28.4378, Review: Sociolinguistics: Nerbonne, Knooihuizen, Côté (2016)

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Subject: 28.4378, Review: Sociolinguistics: Nerbonne, Knooihuizen, Côté (2016)

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Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2017 13:43:55
From: Marco Caria [caria.mar at tiscali.it]
Subject: The future of dialects

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-864.html

EDITOR: Marie-Hélène  Côté
EDITOR: Remco  Knooihuizen
EDITOR: John  Nerbonne
TITLE: The future of dialects
SERIES TITLE: Language Variation 1
PUBLISHER: Language Science Press
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Marco Caria, (MIUR) Ministero dell'Istruzione Università e Ricerca

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The conference Methods in Dialectology XV held on 11-15 August 2014 in
Groningen, the Netherlands as the fifteenth in the series started in 1972,
consisted of  the presentation of 140 single-papers. For the first time the
organizers included a poster session consisting of fourteen posters, two of
which were awarded with prizes for young scholars funded by the Alliance for
Digital Humanities Organizations. 

In “The future of dialects: Selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV”,
edited by Marie-Hélène Côté,   Remco Knooihuizen and John Nerbonne,  the main
topic focuses on the methodology dealing with the dialects of different
linguistic areas and the papers include studies on several idioms going from
the “immigration languages” in Canada to some variants of Japanese.

The book consists of three main sections:  “The future”,  “Methods”  and
“Japanese Dialectology”.  In the first section, as the title proposes, the
articles deal with the problematic of the dialects and their future. It is
widely acknowledged that traditional dialects are suffering from an increasing
loss of prestige against the standard languages, especially in Europe, due to
the massive predominance of the standard  languages in education and
communication  media. Starting from this perspective Naomi Nagy describes in
her paper “Heritage languages as new dialects” the situation of the heritage
languages (Faetar, Cantonese, Italian, Korean, Russian and Ukrainian) imported
to Canada by immigrants and eroded or influenced by Canadian English or
Canadian French and in which way these heritage languages can be identified as
new dialects of their original standard counterparts. Nagy also insists on the
necessity to integrate methods of contact linguistics. Anne-Sophie Ghyselen
analyses in her contribution “From diglossia to diaglossia: a West Flemish
case study”  the phenomenon of diglossia and diaglossia in Ypres, West
Flanders.  The results of her surveys show that both dialect and standard
language are used as a means of daily communication in the area, respectively
for informal/regional and formal/supraregional situations.  The intermediate
variety of speech between dialect and standard idiom, the Tussentaal, appears
to be too heterogeneous and unstable to be considered as an autonomous
variant. In “The future of Catalan dialects’ syntax: A case study for a
methodological contribution”  Ares Llop Naya uses the micro-comparative syntax
method in order to obtain fine-grained data related to the negative
constructions in Catalan. In particular, he combines existing studies on
Catalan with dialect literature, speaker recordings and even folk-linguists
and  he focuses on the negation particle “cap” (head) and its use in Pallarese
Catalan (a Northwestern Pyrenean Catalan dialect, very conservative and in
contact with Aranese Gascon, Aragonese and French) to show clearly that
innovation in variation research consists also of a multi-methodological
linguistic approach. 

 In the second section the contributions study the dialects from the point of
view of the Dialectometry and the necessary new approaches to this branch of
the Dialectology.  Simon Pickl writes in “Fuzzy dialect areas and prototype
theory: Discovering latent patterns in geolinguistic variation” that for
decades dialect areas, or rather regional distribution of dialect analogies,
have been considered as one of the favourite means of presentation of the
dialectological research about the influence of geography on varieties of
speech, even if it was widely evident that such cladistic techniques   could
not always represent the real dialect relationships, since the dialect
continua were to be found in the data,, and the borders of these dialectal
zones were often too dim.  A good solution suggested by the scholar consists
of avoiding some dialectometric methods such as clustering in favour  of
considering dialect areas  as fuzzy and trying to reconstruct the varieties
through the well-known theory of Isoglosses and the technique of factor
analysis. It will result that if dialect varieties can be seen as fuzzy
categories, they cannot consequently have sharply defined boundaries but show
several features directly correlated to the many overlapping cultural and
linguistic co-occurrences and variants.  In the second contribution  entitled
“On the problem of field worker Isoglosses” Andrea Mathussek analyses the
technique of field worker isoglosses  (FWI) with special reference to their
presence in the Sprachatlas vom Mittelfranken. The author writes that the
field workers were conscious of the risks of possible idiosyncrasies in
transcription originating in the individual habits of the researchers; they
attempted to eschew them by comparing, co-transcribing and meeting to discuss
on their works.  Using the web application Gabmap which has been conceived to
highlight dialect variations, the author demonstrates how the differences owed
to FWI were present even after a high level of efforts to avoid them. 

Simonetta Montemagni and Martijn Wieling focus their research “Tracking
linguistic features underlying lexical variation patterns: A case study on
Tuscan dialects” on lexical dialectology and on the use of graph theory to
show the characteristics of Tuscan dialects. The innovation introduced to the
traditional dialectometry consists of regarding as characteristic only those
features which meet both the conditions of how representative and how
distinctive the studied features are.  Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, Tanguy Solliec 
and Jean Le Dû follow in their paper  “A new dialectometric approach applied
to the Breton language” an innovative dialectrometical approach pertaining the
Breton language and basing their research on data from the Nouvel Atlas
Linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne Le Dû (2001). In particular, the authors
report the results obtained resorting to the Levensthein algorithm which is
applied to measure and to record statistically the dissimilarities and the
resemblances between different ways of pronouncing a word. The target of the
authors is to determine whether the cause of linguistic distance resides in
the repetition of the same linguistic circumstance or whether it is the result
of a series of manifold transformations. A really interesting point of view on
another dialectometrical technique is given by Jelke Bloem, Martijn Wieling
and John Nerbonne in “Automatically identifying characteristic features of
non-native English accents”, who measure quantitatively the level of
characterisation of a speech trait to automatically identify the distinctive
features of non-native English accents. 

In “Mapping the perception of linguistic form: Dialectometry with perceptual
data” Tyler Kendall and Valerie Fridland deal with the dialectometrical
methods, particularly the geo-statistical techniques,  by proposing them as
effective tools for  perceptual phonetics tasks: the aim of their research is
in fact not only to understand the regional differences in vowel perception in
the USA from a statistical point of view, but also to strengthen the validity
of the collaboration between dialectometry and sociolinguistics.  In his
contribution “Horizontal and vertical variation in Swiss German morphosyntax” 
Philipp Stoeckle deals with the German spoken in Switzerland. Even if he
doesn’t identify his work as purely dialectometrical, he uses the
Delaunay-Voronoi techniques  to obtain an index of variation based on the
aggregation of over 57 items. The author focuses on the syntactic variation
and he measures the occurrences of a given variant also on a geographical
scale to determine the eventual degree of dominance. 

In their second co-written contribution “Infrequent forms: Noise or not?”
Simonetta Montemagni and Martijn Wieling investigate how effective the
simplification of dialectometrical data through the removal of infrequent
forms is. They use hierarchical bipartite spectral graph partitioning to
highlight variations in a large corpus of Tuscan dialects applying a double
analysis: the first one includes the variants used at least by the 0,5% of the
informants and the second one which includes all the given variants in the
data. The final result of their research is that using all data allows them to
establish a geographical characterisation more aligned to a linguistic basis
than by using curtailed data.

 Christoph Wolk & Benedikt Szmrecsany describe in “Top-down and bottom-up
advances in corpus-based dialectometry” their use of three different
dialectometrical approaches applied to morphosyntactic variation in the
Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects. The first two approaches are “top-down”:
one of  them uses a pure frequency-based analysis and the other investigates
the probabilistic variants. The third approach is “bottom-up” and it avoids
pre-built lists and uses a permutation-based metric deriving directly from the
analysis of the data. In “Imitating closely related varieties”  Lea Schäfer,
Stephanie Leser and Michael Cysouw investigate the mechanisms involved in the
phenomenon of imitation of closely related languages, offering interesting
overviews on the role of perceptual dialectology, psycholinguistics and the
study of the evolution itself of a language. 

In “Spontaneous dubbing as a tool for eliciting linguistic data: The case of
second person plural inflections in Andalusian Spanish” Victor Lara Bermejo
tries to analyse in an innovative way the sociolinguistic evolution of a
Peninsular Spanish phenomenon whose most recent research dates back to the
1930’s: the use of a single pronoun used to address a group of people. In 
“Dialect levelling and changes in semiotic space” Ivana Škevin deals with the
levelling of a dialect in correlation with the concept of semiotic  and
sociolinguistic space. The loss of many romance words in the Dalmatian dialect
of Betina, Croatia, is not due to the influence of standard Croatian but to
the lesser importance of these words in the daily life of the speakers. This
alteration in the semiotic space has the same result  as that occurring in
case of dialect levelling: the loss of the peculiarities of a dialect.

 In “Code-switching in the Anglophone community in Japan” Keiko Hirano
investigates the use of the Japanese lexicon in native English-speaking
teachers of English in Japan and the phenomenon of code-switching
Japanese-English. The research shows how the use of Japanese words increases
proportionally to the duration of the period the teacher has lived in Japan
and that it is correlated to the social network built by each native speaker
of English with other native speakers of the same language.  Both the last two
papers of this section deal with the technique of ultrasound tongue imaging
applied to dialectology. In “Tongue trajectories in North American English /æ/
tensing” Christopher Carignan, Jeff Mielke & Robin Dodsworth draw their
attention to the /æ/ variant in North American English, comparing its phonetic
realisation before different consonants and in different variants.  The
results show different degrees of vowel-consonant coarticulation of /æ/ in the
North American dialects, but the authors also take the opportunity to
emphasise how attractive the ultrasound tongue imaging technique can be.

 In “s-retraction in Italian-Tyrolean bilingual speakers: A preliminary
investigation using the ultrasound tongue imaging technique” Lorenzo Spreafico
use the same technique to investigate the realisation of /s/ in South-Tyrol,
Italy. He highlights how the articulation of this consonant is opposed to the
apical one of Italian, particularly in /sV/ vs. /sCV/  in Italian and Tyrolean
words pronounced by Italian-mother tongues, Tyrolean-mother tongues and
bilinguals in different contexts, suggesting that the articulation of /s/ is
influenced by the contact with Italian. The author concludes his article
expressing the necessity of more studies to clarify the sociophonetic
significance of the results he has attained with his research.

In the last section the papers deal with Japanese dialectology. In “Developing
the Linguistic Atlas of Japan Database and advancing analysis of geographical
distributions of dialects” Yasuo Kumagai gives details on the ongoing
development of the Linguistic Atlas of Japanese Database (LAJ) and on the
digitalisation of the materials collected for it from 1966 to 1974. Kumagai
emphasizes that some of this material, when updated, offers the possibility to
investigate the geographical distributions of  standard forms or  the degrees
of similarity among localities and the consequent emerging  network
representation of these phenomena. In the following two papers “Tracing real
and apparent time language changes by comparing linguistic maps” and “Timespan
comparison of dialectal distributions” the authors, respectively Chitsuko
Fukushima and Takuichiro Onishi, discuss and use the longitudinal data
deriving from a comparison between the material contained in the LAJ and
recent linguistic surveys. Fukushima makes use of four surveys  proposed in
different periods to trace the language changes which occurred in the Niigata
area from a diachronic perspective. The superimposition of the maps obtained
from the surveys gives isoglosses that show completed language changes and
changes still in progress. Onishi makes use of two surveys to investigate the
theory of waves for linguistic changes. The author analyses a period covering
50 years of geolinguistic data for the same area, obtaining as a result the
fact that language changes are neither continual nor gradual, but almost
immediate, and not only from the centre to the periphery of an area, but also
inversely. However, these changes do not occur easily because dialect is a way
of communication for people, and dialect changes could obviously impede or
aggravate the communication itself. 

In the conclusive article “Tonal variation in Kagoshima Japanese and factors
of language change” Ichiro Ota, Hitoshi Nikaido and Akira Utsugi discuss the
tonal variation in Kagoshima Japanese (KJ) by analysing the phonological and
social factors that may invest the language changes. KJ shows relevant
differences from Standard Japanese (SJ), especially in the use of accented and
unaccented words. The authors point out the fact that change patterns toward 
accented/unaccented, respectively indicated as “de-dialectization” and
“de-standardization”, are strictly connected to different social meanings and
influenced by the role of the mass media. 

EVALUATION

“The Future of Dialects” is an innovative book for all the dialectologists who
want to use dialectometry for their research. It gives important advice on how
dialectometrical techniques are to be used in analysing linguistic data
already disposable, but it also points out the necessity to apply new methods
for the collection of new materials. For all these reasons the papers
contained in the volume should be read not only for their intrinsic value, but
also as a guide in conducting studies of variationist linguistics, covering
the matters of areal, social and historical changes in dialects.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a PhD of the University of Sassari, Italy. My research fields deal with
the linguistic minorities in Italy, especially those of German origin. With my
PhD dissertation I have analyzed the situation of Kanaltal/Val Canale, a small
valley of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, where Italian, Friulian, German and Slovenian
dialects still coexist. I hope I will be given the possibility to continue
this research, also focusing on the similar situation in South-Tyrol.





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