The Dialect Geography of hast, hat in Swiss German

In The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor, 1961), Hans Kurath and his collaborator, Raven I. McDavid Jr., have given us the first detailed study in structural dialectology that has ever been made of a large geographical area. In the present article, offered in Kurath's honor, I shall try to make a similar contribution in miniature: a structural analysis of the vowel of a single pair of words, involving part of the short-vowel system of part of German-speaking Switzerland. Following Kurath's example, I shall examine the vowel phonically, phonemically, and historically

Geography · German · Linguistics · History · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy