This paper provides an account of the long vowel shift currently underway in the trans-statal Plautdietsch speech community. Placement of the shift within Labov’s typology of vowel shifts reveals a commonly overlooked development in Plautdietsch vowel movement, namely the centralization of mid-high back vowels which must have occurred before the breakup of the community into New and Old World groups. Shared centralization prompted both groups to have similar developments in the back vowel space after they were no longer geographically contiguous and prompted many groups to undergo centralization in the front vowel space. This case study reveals a pattern of innovation in which separation from parent communities fosters linguistic innovations in daughter communities. These innovations occur irrespective of the traditional Molotschna or Chortitza dialect affiliation of the daughter colonies in question.

This paper revisits the question of national varieties in German, a concept that still has not found solid empirical proof, at least not from a quantitative-etic perspective. The question raised is how data collected in the course of the international research project, Variantengrammatik des Standarddeutschen (Handbook of Grammatical Variation in Standard German), and the application of spatial statistical methods to geographical variant distribution patterns can contribute to this discussion. With the aid of Factor Analysis and spatially modified clustering of variant distribution patterns it is shown that—at least from a quantitative/corpus linguistic point of view—there is no evidence for assuming nation-specific varieties. Importantly, this result does not imply the existence of a homogenous German standard language; rather, it is argued that geographical variation does not self-evidently legitimize the assumption of standard varieties.

This paper discusses the regional variation in four ongoing sound changes in the Dutch vowels /eː,øː,oː,ɛi,œy/ that are conditioned by a following coda /l/. The synchronic diatopic diffusion of these changes is charted using the Dutch teacher corpus, a comprehensive dataset containing word-list data from four regions in The Netherlands and four in Flanders. Comparisons are made of the five vowels preceding nonapproximant consonants and preceding coda /l/. To avoid manually segmenting the oftentimes highly gradient vowel–/l/ boundary, GAMMs are used to model whole formant trajectories. Comparisons are then made of trajectories and of peaks of trajectories. The results are used to classify the nature of the four sound changes in terms of phonetic and lexical abruptness/graduality and to show that the changes are intertwined in such a way that they can only be considered as separate facets of a single, currently ongoing vowel shift.

This article describes the results of a research project carried out over a period of 25 years on the spoken Irish Gaelic of the Aran Islands, Co. Galway, Ireland. It combines microdialectology with sociolinguistics and investigates a wide range of phonological, grammatical, and lexical variables. In addition to revealing complex patterns of geolinguistic variation involving small local areas on the main island and on neighboring islands, it also shows the clear influence of age, gender, and individual creativity on the patterns of variation.

This paper takes a quantitative perspective on data from the project Syntax hessischer Dialekte (SyHD), covering dialects in the German state of Hesse, an area with rich dialectal variation. Many previous dialectometric analyses abstracted away from intralocal variation (e.g., by only counting the most frequent variant at a location). In contrast, we do justice to intralocal variation by taking into account local frequency relations. The study shows that the border between Low German and Central German—one of the most important isoglosses in German dialectology—is not relevant for syntactic phenomena. At the same time, a comparison with character n-grams (a global measure of string similarity) reveals that the traditionally assumed dialect areas, primarily defined according to phonological developments, are still present in the twenty-first century data. Different from previous studies, our results are obtained from a uniform data base. Therefore, the differences between syntax and phonology cannot be due to variation in sampling, elicitation method, or time of elicitation.

This paper investigates the occurrence of inflected predicative adjectives, an optional yet distinguishing feature of German dialects spoken in southern Switzerland. We provide an in-depth analysis of the patterns of change of this morphosyntactic marker with a particular focus on extralinguistic factors. Historical records from 1950 were compared to contemporary data collected from 192 speakers across 49 localities in 2020–21. Our results corroborate previous reports indicating a substantial, real-time decline in inflected forms. Logistic mixed-effects modeling suggests that the inflection of predicative adjectives occurs more frequently among speakers who report tight social networks, have a strong local dialect identity, and regularly use one or more Romance languages. These findings support the claim that tight social networks and local dialect identity construction may lead to the preservation of conservative grammatical forms. Additionally, the effect of Romance languages highlights the role of transfer phenomena induced by language contact.

Placenames are seemingly universal, with the potential to reveal different systems of organizing information in everyday communication. We report on the relationship between placenames in Jahai, an indigenous language spoken by the Jahai people of the Malay Peninsula, and the environment. Our approach explores the tendency to organize names using a hierarchy of kinship associated with the cnεl, mythological entities in origin stories, which appears to map onto catchment areas. By associating linguistic data with these ethnographic inputs and geographical properties calculated in a Geographic Information System, we generate and make suggestions for productive ways of understanding placenames as systems.

The present study explores how two symbolic boundaries—linguistic variety and race—intersect, influencing how Latin American immigrants are perceived in Spain. To this end, 217 Spaniards participated in an experiment in which they evaluated three men along a series of social properties, but they were presented with different combinations of linguistic variety (Argentinian, Colombian, or Spanish) and race (a White or Mestizo photograph). The results of mixed-effects regression models found that linguistic variety conditioned participants’ evaluations of status, occupational prestige, solidarity, and trustworthiness, and both variety and race conditioned evaluations of religiousness. We contend that linguistic features become associated with a specific group of people through rhematization (Gal, 2005; Irvine & Gal, 2000) and, by extension, ideologies link those people with stereotypical characteristics. We conclude that the “ideological twinning” (Rosa & Flores, 2017) of race and linguistic variety can enhance stereotypes toward immigrants and impact their experiences in the receiving country.

The use of future subjunctive (FS) has suffered a steady decline in written Spanish from the fourteenth century. It is not clear whether it disappeared similarly in each clause, and whether its use was determined by regional distinctions to be considered as a dialectal feature. Granda (1986) suggested that the Hispanic Caribbean countries in the Americas were more conservative in the use of FS in contrast to other regions in a southerly direction. Ramírez-Luengo (2008), however, argued that FS decline occurred uniformly in the Americas, with the eighteenth century being the critical time for the substitution. In a sample of 45 legal documents (60,852 words) from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, issued in northwest and southwest Colombia, the proportions of FS and other alternating forms were equally likely in both regions. FS tabulations were less likely to occur in the nineteenth century within relative clauses, while they were equally likely to occur in conditional protases. This suggests that FS in written Spanish does not show dialectal differences and that its decline might have occurred earlier in relative clauses than conditional protases, probably due to a stylistic motivation.

This paper aims to understand the contribution of geographical information in the perception of linguistic variation. A total of 813 mental maps collected among young speakers from different cities in Tuscany have been analyzed via an open-access web dialectometric tool (Gabmap). In particular, the study seeks to verify the role of geographic distance and the place of residence of the respondents in modeling perceived variation. The relationship between dialect grouping as made by linguists and perceived taxonomies of sublinguistic areas is also investigated. Results show that geographical proximity between mapped areas significantly predicts the perception of dialect similarity. Our participants made their decisions looking at (1) a keen sense of spatial contiguity, and (2) the synchronic presence of linguistic differences between the Tuscan subregions. Moreover, classification uncertainty grows when the mapped areas are very close to, or very distant from, the participants’ places of residence. Methodological and linguistic perspectives of mental maps in folk linguistics are finally discussed.

This project uses GIS mapping to analyze spatial trends in spoken language, testing how features identified as part of the “Southern dialect” by the Atlas of North American English (ANAE; Labov et al., 2006) are used in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS; Kretzschmar et al., 2013). We analyze vowel mergers, diphthongization, monophthongization, fronting, and several consonantal features. Rather than drawing isoglosses, we use local spatial autocorrelation analysis to reveal subregional patterning in the data. We present a series of maps illustrating the realization of Southern speech features as enumerated by ANAE. We find little evidence for ANAE’s Inland South region based on acoustics, and while some areas surveyed in DASS align well with the portrayal of Southern speech presented by ANAE, others do not.