In this book, Mari C. Jones examines how contact with its two typologically different superstrates has led the Norman dialect to diverge linguistically within mainland Normandy and the Channel ...Islands.
West Greenlandic Eskimo, a part of the Eskimo-Aleut language family spoken all across the Arctic, is primarily found among the Native peoples of central west Greenland. In this highly nuanced study ...of West Greenlandic, linguist Anna Berge examines how the speaker's role affects syntactic structures within discourse. Also included are transcripts of conversations with fluent Native speakers, providing a practical context in which to examine these grammatical questions.
This study was the winner of the prestigious Mary R. Haas Award, presented annually by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, the highest award given in the study of Native languages.
In this book, Nerida Jarkey investigates the highly productive strategy of verb serialisation and reveals that its key function in this dynamic Southeast Asian language is to depict a single event in ...an elaborate and vivid way.
The question of how to classify the different varieties of spoken Arabic is a long-standing problem in the fields of Arabic and Semitic linguistics, and it has been addressed by several authors and ...from a number of different perspectives. This collection of articles represents a further contribution to the vast collective effort of attempting to more effectively assess, organize, and understand the varieties of spoken Arabic, applying a classification of Arabic dialects in the broadest possible sense. The authors who contribute to this volume tackle this issue by examining varieties spoken from the Maghreb to the Mashreq and employing various approaches and perspectives, e.g., diatopic and diachronic, syntactical, and typological.
Among the Weyewa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, spokesmen seek to inscribe their traditions and sacred obligations through ritual speaking performances. In a series of lively poetic ...dialogues, performers use a distinctive couplet style to pursue the trail of their ancestors.
This study investigates changes in Tōhoku dialect speakers’ phonology after their immigration to Hawaii, specifically concerning intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers. Tōhoku dialect is ...known for its unique phonology compared to other Japanese dialects and, for this reason, it is often stigmatized. Previous studies of second dialect acquisition have suggested that older speakers tend to retain the phonological features of their original dialects during dialect contact situations. The results from adult Japanese plantation immigrants, as expected, suggested that adult Tōhoku dialect speakers demonstrated limitations in acquiring second dialect phonology in their contact with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers. However, there are different degrees of second dialect acquisition between the intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers among the Tōhoku dialect immigrants who interacted with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers on a daily basis and those who did not; namely, the former eliminated the stereotypical stigmatized Tōhoku dialect feature – the mergers – more than those speakers who did not have such frequent interaction. This suggests that both sociolinguistic factors, e.g., dialect discrimination by peers, as well as relative phonological complexity, influence the rates of second dialect acquisition.
Tropical Tongues Salmon, William Noel; Gómez Menjívar, Jennifer Carolina
2018
eBook
Open access
Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize examines the precarious state of languages in coastal Belize. In the period following the country's independence ...in 1981, Kriol has risen to the level of a national language. While the prestige enjoyed by English and Spanish is indisputable, a range of historical and socio-economic developments has given Kriol an elevated status in the coastal districts at the potential expense of more vulnerable minority languages also spoken there. Using fieldwork, ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys of language attitudes and use, Gómez Menjívar and Salmon show the attenuation of Mopan and Garifuna alongside the stigmatized yet robust Kriol language. Language endangerment studies generally focus on the loss of a minority language to a European language. Tropical Tongues presents a fresh perspective on language shift and loss by examining how large-scale economic restructuring can unsettle relationships among minority languages. An open access edition of Tropical Tongues is available through a partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.
For educators committed to promoting social equity, the question of how to address dialect hegemony is increasingly important. While linguists have long accepted the concept of dialect equality, ...educators have struggled with the issue, sparking a history of controversy and debate underscoring larger social issues of diversity and equity. For decades, educators have struggled with the most fundamental questions of when, how, and towards what purpose to address linguistic diversity. Drawing from the literature, debates, and practices in the U.S., this article examines the evolution of educational responses to the interrelated issues of disrespect for stigmatised dialects, expectations for Standard English in academic and professional settings, and students' developing sense of self and authentic voice. Different pedagogies for addressing linguist diversity are reviewed and compared, including code-switching, literary analysis, and code-meshing. These pedagogies build on each other and are moving in the direction of greater alignment, with important considerations for educators who seek to broaden their understanding of linguistic diversity as part of an overarching commitment to equity and social justice.
This study examines the regional and sociolinguistic variation in the paradigms of personal pronouns, independent and dependent, in Najdi dialects. The regional dialects are Central, Qassim, and ...Northern. The social dialects are sub-varieties of the Central dialect: Hamadan, Hawazin, and Sedentary. The data was collected using the sociolinguistic interview of 25 speakers. It was found that there were more variations in the personal pronoun forms than what have been reported in the literature. When comparing forms with Standard Arabic, the Central dialects are more conservative in the number of changes to the forms. However, Qassim and Northern have retained gender distinction in plural forms while Central dialects did not. This study introduced forms of personal pronouns that were never mentioned in the literature.
It is often supposed that dialect contact and dialect mixture were involved in the development of new colonial varieties of European languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian French, and ...Australian English. However, while no one has denied that dialect contact took place, the role of dialect mixture has been disputed. Among those who do not accept a role for it, some have also considered the role of identity, especially new national identities, to be self-evident. This article argues for the role of dialect mixture and against the role of identity. It presents case studies from pre-16th-century colonial expansions of European languages, an era when any role for national identities would be very hard to argue for. Instead, it suggests that dialect mixture is the inevitable result of dialect contact, and that the mechanism which accounts for this is quasi-automatic accommodation in face-to-face interaction.NOTE: Very many thanks for help with this article go to David Britain, Brian Joseph, Lesley Milroy, James Milroy, and especially Max Wheeler.
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