Questions tagged [dialects]
Dialects are varieties of a language that differ in systematic ways from each other but are mutually intelligible.
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Does anyone actually use /æ/ as an emphatic article?
In the movie "Wayne's World" (1992), Mike Myers's character (the titular Wayne) says "I don't even own æ gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack." To my ears ...
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Does British English use fewer words than American English?
I was looking at the word frequency in British English. (I am an American, so I have some biases, but this does seem to be an objective pattern.) I looked at the 10,000 most common words in English ...
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1answer
88 views
Differences between free languages and official languages?
In short: as far as I know, English in the USA has no official standards from the government for how it's to be written and used. There are just dictionaries. Spanish however, has the RAE, which is an ...
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139 views
Is language change universal, ongoing, and arbitrary?
Learning that arbitrariness from Saussure means there is no logical connection between the sound of morpheme and its meaning. But can we brain storm about this topic a little bit?
When it comes to ...
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472 views
Why Russian does not vary from a region to a region?
We know that English varies from one country to another. Even within US, there are different accents (Baltimore, Texas, Kentucky, New York, etc).
But why Russian does not vary despite the large ...
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122 views
What is it called when a person pronounces the letter t in the word “metal” as something more similar to a d sound?
What is it called when a person pronounces the letter t in the word "metal" as something more similar to a d sound? And what is it called when a person stresses the t in the word "metal" to be more ...
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60 views
Are there any recent studies on vowels of PRS?
Consonants and their phenomena are well studied for PRS (Puerto Rican Spanish). However, vowels and their phenomena are less well known. Known vowel phenomena in the dialect are unstressed/final vowel ...
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1answer
118 views
Are consonants more stable than vowels?
I was trying my hand at an exercise to distinguish the different Sámi dialects (the exercise was used in the 2020 version of the Dutch Linguistics Olympiad). It gives nine words in all nine dialects ...
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86 views
Northumbrian pronunciation of ge-/gi- prefix and -g suffix
I'm working on a musical setting of Cædmon's Hymn, and I'd like to have the primary setting be in the Northumbrian dialect of its earliest written example (the 737 "Moore" Bede manuscript). I'm ...
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2answers
237 views
Is there a linguistic term for replacing past tense verb with present tense?
In my dialect of English (North West England), we sometimes use the present tense of a verb when standard English employs the past tense, such as in the sentence below:
"I waits for the bus ...
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1answer
130 views
Cumbrian sources
I'm interested in the cumbrian dialect, but I couldn't find good sources of vocabulary and pontual aspects of its grammar. Also, I was trying to understand the following poem:
I'll tell the'
We're ...
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1answer
38 views
Spoken Arabic dictionary/corpus?
Is there an existing corpus or dictionary for different spoken Arabic dialects? I'd like to look up a word (in English or MSA or in a spoken dialect) and find where this word or phrase is spoken (and ...
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1answer
57 views
Looking for Spanish varieties/accents
This might not be the right place to ask this, and if so, I apologize. I'm a student conducting research on Spanish varieties and I am wondering if anyone knows where I could find short texts read by ...
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181 views
What is a similect?
I'm looking for attested examples of similects in action. The term is relatively new for me. Could someone point me in the right direction?
Etymology
Coined by Anna Mauranen in a 2012 paper, from ...
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1answer
107 views
Difference between dialect levelling and pidgin formation?
So dialect levelling is, in which the speech of a group of people converges towards a common norm, with extreme differences being ironed out. While pidgin is a grammatically simplified means of ...
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35 views
What is sentence focus environment?
I am currently reading a chapter about dialect that distinguish dialects according to the alignment that is used in the dialect (alignment such as nominative-accusative, tripartite. etc)
I am ...
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1answer
232 views
Does the southern pronunciation of Jenny have a triphthong in it?
You know when Forrest Gump yells Jenny's name and it sounds like "Jenneay". I'm wondering if there actually is a triphthong at the end there, of it is a figment of my imagination. I believe the ...
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42 views
How have dialectology surveys changed over the years?
*Apologies for any ill terminology I may use, I'm pretty new to the field
I've been working on the transition of dialectology surveys from the traditional methods to the modern ones, now that we not ...
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87 views
Is there a name for this type of language divergence and isolation?
In South Australia there is a region called the Barossa Valley. At some point [after WW2? not sure] it was settled by a lot of German farmers who bought land and started dairy farms. They applied ...
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1answer
141 views
Where does Texan English derive its l-vocalization?
My English teacher grew up in Texas and unsurprisingly her native dialect is Texan English. I noticed that when intervocalic /l/ is followed by /i/, the /l/ is elided and /y/ takes its place. For ...
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2answers
104 views
How does the Sankt Goar isogloss work?
The Sankt Goar line crosses the german town of Sankt Goar and separates the dialects that have t in words like wat and dat and the dialects that have s in the corresponding words was and das. Is this ...
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1answer
159 views
The “th” sound as a plosive in British dialects
I've noticed that the th sound often becomes a plosive sound in Appalachian English. When and how did this phenomenon start?The only case I know where this happens in the british isles is Irish.Does ...
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37 views
Data on how people really talk in, for example, West Texas?
My wife and I just watched the movie No Country for Old Men, which is set in West Texas ca. 1980, and I couldn't help feeling that the screenwriter was laying it on a little thick with the regional ...
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3answers
376 views
“Ring species” as dialect continuum?
In biology, ring species is a population of subspecies in a geographically ring-shaped region, where individuals are close (in terms of interbreeding) if they live close to each other, but between the ...
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Pre-Hilalian Hilalian dialects comparaison
What are the main differences between Pre-Hilalian Tunisian dialects ( or any other Maghrebi dialects ) and the Hilalian ones ( Pronunciation , vocabulary ... ) .
Let’s take the dialect I speak as an ...
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2answers
138 views
Use of the definite article in European vs. Brazilian Portuguese
When I started learning Portuguese years ago, all the books I used at the time told me that when using possessive adjectives you also have to put the corresponding definite article in front of the ...
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1answer
148 views
What's the longest extant dialect continuum?
According to jknappen, there's a dialect continuum stretching from Rome to Lisbon without interruption. This is a wonderfully interesting piece of trivia that I wouldn't have believed before seeing ...
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1answer
345 views
“We was” and other dialectical variants
According to the British Library site, the use of nonstandard forms of past tense expressions like “we was” are common in some English dialects
The verb 'to be' has two simple past forms in ...
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1answer
216 views
Which dialect/accent of English has the most/least sounds?
My accent is from New York City, yet I wonder which area has the most or least sounds in their phonemic inventory. While one may have the most vowels and another the most consonants, I would like to ...
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3answers
581 views
Are there established linguistic theories which incorporate the concept of “lazy speech”?
Motivation
So on EL&U, I pretty often encounter the claim, under a question of some usage or other, that certain usages are the consequence of "lazy speakers", who "would otherwise" use some (...
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1answer
115 views
What ways do you know to encourage people to come up with different ways of saying the same thing?
Question: What ways do you know to encourage people to come up with different ways of saying the same thing?
Background: I'm working on a project where my goal is to get variants of utterances as a ...
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2answers
148 views
Is there a term when two words have swapped definitions in one language or dialect compared to another?
My Peruvian friend informed me that a lemon is called "lima" in Peru while a lime is called "limón". This contrasts with some other Spanish dialects that use the word "limón" for lemon and "lima" for ...
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63 views
Is it plausible there will be an established form of European English in the future?
What is more probable:
A) there will be an established form of European English in the future that will differ slightly from British or American English?
Or
B) the English dialects in the world ...
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1answer
352 views
Is the voiceless alveolar affricate, [t͡s], phonetically present in General American?
I've run into a lot of sources that indicate [t͡s] is not in GA. While this might be true phonemically, I don't entire believe this to be true for the actual phonetics.
By the definition of an ...
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1answer
7k views
How different are Chinese dialects?
How different are Chinese dialects, on average, relative to the differences between European languages?
Are the dialects spoken in Western and Eastern China as different as, say, Russian and Polish, ...
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1answer
195 views
Conflation of language dialects and phonology
The main idea behind this questions is that I have some difficulty to accept that a certain language can be a dialect of another one by simply basing that argument on the similarity of the vocabulary ...
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611 views
Can the “dialect continuum” phenomenon be recognized from Rome to Lisbon?
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a spread of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighbouring varieties differ only slightly, but the differences accumulate over ...
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1answer
259 views
What is the IPA classification for these sounds?
I'd like to know the classification for these sounds: g, c, z and s as in gitano, trencito, zorro and casa, in Latino American Spanish. For instance, which ones are fricatives, or affricates, etc.
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299 views
Calabrian/Sicilian and unstressed e/o
I sorta-kinda was "taught" that Sicilian turns all unstressed "e"s to "i"s and "o"s to "u"s.
Then I got to know a couple Calabrian songs whose dialect seemed almost Sicilian, so I extended that ...
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1answer
305 views
Is Occitan a single language or have its different dialects become separate languages?
The Wikipedia page for the language mentions a 'controversy' about whether it is a language, macrolanguage or language family.
Is there an official status for the language and what are the ...
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2answers
220 views
Can Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian be considered linguistically distinct?
I grew up the in the former Yugoslavia, and the language I studied in school was called Serbocroatian, which was spoken in four out of the six republics of the union. When the country fell apart, the ...
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367 views
Any other example of “socially stigmatized phoneme” like the “th” sound in some Venetian dialect?
Older people living in some rural areas north of Venice use the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ for many words, like cena "supper" which is pronounced θena, exactly like in Spanish cena (Castilian, not ...
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1answer
128 views
What's this punctuating feature of some peoples' English?
What exactly is the name and nature of this odd bit of consistent yet seemingly redundant English found in many forms of colloquial English:
"She gave me dates, she did!"
"The little lads ran home, ...
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2answers
172 views
Why do some English speakers insert a /t/ in ⟨else⟩ and say /ɛlts/?
Some English speakers insert a /t/ absent in standard American English in ⟨else⟩.
How did this arise? What’s the mechanism behind it? Is it related to the insertion of a /ks/ in ⟨espresso⟩, as in /...
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1answer
180 views
Where can I find training data for dialects of Hindi?
I am working on a NLP project that aims at identifying different dialects of Hindi language. My über goal is to generate dialogs in once the program identifies which dialect is given.
I tried ...
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624 views
How do linguists differentiate a dialect from a language? [duplicate]
As in how do they decide "X is a separate language from Y, but Z is a dialect of Y." I know there is the old adage "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy", but surely there must be some semi-...
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586 views
Minimal Pairs Highlighting the Difference between American and British English
Does anyone have a list of minimal pairs, highlighting the difference between American and British English?
Thanks.
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4answers
862 views
Are different varieties of German closer to each other than different Slav languages?
Are different varieties of German (e.g. Bavarian and Low German) closer to each other than different Slav languages (e.g. Russian and Polish)?
The lexical distance map from https://elms.wordpress.com/...
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1answer
313 views
Is there such a thing as a “neutral dialect”?
It seems every language (that I know, at least) has a dialect that it considers more "neutral" than others. Like General American, for instance.
To what extent are these dialects actually more ...
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3answers
366 views
Are non-spoken elements, such as capitalization and punctuation mark usage, part of the English language?
On the English Language Learners SE meta site, I'm involved in a conversation that I find somewhat bizarre. In the order in which they appear, here are the assertions (paraphrased with supporting ...
