Documentation of Gutnish phonetics and phonology

This study constitutes a basic description of the phonetics and phonology of the Gutnish language which is spoken in the Swedish province Gotland. Based on original recordings collected by me in Gotland during the summer of 2011 the vowel and consonant inventory is mapped, phonotactic rules are established and stress and pitch accents patterns described. The introduction gives some background information about the language and tries to evaluate the linguistic situation in Gotland. Throughout, local variation is acknowledged in an attempt to show the diversity but also the instability of the language. Purpose: The aim of this study was to gather sound recordings of speakers of Gutnish and to use them to describe phonteic and phonological traits of the Gutnish language. I also wanted to provide some comments on the linguistic status of Gutnish. The dataset contains recordings of 11 speakers of Gutnish with metadata about each recording and phonetic transcriptions of some of the recorded words. The recordings contain both conversation and word list elicitation. The data were collected as lengthy recordings and then words and phrases were cut out to facilitate analysis and transcription.