Linguistics

Questions tagged [dialects]

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Dialects are varieties of a language that differ in systematic ways from each other but are mutually intelligible.

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What to call a "dialect" that forms in a certain setting?

What do you call the language-variation that a group of people speak with each other in a certain setting? It's a language variety that adheres to all the rules and framework of the original language, ...
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How does an original proto language produce its daughter languages?

I am trying to understand the principles how a proto language produces it daughter languages, do they proliferate from dialects of the same proto language or do they proliferate from dialects of other ...
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643 views

Origin of the English word 'tooth' being pronounced /tʊθ/?

According to Wiktionary, the English word 'tooth' can be pronounced as /tʊθ/ (as opposed to its regular pronunciation in RP of /tuːθ/) in certain areas of Wales and the British Midlands. Is there any ...
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Is there a region in which velarized L is the primary (and sole) articulation? Or is it indicative of an articulation disorder?

Listening to Ira Glass the other day, I noticed his 'l', to my ears, sounds exclusively velar with little to no dental component. Here's a clip (he says the word "like" a couple times in ...
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447 views

Examples of languages that should be considered dialects, or dialects that should be considered languages

Are there any examples of languages that are extremely similar but are nonetheless considered to still be separate languages? Or the converse, dialects of one language that are extremely different ...
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Is this Wikipedia Arabic dialects map correct about Badawi Arabic, and what is Badawi Arabic?

This map is from Wikipedia's Varieties of Arabic page. On the northern half of the western Red Sea coast, as well as most of Sinai and Israel, it seems to indicate that "Badawi" Arabic is ...
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Why do even completely illiterate persons, who speak their national language poorly, speak their local dialect with perfection?

Disclaimers: I have no linguistic knowledge whatsoever, I'm just fascinated by these subjects. Also, I will use the word "dialect" due to my lack of a better word, although I see that the ...
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128 views

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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155 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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268 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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647 views

Why does Russian not vary from region to 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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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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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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178 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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126 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
296 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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145 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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78 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
63 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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443 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
151 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
295 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, or of it is a figment of my imagination. I ...
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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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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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180 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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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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221 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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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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483 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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137 views

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
158 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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212 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
392 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
424 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
753 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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121 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
165 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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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
604 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
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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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261 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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830 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
323 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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580 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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447 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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274 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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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
135 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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207 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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