Dialectal Variation Research Articles

Establishing the Age of the Latvian Debitive Mood: the Evidence of Latgalian

This article attempts to determine the age of the Latvian debitive mood with the help of a systematic investigation of its attestation in Latgalian, the variety of High Latvian dialects spoken in Latgale. While the debitive in older Standard and Central Latvian sources has been studied extensively, the debitive in older Latgalian sources has not met with equivalent interest yet. It is against this backdrop that, for the first time, the present article seeks to provide a systematic historical survey of the debitive as attested in 18th and 19th-century Latgalian sources. This survey will show that the debitive is well-attested in Latgalian since the very beginning of its written record, and that it has most likely always constituted a genuine part of Latgalian morphosyntax. As Latgalian developed free from Standard/Central Latvian influence up until the 20th century, these findings have major implications for establishing the age of the debitive: the cooccurrence of the debitive in Latgalian and Central/Standard Latvian suggests that the debitive is a shared innovation of the Latvian dialects dating back to Proto-Latvian times.

Exploring the Performance of Farasa and CAMeL Taggers for Arabic Dialect Tweets

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), Part Of Speech (POS) tagging is an important step; it is a fundamental requirement for many applications, such as information extraction, machine translation, and grammar checking. Successful POS taggers have been developed for many languages, including Arabic. Currently, the spread of social media has increased the diversity of dialects as people use them in their online communications. Therefore, it has become more difficult for researchers to classify some words that are understood by humans but not computers. In addition, most Arabic POS research focuses on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), while Dialect Arabic (DA) receives less attention. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of two Arabic taggers when used on dialect Arabic tweets and determine which tagger is the appropriate one, which will accordingly help to improve the existent taggers for dialect Arabic tweets. We used the Farasa and CAMeL taggers, which are commonly used to analyze Arabic texts and are considered the best taggers for Arabic. The results indicate that CAMeL tagger performed better than Farasa tagger, with accuracies of 92% and 83% respectively. In other words, a hybrid POS tagger trained with MSA and DA returns better results than the one trained on MSA.

The Children of Death Never Die: Specters of the Early Zionist Past

Abstract: This chapter considers the curious and perennial recurrence, in Zionist periodicals, memoirs and historiographic literature, of the claim that Palestinian Arabs referred to Jews in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as " Awlad al-mawt " (Children of Death). Invocations of this term are typically paired with ideologically laden statements of Zionists overcoming this characterization by demonstrating their capacity for physical strength and willingness to employ violence. Evoking a legacy of conflict with Palestinian Arabs, a longstanding European trope of Jews lacking vitality, and the promise of Jewish revival, Awlad al-mawt , in multiple dialectical variations and transliterations, became a byword for Jewish transformation but also for a lingering anxiety about its ultimate impossibility. By tracing the usages and context of this term throughout the twentieth century, from its first known appearances just before the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 through 1948, it argues that ambivalence about early Zionist strength informs evolving anxieties about the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the inherent precarity of Zionism as a settler project, and the attendant militarization of Zionist and Israeli society.

Типы формальных вариантов слова в лексической системе донских говоров Волгоградской области

Don patois – with all the originality of linguistic features - are an organic part of the Russian dialect space. The studied patois are socially isolated, which determines such an inherent linguocultural phenomenon as prestige, therefore the Don patois retains the most important features of the traditional system. Studying the problem of variability allows us to trace the formation of the linguocultural space that forms the vocabulary of the Don patois, and to assess the current state of the lexical system of the studied dialects. Based on the material of Don Cossack patois, the question of the functioning of formal variants of a word in the dialect lexical system is considered. The formal intra-system dialect variation, covering variants of the word-formation level, has been analyzed. A brief overview of currently available points of view regarding the understanding of variability in the domestic linguistic tradition is presented. Criteria have been identified for distinguishing synonyms and variants in the lexical system of the Don patois. The collected material made it possible to trace the peculiarity of the dialect lexical system, which consists in the development of a large number of word variants. The study showed that word variants in Don patois are an integral part of the dialect lexical system, contributing to its preservation. The study of formal variability allows us to show the state of the lexical system of Russian patois at the present stage.

Um estudo inter-regional sobre o reconhecimento da diversidade dialetal nos usos dos pretéritos espanhóis nos livros didáticos de espanhol L2

ABSTRACT: This analysis continues the examination of the acknowledgement of dialectal variation in L2 Spanish textbooks initiated by Hernández Cubo (2019) and compares its findings with those from that previous study by focusing on the same linguistic aspect: the difference in the uses and semantic scopes of two past tenses – Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto and Pretérito Indefinido – in the Peninsular and Hispanic American macro-varieties. As the study by Hernández Cubo (2019) only examines textbooks produced in Spain, this investigation proposes a cross-regional comparison by evaluating materials from other world regions. Therefore, this research contributes to the investigation of language variation in L2 Spanish instruction by proposing a cross-regional analysis, which shows that the recognition of dialectal diversity within the uses of the aforementioned tenses is not a priority among textbook authors. Works from the USA, France, Germany and Italy present certain levels of dialectal acknowledgement, while the ones from Brazil and the UK constitute the most significantly dialectally sensitive materials regarding the treatment of Spanish past tenses.

The Local Speech of Three Bistricas in Prekmurje

The local speech of three Bistricas – Gornja, Srednja and Dolnja – is classified as the southern variant (or dialect variant of Dólinsko) of the Prekmurje dialect of the Pannonian dialect group, but in some respects, it is closer to the speeches of Prlekija and Medžimurje dialects than to the neighbouring speeches of Dólinsko. The material-supported paper deals with those phonological, morphological, and verbal phenomena in the local speech of the three Bistricas, which are distinctive in relation to nearby local speeches and which linguists have too often generalized to the entire Prekmurje dialect. A list of uninhabited-area names of Gornja, Srednja and Dolnja Bistrica has also been added.

Assessing the Impact of Contextual Information in Hate Speech Detection

In recent years, hate speech has gained relevance in social networks and other virtual media because of its intensity and its relationship with violent acts against members of protected groups. Due to the huge amounts of user-generated contents, a great effort has been made to develop automatic tools to aid the analysis and moderation of this speech, at least in its most threatening forms. One of the limitations of current approaches to automatic hate speech detection is the lack of context; most studies and resources focus on isolated messages, without considering any type of conversational context or even the topic being discussed. This severely restricts the available information for determining whether a post on a social network should be tagged as hateful or not. In this work, we assess the impact of adding contextual information to the hate speech detection task. In particular, we study a Twitter subdomain consisting of replies to posts by news outlets, which provides a natural environment for contextualized hate speech detection.We collected a novel corpus in the Rioplatense dialectal variety of Spanish focusing on hate speech associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and manually annotated it using carefully designed guidelines. Our classification experiments using state-of-the-art transformer-based machine learning techniques show evidence that adding contextual information improves the performance of hate speech detection for two proposed tasks (binary and multi-label prediction), increasing their Macro F1 by 4.2 and 5.5 points, respectively. These results highlight the importance of exploiting contextual information for the task of hate speech detection. We make our code, models, and corpus available for further research.

The impact of cultural diversity on urban housing prices in China

<p>Using the commercial housing price data of 254 cities at prefecture level and above in China, this paper measures the cultural diversity by the diversity of Chinese dialects, and studies the impact of regional culture represented by dialects on urban housing prices. The research shows that after controlling the economic development level of the city, the urban ecological environment and other factors, the cultural diversity measured by dialect types has a significant negative impact on the price of urban commercial housing, that is, the more diverse the culture, the lower the house price, and the cultural diversity will restrain the house price by hindering the inflow of local population.</p>

Text-Independent Automatic Dialect Recognition of Marathi Language using Spectro-Temporal Characteristics of Voice

Text-independent dialect recognition system is proposed in this paper for Marathi language. India is rich in language varieties. Each language in turn has its unique dialect variations. Maharashtra has Marathi as official language and for Goa it is a co-official language . In literature there are very few studies available for Indian language recognition and then their respective dialect recognition. So research work available for regional languages such as Marathi is extremely limited. As a part of research work, an attempt is made to generate a case study of a low resourced Marathi language dialect recognition system. The study was carried out using Marathi speech data corpus provided by Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Language (LDC- IL). This corpus includes four major dialects of Marathi speakers. The efficiency and performance evaluation of the explored spectral (rhythmic) and temporal features are carried out to perform classification tasks. We investigated the performance of six different classifiers; K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT) classifier , Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) classifier and Ridge Classifier (RC). Experimental results have demonstrated that the RC classifier worked well with 84.24% of accuracy for fifteen spectral and temporal features. With twelve MFCCs it has been observed that SGD has outperformed among all classifiers with accuracy of 80.63%. For further study, a prominent feature subset as a part of dimensionality reduction has been identified using chi square, mutual information and ANOVA-f test. In this chi-square based feature extraction method has proven to be the best over over mutual information and ANOVA f-test.

Change in Buchan vowel harmony

English is not typically considered to be a vowel harmony language, and yet one of its cousins, Buchan Scots, clearly shows vowel-harmonic patterns. This involves a type of height harmony which is blocked by certain consonants and consonant clusters (which do not form a natural class). The front vowel /ɪ/ has historically functioned as a high vowel but seems to have changed into a non-high vowel in the inland dialectal variant. This article considers whether this change has also occurred in the costal variant of the dialect. From newly collected data, I observe that /ɪ/ continues to behave as a high vowel in the Buchan Scots spoken on the coast. However, there are some indications that the group of blocking consonants is shifting to include simple nasals and /r/. While simple nasals have been documented as blocking consonants in some varieties, /r/ has not.

Vectors of the State Language Policy of Russia and China in Relation to the National Language and Dialects (Comparative Aspect)

The status of state languages is fixed in the official documents of a particular country. In the Russian Federation, the Russian language is recognized as such, in some subjects, languages that are titular for representatives of different ethnic groups receive such status. In China, the language policy is aimed at the widespread promotion of the national Putonghua language, despite the fact that its status has not been constitutionally approved. The forms of language existence include literary (normative) the language and its dialect varieties. Together they represent the national language of a certain linguistic and cultural community. Dialects of Russian and Chinese have unique features expressed at all levels of the system. As a result of a long historical development, they demonstrate the linguistic richness and diversity of languages, as well as the most valuable cultural heritage of states. The language policy of the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China is based on the concept of national unity and is aimed at creating a common cultural space through the unification of language standards and the popularization of the language of interethnic communication.

Developing Unbiased Teacher Identity in Pluri-Accent Reality: Research-Based Classroom Activities

In the current pilot report, we draw on and further develop our previous research examining pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about accents, in which we proposed a pedagogical intervention reflecting certain aspects of our research outcomes, mainly the positive trend of embracing one’s non-nativeness. A set of four classroom activities, namely Nativeness perception test, Four corners, Bank of experiences and Sociodynamic teacher, were incorporated into three different online graduate courses in the winter and summer semesters 2020/2021 at the Department of the English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education in Prague. The piloting process was partly replicated in face-to-face classes of the following academic year. The overarching goal was to raise awareness of accent variation, especially in such a linguistically homogenous country as the Czech Republic and cultivate future teachers’ ability to address accent-related issues confidently, objectively and sensitively. The subsequent scrutiny of participants’ recorded discussions, written and/or oral feedback, submitted tasks as well as teachers’ observations indicated increased awareness of accent variability and a raised level of pedagogical confidence in approaching accent in the classroom context. Particularly, the respondents proved to be highly creative when devising adequate and supportive reactions to imagined negative comments related to accents or preventing them by specifically designing their lesson plans. Furthermore, the pedagogical intervention was appraised by the participating graduate students in their reflective assessment one year later.

Leveraging feature-level fusion representations and attentional bidirectional RNN-CNN deep models for Arabic affect analysis on Twitter

Arabic affect analysis on Twitter avidly helps to capture the emotional states of individuals being expressed regarding many targets, such as world-level events, products, and services. It is the key to monitoring and advancing human intelligence, which impacts human decision-making processes efficiently. However, state-of-the-art models have not witnessed serious developments yet since they have just achieved an accuracy of around 54%. This inaccuracy is mainly due to the agglutination, dialectal variation, and morphological richness of the Arabic language, as well as the unique features of tweets, such as shortness, noisiness, and informal language. This paper presents an approach that tackles these challenges and then improves the performance of Arabic affect analysis on Twitter. First, we propose a novel feature-based fusion representation for Arabic tweets to capture the polysemy, semantic/syntactic information, and conveyed emotional knowledge; and to deal with Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. Second, we propose an attentional deep learning model based on Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), and Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to effectively learn local and global features and provide a multilabel emotional classification. The experimental results indicate that our proposal outperforms twelve state-of-the-art and baseline methods with a significant improvement of 6% in accuracy.

Deep Neural Networks for Enhancing Conversational AI in Multilingual India

This paper investigates the application of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in developing conversational AI systems tailored for India's multilingual population. The study evaluates various neural network architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), to enhance speech recognition and natural language understanding in Indian languages. Challenges like language diversity, dialect variation, and low-resource languages are addressed by introducing new training datasets and multilingual models. The paper also examines how conversational AI systems can be integrated into customer service, education, and healthcare sectors in India, with a focus on inclusivity and accessibility.

РОЗВИТОК ІНШОМОВНОЇ КОМУНІКАТИВНОЇ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТІ СТУДЕНТІВ ФІЛОЛОГІЧНИХ СПЕЦІАЛЬНОСТЕЙ МЕТОДАМИ АКТИВНОГО НАВЧАННЯ

The article deals with active learning methods used in the training of philologists to develop foreign language communicative competence. The authors clarify the term of foreign language communicative competence which is considered as a basic component of the professional competence of philologists. It is defined as an ability based on the system of acquired knowledge and skills, as well as individual characteristics, qualities, values, which ensures the organization and implementation of interpersonal, intercultural communication in different languages in oral or written form, allows philologists to solve complex professional tasks and practical problems. Dramatization and performance of original works of fiction and films are considered as effective methods that promote the development of communicative competence, mental abilities, and the emotional sphere of students. The application of these methods in the training of philologists by means of interpretation of literary works in a foreign language enables them to explore the socio-cultural context, to get acquainted with linguistic markers of social relations, folk wisdom, variety of dialects and accents, and to acquire an original positive linguistic experience. Dramatization increases student educational motivation, removes psychological barriers to communication in a foreign language, helps to master and choose relevant speech patterns for better assimilation of lexical and grammatical structures, speech patterns, to improve pronunciation, intonation. These active learning methods allow students to integrate skills and abilities in the process of a creative activity, while simultaneously applying speaking skills in a meaningful context and emotionally rich learning interaction.

Aproximación sociolingüística al doblado de clítico de objeto directo en Lambayeque, Perú

In this research, we analyze the accusative clitic doubling in Spanish Lambayeque. We understood accusative clitic doubling as the presence of the clitic of the direct object in co-occurrence with the nominal phrase of the direct object in postverbal position. The analysis is carried out in four cities of Lambayeque: Chiclayo, Eten, Ferreñafe and Mochumí. The four cities studied were chosen according to the level of contact with Quechua, economic activities, and greater centrality in education and services. The analysis was conducted in 72 interviews. We investigate the statistical significance of four linguistic factors: animacy, definiteness, and concordance (of gender and number) in the occurrence of the accusative double. In addition, the social factors of age, gender, and city of origin were studied. The results show that the accusative clitic doubling in this dialect variety is sensitive to the animacy, definiteness, and agreement between the determining phrase (FD) and the corresponding clitic. We found the possibility of proposing a hierarchy of significance among the studied factors.

Board culture and bank innovation: Evidence from China

This study mainly investigates the influence mechanism and effect of board culture on bank innovation. On the basis of unique cultural context of the East and state-owned bank attributes, we used the data of China's A-share listed banks from 2003 to 2018 to construct the cultural indicators of the board of directors, and used the dialect diversity index to measure the cultural diversity of the board of directors. Results show that the indicators of masculinity, degree of indulgence and cultural diversity are directly proportional to bank innovation. The value of power distance and uncertainty avoidance is inversely proportional to bank innovation. Further analysis found that the Oriental culture of the board of directors mainly affects bank innovation through channels such as human capital investment and efficiency and bank risk-taking. Our research results remain robust after controlling for endogenous issues and influencing factors such as Confucian culture.

Dialectal variation in lexical borrowings in Dangme

language spoken in Southern Ghana. Dangme has seven dialects (Ada, Gbugblaa, Yilɔ Krobo, Manya Krobo, Nugo, Sɛ and Osudoku), but this study concerns lexical borrowings into the first four. The language is in contact with four languages from which it has borrowed: Ewe, Ga, Akan, and English. Each dialect of Dangme is in direct contact with English, the official language of Ghana, and with at least one of the three Ghanaian languages. While Ada is in contact with Ewe and Gbugblaa with Ga, both Yilɔ Krobo and Manya Krobo are in contact with Akan and, to some extent, Ewe. The study departed from focus on phonological adaptation of borrowed words, the subject matter of previous studies, to pursue two interrelated objectives, i.e., to find out: (i) whether, and to what extent, borrowings into a dialect from a given source language remain localized or are transferred to the other dialects and (ii) whether, and what extent, the lexical borrowings constitute additions to the Dangme lexicon or, conversely, a relexification of native words in the lexicon. Eighty (80) respondents, 20 each from the four dialects considered, were purposively sampled to participate in the data collection process and the data analysis was done within the Variationist Sociolinguistics Theory. It was found that while most Akan and English lexical borrowings have become integrated in all the four dialects of Dangme, this is not the case with lexical borrowings from Ga and Ewe. Most Ga borrowings are found only in Gbugblaa and most Ewe borrowings are found only in Ada and, to some extent, Manya Krobo. It was also found that Akan and English lexical borrowings generally constitute additions to the Dangme lexicon while Ewe and Ga lexical borrowings may be seen as subtractive borrowings or cases of relexification in Ada and Gbugblaa respectively. The study is expected to contribute to an understanding of how languages like Dangme whose dialects have geographical contact with different languages develop dialectal variation.

MIND your language(s): Recognizing Minority, Indigenous, Non-standard(ized), and Dialect variety usage in “monolinguals”

AbstractWhile Psychology research in general has been criticized for oversampling from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations, Psycholinguistics has a problem with conducting a large amount of research on a relatively small number of languages. Yet even within WEIRD environments, the experiences of speakers of Minority, Indigenous, Non-standard(ized), and Dialect (MIND) varieties are not always captured alongside their use of a more prestigious standard language.This position piece will provide a case study of one such variety: Scots, a Germanic variety spoken in Scotland, which is often considered “bad English.” However, its speakers display cognitive characteristics of bilingualism despite often regarding themselves as monolingual due to sociolinguistic factors. Such factors include social prestige and language ideology, as well as linguistic distance. In doing so, this paper introduces a new acronym encouraging researchers to MIND their language – by developing more inclusive ways of capturing the linguistic experiences of MIND speakers, to move away from binary distinctions of “bilingual” and “monolingual,” and to recognize that not all varieties are afforded the status of language, nor do many multilinguals consider themselves as anything other than monolingual.

The Comparison Between Kerinci Siulak and Kerinci Rawang Dialect

The Kerinci dialect has various variations in almost every region. These dialects also have differences, both at the phonological and lexical levels between dialects. However, speakers and interlocutors understand each other when speaking in their respective dialects so that it does not prevent the Kerinci people from communicating with each other. The purpose of the research was to describe the differences in language variation between the Kerinci Siulak dialect and the Kerinci Rawang dialect. This research uses Jeff Siegel's theory of language and dialect variations. In reviewing the data of this study using qualitative methods, while data collection used interview methods with recording techniques. This research was conducted in Hamparan Rawang Village and in Siulak Village, Kerinci Regency with 5 informants. The results showed that based on the available data, in the Kerinci language, the Siulak dialect and the Rawang dialect, there are sounds which are phonemes that can be grouped into three groups, namely vowels, diphthongs, and consonants. The Siulak and Rawang dialects have 23 sounds, with 5 vowels, 10 consonants, and 8 diphthongs. The correspondence phonemes of the two dialects are 35 which are at the initial, middle and final syllable caused by geographical, sociocultural and social status factors.