VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
For Standard Austrian German, the phonemic position of the schwa need not be
discussed, since a mid central schwa exists neither phonetically nor phonologically 57 .
As concerns /E:/, Iivonen (1987b) still assumes this vowel to be a part of Standard
Austrian German, although it strongly approaches /e:/. In the current investigation, /E:/
has totally merged with /e:/, therefore it can been discarded as a phoneme. As a starting
point, the phoneme inventory of Standard Austrian German is assumed to consist of the
following 14 (underlined) vowels:
bieten bi:tEn Hüte hy:tE spuken Spu:kEn
bitten bçtEn Hütte hYtE spucken SpïkEn
beten be:tEn Höhle hë:lE Mode mo:dE
betten bEtEn Hölle hêlE Motte mOtE
Schall Sal Schal SA:l
Phonemically, these vowels are very unevenly distributed. A counting of all phonemes
in spontaneous speech over all speakers resulted in a predominance of front unrounded
vowels. The front rounded vowels hardly play any role, and the back rounded vowels
occur relatively rarely as well (see Figure 4.1):
%
35,00
30,00
25,00
20,00
15,00
10,00
5,00
0,00
i vowels y vowels e vowels ö vowels u vowels o vowels a vowels
all speakers 23,34 1,72 31,54 0,38 8,41 10,11 24,49
Figure 4.1: Occurrence (in %) of the vowel pairs in spontaneous speech, pooled over all
speakers and all prosodic positions.
57 For example, in pre-tonic /e/ of the prefix “ge-“, none of the speakers produces formant
frequency values that would justify the assumption of a schwa.
52