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The present contribution is situated in the field of sociolinguistics and perceptional dialectology (Preston 1999) investigating differences in the perception of standard varieties in Austria by the use of Listeners’ Judgement Tests (LJT) (Purschke 2011).
Standard varieties in Austria are situated in a distinctive field of tension regarding their specific prestige and function (keyword pluricentricity) (Lenz, Soukup, Koppensteiner 2022), making research on this topic particularly relevant for gaining information on the status of competing standard varietal norms in Austria and beyond.
The research presented in this paper addresses this tension, focussing on the specific role of the listeners’ background and the relating factors ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’ in identifying and evaluating standard varieties.
Firstly, the paper examines the factor ‘geographical impact’, investigating how the listeners’ linguistic background on the one hand and the perceived origin of the speech samples on the other hand influence the evaluation and recognition of different standard varieties in Austria.
Secondly, with regard to the aforementioned highly complex interaction of different (standard and non-standard) varieties within the Austrian linguistic landscape (Lenz 2019), the paper examines in what way different standard varieties are perceived as closer to “pure High German” in connection to their perceived origin and role.
The empirical basis of this contribution is a nation-wide conducted LJT with 635 participants (containing an experimental group with 435 Austrian autochthonous participants, and a control group of 200 participants).
The LJT utilizes a verbal guise technique (Garrett 2010) with 12 guises by 12 untrained speakers (gender balanced, comparable age and education) from Austria, taking into consideration the poles of the Austrian geographic north-south-east-west-extension, while putting a special focus on the differences between the Alemannic part of Western Austria and the Bavarian part of Eastern Austria. The LJT was distributed online in 2021 and contained open and closed questions combining Likert Scales and Semantic Differentials.
The following questions are the focus of the paper’s underlying in-depth analyses:
– To what extent is it possible for Austrian listeners to regionally locate different Standard German guises?
– What role does the factor ‘own linguistic origin’ play for the regional identification of standard varietal guises which include a minimum of dialectal features?
– In what way do participants perceive their ‘ideal standard variety’ in relation to the regional positioning of the guises?

Data analysis is still ongoing, but preliminary results suggest that in contrast to gathered feedback on the perceived difficulty of regionally locating Standard German audio stimuli, listeners tend to correctly locate standard varietal guises – especially if the speaker’s linguistic background is close to their own linguistic background, even though the guises feature little concrete regional identification patterns. Results further indicate that if guises are located in Germany by the participants, they tend to evaluate the guises closer to the ideal of “pure High German” compared to guises located in Austria (regardless of the actual origin of the speaker). This highly empathises the assumption of competing standard varietal norms in Austria.