Mixed Dialect Research Articles

Using the Tolerance Principle to predict phonological change

AbstractLanguage acquisition is a well-established avenue for language change (Labov, 2007). Given the theoretical importance of language acquisition to language change, it is all the more important to formulate clear theories of transmission-based change. In this paper, we provide a simulation method designed to test the plausibility of different possible transmission-based changes, using the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to determine precise points at which different possible changes may become plausible for children acquiring language. We apply this method to a case study of a complex change currently in progress: the allophonic restructuring of /æ/ in Philadelphia English. Using this model, we are able to evaluate several competing explanations of the ongoing change and determine that the allophonic restructuring of /æ/ in Philadelphia English is mostly likely the result of children acquiring language from mixed dialect input, consisting of approximately 40% input from speakers with a nasal /æ/ split. We show that applying our simulation to a phonological change allows us to make precise quantitative predications about the progress of this change. Moreover, it forces us to reassess intuitively plausible hypotheses about language change, such as grammatical simplification, in a quantitative and independently motivated framework of acquisition.

ЛИНГВОКУЛЬТУРНЫЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ КУЛИНАРНЫХ РЕЦЕПТОВ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ДИАЛЕКТА РОССИЙСКИХ НЕМЦЕВ)

The article analyzes the linguo-cultural peculiarities of the Russian Germans’ culinary recipes. The study is based on the comprehensive analysis of culinary recipes texts and field method (interview). Culinary recipes texts and the survey results served as the research material. The findings allowed the author to identify the structural and linguistic peculiarities of culinary recipes in the mixed dialect (West Central German and East Central German). Though the young generation has lost the dialect, culinary traditions have appeared to be one of the most stable elements of the Russian Germans’ culture.

Contact Phonology : Fonologi Kata Serapan dalam Bahasa Jepang

This paper focuses its discussion about loanword phonology in Japanese language. Loanword phonology is one of five contact phonology situations that was described by Smith (2007). The four other situations are areal influence, dialect mixing, language mixing, and simplification. Japanese language has been borrowing many words from foreign languages. One of those foreign languages is English. As we all know that both languages, Japanese and English, have different phonological system. Therefore, borrowed words of English language has been adapted to fit the phonological patterns of Japanese language. This adaptation could solve the loanword phonology problem. And because up until now the number of loanword in Japanese language is till limited so the phonological system of Japanese language is remain unaffected. In other words, the loadwords’ phonology does not cause lasting changes in the phonological system of Japanese language.

Ethnic Identity and Language Variations of the Russian Germans in the Kirov Region

Currently, the process of globalization, intense intercultural contacts, changes in social structure, and internationalization of higher education influence inter-ethnic relations, ethnic identity, as well as language changes. These processes can be observed among the Russian-Germans living in the territory of the Kirov region. Their investigation started in 1999 and is currently going on. The relevance of the study is due to the significance of the linguistic interaction at the present stage of the German language development in Russia, where for decades the German language has been developing and changing in linguistic enclaves environment. In this regard, this paper aims to explore ethnic and linguistic identity of German bilinguals living in the environment of a foreign language, different dialect, or different confession in isolation from the main ethnic array. The leading methods in the study were socio-differentiated analysis, as well as comparative and statistical methods used while correlating the dialect systems under review to other German dialectal systems, literary German language, as well as with the Russian language. In the study, we came to the conclusion that the priority layer in the structure of the ethnic identity of Russian Germans in the Kirov region includes the following distinctive features: common territory, language, religion, family life, folklore, crafts, norms of behavior, common historical destiny and common psychological makeup. The language of the German ethnic minority, who live in the territory of the Kirov region, is unique and peculiar. It is characterized, above all, by mixed dialects in a foreign language environment and by a variety of their existing forms of. The paper is of practical value to scholars dealing with the German island dialects.

/kwo/ and /y/ in Taiwan Mandarin: Social Factors and Phonetic Variation

This article studies three phonological variants of /kwo y/ and the acoustic properties of /o/ and /y/ in 1,159 Taiwan Mandarin face-to-face interviews from social perspectives. Language shift from Southern Min and Hakka towards Taiwan Mandarin, leading to dialect loss, is updated by quantitative evidence derived from a series of sociolinguistic analyses. Social factors including gender, age group, educational level, internet use, and childhood residence significantly correlate with the use of three /kwo y/ variants: the standard form, /w_o/ merger, and /y/ delabialization. The latter two variants are typical Southern Min-accented Mandarin pronunciation. However, results of acoustic analysis of /o/ and /y/ suggest that the influences of Southern Min are significant only in the group with the largest Southern Min exposure. That is, for Taiwan Mandarin in its current form, dialect mixing is progressing due to intensive contact with Southern Min. But it is not a stabilized end form of change, yet.

La presencia de la lengua aragonesa en la revista "El Ebro" (1917-1936)

La revista El Ebro (1917-1936), editada en Barcelona por emigrantes aragoneses, supuso la primera experiencia de convivencia de diferentes variedades dialectales de la lengua aragonesa en un mismo medio de comunicación. Se trata de una experiencia que ha pasado prácticamente inadvertida en la historia reciente de una de las lenguas más minoritarias y con menor presencia mediática de Europa Occidental. En sus páginas se mezclaron artículos y colaboraciones escritos en dialectos hablados en los diferentes territorios de dominio lingüístico de la lengua junto con transcripciones de documentos medievales. Al mismo tiempo, se suscitaron debates sobre la cuestión lingüística que se vieron truncados tanto por la propia desaparición de la publicación como por la falta de concreción teórica

Automatic Speech Recognition for Mixed Dialect Utterances by Mixing Dialect Language Models

This paper presents an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that accepts a mixture of various kinds of dialects. The system recognizes dialect utterances on the basis of the statistical simulation of vocabulary transformation and combinations of several dialect models. Previous dialect ASR systems were based on handcrafted dictionaries for several dialects, which involved costly processes. The proposed system statistically trains transformation rules between a common language and dialects, and simulates a dialect corpus for ASR on the basis of a machine translation technique. The rules are trained with small sets of parallel corpora to make up for the lack of linguistic resources on dialects. The proposed system also accepts mixed dialect utterances that contain a variety of vocabularies. In fact, spoken language is not a single dialect but a mixed dialect that is affected by the circumstances of speakers' backgrounds (e.g., native dialects of their parents or where they live). We addressed two methods to combine several dialects appropriately for each speaker. The first was recognition with language models of mixed dialects with automatically estimated weights that maximized the recognition likelihood. This method performed the best, but calculation was very expensive because it conducted grid searches of combinations of dialect mixing proportions that maximized the recognition likelihood. The second was integration of results of recognition from each single dialect language model. The improvements with this model were slightly smaller than those with the first method. Its calculation cost was, however, inexpensive and it worked in real-time on general workstations. Both methods achieved higher recognition accuracies for all speakers than those with the single dialect models and the common language model, and we could choose a suitable model for use in ASR that took into consideration the computational costs and recognition accuracies.

The tone pattern in dialect contact

The features of tones contact have been investigated between Xiang Dialect and Gan Dialect, by using the method of tone pattern in this paper. It is showed that the “transition” feature of the mixed dialect reflects in similar features of tones between mixed dialect and ancestor dialect or between mixed tones and target dialect, which includes as follows: the balance of the tone number, the mixing of tone category, the similarity of tone value, and the correlation of tone contour.

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.

Manifestations of areal convergence in rural Belarusian spoken in the Baltic-Slavic contact zone

Abstract This article combines methods and insights from dialect geography, areal and contact linguistics. It focuses on a specific, yet heavily understudied mixed dialect of Belarusian spoken in the entire Slavic-Baltic contact region. It turns out that on practically all levels (from phonetics to syntax), the variation of features encountered in this dialect is, from all varieties of that region, the most representative for convergence phenomena characteristic of East Slavic, Polish and/or Baltic varieties in contact with each other. This convergence is so far-reaching that, for instance, it seems impossible to distinguish the rural Belarusian vernacular from regional varieties of Polish on the basis of structural properties alone, despite the fact that these varieties are clearly perceived as different by both native speakers and field linguists. Simultaneously, features of the Belarusian dialect – and, thus, of the whole contact region which it most accurately reflects – should be judged under the perspective of larger areal clines (in particular, within the eastern part of the Circum Baltic Area); this view is pursued on the basis of Wiemer (2004) and more recent insights into the areal distribution of structural features crossing family boundaries. Such areal continua, in turn, intersect with inner-Slavic dialect continua and phenomena occurring in various locally restricted “pockets” scattered around in Slavic. On the background of this, we approach answers to the problem of determining the influence of contact (with Baltic and/or Finnic) over “genetic heritage” and the question of which features are more “immune” against influence from genealogically less close contact varieties.

New Perspectives to The Works of Mixed Dialect, Which Have Oghuz and Eastern Turkic Features

New Perspectives to The Works of Mixed Dialect, Which Have Oghuz and Eastern Turkic Features

Nuevas cartas de la última prisión de Quevedo ed. by James O. Crosby

MLR, I02.3, 2007 863 documents fromBraga with their thirteenth-century copies. JoelRini examines the history of thepresent indicative paradigm of Spanish ir, suggesting that the appear ance of pres. ind. vais (and subsequently pres. ind. vamos) in the late fifteenthcentury was a direct result of the reduction of the second person plural verbal suffixesand, in particular, the reduction of ides> is.Robert Blake relies on thirteenth-century bilin gual Spanish/Arabic treaties todetermine thepronunciation of thegraphemes h- and f-. Donald N. Tuten demonstrates thatour understanding of linguistic variation in Alfonsine texts can be enhanced by analysing the earlier stages of dialect mixing and thekoinezation which tookplace insouthern Spain during Alfonso's lifetime. Martin J. Duffell argues that Insular (Anglo-)French was characterized by strongword stress, variability in the deletion ofword-final schwa, and stress-timing. Peter T. Ricketts offers a critical edition and translation of fourteenth-centuryOccitan prayers. Alan Deyermond contrasts the treatment of theTower of Babel in theLibro deAlexandre with that of latermedieval Castilian texts. Ray Harris-Northall demonstrates that until the thirteenthcentury at least,Castilian shared with Cantabrian and Asturian varieties the use in close association of partitive structures and a count/non-count distinction. Diana L. Ranson calls for a pragmatics-based explanation of the varia tionbetween aqueste and este in fourteenth-century Spanish. Dana L. Allen traces the merger of the sibilants of Peninsular Spain from the eleventh to the sixteenth cen turies.Thomas R. Hart focuses on Juan de Valdes's use of the terms ingenio,juicio,and prudencia inhisDialogo de la lengua.Rodney Sampsons offersa historical comparative perspective on the role of sociolinguistic and structural factors in the fate of vowel prosthesis in Spanish and French. Ian Macpherson analyses the ambiguity of the fifteenth-centurySpanish glosas generated by motes. Kormi Anipa addresses intra personal linguistic variation inCervantes's Novela de Rinconete y Cortadillo. John England analyses Golden Age Spanish words with unstable feminine forms.Christo pher J.Pountain examines thehistory of gender contrasts inSpanish in the lightof a process he calls 'capitalization'. David Pharies explores the role ofwhat he labels the 'chiquirriticotemplate' in Western Hispano-Romance word formation. Steven N. Dworkin provides new insights into the development ofLatin cogitare and curare in Hispano-Romance by analysing their evolution within the theoretical framework of diachronic cognitive semantics. IanMakenzie takes up the topics of ser-selection in Old Spanish and bare subjects in Modern Spanish. JoseDel Valle evaluates Spain's linguistic ideologies during the last three decades. Francisco Moreno Ferniandez of fers a statistical analysis of the variants [s] and [0] inParaguayan Spanish. JohnN. Green zooms in on expressions of prohibition inModern Spanish. Roger Wright illustrates how thehistory of Latin as aworld language can give us a glimpse into the twopossible routes thatSpanish might take in the future:convergence or divergence. The broad range of topics and perspectives makes thisvolume of great interest to anyRomanist. COLGATEUNIVERSITY NATALYASTOLOVA Nuevas cartas de la tltimaprisi6n deQuevedo. Ed. by JAMES 0. CROSBY. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2005. 496pp. ?50. ISBN 978-i-85566-iI2-7. Over a period of almost fifty years, James 0. Crosby has been publishing, in critical editions, fundamental works by Francisco de Quevedo, including his Politica deDios (Madrid and Urbana: Editorial Castalia and University of Illinois Press, I966), Suenios y discursos, 2 vols (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, I993), and an anthology of his poetry, Poesia varia (Madrid: Ediciones Ciatedra, I98 I), based upon the textof theprinceps, El Parnaso espaniol (I648). At the same time,Crosby was researching seventeenth century documents that shed new lightupon the circumstances of composition and 864 Reviews transmission ofQuevedo's prose and poetry,which he published in articles that ap peared inAmerican and European journals, as well as in his well-known collection En tornoa lapoesia deQuevedo (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, I967). In thisnew book, Crosby offersa critical and annotated edition of i I0 letters written byQuevedo to five correspondents from I639 to I645; that is,from theyears when he was kept inprison in San Marcos de Le6n until he died inVillanueva de los Infantes on 8 September I645. Scholars will now be able to read these letters in reliable critical texts, to study the variants present in their different testimonies, and to contextualize Quevedo...

What did sociolinguistics ever do for language history?

This paper discusses the role of sociolinguistics in the development of historical linguistics in general, and then examines the particular importance that sociolinguistics has for the linguistic history of Spain and Spanish America. Particular attention is given to the relevance of accommodation theory (Giles, 1980), dialect contact theory (Trudgill, 1986), and social network theory (Milroy & Milroy, 1985) to an understanding of the way that Spanish developed in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. A series of koineizations took place in Central and Southern Spain, in the Balkans, and in the Americas, resulting from the processes of social and dialect mixing which the Reconquest of Islamic Spain, the expulsion of the Peninsular Jews, and the settlement of the American colonies entailed. The main conclusion from this approach to the history of Spanish is that linguistic history should not be regarded as a linear process, but one which is discontinuous, full of blind alleys, hiccups, and new starts. Sociolinguistics has taught language historians, including those working with Spanish, that it is not true to say that ‘language changes’; what happens is that speakers change language.

THE INVISIBLE COMMUNITY OF THE LOST COLONY: AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH ON ROANOKE ISLAND

The regional accommodation of earlier and contemporary African American speech remains a major issue in the development of African American English(AAE). This article analyzes a unique regional situation with respect to African American speech—Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where the first settlement of British colonists disappeared in 1587 and where a stable community of African Americans has lived since the Civil War. Quantitative analysis of the speech of four generations of African Americans from Roanoke Island for Outer Banks regional features and core diagnostic structures of AAE shows patterns of dialect alignment over time. The generational patterns reveal changes in alignment in the AAE spoken on Roanoke Island over apparent time. However, significant levels of individual variation in each generation are also attested, challenging generalizations about consistent changes over time. The mixed dialect alignment among Roanoke Island African Americans supports the conclusion that regional speech patterns can serve an important role in the development of different varieties of AAE. Furthermore, the unique configuration of dialect features on Roanoke Island indicates alternative trajectories of change in different regional settings,influenced by such factors as population size and local and extended interethnic contact situations.

Amarna Studies: Collected Writings

Amarna Studies: Collected Writings, by William L. Moran. Edited by John Huehnergard and Shlomo Izre'el. HSS 54. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003. Pp. xxxi + 363. $44.95 (hardcover). ISBN 1575069067. This book is a tribute to the memory of the dominant scholar in Amarna studies during the second half of the twentieth century. The editors seek to present all of the major essays on the grammar and contents of the Amarna correspondence that Moran wrote and published. They begin with his Ph.D. dissertation, A Syntactical Study of the Dialect of Byblos as Reflected in the Amarna Tablets, completed under William F. Albright in 1950. Described by the editors as of the most oft-cited unpublished works in the field of Near Eastern studies, the publication of this work fifty-three years after its completion attests to the groundbreaking nature of Moran's study and its ongoing importance for research. It is the most important single service that the editors perform. They make easily accessible a previously unpublished work that within its 130 pages provides the syntactical distinctives of this important dialect, and thereby presents the major single corpus of linguistic information for antecedents to biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, and the West Semitic languages of the Iron Age. To this may be added the value of the dissertation as a model for the study of the whole collection of West Semitic dialects as represented in the corpus of the Amarna correspondence, the fourteenth-century B.C.E. cuneiform letters exchanged between the princes and administrators of Canaan and the pharaohs of Egypt. In the period before Moran's work, the general perspective on the language of the Amarna correspondence was that it reflected poorly trained scribes or, at best, made use of mixed dialects that confused interpretation. Moran chose to study the largest collection of Amarna letters from one geographic site, that of Byblos. In this manner, he was able to define a dialect from a single city over a relatively short period. Moran identified significant features in the particles, verbal morphology, and clause syntax that demonstrated a meaningful and distinct dialect. He argued that this dialect consistently reflected West Semitic grammar and syntax, distinct from the Old Babylonian language, which appeared in the script and vocabulary that the scribe used. One example of a major breakthrough in Moran's study was his identification of modal congruence in purpose clauses. …

Belarusian as an endangered language: can the mother tongue of an independent state be made to die?

While decline and/or extinction threaten an ever-increasing number of languages, most of these are minority tongues that struggle for survival against dominant languages. The present paper reports the case of Belarusian, a national and co-official language, which the great majority of the population of Belarus considers as its mother tongue, but which has become endangered due to sustained official policies discriminating against it, and the general apathy of the population. The paper places this complex and puzzling situation in the historical context of people long accustomed to changing cultural and linguistic elites, with a succession of rulers that paid little regard to the wishes or needs of the majority of the country’s inhabitants. Recent data are presented showing the rapid decline in the teaching of Belarusian language in schools and other public domains and the use of mixed dialects as the prevailing mode of communication, shifting through a Belarusian-Russian mix (trasianka) to Russian. The effort of a small national linguistic elite to sustain the use of standard Belarusian is examined against the concept of language as a core value of culture and Fishman’s framework for reversing language shift, in order to evaluate the prospects of maintaining Belarusian as an integral part of the linguistic heritage of Europe.

Subject-Verb Concord in a Postinsular Dialect

Most natives of Ocracoke, North Carolina, will attribute their roots to the Eng lish who began coming to the island at the start of the eighteenth century. Some Ocracokers will also admit to Scots or Scots-Irish ancestry, and some, especially those bearing Scottish names, are quite proud of it. Almost 300 years removed from the time of the first Anglo-American settlement on Ocracoke, the distinctions between English and Scots origins would seemingly be erased in all but name. To a great extent this is true, but the island of Ocracoke has only been in a postinsular stage of development for 40 years, previously cut off from the mainland except by small boat (Wolfram, Hazen, and Schilling-Estes 1999). This isolation has allowed one aspect of their grammatical system, their subject-verb concord system, to maintain almost the same patterns that existed in Scots English more than 600 years ago. In this quantitative study of the Ocracoke English subject-verb concord system, I present data and statistics from sociolinguistic interviews conducted with ancestral islanders to support the hypothesis that the subject-verb concord pattern of Scots English, although not the predominant pattern, has structurally persisted with only minor adjustments for more than 600 years. The subject-verb concord pattern was transferred from Scotland to Ulster, Ireland, and remained there for more than a century before it was transferred to the United States. The Scots-Irish who came to the United States carried with them the same pattern as their Scots ancestors but at reduced rates (Montgomery and Robinson 1996). The rates of the Ocracoke pattern are lower, but the pattern persists. I also hypothesize that the Ocracoke subject-verb concord system is the result of dialect mixing. The two contributing dialects are the eighteenth-century British system (the superstrate) and the eighteenth-century Scots-Irish system (the sub AUTHOR’S NOTE:I would like to thank Walt Wolfram for his patience with this article and the formative criticism he gave through his many readings. The research for this article was supported by an NSF grant (SBR-93-19577) directed by Walt Wolfram. I would also like to thank Michael Montgomery and the two JEngL reviewers for a number of insightful comments and criticisms on the current version of this article.

Proto-algic V: Doublets and their Implications

Accumulating evidence suggests that a recalcitrant problem first addressed by Howard Berman - how to explain an apparent correspondence among PA *t, W t, and Y ? - is best solved by reconstructing Proto-Algic doublets. These doublets suggest dialect mixing before the breakup of Proto-Algic society, with frequent elements commonly manifesting the prestige-dialect innovations. The combination of *? with adjacent consonants, once e-dropping is taken into account, explains the glottalized consonants in several words - but others remain and should be transcribed.

Rural dialect speakers in an urban speech community: the role of dialect contact in defining a sociolinguistic concept

This article discusses the applicability of the notion of speech community in urban centres where considerable dialect mixing takes place. The model examined is that of Labov, whose views on the speech community have remained remarkably constant. The reason for the choice of this model is its testability. Four speech community criteria, derived from Labov's work, are examined; these are (1) the nativeness of speech community members; (2) the presence of uniform patterns of linguistic variation; (3) the shared evaluation of linguistic features; and (4) the close relatedness of the varieties on all linguistic levels. The test bed is Bergen, in western Norway, a city with a strongly localised language variety and a linguistically clearly identifiable (and stereotyped) rural migrant minority. A range of approaches to the linguistic data are taken, including a dialect perception test. The data for both the ‘native’and the rural migrant groups show that each forms a separate speech community according to some or all of the criteria. Moreover, it is also shown that the rural migrants’language variation is only interpretable against the background of the group's relationship with the host community. This leads to the presentation of a two‐tiered speech community model. The higher tier subsumes all the groups found in a particular population centre; this tier is not necessarily ‘Labovian’according to any of the criteria listed, but the language variation found within it will be interrelated in some way. The lower tier consists of a number of ‘Labovian’communities, which will include the ‘natives’of an area along with various distinguishable subgroups.

Regional song dialects of the Ortolan Bunting Emberiza hortulana L. in Sweden

During the period 1966—1990 we studied the occurrence of different song dialects of the Ortolan Bunting in Sweden. Song dialects were identified for more than 420 males from about 150 different localities. We found that two regional dialects, one Northern Swedish and one Central Swedish, were prevailing. The characteristics of these two dialects are shown on melograms with one curve for fundamental frequency and one curve for relative sound pressure. The dialects can be identified and the differences clearly heard in the field without technical means. The Northern Swedish dialect is predominant north of the province of Hälsingland and the Central Swedish dialect south of that province. The two dialects meet and “overlap” in Hälsingland. The picture is supplemented by the occurrence of individuals with the foreign dialect, both dialects or a mixed dialect.