The pronunciation of /l/ in East Austria: Is there a velarized [ɫ] outside of Vienna?
Jan Luttenberger, Nina Weihs and Eva Reinisch from the Phonetics Cluster have conducted a study on the pronunciation of /l/ in the dialects of East Austria.
20.03.2024
Figure 1: Map of Austria showing the locations under investigation. The geometrical shape indicates the dialect region (squares: WCB = Western Central Bavarian in Salzburg and Upper Austria; circles: ECB = Eastern Central Bavarian in Upper Austria and Lower Austria; triangles: SCB = South Central Bavarian in Styria, Lower Austria and Burgenland), the color indicates the regions of the statistical analysis (black: “East Region”, grey: “West Region”, white: “South Region”). This figure is identical to Figure 1 in the cited article, Luttenberger et al. (2024).
In Standard Austrian German and the Austrian German dialects there is only a single phonological lateral sound /l/, which is typically realized as an alveolar lateral [l]. Depending on word position and the variety of German other realizations are used as well, for example the velarized alveolar lateral [ɫ]. Both variants have an occlusion between tongue tip or tongue blade and the upper alveolar ridge or upper teeth with an opening to the side, through which the air stream can pass. Additionally, velarized [ɫ] has a secondary tongue gesture in which the back of the tongue is retracted towards the velum or pharynx. In terms of acoustics, this tongue gesture lowers the frequency of the second formant, which gives a “dark” auditive impression similar to a /u/ sound. The difference between [l] and [ɫ] is a gradual one, which means any /l/ may be more or less velarized. Clearly velarized /l/ usually has an F2 of less than 1200 Hz (two contrastive hearing examples with the German words “Esel” (donkey) and “lesen” (to read) can be found at the very bottom of this page).
So far, the velarized variant [ɫ] has been described for the dialect in the city of Vienna, where it can be found word initially (e.g. in “Lied” (song)) and in word-final syllabic position in non-accented syllables after alveolar consonants (e.g. in “Sessel” (chair) with the second <e> vowel being deleted). From the Austrian federal states of Lower and Upper Austria only cursory descriptions are available so far. Therefore, velarization was assumed to be mostly a phenomenon of Viennese dialect. The recently published study asks, whether velarization is also present in rural dialects in Eastern Austria outside of Vienna. To this end the pronunciation of /l/ of 68 speakers from 17 locations in the federal states of Salzburg, Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Styria and Burgenland in 54 words was analyzed. The data are part of the corpus of the Special Research Programme “German in Austria. Variation – Contact – Perception” (https://www.dioe.at/).
The difference of the frequencies between the first and second formants was used as the acoustic parameter for analysis to normalize physiological differences between speakers. For the statistical analysis, the locations under investigation were bundled into three groups: an Eastern region in the Central Bavarian dialect area in Lower Austria in the neighbouring "Mühlviertel" in Upper Austria, an adjacent Western region in Upper Austria and Salzburg, and a Southern region in the South Central Bavarian dialect area in Lower Austria, Styria and Burgenland (see Figure 1). Some of the most interesting results are depicted in Figure 2: The velarized variant [ɫ] (approximately less than 1000 Hz F2-F1 difference) is used regularly in Lower and Upper Austria, but most of the time only in word final position like in “Sessel”, while /l/ in word initial position, e.g. in “Lied”, tends to be not or not as much velarized. This pattern of distribution, which is also present in English RP or Standard Dutch, is strongest in Lower Austria and Upper Austria – correlating with the “East Region” and “West Region” in Figure 2. This similarity ties in with the grouping of these dialects as Eastern Central Bavarian. Outside of this region velarization is diminishing with increasing distance to Vienna. Furthermore, female speakers use the velarized variant less than male speakers, which was also observed in previous studies on Vienna. In contrast, there is almost no difference between younger and older speakers, so it seems that the use of the velarized variant is stable across generations. By and large it is safe to say that the velarized variant [ɫ] is definitely present outside of Vienna.
Luttenberger, Jan; Weihs, Nina; Reinisch, Eva (2024): The velarized lateral [ɫ] in East Austrian base dialects. In: Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 1–26. The article (in English) is available here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100323000300
Figure 2: Density plots (left column) and box plots (right column) showing the difference F2-F1 in Hertz for all locations (first row) and for each Region (second to fourth row). Darker shading indicates /l/ in word initial position, lighter shading indicates /l/ in word final position. The box blots to the right also show the individual locations. This figure is identical to Figure 4 in the cited article, Luttenberger et al. (2024).
Figure 2: Density plots (left column) and box plots (right column) showing the difference F2-F1 in Hertz for all locations (first row) and for each Region (second to fourth row). Darker shading indicates /l/ in word initial position, lighter shading indicates /l/ in word final position. The box blots to the right also show the individual locations. This figure is identical to Figure 4 in the cited article, Luttenberger et al. (2024).
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