Sociophonetics of the velarized lateral in the Viennese dialect

The alveolar lateral of the Viennese dialect undergoes several allophonic processes, among these, vocalization and velarization are the most prominent ones. In the current contribution, we will concentrate on the sociolinguistic aspects which disturb the complementary distribution of the alveolar and the velarized lateral and give rise to a possible reversal of the velarization process which started around 1900 due to contact with Czech immigrants. We investigate the realization of the alveolar and the velarized lateral in a corpus of spontaneous speech of 11 Viennese dialect speakers. F2 of the lateral is measured to describe the effect of the parameters phoneme context, syllable stress, word position and gender on the lateral realization. Results show that the velarized lateral is mainly produced between back vowels and in wordfinal position. Male speakers produce the velarized lateral also in stressed position, while female speakers, if at all, produce it in the unstressed word-final position.