Volume 20, Issue 1

This article explores folk-perceptions of dialect differences within Tyne and Wear, North East England. It presents a qualitative analysis of responses to an online survey in which participants offered their descriptions of linguistic variation. These richly detailed comments are used in the composition of a nuanced picture of lay perceptions of linguistic variation in the region.

This article presents the linguistic analysis of a humorous program broadcast on the Maribor commercial radio station Radio City. The program is deliberately recorded in the Maribor colloquial language variety and as such reflects the diversification of media language. The aim of our present research is to confirm the stratification of media speech as a manifestation of the need for identification with the speech of the environment, i.e. the intended public, and at the same time point out the need of public speech as a national language for the achievement and reflection of a collective identity. We believe that in the realization of the multilingual strategy in the integrational and globalizational processes in Europe, the preservation of such linguistic and cultural diversity should present a source of strength rather than a weakness.

This paper explores the relations between three domains dealing with linguistic variation: dialectology, typology, and contact linguistics. It aims to contribute to dialectal research that also considers syntactic questions, exploring the syntactic domain of comparative constructions of superiority in Purepecha (a language isolate spoken in Mexico). I demonstrate that the expression of the comparison of superiority can be mapped onto the language by means of ten constructions, which may be divided into four types, showing that language contact can lead to the emergence of new types. This study points out that the consequences of language contact are not homogeneous, but fall into various types of construction aligned with local specificities and geographical distribution. I argue that the integration of dialectology, typology, and contact linguistics results in a dynamic and multidimensional organization, which I characterize as a multi-layered perspective.

Supporters of the existence of the Altaic language family consider it to include Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean and Japonic branches, and believe that all of these originated from the Proto-Altaic. On the basis of archaeological findings, one may expect that traditional Eurasian pulse crops, such as peas ( Pisum sativum ), lentils ( Lens culinaris ), chickpeas ( Cicer arietinum ), faba beans ( Vicia faba ), vetchlings ( Lathyrus spp.) and vetches ( Vicia spp.), were known to the ancestors of the modern Altaic nations. This assumption is confirmed by two Proto- Altaic roots. The first root is * bŭkrV , denoting pea. Its three main direct derivatives preserved the original meaning and transferred it to their modern descendants, namely the Proto-Turkic * burčak to the majority of modern Turkic languages, such as Kazakh with burşaq ; the Proto-Mongolic * buγurčag , giving the modern Mongolian būrcag ; and the Proto-Tungusic * boKa-ri , giving the Manchu boxori . Another root is * zịăbsa , denoting lentil. It gave the Proto-Turkic * jasimuk , the Proto-Mongolic * sisi and the Proto-Tungusic * sibsV . In Turkic and Tungusic, its original meaning was preserved, such as in the Turkmen jasmiq or the Nanai siusi , while in Mongolic it shifted to Sorghum spp., such as in Kalmyk, with šiš.

To manually detect geometric structures in large quantities of dialect maps is a tedious and error-prone (if not impossible) task. Methods from stochastic image analysis and pattern recognition can help to automate, objectify and thus facilitate this process. This paper presents a quantitative method for detection of ellipsoid patterns and their centers in dialect maps using the Randomized Hough Transform . It will outline the necessary parameters, which are fully customizable, thus making the method adaptable to any kind of map. The centers of these structures can be divided into two types, a geographic and a linguistic one. Previous approaches were unable to make such a distinction. It will be argued that the aggregations of such linguistic centers could best be described as attractors of a dynamic system.

Given its early date, breadth of coverage (geographical and linguistic) and the huge amount of data it contains, Alexander Ellis's The Existing Phonology of English Dialects marks an extremely significant episode in British dialectology. Despite this, there has been very little in the way of detailed linguistic analysis of Ellis’s survey, and no attempt has been made to construct a linguistic atlas from the data it contains, although several studies have included a few preliminary maps based on it. Why is this so, and what might we discover if we did investigate this early survey of the dialects of English and Scots in more detail? The aim of this paper is to begin such an investigation and, in particular, to demonstrate that there is considerable mileage (and benefit) in mapping the data in Ellis (1889).

Dialect variation is perceived and encoded in everyday language situations. Studies in the field of folk linguistic enquiry which has come to be known as perceptual dialectology, pioneered in the 1980s by scholars such as Dennis Preston, showed that beliefs nonlinguists have about language variation can play a critical role in language maintenance and change. This paper is an attempt to rethink the issue of accent identification from the perspective of perceptual dialectology by discussing the methodological hurdles to overcome when assessing folk perception of dialects. Illustration comes from two recent studies tackling the perception of geolinguistics variation in Eastern Canada. A comparison of the most common data collection techniques such as mental mapping, dialect identification tests requiring informants to listen to voices of different degrees of dialect markedness and dialect questionnaires raises several issues that call for a diversification of research design including indirect attitude measurements, especially affective priming.