276 Raphael Berthele
comes closest to the multi-dimensional construal emerging from our data.
However, the prestige of the sociolect or dialect is probably not necessarily
covert; its overtness or covertness simply depends on the context of elicita-
tion and is thus a question of perspective. Obviously, the Norwich working
class males (cf. Trudgill 1983: 177) did not, in the presence of the research-
er, overtly admit that they actually have a positive attitude towards their
native variety. But this does not automatically allow for generalizations
about the overtness or covertness of sociolinguistic prestige. There is no
doubt that the Swiss German situation is significantly different from the
British context. But there is no reason to assume that other data elicitation
techniques would actually reveal openly positive judgments about non-
standard varieties also in contexts where the non-standard might have a
harder life than in German-speaking Switzerland. As shown above, ap-
proaches from cognitive linguistics and their application to the data col-
lected in this project give a much more fine-grained picture of linguistic
value judgments and language loyalties than the traditional vertical axis
applied in sociolinguistics (high vs. low; prestigious vs. non-prestigious;
standard vs. non-standard). The two varieties discussed above obviously
both bear sociolinguistic prestige, but each one of a different kind: The
dialect is the variety with the “warm” prestige of the language of proximity,
it carries solidarity and attractiveness, whereas the standard is the high-
status bearer of the “cold” prestige of the “real”, logical and well-designed
artifact. This reflects quite nicely the result of Hogg, Joyce and Abrams
(1984) where Swiss German is tied to the dimension of solidarity whereas
the standard language is related to status. Whether a particular manifesta-
tion of prestige is overt or covert is not an intrinsic quality of linguistic
prestige but rather a question of the perspective of the observer with respect
to the observed and to the reference points that are activated.
2.3. Attributions and phonological inventories of varieties
In the preceding section I have compared the mappings regarding the two
(statistically) most important varieties in our sample. Implicitly, the Bern
dialect has been treated in a metonymical fashion as representing THE di-
alect par excellence. This has been justified by the relatively open nature of
the task and the constraint to work only with varieties/languages that have
been frequently characterized by the participants. However, there are – as
ever – enormous differences when it comes to the esthetic, ethnic and cul-