The realization of plosives in the national varieties of German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

The present paper deals with the synchronic variation of plosive phonemes in the national varieties of German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Our research task was to describe the full range of modifications of the plosives in the national varieties under investigation and to determine two conditional factors: 1) which modifications are due to positional and combinatorial conditions of sound realization; 2) which modifications can be taken to be typical of these national varieties of German. The data collected are based on the acoustic analysis of reproductive speech (a reading of a word list and short stories by Leonhard Thoma) of 12 German teachers (4 for each national variety) from Northern Germany, from the Vienna area and from the cantons of Aargau and Lucerne. Our results showed that national-specific modifications of the plosive phonemes are the frequent loss of tone by the lax plosives [(b) under circle], [(d) under circle], [(g) over circle] in the speech of the German Swiss and Austrians, and a weakening until the complete loss of aspiration by the plosives [p] and [t] in the speech of Austrians.