Variants of /r/ in the Canton of Basel-Country: a sociophonetic survey

Supervisor: Prof Stephan Schmid

Topic

Previous findings from a study with croudsourded data (Schmid et al. 2019) show that inhabitants of the Canton Basel-Country realise both alveolar and uvular variants of the phoneme /r/; it is hypothesised that the latter are more frequent in the surroundings of Basel-City.

Aim

This thesis should provide evidence in favour or against the above-mentioned hypothesis collecting new data with the labovian ‘rapid anonymous response’ technique. Social factors that might have an influence on /r/-realisations are:

  • distance from Basel-City,
  • working place,
  • age,
  • gender.

Requirements

Both passive and active knowledge of Swiss German.

Literature

TBA