses the Rhine at Benrath and runs through the area of Magdeburg and Berlin. The

Germersheim Line to the south starts south of Saarbrücken and runs north-east to the south of Erfurt to the Czech border (Fagan, 2009, p. 237). The Pund/Fund isogloss runs north-south just to the east of Kassel and divides this area into west (Westmitteldeutsch) and east (Ostmitteldeutsch). Monophthongization affects all the central dialects, which have also undergone diphthongization.

Low German dialects lie north of the Benrath Line. This area covers the region from the Dutch-German border on the west, the Danish-German border to the north and the German-Polish border to the east. Characteristic of the Low German dialects is the

35 absence of the Second Sound Shift (Fagan, 2009, p. 238). In these dialects we find ik, maken, Dorp, dat, Appel and Pund (Fagan, 2009, p. 239). The exception is the area between the Ürdingen Line and the Benrath Line, where some monosyllabic words with

[k] in final position have shifted to [x]. There is also the lack of diphthongization. They display the initial [s] before a consonant instead of the [ʃ] seen in Central and Upper

German dialects. There is a single plural ending for verbs in the present tense, -et in the west (Westniederdeutsch) and –en in the east (Ostniederdeutsch). There is also only a single non-nominative case for personal pronouns. In Ostfälisch, it is the accusative mik and dik and in all others, it is the dative mir and dir (Fagan, 2009, p. 239). Characteristic of Westfälisch are two different long a-vowels. One is the old velar â as in the word

Schåp ‘Schaf’. The other is the palatal ā as in maken (Niebaum and Macha, 2006, p.

200). In Mecklenburgisch, the diphthongs ai has replaced the old ê in ‘lieb’ and au has replaced the ô in ‘Bruder’ (Niebaum and Macha, 2006, p. 221).

2.5 Summary

In this chapter, I have provided an overview of German dialectology with a focus on perceptual dialectology. The current study is a contribution to this growing field.

With a solid foundation of traditional dialectological studies behind us that have identified specific linguistic differences among dialects, we now have the knowledge and methods to undertake perceptual studies. The results of perceptual studies of this sort with native speakers have shown that the perception of variation within a language is not only affected by awareness and exposure, but also by prejudices relating to familiarity, prestige and stigmatization. Unlike in previous studies, however, participants in the

36 current study are L2 learners immersed in an L1 environment. Eisenstein’s (1986) study was one perceptual dialectology study that examined L2 learners, but her participants were all living in the L2 environment. Previous research has not been performed to determine whether L2 learners have any real attitudes towards particular varieties. My study will provide insight into this issue. A comparison with the results of previous studies will allow me to determine whether L2 learner attitudes are similar to or different from those L1 speakers, whose attitudes are influenced by the complex socio-political situation in Germany after reunification.

METHODOLOGY

The goal of this thesis is to study how L2 learners of German perceive language variation. To achieve this goal, an experiment was conducted consisting of three tasks that look at dialect discrimination, intelligibility, and language attitudes. The study is guided by four main research questions:

1. How are the students’ abilities to discriminate German dialect varieties from the

standard?

2. How well do students understand German dialect varieties?

3. What are the students’ attitudes towards German dialect varieties?

4. How do these abilities and attitudes correlate with language proficiency?

3.1 Participants

Research subjects were recruited from German courses at the university. I visited various German classes in the Fall 2011 semester to present the study. Subjects were all learners of German as an L2 and all spoke English as their L1, except for one Spanish L1 speaker, one Romanian L1 speaker, and two Russian L1 speakers. Interested subjects were asked to contact me to set up an appointment to meet in the psycholinguistics lab.

Subjects met with me for approximately one hour in the lab. Subjects were assigned a random four-digit subject number for anonymity. After giving both oral and written consent, the subject completed a standard Goethe Institut (2004) language placement test. This test was administered online and consists of thirty multiple-choice questions that evaluate language proficiency. The subjects were assigned a score out of

30 points based on their result on the test. Following the test, subjects completed a

38 language questionnaire online through www.surveymonkey.com. This questionnaire asked about biographical and demographic information. An important portion of this questionnaire included the subjects’ experience with the German language and awareness of language variation. See Table 3.1 below for a summary of the results of the proficiency test and information from the language background questionnaire. A total of

20 participants completed the experiment. All of the participants completed all of the tasks required of them.

Table 3.1: Summary of Language Proficiency and Background Questionnaire # Participants

Male 9 Gender Female 11

15-19 5

20-24 9 Age Group 25-29 5

30+ 1

English 16

Russian 2 L1 Spanish 1

Romanian 1

Mean 46.17 Goethe Test Result (%) SD 10.94

Total (N) 20

3.2 Procedure

The subjects then proceeded to the experimental part of the study. Data were collected on an Apple computer using Psyscope X (2010). The experiment consisted of three tasks to evaluate the subjects’ perception of German dialects. The first task evaluated the subjects’ ability to discriminate German dialect from the standard. The second task evaluated dialect intelligibility. Both of these tasks are based on the methodology used by Eisenstein (1986). The third task asked the subjects to subjectively rate dialects in terms of their quality and sound, and this is based on scales used by

Plewnia and Rothe (2009). I chose to evaluate six dialect regions in Germany, all of which are described in detail in Chapter 2 of this thesis: Westniederdeutsch and

Ostniederdeutsch which represent the Low German dialect area, Westmitteldeutsch and

Ostmitteldeutsch which represent the Central German dialect area, and Alemannisch and

Bairisch which represent the Upper German dialect area.

3.2.1 Task 1: Dialect Discrimination

In the first task, the subjects were presented with audio recordings of sentence pairs. These sentences were chosen from the list of Wenkersätze (Wenker sentences).

Wenkersätze are a list of forty sentences created by the linguist Georg Wenker in the late

19th century. His hypothesis was that this list of forty sentences had linguistic elements in them that would show regional variation across the German-speaking area. Since that time, written and later audio data were collected based on these Wenkersätze for dialectology research (Niebaum and Macha, 2006, p. 58-63). Of the forty sentences, I chose to use three for my study: Wenkersatz 9, 16, and 24. I chose these three sentences

41 because they were approximately the same length and contained subject matter that would still be relevant today. Some of the sentences, for example, contained subject matter that is out-dated (e.g., putting coal in the oven or agriculture), and one could not imagine hearing a person saying that sentence today. The three sentences I chose are seen below:

Wenkersatz 9: Ich bin selber bei der Frau gewesen und habe es ihr gesagt, und

sie sagte, sie wolle es auch ihrer Tochter sagen. (I was with the woman myself

and I told her and she said that she wants to also tell her daughter.)

Wenkersatz 16: Du bist noch nicht groß genug, um eine Flasche Wein allein

auszutrinken, du musst erst noch wachsen und größer werden. (You are not yet

big enough to drink a whole bottle of wine yourself. You must grow and get

bigger first.)

Wenkersatz 24: Als wir gestern abend heim/zurück kamen, da lagen die anderen

schon im Bett und waren fest eingeschlafen/am schlafen. (When we came home

last night, the others were already lying in bed and sound asleep.)

I acquired the audio recordings of these sentences from the Forschungzentrum

Deutscher Sprachatlas at the University of Marburg in Germany. Here, they have a large database of recordings of Wenkersätze collected over the years. I received recordings of the three sentences in six different diglossic dialect speakers: Westfälisch

(Westniederdeutsch), Mecklenburgisch-Vorpommersch (Ostniederdeutsch), Hessisch

(Westmitteldeutsch), Sächsisch (Ostmitteldeutsch), Alemannisch, and Bairsch. The

42 methodology employed when the data were gathered takes as its starting point the assumption that the diglossic speakers were in control of both the dialect and the standard language. As the goal of the task was to have subjects determine whether the sound files were identical or different, each of these speakers read the sentence in dialect and also in standard to prevent discrimination based on speaker alone. I received a total of 18 digitized audio files from the Forschungzentrum. These .wav files were adjusted in

Audacity (2008) to control for volume and then converted into .aif files for use with

Psyscope X (2010).

Each subject was presented with a sentence pair of the same speaker and same sentence. This sentence pair was either identical or different. For example, for the

Westfälisch speaker reading Wenkersatz 9, the pair would either be Westfälisch-Standard or Standard-Standard. After a screen of written instructions, the subject began with a practice sentence pair. Both the sentence (Wenkersatz 15) and the dialect (Ripaurisch) of the practice sentence were not used in the actual experiment.

The subject was first presented with a fixation screen that ensured the subject was ready to begin. After pressing a key on the keyboard there was an arbitrary 1000 millisecond pause before the first sentence was played. After another 1000 millisecond pause, the second sentence of the pair was played. Once the subject has heard both sentences, he/she was asked to identify whether the two sentences are identical or different by pressing keys on the keyboard. If the subject chose “identical”, the experiment would move on to the next sentence pair. If the subject chose “different”, he/she was asked whether the first sentence or the second sentence sounded “better”.

This wording was taken from the methodology used in Eisenstein’s (1986) study on

43 discrimination of American dialects by L2 speakers and was done to determine whether the subject could identify the standard sentence. My study differs from hers in that her subjects were immersed in the L2 environment whereas the subjects in this study are in an L1 environment.

The task involved a total of 36 sentence pairs: 6 dialects x 3 sentences x 2

(identical or different) = 36 sentence pairs. There were two different scripts of Psyscope.

The choice of script depended on the randomized subject number. If the subject number was odd, script “A” was run and if even, script “B” was run. The “A” script had the 36 sentence pairs presented in a pre-set random order. Each of the “different” pairs was also pre-set in terms of whether the subject heard the standard or the dialect sentence first.

The “B” script not only presented the sentence pairs in reverse order, but also reversed the sequence of the “different sentences”. For example, if the “A” script presented sentence 9 as Westfälisch-Standard, the “B” script presented Standard-Westfälisch. In other words, all subjects with even subject numbers heard the sentence pairs in the same order and those with odd numbers heard them in the reverse order and with the

“different” sentence pairs swapped.

It was important to determine whether there were differences between the sentence pairs and precisely what the differences were. I analyzed each sentence used in the discrimination task for speech rate and linguistic differences. Since not all of the speakers spoke at exactly the same speed, I ran a script (de Jong and Wempe, 2009) on

Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2012) to determine the number of syllables uttered per second in each of the sound files in order to see if speech rate has an effect on discrimination. See Table 3.2 below.

Table 3.2: Number of Syllables Uttered per Second for Each Sound File in Task 1

Satz 9 Satz 16 Satz 24 Mean SD Westniederdeutsch - 3.69 3.88 3.25 3.61 0.32 Standard Westniederdeutsch – 2.98 3.70 2.83 3.17 0.47 Dialect Ostniederdeutsch - 2.61 2.50 2.72 2.61 0.11 Standard Ostniederdeutsch – 2.63 2.57 2.59 2.60 0.03 Dialect Westmitteldeutsch - 2.23 2.23 3.00 2.49 0.44 Standard Westmitteldeutsch – 3.73 2.65 3.82 3.40 0.65 Dialect Ostmitteldeutsch – 2.79 2.88 3.03 2.90 0.12 Standard Ostmitteldeutsch – 2.44 2.79 3.39 2.87 0.48 Dialect Alemannisch – 3.27 2.88 2.73 2.96 0.28 Standard Alemannisch – 3.03 3.14 2.83 3.00 0.16 Dialect Bairisch – 2.64 2.20 2.02 2.29 0.32 Standard Bairisch – 3.68 2.72 2.95 3.12 0.50 Dialect

As can be seen from Table 3.2, based on the mean values, it appears that both the

Westmitteldeutsch and Bairisch speakers are speaking dialect a lot faster than standard.

These factors could be affecting the discrimination ability of the participants. However, statistical analysis fails to show any significant difference in the speech rate between standard and dialect in all of the speakers. I also transcribed all of the sound files to analyse which possible linguistic differences could affect the discrimination ability.

Transcriptions of all the audio files used in this task are included in Appendix B. Table

3.3 shows some of the major phonological and lexical differences I noted between standard and dialect in each of the speakers. Diphthongization was absent in Westfälisch

([biː], , [fruː], , [viːn], ) and in Mecklenburgisch ([fruː], ,

[viːn], ). The Second Sound Shift was also absent in Westfälisch ([ɪk], ,

[ʃlopn̩ ], ) and in Mecklenburgish ([ʃlœbn̩ ], ). These were expected for Low German dialects. There were also lexical differences for the word Flasche in

Westfälisch ([pʊlə]) and in Mecklenburgisch ([botl̩ ]). The word noch had differences in

Westfälisch ([ən bɪʃçən]), Mecklenburgisch ([bɛdn̩ ]), Hessisch ([nə bɪziː]), and Bairisch

([n̩ bɪzl̩ ]). For the umlaut in größer, one may expect unrounding to [gʁeːsɐ] in Upper

German dialects (Alemannisch and Bairsch) but this was not noted (König, 2007, p. 149).

Another unexpected variation from other Low German dialects is the retention of the diphthong in bei in Mecklenburgisch. An interesting note is the complete absence of the subject pronoun ich in Bairisch.

Table 3.3: Summary of Major Linguistic Differences Between Standard and Dialect 46

I also created isoglosses of the major differences illustrating the variation geographically. Figure 3.1 shows the location of the dialects used in this task.

Figure 3.1 Dialects used in Task 1

Figure 3.2 shows the absence of diphthongization for the word bei in Westfälisch. This is also expected of Mecklenburgisch but not noted.

Figure 3.2: Isogloss for bei

Figure 3.3 shows the absence of diphthongization for the word Frau in both

Westfälisch and Mecklenburgisch as expected.

Figure 3.3: Isogloss for Frau

Figure 3.4 shows the absence of diphthongization for the word Wein in both

Westfälisch and Mecklenburgisch as expected.

Figure 3.4: Isogloss for Wein

Figure 3.5 shows the absence of the Second Sound Shift in ich in Westfälisch. It is shifted in Mecklenburgisch as expected.

Figure 3.5: Isogloss for ich

Figure 3.6 shows the absence of the Second Sound Shift for the word schlafen in

Westfälisch and Mecklenburgisch. In this case the pàf shift did not occur with these two dialects.

Figure 3.6: Isogloss for schlafen

Figure 3.7 shows the lexical differences for the word Flasche in Westfälisch ([pʊlə]) and Mecklenburgisch ([botl̩ ]).

Figure 3.7: Isogloss for Flasche

Figure 3.8 shows the lexical differences for the word noch. Variation is noted in

Westfälisch ([ən bɪʃçən]), Mecklenburgisch ([bɛdn̩ ]), Hessisch ([nə bɪziː]) and Bairisch

([n̩ bɪzl̩ ]).

Figure 3.8: Isogloss for noch

3.2.2 Task 2: Dialect Intelligibility

The second task investigated dialect intelligibility. Audio recordings of dialect speakers were downloaded from the Zwirner Corpus at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache

(2011) at the University of Mannheim. These are recordings of speakers talking completely in dialect. I chose recordings of monologues in which the speaker was telling a story. I tried to choose themes that a university student could relate to. For example, I excluded monologues about farming or experiences with the wars. I included monologues of speakers talking about their childhood, their hometown, and schooling.

The same six dialect areas were chosen as above: Westniederdeutsch, Ostniederdeutsch,

Westmitteldeutsch, Ostmitteldeutsch, Alemannisch, and Bairisch. Because these recordings came from a different corpus of data than those from the first task, it was not possible for me to find the same exact dialects as those used in the first task, but I did choose samples from the same dialect areas as in the first task. I used Märkisch instead of Mecklenburgisch in the Ostniederdeutsch area and Mittelfränkisch instead of Hessisch for the Westmitteldeutsch area. These sound files were downloaded as .mp3 files from the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (2011) website. The files were converted to .wav files in Audacity (2008) and adjusted for volume. The files were then converted to .aif files for use with Psyscope X (2010).

At the beginning of this task, the subject was presented with a set of written instructions on the Apple computer screen immediately following the first task. The subject then proceeded through a practice question that was a monologue speaker of

Thüringisch, a dialect not used in the experimental task. A fixation screen ensured the subject was ready for the audio. The subject pressed the spacebar to begin the task. In

56 this task, the subject was asked to use a notepad to write down any words that they recognized while listening to the audio recordings. This was done to ensure that the task was not a test of short-term memory but rather a test of intelligibility.

The subject was sequentially presented with the audio recordings of the six dialect speakers. Each monologue was cut to be exactly 30 seconds long. A randomized order was determined for the “A” script and the reverse order was presented for the “B” script.

After listening to each monologue, the subject was presented with a set of three questions. The first question asked the subject to type in all the words that they recognized from the monologue. The second and third questions were monologue- specific and consisted of multiple-choice questions. Each question had 4 choices with the fourth choice being “don’t know”. The second question was a general question about the theme of the monologue. For example, it asked whether the speaker was talking about work versus family. The third question was something more specific to determine whether the subject understood any details in the monologue. For example, it may have asked how many children the speaker had. The questions can be found in Appendix D.

As with task 1, I analyzed each recording used in the intelligibility task for speech rate and linguistic differences. I ran a script (de Jong and Wempe, 2009) on Praat

(Boersma and Weenink, 2012) to determine the number of syllables uttered per second in each of the sound files in order to see if speech rate has an effect on intelligibility. For example, a faster speaker may be less intelligible. See Table 3.4 below.

Table 3.4: Number of Syllables Uttered per Second for Each Sound File in Task 2

Speech Rate (syll/s) Westniederdeutsch 3.63 Ostniederdeutsch 2.53 Westmitteldeutsch 4.03 Ostmitteldeutsch 4.13 Alemannisch 3.36 Bairisch 3.20

To analyze the recordings for linguistic differences, I transcribed the audio and these transcriptions are available in Appendix C. The speakers in these recordings were chosen for their full dialectal speech. What can play a role in intelligibility are the linguistic differences from the standard mentioned in Chapter 2. The salient dialectal features realized in these recordings are the lack of diphthongization and the Second Sound Shift in the Low German dialect speakers and unrounding of vowels ([ʃeːnə], ) in the

Upper German dialect speakers. For example, there is the lack of the Second Sound Shift and lack of diphthongization in the same word in [tiːt] . Some examples of lexical differences in the recordings include [hɛf] , [mɔɪns] and [fɔɐklap]

. Aside from dialectal elements, I noticed that the speech was often slurred and most of the final syllables in words were dropped making it very difficult to understand.

3.2.3 Task 3: Dialect Attitudes

The third task investigated subjective ratings on dialects. Subjects were asked to rate aspects of quality and sound on the same six dialect areas as in task 2:

Westniederdeutsch, Ostniederdeutsch, Westmitteldeutsch, Ostmitteldeutsch,

Alemannisch, and Bairisch. A different set of thirty-second monologues was chosen from the Zwirner Korpus at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (2011) of the University of

Mannheim, so as not to repeat what the subject had already heard in task 2. These monologues were also all male speakers so subjects would not judge the speaker based on gender. Once again, the files were downloaded as .wav files, adjusted for volume, and converted to .aif files for use with Psyscope (2010).

The subject was presented with a screen of written instructions that included a sample of the five-point scale of bipolar antonym adjectives that the subject used to rate the dialects. The sample pair of antonym adjectives used was ugly-beautiful. The scale went from 1 to 5 with 1 being most ugly and 5 being most beautiful. The subject then completed a practice question with a monologue in Thüringisch, a dialect not included in the experimental task.

After a fixation screen, the subject began the actual task. The subject was once again sequentially presented with the monologues of speakers from the six dialect areas.

A random order was determined for the “A” script and reversed for the “B” script. After listening to each monologue, the subject was asked to rate two aspects of quality and two aspects of sound for a total of four questions. Each of these aspects was a five-point scale of antonym adjectives. The two pairs of adjectives for quality were ugly-beautiful and repulsive-appealing. The two pairs of adjectives for sound were hard-soft and tuneless- melodic. The methodology used here is similar to that used by Plewnia and Rothe

(2009), who asked native speakers to rate their language and dialects. However, in their study the subjects were not given audio stimuli. They were also asked to rate aspects of

59 structure with the adjective pairs illogical-logical and difficult-easy, which I omitted because I thought that would be inappropriate for L2 learners.

As with tasks 1 and 2, I analyzed each recording used in the dialect attitude task for speech rate and linguistic differences. I ran the same script (de Jong and Wempe,

2009) on Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2012) that was used to analyze the speech samples in tasks 1 and 2, to determine the number of syllables uttered per second in each of the sound files in order to see if speech rate has an effect on attitudes. See Table 3.5 below.

Table 3.5: Number of Syllables Uttered per Second for Each Sound File in Task 3

Speech Rate (syll/s) Westniederdeutsch 3.53 Ostniederdeutsch 2.23 Westmitteldeutsch 3.20 Ostmitteldeutsch 3.43 Alemannisch 2.60 Bairisch 3.30

I analyzed the recordings for linguistic differences as I did with the previous tasks. I transcribed the audio and the transcriptions are available in Appendix E. As with task 2, the speakers in these recordings were chosen for their full dialectal speech. The same dialectal features were realized as with task 2. Again, the salient dialectal features realized in these recordings are the lack of diphthongization ([hoːzə], ) and the

Second Sound Shift ([teːmlɪç], ) in the Low German dialect speakers, monophhthongization ([hyːk], ) in the Central German speakers and unrounding

60 of vowels ([leːsə], and [ʃeːns], ) in the Upper German speakers. An example of lexical differences include [fɛɐtɛlən] and the use of the particle gell. These linguistic features could play a role in the way participants judged the dialects.

3.3 Data Analysis

Results from the language questionnaire were entered into Microsoft Excel. This included each participant’s gender, age group, years of German study and result of the

Goethe Institut (2004) language proficiency test. The data from the three tasks were then entered into the same spreadsheet before being transferred to SPSS for statistical analysis.

3.3.1 Task 1: Dialect Discrimination

There were five possible results for each of the sentence pairs in the discrimination task. If the sentence pair was identical, the participant could have 1.

Correctly chosen “identical” or 2. Incorrectly chosen “different”. If the sentence pair was different, the participant could have 3. Correctly identified it as “different” and correctly identified the “standard” sentence, 4. Incorrectly identified it as “identical”, or 5.

Correctly identified it as “different” but chose the wrong “standard” sentence. See Table

3.6 below.

Table 3.6: Possible Results in the Dialect Discrimination Task Sentence Pair Participants’ Response

Identical 1. Correctly chosen “identical”

2. Incorrectly chosen “different”

Different 3. Correctly identified “different” and

correctly identified the “standard”

4. Incorrectly identified as “identical”

5. Correctly identified as “different” but

chose the wrong “standard”

Scores for each participant were calculated as follows. In cases 1 and 3, the participant was given one point for having correctly discriminated the sentence pair. In cases 2 and

4, no points were given for an incorrect response. In case 5, half a point was given for correctly identifying a “different” sentence pair but failing to pick out the “standard”.

Thirteen scores were calculated for each participant for analysis: one total score for each of the three Wenkersätze, one total score for each of the six dialect regions

(Westniederdeutsch, Ostniederdeutsch, Westmitteldeutsch, Ostmitteldeutsch,

Alemannisch, and Bairisch), one total score for each of the broader dialect divisions (Low

German, Central German and Upper German), and an overall total score.

3.3.2 Task 2: Dialect Intelligibility

There were two parts to this task: word recognition and multiple-choice. For the word recognition section, each word correctly entered was given one point. As long as the word entered had the same root as the word uttered by the speaker in the recording, it was scored as correct regardless of morphological form and capitalization. Here I mean root to be the primary lexical unit of a word that cannot be reduced into smaller units.

For example, if the word uttered was schönen (beautiful with case ending), all other morphological forms including schön, schöne, schönem, schönes were scored as correct.

The score for this section was the number of correct words out of the total number of words uttered in the audio recording. For the multiple-choice section, one point was given for a correct answer and no points were given for either an incorrect answer or

“don’t know”. For statistical analysis, four scores based on the multiple-choice section were calculated: one total score for each of the broader dialect divisions (Low German,

Central German, and Upper German) and an overall total score.

3.3.3 Task 3: Dialect Attitudes

In this task, there were four bipolar Likert scales. Mean ratings for each dialect region for each of the four scales were calculated. The ratings were then combined into five broader divisions for comparison: Low German, Central German, Upper German,

Western dialects (Westniederdeutsch and Westmitteldeutsch) and Eastern dialects

(Ostniederdeutsch and Ostmitteldeutsch). Because Dailey-O’Cain (1999) found differences between westerners and easterners in the way they judge Western and Eastern dialects, I wanted to compare her findings in native speakers with that in L2 learners.

RESULTS

In this chapter, I will present the results of the data analysis. The results of the three tasks will show the discrimination ability, ability to understand what is being said and attitudes towards German dialects. The results of the Goethe Institut (2004) language placement test were used to determine whether language proficiency correlated with discrimination ability and intelligibility. Table 4.1 shows the details of the results of the placement test.

Table 4.1: Results of the Language Placement Test N Min Max Mean SD

Proficiency Scores (%) 20 23.33 60.00 46.1667 10.93709

This test consisted of 30 multiple choice questions designed to place a student on a level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This framework is a guideline used to describe the achievements of L2 learners. A score of less than 10 out of 30 (<33.33%) corresponds to a level of A1 or A2 (beginner), 11-15

(33.33-50%) is B1 (intermediate), 16-20 (50-60%) is B2 (upper intermediate), 21-26 (60-

86.67%) is C1 (advanced) and 27-30 (86.67-100%) is C2 (mastery). Table 4.1 shows that the participants had a minimum result of 23.33% and a maximum result of 60.00%. The mean score was 46.17%, which corresponds to a level of B1 (intermediate).

4.1 Task 1: Dialect Discrimination

In this task, participants were presented with a sentence pair (either standard/standard or standard/dialect) and were asked to identify whether the sentence pair was identical or different and if different which one sounded “better”. Overall, the participants scored quite well on the dialect discrimination task. A total of 36 sentence pairs (i.e., six sentence pairs per dialect) were presented to each participant so there was a maximum of 36 points. Achieving a maximum score would indicate that the participant was successful at discriminating all six dialects from the standard and was able to identify the standard. The mean overall score was 30.70. The minimum score was 24.50 and the maximum score was 35.00. See Table 4.2.

Table 4.2: Overall Discrimination Performance

N Min Max Mean SD Overall Score 20 24.50 35.00 30.7000 2.75490

Linear regression was used to determine the relationship between language proficiency and discrimination ability. The analysis showed that language proficiency significantly predicted overall discrimination ability, β=.490, t=2.383, p=.028. That is, more proficient participants were more successful at discriminating dialect from standard. Overall discrimination ability could be predicted from language proficiency by the following formula:

Discrimination Score = .123 x Language Proficiency + 25.006, R2 = .240

The R2 value shows that language proficiency explains 24% of the variation in discrimination ability. Gender and age group were not significant predictors of discrimination ability. The overall score was first broken down by Wenkersatz. Each

Wenkersatz had 12 sentence pairs, so there was a maximum of 12 points awarded for each sentence. See Table 4.3.

Table 4.3: Discrimination Score by Wenkersatz

N Min Max Mean SD Wenkersatz 9 20 7.50 12.00 10.4000 1.10739 Wenkersatz 16 20 6.00 12.00 10.0500 1.56357 Wenkersatz 24 20 8.00 12.00 10.2500 1.11803

A paired-samples t-test was conducted across Wenkersatz scores and there was no significant difference in the ability to discriminate each of the three sentences from the others. The overall score was then broken down by dialect group and dialect region.

Each dialect group had 6 sentence pairs so the maximum number of points was 6. Table

4.4 shows the discrimination score of participants on each of the dialect groups.

Participants scored similarly across all dialect groups except for Ostmitteldeutsch, which had the lowest mean score (4.35). This will be discussed further below and also in

Chapter 5 of this thesis.

Table 4.4: Discrimination Score by Dialect Group

N Min Max Mean SD Westniederdeutsch 20 4.00 6.00 5.5750 .61291 Ostniederdeutsch 20 4.00 6.00 5.1000 .77119 Westmitteldeutsch 20 4.00 6.00 5.2250 .88071 Ostmitteldeutsch 20 3.50 5.50 4.3500 .69016 Alemannisch 20 4.00 6.00 5.3000 .67668 Bairisch 20 3.50 6.00 5.1500 .82876

Two dialect groups were combined together to form the dialect regions of Low (i.e.,

Westniederdeutsch and Ostniederdeutsch), Central (i.e., Westmitteldeutsch and

Ostmitteldeutsch) and Upper German (i.e., Alemannisch and Bairisch), so the maximum score for these regions was 12 points. Table 4.5 shows the discrimination score of participants on each dialect region. Again, participants scored similarly on all regions except for Central German. See explanation below and in Chapter 5.

Table 4.5: Discrimination by Dialect Regions

N Min Max Mean SD Low German 20 8.00 12.00 10.6750 1.26984 Central German 20 7.50 11.50 9.5750 1.23837 Upper German 20 7.50 12.00 10.4500 1.14593

Paired-samples t-tests were conducted to compare differences in ability to discriminate

Low, Central and Upper German dialects. Scores for Central German (M=9.58,

SD=1.24) were significantly worse than both Upper German (M=10.45, SD=1.15); t(19)=-2.865, p=.010 and Low German (M=10.68, SD=1.27); t(19)=-3.240, p=.004. It appeared that the low score for Ostmitteldeutsch was the reason students faired worst on

Central German. When the score for Ostmitteldeutsch was eliminated and

Westmitteldeutsch was grouped together with Upper German to form the High German region, a paired-samples t-test showed no significant difference in discrimination ability between Low German and High German. An independent t-test found that there were no significant differences between genders in discrimination ability.

4.2 Task 2: Dialect Intelligibility

In this task participants listened to a 30-second monologue spoken in dialect and were asked to write down words that they recognized and to answer two multiple-choice questions regarding the content. Overall, the participants did not find the dialect speech to be intelligible. There were two multiple-choice questions for each of the six dialect groups for a possible total of 12 points. The mean score was 3.65. See Table 4.6.

Table 4.6: Overall Intelligibility Score

N Min Max Mean SD Overall Score 20 .00 7.00 3.6500 2.20705

Out of a total of 12 questions, the maximum score for any participant was only 7 points.

At least one participant did not get any points on the multiple-choice questions. This

68 means that the participant did not understand the content in any of the dialects.

However, all but one of the participants had at least one word written down in the word recognition portion of this task. The word recognition portion was not used for statistical analysis because the results were not consistent across dialects. Some dialect speakers spoke faster than others resulting in more words uttered during the 30-second monologue segment. In addition, it was not a true measure of the number of words recognized because it also depended on how fast students could write the words down. An analysis of the words that the participants wrote down is discussed in Chapter 5 of this thesis. The intelligibility scores (the score of the multiple-choice questions) were then broken down by dialect region. The minimum score for all dialect regions was 0, and the maximum score for Low and Central German was 4.00, which means that at least one participant got all of the questions correct. The maximum score for Upper German was only 2.00, which means that no participant understood enough to get all of the questions correct.

See Table 4.7.

Table 4.7: Intelligibility by Dialect Regions

N Min Max Mean SD Low German 20 .00 4.00 .9500 1.19097 Central German 20 .00 4.00 1.9000 1.02084 Upper German 20 .00 2.00 .8000 .69585

Linear regression results showed that language proficiency, gender, and age group did not significantly predict intelligibility. However, paired-samples t-tests were conducted to

69 compare differences in intelligibility across Low, Central, and Upper German dialects and it was found that Central German (M=1.90, SD=1.02) was significantly more intelligible than both Upper German (M=.80, SD=.70); t(19)=5.082, p=.000 and Low

German (M=0.95, SD=1.19); t(19)=-3.133, p=.005. An independent t-test found that there were no significant differences in intelligibility between genders. Neither males nor females were better able to understand what was being said.

4.3 Task 3: Dialect Attitudes

In this task, participants were asked to rate each dialect on four 5-point bipolar scales after listening to a 30-second monologue that was different from those heard in task 2. Mean ratings for each dialect region were calculated for each of the four bipolar

Likert scales. The results are presented in Tables 4.8-4.11. Table 4.8 shows the mean ratings on the 5-point ugly-beautiful scale (where 1=ugly and 5=beautiful) for each of the dialect regions.

Table 4.8: Mean Ratings on the Ugly-Beautiful Scale

N Min Max Mean SD Low German 20 2.50 4.00 3.2500 .52566 Central German 20 1.50 4.00 2.8500 .63037 Upper German 20 1.50 3.50 2.2750 .54952 Western 20 2.00 4.00 3.2750 .54952 Eastern 20 1.50 4.00 2.8500 .63037

Based on the mean ratings, when comparing Low, Central, and Upper German dialects, participants found Upper German to be the ugliest and Low German to be the most beautiful. Participants found Eastern dialects to be uglier than Western dialects. Table

4.9 shows the mean ratings on the 5-point repulsive-attractive scale (where 1=repulsive and 5= attractive) for each of the dialect regions.

Table 4.9: Mean Ratings on the Repulsive-Attractive Scale

N Min Max Mean SD Low German 20 2.50 4.00 3.3250 .51999 Central German 20 2.00 4.00 3.0750 .51999 Upper German 20 2.00 4.00 2.5500 .58264 Western 20 2.00 4.00 3.2750 .54952 Eastern 20 2.00 4.50 3.1250 .55902

Based on the mean ratings, when comparing Low, Central, and Upper German dialects, participants found Upper German to be the most repulsive and Low German to be the most attractive. Participants found Eastern dialects to be more repulsive than Western dialects. Table 4.10 shows the mean ratings on the 5-point hard-soft scale (where 1=hard and 5=soft) for each of the dialect regions.

Table 4.10: Mean Ratings on the Hard-Soft Scale

N Min Max Mean SD Low German 20 2.00 4.00 3.0250 .59549 Central German 20 1.50 5.00 2.9250 .78262 Upper German 20 1.50 4.00 2.7250 .69727 Western 20 2.00 4.00 3.0000 .58490 Eastern 20 1.50 5.00 2.9000 .80459

Based on the mean ratings, when comparing Low, Central, and Upper German dialects, participants found Upper German to be the hardest and Low German to be the softest.

Participants found Eastern dialects to be harder than Western dialects. Table 4.11 shows the mean ratings on the 5-point tuneless-melodic scale (where 1=tuneless and 5=melodic) for each of the dialect regions.

Table 4.11: Mean Ratings on the Tuneless-Melodic Scale

N Min Max Mean SD Low German 20 2.50 4.50 3.3250 .54471 Central German 20 2.00 4.50 3.0250 .67814 Upper German 20 1.50 4.00 2.5500 .70524 Western 20 2.00 5.00 3.4500 .64685 Eastern 20 1.50 3.50 2.9500 .48395

Based on the mean ratings, when comparing Low, Central and Upper German dialects, participants found Upper German to be the most tuneless and Low German to be the most melodic. Participants found Eastern dialects to be more tuneless than Western dialects.

When looking at the mean ratings, it appears that in general, participants stayed away from the extreme ratings of 1 and 5. The general trends on all four bipolar scales appear to be similar. When comparing Low, Central, and Upper German dialects, participants had the most negative attitudes towards Upper German dialects and the most positive towards Low German dialects. Central German dialects lie somewhere in the middle. When comparing Western and Eastern dialects, participants consistently had more negative attitudes towards Eastern dialects.

In order to determine whether the four scales are related to each other, factor analysis was performed. The results of the factor analysis show that there are two distinct factors being evaluated by the four bipolar scales: ugly-beautiful and repulsive-attractive comprise factor 1, hard-soft and tuneless-melodic comprise factor 2. Factor 1 has an eigenvalue of 2.261 and factor 2 has an eigenvalue of 1.039. This measures the variance in all the variables that are accounted for by each factor respectively. The total variance explained by the two factors is 82.5%. That is to say, the two factors together explain

82.5% of the variance measured by the four bipolar scales. Paired-samples t-tests were conducted to compare differences in attitudes across Low, Central, and Upper German dialects and also between Western and Eastern dialects. On the ugly-beautiful scale,

Upper German (M=2.28, SD=.55) was found to be significantly uglier than both Low

German (M=3.25, SD=.53); t(19)=6.833, p=.000 and Central German (M=2.85, SD=.63); t(19)=3.437, p=.003. On the repulsive-attractive scale, Upper German (M=2.55, SD=.58) was found to be significantly more repulsive than both Low German (M=3.33, SD=.52); t(19)=4.971, p=.000 and Central German (M=3.08, SD=.52); t(19)=3.280, p=.004. On the tuneless-melodic scale, Upper German (M=2.55, SD=.71) was found to be

73 significantly more tuneless than Low German (M=3.33, SD=.54); t(19)=4.152, p=.001.

Eastern dialects (M=2.95, SD=.48) were found to be significantly more tuneless than

Western dialects (M=3.45, SD=.65); t(19)=2.874, p=.010.

4.4 Summary

The results of the study showed that the discrimination ability of the participants was generally high. They were able to discriminate dialects from the standard language.

This ability correlated with language proficiency. More proficient learners were better able to discriminate dialects from the standard. There were no differences in discrimination ability across dialect regions. Their ability to understand dialects, on the other hand, was generally low, and this did not correlate with language proficiency.

More proficient learners were not able to necessarily understand dialects any better than less proficient learners. Central German was found be the most intelligible. Participants generally found Low German dialects to be more pleasant than Central and Upper

German dialects.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I will discuss the results of the current experiment in light of results found in similar studies in the past. I will discuss the results of the three tasks individually. I will then discuss real world implications of these results and suggest some areas for possible future research. Finally, I will offer a few concluding remarks.

5.1 Task 1: Dialect Discrimination

The results of this task showed that participants were able to discriminate dialect from the standard quite well. They achieved a mean score of 30.7 out of a possible 36 points. Statistical analysis showed that language proficiency significantly predicted discrimination ability. More proficient learners were able to discriminate better. Gender, on the other hand, had no significant effect on discrimination ability. Other possible predictors were age, L1, and studies abroad, but there was not enough variation in the subject pool to analyse these factors.

When looking at dialect regions, I found that the discrimination scores were significantly worse for Central German when compared to Low and Upper German. The problem is most likely due to Ostmitteldeutsch. When I received the audio recordings from the Forschungzentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas (transcribed and available in

Appendix B), I noticed that the standard vs. dialect sentence pairs for Ostmitteldeutsch did not have significant linguistic differences. In fact, for Wenkersatz 9, the dialect and the standard sentence sounded completely identical, except for the fact that the standard sentence was truncated. The speaker did not read the whole sentence in the standard recording but did so in the dialect recording. As discussed in Chapter 3, the participants

75 were most likely discriminating the sentence pairs for all the other dialect regions based phonological and lexical differences between standard and dialect and using their exposure to standard language learned in the classroom to identify the standard sentence in cases where the sentence pairs were different. Therefore, when the participants heard two identical sentences with one longer than the other, they were not able to identify one as standard. This is a possible reason why the scores for Ostmitteldeutsch were significantly lower than the other dialect groups. Wenkersatz 16 and 24 were not truncated, but the standard and dialect sentences also did not differ much from each other linguistically. The low score for this dialect group in turn made the score for Central

German significantly lower than both Low and Upper German. If we assume

Ostmitteldeutsch to be problematic and remove it from the equation, the result showed that there were no significant differences in discrimination ability across dialect regions.

The one previous study that looked at discrimination ability in L2 learners was that of Eisenstein (1986) on American English. She also found that overall discrimination ability of her participants was quite high. However, in addition to language proficiency, she found that participant gender and the dialect being discriminated were significant predictors of discrimination ability. There were differences in the scores between males and females in the present study but the difference was not significant. It is possible that a larger subject pool would reveal significant differences between genders. In terms of dialect, Eisenstein (1986) only tested two dialects (Black English and New Yorkese) in addition to standard American

English. One possible reason why there were no significant differences in discrimination scores among dialect regions in German could be because all of the German dialects

(except Ostmitteldeutsch) have significant linguistic variation from the standard making them all equally discriminable. For example, with New Yorkese and Black

English, it is possible that New Yorkese has more subtle differences from the standard when compared to Black English making New Yorkese more difficult to discriminate from the standard.

5.2 Task 2: Dialect Intelligibility

The overall intelligibility—the ability of participants to understand what was being said—of German dialects by participants was poor. The mean score was 3.65 out of a possible 12 points. This means that participants were, on average, only able to answer three or four questions correctly about what they had heard. The reader is reminded that the sound files for this task differed from those of the first task. The audio stimuli here consisted of 30-second monologues spoken in dialect. While language proficiency significantly predicted discrimination ability, it did not significantly predict intelligibility. That is to say, more proficient learners did not necessarily perform better than less proficient ones on this task. This could be because the more proficient participant can more easily identify the standard from the dialect when discriminating.

However, since there is little dialect training in the second language classroom, it does not matter how proficient the participants are in the standard language, they all face the same problems when trying to understand dialectal speech. What can be problematic for the participants are those linguistic differences that set dialectal speech apart from the standard. These include the lack of the Second Sound Shift and lack of diphthongization in the Low German dialects, monophthongization in the Central German dialects,

77 unrounding of vowels in the Upper German dialects, and a few lexical differences. In addition to these linguistic differences, the slurring of speech and dropping of syllables made the recordings very difficult to understand.

When comparing dialect regions, participants performed significantly better on

Central German when compared to Low and Upper German. This was not due to slower speech rate, since the Central German speakers spoke the fastest when compared to the

Low and Upper German speakers. Recall Table 3.4. There were 2 sections to this task.

The first section evaluated word recognition. The participant was asked to write down as many words as possible that they recognized after listening to the 30-second monologue.

As discussed in Chapter 3, this section was scored by the total number of correct words recognized out of the total number of words uttered by the speaker. The second section consisted of two multiple-choice questions that asked about the content of the monologue. The first section was included in this task in case the participants performed so poorly on the multiple-choice questions that the data were not analyzable. This turned out not to be the case, and the scores for the multiple-choice questions produced enough variation for statistical analysis. The scores for the first section were also not consistent across dialects because some speakers spoke faster than others, resulting in more words uttered, thereby making it more difficult for participants to recognize the same percentage of words than a slower speaker. This section was therefore not used for statistical analysis. There was a range in the number of words that each participant wrote down and this did not necessarily correlate to the result on the multiple-choice questions. It is unlikely that the participants were guessing when answering those questions because there was the choice of “don't know”, and this was chosen quite often.

The percentage of the number of words written down as compared to the total number of words uttered by each dialect speaker ranged from 0-19%. This is a large range because some participants wrote down everything they heard including words like

“und”, and one participant skipped the words section entirely but did not perform too poorly on the multiple-choice questions. He/she most likely just decided to concentrate on listening and understanding instead. In cases where participants got the multiple- choice questions correct, this was most likely due to the fact that they recognized enough key words (which they may or may not have written down) to piece together some degree of understanding. Most of these words written down were standard words (i.e., not specifically used in dialect) with similar pronunciation to the standard. Examples include: Fußball [fusbal], ganze [gantsə], geboren [gəboʁn̩], schönste [ʃøːnstə], Kinder

[kɪndə], and Schule [ʃuːl]. The degree of intelligibility of a dialect depends to a large extent on the linguistic differences between the dialect and the standard. L2 learners, unless they have spent a significant amount of time abroad in a specific dialect region, have little exposure to dialect speech in the classroom. Only one participant declared study abroad experience, so unfortunately, this was not statistically analyzable.

Therefore, when listening to a new dialect for the first time, L2 learners are only able to recognize words that do not deviate phonologically to a large extent from the standard. If there are enough key words recognized, they may be able to pick out general meaning. If not, the dialect would not be intelligible to them. Therefore, lack of exposure to and awareness of dialects could be one reason for poor intelligibility. This could also explain why Central German was significantly more intelligible than Low and Upper German.

Central German dialects are linguistically more similar to standard German (König,

2007).

In previous studies, Eisenstein (1986) had similar findings with American

English. In an intelligibility task, she found that Black English was consistently more difficult for the participants to understand than both New Yorkese and standard American

English. The same explanation could play a role here in that Black English deviates more linguistically from standard American English than does New Yorkese. Furthermore, her results points to the role of exposure in intelligibility. Her participants were all L2 learners of English in the New York City area, so they had exposure to New Yorkese when outside the classroom. This exposure could have contributed to better intelligibility performance on the experimental task.

5.3 Task 3: Dialect Attitudes

The results of dialect ratings showed similar trends across all four bipolar Likert scales: ugly-beautiful, repulsive-attractive, hard-soft, and tuneless-melodic. Although not statistically significant across all four scales, participants generally had the most negative attitude towards Upper German dialects and the most positive attitude towards Low

German dialects, with Central German dialects somewhere in between. They also had more negative attitudes towards Eastern dialects than Western dialects. Upper German was found to be significantly uglier and more repulsive when compared to both Central and Low German and significantly more tuneless when compared to Low German.

Eastern dialects were also significantly more tuneless than Western dialects. The reason that participants had the most positive attitude towards Low German dialects could be

80 due to the linguistic features that set them apart from the standard. The salient ones realized in these speakers were the lack of the Second Sound Shift and the lack of diphthongization. Speech rate most likely did not play a role since the Low German speakers did not speak particularly faster or slower than the other dialect speakers.

These trends are similar to what Dailey-O’Cain (1999) found in her study with L1

German speakers. The reason I decided to compare Western and Eastern dialects in this task was because Dailey-O’Cain (1999) found differences in the way L1 speakers judged these areas. In fact, when asked to draw isoglosses of where they thought dialects boundaries existed, there was a definite boundary where the former east-west border ran.

She found that westerners found Eastern dialects to be less correct and less pleasant but easterners did not perceive much of a difference between Eastern and Western dialects.

Easterners perceived more of a difference on the north-south axis than the east-west axis.

Both westerners and easterners in her study had negative attitudes towards the

Ostmitteldeutsch area. This is similar to the trends found in the present study with L2 speakers where the difference in attitude was more significant across Low, Central, and

Upper German dialects than between Western and Eastern dialects. The difference is that

L2 speakers do not specifically have negative attitudes towards the Ostmitteldeutsch area.

The fact that L2 speakers have more similar attitudes to easterners than westerners—i.e., that they did not show significant differences in their attitudes about dialects from the east vs. west—shows that exposure could be affecting the way in which people judge dialects. L2 speakers and easterners represent two extremes of dialect exposure. Dailey-

O’Cain (1999) attributed the differences between the attitudes of westerners and easterners to exposure. She argued that during the time of divided Germany, easterners

81 had exposure to Western dialects through television and radio. Westerners, on the other hand, were not interested in eastern media and therefore had less exposure to

Eastern dialects. Easterners represent maximum dialect exposure. They are familiar with their own as well as Western dialects. L2 speakers, on the other hand, represent minimal exposure. They have equally little exposure to all German dialects. The fact that L2 participants with minimal exposure also perceive less of a difference on the east-west axis than the north-south axis supports the role of exposure in affecting dialect judgement. What does not play a role in the judgement of L2 speakers is prejudice because the L2 speakers in the current study with the exception of one participant have not spent enough time abroad and therefore do not recognize where the speakers are from.

It is interesting to note that Dailey-O’Cain (1999) found that native speakers judged Low German dialects to be the most pleasant. This is also what was found in this study with L2 learners. The fact that native speakers and L2 learners display similar attitudes could mean that they are in fact evaluating the same linguistic features. While native speakers in Dailey-O’Cain (1999) did not have access to audio stimuli, they probably have an awareness level of variation from the standard that allows them to judge

Low German dialects as more pleasant. These features could be the same ones that L2 learners are responding to when listening to audio stimuli (e.g., the lack of the second sound shift and lack of diphthongization). However, given the differences in methodologies used in the two studies, it is difficult to directly compare the results of the two studies.

What Plewnia and Rothe (2009) found was that speakers are often biased towards their own dialect. They looked at two groups specifically: Bairisch and

Sächsisch. They found that Bairisch speakers are more positive towards Bairisch than

Sächsisch. The opposite is true for Sächsisch speakers; they are more positive towards

Sächsisch than Bairisch. The results of Plewnia and Rothe (2009) support what

Williams, Garrett and Coupland (1999) found in Welsh speakers. They call this

“claiming and denial processes”. Participants tend to judge the in-group more positively that the out-group. An interesting result they had was that participants could incorrectly claim a speaker as the in-group (believe that the speaker is speaking the same dialect as themselves) and judge it more positively or incorrectly deny a speaker as the out-group

(believe that the speaker is speaking a dialect different than their own) and judge it more negatively.

The choice of the bipolar scales used in the present study was taken from Plewnia and Rothe (2009), in which L1 speakers judged their own German language. They grouped the ugly-beautiful and repulsive-attractive scales together as aspects of sound.

The hard-soft and tuneless-melodic scales were grouped as aspects of quality. Although the authors did not statistically justify this grouping in their own study, the results of the present study support grouping of Likert scales. Factor analysis of the results shows that the ugly-beautiful and repulsive-attractive scales evaluate similar attitudes as do the hard- soft and tuneless-melodic scales.

Taken together, the results of the three tasks show that each one is relatively independent of each other. Language proficiency correlated with discrimination ability but had no effect on intelligibility. When looking across tasks, I could not directly

83 compare discrimination ability with intelligibility and dialect attitudes because the dialects used as stimuli were not identical. Statistical analysis showed that poor intelligilbity in task 2 did not correlate with negative attitudes in task 3.

5.4 Implications

The first implication of the present study I would like to discuss is the real world consequences for L2 learners. As Putz (2007) showed in her study, dialect presented a real communication problem in physician offices in Süditrol. Although the results of the current study do indicate that L2 learners may experience potential communication difficulties, an environment where speakers only speak dialect is likely an exception.

Language variation poses a minimal problem when it comes to reading and speaking.

The L2 learner would be able to read and be understood according to their level of proficiency. Listening is the area that L2 learners may have a problem with if speakers are using dialect. The results of my study support poor understanding of dialect.

However, the results from the discrimination task show an excellent ability to discriminate dialect from the standard. L2 learners may, therefore, be able to recognize that a speaker is using dialect when there is poor intelligibility. Macha (2005) found that the Low German dialect region has diglossic speakers in an environment similar to

Switzerland where speakers are competent in both dialect and the standard. L2 learners may find Central and Upper German areas more problematic then, because speakers are more likely to mix in dialectal elements such as phonological and lexical variation into everyday speech, whereas in the Low German dialect region and in Switzerland, speakers can switch to the standard when communicating with L2 learners.

The second implication of this study has to do with language pedagogy. A debate exists as to which language variety should be taught in the L2 classroom. Given the time constraints, the obvious goal is to enable students to be competent in the standard language because it has the broadest application. However, in the German language classroom, even teaching the standard language involves educating students in the different national standards of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The question then is whether there is time to discuss dialects and language variation and to what extent.

Davies (2000) noted in his study that teachers in the Pflälzisch area have no training on how to deal with dialects in the L1 classroom. I think this can be equally problematic in the L2 classroom. If teachers have little or no awareness of language variation and its effects, they would not be able to pass that on to the students. I believe it is important to create at least awareness of language variation not only for the sake of functioning in the real world, but also to minimize the development of prejudices and negative attitudes towards the unfamiliar dialects. Spiekermann (2007) found that L2 students in the

Freiburg area judged dialectal elements as less correct than the L1 students. Because L2 students are not aware of these elements, any deviation from the standard was negatively received.

Based on the results of the current study, I would recommend that the notion of language variation should be introduced at the intermediate level with L2 students. At the beginner level, L2 students need to have a standardized structure in order to learn the new language. Their guide would be the prescriptive grammar provided by national standards. However, starting at the intermediate level, when students have a firm grasp of the prescribed structures, teachers should start introducing dialectal variation. The

85 goal should be to make the students aware of language variation and to expose them to various dialects, but not necessarily to educate students to be proficient in the use of dialects. Even if students do not encounter speakers who are only proficient in dialect, an awareness of dialects would allow them to recognize situations when dialects are the cause of misunderstanding or not understanding. Being aware of language variation might also prevent students from prescriptively judging dialectal elements as incorrect as in Spiekermann (2007), and possibly developing negative attitudes based on broad stereotypes.

5.5 Limitations of Current Study

There are several limitations of the present study that could be taken into consideration for future study. More participants and a wider range of L2 abilities would allow for a more in-depth analysis. Only three sentences from the Wenkersätze were chosen for the study. The use of more sentences may reveal more precisely what participants make use of to discriminate dialect sentences from the standard. I chose these three specific sentences because the content was something I thought students could relate to. More dialect groups could also be included in the study. The conclusions from this study were drawn by generalizing from six dialect regions. The use of more dialects would produce more precise results. A new study could use modern recordings of monologues. The monologues used for the intelligibility and dialect attitudes tasks are more than 50 years old. Wagener (2002) concluded from his study that dialectal elements have changed over time. Modern recordings could produce different results. It

86 would also be interesting to compare those results with those of the old recordings to determine if dialect change over time has an effect on intelligibility and dialect attitudes.

One aspect of this study could be analyzed in more detail and that is the comparison across tasks. The reader is reminded that poor intelligibility did not correlate with negative attitudes. For any correlation between task 1 and the other tasks to be done in the current study, it would have been necessary to make use of the same six specific dialects across all tasks. Other relationships between tasks could then be analyzed, and one could also determine whether the ordering of the tasks had any effect on the results, by varying the order in which the tasks are presented to the participants.

5.5 Other Areas for Future Research

One area for future research could expand upon the present study and compare differences between students here and students studying in Germany. Doing a study in

Germany on L2 learners would be more similar to Eisenstein’s (1986) study on American

English where the environment outside the classroom is the L2. Another study could look at effects of studying abroad. Unfortunately, with the present study, the sample size was too small to analyze these effects. There were not enough students with study abroad experience. It would be interesting to see whether studying in different dialect areas in

Germany has any effect on discrimination ability, intelligibility, and dialect attitudes. A study could also be done to investigate what is included in the training of L2 educators.

A study similar to Davies (2000) could be done to investigate the awareness of language variation in L2 teachers and also look at what is included in teacher training in the area of dialectology.

5.6 Summary

This study has shown that L2 learners of German can discriminate standard language from dialect well and that this discrimination ability improves with advancing language proficiency. Intelligibility of dialects, on the other hand, is generally poor and is not affected by language proficiency. These results are similar to those of Eisenstein

(1986), who also found that L2 learners living in the L2 environment had a high ability to discriminate dialects from the standard, and found some dialects more difficult to understand than others. The results are different in that this study did not find differences in discrimination ability and intelligibility between genders. Differences in dialect attitudes among participants in the current study are more pronounced across the north- south axis than the east-west axis. This is similar to what Dailey-O’Cain (1999) found of

Eastern German native speakers. My study allowed this comparison between L2 speaker attitudes and what Dailey-O’Cain (1999) found with L1 speaker attitudes. Participants generally found Low German dialects to be more pleasant than Central and Upper

German dialects. Future research will contribute to this growing field of perceptual dialectology in L2 learners.

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Language Questionnaire

Subject #______

1. Gender M / F

2. Age ______

3. Academic Major ______

4. Where were you born?

5. Where did you grow up?

6. What is your native language?

7. What other languages do you know? Please also specify proficiency (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced)

8. How long have you been learning German? (Please specify whether it is school, university, living abroad etc.)

9. Do you have any exposure to German outside the classroom? (e.g., Family, friends, etc.) If so, for how long?

10. Have you spent any time (more than1 month) in a German-speaking country? If so, when, where, length of time, reason?

11. What German language varieties/dialects are you aware of? Please list as many as possible.

Appendix B: Transcriptions of Wenkersätze from Dialect Discrimination Task

Wenkersatz 9

Wenkersatz 16

Wenkersatz 24

Westfälisch

Wenkersatz 9

Standard

[ɪç bɪn zɛlpst baɪ dɛɐ fʁaʊ gəveːzən ʊnt hat ziː viːdɐ gɛzakt zɪt ziː zaktə ziː vɔltɛs iːʁɐ tɔxtɐ zaːgn̩ ]

Dialekt

[ɪk zɛm biː də fruː vɪɐst ʊn hɛb ɪk fɛɐtaʊt ʊn zeː zɛç ʊn zeː zoːxt tʁop zə vɔl nɔ iːɐ dɔxtə zegən]

Wenkersatz 16

Standard

[duː bɪs nɔx nɪç gʁoːs gɛnuːg aɪnə flaʃə vaɪn aʊstsuːtʁɪnkən duː mʊs ɛɐst nɔx azn

ɛntvaksən ʊnt gʁøsɐ vɐdən]

Dialekt

[duː bɪs no niː xʁaʊs xənaʊx ʊm nə xantsə pʊlə fɔn viːn uːtsoːgn̩ duː mʊs alzoː ən bɪʃçən vasən ʊn xʁøsɐ vɛɐn]

Wenkersatz 24

Standard

[als viːɐ gɛsɐn aːbɛn na haʊzə kaːm daː laːgən diː andəʁən alə ʃoːn alə ɪm bɛt ʊn van fas aɪngəʃlafən]

Dialekt

[als viːɐ hɪstən ɔbɛn tʏʁʏk gəkamn̩ do leːgə də andəʁən al ɪm bædə ʊn vonʃ fast

ə om ʃlopn̩ ]

Mecklenburgisch

Wenkersatz 9

Standard

[ɪç bɪn zɛlpst baɪ dɐ fʁaʊ gɛveːzən ʊnt hap iːʁ das gɛzakt ʊnt ziː zakt ziː vɪl ɛs aʊx iːʁɐ tɔxtɐ zaːgn̩ ]

Dialekt

[ɪç bɪn baɪ diː fʁuː vɛs ʊnt hɛp hɛf iːɐ das zɛçt ʊn zaɪ zɛç ɪç zeː vʏʁd es oːx iːɐ toxtɐ zɪŋ]

Wenkersatz 16

Standard

[duː bɪs nɔx nɪç gʁoːs gɛnoːx uːm aɪnə flaːʃə vaɪn aʊstsʊtʁinkn̩ duː mʊst nɔx ɛɐst aɪnə ɛndə vaksən ʊnt gʁœsɐ vɛɐdn̩ ]

Dialekt

[duː bɪs no niːk gʁoːt gɛnuːx uːm aɪn botl̩ viːn uːtʊtʁinkən duː mʊs iːɐs nox bɛdn̩ vasn̩ ʊnt gʁœdɐ vaɐn]

Wenkersatz 24

Standard

[als viːɐ gɛstɐn abɛnt tsʊʁʏk kaːm daː laːgən diː andɛʁən ʃoːn tsuː bɛt ʊn vaːn fɛst aɪngɛʃlaːfn̩ ]

Dialekt

[als viː gɛstn̩ abɛnt tʁʏçkam daː laːgn̩ diː andʁən ʃaʊn taʊ bɛt ʊnt ʃlœbn̩ fast]

Hessisch

Wenkersatz 9

Standard

[ɪʃ vaɐ baɪ dɛɐ fʁaʊ ʊn hap iːɐ das gɛzakt ʊn diː hat gəzakt ziː vɪl das iːʁɐ tɔxtɐ aʊx zaːgən]

Dialekt

[ɪʃ vaɐ baɪ də fʁa ʊn hun zə ʁə gəzaː ən daɪ hʊt miːɐ gəzaːt ziː vɪl zaː iːʁɐ tɔxtə zaɣə]

Wenkersatz 16

Standard

[duː bɪs nɔx nɪʃt gʁoːs gənuːk ʊn kanst aʊx nɔx kaɪnə flaʃe vaɪn aʊstʁɪnkən duː mʊst ɛɐs nɔx vaksən ʊn gʁøsɐ vɛɐdn̩ ]

Dialekt

[də bɪs nɔx nɛ gʁos gənuː ʊm ə flaʃ vaɪ aʊzʊtʁɪnkə duː mʊst ɛɐʃ nə bɪziː vɔxsə ʊn grøsə vɛɐn]

Wenkersatz 24

Standard

[viː viːɐ gɛstɐn abɛnt haɪm gekɔmən sɪnt haːbən diː andərən ʃoːn ɪm bɛt gɛleːgən ʊn haːbən fɛst gɛʃlavən]

Dialekt

[als viːʁ gɛstən oːəm tsɪʁɪk koːmə ʊn diː amn̩ ʃœn ɪm bɛt gəleːgə ʊn vɔn fɛst ɔm ʃlovə]

Sächsisch

Wenkersatz 9

Standard

[ɪʃ bɪn zɛlbɐ baɪ dɐ fʁaʊ gəveːzən ʊn haːbə ɛs iːɐ gɛsakt]

Dialekt

[ɪʃ bɪn baɪ dɛɐ fʁaʊ gəveːzən ʊn haːbə ɛs iːɐ gɛzakt ʊn ziː zaːktə ziː vɔldə aʊx iːʁɐ tɔxtɐ zaːgən]

Wenkersatz 16

Standard

[duː bɪs nɔx nɪʃ gʁoːs gɛnuːk duː kanst dɔx nɪʃt aɪnə flaʒə vaɪn alaɪnə aʊstʁɪnkən duː mʊst ɛɐst nɔx vaksɛn ʊn gʁœsɐ vɛɐdn̩ ]

Dialekt

[duː bɪs nɔx nɪʃ gʁoːs gɛnuːk ʊm aɪnə flaʃə vaɪn aʊstsʊtʁɪnkən duː mʊst ɛɐst nɔx aɪn ɛndə vaksən ʊn gʁøːsɐ vɛɐdn̩ ]

Wenkersatz 24

Standard

[als viːɐ gɛstɐn aːbən na hazə kam daː laːgən alə andəʁən ɪm bɛt ʊn vaʁən fɛst aɪngəʃlafən]

Dialekt

[als viːɐ gɛstɐn aːbən zʊʁʏk kamɛn daː laːgən diː andəʁən ʒœn tsuː bɛt ʊn vaːrən fɛst am ʃlaːfən]

Alemannisch

Wenkersatz 9

Standard

[ɪç vaɐ baɪ dɐ fʁaʊ ʊn haps iːɐ gəzakt ʊn ziː hat gɛzakt das ziː ɛs iːʁɐ toxtɐ zaːgən mœxtə]

Dialekt

[ɪç bɪn baɪ dɐ fʁaʊ gəveː ʊn hap es gəzaɪt ʊnt ziː zeːt ziː vɪlz oː iːʁɐ toxtɐ zaːgə]

Wenkersatz 16

Standard

[duː bɪs nɔx nɪç gʁoːs gɛnuːg uːm aɪnə flaʃə vaɪn aʊstsʊtʁinkən duː mʊs tsuɛɐʃt nɔx vaksən ʊnt gʁøːsɐ vɛɐdn̩ ]

Dialekt

[duː bɪʃ no nɪ gʁoːs nuːg uːm ən və a flaːʃ vaɪ ts tʁinkət duː mʊʃ ɐʃ no vasə ʊn gʁøːsɐ vɛɐdə]

Wenkersatz 24

Standard

[als viːɐ gɛʃn̩ abn̩ tsʏʁʏk kaːmən vaʁn̩ diː andʊŋ ʃoːn tsuː bɛtə ʊn haːb fɛst gɛʃlaːfən]

Dialekt

[als vːiɐ gɛʃtn̩ ɔbɛn tsʏʁʏk kamən koːmət sɪnt da zɪnt diː andərə ʃoːn ɪm bɛt gəleːgə ʊn vaʁ hɪn fɛʃ gəʃlɔfə]

Bairisch

Wenkersatz 9

Standard

[iː vaʁ də baɪ dɛʁ fʁaʊ ʊn hab ɛs iːɐ gɛsakt ziː hat gɛzakt ziː vɪl dɪs aʊx iːʁɐ toːxtɐ zaːgən]

Dialekt

[bi baɪ dɐ fʁaʊ gəveːn ʊn hops iːʁə kəsʊkt ʊnt diː ox kəzokt ziː meːçt aɪ iːʁɐ toːxtə zoːn]

Wenkersatz 16

Standard

[duː bɪs nɔx nɪçt groːs gɛnuːk duː kanst dɔx nɪçt aɪnə ganzə flɔʃə vaɪn alaɪnə aʊstʁɪnkən duː muːst ɛɐst nɔx vaksən ʊn gʁœzɐ vɛɐdən]

Dialekt

[duː bɪs no niː gʁoːs gœk uːm a flaʃə vaɪn aʊstsaʊfə duː mʊst ɛɐʃ nə n̩ bɪzl̩ vɔxs n̩ ʊn gʁœsɐ vɛɐn]

Wenkersatz 24

Standard

[gɛstɐn aben viː viːɐ nax haʊzə gɛkomn̩ sɪnt sɪn diː andɛʁən ʃoːn ɪm bɛt gɛleːgən ʊn haːbn̩ fɛst gəʃlafən]

Dialekt

[vɛn viː geːstən avlovt oːm kɪmant han diː ondɐn dʒon bɪt leːg ʊn hom ʒo fɛʃ geʃloːfə]

Appendix C: Dialect Intelligibility Audio Recordings1

Westniederdeutsch

Da haben wir unser Wissen, das wir heute brauchen für unser Leben, haben wir da her holen müssen. Dann spielten wir auf dem Schulhof: Kuhbär, Völkerball, auch manchmal

Fußball. Fußball, das war die Zeit damals in den dreißiger Jahren,>

Transcription

[ɪç va sɛs jɔə, da kam ɪç hiɐ lə ʊn folkʃau in di kiʁkən. diː ʃautiːt, diː ham viː hiː auf dm̩

ʃaulɔf aufm̩ kɛɐkplats, vo fʁʏ di alə kɛɐk gəstan hɛf. hɛf viː ʃønə ʃtundə ʃønə jaːʁə fɛɐliːʁət. daː habə vi ute vɛttn̩ vʊt vi du fon da gəbʁokətən leːbn̩ hɛb vi dɔ he haːn̩ mʊst. dan ʃpeltn̩ viː aupm̩ ʃaulhɔf, kuːbeːɐ fœlkɐbal auk manʃ fusbal. fusbal das va di tiːt damals in di tɛːtigɐ jaːʁən]

1 Translation to standard German from Institut für Deutsche Sprache (2011). Transcriptions are my own.

Ostniederdeutsch

Deutschland, der Schmallutzin! Wer den nicht kennt, hat noch gar nichts gesehen. Mehr

Seen waren in meiner späteren Heimat, in Mirow, dicht an der Müritz.>

Transcription

[ɪk hɛf miːn gantsə lɛstiːt ɪn meklə ʃtʁɛləts toːbʁɛçt. fɛlbax vo ɪç gəboɐn̩ bɪn, ɪs diː ʃøːnstə geːgən diː ɪç kɛnən duː. da ɪs diː ʃøːnstə zeː ɪn gans dutʃlan də ʃmal lutsiːən. və dɛn nɪç kɛnt hɛt nɔx gɔ niːks zeːən. miːɐ zeːən viːən ɪn miːn ʃpeːdəʁə haɪmat in miːʁoː dɪçt an dɐ mʏʁɪts]

100

Westmitteldeutsch

Transcription

[ja ja va ən gans ən gans ʃɪnk tseː. diʃ jaːɐ sɪn vɪ ɪn də kɪndəgaɐt gəgaŋ un n̩ əntsənhənsɛksʊndʁaɪsɪç an də ʃuːl. ʊn eː jaːɐ sɪn vi nɔ ɪn di al ʃuːl gaŋ. ə va nɔx kɛn zo ʃɪŋ ʃuːl ʊn zɪn viɐ nɔx tsə fiɐ dan ɪn a bankraɪ gəzeːəs. ʊn hat mə fiːɐmɪtas ʃuːl ʊn danə tsɪ hat mən nɔmɪtɔs fɔn tsvuː bɪs sɛks ʃuːl. mɔɪns va da no mɐ fʁiː ə va klet ʊn li tʁa vot tsugɔɐ di va vi naɪntsenhʊnziːbn̩ ʊndʁaɪsɪç ɛndlɪç fʁoː wɛn vi kɔntn̩ ən di naɪ ʃuːl gɔn. dat va a gʁos fɛst vi di ɛɐœfnʊŋ vaː]

101

Ostmitteldeutsch

Transcription

[azo das vaɐ də ɔxtətsvantsɪkstə zɛptɛmbɐ də saɪn viɐ nɔ viːzəndɔl gaŋə das ɪs iːbɐ dɐ gʁɛntz, də ʊt mə maɪsəns də tsɔkn gəpɔʃt nə. ʊn də kɔm ɛs də ɔɪtə ʃʊstɐ ʊn daː hoːt ziː

ɪmɐ gəbʁaʊxt ʊn da vaɐ də fɛʃtɐ aliː ʃuː gəkɔnt. tsə vɔltə nuː fyːɐ iːʁɐ kɪndɐ da zɔkən aʊsgəsuxt. jets vɔɐ dɔx diː vɪtʃ fɛɐloʁn̩gɔŋə jets hɔ zi nɔx danə vɪtʃ gəsuxt dɛn di vʊs dɔx də zɔŋ ɔpʁobiːʁən vɛn zi hamkɔmn̩ ʊn di ham nɪçt gəpɔst. dəs gɪŋ]

102

Alemannisch

Turnhalle und da war es eben noch schön. Das ist heute alles nicht mehr. Na, heute ist

Münster industriealisiert, das ist (PAUSE) viel Fabriken unten und Zeugs, da kennt man das nicht mehr, da geht alles in die Fabrik. Bauern haben wir glaube ich noch einen drunten,>

Transcription

[iː beː gəboʁən mɛnʃeː dʁʊndə dəs ɪʃ də vɔɐɔt fɔɐ ʃtuːgət, ɪʃ apʁaɪt baɪnə tsamn̩baʊt ʊn fʁiːɐ, vo iː nɔ ʃuːlə gaŋə beː bɪs naɪtsɪnhundɐtɔɪtsɔtsvantsiç ha vi aɪn ʃeːnə vaːzə kɪt tʊɐnhaɪlə ʊn da vaːs abə nɔ ʃeː. das ɪʃ haɪt ɛləs nɛmə. na haɪt ɪʃ mɛnʃtə ɪndʊstʁiːaliːziːɐt da ɪs fə fabʁiːkə ʁʊndə ʊn zeːks, dɔ dɔ kɪnt mə das nɪmə dɔ gɔl aləs ɪn fabʁiːk. baʊɐ ha vi glaʊb iːnə ɔɪn ʁʊndə]

103

Bairisch

Kinder gehabt. Und da mußte ich halt noch lange mit den Kindern fortarbeiten, nicht, bis man einmal die Kinder in die Welt hinausschicken hat können. Und dann ist einer dann

Flieger geworden und einer ist dann - zwei sind Lagerhausverwalter geworden und einer ist Metzger geworden. Mei bis man die Kinder untergebracht hat! Und jetzt haben sie sich allesamt verlaufen. Und jetzt habe ich…>

Transcription

[azo da va mazn man kʃtøbn̩ ʊn hav iː nɔ dʁaɪtsən klaɪnə ʊnfəzɛktiː kɪndə kɔpt. ʊn mʊst iː hɔ nɔ lɔŋ mɪt diː kɪndɐ føɐtaɐbaɪtən nɪt bɪs mə mal diː kɪndɐ ɪn də vɛlt naʊʃɪkə ɔ kiːna. ʊn do ɪs ɔnə iːs na fliː çəvɔn ʊn ɔnɐ iːs nɔx a twɛl hans laʊhahaʊsfəwaltə vɔɐdn̩ ʊn dwan iːz a meːtʃ gəvɔɐdn̩. maɪ biː miː diː kɪndɐ fɔn nɔ gəbraʊxt hət! ʊn jɛts habn̩ ziː ziː ɔlsamt fəɐklap. ʊn jət haːbə da ʔiːvɪk]

104

Appendix D: Dialect Intelligibility Multiple-Choice Questions

Westniederdeutsch

The speaker talked about School was at a

A. Schooling A. Church

B. A trip B. Old school

C. Hometown C. New school

D. Don't know D. Don't know

Ostniederdeutsch

The speaker talked about The speaker is from

A. Childhood A. Mecklenburg

B. A trip B. Holstein

C. Hometown C. Saxony

D. Don't know D. Don't know

105

Westmittledeutsch

The speaker talked about Kindergarten was in

A. Childhood A. Church

B. A trip B. Old school

C. Hometown C. New school

D. Don't know D. Don't know

Ostmitteldeutsch

The speaker talked about The story took place in

A. Childhood A. September

B. A trip B. October

C. Hometown C. November

D. Don't know D. Don't know

106

Alemannisch

The speaker talked about The speaker was born in

A. Childhood A. Düsseldorf

B. A trip B. Stuttgart

C. Hometown C. Munich

D. Don't know D. Don't know

Bairisch

The speaker talked about How many children?

A. Childhood A. 4

B. Family B. 8

C. Occupation C. 13

D. Don't know D. Don't know

107

Appendix E: Dialect Attitudes Audio Recordings2

Westniederdeutsch

essen hatten, und wir waren ja immer neun Jungen im Haus, und wir haben viel, Kummer haben wir sie gemacht, nicht, viele Streiche haben wir auch gemacht, nicht, das blieb auch gar nicht aus, bei den…>

Transcription

[ja və iː so maɪnɐ kɪndɐteːt fɛɐtɛlən zɔl mʊk fɛɐtɛln̩ da və daz ə ɤlʏklɪgə juːgənt haːtət ɔp ʃoːn viː vas niː fiːl kɪndɐ ʊn bʊs na dɔmals das fiː nə juːgənt vas aʊx nit al ʏpiç

ɪn hoːzə nə ʊn abə vɛɐ fɪel umɔɐ hatə nə! ʊnzə fazə ʊ mʊtɐs də sɔr ɪmər fə nə də və da vas avə jɛtn̩ aːn̩ ʊn viːɐ vas ɪmə niːn jʊŋ ze hoːzə ʊn viːɐ fiːls kʊmɐ hɛlvzə maːxə nə fɪel streɪke vaux maːxə nə da blaɪ aʊ ɤa ni aʊ bi də]

2 Translation to standard German from Institut für Deutsche Sprache (2011). Transcriptions are my own.

108

Ostniederdeutsch

Straßen dahin gab es allerdings nicht. Und bei uns wurde auch viel gescholten auf die

Preußen. Ich kenne noch den letzten Reichstagsabgeordneten, Nauck. Der war

Domänenpächter…>

Transcription

[dat keːm vol dɔdʊʁç dat pʁaʊzən diː ʊkɐmaɐk teːmlɪç dɪçt biː ʊns liːgən dɛɐ. ʃtrɔtən dɔhɪn geːft alɐdɪŋs niːç. ʊn biː ʊns vuːdʊk fɛl ʃoːl aʊ də praʊsən. ɪk kɛn nɔx deːn lɛtstən raɪçstaksapgəoɐnətn̩ naʊk. diː viːɐ doːmɛnpɛçtɐ]

109

Westmitteldeutsch

Neukirchener Dorforiginal und zweitens über ein paar alte Schulerinnerungen. Wie gesagt also, zunächst möchte ich mal über ein paar Anekdötchen von Peter Mattes erzählen, wie man sie heute noch so ab und zu in den Wirtschaften von alten

Neukirchener Leuten erzählen hört. Peter Mattes war so eine Art von Dorforiginal, wie man sie…>

Transcription

[ɪk maltə hyːk yːbɐ̩ tsvaɪ fɛɐʃiːdənə dɪŋ kan. tsuːneːkstəns yːvɐ̩ ə nəkɐ̩ ʃɐ̩ dɔɐt oʁiːgiːnaːn ʊn tsvɛtəns yːvɐ ə pa aldə ʃuːlɛɐɪnɐʊŋən. viː gəzaɪt alzo tsunekst mal iː ma yːbɐ aɪn paːɐ anɛkdœtʃɐ fɔn piːtɐ matəs fatsɛt viː man ziː jɛtst nɔx so ap ʊn tsuː ɪn də vɪɐʃaftə fɔn ald nəkɐʃɐ lyːt fɔxtsələ hyːt. piːtɐ matəs vaːɐ so ən aɐt fɔn dɔɐt oʁiːgiːnaːn, viː man sə]

110

Ostmitteldeutsch

Weihnachtszeit ist, da ist [es] am schönsten bei uns, die schönste von den ganzen Jahr.

Da haben wir die Bergmänner und die Räuchermänner und die Kerzen aufgestellt, und dann der andere (PAUSE) Kollege, der sitzt daneben, der tut schnitzen, der tut (PAUSE) der eine macht ein Bäumchen, der andere, der tut wieder was anderes machen: ein

Männchen. Und bis das fertig ist, und da wird nicht eher Ruhe gehalten,>

Transcription

[viːɐ zaɪ vən ɛlzgəbaɪk. baɪ ʊns ɛs haɪgə zøgə vɛn viːɐ baɪ vaɪnaxstsaɪt ɪs, da ɪs am ʃɛnstən baɪ ʊns dɔ ʃɛnstə fɔn gantsəs jaːɐ. dam̩ iːɐ də baɐgmaʊɐ ʊn də raɪɤəmɔnɐ ʊn diː kɛɐtsən aʊfgəstɛlt ʊn dan dɛɐ andəʁe kal kɔleːg da sɪtst danaːn da dy ʃnɪtsən da dʊt daɪnə maxt ə bamə da andəʁə da dyːt viːdə vas andəʁəʃ mɔxən ɛn maːnə ʊn bɪs das nax ʃʏs ʊn da vaːd niː ja ruː gəhøln̩ ]

111

Alemannisch

Weinberg an. Das ist das Bandlösen. Da gehen die Weibervölker [Frauen] mit ihren

Rebmessern gehen sie in die Reben und hauen die Bänder auf, mit denen die Reben angebunden worden sind. Mit, äh, die werden, mit…>

Transcription

[ɪm januːaʁ faŋt ʊns byːʁə biː ʊns raɪbyːʁə faŋt ɛː diː ɛɐʃtə aɐbɪt ɪn ʁiːbɛɐg a. das ɪʃ spɔndleːzə. dɔ geːn də viːbəfœlkə mɪd iːʁə ʁaːbmaɪsə geːn ziː ɪn dʁaːbə ʊn havə dɛɐ band oːf mɪd dan dʁaːbə aːbʊnd vɔɐdə ɪs zɪn. mɪd ɛː də vaɪdə mɪd də]

112

Bairisch

Mai. Ja mein, so ist dann die Arbeit angegangen am Feld draußen, gell. Dann ist, ist es schönes Wetter worden. Dann hat man zuerst an -am Feld angegangen, gell. Da hat man zuerst - zuerst das Vieh auf die Weide gegangen, da hat man viel Arbeit gehabt, bis man sie immer aus- und eingetrieben hat. Und derweil ist die Heuarbeit angegangen, dann hat man Heu, gearbeitet, wie es halt immer hergeht, gell. Hat man schönes Wetter gehabt, hat schlechtes Wetter gehabt, und da werkelst…>

Transcription

[ja maɪn viː ham mɛlsə viː ham jɪts zɪksuːdʁaɪsik gəhaɪrat gɛl das vɔɐd ɪm maɪ. ja mə so ɪs dɔn aʁbɪt gəgɔŋ a feː aʊsən gɛl. dan ɪs ɪs ʃviːdə vɔɐn. dan hɔt mɔn tsɛst an an fɛl oːgaŋ gɛl ɛs ʃɛst a fiː aʊf vaː gəgɔŋ dam fiː abə kɔp biː miː zɪmə aʊ aɪntʁiːbən hɔt. ʊn dəvaɪz haɪʁadə gɔŋə nɔ baɪ haɪ gɔʁət bɪs fə nə və he gət gə. hɔt man ʃeːns vɛdə kɔp hɔt ʃlɛçt vɛdə kɔp ʊn da vɛɐ]

113

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