VarDiÖ: Variation and Change of dialect varieties in Austria (in apparent and real time)

Project Part 02 of the Special Research Programme German in Austria. Variation - Contact - Perception financed by FWF (FWF6002) in cooperation with Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg

Project lead:  Stephan Elspaß (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg), Eva Reinisch (Acoustics Research Institute of the OeAW)

Start of project: January 1^st 2016

Project description:

The project is concerned with the multitude and dynamics of the German dialects in Austria. A large corpus of new recordings should allow to tackle various research questions, such as: Which differences and changes (e.g., as a result of processes of convergence and divergence) can be observed between different dialectal areas in Austria? Are there differences in language change between rural and urban areas? Do the factors age and gender lead to differences in language change? Can dialect studies following both, the real-time and apparent-time paradigm, inform general theories of language change?

To approach these questions, a corpus of 160 old and young speakers of dialects from 40 rural locations in Austria has been compiled during the first phase of the project from 2016 to 2019. In the second phase from 2020 onwards, this corpus was augmented by 75 locations with 2 speakers each. Additional recordings in the laboratory using ultrasound tongue imaging allow articulatory analyses to complement the acoustic recordings in the field. Based on the project data, two acoustic studies on language change regarding diphthongs („Viennese Monophthongization“) and velarized laterals have been conducted that investigate the occurrence of historically Viennese variants in neighboring base dialects. Another study that additionally uses data from ultrasound tongue imaging describes retroflex laterals in read speech of speakers from the cities of Vienna and Graz. Additional studies including experiments on perception are planned and two ongoing dissertation projects (Jan Luttenberger on laterals and David Gschösser on the dorsal affrikate /kx/) use the project data. The data will be made available for a broad audience on the platform „German in Austria“ at the end of the project featuring the first „talking dialect map“ of Austria as a whole.