2025P Velar or Uvular? The Standard German Ach-Laut Revisited

While the so-called “ach-laut” in Standard German (SG) is commonly transcribed as the velar [x], the current investigation presents a multi-perspective view on the question if a transcription as the uvular [χ] might reflect SG speech more accurately. Two experiments explored the realization and judgment of the ach-laut, specifically examining the above question under the hypothesis that differences might be due to regional variation. During a word-list reading task, all speakers exhibited uvularity in at least some productions of the ach-laut, but also showed both within- and between-subject variation in uvular scrape and center of gravity. While the dialectal background of the speaker did not significantly predict between-subject variation in the phonetic realization, acoustic measures such as the duration of the of the uttered sound emerged as possible predictors. The speech data most likely points to a combination of idiolectal and situational phonetic factors determining the uvularity of the ach-laut, rather than dialect or a sometimes attested complementary allophony of [x] and [χ]. A perception experiment in which participants placed recordings of velar and uvular stimuli on map, depending on where they thought the speaker might be from, reflected a lack of discrimination between [x] and [χ] across all participants. The results of these experiments call for a more specific acoustic description of uvular sounds and, in combination with a review of early and current literature on the ach-laut (which has often confused velar and uvular) they indicate above all that a historical bias against a transcription as uvular might be more responsible for the common [x]-transcription than actual speech patterns.