Atlas Linguarum Europae

Last updated

The Atlas Linguarum Europae (literally Atlas of the Languages of Europe, ALE in acronym) is a linguistic atlas project launched in 1970 with the help of UNESCO, and published from 1975 to 2007. The ALE used its own phonetic transcription system, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet with some modifications. It covers six language families present on the European continent: Altaic, Basque, Indo-European, Caucasian, Semitic and Uralic; these families are divided into 22 linguistic groups comprising 90 languages and dialects. The data were collected in 2631 localities. The members of the ALE project are organized into 47 national committees and 4 committees for minority languages.

Contents

Roman Jakobson proposed a linguistic atlas for Europe in the late 1930s, but World War II disrupted this plan. [1] The idea was revived by Mario Alinei at the Second International Congress of Dialectologists in 1965, [1] and Alinei was still President of the ALE as late as 1997. [2] Wolfgang Viereck took over as president between 1999 and 2005, [3] and was then followed by Nicolae Saramandu. [4] Alinei developed a theory that much of language is based on "magico-religious motivations", which he believed pre-dated the spread of Christianity and Islam to Europe. [5] Viereck later wrote on the influence of religion on language. [6]

It was the first computerised linguistic atlas. [7] In England, the 66 sites had all been part of the earlier Survey of English Dialects. Viereck noted that the 1970s fieldwork of the ALE demonstrated widespread lexical erosion in English dialects since the SED (e.g. the word "icicle" had become universal in England and displaced other dialect words). [8] Work in Ireland, Scotland and Wales covered both Celtic and Germanic dialects. [9] The Germanic dialects of Scotland were classified as Scots, whereas those of Ireland and Wales were classified as English. [9] Work in the Channel Islands only investigated Romance dialects. [9]

An article by the Yorkshire Dialect Society noted the troubled history of the survey in England and Wales. J. D. A. Widdowson had initially said that there were not the resources to do the survey domestically, but he was persuaded to take part after the persistence of Toon Weijnen. The results for Britain and Ireland have hardly been analysed. As of 2023, the ALE committee still has representation for Gaelic, Irish, Manx, Scots and Welsh but not for English. [10]

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roman Jakobson</span> Russian linguist

Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.

The Istro-Romanian language is an Eastern Romance language, spoken in a few villages and hamlets in the peninsula of Istria in Croatia, as well as in the diaspora of this people. It is sometimes abbreviated to IR.

Mario Alinei was an Italian linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987. He was founder and editor of Quaderni di semantica, a journal of theoretical and applied semantics. Until 1997, he was president of Atlas Linguarum Europae at UNESCO.

Dialect levelling is the means by which dialect differences decrease. For example, in rural areas of Britain, although English is widely spoken, the pronunciation and the grammar have historically varied. During the twentieth century, more people moved into towns and cities, standardising English. Dialect levelling can develop by the influence of various types of media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Survey of English Dialects</span> British dialect survey of England and Wales

The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear. Standardisation of the English language was expected with the post-war increase in social mobility and the spread of the mass media. The project originated in discussions between Professor Orton and Professor Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich about the desirability of producing a linguistic atlas of England in 1946, and a questionnaire containing 1,300 questions was devised between 1947 and 1952.

The Romanian dialects are the several regional varieties of the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian). The dialects are divided into two types, northern and southern, but further subdivisions are less clear, so the number of dialects varies between two and occasionally twenty. Most recent works seem to favor a number of three clear dialects, corresponding to the regions of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Banat, and an additional group of varieties covering the remainder of Transylvania, two of which are more clearly distinguished, in Crișana and Maramureș, that is, a total of five.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Grigore</span>

George Grigore is a Romanian writer, essayist, translator, professor, researcher in Middle Eastern Studies.

Vasile Puşcaş is a Romanian politician, diplomat and International Relations professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Pavel</span> Romanian essayist and literary critic (born 1968)

Laura Pavel is a Romanian essayist and literary critic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Veny i Clar</span> Catalan dialectologist

Joan Veny i Clar is a linguist and Catalan dialectologist from Majorca, considered one of the most prestigious and renowned of the Catalan Countries. He is the author of Els parlars catalans, an essential book for Catalan dialectology, synthesis of the dialectal variation of the entire space of the Catalan Countries; and furthermore a dense and rich work, made in conjunction with Lydia Pons: Linguistic Atlas of the Catalan Domain

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Traian Bratu</span> Romanian philologist

Traian Bratu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian scholar of German language and literature. A native of the Mărginimea Sibiului region in present-day Sibiu County, southern Transylvania, he left for the Romanian Old Kingdom, where he attended university, followed up by a doctorate at the University of Berlin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Spinei</span>

Victor Spinei is Emeritus Professor of history and archaeology at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, member and vice president of the Romanian Academy. He is a specialist on the history of Romania and the Romanian people in the Early and High Middle Ages, the history of migratory peoples in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during this period, and the production and circulation of cult objects in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the Middle Ages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theodor Capidan</span> Romanian linguist

Theodor Capidan was an Ottoman-born Romanian linguist. An ethnic Aromanian from the Macedonia region, he studied at Leipzig before teaching school at Thessaloniki. Following the creation of Greater Romania at the end of World War I, Capidan followed his friend Sextil Pușcariu to the Transylvanian capital Cluj, where he spent nearly two decades, the most productive part of his career. He then taught in Bucharest for a further ten years and was marginalized late in life under the nascent communist regime. Capidan's major contributions involve studies of the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians, as well as their respective languages. His research extended to reciprocal influences between Romanian and the surrounding Slavic languages, the Eastern Romance substratum and the Balkan sprachbund, as well as toponymy. He made a significant contribution to projects for a Romanian-language dictionary and atlas.

Manuel Alvar was a Spanish linguist, historian, and university professor who specialized in the study of dialectology and philology of the Spanish language. Throughout his career, Alvar oversaw and influenced the creation of many Spanish linguistic atlases; maps which recorded speech variations in a given geographical area. He served as Director of the Real Academia Española for four years and was a member of language academies throughout Europe and Latin America.

Geolinguistic organizations may be divided into academic associations, research institutes, and academic journals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lidia Vianu</span> Romanian academic, writer, and translator

Lidia Vianu is a Romanian academic, writer, and translator. She is a professor in the English department of the University of Bucharest, a writer of fiction and poetry, and a translator both from English into Romanian, and from Romanian into English.

Michel Contini is a Sardinian, naturalized French linguist, researcher and academic.

Nicolae Saramandu is a Romanian linguist and philologist of Aromanian ethnicity. He has been professor in several universities and vice president and later president of the Atlas Linguarum Europae, also being a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. Saramandu has undertaken extensive research on the Aromanians, and has involved himself in several activities related to their cultural development.

References

  1. 1 2 Caprini (1996), p. 122.
  2. Alinei (1997), p. 125.
  3. Čižmárová (2006), p. 118.
  4. Viereck (2006a), p. 104.
  5. Alinei (1997), p. 3.
  6. Viereck (2006a), p. 106.
  7. Viereck (1987), p. 145.
  8. Viereck (1987), p. 147.
  9. 1 2 3 Viereck (1987), p. 146.
  10. Aveyard, Edward (2023). "The Atlas Linguarum Europae in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland". Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society: 3–11.

Bibliography