Volume 33, Issue 1

This article outlines the origins and development of early American English phonology between the 17th and 18th centuries. Contrary to Trudgill (2008) and Mufwene (2008), who replace the terms ‘koineization’ and ‘koine’ by ‘dialect mixture’, I see the latter as the inevitable result of interdialectal contact between speakers of the same language while I consider koineization to be a long, primarily oral process, the outcome of which is the production of a koine. However, in the case of colonial British North America, I argue that there was not only one American koine, as has frequently been advanced, but several. Furthermore, I posit the existence of a continuum of registers within each koine ranging from the disparitary (highly formal) to the paritary (highly informal / nonstandard). Although the emphasis has always been on the uniformity and standard nature of early American colonial English, I consider this disparitary register to be especially the result of literacy and the formal teaching of standard English. Koineization, on the other hand, is primarily the consequence of the steady, intergenerational oral transmission of paritary registers, that is, the colonial contact vernaculars. If so, the contemporary American dialects are the product of non-standard linguistic continuity since colonial times and beyond. This view contradicts aspects of Dillard's hypotheses (Dillard 1972; 1973; 1975; 1980; 1992). A combination of theoretical and methodological approaches are employed in this paper involving historical phonology, dialectology, creolistics and sociolinguistics.

The article presents the Spatial AidasData Infrastructure for the Lithuanian Language (SDI4LTL), developed by Lithuanian geolinguists on the basis of the Esri ArcGIS platform, which is used for the optimisation of the processes of linguistic spatial data collection, analysis, and sharing. SDI4LTL will ensure systematic monitoring of linguistic and sociolinguistic processes in Lithuania, which are expected to change intensively due to various socioeconomic, demographic, and geopolitical factors. To reveal the potential of SDI4LTL, Geographical Information System (GIS)-based tools and methods are used to analyse the data of perceptual dialectology: 4,022 gymnasium students' responses to an online questionnaire on the use of the dialect and their perception of the dialect user (i.e., more than 12,000 associations of a dialect speaker) were analysed. The geospatial analysis identified the areas of highest and lowest dialecticity in Lithuania, the degree of prestige of the local language variant used by the younger generation, the values of the dialect-speaking associations, and the correlation of the results.

This paper explores evidentials in various dialects of Turkish spoken across Anatolia, scrutinizing their semantic domains, diversity, and evolution paths. The data for analysis consists of fieldwork transcriptions, literary sources, and naturalistic recordings of everyday language. Adopting the definition of evidentiality as the coding of information sources on the proposition, we identified the items as denoting inference and hearsay under indirectivity based on the corpus. Findings show that certain lexical items developed into semi-grammatical evidentials via grammaticalization while the future and postterminal suffixes evolved into grammatical markers by interpreting existing items. The analysis also highlights the distribution of these evidentials, noting that while some remain confined to specific lin-guistic boundaries (isoglosses), others gain broader currency across dialects, pro-pelled by the influences of social media, TV shows, and migratory movements. Consequently, this paper sheds light on the dynamic paths of evidential evolution providing evidence from Turkish dialects, offering insights into the interplay between language change and socio-cultural factors.

This article provides insight into a question which continues to be debated, namely, whether to call the means of communication used by the Latvians of eastern Latvia, or Latgale, a language or a dialect . Different views on this question are discussed as well as the various terms the Latgale’s Latvians use to describe their speech. A classification of Latgalic subdialects according to their phonetic and morphological characteristics is also provided. The question of what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect is discussed in many places around the world. Linguists tend to define language as a standardised code, which has a spoken and written form, while defining a dialect as a spoken language variety lacking a standardised written form. The concepts dialect and language often have a political shade to them. Dialects can also be defined as different varieties of the same language, which have undergone unique development in different geographic locations or have ended up in dissimilar extralinguistic situations (for more on this see Hoekstra 2003; Haugen 1966; Rudzīte 1964:13). In this sense, the linguistic situation in Latvia’s eastern region of Latgale is unique. It has largely been determined by extralinguistic factors. For Latgalian this question is complicated by the historical circumstances of Latgale where a separate written tradition has existed for nearly 300 years, which only began to be standardised at the beginning of the 20th century, while its spoken form has not been similarly standardised even now.

In the absence of a generally accepted etymology, or other acceptable explanation, of the name Fleance, a character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, this paper suggests an origin on the basis of Gaelic dialectology. The solution suggested not only solves a longstanding literary problem but, additionally, uncovers an original underlying irony in pre-Holinshed sources.

Studies on linguistic diversification are mainly based on large databases, in which internal or dialectal variation is often not taken into account. In this work, we intend to focus on one language, Breton, to observe how diversification operates at the level of vernacular varieties. To achieve this, we have applied a dialectometric approach to data taken from the Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne (Le Dû 2001) and analyzed the patterns present in the distribution of linguistic distance across the dialectal network. The results reveal multiple temporal layers that echo the period of the emergence of new Brittonic dialects in the early Middle Ages.