 German is the national language of Germany, Austria and many other countries. It exhibits a number of dialects which are not inherently intelligible with each other. The main variety of German is referred to as Deutsche Hochsprache or Deutsche Standardlautung, modern high German. It developed from the chancellery of Saxony, gaining acceptance as the written standard in the 16th and 17th centuries. This e-lecture discusses the segmental phonological inventory of German on the basis of its main variety, Standard German. This includes the discussion of the modern high German phonemes, some selected aspects of allophonic variation, including the discussion of special variants in some German dialects. Let us start with a brief look at the inventory of the German phonemes first. In modern high German we can define a total of 48 phonemes. There are 16 monophones, it depends a little bit as we will see in a second. Eight diphthongs and 24 consonants. The vowel phonemes differ among the varieties of German to a relatively large extent. The consonantal phonemes by contrast are almost identical in the varieties of German, yet their allophonic realisation is different in a number of cases. The monophones can be subdivided into long or short or more precisely into tense and lax, tense vowels involve a greater muscular energy during articulation and lax vowels involve relatively little muscular energy during articulation. Since the tense monophones are generally longer than the lax ones, the colon is normally added in their transcription. Let us look at the long monophones first. So, as already said, there are seven long monophones, or eight, depending on whether the two front vowels e and e have merged. Most speakers, especially those who use the northern accents of German like myself, merge these two vowels everywhere, for example in words such as beren, the berries, and beren, the bears, which are now homophones. Others generally keep them apart, thus they have one vowel more. So they would say beren, the berries, and beren, the bears. But even those who keep them generally apart, for example in some verb forms, in order to distinguish the subjunctive or indicative as in verbs like ich gäbe versus ich gebe, even they still only have one vowel e. So, let us illustrate the German sound system on the basis of the merger of the two front vowels, so on the basis of seven long monophones. Now, here is one example per phoneme. We have an e as in viel. There is an e as in beat. A low central vowel a as in zat. A mid high back vowel o as in boot. And a high back vowel u as in hoot. And then there are two special vowels, namely two rounded front vowels. U as in rube and ö as in öl. Let us now add the short or lax monophones to the system of the long or tense ones. So here are the nine short monophones. Again, I will produce one example per monophone. We have a short e as in bist. A mid low front vowel e as in hetter. There is a low central vowel which is shorter than the other one, zat. So there is a contrast between zat and zat. Here is the mid low back vowel o as in post. Then a short u as in bus. And again we have two rounded front vowels, the short u as in hülle. And the short ö as in götlich. And last but not least, there are two central vowels, the schwa in unstressed position, alle. And a low central vowel a as in words such as besser. Okay, so much for the monophones. Let us now deal with the German diphthongs. German has eight diphthongs that can be grouped into up gliding diphthongs and down gliding diphthongs. And as we would see, there is one diphthong that is slightly exceptional. Well, here they are. Let us start with the down gliding ones. We have the diphthong ear as in tear. There is an ear as in tear. Another down gliding diphthong is oar as in tour. And then one with a rounded front vowel on set, ür as in tür. These diphthongs have in common that they occur in words where we find a post-vocalic orthographical r. Again, the words are tear, tear, tour and tür. Let us now look at the up gliding ones. There is i as in hei. Au back up gliding as in how. And then oi as in hoi. Where the offset is rounded but could also be treated as unrounded hoi, hoi. So there is a lot of variation involved. And last but not least, we have ui as in hui or fui. And this one is a little bit special. The sample words are primarily interjections, hui and fui. As you can see here, the offset is a little bit lower or maybe level with the onset. So it's not really up gliding anymore. Maybe it's level but it's a sort of fronting diphthong. Here are the consonants. And as I said earlier on, there are 24 consonants in modern hei German. Now, this consonantal system is by no means exceptional but the following aspects are special in German. In most varieties of German, the voiced plosives b, d and g. And the voiced fricatives are devoiced in final position. So let's look at two examples to illustrate this effect. Here we have the d as in rudi, dan and in the final position rat. And in the final position, you can clearly hear it, it is devoiced, rat. The same applies to the voiced labiodental fricative, was. And then in final, in the final position, we don't have brav but brav. So clearly an effect of final devoicing in German. Some consonants have a limited distribution as far as their alophones are concerned. For example, the alveolar fricative never occurs word initially. So words like symbol come out as symbol in German, clearly a voiced alveolar fricative. And then there is the vela nasal. Again, it has a limited distribution, it only occurs at the end of syllables, so in the syllable koda. Some consonants involve a high degree of variation and this applies in particular to the realization of the r in German. We will come back to this in a second. A number of phonemes exhibit variants that occur in complementary distribution or are free variants of a particular phoneme. Both supplement the phonological analysis of German. So let's look at these effects in more detail. Let's look at vocali variation first. And there is one effect referred to as the shortening of long vowels. Depending on their position, whether they are stressed or unstressed, most long vowels can be shortened. Let us look at the examples on the board. I will first of all produce the long ones which occur in stressed position. Feel, beat, boot, hoot, rübe and öl. And now the short ones where the vowel does not occur in a stressed position. Studie, metan, moral, kulland, mykene and ökonom. Another aspect is referred to as free variation. Now some vowel phonemes can be replaced by an alternative without changing the meaning. This phenomenon which does not occur in standard German is referred to as vocali variation. The example that I have here is the word Jensites which can either be pronounced with a long e, Jensites or with a short e, Jensites. Central vowels are also quite interesting in German. The schwa is generally defined as a phoneme in German. Even though some of its allophones deviate considerably in terms of their vowel quality. Here are three variants. Haase, clearly a central vowel. Then we have Bessa, which involves in the unstressed position a low central vowel. And in the word Grosem, the vowel is dropped altogether. Let us look at some aspects of continental variation next. Probably the most interesting one concerns the realization of R in German. Now let's illustrate this on the basis of one word, the word Rat, Ratte in German. There are three main variants. The first one is the alveola trill as in Ratte. This occurs mostly in Bavarian, Franconian, so in the southern dialects and quite interestingly in singing. The uvola trill, Ratte, can be used as a free variant of the voiced uvola fricative, Ratte. Some people even make it more front, replacing it by a voiced vila fricative, Ratte. In syllable final position, the orthographical R is often realized as a low central vowel as in Mutter. So we don't say Mutter, but Mutter. An interesting phoneme which is often used as an example of complementary distribution is the phoneme that has the two alophones Sch and Ch. As in Ich, where the palatal fricative occurs after a front vowel and Bach, where the vila fricative occurs after a back vowel. However, if we include morphological variation and morphological aspects, for example the diminutive, then the alophones may be treated as different phonemes. So there is a distinction between Kuchen, a small cow, and Kuchen, the cake. Well, so much for the system of phonemes of German. As usual in our e-lectures about a particular language or a variety of it, a sample text, read by a native speaker, will be presented. In this case, since my mother tongue is German, I can do it myself. And as usual, I'm using the story of the north wind and the sun, so here is the German version. Can I have it? Okay, yes, thank you. So here it is. Once the north wind and the sun were fighting each other, who would be the strongest of them both, when a wanderer who was in a warm coat of cloth came down the way. They were convinced that the one who should be the strongest should take off his coat, who would force the wanderer to take off his coat. The north wind blew with all its power, but the more he blew, the more the wanderer took off his coat. Finally, the north wind gave up the fight. Now the sun warmed the air with its friendly rays, and after a few eyes, the wanderer took off his coat. There the north wind had to admit that the sun of both of them was the strongest. Well, this may suffice as an example. Let's summarize. In this e-lecture, I tried to outline the sound system of German using examples where necessary. I also included some aspects of variation, especially on the level of alophones. A number of aspects were not mentioned in this e-lecture. For example, the enormous variation as far as German dialects are concerned are aspects of connected speech which influence the rhythm of German and the pronunciation of words and syllables beyond their pronunciation in isolation. These aspects will be added in our contrastive e-lecture, present-day English versus German, where we will focus on the central principles of teaching English to native speakers of German. So, see you again in that particular e-lecture.