Language geography

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A map of the language divisions within Justinian I's Byzantine Empire .mw-parser-output .legend{page-break-inside:avoid;break-inside:avoid-column}.mw-parser-output .legend-color{display:inline-block;min-width:1.25em;height:1.25em;line-height:1.25;margin:1px 0;text-align:center;border:1px solid black;background-color:transparent;color:black}.mw-parser-output .legend-text{} Greek Greek and native Latin Latin and native Aramaic Coptic Caucasian and Armenian Linguistic Map of Justinian I's Empire c. 560.png
A map of the language divisions within Justinian I's Byzantine Empire
  Greek
  Greek and native
  Latin
  Latin and native
  Aramaic
  Coptic
  Caucasian and Armenian

Language geography is the branch of human geography that studies the geographic distribution of language(s) or its constituent elements. Linguistic geography can also refer to studies of how people talk about the landscape. For example, toponymy is the study of place names. [1] Landscape ethnoecology, also known as ethnophysiography, is the study of landscape ontologies and how they are expressed in language. [2]

Contents

There are two principal fields of study within the geography of language:

  1. geography of languages, which deals with the distribution through history and space of languages, [3] and/or is concerned with 'the analysis of the distribution patterns and spatial structures of languages in contact'. [4]
  2. geolinguistics being, when used as a sub-discipline of geography, the study of the 'political, economic and cultural processes that affect the status and distribution of languages'. [5] When perceived as a sub-discipline of linguistics that incorporates contact linguistics, one definition appearing has been 'the study of languages and dialects in contact and in conflict with various societal, economic, ideological, political and other contemporary trends with regard to a particular geographic location and on a planetary scale'. [6]

Various other terms and subdisciplines have been suggested, but none gained much currency, [7] including:

Many studies in what is now called contact linguistics have researched the effect of language contact, [14] as the languages or dialects (varieties) of peoples have interacted. [7] This territorial expansion of language groups has usually resulted in the overlaying of languages upon existing speech areas, rather than the replacement of one language by another. For example, after the Norman Conquest of England, Old French became the language of the aristocracy but Middle English remained the language of a majority of the population. [15]

Linguistic geography

Linguistic geography, as a field, is dominated by linguists rather than geographers. [11] Charles W. J. Withers describes the difference as resulting from a focus on "elements of language, and only then with their geographical or social variation, as opposed to investigation of the processes making for change in the extent of language areas." [7] Peter Trudgill says, "linguistic geography has been geographical only in the sense that it has been concerned with the spatial distribution of linguistic phenomena." [12] Greater emphasis has been laid upon explanation rather than mere description of the patterns of linguistic change. [11] [7] That move has paralleled similar concerns in geography and language studies. [16] Some studies have paid attention to the social use [17] of language and to variations in dialect within languages in regard to social class or occupation. [18] Regarding such variations, lexicographer Robert Burchfield notes that their nature "is a matter of perpetual discussion and disagreement" and notes that "most professional linguistic scholars regard it as axiomatic that all varieties of English have a sufficiently large vocabulary for the expression of all the distinctions that are important in the society using it." He contrasts this with the view of the historian John Vincent, who regards such a view as

"a nasty little orthodoxy among the educational and linguistic establishment. However badly you need standard English, you will have the merits of non-standard English waved at you. The more extravagantly your disadvantages will be lauded as 'entirely adequate for the needs of their speakers', to cite the author of Sociolinguistics. It may sound like a radical cry to support pidgin, patois, or dialect, but translated into social terms, it looks more like a ploy to keep Them (whoever Them may be) out of the middle-class suburbs."

— John Vincent, The Times [19]

Burchfield concludes, "Resolution of such opposite views is not possible.... future of dialect studies and the study of class-marked distinctions are likely to be of considerable interest to everyone." [20]

In England, linguistic geography has traditionally focused upon rural English, rather than urban English. [21] A common production of linguistic investigators of dialects is the shaded and dotted map showing to show where one linguistic feature ends and another begins or overlaps. Various compilations of these maps for England have been issued over the years, including Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1896–1905), the Survey of English Dialects (1962–8), and The Linguistic Atlas of England (1978). [22]

Geolinguistic organizations

Most geolinguistic organizations identify themselves as associations of linguists rather than of geographers. This includes the two oldest which both date to 1965 with "Amici Linguarum" (language friends) being founded by Erik V. Gunnemark and The American Society of Geolinguistics by Prof. Mario A. Pei. The research in geolinguistics which these organizations and others, which are more geographically oriented, promote is often interdisciplinary, being at times simultaneously both linguistic and geographic, and also being at times linked to other sub-disciplines of linguistics as well as going beyond linguistics to connect to sociology, anthropology, ethnology, history, demographics, political science, studies of cognition and communication, etc.

See also

Related Research Articles

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called an isolect or lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word "variety" to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard varieties thought of as less prestigious or "correct" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties. "Lect" avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.

In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, an age group, or other social group.

In the field of dialectology, a diasystem or polylectal grammar is a linguistic analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties in a way that displays their structural differences.

Peter Trudgill, FBA is an English sociolinguist, academic and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Speech community</span> Group of people who share expectations regarding linguistic usage

A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal, choosing words that are considered more "formal", and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't and y'all.

J. K. "Jack" Chambers is a Canadian linguist, and a well-known expert on language variation and change, who has played an important role in research on Canadian English since the 1980s; he has coined the terms "Canadian Raising" and "Canadian Dainty", the latter used for Canadian speech that mimics the British, popular till the mid-20th century. He has been a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto since receiving his a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1970. He has also been a visiting professor at many universities worldwide, including Hong Kong University, University of Szeged, Hungary, University of Kiel in Germany, Canterbury University in New Zealand, the University of Reading and the University of York in the UK. He is the author of the website Dialect Topography, which compiles information about dialectal variation in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario, Canada.

In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige. In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical constructs, which may not be distinctive enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form among speakers of a language or languages.

Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.

Geolinguistics has been identified by some as being a branch of linguistics and by others as being an offshoot of language geography which is further defined in terms of being a branch of human geography. When seen as a branch of linguistics, geolinguistics may be viewed from more than one linguistic perspective, something with research implications.

A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of late with that of wait or eight. Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait with that of eight. This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late, a second diaphoneme for words like wait, and a third diaphoneme for words like eight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Koiné language</span> Contact language from mutually intelligible dialects of the same language

In linguistics, a koiné language, koiné dialect, or simply koiné is a standard or common language or dialect that has arisen as a result of the contact, mixing, and often simplification of two or more mutually intelligible varieties of the same language.

Sociolinguistic research in India is the study of how the Indian society affects and is affected by the languages of the country.

Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in sentence word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate with language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.

Dialect levelling or leveling is the process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects. Typically, this comes about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language standardization. It has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialisation and modernisation of the areas in which they are spoken.

In sociolinguistics, the curvilinear principle states that there is a tendency for linguistic change from below to originate from members of the central classes in a speech community's socioeconomic hierarchy, rather than from the outermost or exterior classes.

The gender paradox is a sociolinguistic phenomenon first observed by William Labov, in which "Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not." Specifically, the "paradox" arises from sociolinguistic data showing that women are more likely to use prestige forms and avoid stigmatized variants than men for a majority of linguistic variables, but that they are also more likely to lead language change by using innovative forms of variables.

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

References

  1. ↑ Kadmon, Naftali (2000). Toponymy : the lore, laws, and language of geographical names (1st ed.). New York: Vantage Press. ISBN   0533135311.
  2. ↑ Johnson, Leslie Main; Hunn, Eugene S., eds. (2012). Landscape Ethnoecology: Concepts of Biotic and Physical Space. New York: Berghahn Books.
  3. ↑ Delgado de Carvalho, C.M. (1962). The geography of languages. In Wagner, P.L.; Mikesell, M.W. Readings in cultural geography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 75–93.
  4. ↑ Williams, C.H. (1980). "Language contact and language change in Wales, 1901–1971: a study in historical geolinguistics". Welsh History Review 10, 207–238.
  5. 1 2 Gunnemark, Erik (1991). "What is geolinguistics ?". Geolinguistics, Journal of the American Society of Geolinguistics. American Society of Geolinguistics. 17: 12. ISSN   0190-4671.
  6. ↑ "International Conference on multilingual perspectives in geolinguistics, April 11, 2015".
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Withers, Charles W.J. [1981] (1993). Johnson, R.J. The Dictionary of Human Geography, Gregory, Derek; Smith, David M., Second edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 252–3.
  8. ↑ Dell'Aquila, V. (1997). Mapping the languages of Europe in Herberts K., Laurén C., Laurén U, Strömann S. (Eds.): "Flerspråkighetens dimensioner. Individ, familj och samhälle", Vaasan Yliopiston Julkaisuja: Vaasa/Vasa, 103–131.
  9. ↑ Pei, M. (1966). Glossary of linguistic terminology. New York: John Wiley.
  10. ↑ Trudgill, P. (1974). Linguistic change and diffusion: description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3:2, 215–46.
  11. 1 2 3 Trudgill, P. (1983). On dialect: social and geographical perspectives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; New York: New York University Press.
  12. 1 2 Trudgill, P. (1975). Linguistic geography and geographical linguistics. Progress in Geography 7, 227–52
  13. ↑ Iordan, I.; Orr, J. (1970). An introduction to romance linguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Berkeley: University of California Press.
  14. ↑ Weinrich, U. (1974). Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton.
  15. ↑ Burchfield, Robert [1985] (2003). The English Language, New York: Oxford University Press, 14.
  16. ↑ Withers, C.W.J. (1984). Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981: the geographical history of a language. Edinburgh: John Donald; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
  17. ↑ Hult, F.M. (2009). Language ecology and linguistic landscape analysis. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (Eds.), Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery (pp. 88–104). London: Routledge.
  18. ↑ Giglioli, P.P. (1972). Language and social context. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  19. ↑ The Times, 23 February 1983, p. 12
  20. ↑ Burchfield, Robert [1985] (2003). The English Language, New York: Oxford University Press, 128–130.
  21. ↑ In 1985, one could still say, "We still know far more about the distribution of byre/shippon/mistall/cow-stable/cow-house/cow-shed/neat-house/beast-house for 'cow-shed' than we do about urban synonyms for pedestrian crossings, lollipop men, machines used to wash cars, forecourts of petrol stations, bollards, sleeping policemen, pay-out desks, supermarket trolleys, traffic wardens, telephone booths and hundreds of other items found in every city in the United Kingdom." Burchfield, Robert [1985] (2003). The English Language, New York: Oxford University Press, 128.
  22. ↑ Burchfield, Robert [1985] (2003). The English Language, New York: Oxford University Press, 125.
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