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
  • Heritage languages as new dialects
    Naomi Nagy
  • From diglossia to diaglossia
    A West Flemish case-study
    Anne-Sophie Ghyselen
  • The future of Catalan dialects' syntax
    A case study for a methodological contribution
    Ares Llop Naya
  • Fuzzy dialect areas and prototype theory
    Discovering latent patterns in geolinguistic variation
    Simon Pickl
  • On the problem of field worker isoglosses
    Andrea Mathussek
  • A new dialectometric approach applied to the Breton language
    Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, Tanguy Solliec, Jean Le Dû
  • Tracking linguistic features underlying lexical variation patterns
    A case study on Tuscan dialects
    Simonetta Montemagni, Martijn Wieling
  • Automatically identifying characteristic features of non-native English accents
    Jelke Bloem, Martijn Wieling, John Nerbonne
  • Mapping the perception of linguistic form
    Dialectometry with perceptual data
    Tyler Kendall, Valerie Fridland
  • Horizontal and vertical variation in Swiss German morphosyntax
    Philipp Stoeckle
  • Infrequent forms: Noise or not?
    Martijn Wieling, Simonetta Montemagni
  • Top-down and bottom-up advances in corpus-based dialectometry
    Christoph Wolk, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
  • Imitating closely related varieties
    Lea Schäfer, Stephanie Leser, Michael Cysouw
  • Spontaneous dubbing as a tool for eliciting linguistic data
    The case of second person plural inflections in Andalusian Spanish
    Víctor Lara Bermejo
  • Dialect levelling and changes in semiotic space
    Ivana Škevin
  • Code-switching in the Anglophone community in Japan
    Keiko Hirano
  • Tongue trajectories in North American English /æ/ tensing
    Christopher Carignan, Jeff Mielke, Robin Dodsworth
  • s-retraction in Italian-Tyrolean bilingual speakers
    A preliminary investigation using the ultrasound tongue imaging technique
    Lorenzo Spreafico
  • Developing the Linguistic Atlas of Japan Database and advancing analysis of geographical distributions of dialects
    Yasuo Kumagai
  • Tracing real and apparent time language changes by comparing linguistic maps
    Chitsuko Fukushima
  • Timespan comparison of dialectal distributions
    Takuichiro Onishi
  • Tonal variation in Kagoshima Japanese and factors of language change
    Ichiro Ota, Hitoshi Nikaido, Akira Utsugi

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

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.

Published

December 12, 2016
LaTeX source on GitHub
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

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Index

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Frontmatter

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