/oy/ as an identity marker of Hood German in Berlin

Abstract

A recent observation of multi-cultural urban German speech as spoken in Berlin is that the diphthong /oy/ is realized more centralized and fronted compared to the standard variety of Berlin German. For this study, spontaneous speech data was collected through standardized interviews from 11 female speakers from different neighborhoods in Berlin. Their speech was orthographically transcribed and added to a database that allows for searching for all occurrences of the diphthong in it's naturally occurring context in unscripted speech. So far, 654 occurrences of these vowels have been analyzed. Measurements of the first and second formants were taken at five equally distanced points throughout the diphthong. Linear mixed effects models were run with different points across the F2-formant as the dependent variable in the two varieties of German. The second formant serves as an estimate of the degree of fronting in the two varieties of German. Results indicate that the nucleus of the /oy/ is realized more centralized in Hood German compared to a standard variety of Berlin German when the speaker associates with the community that is highly associated with this vernacular. Speakers use the centralization of /oy/ as a linguistic marker of their local urban identity.