Dialect Research Articles

The Language Registers of Karisal Region as Depicted in R.S. Jacob’s ‘Vaathiyaar’ Novel

The Purpose of this study is to identify the Language registers of Karisal (Black Soil) region based on the novel written by R.S. Jacob. Descriptive and analytical methods are used to bring out peculiar usage of language expressions associated with the people, culture, and agro village life of this region as documented in this novel. This paper will help us understand the uniqueness of Karisal dialect and its archaic forms. It also reveals the importance of fictions in regional dialects.

Relative Contributions of Social, Contextual, and Lexical Factors in Speech Processing.

This exploratory study examined the simultaneous interactions and relative contributions of bottom-up social information (regional dialect, speaking style), top-down contextual information (semantic predictability), and the internal dynamics of the lexicon (neighborhood density, lexical frequency) to lexical access and word recognition. Cross-modal matching and intelligibility in noise tasks were conducted with a community sample of adults at a local science museum. Each task featured one condition in which keywords were presented in isolation and one condition in which they were presented within a multiword phrase. Lexical processing was slower and more accurate when keywords were presented in their phrasal context, and was both faster and more accurate for auditory stimuli produced in the local Midland dialect. In both tasks, interactions were observed among stimulus dialect, speaking style, semantic predictability, phonological neighborhood density, and lexical frequency. These interactions revealed that bottom-up social information and top-down contextual information contribute more to speech processing than the internal dynamics of the lexicon. Moreover, the relatively stronger bottom-up social effects were observed in both the isolated word and multiword phrase conditions, suggesting that social variation is central to speech processing, even in non-interactive laboratory tasks. At the same time, the specific interactions observed differed between the two experiments, reflecting task-specific demands related to processing time constraints and signal degradation.

Grouping Spanish-speaking countries by dialect: A corpus dialectometric approach

The present study attempts to cluster Spanish-speaking countries into dialect regions by computational means. The frequencies of 592 lexical and grammatical features for 21 countries were obtained the from Corpus del Español-Web Dialects. Principal components analysis and hierarchical clustering analyses used the resulting data to group countries into dialect regions. A number of algorithms were used to rank features in terms of how much they aided in dialect classification, which allowed grouping based on a smaller set of features. Six dialect zones were identified: European (Spain), Southern Cone (Uruguay, Argentina), Southern Central America (Costa Rica, Panama), Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic), Northern Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras), Andean South America (Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Peru). However, different subsets of features, and different clustering algorithms produced groupings that varied somewhat. The bulk of the variation dealt with where Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and the US fit into the dialect regions. The difficulties of the computational approach to dialect classification are discussed. Allowing computer algorithms to determine dialect boundaries appears objective. However, interpreting a principal components analysis entails a degree of subjectivity. Furthermore, the plethora of different classification algorithms allows the researcher to choose the one that produces the desired outcome.

Duterte's “War on Drugs” Rhetoric

Duterte's “War on Drugs” Rhetoric

MULTILINGUALISM AND ITS EFFECTS ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS OF WESTERN ODISHA

In Odisha, English acts as a second or third language. Here English teaching is that much not beneficial for students in resolving regional accents,incorrect pronunciation, grammatical errors, speaking, etc. Western Odisha’s language is called Sambalpuri or Kosli. This area of Odisha is a multilingual area. Here people speak many mother tongues, like Sambalpuri, Odia, Hindi, Chhattisgarhi, etc. Students speak a different language at home and a different language at school. Most of the students are Sambalpuri speakers. At school, they learned English as a second/third language.This paper finds out the effect of multilingualism on English language learning in some selected high schools in Western Odisha. This paper is based on primary data collection. The data collection tool included a questionnaire, interview, and participant observation. Four high schools were selected for sample size. The participants of the study were 20 students (from each high school 5 students) 2 high schools from Nuapada and 2 from Kalahandi district of Odisha. This study was conducted to find out whether being multilingual really effects Sambalpuri speaking students’ English language learning. If multilingualism has any effect on English language learning, then what are the influences, and how the student will overcome from this consequence.

The Impact of Diglossia on the Language Development and Educational Achievement of Saudi Students in Primary Schools

Arabic is a diglossic language. Two variants of Arabic are widely used. H (the High variant) is Classical Arabic, now referred to as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The L (Low) variant is the colloquial dialects (DA), which are mostly spoken. The H variant is used in education, press, and other formal correspondence. The Low version is associated with informal contexts. Interestingly, the two versions are completely different from each other in terms of vocabulary, syntax, and even structure. Given the social and cognitive aspects of the language, children go to primary schools with almost no knowledge of MSA. Despite the prolific literature on the linguistic features of Arabic diglossia, very little has been done on the impact of diglossia on academic and educational achievement. In light of this argument, this paper seeks to investigate the teachers' perceived impact of diglossia on the language development and educational achievement of primary school students from a linguistic and anthropological perspective. Interviews were conducted with selected primary school teachers from the Riyadh region of Saudi Arabia to elicit their opinions and perception on how diglossia should be tackled when students arrive in a classroom. The data collection tool was an interview comprising close and open-ended questions. The interview questions explored three areas: teachers’ perception of diglossia; perceived challenges that students faced with teaching and study material; and how teachers addressed these challenges. Findings indicate that diglossia poses serious sociolinguistic challenges to most young learners in Saudi schools. Both teachers and learners face difficulties in using only MSA in classrooms as the formal and official medium of instruction in Saudi schools. It is recommended thus the colloquial and vernacular dialects (L varieties) of Arabic should be integrated into the instruction mode to reflect the linguistic reality of the Arab countries.

Space-time modeling of intensive binary time series eye-tracking data using a generalized additive logistic regression model.

Eye-tracking has emerged as a popular method for empirical studies of cognitive processes across multiple substantive research areas. Eye-tracking systems are capable of automatically generating fixation-location data over time at high temporal resolution. Often, the researcher obtains a binary measure of whether or not, at each point in time, the participant is fixating on a critical interest area or object in the real world or in a computerized display. Eye-tracking data are characterized by spatial-temporal correlations and random variability, driven by multiple fine-grained observations taken over small time intervals (e.g., every 10 ms). Ignoring these data complexities leads to biased inferences for the covariates of interest such as experimental condition effects. This article presents a novel application of a generalized additive logistic regression model for intensive binary time series eye-tracking data from a between- and within-subjects experimental design. The model is formulated as a generalized additive mixed model (GAMM) and implemented in the mgcv R package. The generalized additive logistic regression model was illustrated using an empirical data set aimed at understanding the accommodation of regional accents in spoken language processing. Accuracy of parameter estimates and the importance of modeling the spatial-temporal correlations in detecting the experimental condition effects were shown in conditions similar to our empirical data set via a simulation study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

How sociolinguistic factors shape children's subjective impressions of teacher quality.

When university students are asked to rate their instructors, their evaluations are often influenced by the demographic characteristics of the instructor-such as the instructor's race, gender, or language background. These influences can manifest in unfair systematic biases against particular groups of teachers and hamper movements to promote diversity in higher education. When and how do these biases develop? Here, we begin to address these questions by examining children's sociolinguistic biases against teachers who speak with different accents. To do this, we presented 5-year-old Canadian English-speaking children with pairs of adult talkers. Children were asked to select "who they'd like to be their teacher" then they rated "how good of a teacher" they thought each talker would be on a 5-point scale. In each trial, one talker spoke in the locally dominant variety of Canadian English, and the other spoke in a different accent. Children strongly preferred Canadian-accented teachers over teachers who spoke with non-native (i.e., French or Dutch) accents, but also demonstrated a preference for Canadian teachers over teachers who spoke with non-local regional accents (i.e., Australian or British). In line with the binary choice data, children rated the Canadian talkers more favourably. The relationship between the gender of the teacher and the gender of the child also impacted ratings. This work demonstrates that even at the onset of formal education, children may already exhibit signs of accent-based biases. We discuss these findings in relation to the growing literature on implicit bias in higher education.

Le scelte linguistiche nel rap italiano di oggi: il caso di Ghali

Ghali’s trap music presents a hybridized experience where languages and cultures are combined to form unique compositions. Born in Milan from Tunisian parents, Ghali’s work merges official languages (Italian, French, English and Spanish) but also regional dialects(Milanese, Neapolitan and Tunisian) as well as contemporary vocabulary connected with digital popular culture (video games, music industry, social media). This article studies to what extent these various languages intermingle in the artist’s music and the reasoning behind the switches from one to another. The findings confirm that the combination of standard languages and the vernacular characterized in Ghali’s songs is integrated within the traditional codes of rap music, therefore serving as a space to express the plight of minorities. Furthermore, through his lyrics that portray various cultures, from his local Baggio to Milan and Italy as well as Tunisia, Ghaliaffirms his transcultural identity by exceeding national categorizations.

Variation in stem-final consonant clusters in Korean nominal inflection

This study investigates how Korean stem-final consonant clusters /ps/, /ks/, /lp/, /lk/, /ls/, and /lm/ exhibit variation, when a vowel-initial inflectional suffix is attached to noun stems. It is well-established that the Korean stem-final consonant clusters are either fully faithfully preserved (i.e. conservative), or simplified by deleting one of the two consonantal elements C1 and C2 (i.e. innovative). However, there has been no study about dominant patterns across clusters: which consonant cluster is more prone to preservation or simplification when inflected. When it comes to simplification, it has also been unclear which of C1 or C2 undergoes deletion, and why. Results of a production experiment show that there is a stark dichotomy between the clusters that share the same [±sonorant] feature (/ps/, /ks/, /lm/) and those that do not (/lp/, /lk/, /ls/): the former preferred conservative forms, whereas the latter favored innovative forms. Innovative forms in particular are accounted for in relation to consonant cluster simplification in isolation forms of nouns, following Kenstowicz’s (1996) Base-Identity effect. While the nature of the consonant cluster turned out to be a significant factor for variation in inflected forms, other factors (inflectional suffixes, speakers’ regional dialects, and gender) did not. This study is significant, in that it sheds light on a blind spot in the discussions of variation in stem-final consonant clusters in Korean and provides a comprehensive analysis that connects consonant cluster simplification in isolation forms with conservative/innovative forms in inflected forms. 

Sentence Prosody and Register Variation in Arabic

Diglossia in Arabic differs from bilingualism in functional differentiation and mode of acquisition of the two registers used by all speakers raised in an Arabic-speaking environment. The ‘low’ (L) regional spoken dialect is acquired naturally and used in daily life, but the ‘high’ (H) variety, Modern Standard Arabic, is learned and used in formal settings. Register variation between the two ends of this H–L continuum is ubiquitous in everyday interaction, such that authors have proposed distinct intermediate register levels, despite evidence of mixing of H and L features, within and between utterances, at all linguistic levels. The role of sentence prosody in register variation in Arabic is uninvestigated to date. The present study examines three variables (F0 variation, intonational choices and post-lexical utterance-final laryngealization) in 400+ turns at talk produced by one speaker of San’ani Arabic in a 20 min sociolinguistic interview, coded for register on three levels: formal (fusħa), ‘middle’ (wusṭaː) and dialect (ʕaːmijja). The results reveal a picture of key shared features across all register levels, alongside distinct properties which serve to differentiate the registers at each end of the continuum, at least some of which appear to be under the speaker’s control.

Latin American Studies in Russia: Themes, Achievements and Problems (To the 60th anniversary of the ILA RAS)

This article analyzes the range of research approaches of domestic scientists to the study of socio-economic and political processes developing in Latin America and the Caribbean. The text fixes the change in theoretical paradigms that took place in the post-Soviet period, when new methods of scientific research for domestic social scientists came to replace the class Marxist-Leninist approach that did not stand the test of time: Positivism, structuralism, comparative studies, constructivism, systemic, invent and functional analysis. The peculiarity of the article is the chosen angle – priority attention to country studies, forming, according to the authors, the supporting structure of the entire building of modern Russian Latin American studies - social science, in a complex studying the problems of Latin America, comprehending the past and present of this large region. The theoretical, methodological and subject framework of the article is determined on the basis of priority selection by the authors of the most relevant, in their opinion, problems of modern Latin American studies. In other words, the article is not aimed at offering an exhaustive picture of domestic Latin American studies at the present stage, does not pretend to the indisputability of the opinions expressed and the truth in the last instance. The purpose of the authors is to broadcast their own, deeply subjective view of the subject of research, allowing to add new ideas and ac cents to its study, to focus on those problems of this. scientific directions, which until now have not received a sufficiently deep development. The study was based on the scientific publications of the staff of the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2021.

A comprehensive Turkish accent/dialect recognition system using acoustic perceptual formants

Accent or dialect is one of the hot topics of emerging technology in speech processing. In an audio recording, extracting accent clues from a speech signal can help investigators to have an idea about where speaker is from. It is mostly used for detecting regional origin/ethnicity of speakers in real-time surveillance systems as well as demographic researches about changes in human sounds by geography. In this work, Turkish language accent analysis was performed using formant frequencies (F1, F2 and F3) of vowels. We divided our work into two approaches which are statistical and classification. In both of them, evaluations were done by splitting Turkey’s map in to 2 and 3 dialect regions virtually. Totally 112 monolingual university students (72 males, 40 females) have uttered 103 meaningful Turkish syllables. Because formant frequencies can vary depending on genders, males and females were evaluated separately in both statistical and classification analysis. The result surprisingly showed that especially the isolated vowel ‘e’ is able to classify a male speaker which was pre-known to be from Mediterranean or Eastern Anatolia regions with an accuracy of 90% using KNN classifier.

Phonetic variation and its spatial distribution in urban Austria: /l/-vocalization as a sociolinguistic marker?

AbstractThis paper investigates German /l/-vocalization in the dialect region of South/Central Bavarian. In Austria, /l/-vocalization is said to be restricted to Central Bavarian, constituting the most salient dialect feature. However, its existence within the transition zone of South/Central Bavarian, including the urban and surrounding area of Graz, is often assumed. By analyzing natural speech data of different age groups from Greater Graz in a formal and an informal communication situation, we see that /l/-vocalization is already a well-established phenomenon, whereby the older age-group vocalizes considerably more often than the younger one. This suggests that /l/-vocalization serves as a sociolinguistic rather than a dialect marker indicating regional identity.

Linguistic traits as heritable units? Spatial Bayesian clustering reveals Swiss German dialect regions

AbstractIn the early 2000s, the SADS, an extensive linguistic atlas project, surveyed more than three thousand individuals across German-speaking Switzerland on over two hundred linguistic variants, capturing the morphosyntactic variation in Swiss German. In this paper, we applied TESS, a Bayesian clustering method from evolutionary biology to the SADS to infer population structure, building on parallels between biology and linguistics that have recently been illustrated theoretically and explored experimentally. We tested three clustering models with different spatial assumptions: a nonspatial model, a spatial trend model with a spatial gradient, and a spatial full-trend model with both a spatial gradient and spatial-autocorrelation. Results reveal five distinct morphosyntactic populations, four of which correspond to traditional Swiss German dialect regions and one of which corresponds to a base population. Moreover, the spatial trend model outperforms the nonspatial model, suggesting a gradual transition of morphosyntax and supporting the idea of a Swiss Germandialect continuum.

Socio-ethnic expectations of race in speech perception

The social construct of race, as a group of individuals to be visually or auditorily discriminated between, or from, or against is a human construction much like speech itself. This talk will share the analyses of a speech production and a speech perception experiment designed to evaluate how familiar and unfamiliar listeners parse the auditory spectral information contained in words to assign the speech token to a racial category. Familiar North Carolina listeners (n = 28) and unfamiliar Indiana listeners (n = 44) heard ten hVd words produced by three male and three female, Black and White talkers from two geographically distant dialect regions in east and west North Carolina (n = 24). Listener groups assigned most speech tokens to the correct racial category with greater than chance accuracy. Statistically significant differences in listener use of socio-ethnically aligned vowels as produced in the words hid, heyd, head, mid and low front vowels the back vowel as produced in whod and the diphthongs as produced in hoyd, hide and howed were noted. Results will be discussed in the context of socio-ethic talker group membership and patterns of both listener accuracy and listener error in assigning talkers to racial groups.

Second Dialect Acquisition “in Real Time”: Two Longitudinal Case Studies from YouTube

Longitudinal tracking of second dialect acquisition normally requires carefully planned data collection and years of patience. However, the rise of self-recorded public speech data on internet archives such as YouTube affords researchers with a novel way of tracking language change over time. This article presents two case studies of YouTube vloggers who have recorded their voices over the course of a decade (or longer) and have also relocated from different dialect regions of the United States to the West Coast. It reveals that, in addition to typical age-graded change such as a decrease in fundamental frequency over time, some vocalic aspects of their original dialects (Hawai‘i English and Inland North English) shifted to become more in line with Western American English, while others did not. The disparity between the vowels that changed and those that did not for each speaker are discussed through the lenses of social salience, gender and race, and the audience design of YouTube vlogs.

Language Variations on TikTok Social Media

Language variation is the non-uniformity in one language. This study discusses variations in Indonesian on TikTok social media. TikTok is now a popular social media for all ages, especially youth. The purpose of this study is to describe language variations on TikTok social media. This study was studied using a sociolinguistic approach, the theory of linguistic variation. This research is descriptive qualitative, the data analyzed is in the form of speech in which there are variations in Indonesian regional dialects. The data source in this study was obtained from the social media TikTok. The results of this study indicate that there are language variations in terms of speakers in the form of Jakarta dialect, Betawi dialect, and Surabaya dialect; while the language variation in terms of formality uses a casual variety.Â

Perception of English Stress of Synthesized Words by Three Chinese Dialect Groups.

This study investigated the possible prosodic transfer influences native regional dialects may have in the perception of English lexical stress by speakers of three Chinese dialects [Beijing (BJ), Changsha (CS), and Guangzhou (GZ)] compared to 20 American English (AE) speakers. F0, duration, intensity, and vowel reduction were manipulated in nonce disyllabic words. Participants performed four-word sequence recall tasks to identify lexical stress location. They performed better with natural sounds than with manipulated words. This study focused on the performance differences in manipulating words. The results showed that all four-group members performed similarly processing F0 condition nonce words. BJ and CS participants were more accurate than GZ participants in duration and vowel reduction cues. Reaction time (RT) suggested that the processing time of acoustic cues differed significantly across language groups. The findings indicate that first language (L1) dialect effect is robust in second language (L2) stress perception tasks.

Talker and accent familiarity yield advantages for voice identity perception: A voice sorting study

In the current study, we examine and compare the effects of talker and accent familiarity in the context of a voice identity sorting task, using naturally varying voice recording samples from the TV show Derry Girls. Voice samples were thus all spoken with a regional accent of UK/Irish English (from [London]derry). We tested four listener groups: Listeners were either familiar or unfamiliar with the TV show (and therefore the talker identities) and were either highly familiar or relatively less familiar with Northern Irish accents. Both talker and accent familiarity significantly improved accuracy of voice identity sorting performance. However, the talker familiarity benefits were overall larger, and more consistent. We discuss the results in light of a possible hierarchy of familiarity effects and argue that our findings may provide additional evidence for interactions of speech and identity processing pathways in voice identity perception. We also identify some key limitations in the current work and provide suggestions for future studies to address these.