The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the 'dialect-standard' landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociolinguistic histories, as well as on previously unexplored sociolinguistic situations. The contributions all share the twin characteristics of (a) robust scrutiny of structural variation and its links to both structural-systemic parameters and extralinguistic variables and (b) nuanced approaches to macro- and micro- level categories, with the requisite theoretical and methodological fine-tuning. While focusing on different languages/language groups, the papers in this volume share the common foci of bringing together structural and sociolinguistic considerations and of the concomitant necessary revisiting of methodologies. The data and analyses presented yield a firmer and more nuanced understanding of the dynamic permutations of cross-dialectal and dialect-to-standard convergence and the formation of intermediate varieties in different yet comparable contexts.

The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the ‘dialect-standard’ landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociolinguistic histories, as well as on previously unexplored sociolinguistic situations. The contributions all share the twin characteristics of (a) robust scrutiny of structural variation and its links to both structural-systemic parameters and extralinguistic variables and (b) nuanced approaches to macro- and micro- level categories, with the requisite theoretical and methodological fine-tuning. While focusing on different languages/language groups, the papers in this volume share the common foci of bringing together structural and sociolinguistic considerations and of the concomitant necessary revisiting of methodologies. The data and analyses presented yield a firmer and more nuanced understanding of the dynamic permutations of cross-dialectal and dialect-to-standard convergence and the formation of intermediate varieties in different yet comparable contexts.

This book is about responses to language variety — their variability, shape, and content, as well as the variable cognitive and neural pathways underlying them. The chapters explore access to, processing of, and outcomes of that diversity and complexity. Many traditions are represented: from social psychology come classic experimental methods as well as more current discourse-based analyses; anthropology is represented in indexicality, iconization, recursivity, erasure, enregisterment, and ideologies; the sociolinguistic focus on specific rather than global elements that trigger responses is highlighted. The individual chapters address a variety of questions concerning language attitude, belief, and ideology, in some cases singly, in others with a more general focus, including attempts to relate one style of research to another. If we accept the fact that individuals house great variability in the underlying cognitive structures that inform responses, it follows that no single way of eliciting and studying them will do. This book provides a tour of the emerging tools that have been productive in such investigations.

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

Highly proficient speakers of a second language who began acquisition as adults are rarely the object of second language acquisition research. In the study described in this book, the speech of 36 advanced learners of German, 20 of whom were considered to have "near-native" proficiency was recorded, transcribed and analyzed according to the "Quaestio Model". The focus of the study was the information structure of the learners' spoken texts and its implications for word order. The study revealed differences in the information structure of texts of learners and native German speakers even for those learners whose performance was nearly indistinguishable from L1 German speakers. The author discusses possible reasons for these differences, suggests implications for second language acquisition theory and draws up lesson plans for using the insights brought forth by the study for the second language and translation classrooms.

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