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Stefan Kleiner: Zur Aussprache von nebentonigem -ig im deutschen Gebrauchsstandard

The alternation between fricative and plosive variants in the pronunciation of ‑ig is one of the best-known variative phenomena of current spoken German. Essentially, it can be traced back to the pronunciation norm established by the Siebs Commission of 1898, in which a fricative pronunciation [ç] was assigned to the grapheme <g> in ‑ig in syllable-final position and before consonants (König, wichtig, zwanzig, verteidigt, Schwierigkeiten) while a plosive realisation [g, k] was prescribed for all other contexts (prevocalic ‑ig, <g> in other constellations). Primarily in order to capture the current regional dimension to this variation, the speech of 670 advanced-secondary school pupils reading aloud (word lists, texts) and participating in interviews was taken from the “Deutsch heute” corpus (collected from across the entire German-speaking area between 2006 and 2009) and analysed. The results show that traditional assumptions about the spatial distribution of the pronunciation variants (fricative in the north, plosive in the south) represents only a coarse approximation of the empirically ascertainable variation, explicable in terms of disparate influences. Variation in the realisations is shown to be influenced by both language-internal factors such as the part of speech involved, lexical semantics, word frequency and, above all, position-distributional conditions, and extralinguistic factors such as the degree of formality, the medium, dialect competence and, above all, the speaker’s region of origin. These lead on a case-by-case basis to widely differing results in the areal distribution of the pronunciation variants. In the read-aloud speech, the corpus exhibits a range of tokens from 72 percent fricative for abstract adjectives formed with ‑igkeit‑ to 92 percent plosive in superlatives formed with ‑igst‑.