Sociophonetic investigations of the German multi-ethnolect

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Peter Auer
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 382673988

This project aims at a systematic sociophonetic and sociolinguistic analysis of the sound shape of (multi-)ethnic young speech, adding to existing sociolinguistic knowledge of (multi-ethnolectal morphosyntax. The appearance of particular ways of speaking among certain groups of young speakers with so-called migration background (and partly also their network peers without such background) became noted towards the end of the last century in several European cities and has been described in the scholarly literature under different labels, multi-ethnolect being the most frequently used one. Most of the studies have dealt with discourse, lexical and grammatical phenomena, while only few scholars have addressed pronunciation. Considering that accent is one of the primary cues for indexing social identities (and hence also for social categorization), the project will focus on the sound shape of multi-ethnic speech. In the project a database will be composed, containing a variety of speech materials from speakers in the city of Stuttgart. Adolescents aged 14-17 and of comparable social and educational background will be recruited from two different neighborhoods (one multi-ethnic, one relatively mono-ethnic) and will be recorded in different speech activities, ranging from spontaneous conversation to controlled read speech. Acoustic and auditory phonetic analyses will be carried out on samples of the data in order to determine the type and amount of sociophonetic variation in the multi-ethnic group against the background of the mono-ethnic control group. Perception experiments as well as a study of the situational and interactional parameters related to the occurrence and suppression of ethnolectal sound features will shed light on the social interpretation of such variation.The project will be carried out in close cooperation with a similar project on Swiss-German multi-ethnolectal speech.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Stephan Schmid