ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Some aspects on individual speaking style features in Hood German

Stefanie Jannedy, Melanie Weirich

Multiethnic urban German (Hood German) as spoken by adolescents in Berlin differs in several significant ways from more standard varieties of Berlin German. It is characterized by a variety of morpho-syntactic alternations and phonetic variants uncommon to the regional standard spoken in Berlin. Previous quan- titative corpus analyses have shown that overall speakers of the multiethnic youth style German have a strong tendency to centralize /OI/ compared to speakers rendering the local regional standard. This paper now summarizes this centralization tendency and investigates auditory salient realizations of variation by individuals which show tendencies towards a hiatus in the diphthong /OI/, breaking the nucleus and the off glide. Moreover, there are other prosodic and segmental co-occurring features in the speech of some adolescents which are displayed since it is suspected that some of these may be(come) markers of Hood German.