VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
and that further durational measurements on larger corpora, and especially on
spontaneous speech, have to be performed in order to answer the question of whether
quantity plays a distinctive role in Central Bavarian.
4.2.3. Isochrony in Standard Austrian German
Standard Austrian German has a difficult position. On the one hand, it models itself on
Standard German, where all possible vowel + consonant combinations are conceivable.
On the other hand, in phonology and prosody, it has Bavarian roots and is strongly
connected with Central Bavarian.
In order to test whether the distinctive feature usually labeled as [± tense] in
Standard German has to be analysed as outlined above in Standard Austrian German,
the durations of vowel, closure of the following plosive, and VOT of bi-syllabics in
stressed positions have been measured. All four possible combinations of vowel +
plosive have been investigated:
• Long vowel + lenis plosive: type: Liebe (love), Grabe (grave: old DAT) –
bilabial, Lieder (songs), Made (maggot) – alveolar, Tiger (tiger), Lage
(circumstance) – velar.
• Short vowel + fortis plosive: type: Lippe (lip), doppelt (double) – bilabial,
bitte (please), Ratte (rat) – alveolar, Hecke (hedge), Hacke (hoe) – velar.
• Long vowel + fortis plosive: type: Siepe (family name), Hupe (horn) –
bilabial, bietet (offer, infectional form), rate (guess, inflectional form) –
alveolar, Ekel (disgust), Luke (hatch) – velar.
• Short vowel + lenis plosive: type: Krabbe (crab) – bilabial, Widder (ram),
– alveolar, Egge (harrow) – velar.
110 tokens per person of the types described above of the sentence reading task of one
female speaker (sp180) and one male speaker (sp127) have been analysed. Performed t-
tests proved no statistically significant differences with respect to vowel duration (in
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