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Manuela Guntern: Erkennen von Dialekten anhand von gesprochenem Schweizerhochdeutsch

This article explores the question of whether male and female L1 speakers of a Swiss German dialect are able to detect the origin or dialect of other members of the linguistic community on the basis of their spoken Swiss Standard German. In a theoretical section, the relevant research literature is canvassed in order to establish the extent to which spoken Swiss Standard German meets the preconditions needed for a reliable localization. In an empirical section, the results of a linguistic experiment are presented. This investigates the recognizability of a speaker’s dialectal origins on the basis of their spoken Swiss Standard German. The experiment also explores the participants’ self-assessment of their own competence in the localization task. Finally, participants’ reports of the factors they believed had led them to their conclusions about the speakers’ dialects form the basis of a discussion of the salience of various features in spoken Swiss Standard German.