Languages, dialects, and speakers have been found to show variability in articulation rate and speech rhythm. The present study examines whether temporal variability found between four Alemannic (ALM) dialects is also present in the same speakers' Swiss Standard German (SSG) varieties. The results suggest that ALM interferences are not systematic. Whereas in ALM dialects, Churspeakers show the quickest articulation rate and Brig speakers the slowest, amongst the SSG varieties, Zurich speakers articulated the most quickly and Bern the most slowly. As for further rhythm metrics, the insights of this study provide evidence that consonantal variability is more telling regarding dialect/variety identification than vocalic measures.

Despite being one of the official languages in Switzerland, the phonetic properties of Swiss Standard German (SSG) have been studied insufficiently. Regarding Alemannic (ALM) dialects, most of the available phonetic studies have dealt with consonants rather than vowels. To counteract this general lack of research, this study investigates the long-vowel inventories of four ALM dialects as well as their respective SSG varieties regarding vowel quality. The aim of the study is twofold: on the one hand, it provides the first comparative acoustic analysis of ALM and SSG vowels; on the other hand, it investigates to which extent interference from ALM dialects determines the vowel qualities of SSG varieties. To this end, four male and four female speakers from Bern, Chur, Brig, and Zurich were recorded producing each vowel three times, which resulted in a corpus of 1632 tokens. The results show that ALM vowel quality is basically transferred to the SSG varieties in two dialect regions: Chur and Brig. Instead, in the SSG varieties spoken in Bern and Zurich certain vowel qualities did not match the ALM ones, mostly for <a> that was fronted in the SSG variety of either dialect. Additionally, the Bern SSG <ä> was produced as both [┋ː] and [ӕː], while <o> was realised more in the back.

While German-speaking Switzerland manifests a considerable amount of dialectal diversity, until the present day the phonetic interrelation of Alemannic (ALM) dialects and spoken Swiss Standard German (SSG) has not been studied with an acoustic phonetic approach on the speaker level. In this study, out of a pool of 32 speakers (controlled for sex, age, and education level) from 4 dialectologically distinct ALM areas, 16 speakers with 2 dialects were analysed regarding SSG consonant duration (in words whose ALM equivalents may or may not have a geminate), 8 speakers from the city of Bern (BE) were analysed for vowel quality, and 32 speakers were analysed for temporal variables, i.e., articulation rate (AR) and vocalic-speech percentage (%V). Results reveal that there is much intradialectal inter- and intraspeaker variation in all three aspects scrutinised, but especially regarding vowel quality of BE SSG mid vowels and temporal variables. As for consonant quantity, while intradialectal interspeaker variation was observed, speakers showed a tendency towards normalised SSG consonant durations that resemble the normalised consonant durations in their ALM dialect. In general, these results suggest that a speaker’s dialect background is only one factor amongst many that influence the way in which Swiss Standard German is spoken.

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