Michael Helten

A Guide to Swabian Michael Helten

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, State University of New York at Stony Brook (Linguistics), course: Phonetics, 8 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: This paper is thought to be an introduction and instruction to Swabian (Schwäbisch), a Southern German dialect. It is accompanied by a number of audio files to exemplify all Swabian phonemes, intonation etc. and it describes and tries to account for a number of particularly Swabian phenomena. , abstract: This guide to Swabian is aimed at American college and university students who have an interest in language and who have studied German for at least a year, and of course for anyone else interested in the subject. The aim is to make people who are already familiar with the general phonetic patterns of German and English aware of how extremely different Swabian, as an example of one of the many and diverse dialects of German, can sound from the textbook Standard German that is generally taught - for a good reason, of course, since the standard variety, like in most languages, is the only variety that has an agreed upon spelling and it will be the most widely understood. Accompanied by a number of speech samples that will illustrate the phonemic sounds of Swabian and give a general feeling for the dialect, the sections on consonants and vowels will focus on the major differences between Standard German and Swabian, and on what sounds in the inventory of English may prove helpful in the pronunciation of Swabian. First of all, however, we should turn towards how Swabian is located, that is locally, but also concerning its linguistic background and surroundings.