VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
Number of periods Sp082 Sp129 Sp180 Sp012 Sp126 Sp127
/i/ 18 18 18 11 12 14
/y/ 23 30 22 21 16 24
/e/ 21 20 22 14 15 17
/ë/ 23 23 24 16 15 20
/A/ 20 18 22 12 17 17
/u/ 21 19 28 15 16 18
/o/ 24 21 25 17 17 19
/ç/ 12 10 15 7 8 9
/Y/ 15 10 14 8 9 11
/E/ 16 11 13 9 11 11
/ê/ 17 13 17 9 11 12
/a/ 18 12 18 9 12 13
/ï/ 15 13 16 9 7 11
/O/ 13 9 14 8 10 11
Table 4.8: Mean NoP for all speakers, broken down for vowel type, sentence reading task.
The temporal patterns (in NoPs) observed for Standard Austrian German vowels
continue a development that is already evident in Standard German. In Standard
Austrian German, the contrastive power of NoP monotonously decreases with
decreasing formality and prosodic strength. Moreover, no durational differences
between high and low vowels can be observed; NoP ratios of the low vowels pairs are
not bigger than the ratios of the high vowel pairs, i.e. the contrastive power of NoP is
not any better for low vowels than for high vowels. From this it follows that a separate
feature [± long] to discriminate the low vowels is not justified. It can be concluded that
duration has no contrastive function in the Standard Austrian German vowel system.
4.2.5. Duration and Laxness
In 4.2.4 it has been argued that duration is not a distinctive feature in Standard
Austrian German. The historical analysis presented in Ronneberger-Sibold (1999)
supports this analysis: since isochrony has been given up in Standard German, the
quality of the former short vowels changed, i.e. the short “tense” vowels became “lax”.
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