Forthcoming: Contemporary research in minority and diaspora languages of Europe

Matt Coler   Andrew Nevins  

Synopsis

This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Matt Coler, Andrew Nevins
  • Documenting Italo-Romance minority languages in the Americas
    Problems and tentative solutions
    Luigi Andriani, Jan Casalicchio, Franesco Ciconte, Roberta D'Alessandro, Alberto Frasson, Brechje van Osch, Luana Sorgini, Silvia Terenghi
  • Spanish-Nahuatl bilingualism in Indigenous communities in Mexico
    Variation in language proficiency and use
    Justyna Olko, Szymon Gruda, Joanna Maryniak, Elwira Dexter-Sobkowiak, Humberto Iglesias Tepec, Eduardo de la Cruz, Beatriz Cuahutle Bautista
    Chapter 3
  • Trilingual modality
    Towards an analysis of mood and modality in Aymara, Quechua and Castellano Andino as a joint systematic concept
    Philipp Dankel, Mario Soto Rodriguez, Matt Coler, Edwin Banegas Flores
  • Language use and variation within the Greek linguistic minorities of Southern Italy
    Manuela Pellegrino, Maria Olimpia Squillaci
  • Innovations in the Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish pronominal system
    Zoë Belk, Lily Kahn, Kriszta Eszter Szendrői, Sonya Yampolskaya
  • Validity of crowd-sourced minority language data
    Observing variation patterns in the Stimmen recordings
    Nanna Hilton
  • Complexity of endangered minority languages
    The sound system of Wymysorys
    Alexander Andrason
  • Language variation and language ideologies as intra- and extralinguistic constructive elements of the Wymysiöryś ethnolinguistic identity
    Tomasz Wicherkiewicz
  • Evaluating linguistic variation in light of sparse data in the case of Sorbian
    Eduard Werner
  • Modeling accommodation and dialect convergence formally
    Loss of the infinitival prefix tau ‘to’ in Brazilian Pomeranian
    Gertjan Postma
    Chapter 11
  • The socio-linguistic history of Zeelandic-Flemish in Brazil
    Using data of a dying language for historical reconstruction
    Elizana Schaffel-Bremenkamp, Kathy Rys

Biographies

Matt Coler

Matt Coler is an Associate Professor of Language & Technology at the University of Groningen (Campus Fryslân) where he is the Director of the MSc Voice Technology program. Matt has performed extensive fieldwork in the Peruvian altiplano working on Aymara, Castellano Andino, and other Andean languages. He currently supervises several PhDs working on issues relating to under-resourced languages in Europe and beyond. Matt is the author of A grammar of Muylaq’ Aymara (2014, Brill), a chapter on Aymara Inflection in the Handbook of Inflection (2015, OUP), and, most recently, two chapters on Aymara and Jaqaru, respectively, for an upcoming volume on the languages of the Central Andes (forthcoming, OUP).

Andrew Nevins

Andrew Nevins is Professor of Language Sciences at University College London. He has conducted research on the contribution of minoritized languages to linguistic theory, with work ranging from from Zazaki Kurdish to Maxakalí Sign Language, across domains such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and is involved with the training of new generations of researchers in methods of experimentally-based data collection, including through a currently Leverhulme-funded research project on Southern Bantu. He is the author of Locality in Vowel Harmony (2010, MIT Press) and co-author of Morphotactics: The Structure of Spellout and Basque Auxiliaries (2012, Springer).

book cover

Published

September 23, 2021
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Contact and Multilingualism
Copyright (c) 2021 Andrew Nevins, Matt Coler

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Cite as
Coler, Matt (ed.)& Nevins, Andrew (ed.) . 2021 . Contemporary research in minority and diaspora languages of Europe . (Contact and Multilingualism) . Berlin : Language Science Press.