Abstract
Auer (2004) postulates that the multi‐ethnolect Kiezdeutsch (Berlin, Germany) differentiates three realizations of /ɪç/: [ɪç]; [ɪ∫]; [ɪφ]. Acoustic analyzes of 1192 tokens of /ç/ from the ZAS‐spontaneous speech database (collected from nine adolescent speakers of the Kiezdeutsch multi‐ethnolect as spoken in Berlin) showed no reliable differences in kurtosis, skewness, cog, or peak between items impressionistically categorized into these three groups. Further, in the spontaneous speech of middle‐aged monolingual speakers of the local Berlin dialect [∫] variants of /ç/ were also detected, although here this alternation is not attested. The hypotheses are (1) that Berlin‐German also has [∫] as an allophonic variant of /ç/ and (2) that Kiezdeutsch has a 3‐way‐split of this category. To evaluate the perceptual validity of these assumptions, tests are being conducted asking native Berliners to rate the category membership of excised variant realizations of /ç/ and /∫/ from the Kiezdeutsch‐ and Berlin‐database on a scale from 1 (/ç/) to 7 (/∫/), with 4 indicating no real preference for either one. First results point to a two‐way perceptual split for the older Berlin speakers and a more fuzzy category boundary between [ç] and [∫] for the Kiez data, suggesting a third intermediate perceptual category. [Work supported by a grant from the German Ministry of Science and Education (BMBF).]
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