The velarized lateral [ɫ] in East Austrian base dialects

This paper is concerned with the velarized lateral [ɫ] as a possible realization of the lateral phoneme /l/ in the rural Central Bavarian base dialects of German in Austria. So far, velarized laterals in Austrian German have mainly been described as a socially marked realization of /l/ in Vienna. However, descriptions of Austrian dialects mostly lack detailed acoustic analyses. Therefore, we analyzed the first two formants of alveolar laterals from dialect speakers in seventeen locations around Vienna that fall into the Central and South Central Bavarian dialect areas. Recordings were taken from the ‘German in Austria’ Corpus, from four speakers per location (two old, two young, each one male, one female), with thirty-two items per speaker with laterals in word-initial and twenty-two in word-final position. We asked whether the degree of velarization as measured by the difference between F2 and F1 (the smaller the more velarized) depends on this linguistic factor of position in the word – as has been shown for other Germanic languages – or social factors including the recording location’s distance from Vienna, age and gender of the speakers. Results showed that velarization was most frequently but not exclusively found in the Eastern region closest to Vienna (Central Bavarian dialects). Non-velarized and velarized laterals tended towards a complementary distribution in initial versus final word position and male speakers showed more velarization overall. Specifically, old speakers in locations close to Vienna tended towards more velarization in word-initial position compared to other regions, matching descriptions of Viennese dialect.