The Affricate tsch in the Variants of German: Structure of Words – Structure of Vocabulary

Abstract

Historically, the German affricate /tʃ/ is an orphan in the German sound system: it has no regular historical sources in older stages of German. Synchronically, in the codified present day standard German vocabulary, it is rather marginal. In dialectal vocabularies, however, words containing /tʃ/ are fairly frequent. In a few cases, /tʃ/ can be traced back to isolated combinatory sound developments. In most cases, however, the origin of/tʃ/ is sound symbolistic word creation or word variation, primarily by onomatopoeia (sound iconism), but also by expressivity (saliency iconism). It is no coincidence that /tʃ/ is so much more frequent in dialectal vocabularies than in standard German. Dialectal vocabulary with words containing /tʃ/ is focussed on everyday experience and is characterized by creativity, irregularity, expressiveness and affectivity, factors that are closely interlinked with each other and essential features of the “language of immediacy” (‘Nähe-Sprache’), i. e. the form of language that is used in intimate personal communication. The diaphasic markedness of /tʃ/ in German explains why it is unfamiliar to the codified standard German, which in principle represents the language of distance.