The differences between German pronunciation dictionaries: Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Aussprache (1982), Duden (2005), Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch (2009)

Abstract

The article analyses the differences in the phonetic transcription between the three leading pronunciation dictionaries of the standard German language. The recently published Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch (henceforth DAWB) is compared to the two earlier dictionaries, which are still in wide use: Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Aussprache (henceforth GWDA), published for the last time in 1982 and Duden (henceforth DUDEN), which was published in 2005 as the 6th edition. The book under review is the DAWB, which is a result of a project started in the early 1990's at the University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). It contains 1076 pages of more than 150.000 entries of German words as well as foreign and loan words and is based on the Standard pronunciation as it is used today in Germany. The phonetic transcription in DAWB differs in many phonetic elements from the GWDA and especially from the DUDEN, which has been the only available pronunciation dictionary on the market for many decades. The differences pointed out by the author of this article concern diphthongs, vowels in the unstressed final position, the pronunciation of the a- vowels, different realisations of the consonantic r, nonsyllabic vowels, syllabic consonants, the devoicing of initial weak obstruents when preceded by strong ones and the binding of identic consonants.