LABIODENTAL AND ALVEOLAR VOICED FRICATIVES: PRONUNCIATION TENDENCIES IN THE NATIONAL VARIETIES OF GERMAN

Abstract

The present paper deals with the synchronic variation of the labiodental and alveolar fricative phonemes in the national varieties of German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Our research task was to describe the full range of modifications of these fricatives in the national varieties under investigation and to determine two conditional factors: 1) which modifications are due to positional and combinatorial conditions of sound realization; 2) which modifications can be taken to be typical of these national varieties of German.
The data collected are based on the acoustic analysis of reproductive speech (a reading of short stories by Leonhard Thoma) of 12 German teachers from Northern Germany, from the Vienna area and from the cantons of Aargau and Lucerne.
Our results showed that the frequent loss of tone by the lax labiodental fricative [v̥] mostly depends on the positional and combinatorial conditions of its realization and can be observed mainly in the positions of the absolute beginning of the phonetic word and after voiceless consonants in all the national varieties under investigation.
The realization of the lax alveolar fricative /z/ in the speech of the German is also dependent on its position and the sound context. Instead, in the speech of the Austrians and the German Swiss the voiceless allophone of the lax alveolar fricative [z̥] prevails regardless of its position in the phonetic word and sound context. Therefore, the occurrence of this allophone can be taken to be typical of these national varieties of German.