Historical Dialectology

Historical Dialectology PDF

Author: Jacek Fisiak

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 3110848139

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In this volume of 29 papers, readers interested in language variation and historical linguistics will find interesting theoretical proposals as well as suggestions concerning ways of approaching previously unsolved empirical problems in the field. The papers deal with various aspects of historical regional dialectology, and some border on the issue of dialectology and linguistic change. Although many deal with English, a number discuss Romance languages in general as well as Norwegian, German, relic languages of the eastern Alpine region, Coptic, and Fox. Some are devoted to more general issues. The language specific contributions also often cover areas of a more general nature. The results indicate new vistas for further productive research in the area of historical dialectology.

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Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780820470184

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Arabic Historical Dialectology

Arabic Historical Dialectology PDF

Author: Clive Holes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-30

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0191005061

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This book, by a group of leading international scholars, outlines the history of the spoken dialects of Arabic from the Arab Conquests of the seventh century up to the present day. It specifically investigates the evolution of Arabic as a spoken language, in contrast to the many existing studies that focus on written Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. The volume begins with a discursive introduction that deals with important issues in the general scholarly context, including the indigenous myth and probable reality of the history of Arabic; Arabic dialect geography and typology; types of internally and externally motivated linguistic change; social indexicalisation; and pidginization and creolization in Arabic-speaking communities. Most chapters then focus on developments in a specific region - Mauritania, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Northern Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, and South Arabia - with one exploring Judaeo-Arabic, a group of varieties historically spread over a wider area. The remaining two chapters in the volume examine individual linguistic features of particular historical interest and controversy, specifically the origin and evolution of the b- verbal prefix, and the adnominal linker -an/-in. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of the linguistic and social history of Arabic as well as to comparative linguists interested in topics such as linguistic typology and language change.

Comparative Historical Dialectology

Comparative Historical Dialectology PDF

Author: Thomas D. Cravens

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2002-09-05

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 9027275394

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This brief monograph explores the historical motivations for two sets of phonological changes in some varieties of Romance: restructured voicing of intervocalic /p t k/, and palatalization of initial /l/ and /n/. These developments have been treated repeatedly over the decades, yet neither has enjoyed a satisfactory solution. This book attempts to demonstrate that both outcomes are ultimately attributable to the loss of early pan-Romance consonant gemination. This study is of interest not only to the language-specific field of historical Romance linguistics, but also to general historical linguistics. The central problems examined here constitute classic cases of questions that cannot be answered by confining analysis solely to the individual languages under investigation. The passage of time, the indirect nature of fragmentary and accidental documentation, and the nature of the changes themselves conspire to deny access to the most essential facts. However, comparison of closely cognate languages now undergoing change supplies a perspective for discerning conditions that may ultimately lead to states achieved in the distant past by the languages under investigation.

Studies in English and European Historical Dialectology

Studies in English and European Historical Dialectology PDF

Author: Marina Dossena

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9783034300247

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Originally presented at the second in the newly-launched series of International Conferences on English Historical Dialectology, held at the University of Bergamo in August 2007, the contributions collected in this volume discuss significant aspects of socio-geo-historical variation in language. In addition to British English, the focus is on Dutch, Scots and varieties of English outside England (in Wales and in the American colonies of the seventeenth century), in a time span ranging from medieval times to the nineteenth century. The aim is to highlight the traits that allow scholars to approach the study of English in a broader European perspective, identifying the patterns that show convergence or divergence, not just in terms of shared linguistic features (morphosyntactic, lexical or pragmatic), but also in terms of methodological approaches. In this respect, great attention is given to the latest developments in corpus and computational linguistics, showing the extent to which such new tools as electronic atlases and tagged corpora may facilitate answers to important research questions. At the same time, perceptual dialectology is awarded new interest on account of its significant role in normative and argumentative language use.

The future of dialects

The future of dialects PDF

Author: Marie-Hélène Côté

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 3946234186

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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.

Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects

Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects PDF

Author: Georgios Giannakis

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-12-18

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 3110531259

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A new collective volume with over twenty important studies on less well-studied dialects of ancient Greek, particularly of the northern regions. The book covers geographically a broad area of the classical Greek world ranging from Central Greece to the overseas Greek colonies of Thrace and the Black Sea. Particular emphasis is placed on the epichoric varieties of areas on the northern fringe of the classical Greek world, including Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia. Recent advances in research are taken into consideration in providing state-of-the art accounts of these understudied dialects, but also of more well-known dialects like Lesbian. In addition, other papers address special intriguing topics in these, but also in other dialects, such as Thessalian, Lesbian and Ionic, or focus on important multi-dialectal corpora such as the oracular tablets from Dodona. Finally, a number of studies examine broader topics like the supraregional Doric koinai or the concept of dialect continuum, or even explore the possibility of an ancient Balkansprachbund, which included Greek too. This new reference work covers a gap in current research and will be indispensable for people interested in Greek dialectology and ancient Greek in general.

The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics

The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics PDF

Author: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-02-15

Total Pages: 708

ISBN-13: 111825726X

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Written by an international team of leading scholars, this groundbreaking reference work explores the nature of language change and diffusion, and paves the way for future research in this rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field. Features 35 newly-written essays from internationally acclaimed experts that reflect the growth and vitality of the burgeoning area of historical sociolinguistics Examines how sociolinguistic theoretical models, methods, findings, and expertise can be used to reconstruct a language's past in order to explain linguistic changes and developments Bridges the gap between the past and the present in linguistic studies Structured thematically into sections exploring: origins and theoretical assumptions; methods for the sociolinguistic study of the history of languages; linguistic and extra-linguistic variables; historical dialectology, language contact and diffusion; and attitudes to language