Volume 23, Issue 1

The article deals with the youngsters in a specific secondary school in Maribor which represents a sort of a conglomerate of different social varieties (dialects) of the Slovenian language. This conglomerate raises particular questions regarding perspectives of Maribor vernacular. The survey is based on 68 questionnaries of secondary school pupils. It was conducted in May 2012 in Maribor. All the pupils of the 1 st , 2 nd and 3 rd year were interviewed. Questionnaires differenciated between pupils according to their gender, their grade in the school subject of the Slovenian language and according to their place of residence during their schooling. The analysis included two variables, i.e. gender and grade; nevertheless, the latter did not prove to be relevant. During Slovenian language classes, male pupils use LSS more consistently than female pupils do; they both frequently use SDS-2, as well as SDS-1, while during other classes there is almost no LSS. The pupils are consistently corrected during Slovenian language classes, which is not the case during other classes (with the exceptions of history and geography). For Abbreaviations, see footnote 2, p. 8. At school, pupils more frequently use slang with classmates and peers than they use LDS. Moreover, the comparison between the use of slang by female and male pupils shows the growing use of slang by the latter. All the pupils whose current address is not in Maribor notice the influence of their school environment (of Maribor city speech), including German loan words (also typical of Maribor city speech). All pupils whose current address is not in Maribor use these words in informal speech, i.e. with classmates, school employees and other citizens of Maribor.

A number of surname-based studies have presented a relationship between medieval regional dialect lexis and the distribution of associated modern-day surnames. However, by carrying out localised research, it appears that the two might not be so closely linked as previously thought, with discrepancies in the distribution of regionally specific names and equivalent occupational descriptions. As a result, there seems to be a need to reconsider the connection between regional lexicons and corresponding name stocks, which may have been less closely related, at a period of non-hereditary by-naming, than current knowledge suggests.

In 1965, I recorded some conversations in the Picard dialect of Aubers, a village located in northern France. I used hearing tests to extract a corpus of 70 words containing diphthongs. The speakers I considered to be representative were born respectively in 1885, 1898 and 1902. Their diphthongs are different from those of traditional Picard speakers and affect both dialect and common French words. A spectrographic analysis allowed me to single out three types of phenomena in the corpus: the vocalization of semi-consonant, the development of an epenthetic vowel before and after a stressed vowel. Various stages of phonetic evolution have thus been stressed, appearing in several points of my Picard Linguistic Atlas maps, insertion of a vocalic element before some accented vowels, lengthening of “epenthetic” vowels, prominence shift from the second to the first accented element of a syllable, as well as the loosening and loss of the second part of a diphthong. These phenomena affect both standard French and Picard words. The vocalic system of the Aubers dialect as spoken in 1900, as revealed by a spectrographic analysis, has no equivalent in the Picardy area.

Missionary linguistics and considerations of Nahuatl as a lingua franca lead us to propose that Nahuatlisms have historically been prominent in American Spanish. Diachronic studies show that after Spanish spelling was standardised, involving occasional losses and extensions of meaning, Aztec words were incorporated into Spanish language vocabularies in the Americas. Because 16 th and 17 th -century data provide inconsistent depictions of the spread of Nahuatlisms in the Caribbean and in South American regions, our research aims to collect data from American Spanish dialectal vocabularies to reconstruct regionalisation and diffusion trends of Nahuatlisms in the centuries that followed. Utilising quantitative and qualitative methodologies, we design a research study that identifies restricted and regional characteristics of more than 84% of Nahuatlisms and of remnants of Nahuatl words in the Caribbean and in South American regions.

One of the two major dialects of Taiwaesen Southern Min [TSM] has two mid back vowels, /o/ and / ɔ/. This distinction is well documented in classic Chinese phonology and agreed upon by most TSM linguists. However, an increasing number of recent evidence-based studies have reported the falling together of these two vowels and, indeed, many non-linguists as well have noticed the loss of the distinction. Since these two vowels are so similar in nearly all phonetic features most studies carried out heretofore which concluded that the merger had in fact taken place were based on auditory criteria. The present study, however, the methodology of which has been designed to take account of the low literacy rate of TSM speakers, as well as the frequent contact which takes place between TSM dialects, investigates the status of these two vowels making use of both acoustic and statistical data. Results indicate that in TSM /o/ and / ɔ / have merged in the case of younger speakers. Both internal and external factors are proposed which have affected the merger, and the further suggestion is put forward that, though the instance of sound shift reversal in Taiwan is on record, this is not likely to occur in the case of TSM /o/ and / ɔ /.

The article focuses on some intonational features of three Romance languages spoken in northern Sardinia (Algherese Catalan, Logudorese Sardinian, and the Sardinian regional variety of Italian). The first part of the article shows, by means of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, that the above-mentioned languages share some intonational features that are not present in the dialects of Catalan and Italian spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula, respectively. In the following sections the article puts forward a diachronic explanation for this intonational convergence, basing on the role of Sardinian as a substrate language for both Algherese Catalan and the regional Italian of Sardinia. The final part of the article proposes a generalization of the findings of the case-study and puts forward a diachronic model of prosodic transfer that includes the mechanisms of direct transfer, fusion, and accommodation.