Die Mundart von Bosco Gurin: Eine synchronische und diachronische Untersuchung (review)

In this book, Charles Russ presents a clear and concise description of the dialect of Bosco Gurin, a small isolated village of less than one hundred inhabitants located in the Swiss Alps, just a few miles from the Italian border. The dialect is classified in the höchstalemannisch ‘highest Alemannic’ group, which has been of particular interest to dialectologists both for its archaisms and for its innovations. The book is very much a traditional grammar, providing a description of the phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of the dialect.

It consists of eight chapters, each divided into conveniently organized sections, plus four appendices and eight maps. The first chapter provides a bit of the history and geography of Bosco Gurin. Ch. 2 includes a discussion of the research methods used and a brief review of published and unpublished work on the dialect. A synchronic account of the phonology is presented in Ch. 3, followed by a diachronic account in Ch. 4. In Ch. 5, R discusses each phoneme in the dialect individually. For each phoneme, he lists a detailed description of the pronunciation, the phonological distribution, allophonic variants, and the historical source. The grammatical structure of the dialect is discussed in Ch. 6, including morphology and syntax. Ch. 7 presents a typology of word formation (including prefixes and suffixes), a list of loanwords, and a list of words grouped according to semantic category (body parts, relatives, insects, etc.). The book concludes with a discussion of the dialect in relationship to other Swiss dialects. Included in the appendices are the historical texts and transcriptions of interviews from which the data was taken. The maps display the geographical location of Bosco Gurin, as well as isoglosses of several key phonological and morphological traits.

As the first comprehensive account of the dialect of Bosco Gurin, this book makes an important contribution to the field of German dialectology. By using a combination of historical texts and oral interviews, R has been able to paint a thorough picture of the dialect. The appendices are particularly valuable, in that they bring together previous research on Bosco Gurin as well as texts in their original form, which would be unavailable to most scholars. There are two ways in which this book could be greatly improved, however. The forms in the phonology section in Ch. 3 are all transcribed using IPA phonetic notation, but elsewhere in the text they are transcribed in a different notation, leaving the reader to decipher the orthography. The second drawback is the lack of a comprehensive glossary. This would be particular helpful when reading the appendices, as well as some other parts of the book in which glosses are not given. In spite of these drawbacks, this book will prove a useful reference tool for dialectologists, particularly those interested in Swiss dialectology.