MEXIQUEÑO?: ISSUES OF IDENTITY AND IDEOLOGY IN A CASE STUDY OF DIALECT CONTACT

This study, set in an urban, predominantly Latino high school, addresses a situation of dialect contact between speakers of Puerto Rican and Mexican Spanish. Given the characteristics of this specific research context, existing models of dialect contact would have predicted the development of a linguistic phenomenon known as "koineization." This study finds that, contrary to these models, koineization is not taking place in this high school and that instead, the two dialects are remaining distinct. In this dissertation, I will first describe the unexpected social and linguistic situation found at this school. It will be shown that ethnic identity is a very salient social category, and that the cross-ethnic interaction necessary for koineization is not occurring. A linguistic analysis confirms that the two Spanish dialects are indeed remaining distinct. This dissertation proceeds to demonstrate that various social factors are extremely important to the dialect contact situation under study. Specifically, questions of ethnic identity and an ideology of essentialized difference are shown to have a powerful impact on interaction, language choice, and ultimately, koineization. It will also be seen that the uniqueness of this context—two dialects of a minority language alongside another, dominant language, English—also impacts the question of koineization. Thus, this study affords us new insights into the topic of dialect contact, and emphasizes the consideration that should be given to numerous social factors in any model of koineization. Methods of data collection in this study included semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Numerous rounds of interviews were conducted with progressively smaller groups of participants. The last phase of fieldwork consisted of a focus on twelve key participants who were representative of ethnicity, sex, and the social networks present in the school. In a fashion similar to Bailey (2002), one day was spent with each of these key participants while they carried a mini-disc recorder. The purpose of this data collection method was to obtain more insights into the natural language and interactional behavior of these key participants. Methods of data analysis were varied and included a social network analysis, a quantitative analysis of linguistic data, and discourse analysis

On the Tail of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Glasgow

One of the most famous sound features of Scottish English is the short/long timing alternation of /i u ai/vowels, which depends on the morpho-phonemic environment, and is known of as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). These alternations make the status of vowel quantity in Scottish English (quasi-)phonemic but are also susceptible to change, particularly in situations of intense sustained dialect contact with Anglo-English. Does the SVLR change in Glasgow where dialect contact at the community level is comparably low? The present study sets out to tackle this question, and tests two hypotheses involving (1) external influences due to dialect-contact and (2) internal, prosodically-induced factors of sound change. Durational analyses of /i u a/ were conducted on a corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian speech from the 1970s and 2000s, and four speaker groups were compared, two of middle-aged men, and two of adolescent boys. Our hypothesis that the development of the SVLR over time may be internally constrained and interact with prosody was largely confirmed. We observed weakening effects in its implementation which were localised in phrase-medial unaccented positions in all speaker groups, and in phrase-final positions in the speakers born after the Second World War. But unlike some other varieties of Scottish or Northern English which show weakening of the Rule under a prolonged contact with Anglo-English, dialect contact seems to be having less impact on the durational patterns in Glaswegian vernacular, probably because of the overall reduced potential for a regular, everyday contact in the West given the different demographies

A Japanese Contact Variety in the North: Evidence from Sakhalin Island in Russia

A number of sociolinguistic studies have been conducted to render detailed descriptions of dialect contact phenomenon. One of the major notions in dialect contact studies, according to Trudgill (1986), is dialect transplantation. A dialect transplantation situation occurs when a language variety is "transplanted" into another area with a certain number of the language speakers and with a certain period of their residence. This paper studies one of the former colonies of Japan, Sakhalin, and discusses the status of the Japanese language over the course of the history of Sakhalin

Social integration and dialect divergence in coastal Palestine

The history of Palestine has caused communities to be displaced and relocated, entailing that speech communities have been dismantled and created anew. The coastal cities of Jaffa and Gaza exemplify this reality. This study analyzes speakers from Jaffa, some of whom remained there and others residing in Gaza as refugees. Through an examination of three variables, (ʕ), (AH), and (Q), we shed light on the effects of dialect contact while highlighting the link between dialect contact and identity formation and maintenance. All three variables are found to be in varied states of change as a result of contact with other varieties of Arabic, as well as with Modern Hebrew. We conclude that (Q), through its high social salience, works to create and maintain a sense of community identity for Jaffan refugees in Gaza at a time when the speech of the larger Jaffa community is undergoing substantial linguistic change

Creating a new town koine : children and language change in Milton Keynes.

Koineization – the development of a new, mixed variety following dialect contact – has well-documented outcomes. However, there have been few studies of the phenomenon actually in progress. This article describes the development of a new variety in the English New Town of Milton Keynes, designated in 1967. The article is structured around eight “principles” that relate the process of koineization to its outcomes. Recordings were made of 48 Milton Keynes-born children in three age groups (4, 8, and 12), the principal caregiver of each child, and several elderly locally born residents. Quantitative analysis of ten phonetic variables suggests that substantial but not complete focusing occurs in the child generation. The lack of linguistic continuity in the New Town is demonstrated, and the time scale of koineization there is discussed. Finally, it is shown that demography and the social-network characteristics of individuals are crucial to the outcomes of koineization

Dialect contact and change in Gaza City

MA thesis from the Department of Language & Linguistics at the University of Esse

DIALECT CONTACT, DIALECTOLOGY AND SOCIONLINGUISTICS

A central problem in considering the subjects of sociolinguistics and dialectology has to do with the relationship between these two topics, which has often been somewhat difficult and controversial. Is, for example, dialectology part of sociolinguistics, or is it a separate discipline? Once their relative status and complementary: nature have been discussed, the ultimate goal of this article is to emphasize the relevance of the micro-sociolinguistic (accommodation theory) and macro-sociolinguistic (dialectology and geolinguistics) approaches to the phenomena of linguistic diffusion in dialect contact situations.Un problema central a la hora de considerar las disciplinas de sociolingüística y dialectología es el de su relación, lo que muy frecuentemente ha sido bastante difícil a la vez que controvertido. ¿Es la dialectología, por ejemplo, parte de la sociolingüística o es una disciplina autónoma? Una vez que se han discutido sus estatus respectivos y su naturaleza complementaria, el objetivo final del presente artículo es subrayar la relevancia de las aproximaciones microsociolingüística (teoría de la acomodación) y macrosociolingüística (dialectología y geolingüística) a los fenómenos de la difusión lingüística en las situacion