SUNY Stony Brook 
16 December
2004
Department of Linguistics
LIN 522: Phonetics

A guide to Swabian

by

Michael Helten

1. Introduction

This guide to Swabian is aimed at American college and university students who have an interest in language and who have studied German for at least a year, and of course for anyone else interested in the subject. The aim is to make people who are already familiar with the general phonetic patterns of German and English aware of how extremely different Swabian, as an example of one of the many and diverse dialects of German, can sound from the textbook Standard German that is generally taught – for a good reason, of course, since the standard variety, like in most languages, is the only variety that has an agreed upon spelling and it will be the most widely understood. 

Accompanied by a number of speech samples that will illustrate the phonemic sounds of Swabian and give a general feeling for the dialect, the sections on consonants and vowels will focus on the major differences between Standard German and Swabian, and on what sounds in the inventory of English may prove helpful in the pronunciation of Swabian. First of all, however, we should turn towards how Swabian is located, that is locally, but also concerning its linguistic background and surroundings.

2. Swabian in Context

Swabian derived its name from the former tribe of the Suebi who “occupied the area between the Upper Rhine and the Upper Danube in the first century AD (Ross 337)¹.” It is the language of the Southwestern area of Germany that covers all of the former kingdom of Württemberg and parts of Baden (now the two parts that make up the Bundesland Baden-Württemberg). In the east it also extends into Bavaria to about as far as the Lech River, the western border is drawn by the massif of the Black Forest. Swabian emerged from Allemanic, the Upper German dialect that is spoken in the southern areas of Germany that border Switzerland.

Like German, Swabian itself is very versatile, too. Within the dialect the literature usually distinguishes between colloquial, regional and basic dialect forms, the colloquial version being the “standard variety” of the dialect, the regional dialects more general subdivisions, and the basic dialect a form that will be different from village to village, and considerably so. The two major regional dialects within the Swabian speaking area are normally characterized as the gwä-dialect vs. the gsi-dialect after the different forms of the past participle of ‘to be’ (in stead of ‘gewesen’ from ‘sein’). The latter is closer to Allemannic both linguistically and geographically, the former, however, is the regional form this guide is describing, mostly because the author and therefore also the speech samples are from this variety.

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1 Most general facts are taken from Ross, Charles. The Dialects of Modern German. London: Routledge, 1990.