Dialect Levelling Research Articles

Internal Boundaries and Individual Differences: /Aʊ Raising in Vermont

Previous research on speech in Vermont has revealed evidence of dialect leveling but with much individual variation. the purpose of the current study of the raising and fronting of /aʊ/ in Vermont is to explore this residual variation with an eye toward offering interpretations based upon group and personal identity and affiliation. broad demographically based analyses as well as the examination of interview content and individual vowel data provide insight into the process of dialect leveling in Vermont. Specifically, in addition to such demographic factors as age and gender, overall life affiliation differences and individual life choices gleaned from interview material are helpful in disambiguating what would otherwise seem to be anomalous variable features. this combination of methods may be particularly useful in situations of economic and cultural change.

A change in the usage of negators in Abha Arabic through dialect levelling

A change in the usage of negators in Abha Arabic through dialect levelling

A change in the usage of negators in Abha Arabic through dialect levelling

A change in the usage of negators in Abha Arabic through dialect levelling

Contact and coherence: Dialectal leveling and structural convergence in NYC Spanish

The sustained and intense interaction of massive groups of English and Spanish speakers in the U.S. has the potential to deepen our understanding of continuity and innovation in linguistic systems under heavy contact. The current study focuses on Spanish as it is spoken in the largest urban center of the United States: New York City. It examines a range of variable phenomena in the most extensive collection of Spanish in New York to date: the Otheguy Zentella Corpus of Spanish in NYC (OZC). The data represent original research by the first author as well as the efforts of several other scholars who have examined aspects of the OZC in detail. When synthesized, results reveal two broad patterns in the Spanish of long-time NYC residents: diminished regional differentiation and structural convergence with English. These trends emerge across numerous levels of linguistic structure, manifesting in patterns of syntactic, morphological, and phonological variation.The coherence of these phenomena is consistent with the view that contact-induced change is tightly constrained, both socially and structurally, and that it is unlikely to manifest as haphazard bricolage. This is because, while the intensity of linguistic innovations and the time required for their onset and implementation may vary from feature to feature, such changes derive ultimately from a single source; namely, the set of linguistic and social factors that characterize the contact situation. As such, we can expect contact-induced changes to be restricted and of a kind, imbued with the character of the whole to which they belong.

The Contribution of the Slovenian Linguistic Atlas to the Study of South Slavic Dialects

This article presents the achievements of the first volume of the Slovenski lingvistični atlas (Slovenian Linguistic Atlas, 2011). It compares this work with the Български диалектен атлас. Обобщаващ том (Bulgarian Dialect Atlas: Generalizing Volume, 2002). The following groups of dialect lexical material are examined: (1) material showing the unity of the lexical system of the Slavic languages, (2) material showing the unity of the Slavic lexicon with the European lexicon, and (3) material showing the dialect division of lexemes from the first two groups. It presents the opportunities offered by juxtaposing various languages at the dialect level both for explaining their historical development and also for solving problems in the history of the language family that they belong to.

‘Stabilisering’ van tussentaal?

Abstract1 ‘Stabilisation’ of tussentaal? The language repertoire in the Westhoek as test caseIn several European language areas, processes of dialect levelling and dialect loss have led to an increasing use of varieties intermediate between dialects and standard language (Auer 2005). In Flanders, these intermediate varieties ‐ mostly referred to as tussentaal ‐ are also penetrating contexts in which Standard Dutch used to be the norm (Grondelaers en Van Hout 2011a). While increasingly more empirical studies focus on this functional elaboration of tussentaal, a number of issues continue to be highly controversial. One of these is the so-called ‘stabilisation’ of tussentaal, viz. whether one clearly delineated tussentaal variety is emerging. Whereas Taeldeman (2008) claims that one ‘stable’ tussentaal is emerging in Flanders, Plevoets (2008) and Geeraerts (2010) contradict this claim by arguing that there is too much heterogeneity in the Flemish tussentaal usage. The present study aims at shedding more light on this issue by mapping the structure of the language repertoire in the peripheral region of West-Flanders, where several of the so-called ‘stable tussentaal features’ do not occur in the local dialect. The language use of two generations of highly educated women is studied in five settings to explore whether a stable tussentaal variety can be identified, a variety being defined as a bundle of language features characterized by linguistic cohesion, idiovarietal elements, clear pragmatic functions and emic category status. Correspondence and cluster analyses of 28 phonological and morpho-syntactic variables in 5 speech settings show that in Ieper, a ‘stable’ tussentaal variety can hardly be distinguished. On the contrary, in the linguistic space between dialect and ‘strict’ Standard Dutch (VRT-Nederlands), not one, but three clusters of correlated language features can be detected: ‘cleaned up dialect’, ‘standard language with an accent’ and ‘Ypres’ supraregional language use’. The latter cluster seems to match Taeldeman’s (2008) description of a stable tussentaal variety and hints at an incipient homogeneisation of tussentaal in West-Flanders, but the large idiolectal heterogeneity in the usage of the cluster and the lack of emic category status problematizes variety claims.

Dialect leveling in Haloze, Slovenia by Grant H. Lundberg (review)

Dialect leveling in Haloze, Slovenia by Grant H. Lundberg (review)

The Romanian linguistic cartography in the digitizing era: the electronic atlases

Abstract The three series of national linguistic atlases (WLAD, ALR and NALR) proof that the Romanian linguistic cartography has one of the richest and most important traditions in Europe, fact acknowledged by the linguistic community starting from the first half of the last century. This tradition continues nowadays with the digitization of the linguistic atlases. The first achievement in this direction is the release in 2007 of the third volume from series NALR. Moldavia and Bukovina with the help of bespoke software built in collaboration by linguists and computer scientists from Iasi Branch of the Romanian Academy. Another project in the same field, done by a Romanian-Canadian team, is the Online Romanian Dialect Atlas which plans to build an interactive database for dialects using a multidimensional scaling statistical technique. The Bukovina Audiovisual Linguistic Atlas (ALAB) is the most recent project for a digital atlas of the Romanian academic community and it is based in the research centre from Iasi. The ALAB project, started in 2010, plans to build, for the first time in Romania, an audio-video atlas centred on sociolinguistic features. This atlas will present, with the help of online support in one interface, diatopic, diastratic (diasexual and diagenerational), and possible diaphasic variations on dialect level.

Variation in Faroese and the development of a spoken standard: In search of corpus evidence

Although Faroese exhibits extensive linguistic variation and rapid social change, the language is near-uncharted territory in variationist sociolinguistics. This article discusses some recent social changes in Faroese society in connection with language change, focusing in particular on the development of a de facto spoken standard, Central Faroese. Demographic mobility, media and education may be contributing to this development in different ways. Two linguistic variables are analysed as a first step towards uncovering the respective roles of standardisation, dialect levelling and dialect spread as contributing processes in the formation of Central Faroese: morphological variation in -st endings and phonological variation in -ir and -ur endings. The analysis confirms previously described patterns of geographically constrained variation, but no generational or stylistic differences indicative of language change are found, nor are there clear signs that informants use Central Faroese. The results may in part be due to the structure of the corpus used.

“Carrefour Louisiane”

The history of Louisiana French (LF) is closely related to Louisiana’s particular societal and linguistic ecosystem, characterized by a mixed society where new forms of societal organization emerged and were reflected in new forms of linguistic patterns and linguistic behavior. From the beginning, language contact has been of crucial importance for the emergence, evolution and gradual decline of Louisiana French (“Cajun French”). In colonial times, contact between related French lects resulted in the formation of a new variety of regional French in North America with its own features and its own evolutionary dynamics. The continuing contact with English, however, which takes place in an entirely different ecological frame, results in the ongoing attrition of the minority language. The first part of the article deals with early stages of dialect contact in Louisiana; it will be shown that from a diachronic point of view Louisiana French has to be seen as a product of language mixing and dialect leveling. In the second part two specific aspects of current English-French language contact will be discussed. Both aspects serve to illustrate particularities of the linguistic situation in Louisiana now and then as well as the importance of certain universal mechanisms of contact-induced language change.

Arabic Dialect Identification

The written form of the Arabic language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), differs in a non-trivial manner from the various spoken regional dialects of Arabic—the true “native languages” of Arabic speakers. Those dialects, in turn, differ quite a bit from each other. However, due to MSA's prevalence in written form, almost all Arabic data sets have predominantly MSA content. In this article, we describe the creation of a novel Arabic resource with dialect annotations. We have created a large monolingual data set rich in dialectal Arabic content called the Arabic On-line Commentary Data set (Zaidan and Callison-Burch 2011). We describe our annotation effort to identify the dialect level (and dialect itself) in each of more than 100,000 sentences from the data set by crowdsourcing the annotation task, and delve into interesting annotator behaviors (like over-identification of one's own dialect). Using this new annotated data set, we consider the task of Arabic dialect identification: Given the word sequence forming an Arabic sentence, determine the variety of Arabic in which it is written. We use the data to train and evaluate automatic classifiers for dialect identification, and establish that classifiers using dialectal data significantly and dramatically outperform baselines that use MSA-only data, achieving near-human classification accuracy. Finally, we apply our classifiers to discover dialectical data from a large Web crawl consisting of 3.5 million pages mined from on-line Arabic newspapers.

Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity by Ricardo Otheguy and Ana Celia Zentella (review)

Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity by Ricardo Otheguy and Ana Celia Zentella (review)

Regional dialect leveling in Najdi Arabic: The case of the deaffrication of [k] in the Qaṣīmī dialect

AbstractThis study investigates the effect of linguistic and social factors (age, gender, and level of education) on the patterns of variation in the affrication of [] for [k] in the stem and suffix in the informal speech of 72 speakers of Qaṣīmī, a local dialect of Najdi Arabic, spoken in the Qaṣīm province in central Saudi Arabia. Findings indicate that affrication is significantly favored in the phonological context of front vowels, particularly the high front ones. Whereas suffix-based affrication is categorically used as [-], stem affrication is strongly correlated with the age, educational level, and gender of the speaker. In particular, older uneducated speakers from both sexes tend to maintain the use of the local variant [], whereas younger and middle-aged educated speakers, particularly women, increasingly shift toward the use of the supralocal variant [k]. The present findings are suggestive of patterns of variation that are typical in regional-dialect leveling, wherein the supralocal variant(s) associated with the major city dialect is (are) diffusing outward, at the expense of traditional and socially marked variant(s), by speakers of smaller towns' dialects. The substantial socioeconomic changes that Saudi Arabia has undergone in the last half century are suggested to have triggered and accelerated the linguistic shift.

Linguistic advergence and divergence in north-western Catalan: A dialectometric investigation of dialect leveling and border effects

This article investigates several linguistic changes which are ongoing in north-western Catalan using a contemporary corpus. We take advantage of a range of dialectometric methods that allow us to calculate and analyse the linguistic distance between varieties in apparent time from an aggregate perspective. Specifically, we pay attention to the process of structural dialect loss due to linguistic advergence to standard and eastern Catalan in many north-western Catalan dialects located in Catalonia (Spain) and Andorra. We also provide evidence that the dialect leveling taking place in these two areas strongly contrasts with the relative stability of the Catalan dialects on the other side of the Catalan-Aragonese border in Spain, where Catalan is not an official language. These opposite sociolinguistic situations (Catalonia and Andorra have strong language policies to support Catalan, whereas Aragon does not) have triggered a twofold process of vertical advergence between the Catalan spoken in Catalonia and Andorra towards the prestigious varieties, on the one hand; and of horizontal divergence between these dialects and those located in Aragon, on the other hand. This situation has notably strengthened the border differences between Aragon and Catalonia during the last 80 years. This article is one of the first attempts to study the border effects not only between regions belonging to different countries but also between different administrative regions 'within' the same country. In addition, we investigate the different roles of urban versus rural areas, providing support for the view that the spatial and hierarchical diffusion patterns are complementary.

Combining Regular Sound Correspondences and Geographic Spread

In this paper we combine the geographic variation of closely related language variants (‘dialects’) with the distribution of sound correspondences through the lexicon. One of the central problems with sound correspondences at the dialect level is that they are not very regular, especially when they are investigated in sufficient detail. Sound changes spread both through a language (e.g., from one word to another) and through the population of speakers (in our case through a population of villages with different dialects). Both processes happen at the same time, and the challenge is to reconstruct what has happened from a snapshot of synchronic data. The method described in this paper allows us to track the geographic spread of sound changes and the underlying patterns of linguistic diversity simultaneously. By combining the two, it is possible to detect areas of intensive linguistic contact and gain better insight into the mechanisms of language change.

GLOBALIZATION, STANDARDIZATION, AND DIALECT LEVELING IN IRAN

This paper is an attempt to shed light on the effects of modernization, urbanization, monolingual educational system, and mass media as well as the process of globalization on dialect leveling among Persian dialects. In so doing, the first part of the paper elaborates on the relationship between globalization and sociolinguistics, and on the concept of standardization. Also, it discusses some factors accelerating dialect leveling among Persian dialects. The second part of the paper presents some empirical evidence for the change, based on the data collected from 3 Persian dialects, namely: Birjandi, Neyshaboori, and Yazdi. Three spoken language sample corpora from two age cohort groups in each speech community were collected. Having transcribed the data, the researchers juxtaposed the phonological, morphological, and syntactic conventions of the two groups of each speech community for further in-depth analysis. Comparing the speech samples of the two age cohorts in each corpus revealed significant movements towards standard dialect. However, the quality and quantity of the observed movements did not appear to be the same across the dialects in question.

Ricardo Otheguy & Ana C. Zentella, Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xviii, 299. Pb. $35.

Ricardo Otheguy & Ana C. Zentella, Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xviii, 299. Pb. $35. - Volume 41 Issue 5

Multilingualism and identity on Mussau

We examine the multilingual situation of the speakers of Mussau-Emira, an Austronesian language spoken in the St Matthias Group of islands of Papua New Guinea. The language repertoire includes Mussau-Emira, the regional language of wider communication Tok Pisin, and English. Within Mussau-Emira, there are currently three closely related dialects spoken on Mussau, and a more distant dialect spoken on Emira. A brief outline of contact with the outside world and traditional trade patterns is given. We look at the current language-use situation, including the use of code-mixing, code-switching and borrowing. Questions of identity are addressed, looking at various layers of identity, based on kinship, geography, and other factors. The changes in the culture due to wider contact, political change and personal mobility are shown to affect several areas of identity. The three Mussau dialects show a remarkable degree of dialect leveling in the course of approximately eighty years. In analyzing this, we see the introduction of Christianity and education with a central boarding school as the key factors in this leveling.

Aggregate analysis of vowel pronunciation in Swedish dialects

In this paper an aggregate analysis of vowel pronunciation in Swedish dialects is proposed by means of multidimensional scaling (MDS). The Gap statistic showed that no statistically significant partitioning of Swedish dialects can be made based on vowel pronunciation, which means that the dialects form a true linguistic continuum. Vowels recorded by 1,170 speakers at 98 sites were analyzed acoustically with principal components of Bark-filtered spectra, and the linguistic distances between varieties were computed as the Euclidean distance of the acoustic variables. The MDS analyses showed that the dialect areas that can be detected based on vowel pronunciation in modern rural varieties of Swedish largely correspond to the traditional Swedish dialect division and divisions of regional varieties of Standard Swedish. The results also show a large-scale ongoing dialect leveling. The change is largest in many central parts of the language area close to the biggest cities, while the dialects in more peripheral areas are relatively stable.

Relative linguistic homogeneity in a new society: The case of Iceland

AbstractThe language of a speech community can only act as an identity marker for all of its speakers if linguistic norms are widely shared and if a minimal number of language varieties are spoken. This article examines briefly how a linguistic norm came to serve the whole of Iceland and how a situation of relative linguistic homogeneity was maintained for centuries. Sociolinguistic theory tells us that the speech community that we can reconstruct for early Iceland should lead to the establishment and maintenance oflocalnorms. However, Iceland, arguably monodialectal, was certainly characterized by long-term linguistic homogeneity and remained a society where nucleated settlements barely formed over a thousand-year period. Scholars have argued that a mixture of dialects leveled shortly after the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century (Settlement). Studies show that dialect leveling requires dialect mixing, the convergence of people on one place, and sustained linguistic contact between the speakers. The settlement pattern of Iceland is indicative of population divergence (not convergence) and there is limited evidence ofsustainedcontact. It is therefore proposed that the dialect leveling might be linked instead with significant population movements and social upheaval in mainland Scandinavia in the immediate pre-Viking period. The variety of Norse that was taken westward across the Atlantic might itself already have been the result of several earlier stages of mixing and koineization. It is only by combining linguistic, historical, and archaeological knowledge that this problem of how one linguistic norm came to serve the whole of Iceland can be understood.