270 Raphael Berthele
areas. Swiss-Germans are thus more or less bilingual in two closely related
systems, the respective base dialect and the Swiss variant of the German
standard language, and the relatively clear functional distribution of usage
of the two systems is commonly associated with the concept of diglossia
(Ferguson 1959, 1991). What is particularly important for the present study
is that – at least on the phonological and morphological level – there is no
such thing as a Swiss German Koiné, i.e. a leveled out form of an Aleman-
nic dialect (cf. Christen 1998). Therefore, we still find a considerable
amount of phonological variation across the Swiss German speaking area,
and Swiss Germans appreciate this diversity, are generally very aware of it,
and love to mock (deprecatingly, but sometimes also admiringly) their
compatriots’ dialects.
In 2004, we^2 carried out standardized data elicitation sessions with 45
adult participants, all of them native Swiss Germans between 19 and 87
years old. These participants were asked to participate in 5 tasks:
- Map elicitation task: Participants had to draw by hand dialect/language
maps of Switzerland - Dialect imitation task: Participants were asked to imitate dialects they
know - Dialect recognition task: Participants were played dialect samples and
they had to recognize the region of origin of the speaker - Visual stimulus mapping task (“Bubble Task”): Participants were pre-
sented a series of hand-drawn bubbles (see Figure 1) and asked to
attribute varieties and/or languages to these bubbles - Attribution task: While doing task 4, participants were asked to charac-
terize the languages/varieties they mapped onto these bubbles
2.1. Bubble task and attribution task
The tasks that are particularly interesting for the issues raised in section 1
are tasks 4 and 5. Our participants were first handed a sheet of paper show-
ing the bubbles in Figure 1. Then, the participants were requested to do two
things:
- Can you assign any varieties/dialects/ languages to any of these bubbles?
- Can you describe the varieties/ dialects/languages you are referring to?