Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa by Lotfi Sayahi

This book, based on an undergraduate course at Cambridge University, provides a comprehensive introduction to language change. Chapter 1 sets forth the history of the study of language change and the basic questions in the field. The remainder of the book is divided into two parts. Chapters 2–7 examine internally motivated change at the phonological, syntactic, semantic, and lexical levels. Within each chapter, the author outlines important theoretical positions, from the Neogrammarians to the generative work of Lightfoot and more recent studies of grammaticalization. Although, as McMahon notes, the separation of types of language change by levels involves considerable idealization, the result is greater clarity of organization. The second part (Chapters 8–12), which is concerned with language contact, language variation, pidgins and creoles, language attrition and death, and linguistic evolution, is organized topically. It is this section that is perhaps of most interest to students of SLA. As in the first section, McMahon reviews the perspectives on language change that emerge from a wide variety of classic studies, including Bickerton's work on Guyanese Creole and Dorian's studies of East Sutherland Gaelic. Although specialists might be disappointed to see their favorite studies missing, the examples provide an effective introduction for the intended audience of undergraduates.

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Heritage Tagalog Phonology and a Variationist Framework of Language Contact

Languages ◽

10.3390/languages6040201 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 201

Author(s):

Pocholo Umbal ◽

Naomi Nagy

Keyword(s):

Language Contact ◽

Heritage Language ◽

Language Variation ◽

Self Report ◽

Language Variation And Change ◽

Heritage Speakers ◽

Heritage Languages ◽

Mixed Effects Modeling ◽

Sources Of Variation ◽

Using Data

Heritage language variation and change provides an opportunity to examine the interplay of contact-induced and language-internal effects while extending the variationist framework beyond monolingual speakers and majority languages. Using data from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project, we illustrate this with a case study of Tagalog (r), which varies between tap, trill, and approximant variants. Nearly 3000 tokens of (r)-containing words were extracted from a corpus of spontaneous speech of 23 heritage speakers in Toronto and 9 homeland speakers in Manila. Intergenerational and intergroup analyses were conducted using mixed-effects modeling. Results showed greater use of the approximant among second-generation (GEN2) heritage speakers and those that self-report using English more. In addition, the distributional patterns remain robust and the approximant appears in more contexts. We argue that these patterns reflect an interplay between internal and external processes of change. We situate these findings within a framework for distinguishing sources of variation in heritage languages: internal change, identity marking and transfer from the dominant language.

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MINORITY GROUPS AND LANGUAGE DIVERSITY IN GERMANY AND BRAZIL: AN INTERVIEW WITH GÖZ KAUFMANN (UNIVERSITY OF FREIBURG, GERMANY)

Caderno de Letras ◽

10.15210/cdl.v0i35.17784 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 279

Author(s):

Göz Kaufmann ◽

Rafael Vetromille-Castro ◽

Bernardo Kolling Limberger ◽

Helena Dos Santos Kieling

Keyword(s):

Language Contact ◽

Language Change ◽

Minority Groups ◽

Language Variation ◽

Language Diversity ◽

Language Variation And Change ◽

Senior Lecturer ◽

Main Research ◽

Research Areas ◽

The University

Göz Kaufmann, who obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1997, completed his habilitation treatise in 2016 and received the venia legendi (livre docência) in German Linguistics from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He holds a permanent position as a senior lecturer (Akademischer Oberrat) for linguistics in the German Department of the University of Freiburg. Kaufmann’s main research areas are sociolinguistics, language contact, language variation, and language change. In the area of language variation and change, his focus is on German minority varieties spoken in South America, particularly Mennonite Low German and Pomerano. Aside from lexical and morphological variation, he analyzes syntactic variation in these varieties combining variationist and generative approaches. Göz Kaufmann worked in Brazil as a guest professor and representative of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) at the UFRGS and the USP. At the University of Pelotas (UFPel), he has already taught several courses and presented numerous talks. For more information, see http://paul.igl.uni-freiburg.de/kaufmann/?Home

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Cognate similarity and intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish

International Journal of Bilingualism ◽

10.1177/1367006921996807 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 136700692199680

Author(s):

Michael Gradoville ◽

Mark Waltermire ◽

Avizia Long

Keyword(s):

Language Contact ◽

Mixed Effects ◽

Frequency Effect ◽

Acoustic Measurements ◽

Linear Mixed Effects Model ◽

Phonetic Variation ◽

Linear Mixed Effects ◽

Contact Language ◽

The Relationship ◽

Phonetic Realization

Aims and objectives: While previous research has shown that phonetic variation in language contact situations is affected by whether a word has a cognate in the contact language, this paper aims to show that such an effect is not monotonic. According to the usage-based model, items in memory are organized according to similarity, thus we anticipated that formally more similar cognates would show a stronger cognate effect. Methodology: This variationist sociophonetic study investigates the relationship between cognate similarity and phonetic realization. We examined this relationship in the bilingual community of Rivera, Uruguay, in which both Portuguese and Spanish are spoken with regularity. Specifically, we focused on intervocalic /d/, which in monolingual Spanish is realized as an approximant [ð̞] or phonetic zero, but in monolingual Brazilian Portuguese is produced as a stop [d] or, in most varieties, an affricate [ʤ] before [i]. Data and analysis: We analyzed a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews of the Spanish spoken in Rivera. Acoustic measurements were taken from approximately 60 tokens each from 40 different speakers. Using a linear mixed-effects model, we examined the relationship between several predictors and the degree of constriction of intervocalic /d/. Findings/conclusions: While there is an overall frequency effect whereby more frequent words exhibit less constriction of intervocalic /d/, as both frequency and cognate similarity increase, less constriction of intervocalic /d/ obtains. Therefore, frequent cognates in Portuguese that have very similar forms affect the production of intervocalic /d/ more so than other cognates. Originality: No previous study has demonstrated that the cognate effect on phonetic variation in a situation of language contact is regulated by form similarity between cognate pairs. Significance/implications: The data support the usage-based model in that similar cognates have more lexical connections and can therefore show greater influence on phonetic realization than can cognates that share less phonetic material.

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Hands off the metadata!: Comparing the use of explicit and background metadata in crowdsourced dialectology

Linguistics Vanguard ◽

10.1515/lingvan-2019-0029 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (s1) ◽

Author(s):

Tamsin Blaxter ◽

David Britain

Keyword(s):

Language Variation ◽

Social Background ◽

Smartphone Application ◽

Background Information ◽

British Isles ◽

Language Variation And Change ◽

Digital Era ◽

The Social ◽

Dialect Variation ◽

Regional Dialect

Abstract In this article we assess the extent to which we can collect plausible data about regional dialect variation using crowdsourcing techniques – the BBC Future Survey – without explicitly gathering any user metadata, but relying instead on background information collected by Google Analytics. In order to do this, we compare this approach with another crowdsourced survey, operated from a smartphone application, which examines the same site – the British Isles – but which explicitly asks users to submit detailed social background information – the English Dialects App (EDA) (Leemann et al. 2018). The EDA has the disadvantage that there is a considerable user drop-off between completing the dialect survey and completing the social metadata questionnaire. The BBC Future Survey, however, only collects information on where users are physically located when they complete the survey – not where they are from or even where they live. Results show that the BBC Future Survey produces a plausible snapshot of regional dialect variability that can complement other more sophisticated (expensive, time-consuming) approaches to investigating language variation and change. We suggest the approach constitutes a digital-era rapid anonymous survey along the lines of Labov (1972), serving similar aims, with similar success, but on a much much larger scale.

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