Mental models of linguistic varieties 285Standard High German, needs to be taken into account. As we have seen in
Table 3 and Figure 3, Standard High German and St. Gallen dialect are
often associated with similar visual stimuli. In terms of vowel phonology,
the two varieties of German are quite similar, as shown in Table 5: In 7 out
of the 10 variables listed, Standard High German has equally closed or even
closer vowel qualities than St. Gallen German. In one of the remaining
phonemes, MHG /i/, Standard High German is at least mid-way between
the lower Bern variant and the higher St. Gallen variant. Given the fact that
the visual stimuli match both the synaesthetic regularities discussed in this
section as well as the cultural topoi discussed in section 2.2, we cannot
entirely be sure whether the St. Gallen bubble choices are exclusively or at
least mainly influenced by the vowel quality, or whether there is an indi-
rect, secondary effect of the recognition of phonological proximity to Stan-
dard High German resulting in the choice of similar bubbles as for Standard
High German. However, instances from the qualitative interview data such
as the one discussed above repeatedly show that the folk spontaneously
associate spikiness with the St. Gallen dialect, often explicitly mentioning
the quality of the /i/ phoneme, which indeed is even more closed than the
corresponding sound in Standard High German (cf. Table 5). Undoubtedly,
a more refined methodology that would allow tapping even more directly
into the folk’s perceptional associations would be necessary to give a more
confident answer to this question. For the time being, based on the evidence
discussed above, it seems nevertheless not totally far-fetched to assume that
there is a synaesthetic component that contributes to the quite consistent
visual associations both in the case of the St. Gallen dialect and Standard
High German. And, given the multifactorial nature of metalinguistic mod-
els and representations, there is no need to exclude more complex interac-
tions such as a conspiracy of phonology, synaesthesia, and cultural models
that, in a joint manner, reinforce this consistency.
Taking into consideration the data and analyses presented in this sec-
tion, the inherent value hypothesis cannot be categorically rejected. This,
however, obviously does not entail that sociolinguistic stereotypes are only
perceptually grounded. But further research might show that there is a (uni-
versal?) esthetic or synaesthetic component to some of the most recurrent
sociolinguistic stereotypes about languages or dialects.