The impact of regional variety upon specific word categories in spontaneous German

The aim of the work to be reported here is to verify that pronunciation variety in German spontaneous speech appears in specific linguistic word categories (POS) while others are less affected. Additionally, the material (transliterations of spontaneous monologues of the RVG1-corpus [5]) allows a detailed view on pronunciation regarding the speakers' origin within the German-speaking regions and regarding the topic a speaker is talking about. Our results show that generally the most affected parts of speech are the auxiliary verbs. The regions with the highest deviation rates of standard German are Switzerland and Austria, and the regions in southern Germany. We can only add the vague answer to the question, whether the semantically topic of a story may have an influence upon the deviation of the standard language, that our results show a striking less frequency of pronunciation variants, when people speak about their jobs.