Universität Bielefeld - Sonderforschungsbereich 360
Intonation in German
Dafydd Gibbon
Background
German is a West Germanic language, closely related to Dutch and English, with
about 100 million native speakers in Germany, Austria and the northern parts
of Switzerland, as well as small enclaves in Russia and neighbouring countries,
in Romania, and in North and South America. Unlike other European standard
languages, Standard German is not the language of a specific social stratum in
a specific geographical area. Rather, it is perhaps best identified in terms of the
pronunciation of the written standard language as codified in the publications of the
Duden dictionary publishers. Standard German, Hochdeutsch, should
not be confused with Hochdeutsch (`High German') as a technical term for
the group of Southern German dialects which underwent the High German Consonant
Shift in the early Middle Ages. The pronunciation of Standard German is a sometimes
called Bühnenaussprache (`stage pronunciation'). Standard German is a
superstrate which is associated historically with the formal speech of the educated
classes in the Lutheran areas of Northern Germany. However, the distinctive regional
pronunciation of speakers in each major German cultural centre is also acceptable in
public life.
The main regional standards are associated with Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne,
Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Leipzig, with Vienna for Austrian German, and Zurich
for Swiss German (see 3.1). A remarkable feature of the German of educated speakers
in many parts of Germany is socially triggered dialect switching, between a local
dialect, the regional standard, and the standard superstrate. As in other countries,
the mass media tend to support spreading of the standard superstrate.
Regional standard accents are characterised both by differences in the vowel and
consonant system, also by a conspicuous variety of intonation patterns. The prosodic
systems of the regional standards do not differ fundamentally from those of the
standard superstrate, however. German pronunciation and its relation to other
varieties is described in detail by Kohler (1995).
Anke Weinberger, 1997-12-18, 1997-01-08