/oy/ as a marker of local identity in Berlin

Abstract

A fairly recent observation of multi-cultural urban German speech as spoken in Berlin is that the diphthongs /oy/ and /ey/ are realized more closed and fronted compared to more standard varieties of German. For this pilot study, spontaneous speech data were collected through standardized interviews from five young female speakers from two different neighborhoods in Berlin: Wedding is more Arab-dominant while Kreuzberg is more Turkish dominant. Their speech was orthographically transcribed and added to a database that allows for searching for all occurrences of the two diphthongs under investigation in their naturally occurring context in unscripted speech. So far, 250 occurrences of these vowels have been analyzed. Formant measurements were taken at five equally distanced points throughout the diphthong. A linear mixed effects model with the midpoint of the F2-formant value as the dependent variable were run, showing that speakers from the arab neighborhood (Wedding) significantly differ in their productions compared to speakers from the Turkish neighborhood (p < 0.05) in Kreuzberg. Moreover, there was a significant effect of language spoken around them (p < 0.01) on the production even though German is their dominant language. We argue that speakers use the production of these diphthongs as markers of their local urban identity.