Amstetten dialect

Amstetten dialect
Amstetten dialect
Native to	Austria
Region	Amstetten, Lower Austria
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Irminonic High German Upper German Bavarian Central Bavarian Amstetten dialect; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None

The Amstetten dialect is a Central Bavarian dialect spoken in the Austrian town of Amstetten. It is a variant of the .

Phonology[]

Vowels[]

Monophthongs of the Amstetten dialect on a vowel chart, based on formant values in Traunmüller (1982), cited in Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:290)

Vowel phonemes^[1]
	Front		Central	Back
	unrounded	rounded	Central	Back
Close	i	y		u
Close-mid	e	ø		o
Open-mid	ɛ	œ		ɔ
Open	æ	ɶ	a	ɒ

The Amstetten dialect is very unusual among the world's language varieties in that it can be analyzed as featuring five phonemic vowel heights. Phonetically speaking, the vowels typically transcribed with ⟨æ, ɶ, ɒ⟩ in IPA constitute a series of open-mid vowels ([ɛ, œ, ɔ] in narrow transcription), one-third the distance between the open central /a/ and the close /i, y, u/ in the formant vowel space. The vowels transcribed with ⟨ɛ, œ, ɔ⟩ and ⟨e, ø, o⟩ also differ from the cardinal vowels; the first series is close-mid ([e, ø, o] in narrow transcription), two-thirds the distance between /a/ and /i, y, u/. The remaining /e, ø, o/ are near-close ([e̝, ø̝, o̝] in narrow transcription), a series of very high vowels that approach /i, y, u/ in their articulation. Among those, the back [o̝] is somewhat more central [ö̝] than the neighboring [u] and [o].^[1]

References[]

^ ^a ^b Traunmüller (1982), cited in Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:290)

Bibliography[]

Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-19815-4.
Traunmüller, Hartmut (1982), "Vokalismus in der westniederösterreichischen Mundart.", Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 2: 289–333

[tm82-1] Traunmüller (1982), cited in Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:290)

[1]