Dialect Change Research Articles

Translating and Glossing Nouns in the Old English Gospels: A Contrastive Study

The translation of the Gospels into Old English has been a text edited on several occasions since the sixteenth century, from Parker’s edition (1571) to that by Skeat at the end of the nineteenth century (1871-1887) and, more recently, the one carried out by Liuzza in the second half of the twentieth century. [1] The Old English Gospels have received attention from many scholars working in the field of English historical linguistics. Although the lexical level has been partially analysed (see for instance Liuzza 1994-2000), it is still an under-researched area. This article aims to examine three versions of the Gospels, namely West Saxon, Lindisfarne and Rushworth, in order to analyse the various mechanisms used by the translator(s) and glossators [2] when rendering lexical items from the original Latin text into the different dialects. The analysis focuses on the study of nouns from an interdialectal perspective, since they are collated in the three different versions, so as to establish dialectal changes. A cross-linguistic approach is also pursued by assessing how the translator(s)/glossators interpreted nouns from Latin. [1] The Anglo-Saxon Gospels have also been edited by Marshall and Junius (1665), Thorpe (1842), and Bosworth and Waring (1865). [2] The scribes copying the text of the manuscript could have also had an active role by introducing modifications.

Multiple vectors of unidirectional dialect change in eastern New England

AbstractTraditional eastern New England (ENE) dialect features are rapidly receding in many parts of northern New England. Because this ENE shift involves seven different phonological features, it provides a prime opportunity to explore different rates of change across multiple linguistic variables at the same time in the same social setting. The present study is the first acoustic sociophonetic investigation of central New Hampshire, and it is based on new field data from 51 adult speakers. Results show that young generations are discarding many traditional ENE pronunciations in favor of leveled, nonregional forms, yet the changes are affecting some variables more quickly than others. Many distinctive traditional ENE variants (nonrhotic speech, intrusive-r, fronted father, “broad-a” in bath) are quickly receding, while others (fronted start and hoarse/horse distinction) are somewhat more conservative, being “overshadowed” by the presence of (r) as a variable within the same syllable. We frame our apparent-time analysis in terms of Sankoff's (2013a) notion of “age vectors” and Labov's (2012) “outward orientation” of the language faculty, illustrating how different generations are juggling multiple age vectors within the same overall shift, and how one variable can overshadow another variable within the same syllable.

African American English–Speaking Students: A Longitudinal Examination of Style Shifting From Kindergarten Through Second Grade

The purpose of this longitudinal study was twofold: to examine shifting from African American English (AAE) to mainstream American English (MAE) across the early elementary grades, when students are first exposed to formal instruction in reading; and to examine how metalinguistic and cognitive variables influenced the students' dialectal adaptations from AAE to MAE in a literacy context with higher expectations for MAE. Participants were 102 typically developing AAE-speaking students enrolled in public schools in the northern Midwest. They were enrolled in the project at kindergarten and tested 3 times a year, for 3 years. Approximately half were male and half female, and two-thirds were from low socioeconomic status homes. A style shifting coefficient (SSC) was created to measure amounts of dialect change between contexts and over time by individuals. Some students shifted to MAE in literacy contexts, and shifting was not related to grade. Metalinguistic skills and SSC predicted reading, and metalinguistic skills predicted the SSC at 2nd grade. The findings indicated that cognitive executive functions may contribute to the SSC. The results provide strong support for the dialect shifting-reading achievement hypothesis and indicated that metalinguistic and perhaps executive functioning are important influences on this linguistic adaptation.

Similarity Index for Sound-alikeness of Drug Names with Pitch Accents

Drug name similarity is one of major reasons of medical accidents. In order to prevent from the accidents, one of the best ways is to avoid approving drugs that has the names similar to that of existing drugs. It is well-known that there are two kinds of drug name similarity, look-alikeness and sound-alikeness. Nabeta et. al. proposed a look-alikeness similarity index,which excludes the sound-alikeness. Though, in Japan, oral prescription is basically prohibited, emergent situation can force a doctor to prescribe orally. In such a situation, medical accidents can occur.In this study, we proposed a sound-alikeness similarity index based on quantitative similarity of consonants. The consonant similarity was proposed based on The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Overall drug name similarity is calculated based on Letter Sequence Kernel (LSK). The similarity calculation method takes account of the effect of plural pitch accents. We divided a drug name into some pieces at the position where a pitch accent changes, applied LSK to each of them, and combined them to obtain the value of the similarity index. The similarity index proposed in this study achieved relatively high correlation to the results of our experiment, r ≃ 0.8.

Familiarity with a foreign accent aids perceptual accent adaptation

A change in speaker accent is reported to temporarily slow speech processing (Bradlow and Bent, 2003; Clarke and Garrett. 2004). Recent work suggests that this delay may be an artifact of task expectations and reflects a surprise effect, not the time needed for accent adaptation (Floccia et al., 2009). The present study tested listeners with high and low exposure to Spanish- and Korean-accented English to determine if frequent exposure to these accents decreases the surprise effect in an experimental setting. Participants listened to four blocks of meaningful sentences and responded to probe words; they heard a native-accented speaker in the first block and either native-, Spanish- or Korean-accented speakers in blocks 2 and 3. Results thus far show that the change from native-accented to foreign-accented speaker (block 1 to block 2) elicited a processing delay for participants in the Korean-accented condition, but not in the Spanish-accented condition. This pattern remained, but was somewhat attenuated, in the change from block 2 to block 3, when voice but not accent changed. These results show that extensive experience with a particular foreign accent (Spanish) outside the lab results in a smaller processing cost when listening to accented speech in the lab.

Deep Brain Stimulation for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Affects Language

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for patients with refractory neuropsychiatric disorders. Along with symptom improvement, DBS may have concurrent behavioral effects that help to unravel the role of specific brain circuitries in complex human behavior. This article reports on 2 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder who received DBS targeted at the nucleus accumbens that resulted in a temporary change of accent and use of vocabulary. Changes in accent and speaking manners are most likely related to direct DBS stimulation effects of the electrode targeted at the nucleus accumbens. The shift in accent, resembling foreign accent syndrome after injuries in brain language centers, has not been reported before in the course of DBS. Induction of aggressive vocabulary may be related to transient hypomanic behavior after DBS.

Agnosia for accents in primary progressive aphasia

As an example of complex auditory signal processing, the analysis of accented speech is potentially vulnerable in the progressive aphasias. However, the brain basis of accent processing and the effects of neurodegenerative disease on this processing are not well understood. Here we undertook a detailed neuropsychological study of a patient, AA with progressive nonfluent aphasia, in whom agnosia for accents was a prominent clinical feature. We designed a battery to assess AA's ability to process accents in relation to other complex auditory signals. AA's performance was compared with a cohort of 12 healthy age and gender matched control participants and with a second patient, PA, who had semantic dementia with phonagnosia and prosopagnosia but no reported difficulties with accent processing. Relative to healthy controls, the patients showed distinct profiles of accent agnosia. AA showed markedly impaired ability to distinguish change in an individual's accent despite being able to discriminate phonemes and voices (apperceptive accent agnosia); and in addition, a severe deficit of accent identification. In contrast, PA was able to perceive changes in accents, phonemes and voices normally, but showed a relatively mild deficit of accent identification (associative accent agnosia). Both patients showed deficits of voice and environmental sound identification, however PA showed an additional deficit of face identification whereas AA was able to identify (though not name) faces normally. These profiles suggest that AA has conjoint (or interacting) deficits involving both apperceptive and semantic processing of accents, while PA has a primary semantic (associative) deficit affecting accents along with other kinds of auditory objects and extending beyond the auditory modality. Brain MRI revealed left peri-Sylvian atrophy in case AA and relatively focal asymmetric (predominantly right sided) temporal lobe atrophy in case PA. These cases provide further evidence for the fractionation of brain mechanisms for complex sound analysis, and for the stratification of progressive aphasia syndromes according to the signature of nonverbal auditory deficits they produce.

Dialect diversity in America: the politics of language change

The sociolinguist William has worked for decades on change in progress in American dialects and on African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In Dialect Diversity in America, Labov examines the diversity among American dialects and presents the counterintuitive finding that geographically localized dialects of North American English are increasingly diverging from one another over time. Contrary to the general expectation that mass culture would diminish regional differences, the dialects of Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Birmingham, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York are now more different from each other than they were a hundred years ago. Equally significant is Labov's finding that AAVE does not map with the geography and timing of changes in other dialects. The home dialect of most African American speakers has developed a grammar that is more and more different from that of the white mainstream dialects in the major cities studied and yet highly homogeneous throughout the United States. describes the political forces that drive these ongoing changes, as well as the political consequences in public debate. The author also considers the recent geographical reversal of political parties in the Blue States and the Red States and the parallels between dialect differences and the results of recent presidential elections. Finally, in attempting to account for the history and geography of linguistic change among whites, highlights fascinating correlations between patterns of linguistic divergence and the politics of race and slavery, going back to the antebellum United States. Complemented by an online collection of audio files that illustrate key dialectical nuances, Dialect Diversity in America offers an unparalleled sociolinguistic study from a preeminent scholar in the field.

Change of accent as an atypical onset of non fluent primary progressive aphasia.

Language disorders can be the first symptom of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The main variants of PPA are: the non-fluent/agrammatic variant, the semantic variant and the logopenic variant.Several additional variants of PPA, however, have been described and are considered as atypical presentations.We describe the case of a woman presenting a progressive isolated language disturbance, characterized by an early dysprosodia, phonological and semantic paraphasias, agrammatism, impairment in repetition, writing of non-words and sentence comprehension. This clinical picture pointed to an atypical presentation of the non-fluent variety. The frequent symptom overlap between the different variants of PPA, most likely reflecting differences in the topography of the pathological changes, needs to be considered in the definition of diagnostic criteria.

Change of Accent as an Atypical Onset of non Fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia

Language disorders can be the first symptom of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The main variants of PPA are: the non-fluent/agrammatic variant, the semantic variant and the logopenic variant.Several additional variants of PPA, however, have been described and are considered as atypical presentations.We describe the case of a woman presenting a progressive isolated language disturbance, characterized by an early dysprosodia, phonological and semantic paraphasias, agrammatism, impairment in repetition, writing of non-words and sentence comprehension. This clinical picture pointed to an atypical presentation of the non-fluent variety. The frequent symptom overlap between the different variants of PPA, most likely reflecting differences in the topography of the pathological changes, needs to be considered in the definition of diagnostic criteria.

Lithuanian dialect reserve. Social and geographical restrictions imposed on dialect mobility as reflected in direct attitudinal studies

The paper investigates a twofold attitude towards linguistic diversity in the Lithuanian-speaking community, where, on the one hand, the dialects are valorised as a national and ethnographic asset and, on the other hand, certain restrictions on their use are imposed because of association with a lower social value and negative stereotypes. Three direct attitudinal studies serve as an empirical basis for the research: a quantitative survey, qualitative interviews and an experiment with high-school students on stereotypical traits of the dialect speaker. When discussing future prospects of dialect change, the overt values of the speakers are compared with the findings of the speaker evaluation experiment that have revealed subconscious values of dialectal speech. The research has shown that compared to the Soviet times, the ideological climate regarding dialects has become more politically correct. Positive attitudes are most prominent at a declarative level and when regional identity and the speaker’s affiliation with a particular community have to be emphasised. Daily personal experiences, however, with the functionality of a dialect and evaluations of social and geographic mobility of dialect speakers, show a less favourable assessment of dialectal speech in comparison to the standard (non-dialectal) varieties. It is very much due to a frequent negative stereotyping of dialect speakers. The subconscious attitudes also reveal that the dialectal variability of speech has an arguably lower social meaning compared to the non-dialectal variability. The attitudes and practices of non-professional (lay) people may be claimed to reflect a double-faced standardization ideology of the Lithuanian language, which valorises dialects as an ecologic asset and at the same time limits their functioning by putting them in the reserve of “immobile” speakers.

Effects of vowel reduction on Russian and Belarusian inflectional morphology

The study investigates a series of morphological changes in Russian and Belarusian dialects provoked by homophony due to vowel reduction. The reaction to potential or actual homophony depends on the morphological category and the specific contrast involved. Either homophony is avoided by the introduction of a new non-homophonous suffix in one of the two relevant cells of the paradigm or homophony is permitted and morphological reanalysis takes place. Contrasts in number and person are supported at the cost of introducing additional allomorphy into the system. Elsewhere homophony entails reanalysis which results in more complex morphology, including partial or complete reclassification, the introduction of morphophonemic alternations, and other idiosyncratic morphological adjustments. The changes discussed are all based on the outputs of a fairly low-level phonological/phonetic process and they reveal another dimension of analogical change.

Farewell to the Founders: Major Dialect Changes Along the East-West New England Border

Hans Kurath's 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England reported a significant east-west dialect contrast along the Green Mountains of Vermont. In 1987, using data from 1960s fieldwork for the Dictionary of American Regional English, Craig Carver found the contrast remained intact a generation later. Such results reflect the enduring influence of eighteenth-century settlers, known as the Principle of First Effective Settlement or the “Founder Effect.” To determine the current status of the east-west dialect contrast and whether the Founder Effect is still present, the authors examined 62 speakers along the border in both real and apparent time. The real-time results show that, among older speakers, Kurath's east-west line of traditional New England features has moved eastward to the state border of New Hampshire. The apparent-time results show that many traditional eastern variants are receding among younger speakers, and these linguistic changes are reflecting and constructing significant social changes occurring in this region. For about two centuries, the east-west contrasts of the early European settlements were faithfully transmitted to each new generation. But now, among the current generations of speakers, the Founder Effect in northern New England is rapidly dissipating.

First language attrition in the speech of Dutch–English bilinguals: The case of monozygotic twin sisters

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on attrition in L1 speech (de Leeuw, Mennen & Scobbie, in press; de Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010; Dmitrieva, Jongman & Sereno, 2010; Mennen, 2004). Adding to this line of inquiry, the present study investigates the speech of a 62-year-old bilingual monozygotic twin who emigrated to an L2-speaking environment 30 years ago. Changes in L1 accent were assessed by comparing her speech to that of her identical twin sister who remained in the L1-speaking environment, thus providing a unique control setting. Acoustic analyses of voice onset time and vowels indicate pervasive changes to the emigrated twin's L1 accent, with attrition presenting in the form of cross-linguistic assimilation patterns. Interestingly, her L1 vowel space exhibited a systematic increase in first formant frequency, confirming claims that L1 and L2 sounds may be related to each other at a system-wide level (Chang, 2010, 2011; Guion, 2003). Implications for theoretical models of bilingual sound systems are discussed.

Big Macs/Peanut Butter and Jelly: An Exploration of Dialectical Contradictions Experienced by the Sandwich Generation

Grounded in relational dialectics theory, this article reports a study exploring the influence of internal relational dialectic contradictions of women who are in the “Sandwich Generation,” or simultaneously providing some kind of care for generations of family both older and younger than them. Two hundred twenty-five female multi-generational caretakers (MGCs) reported their perceptions of the autonomy–connection, predictability–unpredictability, and openness–closedness of the relationship they have with an older adult for whom they provide care, as well as their current satisfaction level with this relationship. The data indicate communication between MGCs and their care recipient is more satisfying when the caretaker believes she has a high level of autonomy in the relationships and when there is a high level of openness within the relationships. These findings are interpreted using dialectic contradiction, change, and totality. This article also discusses practical implications of these findings for members of the Sandwich Generation.

Transcending Socialization

A nine-year ethnography is used to show how two investment banks’ controls, including socialization, targeted bankers’ bodies, how the bankers’ relations to their bodies evolved, and what the organizational consequences were. The banks’ espoused and therefore visible values emphasized autonomy and work-life balance; their less visible embodied controls caused habitual overwork that bankers experienced as self-chosen. This paradoxical control caused conflict between bankers and their bodies, which bankers treated as unproblematic objects. The conflict generated dialectic change that cognitive control theories overlook because they neglect the body. Cognitive control theories predict outcomes only in bankers’ first three years, when the banks benefited from bankers’ hard work. Starting in year four, body breakdowns thwarted organizational control. Despite bankers’ increased attempts to control their bodies, performance declined. Starting in year six, intensified breakdowns forced some bankers to treat their bodies as knowledgeable subjects. Because the body cannot be socialized completely, it helped numerous bankers transcend the banks’ socialization and modify their behaviors. Surprisingly, the banks benefited from this loss of control because the bankers’ ethics, judgment, and creativity increased.

The Rain in Spain

The Rain in Spain George Watson (bio) The whole strength of England, George Bernard Shaw once remarked, is that most people are snobs. That sums up what is often taken for granted, and it masks two assumptions seldom brought to light. One is that it is silly or worse to be a snob; the other is that only the English do it—or do it well. There are foreign lands that use the word gentleman as if they had neither the word nor the thing, though they have both, and for as long as anyone can remember England has been the whipping boy of the world for those who seek moral credit by claiming to treat everyone alike. Shaw had already noticed plenty of snobbery in his native Dublin, as Oscar Wilde did before him, before he settled in London at the age of twenty in 1876, and he speaks of it in his letters—but not in his plays and prefaces, in which he nails the English to the wall again and again as class-ridden nincompoops. Just before the First World War he wrote Pygmalion, a play the fifties musical My Fair Lady was based on; and both play and musical hammer home the point that to promote yourself from the lower orders in English society you have to change your accent, and that to change it you need a lot of technical training by a phonetician like Professor Henry Higgins. "The thing has to be done scientifically," Shaw says in his preface, "or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first." Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, the cockney girl, chant a vowel-exercise about the rain in Spain that stays mainly in the plain, until the flower girl who must some day pass as a lady finally gets it right. Higgins is triumphant: "By George, she's got it." "Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music," T. S. Eliot remarked to Rex Harrison after the first London night of My Fair Lady, but the musical is no less emphatic about snobbery than Pygmalion. Enlightened societies everywhere claim to behave otherwise. In "Do We Have a Class Society?" in We Write for Our Own Time (selected essays from the Virginia Quarterly Review), Henry Steele Commager patriotically claims that the whole concept of class is un-American, belonging as it does to the Old World, and speaks ominously of the English as being branded at birth on the tongue. The article first appeared in 1961, at a time when President John F. Kennedy's Harvard accent was exciting comment but before President George W. Bush's version of Texan was widely known, and its patriotism is impressive. Mark Twain knew better, and in an explanatory note at the start of Huckleberry Finn in 1884 he itemizes the several kinds of Missouri accent used by his characters, black and white, in case anyone should think they were all trying to talk alike and not succeeding. Regionally defined accents [End Page 483] with implications of status are commonplace in the wider world, and most people who choose to switch accents neither use nor need a phonetician like Higgins. In professional life, especially, it is so common to switch that you sometimes ponder the significance of staying as you are. I recall an incident in an Australian university when a student production was being cast; it called for a character with an Australian accent, which proved astonishingly hard to fill. But then anyone aspiring to a career in theater is likely to use the standard of Received Pronunciation in an audition unless told otherwise. Accent change is nothing to be embarrassed about. It amounts to a freedom to reinvent yourself on the threshold of adult life, and most people do it readily and without help. It is fun, after all, to be anyone you want to be—as the Germans say, Stadtluft macht frei. Not everyone, fortunately, is a dogmatic egalitarian. Gladstone publicly called himself an inequalitarian, a word he claimed to have invented, though it was not speech he mainly had in mind, arguing that if equality ever came to England he would be in favor of abolishing...

You had me at “Hello”: Rapid extraction of dialect information from spoken words

Research on the neuronal underpinnings of speaker identity recognition has identified voice-selective areas in the human brain with evolutionary homologues in non-human primates who have comparable areas for processing species-specific calls. Most studies have focused on estimating the extent and location of these areas. In contrast, relatively few experiments have investigated the time-course of speaker identity, and in particular, dialect processing and identification by electro- or neuromagnetic means. We show here that dialect extraction occurs speaker-independently, pre-attentively and categorically. We used Standard American English and African-American English exemplars of ‘Hello’ in a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) Mismatch Negativity (MMN) experiment. The MMN as an automatic change detection response of the brain reflected dialect differences that were not entirely reducible to acoustic differences between the pronunciations of ‘Hello’. Source analyses of the M100, an auditory evoked response to the vowels suggested additional processing in voice-selective areas whenever a dialect change was detected. These findings are not only relevant for the cognitive neuroscience of language, but also for the social sciences concerned with dialect and race perception.

The varying influence of spokesperson's accent in communication effectiveness: A comparative study in two different regions of Mexico

This study examines the communication effectiveness of a spokesperson with an American-Spanish Accent (ASA) and a Mexican-Spanish Accent (MSA) in two different locations of Mexico. These cities were selected based on their high or low exposure of the US culture (that is, high exposure is assumed if the city was close to the US border and/or coastal city). We used Tajfel's Theory to hypothesize the relationship between spokesperson's accent and consumers’ purchase intentions in that location. The theory posits that the most influential spokesperson will be the person who speaks with the standard accent for a given region but what is considered standard accent changes based on cultural influences of different groups. To test the hypothesized relationships, we used a sample of 1058 student subjects who observed an advertisement with different accented spokespersons. Consistent with the theory, the results of this study indicate that consumers that are less exposed to the US culture (inland Mexico cities) had more favorable views about the spokesperson that had an MSA than a spokesperson with an ASA. Moreover, consumers in the cities close to the US border and coastal areas had equally favorable views for both accents. The implications for the marketers are discussed.

Attitudinal and sociostructural factors and their role in dialect change: Testing a model of subjective factors

AbstractThe causation of language change is a problem with a high profile in sociolinguistics. This paper presents two contrasting models of language change: one that is based on sociopsychological factors (Kristiansen & Jørgensen, 2005) and one that rejects them (the Napoleon Principle, Brink & Lund, 1979). In a longitudinal study of individuals' changing pronunciation of the Danishaj-diphthong over 20 years, we test predictions following from the sociopsychologically oriented model. By the mid-1980s, female speakers used moreaj-pronunciations that are associated with high socioeconomic status than did male speakers. However, in guise tests, females revealed a more positive attitude toward speech associated with low socioeconomic status. Our prediction that female speakers would change their speech patterns to include moreaj-pronunciations associated with low socioeconomic status is supported by an analysis of the same female speakers' pronunciations as recorded in the mid-2000s.