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1
Sanchez, Tara. "Accountability in morphological borrowing: Analyzing a linguistic subsystem as a sociolinguistic variable." Language Variation and Change 20, no. 2 (2008): 225–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394508000124.
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ABSTRACTPrinciples of structural borrowing have been proposed, relating to structures of the languages involved and sociodemographic circumstances of their respective societies. This article quantitatively evaluates the roles of both linguistic and social factors in structural borrowing via examination of language contact data from Aruba and Curaçao, where creole Papiamentu is in contact with Spanish, Dutch, and English. Variationist methods, rooted in Labov's Principle of Accountability, are applied in a novel way to the system of verbal morphology to flesh out factors promoting borrowing. Linguistic factors are found to be quantitatively stronger, and only one nonlinguistic factor was found to promote borrowing. Results are discussed in light of prevailing theories of language contact. Findings contribute to our understanding of the long-term consequences of language contact and the relationship of contact-induced change to a more general sociolinguistic theory of language variation and change.
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Mesthrie, Rajend. "J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change. (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics.) Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2002. xii + 807 pp." Language in Society 33, no. 5 (2004): 769–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404504215056.
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This is the eleventh volume in the Blackwell series “Handbooks in Linguistics.” Of the previous ten, one was devoted to general sociolinguistics (Coulmas 1997), making this the first in the series to deal with a specific branch of sociolinguistics. For many scholars, variation theory (including the study of change in progress) is the heartland of sociolinguistics, though not everyone would go as far as Chambers 2003 in equating sociolinguistic theory with variation theory alone. As the earlier Blackwell handbook suggests, the field of sociolinguistics is broader than variation theory per se. However, considering the richness of the handbook under review, one can understand why variation theory should hold the high ground in sociolinguistics. The handbook comprises 29 chapters, divided into five sections: methodologies, linguistic structure, social factors, contact, and language and societies.
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Nagy, Naomi. "Linguistic attitudes and contact effects in Toronto’s heritage languages: A variationist sociolinguistic investigation." International Journal of Bilingualism 22, no. 4 (2018): 429–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367006918762160.
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Aims and objectives: I review several methods of constructing bridges between structural linguistic variation in language contact situations and linguistic attitudes and prestige. Methodology design: Data are examined for heritage varieties of Cantonese, Faetar, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian spoken in Toronto, Canada, and in the corresponding homeland varieties, in an effort to consider how the notions of ‘prestige’ and ‘attitude’ are best operationalized in heritage language studies and to seek associations between structural variation and prestige. Linguistic variation is explored via multivariate analysis of (linguistic and) social factors, in order to determine which factors best account for the selection of competing variants of selected sociolinguistic variables (primarily null subject variation and voice onset time) in spontaneous speech. The attitudinal or prestige aspect is explored in several ways: comparison of ethnolinguistic vitality, language status (in popular and academic media) and ethnic orientation. It is hypothesized that: • communities with a higher ethnolinguistic vitality will be more resistant to contact-induced variation; • varieties exhibiting more contact-induced variation will more likely have acquired a label distinct from the homeland variety; • within a generation, speakers with greater affinity for or more frequent use of English will show stronger contact effects; and • successive generations of speakers, with increasing contact with English, will show greater contact effects. Conclusions/originality/significance: These hypotheses are not supported by our data.
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Kantarovich, Jessica, and Lenore A. Grenoble. "Reconstructing sociolinguistic variation." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 2 (June 12, 2017): 27. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4080.
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In this paper we illustrate a methodology for reconstructing language ininteraction from literary texts, demonstrating how they can serve as documentation ofspeech when primary linguistic material is unavailable. A careful incorporation offacts from literary dialect not only informs grammatical reconstruction in situationswith little to no documentation, but also allows for the reconstruction of thesociolinguistic use of a language, an oft-overlooked aspect of linguisticreconstruction. Literary dialogue is often one of the only attestations of regionalvarieties of a language with a very salient standard dialect, where no primary sourcesare available. Odessan Russian (OdR), a moribund dialect of Russian, serves as a casestudy. OdR grew out of intensive language contact and differs from most othervarieties of Russian, with substrate influences from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish,and lexical borrowing from other languages. The only records of "spoken" OdR arefound in fictional narrative. An analysis of works from several prominent Odessanwriters, including Isaak Babel and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, reveals considerable variationamong speakers of OdR; careful tracking of this variation shows how it wasdistributed among different social groups, and suggests how it may have beendeployed to index and acknowledge different social roles.
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William, M. Cotter, and M. Cotter William. "Current research on linguistic variation in the Arabic-speaking world." Language and Linguistic Compass 10(8) (August 23, 2016): 370–81. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.259963.
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Given its abundance of dialects, varieties, styles and registers, Arabic lends itself easily to the study of language variation and change. It is spoken by some 300 million people in an area spanning roughly from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Traditional Arabic dialectology has dealt predominantly with geographical variation. However, in recent years, more nuanced studies of inter- and intra-speaker variation have seen the light of day. In some respects, Arabic sociolinguistics is still lagging behind the field compared to variationist studies in English and other Western languages. On the other hand, the insight presented in studies of Arabic can and should be considered in the course of shaping a crosslinguistic sociolinguistic theory. Variationist studies of Arabic speech communities began almost two decades after Labov's pioneering studies of American English and have flourished following the turn of the twenty-first century. These studies have sparked debates between more quantitatively inclined sociolinguists and those who value qualitative analysis. In reality, virtually no sociolinguistic study of Arabic that includes statistical modeling is free of qualitative insights. They are also not flawless and not always cutting-edge methodologically or theoretically. But the field in moving in a positive direction, which will likely lead to the recognition of its significance to sociolinguistics at-large.
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Newerkla, Stefan Michael. "Reconstructing historical language contact between Slavic languages and Austrian varieties of German: theoretical assumptions, methodological approaches and general results." Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis 74, no. 2 (2023): 645–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/jazcas-2024-0016.
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Abstract Undisputedly, slavic languages have had a considerable influence on german and the attitudes towards multilingualism in austria. This article portrays theoretical reflections, new findings and innovative methodological approaches to the reconstruction of historical language contact between slavic languages and austrian varieties of german. These approaches were jointly developed within the task cluster on language contact of the austrian special research programme “german in austria. Variation – contact – perception”. In this context, the implications of historical and recent slavic-german multilingualism on german in austria are of special interest. The paper concludes with an overview of preliminary research results, methodological lessons learnt and considerations for further sociolinguistic research in historical contexts.
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Zhou, Minglang. "Theorizing language contact, spread, and variation in status planning." Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 16, no. 2 (2006): 159–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/japc.16.2.02zho.
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A theoretical model, managed community second language acquisition (SLA), is proposed to provide a comprehensive view of nine studies of language contact, spread, variation, and attitudes of Chinese, which are shaped by nearly a century of language planning. The model has been reformulated on the basis of the individual SLA modle and it is intended to make the notions of macroacquisition and planning acquisition operational. It has two linguistic factors (input and output) and two sociolinguistic factors (language identity and language marketability) that can be managed or manipulated in status planning. The two sociolinguistic factors, language identity and marketability, appear to have played the most significant roles in language spread, variation, and attitudes in status planning, at least in China. This model also serves as the basis to make a theoretical distinction between interference and borrowing, a distinction that helps to sort out the consequences of language contact and provides indexes of language shift under status planning conditions.
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Koole, Tom, and Jacomine M. Nortier. "De Sociolinguïstiek in het Nederlandse Taalgebied Anno 2003." Thema's en trends in de sociolinguistiek 4 70 (January 1, 2003): 9–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ttwia.70.02koo.
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This article presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in the Dutch-speaking community of the Netherlands and Belgium. The overview is based on the contributions to the 4th Sociolinguistic Conference held in March 2003, after three earlier conferences in 1991, 1995 and 1999. Compared to the earlier conferences, the 2003 conference shows an increased number of papers, due to an increased involvement of Flemish researchers. In terms of sociolinguistic subdisciplines, the main developments are a decrease in the research of multilingualism and language contact, and a steady flow over the years of linguistic variation research, and of interaction and discourse studies. The most striking development, however, is the fact that almost half of the papers at the conference (49%) are concerned with aspects of Dutch and Belgian multicultural and multilingual society. Again 76% of this body of research is concerned with education. For this reason the authors survey the present-day relation between sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. They conclude that in the Dutch-speaking community and internationally, applied linguistics has developed into a field that encompasses sociolinguistics and presents a stage for the presentation of sociolinguistic research.
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Stamp, Rose. "Sociolinguistic variation, language change and contact in the British Sign Language (BSL) lexicon." Sign Language and Linguistics 18, no. 1 (2015): 158–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sll.18.1.08sta.
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Conrad, François. "The sociolinguistics of Luxembourgish football language: A case study of contact-induced lexical variation in a complex multilingual society." Sociolinguistica 37, no. 2 (2023): 231–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/soci-2023-0009.
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Abstract Luxembourgish is a Germanic language in Western Europe situated on the Germanic-Romance language border. The centuries-long multilingualism, that has included German and French as main contact languages, has led to much variation on all linguistic levels, yielding lexical doublets – contact-induced synonym pairs. The study presents the results from the online Lëtzebuerger Futtballsprooch ‘Luxembourgish football language’ survey (n = 1189 participants), set up to analyze the distribution of the variants of lexical doublets in the special language of football in order to exemplify the mechanisms of contact-induced lexical variation in Luxembourgish as a whole. The variation is correlated with sociodemographic and language biographical factors (quantitative analysis, beta regression). The study also introduces linguistic orientation as an overarching factor for the individual language biography that is useful to model the positioning of individuals in relation to the contact languages involved in a complex multilingual society. The results reveal a societal trend towards Germanic variants linked to the linguistic orientation of the participants towards German, mirroring sociolinguistic dynamics and changes.
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Bancu, Ariana. "Language profile and syntactic change in two multilingual communities." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 3, no. 1 (2018): 65. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4364.
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This paper explores variables that can explain contact-induced linguistic variation and change in a situation where diachronic data is lacking and number of speakers is small. For example, in contexts involving language endangerment traditional sociolinguistic variables such as age, gender, and social class will not apply due to small number of participants. Furthermore, additional sociolinguistic variables such as degree of language use, language attitudes, etc. are needed to explaining contact-induced variation. The target language is Transylvanian Saxon (hereafter TrSax), an endangered language that coexists with German and Romanian in Romania and in émigré communities in Germany. I collected sociolinguistic and questionnaire data from two groups of trilingual speakers of TrSax, German, and Romanian. Six participants are from Viscri, Romania and six participants are part of a community of Transylvanian Saxons from Viscri, who moved to Nuremberg, Germany approximately 30 years ago. I illustrate the methodology I used for identifying the variables that distinguish the two groups and I discuss how these variables can be applied to analyze contact-induced variation in TrSax on hand of preliminary production data.
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Mazzaro, Natalia. "The Effect of Language Contact on /tʃ/ Deaffrication in Spanish from the US–Mexico Borderland". Languages 7, № 2 (2022): 101. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages7020101.
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This study examines the sociophonetic variation in the L1 speech of Spanish–English bilingual speakers living in the Ciudad Juárez, Mexico–El Paso, TX border metropolis. The purpose of this research is to analyze the sociolinguistic production of /ʧ/ deaffrication in U.S. Spanish, particularly, in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Based on the Revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), it was hypothesized that L1 production of /ʧ/ deaffrication can be significantly affected by the establishment of a new L2 phonetic category /ʃ/ in bilinguals. Interviews with forty-four adult participants, including fourteen first generation simultaneous bilinguals, twelve sequential bilinguals, and eighteen monolingual Spanish speakers were acoustically and auditorily analyzed. Participants were recorded while they performed two types of tasks: a formal (reading) and two semi-informal speech production tasks. Results showed that simultaneous and sequential bilinguals had a significantly lower realization of [ʃ] than monolinguals, suggesting that L1 sociolinguistic variability is influenced by contact with English. Results also indicate the significance of the preceding segment on the realization of the variable under study in monolingual speech, with preceding /a, n, r, l/ favoring the variation and preceding /s, e, i, o, u/ disfavoring it. Comparisons of the variation in monolingual and bilingual speech show that the sociolinguistic factors (preceding segment, sex, and age) that influence the variation in monolingual controls do not influence the variation in bilingual speech.
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Cruschina, Silvio. "Language contact and morphological competition: Plurals in central Sicily." Word Structure 14, no. 2 (2021): 174–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/word.2021.0186.
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This paper explores the effects of language contact in the nominal morphology of central Sicilian dialects. In particular, this study is concerned with the contact-induced changes related to the distribution of three plural formatives that give rise to competition between different inflectional classes with respect to a number of lexemes. It is shown that sociolinguistic factors such as speaker age account for the distribution of the competing plural forms and the high degree of variation. As a consequence, a slow and gradual change is leading to the disappearance of the plural form that has no equivalent in the contact language, that is, in Italian.
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Brown, Matt, and Kearsy Cormier. "Sociolinguistic Variation in the Nativisation of BSL Fingerspelling." Open Linguistics 3, no. 1 (2017): 115–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opli-2017-0007.
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Abstract British Sign Language (BSL) is a visual-gestural language distinct from spoken languages used in the United Kingdom but in contact with them. One product of this contact is the use of fingerspelling to represent English words via their orthography. Fingerspelled loans can become “nativised”, adapting manual production to conform more closely to the native lexicon’s inventory of phonemic constraints. Much of the previous literature on fingerspelling has focused on one-handed systems but, unlike the majority of sign languages, BSL uses a two-handed manual alphabet. What is the nature of nativisation in BSL, and does it exhibit sociolinguistic variation? We apply a cross-linguistic model of nativisation to BSL Corpus conversation and narrative data (http://bslcorpusproject.org) obtained from 150 signers in 6 UK regions. Mixed effects modelling is employed to determine the influence of social factors. Results show that the participants’ home region is the most significant factor, with London and Birmingham signers significantly favouring use of fully nativised fingerspelled forms. Non-nativised sequences are significantly favoured in signers of increasing age in Glasgow and Belfast. Gender and parental language background are not found to be significant factors in nativisation. The findings also suggest a form of reduction specific to London and Birmingham.
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Warditz, Vladislava. "Intralingual Varieties in Interlingual Contact (The Case of Migrant Russian in Germany)." Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 82, no. 5 (2023): 22. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s160578800028324-2.
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The paper examines the evolution of the system of intralingual varieties of Russian in the context of migration-affected unbalanced multilingualism (Russian as a heritage language vs German as a language of official communication). In this specific case of multilingualism, two languages with similar sociolinguistic characteristics (status, polyfunctionality, codification) enter in contact, whereby Russian, as a language without administrative status and used only in the personal sphere, is de facto reduced to one (informal) communicative code. This situation in turn contributes to the lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic transfer from German into Russian. However, as the analysis of sociolinguistic and linguistic data shows, interlingual contact also affects the system of Russian language varieties. The reduction of the original repertoire of intralingual varieties and the transfer of German interlingual varieties, i.e. the emergence of a new (mixed) system, is explained by the change in the sociolinguistic characteristics of the Russian language due to migration. An indicator of the emerging polylingual variation, including stratification, is the switching of the interlingual code instead of the intralingual code, a typical feature of the second generation in the diaspora.
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Meyerhoff, Miriam, and James A. Walker. "Grammatical variation in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27, no. 2 (2012): 209–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.27.2.01mey.
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Despite the publication of Aceto & Williams (2003), the languages spoken in the Eastern Caribbean remain underdescribed. In this paper, we outline a project examining language use in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines), based on fieldwork between 2003 and 2005, comprising over 100 hours of sociolinguistic interviews conducted and recorded by community-member researchers. We present quantitative analysis of three aspects of the grammatical system that exhibit variation: absence of the verb BE, verbal negation, and tense-aspect marking. We focus on three communities characterized by different sociodemographic histories. This paper fills a gap in our knowledge of the Eastern Caribbean and provides a descriptive sociolinguistic analysis as a starting point for future work. The findings contribute more generally to our understanding of (post-)colonial and contact varieties of English.
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Bancu, Ariana. "Two case studies on structural variation in multilingual settings." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 5, no. 1 (2020): 750. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4760.
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In this article, I report on two analyses of variation in Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), an endangered Germanic language in contact with German and Romanian, used in settings predictive of structural influences among languages. My goals are to document the structural properties of the target variables and to evaluate if processes of language contact have an effect on synchronic variation in TrSax. I identified two areas of TrSax that display variation at the morphosyntactic level, and in each case one of the variants has a corresponding structure in German, while the other variant has a corresponding structure in Romanian. To tease apart contact-induced variation from internally motivated variation, I compare data from multilingual speakers with different linguistic profiles and assess the effect of sociolinguistic factors on variation through mixed effects analyses. Variation that patterns similarly across these two groups can provide a clearer account of the structure of TrSax, while differences between the groups can shed light on trajectories of change in TrSax. Furthermore, results of this study have implications for borrowing hierarchies in language contact.
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Wagner, Lauren. ":Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic: Variations on a Sociolinguistic Theme." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16, no. 1 (2006): 149–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2006.16.1.149.
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Barnes, Sonia. "Awareness and salience in language contact The case of Asturian Spanish." Lletres Asturianes, no. 128 (March 31, 2023): 75–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.17811/llaa.128.2023.75-96.
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Awareness of a sociolinguistic variable and linguistic behavior are intricately connected, such that the former can influence speakers’ use of particular linguistic variants. As a result, exploring awareness and salience as part of linguistic variation is crucial to fully understanding the linguistic choices that speakers make in interaction and the social meaning of the variants they employ. In this article, I investigate how patterns in the production and perception of Asturian features might be explained by examining their cognitive and social salience, and the different levels of sociolinguistic awareness observed in the communities in which Spanish and Asturian are in contact. After an analysis of metalinguistic discourse on public social media, the article explores the effect of cognitive salience and explicit awareness on the perceptions of the Asturian gender morphemes /-u/ and /-es/, as well as how the availability of Asturian “ye” to index interactional stances relates to the speakers’ awareness of this sociolinguistic variant, its symbolism, and their control over its use. I show that different dimensions of salience and awareness affect the indexical fields of these contact variants, allowing some features to become markers of Asturian identity and social status, to adopt particular styles, and to be employed as stance-marking units based on the speakers’ interactional needs.
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HOWARD, MARTIN, ISABELLE LEMÉE, and VERA REGAN. "The L2 acquisition of a phonological variable: the case of /l/ deletion in French." Journal of French Language Studies 16, no. 1 (2006): 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269506002298.
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This article is situated within the recent strand of SLA research which applies variationist sociolinguistic methods to the study of the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by the L2 speaker. Whilst that research has tended to focus on the study of morphological and morphosyntactic variables, this article aims to investigate a number of acquisitional trends identified in previous research in relation to phonological variation, namely the variable deletion of /l/ by Irish advanced L2 speakers of French in both an instructed and study abroad environment. Based on quantitative results using GoldVarb 2001, the study further illuminates the difficulty that the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation poses to the instructed L2 speaker, who is found to make minimal use of informal sociolinguistic variants. In contrast, contact with native speakers in the native speech community is seen to allow the L2 speaker to make considerable sociolinguistic gains, not only in relation to the acquisition of the informal variant in itself, but also in relation to the underlying native speaker grammatical system as indicated by the constraint ordering at work behind use of the variable.
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Csernicskó, István, and Anna Fenyvesi. "Sociolinguistic and Contact-induced Variation in Hungarian Language Use in Subcarpathia, Ukraine." Hungarian Cultural Studies 5 (January 1, 2012): 185–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2012.91.
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In addition to showing regional and social variation, the language use of the minority Hungarians of Subcarpathia, Ukraine, also presents a reflection of the region’s complex linguistic history and its effects from contact with Russian and Ukrainian. On the basis of quantitative empirical findings, this study shows Subcarpathian Hungarians to be a sociolinguistically stratified group of speakers whose Hungarian language use varies in a systematic manner according to sex, age, level of education, and place of residence. The paper also outlines some of the main differences in the language use of Hungarians in Subcarpathia and Hungary which are manifested in statistically significant ways.
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Suokhrie, Kelhouvinuo. "Clans and clanlectal contact." Asia-Pacific Language Variation 2, no. 2 (2016): 188–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/aplv.2.2.04suo.
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Abstract This is the first variationist study of clan intermarriage and intergenerational change in Nagaland (India). The study investigates clan as a sociolinguistic variable by drawing data from the Angami (belonging to the Kuki-Chin-Naga sub-group of Tibeto-Burman languages) community of Kohima village in Nagaland. The linguistic variables examined include two alveolar fricatives and three affricates showing variable palatalization. Like many other clan-based communities (cf. Stanford, 2007, 2008, 2009), Angamis practice exogamy. Women settle down in their husband’s clans in the same village after marriage, but continue to maintain their original clanlects despite being in contact with their husband’s clanlects for many years. Exogamy practices are however weakening in Kohima, resulting in intra-clan marriages. The study examines the linguistic implications of the inter-clan and intra-clan marriages, illustrating the patterns that young learners acquire under such circumstances and the way they respond to the new changes. Labov finds evidence for an “outward orientation of the language learning faculty” (2012, 2014). The Nagaland results build on this notion but provide a new perspective: In Nagaland, children’s language learning is inwardly oriented with respect to stable variation and outwardly oriented in the case of change in progress.
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Vuckovic, Marija. "Current dialectological research in Serbian linguistics and language contact issues." Juznoslovenski filolog, no. 65 (2009): 405–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/jfi0965405v.
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Examined in this paper is the attitude of current Serbian dialectology towards phenomena that are the subject matter of contact linguistics. The aim of the study is to show which types of contact situations and their outcomes are investigated by dialectologists and which are, by applying certain methodological procedures, excluded or at least minimised. The survey of the scholarly production in the field reveals that the attention has been given to the dialectal lexical and structural borrowings from the neigh bouring languages, as well as the interdialectal interference, the contact-induced Balkan innovations and analytic tendency in dialects (which are of particular significance for the study of the Balkan Sprachbund), the mutual influences of standard language and dialects, the sociolinguistic factors determining the dialectal variations that result from language contact, urban dialects and even bilingualism. It should be noted that not all issues have been equally addressed: some of them are well established in the field, while the others only give hints of possible future trends within the discipline. The observed changes in the focus as well as in methodology of its investigations make dialectology more open to the issues contact linguistics is interested in.
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Núñez-Méndez, Eva. "Variation in Spanish /s/: Overview and New Perspectives." Languages 7, no. 2 (2022): 77. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages7020077.
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The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision, and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors, and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing the sibilants’ geo-linguistic features has received much attention from scholars, resulting in sibilants being one of the most studied variables in Spanish phonetics. In this article, we provide a concise approach that offers the reader an updated sociolinguistic view of the modern cross-dialectal realizations of /s/. It is essential to study sibilant development to describe Spanish dialects, the differences between Transatlantic and Castilian varieties, and the speech features found in Spanish speaking communities in the Americas. Examining sibilance from different approaches with a representative variety of Spanish dialects as examples advances the importance of sociolinguistic phenomena to index language changes.
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Van Compernolle, Rémi A. "Constructing a Second Language Sociolinguistic Repertoire: A Sociocultural Usage-based Perspective." Applied Linguistics 40, no. 6 (2018): 871–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy033.
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Abstract This article discusses a sociocultural usage-based perspective on the development of sociolinguistic competence. Previous research has focused on learners’ acquisition and use of alternative ways of ‘saying the same thing’ (i.e. native-like variation) in relation to study abroad, contact with native speakers, and pedagogy. Missing from the literature are studies examining the developmental trajectories of individual learners from a qualitative perspective. This article takes a first step in this direction by documenting the specific lexicogrammatical constructions deployed by one learner of French, Leon, over the course of a 6-week stylistic variation intervention. The findings show that his sociolinguistic repertoire emerged from a single multiword expression, which in combination with Leon’s application of new metalinguistic knowledge and mediation from a teacher expanded to become a more productive schematic template. The research suggests that future work on L2 sociolinguistic development would do well to focus on qualitative accounts of individual developmental trajectories, emphasizing the specific lexicogrammatical constructions learners appropriate, to understand how L2 sociolinguistic repertoires are constructed across time.
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Sagara, Keiko, and Nick Palfreyman. "Variation in the numeral system of Japanese Sign Language and Taiwan Sign Language." Asia-Pacific Language Variation 6, no. 1 (2020): 119–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/aplv.00009.sag.
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Abstract Abstract (Japanese Sign Language) The numerals 10, 100 and 1,000 are expressed variably in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) and Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), two languages that also have historic links. JSL was used in deaf schools that were established in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era, leaving a lasting impression on TSL, but complex sociolinguistic situations have led to different outcomes in each case (Fischer, 2014; Sagara, 2014). This comparative sociolinguistic analysis is based on two datasets comprising a total of 1,100 tokens produced by 72 signers from the Kanto and Kansai regions (for JSL) and the cities of Tainan and Taipei (for TSL). Mixed effects modelling reveals that social factors such as the age and region of the signer have a significant influence on how the variable is realised. This investigation shows how careful cross-linguistic comparison can shed light on variation within and between sign languages that have been in contact, and how regional variation in one language may influence regional variation in another.
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Pinta, Justin. "Correntino Spanish Memes and the Enregisterment of Argentine Guarani Loanwords." Languages 8, no. 3 (2023): 165. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages8030165.
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The intense contact between Guarani and Spanish in the Argentine province of Corrientes has produced a wide array of mutual contact effects, the most visible being widespread borrowing in both directions. This article examines a previously unreported feature of Argentine Guarani loans in Correntino Spanish: the social value they have acquired. Building on the growing body of work in sociolinguistics on internet memes, which are sites of phenomena rich in sociolinguistic value, an analysis is provided of Argentine Guarani loans in Correntino Spanish using an original corpus of memes collected from Correntino Instagram pages. Such memes, whose intended audience is monolingual, are a valuable source of Correntino Spanish features, which are used for humorous, ironic, or nostalgic effect. Via analysis of the relationship between these loans and the kinds of memes they appear in, I show that these loans have undergone enregisterment, i.e., they have taken on additional social meaning that allows them to index a complex variety of ideological stances toward Correntino social phenomena and character types. The results of this process evidence the fact that language contact, as an engine of variation, creates fertile ground for the emergence of social meaning and that memes are a productive and promising window into the (re)creation and evolution of such meaning.
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Lyons, Kate, and Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez. "Quantifying the Linguistic Landscape." Spanish in Context 14, no. 3 (2017): 329–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sic.14.3.01lyo.
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Abstract Study of speech and written texts has provided significant insight regarding linguistic variation and its social correlates. Variation in the representation or display of language, however, remains a relatively understudied phenomenon. With this in mind, we present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the variation observed in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Pilsen, Chicago. A community undergoing perceived processes of gentrification, Pilsen is an active site of economic, sociocultural change as well as newly intensified language contact. To investigate Pilsen’s displayed language variation, we implement a series of logistic regression models that analyze the distribution of both language and contextual framing observed on signs in four key areas in Pilsen. In doing so, we present an informed means with which to understand the sociolinguistic context of Pilsen as a community undergoing change and provide a replicable framework for future study of LLs that experience similar dynamics.
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Baird, Brandon, and Brendan Regan. "The status of /f/ in Mayan-accented Spanish." Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 18, no. 1 (2025): 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2025-2001.
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Abstract Although scant, the previous research on Guatemalan Spanish has suggested that both /f/ lenition, /f/ → [h], and /f/ fortition, /f/ → [p], are more common among Mayan-Spanish bilinguals with lower levels of education as /f/ is not present in any Mayan language. The present study analyzes 1,430 tokens of /f/ from sociolinguistic interviews in Spanish from 40 bilinguals of Spanish and the Mayan language K’iche’ according to both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Overall, both lenition and fortition were relatively infrequent. The results indicate that /f/ lenition is favored by the following phonetic contexts of [u̯i] and [u̯e] and by speakers with less formal education, especially for those who were more K’iche’-dominant. /f/ fortition is favored by previous nasals and pauses and by speakers who were more K’iche’-dominant. That is, while /f/ fortition is predicted by language dominance, /f/ lenition, similar to other varieties of Spanish, is most predicted by educational attainment, although with an interaction between education and language dominance. Thus, it is argued that in this community, /f/ lenition is due to sociolinguistic variation of a diachronic sound change while /f/ fortition is a result of language contact and processes of enregisterment. The findings indicate that sociolinguistic studies in bilingual communities must examine the role of education, language dominance, and the interaction between the two as language dominance does not inherently explain all variation in situations of language contact.
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al-Rojaie, Yousef. "Sociolinguistics in Saudi Arabia: Present situation and future directions." Journal of Arabic Sociolinguistics 1, no. 1 (2023): 76–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/arabic.2023.0006.
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This study provides a brief state-of-the-art overview of sociolinguistic research in Saudi Arabia. It begins with a historical review of the language situation in Saudi Arabia in an attempt to relate the past situation with current language use, focusing on studies that examine Arabic dialects of major tribes and urban centers in the Arabian Peninsula before and after the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It continues with a schematic survey of major trends in Saudi sociolinguistic works over the past few decades, including language variation and change, language contact, language attitudes, and code-switching. As such trends unfolded, researchers investigated the processes of dialect contact, mixing, and, ultimately, koineization and followed, in particular, the socioeconomic changes that Saudi Arabia has witnessed in terms of the spread of education, population movements, and urbanization patterns. Special attention is given to the various sociolinguistic methods employed in such works, as well as the linguistic features that are examined. This study concluded with future directions for Saudi sociolinguistic research in an effort to highlight topics and concerns that need further research, such as certain sociolects and ethnolects, and also new topics and trends associated with language use in social media, particularly by the younger generation.
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Chand, Vineeta. "Postvocalic (r) in urban Indian English." English World-Wide 31, no. 1 (2010): 1–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.31.1.01cha.
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Native varieties of World Englishes can shed light on competing local and international language ideologies and alignments with different standards, while quantitative variationist methods permit dialect internal analysis of structural variation without direct reference to external standards, by focusing on internal linguistic and social constraints. Contributing to these endeavors, this study examines variation in postvocalic (r)-deletion in Indian English (IndE), uncovering rhotic patterns which are significantly influenced by, and illuminate, distinct urban Indian sociolinguistic alignments. The results also demonstrate that IndE is diverging from both its British colonially influenced past, and from modern internationally prestigious English varieties, through real and apparent time analysis. This analysis focuses on the larger sociolinguistic milieu of IndE emergence and evolution, offering a nuanced response to superficial and oftentimes categorical IndE grammars. Further, studying native speakers offers a counterpoint to L1 contact explanations for IndE stabilization and evolution in the postcolonial context.
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Cerruti, Massimo, and Riccardo Regis. "Partitive determiners in Piedmontese: A case of language variation and change in a contact setting." Linguistics 58, no. 3 (2020): 651–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0080.
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AbstractThis paper addresses the use of partitive determiners in Piedmontese as a case in point for the interplay of language variation and change in Italo-Romance. Firstly, a brief diachronic account will be provided of the development of partitive determiners in Piedmontese, ranging from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; such an overview will rely upon the results of recent studies on this subject. Next, the behavior of partitive determiners in contemporary Piedmontese will be examined; we will draw primarily on some unpublished materials collected within the ALEPO research program (ALEPO stands for Atlante linguistico ed etnografico del Piemonte Occidentale, “Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Western Piedmont”), which consist of both responses to a questionnaire survey and spontaneous speech data. The study will help to shed light on the similarities and differences not only between different varieties of Piedmontese, but also between such varieties and Italian. The main paradigmatic differences identified will be argued to relate to two different ways of categorizing the relationship between mass nouns and countable plurals, one in which quantification prevails over classification, and the other in which classification is foregrounded. This state of affairs will then be discussed against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic situation under scrutiny, paying special attention to the contact between Piedmontese and Italian (as well as with French up to the end of the nineteenth century) and to the “superposition” of both an official standard language (i. e., Italian) and a regional koine (based on the variety of Turin) over local varieties of Piedmontese.
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STANFORD, JAMES N. "“Eating the food of our place”: Sociolinguistic loyalties in multidialectal Sui villages." Language in Society 38, no. 3 (2009): 287–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404509090502.
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ABSTRACTAmong the Sui people of rural southwestern China, descent-group loyalties are closely tied to linguistic features. In every village, long-term dialect contact occurs between local villagers and in-marrying women from different clans, yet most speakers maintain their original dialect features to a high degree. The present study conducts ethnographic interviews to more deeply understand why such behavior occurs. Most current, practice-based models of identity tend to emphasize dynamic, flexible, individualistic choices – an approach that suits variation on many levels in many societies. However, to understand the descent-group loyalties particular to indigenous, non-Western, clan-based cultures like Sui, a more tempered, culturally sensitive model is necessary. Speakers show a deep sense of stability, permanence, and collective loyalty to communities of descent, (re)produced through stable linguistic expressions: acts of loyalty. The study also highlights the use of indigenous minorities’ own categories (place, toponyms, lineage) rather than non-indigenous categories. (Language and identity, place, dialect contact, clan, indigenous minority, acts of identity, acts of loyalty, community of practice, community of descent)
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Nahon, Peter. "The French linguistic varieties of Gypsies and Travellers: an original diastratic variation perspective." Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 140, no. 1 (2024): 30–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zrp-2024-0002.
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Abstract For centuries, France and the French-speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland have been home to a large minority of Gypsies and Travellers, comprising about 300,000 individuals who all speak a form of French as their native language and form a close-knit sociolinguistic community. Their French sociolect, hitherto never described by linguists, differs from other varieties of French through a wide array of phenomena at all levels of language structure: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics and morphology. Diachronic and contrastive analysis shows that these features are either (1) non-standard, archaic or regional characteristics now lost in other varieties of European French, but kept by the Travellers as diastratic variants; (2) internal innovations within the diasystem of Traveller French; (3) outcomes of contact with heritage languages of some of these groups (Sinti Romani, Jenisch, and Alemannic and Gallo-Romance dialects). Using predominantly new fieldwork I provide here the first description of this important set of diastratic varieties of French, which represents an outstanding case of linguistic variation in a context of social separation yet with sustained contact.
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Britain, David. "Dialect contact and phonological reallocation: “Canadian Raising” in the English Fens." Language in Society 26, no. 1 (1997): 15–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500019394.
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ABSTRACTThis article reports on research carried out in the Fens in Eastern England, a region noted in the dialectological literature as the site of a number of important phonological transitions, most notably [] and [a – a:], which separate northern and southern varieties of British English. Recordings of 81 speakers from across the Fens were analyzed for the use of (ai), a particularly salient local variable. A “Canadian Raising” type of allophonic variation was found in the central Fenland: speakers in this area used raised onsets of (ai) before voiceless consonants but open onsets before voiced consonants, morpheme boundaries, and //. The article weighs a number of possible explanations for the emergence of this variation in the Fens. Based on compelling evidence from the demographic history of the area, it supports a view that such an allophonic distribution, previously thought not to be found in Britain, emerged as the result of dialect contact. The sociolinguistic process of koinéization that is commonly associated with post-contact speech communities (Trudgill 1986) is held responsible for the focusing of this allophonic variation from the input dialects of an initially mixed variety. The article concludes by suggesting a socially based explanatory model to account for the way that speakers implement processes of focusing and koinéization in areas of dialect contact. [English, dialects, contact, koiné, geographical linguistics, social networks, structuration theory)
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Myrick, Caroline. "Putting Saban English on the map." English World-Wide 35, no. 2 (2014): 161–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.35.2.02myr.
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Small Caribbean islands offer a unique venue for examining principles of language contact and sociolinguistic variation. Only recently, however, has the use of acoustics-based analysis been incorporated as a tool for the phonological description and analysis of Caribbean varieties. This study offers the first empirical description and analysis of the English spoken on the island of Saba, a Dutch municipality located in the Eastern Caribbean. Data come from 22 sociolinguistic interviews with long-term residents conducted on Saba in 2012. Phonological and morphosyntactic features are analyzed with respect to the interrelationship between effects from community, ethnicity, and generation. Overall, this study contributes to the important process of phonological and morphosyntactic documentation of lesser-known Caribbean varieties, highlighting the usefulness of acoustics-based and statistical analyses in such processes.
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Delgado-Díaz, Gibran J. "The imperfect progressive in Puerto Rican Spanish: a case of language contact or grammaticalization?" International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2024, no. 286 (2024): 137–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2023-0021.
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Abstract The present study examines the use of the Spanish imperfect progressive in Puerto Rican Spanish to determine if this construction is influenced by English, or if it is responding to internal grammaticalization processes as defined as the process in which a lexical item acquires a grammatical function. 33 Puerto Ricans that lived in Puerto Rico completed a sociolinguistic interview and two retell tasks. The English influence hypothesis is discarded since the results indicate that the imperfect progressive is slowly grammaticalizing as a past imperfective, which explains why it can be used with all verbs classes and to express habitual events. Pre-existing work in the field proposes that progressive constructions can develop as imperfective markers. This finding supports the present progressive hypothesis which states that it grammaticalizes from a locative to a progressive expression, and later develops a habitual meaning. Finally, it is possible that some cases of language variation and change are due to grammaticalization processes, language contact, or language contact induced grammaticalization.
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Gordon, Matthew J. "Language Variation and Change in Rural Communities." Annual Review of Linguistics 5, no. 1 (2019): 435–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011817-045545.
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Despite the difficulty of delineating the rural from the urban according to economic or demographic criteria, this distinction has powerful cultural resonances, and language plays a key role in constructing the cultural divide between rural and urban. Sociolinguists have generally devoted more attention to urban communities, but substantial research has explored language variation and change in rural areas, and this scholarship complements the perspective gained from studies of metropolitan speech. This article reviews research on rural speech communities that examines the linguistic dimensions of the urban/rural divide as well as social dynamics driving language variation and change in rural areas. One theme emerging from this literature is the role of dialect contact and how its effects are shaped by material as well as attitudinal factors.
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Ekiye, Ekiyokere. "The use of specific linguistic features within the context of a casual conversation in a speech community." EJOTMAS: Ekpoma Journal of Theatre and Media Arts 7, no. 1-2 (2020): 294–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ejotmas.v7i1-2.19.
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There seems to be nothing remarkable about the interaction between two interlocutors who have never been in contact with each other. These persons are able to understand themselves in contact situations because most times, a common language of communication is known that can sustain the exchange for the time necessary. However, when such exchange is between individuals with some level of contact or familiarity, the concept of speech community comes into play. The concept is useful but may be problematic at times and one cannot avoid applying this idea when trying to make sense of the process that takes place in the conversation, specifically a causal conversation. The aim of this sociolinguistic study is to explain how individuals are able to build social history, construct interactional talk, maintain relations with each other and reinforce solidarity from a two hour audio recorded conversation (ARC) between an ethnic Indian and a Nigerian in Marylebone, London using interactional socio-linguistic and conversation analytic. By doing so, the concept of a speech community as well as how a group can be identified as being members of a community is understood. A particular focus is paid to such linguistic features as the register of conversation, turn taking, discourse variation, phonological variation and grammatical variation characteristic of London, Nigerian and Indian English observed in the speech of the participants and how these features function to build and maintain relations.
 Keywords: Speech community, Casual conversation, Linguistic features, Sociolinguistics, ARC
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Semenova, Marina, Daler Abdikaiumov, Genrik Amirian, and Jiang Jinhui. "Comparative T/V distribution in the speech of international students." BIO Web of Conferences 138 (2024): 04028. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/bioconf/202413804028.
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T/V distinction is a pressing linguistic issue in both applied and fundamental science due to language variation and change. Academic cooperation and mobility opportunities facilitate language contact and mutual transformation. Many Russian universities boast a large number of international students who speak native languages of their nation states at the same time learning Russian as a foreign language. The article aims at studying personal pronouns T/V in the speech of international students in their native languages as compared to Russian as a foreign language as it is a popular morphological element that marks social relations between individuals. This goal is achieved via a sociolinguistic experiment, which establishes certain sociolinguistic positions in terms of gender, age, professional occupation that might represent a problem of choosing between T and V pronouns. The research concludes that spontaneous speech contains certain deviations and fluctuations from the standard norm, with the most important positions being age and professional occupation.
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Blas Arroyo, José Luis. "At the boundaries of linguistic convergence: Variation in presentational haber / haver-hi." Languages in Contrast 18, no. 1 (2018): 35–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lic.00003.bla.
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Abstract In this paper, we focus on an eventual convergence outcome (the pluralization of presentational haber/haver-hi) in the grammar of two Romance languages, Spanish and Catalan, which have been living side-by-side for centuries in Eastern Spain. Taking into account the sociolinguistic comparative method and on the basis of several representative corpora of the two languages in contact, the data from this research offer evidence that points to a notable congruence between the underlying grammars of both languages, which would, at least partially, account for a similar diffusion of these vernacular pluralizations. Moreover, some of the few cases of disagreement found can be explained on the basis of both internal (such as the existence of points of structural conflict in some verbal paradigms) and external factors (such as hypercorrection), which certain social groups particularly sensitive to normative pressure are more receptive to.
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Méndez Kline, Tyler. "Sociolinguistic perception of lexical and syntactic variation among Persian-English bilinguals." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 8, no. 1 (2023): 5515. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5515.
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This study examines the relationship between sociolinguistic perception and Persian language variation. Prior work has shown that preconceived notions about how speakers use language and what kind of language they produce can affect listeners’ perceptions (D’Onofrio 2016; Hansen Edwards et al. 2019; Mack & Munson 2012; Niedzielski 1999). However, many questions remain unanswered regarding how social meaning is applied in contact situations, especially among self-identified native and heritage speakers. Within Persian language studies, some work has observed linguistic practices among both native and non-native speakers, finding that both vary significantly in their production patterns of certain syntactic and lexical features (Megerdoomian 2020). I ask whether Persian-English bilinguals associate non-standard forms with certain social personae categorized by linguistic background. Sixteen bilingual Persian-English speakers participated in an online survey with the task of matching standard and non-standard written productions to a pre-defined linguistic persona. Results so far suggest that Persian-English bilinguals actively construct associations between language use and speaker personae, with specific grammatical categories appearing more likely to index a non-native speaking identity. This brings up further questions about how bilinguals navigate sociolinguistic ideologies tied to speaker identity, and how heritage speakers and learners approach these notions. This study adds to the growing literature on bilingualism and sociolinguistic perception, with implications for critical discussions surrounding the various ideologies that place communities of multilingual speakers into strict social categories.
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Elkhafaifi, Hussein M. "Review of Rouchdy (2002): Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic. Variations on a Sociolinguistic Theme." Language Problems and Language Planning 27, no. 2 (2003): 205–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.27.2.12elk.
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Zenner,, Eline, Dirk Speelman,, and Dirk Geeraerts,. "Cognitive Sociolinguistics meets loanword research: Measuring variation in the success of anglicisms in Dutch." Cognitive Linguistics 23, no. 4 (2012): 749–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2012-0023.
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AbstractThis paper introduces a new, concept-based method for measuring variation in the use and success of loanwords by presenting the results of a case-study on 149 English person reference nouns (i.e. common nouns used to designate people, such as manager) in Dutch. With this paper, we introduce four methodological improvements to current quantitative corpus-based anglicism research, based on the general tenets of Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Geeraerts 2005; Kristiansen and Geeraerts 2007; Geeraerts 2010; Geeraerts et al. 2010): (1) replacing raw frequency as a success measure by a concept-based onomasiological approach; (2) relying on larger datasets and semi-automatic extraction techniques; (3) adding a multivariate perspective to the predominantly structuralist orientation of current accounts; (4) using inferential statistical techniques to help explain variation. We illustrate our method by presenting a case-study on variation in the success of English person reference nouns in Dutch. Generally, this article aims to show how a Cognitive Sociolinguistic perspective on loanword research is beneficial for both paradigms. On the one hand, the concept-based approach provides new insights in the spread of loanwords. On the other hand, attention to contact linguistic phenomena offers a new expansion to the domain of cognitive linguistic studies taking a variationist approach.
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Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E., and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. "‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters." Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 9, no. 2 (2023): 243–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0042.
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Abstract This paper presents a case study based on the writing of James Horner, one of the many Irish emigrants who crossed the Atlantic between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Communication between Horner and his family back in Ireland was kept through personal correspondence. His letters, which contain about 14,000 words in total, are part of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), and they provide detailed accounts of his experiences and impressions of the recently adopted country. They also show progressive standardisation, which makes them an interesting site for historical sociolinguistic analysis: shifting from vernacular Irish English towards a more standardised type of English to some degree. Our study focuses on the use of subject-verb agreement and addresses the following research questions: does geographical and social mobility condition Horner’s speech? If so, how does an individual’s social status affect language? The findings reported below show that social mobility as well as dialect contact seem to have contributed to general standardisation and the subsequent blurring of identity markers in language use. The paper, thus, offers new perspectives on the analysis of intra-speaker variation using historical data and contributes to the discussion of the need for this type of micro-analysis in the area of historical sociolinguistics.
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Nance, Claire. "‘New’ Scottish Gaelic speakers in Glasgow: A phonetic study of language revitalisation." Language in Society 44, no. 4 (2015): 553–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404515000408.
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AbstractThis article analyses phonetic variation among young people who have learned a minority language in immersion schooling as part of revitalisation measures. Such speakers are increasingly referred to as ‘new speakers’ in an expanding body of literature. The variable phonetic features analysed are vowels, laterals, and intonation in the speech of new Gaelic speakers from Glasgow and the Isle of Lewis. Results support previous work suggesting that new speakers will sound different from ‘traditional speakers’. These results are discussed in terms of language contact, modes of acquisition in revitalisation situations, and the differing perceptions and ideologies surrounding how new speakers use Gaelic. The data also necessitate an examination of some of the assumptions in sociolinguistic models of change and their applicability to contexts of rapid social evolution. (New speakers, language revitalisation, minority languages, Scottish Gaelic, laterals, vowels, intonation)*
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Slomanson, Peter, and Michael Newman. "Peer group identification and variation in New York Latino English laterals." English World-Wide 25, no. 2 (2004): 199–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.25.2.03slo.
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Following recent work showing that adolescent peer culture affiliation correlates with phonological variation, our research explores the effect of peer identities and national heritages on the English of Latino students in a New York City high school. Data were gathered in sociolinguistic interviews embedded in a two-year ethnography. The peer groups investigated for Spanish-English contact effects include Hip-Hoppers, Skaters, Geeks, and non-participants in high school peer cultures. Our data show that New York Latino English (NYLE) is distinct from both African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and New York European American Vernacular English (NYEAVE). Here we discuss a previously unexamined variable: the lateral (l). Our most robust research finding is the frequent occurrence of apical /l/ in the L1 Latino English onsets of our sample. This Spanish feature is foreign to NYEAVE and AAVE. Its frequency in L1 NYLE is highest among speakers unaffiliated with the high school peer cultures which promote convergence with NYEAVE and AAVE.
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Zainab Amir, Dr. Zahida Hussain, and Maham Noor . "THE ECHOES OF THE WORLD: LEXICAL BORROWING AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN MARQUEZ, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE." Journal for Current Sign 3, no. 2 (2025): 109–24. https://doi.org/10.63075/jcs.v3i2.136.
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Language functions beyond basic communication because it reflects both historical elements and power structures that unite with cultural traditions. Throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez combines Spanish indigenous languages and African dialects with English vocabulary in his story creation. The paper employs William Labov’s Sociolinguistic Variation Theory (1966) to examine how borrowed lexical items display Macondo’s evolving social order together with its colonial relationships and economic transformations. According to Labov, language variation is influenced by historical circumstances, social status, and identity markers. Elite members of society in One Hundred Years of Solitude speak traditional Spanish while the underprivileged combine indigenous and foreign words in their language. The arrival of the banana company introduces English words to Macondo thereby symbolizing rising contact between global capitalism and exploitation. Through the combination of code-switching, style- shifting and linguistic prestige Márquez enables words to act as narrators that demonstrate both colonial influence and indigenous resistance and cultural development patterns within his novel. Lexical borrowing in Márquez work serves more than mere decorative purposes since the author uses it to develop textual meaning that examines identity transformation alongside institutional oppression as well as cultural modernization. The author creates richer storytelling layers through language mixture to display Macondo’s struggle between traditional beliefs and modern changes which define its social complexion. One Hundred Years of Solitude presents an extended tale since the author expresses that his work encompasses the complete linguistic record of Latin America in history. Keywords: Language Variation, Lexical Borrowing, Linguistic Prestige, Sociolinguistic Variation Theory, Power Structures
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Yurayong, Chingduang, and Erika Sandman. "Chinese Word Order in the Comparative Sino-Tibetan and Sociotypological Contexts." Languages 8, no. 2 (2023): 112. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages8020112.
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The present study discusses typology and variation of word order patterns in nominal and verb structures across 20 Chinese languages and compares them with another 43 languages from the Sino-Tibetan family. The methods employed are internal and external historical reconstruction and correlation studies from linguistic typology and sociolinguistics. The results show that the head-final tendency is a baseline across the family, but individual languages differ by the degree of head-initial structures allowed in a language, leading to a hybrid word order profile. On the one hand, Chinese languages consistently manifest the head-final noun phrase structures, whereas head-initial deviants can be explained either internally through reanalysis or externally through contact. On the other hand, Chinese verb phrases have varied toward head-initial structures due to contact with verb-medial languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, before reinstalling the head-final structures as a consequence of contact with verb-final languages in North Asia. When extralinguistic factors are considered, the typological north-south divide of Chinese appears to be geographically consistent and gradable by the latitude of individual Chinese language communities, confirming the validity of a broader typological cline from north to south in Eastern Eurasia.
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Shetewi, Ourooba. "Accommodation Patterns in the Speech of Arabic-Speaking Children and Adolescents: A Variationist Analysis." Languages 8, no. 4 (2023): 236. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages8040236.
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This paper presents a variationist analysis of patterns of speech accommodation by 40 Arabic-speaking children and adolescents (aged 3–17) experiencing dialect contact in a Bedouin speech community near Damascus, Syria. It examines participants’ use of the phonological variables (θ), (ð), and (q), and the morphophonological feminine suffix (-a) in recorded sociolinguistic interviews and play sessions with two female fieldworkers, a local and an urban speaker, in order to investigate accommodation patterns across different interlocutors. Accommodation patterns were influenced by age, gender, and the linguistic variable under examination. Convergence to the urban interviewer was most evident in the realization of (q), whereas little convergence, and indeed variation, occurred in the realization of (-a), and more convergence occurred in the speech of girls and speakers younger than 15. Divergence and maintenance emerged in the speech of 15–17-year-old male speakers. These patterns are analysed in light of Accommodation Communication Theory and issues of identity and linguistic prestige in Arabic. Accommodative behaviour in the speech of participants exhibits their awareness of the social value of the phonological variables under investigation and demonstrates a high level of sociolinguistic awareness and competence.