282 Raphael Berthele
very open fronted /a/, /e/ and /i/ phonemes and a significantly raised voice
(f0)]
INVESTIGATOR: do you always have to raise your voice here?
SH3: [laughs] no, the raising of the voice is, now –
I am imitating somebody who used this sentence [...] you do automatically- in order to say this, you go up, probably with the tongue, or, that is the...
INVESTIGATOR: you actually don't really open your mouth
SH3: yes you also have... I mean, this is very characteristic for this dialect,
you've got totally different – for many things you've got a totally different
position of the mouth
What the participant refers to here could be related to the actual phonologi-
cal makeup of typical St. Gallen dialect: the presence of, historically speak-
ing, a considerable amount of vowel raising and the absence of certain par-
ticular vowel lowerings. Figure 4 gives an account of these phonological
processes. The relevant processes are illustrated in Table 5.
lowering î iu û
i ü u
e ö o
ë ê œ ô
ä[æ] a æ â[ɛ][ɔ][e] [o] [e:] [o:][ɛ] [ɛ:] [ɔ:] raising
Middle High German
short vowels long vowelsFigure 4. Raising and lowering in Swiss German dialects (cf. Haas 1978)
A salient consequence of the processes documented in Figure 4 and Table 5
is that any sample of authentic St. Gallen Swiss German speech contains
indeed significantly more high vowels compared to e.g. the Bern dialect.
As shown above, at least some particularly good “amateur linguists” among
our participants are actually aware of these differences – maybe not in
terms of phonological systems, but in terms of the articulatory differences
of the instantiations of the systems. Since these differences are salient and
systematic, we can at least try to ask the question whether there is any evi-
dence from research on sound symbolism (as it can be found in the early