Increased Breathiness in Adolescent Kiezdeutsch Speakers: A Marker of Multiethnolectal Group Affiliation?

Kiezdeutsch is a multiethnolectal variety of German spoken by young people from multicultural communities that exhibits lexical, syntactic, and phonetic differences from standard German. A rather salient and pervasive feature of this variety is the fronting of the standard palatal fricative /ç/ (as in "I") to [ɕ] or [ʃ]. Previous perception work shows that this difference is salient and carries social meaning but dependent on the listener group.

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods.

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center "Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define "register" as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register.

The Social Meaning of Contextualized Sibilant Alternations in Berlin German.

In Berlin, the pronunciation of /ç/ as [ɕ] is associated with the multi-ethnic youth variety (). This alternation is also known to be produced by French learners of German. While listeners form socio-cultural interpretations upon hearing language input, the associations differ depending on the listeners' biases and stereotypes toward speakers or groups.

Spectral moments vs discrete cosine transformation coefficients: Evaluation of acoustic measures distinguishing two merging German fricatives.

The results of the quantification of the acoustic differences between German /ç/ and /ʃ/ in three speaker groups with varying contrast realizations are presented. Data for two speaker groups were collected in Berlin and Kiel, where the contrast is still realized. Data for a third group were collected in Berlin from speakers of Hood German-a youth-style multiethnolect spoken by adolescents in multilingual and multicultural neighborhoods of Berlin-where the contrast has weakened or is even lost.