Sociolinguistic variation in a non-native variety of Swiss German: Romansh migrants in the city of Berne

Büchler, Andrin (2 August 2022). Sociolinguistic variation in a non-native variety of Swiss German: Romansh migrants in the city of Berne (Unpublished). In: Methods in Dialectology XVII. Mainz. 01.08.–05.08.2022.

This paper is concerned with the sociolinguistic effects of Swiss intra-national migration involving speakers of the minority language Romansh. Since Switzerland is officially a quadrilingual country characterised by “territorial multilingualism” (cf. Riehl 2014: 64), people often need to acquire an additional language when moving to another region within the country. This also holds true for speakers of Romansh. However, given the strong economic and social prevalence of German-speaking Switzerland, Romansh speakers generally acquire the Grison variety of Swiss German as an L2 already during adolescence. If they move to German-speaking Switzerland (e.g., to attend university), they are confronted with yet other regional varieties of Swiss German, which leads to an intense dialect contact situation.
The Swiss German variety spoken by Romansh speakers as L2 has only recently gained some scholarly attention (cf. Eckhardt 2021). Previously, studies of Swiss German have focused more on regional rather than social variation and hence have excluded non-native speakers, such as Romansh speakers (cf. SDS; Glaser 2021). Furthermore, non-mobile speakers have been favoured. So, to some degree, Swiss dialect studies have adhered to traditional methods of dialectology and hence have only partially investigated the social processes underlying linguistic variation.
The present paper adopts variationist sociolinguistic methods to analyse long-term accommodation involving mobile, non-native speakers of Swiss German. Specifically, this research shows how variationist methods can better explain accommodation processes present in the Swiss German L2- variety of Romansh speakers who have migrated from their rural villages in Grisons to the city of Berne. I present data demonstrating internal as well as external factors to predict speakers’ level of accommodation.
The sample consists of sociolinguistic interviews of 40 tertiary-educated Romansh speakers, aged between 20 and 40, who have migrated to Berne. The variationist analysis is based on three phonetic- phonological variables, Germanic word-initial (k), non-Germanic word-initial (k) and word-final (ə), for which the Grison variety of Swiss German has typical local variants. Long-term accommodation means that speakers level out these typical Grison features and approach variants common in most Swiss Midland varieties (that is, the adoption of supralocal variants). Results suggest a high degree of inter- speaker variability. This is no surprise given each speaker’s distinct history of acquisition and contact to different varieties of Swiss German. However, variation is not random but constrained by internal factors such as the phonetic environment as well as a number of social factors (e.g., language biography, geographical orientation, network structure, school attended, etc.) which help to explain speakers’ varying degrees of accommodation towards more supralocal variants.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

0 since deposited on 09 Aug 2022
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item