The future of dialects

Marie-Hélène Côté; Remco Knooihuizen; John Nerbonne; Naomi Nagy; Anne-Sophie Ghyselen; Ares Llop Naya; Simon Pickl; Andrea Mathussek; Simonetta Montemagni; Martijn Wieling; Guylaine Brun-Trigaud; Tanguy Solliec; Jean Le Dû; Jelke Bloem; Tyler Kendall; Valerie Fridland; Philipp Stoeckle; Christoph Wolk; Benedikt Szmrecsanyi; Lea Schäfer; Stephanie Leser; Michael Cysouw; Víctor Lara Bermejo; Ivana Škevin; Keiko Hirano; Christopher Carignan; Jeff Mielke; Robin Dodsworth; Lorenzo Spreafico; Yasuo Kumagai; Chitsuko Fukushima; Takuichiro Onishi; Ichiro Ota; Akira Utsugi; Hitoshi Nikaido

The future of dialects: Selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV

Marie-Hélène Côté Remco Knooihuizen John Nerbonne

Keywords:

dialectology, sociolinguistics, language variation, linguistic methodology, quantitative linguistics

Synopsis

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world.

The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

Chapters

Embracing the future of dialects

John Nerbonne, Remco Knooihuizen, Marie-Hélène Côté

Chapter 1
Heritage languages as new dialects

Naomi Nagy

Chapter 2
From diglossia to diaglossia
A West Flemish case-study

Anne-Sophie Ghyselen

Chapter 3
The future of Catalan dialects' syntax
A case study for a methodological contribution

Ares Llop Naya

Chapter 4
Fuzzy dialect areas and prototype theory
Discovering latent patterns in geolinguistic variation

Simon Pickl

Chapter 5
On the problem of field worker isoglosses

Andrea Mathussek

Chapter 6
A new dialectometric approach applied to the Breton language

Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, Tanguy Solliec, Jean Le Dû

Chapter 8
Tracking linguistic features underlying lexical variation patterns
A case study on Tuscan dialects

Simonetta Montemagni, Martijn Wieling

Chapter 7
Automatically identifying characteristic features of non-native English accents

Jelke Bloem, Martijn Wieling, John Nerbonne

Chapter 9
Mapping the perception of linguistic form
Dialectometry with perceptual data

Tyler Kendall, Valerie Fridland

Chapter 10
Horizontal and vertical variation in Swiss German morphosyntax

Philipp Stoeckle

Chapter 11
Infrequent forms: Noise or not?

Martijn Wieling, Simonetta Montemagni

Chapter 12
Top-down and bottom-up advances in corpus-based dialectometry

Christoph Wolk, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi

Chapter 13
Imitating closely related varieties

Lea Schäfer, Stephanie Leser, Michael Cysouw

Chapter 14
Spontaneous dubbing as a tool for eliciting linguistic data
The case of second person plural inflections in Andalusian Spanish

Víctor Lara Bermejo

Chapter 15
Dialect levelling and changes in semiotic space

Ivana Škevin

Chapter 16
Code-switching in the Anglophone community in Japan

Keiko Hirano

Chapter 17
Tongue trajectories in North American English /æ/ tensing

Christopher Carignan, Jeff Mielke, Robin Dodsworth

Chapter 18
s-retraction in Italian-Tyrolean bilingual speakers
A preliminary investigation using the ultrasound tongue imaging technique

Lorenzo Spreafico

Chapter 19
Developing the Linguistic Atlas of Japan Database and advancing analysis of geographical distributions of dialects

Yasuo Kumagai

Chapter 20
Tracing real and apparent time language changes by comparing linguistic maps

Chitsuko Fukushima

Chapter 21
Timespan comparison of dialectal distributions

Takuichiro Onishi

Chapter 22
Tonal variation in Kagoshima Japanese and factors of language change

Ichiro Ota, Hitoshi Nikaido, Akira Utsugi

Chapter 23

Reviews

Review in Dialectologia by Wladyslaw Cichocki published September 1, 2016
[T]his volume illustrates very effectively that current dialectological inquiry is a dynamic, multidisciplinary enterprise that continues to adapt exciting methodological innovations. The success of the volume in communicating this dynamism is due in no small part to the careful work of the co-editors and of the large group of referees who have ensured the high quality of these papers.

Review on LinguistList by Marco Caria published October 23, 2017
“The Future of Dialects” is an innovative book for all the dialectologists who want to use dialectometry for their research. [...] [T]he papers contained in the volume should be read not only for their intrinsic value, but also as a guide in conducting studies of variationist linguistics, covering the matters of areal, social and historical changes in dialects.

Review in Language Dynamics and Change 7 (2) by Frans Hinskens published January 1, 2017
[...] the overwhelming majority of the contributions do not discuss the future of dialects [...] but rather dialect research, more specifically techniques which may play a role in the future of dialect research. And in that respect the volume has very much of interest to offer. So maybe the title should have rather been The future of dialectological research, or even Future methods of dialectological research

Review in Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik LXXXV (3) by David Clement published January 1, 2018
The editors give a survey of the aspects of dialectology covered in this volume, [which] even includes articles which seem to extend beyond the usual definition of dialects, for example, Naomi Nagy’s [work on] 'Heritage languages' [...], Keiko Hirano’s [on] 'Code-switching' [and Bloem et al. on "characteristic features of accents

Statistics

The future of dialects: Selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV

Biographies

Marie-Hélène Côté

Marie-Hélène Côté, Laval/Québec, specializes in phonology and variation in sound patterns. She has worked on several languages, in particular geographical variation in French, in the context of the project Phonologie du français contemporain

Remco Knooihuizen

Remco Knooihuizen, Groningen, works on the sociolinguistics language change in situations of language and dialect contact. He has worked on contemporary and historical data sets from languages such as English, Dutch, Frisian and Faroese.

John Nerbonne

John Nerbonne, Groningen & Freiburg, applies computational sequence distance measures to dialect pronunciations and also investigates the detection of groups in dialect data and statistics sensitive to both geographic influences and to social conditioning.

Downloads

PDF

Bibliography

Index

Frontmatter

Hardcover

Buy on Amazon UK

Auf Amazon DE kaufen

Buy on Amazon.com

Collaborative reading on Paperhive

Published

December 12, 2016

LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Language Variation

Cite as

Côté, Marie-Hélène, Knooihuizen, Remco & Nerbonne, John (eds.). 2016. The future of dialects: Selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV. (Language Variation 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.78 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.79 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.80 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.81 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.82 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.83 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.84 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.145 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.146 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.147 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.148 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.149 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.150 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.151 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.152 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.153 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.154 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.155 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.156 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.157 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.158 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.159 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.160 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.161 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.162 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.163 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b81.164

Copyright (c) 2016 Marie-Hélène Côté, Remco Knooihuizen, John Nerbonne; Naomi Nagy, Anne-Sophie Ghyselen, Ares Llop Naya, Simon Pickl, Andrea Mathussek, Simonetta Montemagni, Martijn Wieling, Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, Tanguy Solliec, Jean Le Dû, Jelke Bloem, Tyler Kendall, Valerie Fridland, Philipp Stoeckle, Christoph Wolk, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Lea Schäfer, Stephanie Leser, Michael Cysouw, Víctor Lara Bermejo, Ivana Škevin, Keiko Hirano, Christopher Carignan, Jeff Mielke, Robin Dodsworth, Lorenzo Spreafico, Yasuo Kumagai, Chitsuko Fukushima, Takuichiro Onishi, Ichiro Ota, Akira Utsugi, Hitoshi Nikaido

License

978-3-946234-19-7