Volume 21, Issue 1

This paper examines the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of the fricative realization of /t/ in the dialect of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, in Nova Scotia, Canada. Two experiments were conducted to determine the similarities and differences betwee fricative /t/, or “slit-t”, and other voiceless coronal sounds. Previous research on this sound in some communities has found it to be more similar to /s/ than /ʃ/, while in other communities it has been found to be more similar to /ʃ/ than /s/. The first experiment conducted was a qualitative analysis of static palatograms of one Cape Breton speaker’s production of six different coronal sounds. Results from this experiment suggest “slit-t” to be articulatorily distinct from both /s/ and /ʃ/. The second experiment conducted was a statistical analysis of several acoustic measurements of six Cape Breton speakers’ production of six different coronal sounds. Results from this experiment suggest “slit-t” is acousticcally distinct from both /s/ and /ʃ/, or rather on a cline between these two sounds.

In this article, I present phonological and morphological features of three Aromanian subdialects in the Republic of Macedonia. The study is based on fieldwork recordings of Aromanian dialect speakers from urban and rural communities: Struga, Cruşova, and Beala di Supra. In describing these features, this article raises the general descriptive question of how far Aromanian is a Romance language preserved in a Balkan environment.

The present article deals with the results of a field work within perceptual Dialectology in Costa Rica, with the aim of finding out to which extent the informants conceive the dialectological constellation of their country, and which dialectological, sociolinguistic or stylistic factors are responsible for this constellation. Furthermore, it will be analysed what concept of dialect as a part of a language (in this case, Spanish) the informants have; what kind of role the capital San José has had in the identification of the regional speech forms and what kind of influence this city has had in the constitution of an idea of normed Spanish

The strategies that have been developed for the incorporation of loanwords are mainly the same in Standard Turkish and its dialects. However, the adaptation process of these words has certain differences in Cypriot Turkish. The paper primarily focuses on the types and examples of phonetic adaptation of loanwords that show differences in this dialect and the standard language.

Welsh English and the Celtic Englishes in general are known for their preference for rising tones in declaratives. However, the statement that Welsh English has a preference for rising tones is insufficient to explain its main prosodic characteristics. The present investigation focuses on Ceredigion, a county in West Wales with a relatively high percentage of native Welsh speakers. Several excerpts have been collected from the interviews taken for the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (1977‒1979) and processed through Praat with the aim of identifying and analysing prosodic features of Ceredigion English. For the analysis, three fundamental elements will be considered: alignment of the stressed syllable, characteristics of the upward movement, and pitch peak. Through this detailed prosodic characterization of Ceredigion English, it will be shown that prosody is a distinguishing feature of Welsh English accent.

This article discusses the structure and state of the German language spoken today by the descendants of German immigrants to Russia in the 18th century. The (socio-) linguistic argumentation permits the following conclusion: The language based on German (Russlanddeutsch) may be a variety of the German language (russisches Deutsch) or a variety of the Russian language (deutsches Russisch), but it is the speakers in Russia who have the last word on this question. How they regard the language depends on their sense of identity, whether they feel Russian or German. Thus, future research into the linguistic situation of this group will best be served by an interdisciplinary approach and the a co-operation of linguists, psychologists, and historians.

Linguistics and Dialectology are two sides of the same coin: the former deals with the rigorous analysis of natural languages and the latter with concrete varieties of language in its cohesive and identifying social roles. Linguistics today is moving towards an integration of its various dimensions: phonology and phonetics are now so intricately tied that the unimodular phonetological approach is gaining ground rapidly; synchrony and diachrony are moving towards a reintegration, thus moving away from their parallel paths; and, finally, the so-called ‘non-structural’ elements of language are gradually being acknowledged as an integral part of the analysis that was traditionally reserved for the ‘structural’ ones. As linguistics moves, so does dialectology, since the latter has always been the laboratory of linguists, even if they have not formally accepted it as such. A new approach to dialectal matters must therefore move away from mere description and search for a more comprehensive analysis that confirms the essential inviolability of the binomial language-society. The traditional view of Hispanic linguistics and dialectology has been a victim of the dichotomic approach: conservative versus radical, Iberian versus American, high lands versus low lands, North-Central Castilian versus ‘Atlantic’ Spanish among others. This paper aims at taking an integrated approach to linguistics and dialectology, with its case study addressing the so called ‘Atlantic’ Spanish and the phonetological changes it is going through in search of a more satisfying explanation of short-term and long-term variability.

In the Fertile Crescent, grain legumes such as peas, lentils and faba beans were domesticated at about the same time as wheat and barley. In most branches of the Uralic language family, the words for pea have common roots, with the exception of the borrowings in the Finnic and Para-Finnic groups from Baltic and in Hungarian from Turkic. These results suggest that the pea may be an ancient crop among the Uralic peoples, with those who migrated losing the original Uralic word for it and borrowing it later from the non-Uralic peoples. Alternatively, the pea may have arrived after the Hungarian and Finnic peoples had migrated from the Uralic homeland. Moreover, words for lentil are clearly borrowed from neighbouring cultures, while words for faba bean are either derived from those for pea or borrowed from other cultures, demonstrating they were not among the first crops to be used by any of the Uralic peoples.