Mental models of linguistic varieties 281alect in order to be able to compare them to the mappings of the Bern di-
alect already discussed in the preceding section.
If one compares Table 2 to Table 4, it becomes clear that indeed there is
a great amount of overlap between the St. Gallen stimuli and attributes and
the stimuli and attributes chosen for Standard High German. As already
noted above, it is thus important to differentiate between different dialects:
not all of them trigger or carry the same mental “gestalts”. The significant
difference between Bern and St. Gallen dialects can be related to a tradi-
tional dislike of eastern Swiss varieties, a tendency which can be traced
back several hundred years (Ris 1992: 756). Thus, it turns out that these
internal Swiss German stereotypes have a very long life. And it is also im-
portant to note that not only people outside St. Gallen have these esthetical-
ly negative evaluations of the St. Gallen dialect; in our sample we also had
speakers of this dialect who themselves exhibited exactly the same mapping
pattern (cf. the groundbreaking study by Lambert et al. 1960 that revealed
negative attitudes towards the participants’ own varieties by using a
matched guise design).
According to the sociolinguistic literature (Giles, Bourhis, and Davies
1975; Trudgill 1983), such esthetic and other judgments about varieties are
mainly ideological constructions, based on either the cultural value attri-
buted to the standard (“imposed norms hypothesis”) or based on other so-
cial/cultural stereotypes (“social connotation hypothesis”). Despite the
overwhelming evidence for the priority of sociological and cultural origin
of evaluatory judgments and classifications of languages/varieties, dissident
voices came out repeatedly advocating an intrinsic foundation especially of
esthetic judgments (“inherent value hypothesis”). It is this third hypothesis
that we will be examining in the remainder of this section.
The starting-point of the following observations was the perplexing
finding that our participants were at the same time quite consistent regard-
ing certain attributions and mappings and totally unable to give any other
motivations for their attributes than linguistically/phonologically motivated
ones. In the dialect imitation task (see section 2), many participants indeed
imitated the St. Gallen dialect (or less specifically the so called “Ost-
schweizer Dialekte”, eastern Swiss dialects) and overtly commented on the
different vowel phonology compared to most other Swiss German dialects,
as in the following transcript of the dialect imitation task:
Imitation by participant SH3 (native speaker of Bern dialect)
SH3: Well the easterners would say [gives a mock St. Gallen example with