Chapter 12

Quotative variation in Bernese Swiss German

Whilst there have been a multitude of variationist studies on the changing quotative system of English, especially the diffusion of innovative be like (e.g. Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999; Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009), work on the quotative systems of other languages (see Buchstaller and Van Alphen 2012) has been largely descriptive (e.g. Guardamagna 2010), either anchored in discourse analytic approaches (e.g. Mazeland 2006), or examining one type of quotative (e.g. Foolen et al. 2006), with few examining the linguistic and social constraints that shape speakers’ preference for certain variants over others (see, however, Palacios Martínez 2014; Cheshire and Secova, 2018). Research on German has been relatively limited and largely tackles quotatives from a conversation analytic perspective (e.g. Golato 2000; Bagi 2006; Imo 2007; Mertzlufft 2014). Here, we conduct a variationist analysis of the quotation system of a variety of German, Bernese Swiss German (BSG). All tokens of quotatives were extracted from a corpus of recordings of conversations with 26 working-class young adults from the western parts of the city of Bern, in which at least a third of the population is not ethnically Swiss. We therefore have recordings from speakers of Swiss German, but also, for example, from Bosnian, Bangladeshi and Albanian backgrounds. The results suggest that the quotative system in contemporary multiethnolectal Bernese German is shaped by a range of social and linguistic constraints, such as the presence or absence of quotative marker so, presence or absence of a quotative verb, presence or absence of a subject, speaker gender and speaker ethnicity.