280 Raphael Berthele
exotic alpine (Uri) languages/dialects clustering together. What characte-
rizes the dialect categories in this cluster could be their (maybe with the
exception of Uri) status of non-prototypical Swiss German dialects. The
upper part of this middle zone, on the other hand, unites two Romance lan-
guages (Italian, French) as well as two folk-linguistically very prominent
dialects, the only Low-Alemannic variety in Switzerland of the city of Ba-
sel, and the dialect of the Wallis, a high-alemannic extreme case that is
stereotypically considered unintelligible to people from outside the Wallis.
Although the variety of bubbles associated to these categories is relatively
wide, there is a certain preference for organic and/or floral shapes (high
scores for bubbles 3, 4, 6 and 11).
It seems to me quite safe to assume that all entries located in the upper
two quadrants of the plot are perceived as prototypical dialects/languages.
In the case of the dialects we find categories covering the most important
urban centers in the Swiss German area, whereas all dialects in the lower
quadrants are somehow less prototypical and definitely not urban (one of
the particularities of the canton of Aargau is precisely that it has no histori-
cal urban center, and stereotypically the saying goes that all the major
towns of the canton simply belong to Zürich suburbia).
Table 4. Mappings and attributes for the St. Gallen dialect (cf. Table 2 above for
the Bern dialect)
St. Gallen dialect
bubbles attributes
1 (10, 31%)
7 (8, 25%)
12 (3, 9%)angular (2), bright, chiseled, clanking,
pointed, sharp (2), sharp edges, spiky
(2), spinose, straight, stridentFor the remainder of this section, I propose to focus on two varieties of
Swiss German, also located in clearly distinct sections of dimension 1 in
Figure 3. The first of these two is again the Bern dialect, a variety spoken at
the border of the Swiss German territories, close to the French part of the
country. The second dialect is the St. Gallen dialect, spoken in the eastern
part of German-speaking Switzerland, closer to the German and Austrian
borders. St. Gallen dialect is close to Zürich and Standard High German in
Figure 3. I will first give an account of the mappings of the St. Gallen di-