Beyond Sounds and Stereotypes – Exploring Phonaesthetic Perceptions of Swiss German Dialects

Abstract

In German-speaking Switzerland, both print and online media regularly publish rankings based on public surveys, assessing the popularity of dialects like Bern German, Zurich German, and Valais German. Over the years, these rankings have shown relative stability, along with stereotypical associations linked to these dialects, such as notions of coziness, attractiveness, or arrogance. Our study delves into the field of phonaesthetics [2, 3, 4, 8, 17] and perceptual dialectology of German varieties [1, 11, 12, 13, 14]. We aim to understand how Swiss German dialectal sound features are subjectively evaluated and which features give rise to stereotypical dialect attributions. We also explore the impact of extralinguistic factors, such as age, gender, education, attitudes toward the region, mobility, and personality, on these evaluations. We thus investigate the role of regional features in language perception and evaluation [13], examining the inherent value and social connotations hypotheses [5, 6]. Our pilot study focuses on the (ethno-)dialectologically most relevant dialect areas in Swiss German, namely Bern and Zurich [9, 15], which consistently receive different positions in popular dialect rankings. These areas are both critical urban centers in German-speaking Switzerland, with Bern serving as the political hub and Zurich as the economic center. We examine 24 linguistic variables, including 9 vowels and 15 consonants, within single-word utterances (e.g., <Rad> [ra̠ːt rɑːt], <fünf> [fɔ͡ ɪf fyːf], <Milch> [mɪlχ mɪʊχ], <Hund> [hʊnt hʊŋ]). These variables create 48 minimal pair items, contrasting Bern German and Zurich German variants where possible, in a matched-guise design. We measure reaction times using Implicit Association Tasks [7, 16] and assess six dimensions of evaluation: three aesthetic descriptors (beauty, status, and eros [8]), and three subjective dialect attributes (urban/rural, soft/hard, and friendly/aggressive). Our study includes three listener groups: residents of Bern, residents of Zurich, and a control group from Hessen, Germany, who are unfamiliar with both dialects. We hypothesize that aesthetic evaluations of dialectal sound features are influenced by learned sociocultural factors, listeners' extralinguistic characteristics, and specific acoustic characteristics. Additionally, we anticipate that the mapping of sound features to subjective dialect attributes will primarily apply to the Swiss German listener groups, rather than the German control group, as the associations in question are deeply ingrained [6] but still linked to certain sounds [10]. We will present initial results of the Implicit Association Tasks using linear mixed effects models in our presentation.

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