Intonation and Sociolinguistic Factors in Regionally Accented Speech (C02)

• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551281144

A regional coloring in spoken Standard German is often understood as noise in the signal. So far, it is unclear why this regionally induced noise, e.g., in prosody, is more pronounced in some speakers and why some listeners adapt to it more quickly. C02 deals with regional patterns in intonation categories in German and Swiss bivarietal speakers of Alemannic and investigates in production, perception and processing experiments whether these can be systematically predicted by sociolinguistic factors such as attitudes towards standard and variety.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1760: SiNoSi: Silence, Noise and Signal in Language
• Applicant Institution: Universität Konstanz
• Project Heads: Dr. Marieke Einfeldt; Professorin Dr. Katharina Zahner-Ritter