Volume 65, Issue 1 -

The aim of this paper is to explore the relations between four domains dealing with linguistic variation: dialectology, typology, diachrony, and contact linguistics. I will contribute to dialectal research that includes syntactic questions by exploring the typological and geographical variations in the position of the indefinite article in the noun phrase in Purepecha. I show that a syntactic focus in dialectal research reveals the dynamic of Purepecha, displaying diachronic change and synchronic variation and revealing social and historical particularities. This dialectal perspective is dynamic and multi-dimensional, with a multi-layered organization.

Spoken Arabic and Berber show great variety in their pronunciation, as evidenced by dialectology studies. Some researchers have attempted to illustrate this variety using maps of the data collected. In this article, my goal will be to commend their work, but also to highlight the difficulties which arise when a purely geographic perspective is adopted. The choice of discriminant in relation to the possible variation mechanisms will also be broached, as, for the languages under study, spatial dissemination only partially explains the linguistic differences and similarities.

In this paper I discuss various issues directly related to the study of Breton dialects, and to the practice of linguistic geography. Some of the questions that will be considered are: Where does the border pass between two contiguous dialectal areas? How can the geographical distribution of the varieties of a language be explained? What factors (social, economic, cultural, religious, political, etc) can be correlated with this geographic distribution?

Smaller animals have more names than bigger ones, not because of size, but because they escape people’s attention. For objects out of scope, human language cannot focus, and names proliferate from village to village. This paper gives examples from Slavic and other language groups. From these examples, the author shifts to the root/affix structure, showing that roots and affixes may change at different paces, giving a wide scope to dialect diversity. With reference to theories of cyclic evolutions of languages (Beames, Haudricourt, Hagège), the possibility is considered that the difference between center (root) and periphery (affixes) is motivated by opportunities for disjoined evolution.

Mazatec (Popolocan, Eastern Otomanguean) became world-renowned following an article by Pike & Pike (1947) and the famous chapter VIII in Pike (1948) on the Huautla variety, which inspired several other seminal studies by Bull (1984), Kirk (1966), Jamieson (1988, 1996), and more recently by Steriade, Golston & Kehrein (1998, 2004), Silverman et al. (1995) on this extremely relevant language as far as phonological typology is concerned. However the early monographs and sketches, which have had a major impact on modern linguistics (laying the premises for the syllabic constituency theory, the theory of tones and tone sandhi as well as their functions in inflectional systems), only take into account a minute proportion of this language’s inner diversity. The ALMaz project is an attempt to both revisit second-hand data on Mazatec varieties all over the area where it is densely spoken (especially using Kirk 1966 lists of over 700 cognates as a data base), and to gather and process new data on Mazatec diatopic and diastratic variation, using computational geolinguistics.

This study tries to contribute to the linguistic geography of France by comparing historical records of surnames in the five departments of Brittany with other geolinguistic resources of the same area. In order to map these data, a new software was developed and applied to the respective data sets. The results show interesting concordances between the distributions of patronyms and isoglosses of lexical and phonological variants.