Swiss German; Phonetics; Sociolinguistics; Migration; Youth language
Morand Marie-Anne, Bruno Melissa, Julmi Nora, Schwab Sandra, SchmidStephan (2020), Speech rhythm in multiethnolectal Zurich German, in
10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020, TokyoISCA, Tokyo.
Schmid Stephan (2020), Swiss German dialects spoken by second-generation immigrants: bilingual speech and dialect transformation, in
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-16.
Morand Marie-Anne, Bruno Melissa, Julmi Nora, Schwab Sandra, Schmid Stephan (2019), The voicing of lenis plosives in Zurich German: a sociophonetic marker of (multi-)ethnolectal speech, in
Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, MelbourneAustralasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., Canberra.
Schmid Stephan (2017), Differenzierungsprozesse im Sprachgebrauch von Jugendlichen in der Deutschschweiz: zur sozialen Interpretation von ethnolektalen Sprechweisen in Schweizer Medien, in
Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée, (1), 105-116.
Schmid Stephan (2017),
Migrationssprachen und ihr Einfluss auf die Landessprachen, SAGW, Bern.
MorandMarie-Anne, SchwabSandra, SchmidStephan, Standarddeutsche Interferenzen im Dialektwortschatz Schweizer Jugendlicher: Lexikalische und lautliche Entlehnungen, in
Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée, 114.
MorandMarie-Anne, SchwabSandra, SchmidStephan, The perception of multiethnolectal Zurich German: A continuum rather than clear-cut categories, in
Loquens: Spanish Journal of Speech Sciences.
This project aims at an analysis of the sound shape of (multi-)ethnic young speech in the German-speaking Switzerland. The project will cover both segmental features (such as obstruent voicing and monophthongization of diphthongs) and prosodic features (above all the frequently mentioned, but poorly understood rhythm of multi-ethnic speech). We propose a socio-phonetic study, which in addition to a description of phonetic variation also includes the social interpretation of this variation. The appearance of particular ways of speaking among young speakers with an immigrant background (and partly also their network peers without such background) became noted towards the end of the last century in several European cities and has been described in the scholarly literature under different labels, ‘multi-ethnolect’ being the most frequent one. Most of the studies have dealt with discourse, lexical and grammatical phenomena, while only few scholars have also addressed pronunciation. Considering that ‘accent’ is one of the primary cues for indexing social identities (and hence also for social categorization), we will focus on the sound shape of multi-ethnic speech. Despite the overwhelming evidence from everyday life, descriptions of multi-ethnic vernacular speech based on empirical data are almost lacking in Switzerland. One main goal of this project will therefore be the construction of a database, containg a variety of speech materials from two groups of speakers living in the Zurich area. Adolescents aged 14-17 and of social comparable background will be recruited from two different neighborhoods (one multi-ethnic, one - relatively - mono-ethnic) and will be recorded in different speech activities, ranging from spontaneous conversation to controlled read speach. Acoustic and statistical analyses will be carried out on samples of the data in order to determine the type and amount of sociophonetic variation in the multi-ethnic groups and the social and situational parameters influencing it against the background of the mono-ethnic control groups; perception experiments will shed light on the social interpretation of such variation.