Northern German in Southern Africa? On the phonology of Namdeutsch

This chapter presents a study on the phonology of Namdeutsch, a variety of
German spoken in Namibia. Previous literature has called its pronunciation either
Standard German or Northern German and the aim of this paper is to determine
whether Namdeutsch does share phonological characteristics with Northern
German, based on the analysis of two vowel variables and four consonant variables
that occur in Northern German. The data for this study stems from the Deutsch
in Namibia corpus. The analysis reveals that, while not all Northern German
variants are common in Namdeutsch, both vowel features and a consonant feature are
frequent or very frequent in the data.