Chapter 3 Reconstructing Linguistic History in a Dialect Continuum: Theory and Method
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Language, Culture, and National Identity
Language, Culture, and National Identity BY ERIC HOBSBAWM LANGUAGE, culture, and national identity is the ·title of my pa per, but its central subject is the situation of languages in cul tures, written or spoken languages still being the main medium of these. More specifically, my subject is "multiculturalism" in sofar as this depends on language. "Nations" come into it, since in the states in which we all live political decisions about how and where languages are used for public purposes (for example, in schools) are crucial. And these states are today commonly iden tified with "nations" as in the term United Nations. This is a dan gerous confusion. So let me begin with a few words about it. Since there are hardly any colonies left, practically all of us today live in independent and sovereign states. With the rarest exceptions, even exiles and refugees live in states, though not their own. It is fairly easy to get agreement about what constitutes such a state, at any rate the modern model of it, which has become the template for all new independent political entities since the late eighteenth century. It is a territory, preferably coherent and demarcated by frontier lines from its neighbors, within which all citizens without exception come under the exclusive rule of the territorial government and the rules under which it operates. Against this there is no appeal, except by authoritarian of that government; for even the superiority of European Community law over national law was established only by the decision of the constituent SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. -
Dialects, Standards, and Vernaculars
1 Dialects, Standards, and Vernaculars Most of us have had the experience of sitting in a public place and eavesdropping on conversations taking place around the United States. We pretend to be preoccupied, but we can’t seem to help listening. And we form impressions of speakers based not only on the topic of conversation, but on how people are discussing it. In fact, there’s a good chance that the most critical part of our impression comes from how people talk rather than what they are talking about. We judge people’s regional background, social stat us, ethnicity, and a host of other social and personal traits based simply on the kind of language they are using. We may have similar kinds of reactions in telephone conversations, as we try to associate a set of characteristics with an unidentified speaker in order to make claims such as, “It sounds like a salesperson of some type” or “It sounds like the auto mechanic.” In fact, it is surprising how little conversation it takes to draw conclusions about a speaker’s background – a sentence, a phrase, or even a word is often enough to trigger a regional, social, or ethnic classification. Video: What an accent does Assessments of a complex set of social characteristics and personality traits based on language differences are as inevitable as the kinds of judgments we make when we find out where people live, what their occupations are, where they went to school, and who their friends are. Language differences, in fact, may serve as the single most reliable indicator of social position in our society. -
The Standardisation of African Languages Michel Lafon, Vic Webb
The Standardisation of African Languages Michel Lafon, Vic Webb To cite this version: Michel Lafon, Vic Webb. The Standardisation of African Languages. Michel Lafon; Vic Webb. IFAS, pp.141, 2008, Nouveaux Cahiers de l’Ifas, Aurelia Wa Kabwe Segatti. halshs-00449090 HAL Id: halshs-00449090 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00449090 Submitted on 20 Jan 2010 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The Standardisation of African Languages Language political realities CentRePoL and IFAS Proceedings of a CentRePoL workshop held at University of Pretoria on March 29, 2007, supported by the French Institute for Southern Africa Michel Lafon (LLACAN-CNRS) & Vic Webb (CentRePoL) Compilers/ Editors CentRePoL wishes to express its appreciation to the following: Dr. Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti, Research Director, IFAS, Johannesburg, for her professional and material support; PanSALB, for their support over the past two years for CentRePoL’s standardisation project; The University of Pretoria, for the use of their facilities. Les Nouveaux Cahiers de l’IFAS/ IFAS Working Paper Series is a series of occasional working papers, dedicated to disseminating research in the social and human sciences on Southern Africa. -
Adapting MARBERT for Improved Arabic Dialect Identification
Adapting MARBERT for Improved Arabic Dialect Identification: Submission to the NADI 2021 Shared Task Badr AlKhamissi∗ Mohamed Gabr∗ Independent Microsoft EGDC badr [at] khamissi.com mohamed.gabr [at] microsoft.com Muhammed ElNokrashy Khaled Essam Microsoft EGDC Mendel.ai muelnokr [at] microsoft.com khaled.essam [at] mendel.ai Abstract syntax, morphology, vocabulary, and even orthog- raphy. Dialects may be heavily influenced by pre- In this paper, we tackle the Nuanced Ara- viously dominant local languages. For example, bic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task Egyptian variants are influenced by the Coptic lan- (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) and demonstrate guage, while Sudanese variants are influenced by state-of-the-art results on all of its four sub- the Nubian language. tasks. Tasks are to identify the geographic ori- gin of short Dialectal (DA) and Modern Stan- In this paper, we study the classification of such dard Arabic (MSA) utterances at the levels of variants and describe our model that achieves state- both country and province. Our final model is of-the-art results on all of the four Nuanced Ara- an ensemble of variants built on top of MAR- bic Dialect Identification (NADI) subtasks (Abdul- BERT that achieves an F1-score of 34:03% for Mageed et al., 2021). The task focuses on distin- DA at the country-level development set—an guishing both MSA and DA by their geographi- improvement of 7:63% from previous work. cal origin at both the country and province levels. The data is a collection of tweets covering 100 1 Introduction provinces from 21 Arab countries. -
Linguistics Development Team
Development Team Principal Investigator: Prof. Pramod Pandey Centre for Linguistics / SLL&CS Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Email: [email protected] Paper Coordinator: Prof. K. S. Nagaraja Department of Linguistics, Deccan College Post-Graduate Research Institute, Pune- 411006, [email protected] Content Writer: Prof. K. S. Nagaraja Prof H. S. Ananthanarayana Content Reviewer: Retd Prof, Department of Linguistics Osmania University, Hyderabad 500007 Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : Indo-Aryan Language Family Description of Module Subject Name Linguistics Paper Name Historical and Comparative Linguistics Module Title Indo-Aryan Language Family Module ID Lings_P7_M1 Quadrant 1 E-Text Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : Indo-Aryan Language Family INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGE FAMILY The Indo-Aryan migration theory proposes that the Indo-Aryans migrated from the Central Asian steppes into South Asia during the early part of the 2nd millennium BCE, bringing with them the Indo-Aryan languages. Migration by an Indo-European people was first hypothesized in the late 18th century, following the discovery of the Indo-European language family, when similarities between Western and Indian languages had been noted. Given these similarities, a single source or origin was proposed, which was diffused by migrations from some original homeland. This linguistic argument is supported by archaeological and anthropological research. Genetic research reveals that those migrations form part of a complex genetical puzzle on the origin and spread of the various components of the Indian population. Literary research reveals similarities between various, geographically distinct, Indo-Aryan historical cultures. The Indo-Aryan migrations started in approximately 1800 BCE, after the invention of the war chariot, and also brought Indo-Aryan languages into the Levant and possibly Inner Asia. -
On Burgenland Croatian Isoglosses Peter
Dutch Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid: Linguistics (SSGL 34), Amsterdam – New York, Rodopi, 293-331. ON BURGENLAND CROATIAN ISOGLOSSES PETER HOUTZAGERS 1. Introduction Among the Croatian dialects spoken in the Austrian province of Burgenland and the adjoining areas1 all three main dialect groups of central South Slavic2 are represented. However, the dialects have a considerable number of characteris- tics in common.3 The usual explanation for this is (1) the fact that they have been neighbours from the 16th century, when the Ot- toman invasions caused mass migrations from Croatia, Slavonia and Bos- nia; (2) the assumption that at least most of them were already neighbours before that. Ad (1) Map 14 shows the present-day and past situation in the Burgenland. The different varieties of Burgenland Croatian (henceforth “BC groups”) that are spoken nowadays and from which linguistic material is available each have their own icon. 5 1 For the sake of brevity the term “Burgenland” in this paper will include the adjoining areas inside and outside Austria where speakers of Croatian dialects can or could be found: the prov- ince of Niederösterreich, the region around Bratislava in Slovakia, a small area in the south of Moravia (Czech Republic), the Hungarian side of the Austrian-Hungarian border and an area somewhat deeper into Hungary east of Sopron and between Bratislava and Gyǡr. As can be seen from Map 1, many locations are very far from the Burgenland in the administrative sense. 2 With this term I refer to the dialect continuum formerly known as “Serbo-Croatian”. -
Exonormativity, Endonormativity Or Multilingualism: Teachers' Attitudes
Exonormativity, Endonormativity or Multilingualism: Teachers’ Attitudes towards Pronunciation Issues in Three Kachruian Circles Mohammad Amin Mozaheb Abbas Monfared* Department of Foreign Languages, Language Center, Imam Sadiq University, Tehran, Iran *Corresponding author Abstract Despite the accumulated body of debates surrounding English as an international language (EIL), and stronger orientations towards mutual intelligibility, little research has been done on teachers’ attitudes towards English pronunciation pedagogy in ELT classes. To address this gap, this study explores the perceptions of 352 English teachers from all Kachruvian Circles towards pronunciation pedagogy within the framework of English as an international language. Using a questionnaire, supplemented with interviews, the findings demonstrated an exonormative-endonormative gap among teachers in expanding circles (EC) and outer circles (OC). While teachers in the EC circle were in favour of native-speakerism, OC teachers highly valued their own local forms of English while they were in favour of native English. Native English teachers’ replies were also indicative of their acceptance of different varieties of English. Teachers’ preferences in regard to their attitudes towards varieties of English also show a disconnection between teachers’ theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge about world Englishes (WEs) in ELT classes which might have influenced the construction of their professional identity. This article argues that together with encouraging and valuing -
Historical Linguistics and Cognitive Science
5 Historical Linguistics and Cognitive Science Philip Baldi 1 2 & Paola Eulalia Dussias1 (1 Penn State University) (2 University of Cagliari) Abstract In this paper we investigate possible links between historical linguistics and cognitive science, or theory of the mind. Our primary goal is to demonstrate that historically documented processes of a certain type, i.e. those relating to semantic change and grammaticalization, form a unified theoretical bundle which gives insight into the cognitive processes at work in language organization and evolution. We reject the notion that historical phenomena are excluded from cognitive speculation on the grounds that they are untestable. Rather, we argue for an extension of Labov’s uniformitarian doctrine, which states “that the same mechanisms which operated to produce the large-scale changes of the past may be observed operating in the current changes taking place around us.” (Labov, 1972:161). This principle is transferable to the current context in the following way: first, language as a system is no different today than it was millennia ago, easily as far back as diachronic speculation is likely to take us; and second, the human brain is structurally no different today from the brain of humans of up to ten thousand years ago. The cognitive- linguistic parallelism between the past and the present makes speculation possible, in this case about code- switching, even if it is not testable in the laboratory. It further allows us to make forward and backward inferences about both language change and its cognitive underpinnings. Keywords: historical linguistics, cognitive science, code-switching, semantic change, grammaticalization 1. -
Contextualizing Historical Lexicology the State of the Art of Etymological Research Within Linguistics
Contextualizing historical lexicology The state of the art of etymological research within linguistics University of Helsinki, May 15–17, 2017 Abstracts Organized by the project “Inherited and borrowed in the history of the Uralic languages” (funded by Kone Foundation) Contents I. Keynote lectures ................................................................................. 5 Martin Kümmel Etymological problems between Indo-Iranian and Uralic ................ 6 Johanna Nichols The interaction of word structure and lexical semantics .................. 9 Martine Vanhove Lexical typology and polysemy patterns in African languages ...... 11 II. Section papers ................................................................................. 12 Mari Aigro A diachronic study of the homophony between polar question particles and coordinators ............................................................. 13 Tommi Alho & Aleksi Mäkilähde Dating Latin loanwords in Old English: Some methodological problems ...................................................................................... 14 Gergely Antal Remarks on the shared vocabulary of Hungarian, Udmurt and Komi .................................................................................................... 15 Sofia Björklöf Areal distribution as a criterion for new internal borrowing .......... 16 Stefan Engelberg Etymology and Pidgin languages: Words of German origin in Tok Pisin ............................................................................................ 17 László -
Lectures on English Lexicology
МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ ГОУ ВПО «Татарский государственный гуманитарно-педагогический университет» LECTURES ON ENGLISH LEXICOLOGY Курс лекций по лексикологии английского языка Казань 2010 МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ ГОУ ВПО «Татарский государственный гуманитарно-педагогический университет» LECTURES ON ENGLISH LEXICOLOGY Курс лекций по лексикологии английского языка для студентов факультетов иностранных языков Казань 2010 ББК УДК Л Печатается по решению Методического совета факультета иностранных языков Татарского государственного гуманитарно-педагогического университета в качестве учебного пособия Л Lectures on English Lexicology. Курс лекций по лексикологии английского языка. Учебное пособие для студентов иностранных языков. – Казань: ТГГПУ, 2010 - 92 с. Составитель: к.филол.н., доцент Давлетбаева Д.Н. Научный редактор: д.филол.н., профессор Садыкова А.Г. Рецензенты: д.филол.н., профессор Арсентьева Е.Ф. (КГУ) к.филол.н., доцент Мухаметдинова Р.Г. (ТГГПУ) © Давлетбаева Д.Н. © Татарский государственный гуманитарно-педагогический университет INTRODUCTION The book is intended for English language students at Pedagogical Universities taking the course of English lexicology and fully meets the requirements of the programme in the subject. It may also be of interest to all readers, whose command of English is sufficient to enable them to read texts of average difficulty and who would like to gain some information about the vocabulary resources of Modern English (for example, about synonyms -
Teaching English with a Pluricentric Approach: a Compilation of Four Upper Secondary Teachers’ Beliefs
Faculty of Education and Society Department of Culture, Languages and Media Degree Project in English Studies and Education 15 Credits, Advanced Level Teaching English with a Pluricentric Approach: a Compilation of Four Upper Secondary Teachers’ Beliefs Att undervisa i engelska med ett pluricentriskt tillvägagångssätt: en sammanställning av fyra gymnasielärares föreställningar Agnes Rauer and Elena Tizzano Master of Arts/Science in Education, 300 Credits Supervisor: Vi Thanh Son 2019-06-09 Examiner: Anna Korshin Wärnsby Acknowledgements We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the upper secondary teachers who agreed to participate in our study, without them it would have been no study at all. We also want to thank Malin Reljanovic Glimäng for making us aware of how the English language is used in the globalized world and also for guiding our first steps in this field of research. And last but not least, we would like to thank our supervisor Vi Thanh Son for guiding and supporting us through this writing process. Contribution to the Synthesis This degree project is a result of a collaborative and equally divided effort. The research, collecting of data and the writing has been fairly distributed among the students/writers. The writing was carried out in a process made of virtual, as well as physical meetings, and facilitated by the use of Google Docs. By using this tool it was possible to follow each other’s creative process and give thorough feedback in order to improve the project. The workload was continuously discussed and adjusted throughout the writing-process and we both gained a deep knowledge of the contents of the text. -
Voicing Distinctions in the Dutch-German Dialect Continuum
Voicing distinctions in the Dutch-German dialect continuum Nina Ouddeken Meertens Instituut This study investigates the phonetics and phonology of voicing distinctions in the Dutch-German dialect continuum, which forms a transition zone between voicing and aspiration systems. Two phonological approaches to represent this contrast exist in the literature: a [±voice] approach and Laryngeal Realism. The implementation of the change between the two language types in the transition zone will provide new insights in the nature of the phonological representa- tion of the contrast. In this paper I will locate the transition zone by looking at phonetic overlap between VOT values of fortis and lenis plosives, and I will compare the two phonological approaches, showing that both face analytical problems as they cannot explain the variation observed in word-initial plosives and plosive clusters. Keywords: dialectology, phonology, phonetics, Laryngeal Realism, transition zones 1. Introduction Voicing distinctions in plosive systems have been studied extensively in phonolo- gy. Lisker & Abramson (1964) discovered that the phonetic realisations of ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ plosives are not identical across languages: in word-initial posi- tion fortis and lenis plosives can be distinguished in different ways with respect to Voice Onset Time (VOT; describing the onset of vocal fold vibration relative to the moment of plosive release). Languages contrasting two plosive series typically contrast prevoiced plosives with plain voiceless plosives (voicing languages), or plain voiceless plosives with voiceless aspirated plosives (aspiration languages). The boundary between plain voiceless and aspirated plosives is placed around 20– 35 msec (depending on Place of Articulation (PoA)) by Keating (1984): Linguistics in the Netherlands 2016, 106–120.