The Amstetten dialect is a
Central Bavarian
Central Bavarian form a subgroup of Bavarian dialects in large parts of Austria and the German state of Bavaria along the Danube river, on the northern side of the Eastern Alps. They are spoken in the ' Old Bavarian' regions of Upper Bavaria ( ...
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
spoken in the Austrian town of
Amstetten. It is a variant of the
Mostviertel dialect
(English: '' Most Quarter'') is the southwestern quarter of the four quarters of Lower Austria (the northeast state of the 9 states in Austria). It is bordered on the north by the Danube and to the south and west by the state borders of Styria ...
.
Phonology
Vowels
The Amstetten dialect is very unusual among the world's language varieties in that it can be analyzed as featuring five phonemic vowel heights. Phonetically speaking, the vowels typically transcribed with in IPA constitute a series of
open-mid vowels ( in narrow transcription), one-third the distance between the open central and the close in the formant vowel space. The vowels transcribed with and also differ from the cardinal vowels; the first series is
close-mid ( in narrow transcription), two-thirds the distance between and . The remaining are
near-close ( in narrow transcription), a series of very high vowels that approach in their articulation. Among those, the back is somewhat more central than the neighboring and .
References
Bibliography
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Amstetten Dialect
Languages of Austria
Bavarian language
German dialects