Pronunciation variation in read and conversational austrian German

This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of pronunciation variation in conversational Austrian German. Whereas for the varieties of German spoken in Germany, conversational speech has been given noticeable attention in the fields of linguistics and automatic speech recognition, for conversational Austrian there is a lack in speech resources and tools as well as linguistic and phonetic studies. Based on the recently collected GRASS corpus, we provide (methods for the creation of) a pronunciation dictionary and (tools for the creation of) broad phonetic transcriptions for Austrian German. Subsequently, we present a comparative analysis of the occurrence of phonological and reduction rules in read and conversational speech. We find that whereas some rules are specific for the Austrian Standard variant and thus occur in both speech styles (e.g., the realization of /z/ as [s]), other rules are specific for conversational speech (e.g., the realization of /a:/ as [o:]. Overall, our results show that less words are produced with the citation form for conversational Austrian German (37.8% ) than for other languages of the same style (e.g., Dutch conversations: 56%).