New research expands the linguistic understanding of dialect contact in specific communities and individuals
Dialect contact occurs whenever speakers of mutually intelligible language varieties interact. Many linguists are interested in the outcome of such contact—how it leads people and languages to vary and change, and what such patterns can reveal about language, mind, and society. Dialect contact can thus be approached as an individual-level or a community-level phenomenon; a cognitive process or a social one.
In Dialect Contact, international contributors present studies touching on both perspectives, representing languages and varieties spanning five continents. The chapters shed light on the many factors influencing dialect change and highlight the importance of considering the contact dynamics that are specific to individual people and communities.
This book will benefit sociolinguistics scholars and students interested in the outcomes of dialect contact, the implications of contact for understanding language change, and the various methods used to investigate contact effects in individuals and communities.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: A Multi-level Approach to Understanding the Dynamics of Dialect Contact
Víctor Fernández-Mallat and Jennifer Nycz
Chapter 2: Dialect Leveling and Supralocalization in a Rural Community: Generational Change from 7:35 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in Ricote
Laura Torrano-Moreno and Juan M. Hernández-Campoy
Chapter 3: Da isch einfach eine Sehnsucht danach 'There is simply a longing for it': Indexicalities of dialect convergence and renewal in Swabian
Karen V. Beaman
Chapter 4: Focusing and Feature Complexity in Amman Arabic
Enam Al-Wer and Areej Al-Hawamdeh
Chapter 5: Unwitting Convergence: Kolokwa and Liberian Settler English
Allison Shapp, Michael Marinaccio, and John Victor Singler
Chapter 6: The Relative Acquirability of Different Types of Dialect Features by Mobile Speakers of Korean
Yoojin Kang
Chapter 7: Interaction, Confounding Effect, and Collinearity in the Analysis of Brazilian Internal Migrants' Speech
Livia Oushiro
Chapter 8: On the (Non-)Uniformity of Contact Outcomes: A Comparison of Spanish in New York City and Boston
Daniel Erker
Chapter 9: T-Flapping in Singapore English: Americanization, Innovation, or Both?
Wesley Mark Lincoln and Rebecca Lurie Starr
Chapter 10: Making Things Easier: The Pragmatism behind Second Dialect Acquisition
Abby Walker
Contributors
Index
Reviews
"This is a powerful volume embracing the full social scope as well as linguistic breadth of contemporary scholarship on dialect contact—from second dialect acquisition to koineization. Furthermore, it places an important and much-needed focus on methodological issues—how we do dialect contact research as well as how we understand its findings."—David Britain, professor of modern English linguistics, University of Bern
Contributors
Areej Al-Hawamdeh, Enam Al-Wer, Karen Beaman, Daniel Erker, Victor Fernández-Mallat, Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, Yoojin Kang, Wesley M. Lincoln, Michael Marinaccio, Jennifer Nycz, Livia Oushiro, Allison Shapp, John V. Singler, Rebecca L. Starr, Laura Torrano-Moreno, Abby Walker
About the Author
Víctor Fernández-Mallat is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. He is an editor of Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces (2021) and has published articles in journals like the Journal of Pragmatics and Intercultural Pragmatics. Jennifer Nycz is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is the author of Second Dialect Acquisition: Theory and Methods (2015).
