Volume 28, Issue 1

This article is a synthesis of the major elements of a sociolinguistic theory presented by Jean Le Dû and Yves Le Berre in their recent book, Métamorphoses, Trente ans de sociolinguistique à Brest (1984–2014) . Given that both authors come from native Breton-speaking families in Western Brittany and have experienced the language shift to French first-hand, they provide a unique, inside view of the process as well as the reasons Breton speakers opted in favour of French. The sociolinguistic concepts they have imagined provide highly useful tools that highlight the inseparable bond between language and the social, political and economic forces that govern our choices. More specifically, they point out that the “Breton language” is splintered into as many varieties as there are social and geographic entities in western Brittany. For this reason, it should not be viewed as a monolithic entity. Far from “reviving” or “saving” the language, the authors argue that the recent creation of a phonologically, grammatically and lexically unified Breton norm is often so distant from the vernacular language that it has provoked a new form of diglossia which failed to reverse the break in the transmission of the natural language. The book provides tremendous insight into the complex issues which lead people to shift to another language. Language planners and scholars working on similar endangered language situations and who want to understand the mechanisms at work (and thus hopefully have some success in their endeavours) would do well to take heed of their experience.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the semantic patterns according to which rises of land are referred to in the Romance dialects of France. Using the motivational method, I examine the etymology and the semantic field of more than 80 lexical types (found in dialect atlases) and their corresponding word families, going from pre-Latin to current language. If we look at their original meanings, it appears that the words that bear the sense ‘rise of land’ first referred to the shape or the rocky/bushy/earthy nature of hills and mountains, when they did not simply represent these as borders, heaps, projections or even as blows, as bumps. The main result of my research lies in the observation of semantic determinism. Any word that is related at one point of its history to the concept of ‘mountain’ is prone to develop (or to have developed) many – if not all – of the meanings listed above. This points out the highly probable existence of semantic laws that bind together sets of correlated notions. Using my results, I attempt to describe the global organization of meaning and its cyclical nature.

This article is concerned with basic intonational features of Sicilian, a Romance variety spoken in Sicily in Southern Italy. While there has been some research on the intonational features of the regional variety of Italian, Sicilian intonation remains undescribed. The first part of the article provides a historic overview of the dialectal configuration of Sicilian and the Sicilian-Italian diglossia. In the subsequent section we perform an intonational analysis on a Sicilian corpus containing acoustic data of 432 utterances (216 broad focus statements and 216 information-seeking yes-no questions). Once the basic intonational features of Sicilian are described and analyzed we use the informatic tool ProDis (Elvira-García et al. 2018) for a quantitative cluster analysis in order to define geoprosodic groups within Siciliy. Finally, we carry out another cluster analysis with the aim of modelling prosodic distances between Romance varieties spoken in different areas in Italy.

This paper treats linguistic changes over a long time span, covering 100 years in terms of the birth years of the informants and over 250 years since the compilation of a dialect glossary. Data from seven generations about 20 years apart were acquired. We compare the absolute time of linguistic change in lexical items recorded in Hamaogi, a dialect glossary, with the results of a large-scale sociolinguistic survey in Tsuruoka City. For lexical phenomena, the change seems to be continuous over the 250 years. Lexical changes occurred in the feudal ages, after modernization, after WWII and even recently. New dialect is discussed as a symbol of language change in the opposite direction to language standardization. A “glottogram map” or “3D glottogram” presents concrete data of the spatial diffusion of the new dialect form, ganpo. We offer concrete observations of the development of new dialect, which is part of a language change in progress. More than 250 years seem to be necessary from the beginning to the end of a lexical change. This suggests that many dialect forms will remain until the 22nd century..

By combining qualitative (synchronic and diachronic) and quantitative (algorithmic) approaches, this study examines the nature, structure, and dynamics of the linguistic variation attested in Berber of the Rif area (North, Northwest, and Northeast Morocco). Based on a cross-level corpus of data obtained from the Atlas linguistique des varieties berbères du Rif (Lafkioui 2007) and from numerous linguistic, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic fieldwork investigations in the area since 1992, this study shows that these Berber varieties form a language continuum with the following five stable core aggregates, which cut across administrative and political borders: Western Rif Berber, West-Central Rif Berber, Central Rif Berber, East-Central Rif Berber, and Eastern Rif Berber. Furthermore, data mining studies made it possible to objectively identify the principal aggregate discriminators of the Rif Berber continuum, which are dealt with in the study. A special focus in the article is put on the interplay between system-internal and system-external parameters for the selection, diffusion, and transformation of variants in Rif Berber.