Phonetic Distance Outweighs Attitudes in Predicting Social Judgments of Swiss German Dialects

Abstract

Evaluations of regional speech variation emerge at the intersection of structural linguistic properties and socially shaped attitudes. While prior sociolinguistic research has emphasized the importance of social connotations, it remains unclear to what extent measurable phonetic differences themselves drive evaluative judgments. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates the role of (i) dynamic language attitudes toward dialect and (ii) segmental phonetic distance in predicting listeners’ social evaluations of speech samples from two Swiss German varieties. Using an online perception task, we analyze positive and negative judgments by two listener groups from Switzerland and two from Germany (N = 61) evaluating matched-guise speech samples from Bern and Zurich dialect areas. We model the effects of individual regional backgrounds, attitudes and segmental phonetic distance on these evaluations in multiple regression and generalized linear models. Our results show that phonetic distance is the primary and region-independent predictor of evaluative judgments: greater distance reliably decreases positive ratings and increases negative ratings. It outweighs the influence of listeners’ attitudinal predispositions and their familiarity with the respective dialects. These findings provide novel evidence for the central role of structural phonetic differences in evaluative perception and suggest a reassessment of the relationship between inherent values and social connotations in language evaluation.