Regionale Variation der Stimmqualität

Regional variation of voice quality is one of the most neglected fields of German dialectology. This apparent lack of interest is all the more regrettable as international research has provided a substantial body of evidence for cross-linguistic and dialectal variation in voice quality. In most of these studies, however, it remains unclear whether the observed variation is a language effect or arises from the affiliation of the speakers to different speaker communities. Accordingly, the present study deals with two questions: (1) Is there regional variation of voice quality in the German language area, and if so, which aspects of voice quality are affected? (2) Is regional variation of voice quality a language effect or an effect of belonging to different speaker communities? In order to keep both aspects apart, bilingual speakers are examined who have grown up in two neighboring Low German dialect areas and share High German as a standard language. The study focuses on the Bersenbrucker Land in the north of the district of Osnabruck in Lower Saxony, which is a transitional dialect area between East-Westphalian in the south and Northern Low Saxon in the north. Two text passages were read aloud in a Low German and High German version, and four acoustic measures were calculated: the spectral slope between 0–1 kHz and 1–5 kHz, the spectral slope between 1–5 kHz and 5–8 kHz, the smoothed Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPPS), and the speaker’s formant. These measures characterize voice quality along the dimensions tense vs. lax voice, degree of breathiness and voice projection. The results indicate more lax and breathy voices in the south and more tense and less breathy voices in the north. At the same time, effects of gender, language, and reading task were found. As voice quality of both Low German and Standard High German varies between the north and the south, this variation can better be explained by the affiliation to different speaker communities than by a language effect in the sense that individual dialects or languages have their own voice quality.