Zurich German belongs to the High Alemannic subgroup of Alemannic, a dialect group forming part of Upper German (cf. Wiesinger 1983: 835). It is the dialect spoken in the city and in most parts of the canton of Zurich. According to recent census data, the canton of Zurich (whose area roughly coincides with the areal extension of Zurich German) has somewhat more than 1.2 million inhabitants, but since immigration both from other German-speaking areas and from more remote linguistic backgrounds plays an important role for the largest city and the largest canton of Switzerland, the number of speakers of Zurich German is certainly lower.

This chapter surveys some of the principal aspects of Romance segmental phonology. It covers development and distribution of the different Romance tonic and unstressed vowel systems; nasalization; principal developments affecting consonantal systems, including phonemic and allophonic oppositions, consonantal strength ((de)gemination, lenition, and fortition). Specific topics dealt with include: inventories of stressed vowel phonemes; vowel quantity; nasal vowel phonemes and allophonic vowel nasalization; unstressed vowels; metaphony and vowel harmony; consonant inventories; retroflex consonants; palatal consonants and palatalization; rhotics and rhotacism; lenition and fortition; assimilation processes.

Using an electroencephalography (EEG)-based mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm, we investigated whether higher familiarity with a dialectal variety of German (Swiss German (CHG) vs. Standard German (StG)) impacted speech perception at the neural and the behavioural level. Specifically, we examined 30 CHG- and StG-native adults, by contrasting a pseudoword containing an allophonic phoneme variant found in both dialects (i.e. standard) with 2 deviant stimuli encompassing allophonic phoneme variants, of which one was more familiar for CHG natives and the other was more familiar for StG natives. The same stimuli were used in a behavioural “same–different” discrimination task. Behavioural pseudoword differentiation was better for more familiar allophonic phoneme variants. MMN measures revealed significant fronto-central and temporal deviance-by-language-group interactions, primarily driven by larger MMN responses for less familiar deviants in StG natives. We conclude that a higher degree of familiarity with allophonic variants seems to impact neural processing efficiency, to the extent that less familiar variants demand more wide-spread activation processes.

To understand a sentence, it is crucial to understand who is doing what. The interplay of morphological case marking, argument serialization, and animacy provides linguistic cues for the processing system to rapidly identify the thematic roles of the arguments. The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates on-line brain responses during argument identification in Zurich German, a High Alemannic dialect, and in Fering, a North Frisian variety, which both exhibit reduced case systems as compared to Standard German. Like Standard German, Zurich German and Fering are Continental West Germanic varieties, and indeed argument processing in sentences with an object-before-subject order engenders a qualitatively similar ERP pattern of a scrambling negativity followed by a P600 in all tested varieties. However, the P600 component—a late positive ERP response, which has been linked to the categorization of task-relevant stimuli—is selectively affected by the most prominent cue for argument identification in each variety, which is case marking in Standard German, but animacy in Zurich German and Fering. Thus, even closely related varieties may employ different processing strategies based on the language-specific availability of syntactic and semantic cues for argument identification.*

The present study examines how Swiss German learners cope with the contrast between voiced and unvoiced obstruents in L2 French. The feature [±voice]) is not exploited in Swiss German dialects, where pairs of obstruents sharing the same place and manner of articulation are basically differentiated in terms of longer or shorter duration (i.e., the feature [±tense]). Therefore, we expect that Swiss German learners of French would assimilate the non-native feature [±voice] to the native [±tense] contrast, due to the great similarity and the functional equivalence of the two features; devoicing is predicted to occur more often in universally preferred positions such as the prepausal context. The corpus consists of 20 sentences (containing 6 voiced obstruents in 6 different phonotactic contexts), which were read by 10 high school students. An acoustic analysis permitted to categorize the 340 tokens into three discrete types: fully voiced, fully unvoiced, partially voiced. Chi-square tests yielded significant effects of the factors "context", "segment" and "speaker" on the variable "voicing". In particular, speakers pronounced 58% of the intervocalic obstruents as fully voiced, whereas they devoiced 85% of the prepausal tokens (thus, revealing both L1-based and universally preferred patterns).