Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German?

Büchler, Andrin; Bülow, Lars und Britain, David (2024): Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German? In: Language Variation and Change, Vol. 36, No. 2: pp. 171-193

Abstract

This paper shows (a) how the concept of the linguistic market can be operationalized as an index to enable its inclusion as a factor in variationist analysis and (b) how this index helps to explain sociolinguistic variation in a diglossic situation. To do this, sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in Swiss Standard German among 16 L1-dialect-speakers aged between 19 and 40 from Biel/Bienne in western Switzerland. Drawing from participants’ self-assessments of the importance of Standard German in their professional life, a linguistic market index (LMI) was created and cross-validated with external assessments. Our varia-tionist analysis considered four phonetic-phonological variables—/k/, /ç/, /aː/, /ε-εː/—for which typical Swiss variants (i.e., sociolinguistic stereotypes) exist. Findings show that the LMI is crucial for explaining variation in all the variables tested. Other social (i.e., gen-der and formality of the language production task) and linguistic factors (e.g., phonetic environment) show partial effects as well.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Languages and Literatures > Department 1 > German Studies
• Subjects: 400 Language > 430 German and related languages
• ISSN: 0954-3945
• Language: English