Language and Space: Theories and Methods HSK 30.1

Language and Space:
Theories and Methods
HSK 30.1
Handbücher zur
Sprach- und Kommunikations-
wissenschat
Handbooks o Linguistics
and Communication Science
Manuels de linguistique et
des sciences de communication
Mitbegründet von Gerold Ungeheuer ()

Mitherausgegeben 19852001 von Hugo Steger
Herausgegeben von / Edited by / Edités par

Herbert Ernst Wiegand
Subseries:
Language and Space
An International Handbook o Linguistic Variation
Edited by Jürgen Erich Schmidt
Band 30.1
De Gruyter Mouton
Language and Space
An International Handbook o
Linguistic Variation
Volume 1: Theories and Methods
Edited by
Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-018002-2
e-ISBN 978-3-11-022027-8
ISSN 1861-5090
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Language and space: theories and methods : an international hand-

book of linguistic variation / edited by Peter Auer, Jürgen Erich
Schmidt.
p. cm. ⫺ (Handbooks of linguistics and communication science ;
30.1)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-3-11-018002-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Language and languages ⫺ Variation. 2. Linguistic geography.
3. Dialectology. I. Auer, Peter, 1954⫺ II. Schmidt, Jürgen Erich,
1954⫺
P120.V37L33 2010
417⫺dc22
2009048180
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
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Introduction to the Language and Space series
In 1982 and 1983 the renowned HSK series was launched with a two-volume handbook,
Dialektologie: Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung. Even
though this first handbook played a significant role in the subsequent success of the
series and was out of print by the mid 1990s, early plans to publish an updated edition
(as was done with other successful titles) were soon shelved. Consensus instead settled
around the view that advances in the understanding of the object of dialectological study,
along with fast-paced developments in the relevant disciplines and the need to adequately
represent the rich findings of this global research effort, made a completely fresh start
necessary.
Even though the variability of human language is in essential ways caused and con-
strained by the dimensions of time and space, and although most people today still speak
with some form of distinct regional coloring, dialects isolated from supranational and
standard varieties are increasingly becoming marginal phenomena, right across the
world. Accordingly, a reorientation of research into language and space has begun ⫺
shifting from a discipline focused on the reconstruction of premodern language states
(traditional dialectology) to approaches dedicated to a precise analysis of the dynamic
processes at work within complex language systems and their explanation in terms of
cognitive and interactive-cum-communicative factors.
This shift in emphasis towards embodied and evolving language has led to a blurring
of the established boundaries between dialectology, sociolinguistics and language contact
studies and to the adoption of impulses from geography, sociology and anthropology as
part of a wider reappraisal of the relationship between geographical place and cultural
space. Additionally, a way has needed to be found to take account of significant differ-
ences in how language is “territorialized”. These range from traditional, sedentary settle-
ment patterns to personally mobile and electronically delocalized postindustrial life-
styles, and from semiliterate, largely oral cultural traditions through, say, the formation
and maintenance of immigrant communities and enclaves within multicultural and ur-
banized landscapes, to the inhabiting of pre-eminently social spaces in the increasingly
fragmented and ad hoc milieus of contemporary society.
Against the background of this reorientation, the idea of a subseries within the HSK
range entitled Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation
developed out of intensive discussions between representatives from various research
fields, the editors and publishers. Inaugurating this subseries are two “foundation” hand-
books, canvassing international developments in theory and research methods and, for
the first time, interrogating the theoretical and practical foundations of linguistic cartog-
raphy. These cross-linguistic foundational volumes are to be complemented by a loose
sequence of volumes that each analyze the full dimensions of spatial variation within an
individual language or language group whilst remaining guided by a uniform structure.
This first introductory volume, Theories and Methods, directly addresses both the
changes in the object of study (linguistic variation across “space”) and the attempts
within the relevant disciplines to adjust to the concomitant reconceptualization of its
nature. As intimated by its subtitle, the volume is divided into two halves. The first of
vi Introduction to the Language and Space series
these, the theoretical wing, encompasses a transdisciplinary discussion of the notion of

space together with critical evaluations of linguistic approaches to it plus several articles
on the structure and dynamics of (and between) language spaces. The second, methodo-
logical wing details and showcases traditional and contemporary methods of data collec-
tion, analysis and presentation in linguistic geography and language variation studies,
with special emphasis on the methodological problems within the individual structural
domains (phonology, prosody, morphology, lexis, syntax and discourse) and a series of
illustrative and multifaceted case studies.
The second volume, Language Mapping, addresses a striking deficit in the field of
studies into language and space. To date there has never been a collected consideration
of the many issues impinging upon the creation and use of maps in the investigation of
language, its distribution and variation. Within various major languages, schools and
traditions have emerged within which problems have been addressed and approaches
have been refined, but there has been a dearth of exchange between these traditions.
Starting from a thoroughgoing consideration of the conceptual, cognitive and carto-
graphic fundamentals of committing languages to maps, the second foundational volume
also explores the individual traditions, their origins, peculiarities and strengths, before
considering numerous aspects of the revolutionary enabling impact of computing on
language mapping and some of the intersections between the cartography of language
and other fields of human endeavor. Naturally, given the topic, the volume will be ac-
companied by an extensive, separately bound collection of maps.
These two foundation stones are to be followed by a series of works that will, while
oriented to a uniform structure, thoroughly explore the current state of research into the
spatial dimensions of particular languages or language areas. Given linguists’ increased
awareness of the complexity of the relationship between language and physical space,
and of the fiction of a single “authentic” variety per speaker, the volumes are focused on
(groups of) languages rather than regions and attempt to chart their internal variational
structure and dynamics, their interface with other languages and their distribution across
physical, social and cultural space. Each volume will open with a section examining the
history of investigation into the language(s) in question, the foci of current research and
perceived deficits. Then the genesis of the (areal) linguistic constellations and variety
spectra will be treated along with a complete anatomy of the language space. But the
bulk of each volume will be devoted to a detailed description of linguistic subregions
and domains including, obviously, those which transcend traditional bounded spaces as
well as attitudes and social configurations, and to an exploration of aspects specific to
the language (group), including its use in a range of locations as a postcolonial or an
immigrant language, the roles of various media and the techniques and technology used
to present results.
For the noble HSK handbook tradition, Language and Space thus represents the
revisiting, after more than a quarter of a century, of one of the fundamental dimensions
of human language in all its variety and flux. The new series attempts to draw together
and take account of the advances in our understanding of this dimension, broaching the
boundaries between disciplines, questioning but not abandoning established traditions,
drilling down into the concept of space itself, in order to bring to its readers some of
the excitement of the scientific hunt for that most immanent quarry ⫺ language itself.
Jürgen Erich Schmidt, Marburg (Germany)

19 June 2009
Introduction to this volume
Theory and Methods, the introductory volume of the Language and Space series, is ap-
pearing at a point in time when the theoretical and methodological reorientation of
research into the interplay of language and space is in full swing. It is illuminating to
see this current reorientation against the background of the major research tradition and
developments within the disciplines involved, since this also reveals how the present
handbook positions itself.
At the time when Georg Wenker and Jules Gilliéron were establishing linguistic geog-
raphy (the late nineteenth century), other linguists were already struggling to gain a
theoretically and methodologically adequate understanding of the variability of language
and expressing surprisingly modern theoretical and methodological concerns. As early
as 1880, for instance, the neogrammarian Philipp Wegener set out a program with which
the “unendliche menge” of “sprachformen” (‘infinite number of linguistic forms’; 1880:
465) of areally, socially and contextually determined linguistic variation should be ap-
proached, starting out from individual village dialects. In 1905 and based on detailed
observations of numerous, carefully socially classified informants, Louis Gauchat un-
dertook an analysis of linguistic variation within the village of Charmey (in Switzerland)
before reaching the conclusion that “l’unité du patois … est nulle” (‘the unity of the
dialect is zero’; 1905: 222). The critical methodological insight to emerge from his work
was that the alleged homogeneity of a village dialect was in fact an artifact (1905: 179,
222; vs. Zimmerli 1899). However, methodical and practical constraints long prevented
these early insights into the complexity of linguistic variation from playing a key role in
the shaping of research undertakings. Wegener failed to develop a methodology that was
adequate to the task of dealing with the complex research goals, and while Gauchat’s
laborious methods were of use in providing a meticulous analysis of the linguistic dy-
namics in a single village (also cf. Enderlin 1910, who even employed covert data collec-
tion techniques), they were not suited to gaining an overview of the areal dimension of
linguistic variation.
In hindsight, it therefore appears almost inevitable that, despite these efforts, robust,
relatively simple to execute, yet also reductionist methods have dominated research for
so long: introspection (in the neogrammarian paradigm of Ortsgrammatiken) and, even
more importantly, surveys featuring translation and naming tasks (traditional dialect
geography). With the help of these methods, an enormous effort over several generations
of European researchers produced an abundance of relatively precise descriptions of the
phonology, phonetics, lexicon and morphology of the dialects spoken in specific loca-
tions, alongside monumental dialect atlases that provide an accurate but partial account
of variation in spoken language across space. The methodological standards of this ep-
och of language and space research increasingly aimed at establishing strict comparabil-
ity across space with the highest possible density of survey locations. As a consequence,
the heterogeneous groups of informants originally selected for the national dialect atlases
(of Wenker and Gilliéron) were replaced in the later regional atlases by informants with
identical social characteristics (elderly, sedentary men and women with little education
and manual occupations), indirect survey methods based on the distribution of written
viii Introduction to this volume
questionnaires (Wenker) were replaced by direct (face-to-face) surveys conducted by

phonetically trained fieldworkers, and so on.
The enormous wealth of data on spatial variation in spoken language accumulated
in this way opened up fascinating possibilities for the analysis of language change; it
allowed the study of the effects of both internal and external factors on language and
reconstructions of the processes that may have produced the areal distributions discov-
ered. For structuralists, it allowed the defining of systems of contrasts between broad
dialectal areas. All this obscured the fact that the mainstream of dialectology had taken
a reductionist turn, ignoring the fundamental problems Gauchat had astutely recognized
so early on. The intrinsic heterogeneity of language and its embedding in a range of
social and other factors was excluded, so that in the end only the spatial dimension re-
mained.
While Wegener and Gauchat were confronted with the problem of how to develop
adequate methods of data collection, later attempts to break away from the monodimen-
sional and homogenizing approach of dialect geography suffered from the lack of appro-
priate analytic techniques; in the end, analysis was often replaced by pure documenta-
tion. The sound archives which began to be set up relatively soon after the emergence
of viable recording technologies and which recorded “the individual language, at the
same location, of persons of differing age, gender and social standing” (Wagner 1924⫺
1925: 230; our translation) are one example. Another example is Hans Kurath’s Linguis-
tic Atlas of New England, for which, between 1931 and 1933, direct survey techniques
were used to collect variants from six “types” of informants who differed in level of
education, degree of social contact, age and general attitude (“old fashioned” vs.
“modern”).
Significantly, the decisive methodological breakthrough finally came from outside,
namely from the sociolinguistics of urban life. The complex sociolinguistic reality of
contemporary, urbanized societies could not be adequately captured using traditional
dialectological methods (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1980: 55⫺56). Borrowing quantita-
tive methods from the social sciences, William Labov (1966) grounded a new discipline
that was able to observe and precisely analyze the facets of urban language use of repre-
sentative social groups. Aside from Labov, it was the pioneering work of linguists such
as John Gumperz, Joshua Fishman, Leslie Milroy, Peter Trudgill and many others which
led to the rapid development of an independent and extremely successful new discipline:
sociolinguistics. With increasingly refined data collection and analysis techniques, it was
finally possible to isolate the social, interactional and attitudinal factors that steer the
complex language use of disparate social groups, to uncover the regularities behind the
variational registers and styles of groups of speakers and finally, through the combina-
tion of apparent and real-time studies, to capture the dynamics of language change.
But, mirroring the origins of language and space research, it was the roaring success
of sociolinguistics which ⫺ for methodological and practical reasons ⫺ at the same time
led to a renewed narrowing of focus. Whereas traditional dialectology suppressed the
complexity of linguistic variation beyond the areal dimension and favored the survey
and analysis of rural informants’ dialect knowledge to the exclusion of language usage
data, sociolinguistics tended to ignore both variation across space and competence data.
The amount of effort required to gain valid spontaneous speech data in comparable
contexts made the systematic investigation of the full spread of linguistic variation across
space appear an impossible task. It was also not clear how a valid analytic connection
Introduction to this volume ix
could be established between the new corpora of spoken everyday language and the data
on dialect knowledge elicited by traditional dialectologists.
The separate developments in traditional dialectology and modern quantitative socio-
linguistics (with its equally rigid methodology) thus led to the isolation of dimensions of
language variation that were in fact intimately interconnected and to the creation of
apparently incompatible data classes.
In comparison to the situation described above and documented in the earlier hand-
books in this series on Dialektologie (1982⫺1983) and Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik
(first edition 1987⫺1988), i. e., 30 years ago, the current landscape has shifted fundamen-
tally. The strict boundaries between sociolinguistics and dialectology have fallen, and
approaches have been developed in which theoretical and empirical linguistics can be
interrelated in promising ways. It should be immediately obvious why research on lan-
guage and space has a significant role to play here. No other dimension of variation so
fundamentally shapes the diversity of human language as does space, both across and
within languages. The spatial, social and contextual dimensions are inextricably linked
to each other, and language diversity and variability are related in complex ways to
interactional and attitudinal factors. The problem that shaped the very beginnings of
language and space research, namely how to obtain data on language use and language
competence that are both reliable and comparable (across space), still awaits a workable
solution. But nowhere else in the field of linguistics are we (or have we ever been) offered
such a great opportunity to analytically combine a wealth of data about well-chosen
sectors of the linguistic knowledge of areally distributed groups of speakers at different
times with a wealth of well-documented data about sectors of the variable speech behav-
ior of speakers in such a way that empirical explanations for the fundamental questions
posed by a theory of language (change) can be found.
The Theory and Methods volume has set itself the goal of rendering the current meth-
odological and theoretical reinvigoration of language and space research visible and, in
so doing, of highlighting the innovative impulses this is bringing to the whole of linguis-
tics. If we are right, it is the following lines of development which have characterized
research into language and space over the last thirty years:
⫺ A breakdown of interdisciplinary barriers, as a consequence of which a field of study
emerges which reaches far beyond classical dialectology and sociolinguistics to also
encompass language contact studies, linguistic and areal typology, theoretical linguis-
tics and cognitive sciences and which draws in and adapts impulses from geography
and anthropology.
⫺ A turn to the exploration of the entire spectrum of language variation, in which the
two fields of dialectology and sociolinguistics are being drawn closer together. On the
one hand, traditional dialectology’s monodimensional surveys of linguistic compe-
tence have been expanded to include competence data from different social groups
(starting with Fujiwara’s work in Japan, 1974⫺1976) and finally combined with the
systematic collection of speech data across space (pluridimensional dialectology, cf.
Thun in this volume). On the other hand, community studies centered upon specific
locations have increasingly begun to take the spatial dimension of linguistic variation
into account (thereby putting an end to the “sidelining of the spatial in early varia-
tionism”, cf. Britain in this volume), so that ⫺ at least in Europe ⫺ the broad devel-
opment of regional varieties can be sketched (cf. Auer 2005).
x Introduction to this volume
⫺ The development of web-based resources which cross-connect data on the dialect

knowledge of groups of speakers collected at different points in time with data from
historical sound archives and more recent surveys of regional speech. This enables
real-time analyses across space in which stability and change in regional varieties can
be tracked and the effects of interactional and cognitive/linguistic factors accurately
determined (Schmidt in this volume).
⫺ The end of the traditional focus on monolingual, immobile speakers from small re-
gions or specific locations. More recent language and space research asks about the
linguistic foundation of spaces (and places) of all sizes: from those which have tradi-
tionally formed the focus of dialectological research (villages or regions) to politically
defined territories (such as nation-states) which assume a (standard) language as their
correlate and ideological justification, from global spaces called into existence by
European colonial expansion (overseas varieties of European languages, pidgins and
creoles) via supranational regions in which languages have converged (sprachbund)
to transnational spaces emerging with the support of electronic media in the age of
globalization.
⫺ The emergence and development of folk linguistics, in which the subjective spatial
structurings (including evaluations) that speakers develop are systematically investi-
gated. It takes as its object those perceived differences between the ways in which
people speak that enable them to locate conversation partners within larger frames
of reference ⫺ frames which, however, are still dependent upon the “placing” partici-
pant’s perspective, i. e., on his or her life-world (cf. Niedzielski and Preston 2000).
⫺ The rapprochement between theoretical linguistics and language and space research.
In the last decades, language and space research has begun to systematically reclaim
the long-neglected research fields of areal syntax (e. g., SAND and SADS) and pros-
ody. Given the importance of syntactical and phonological studies (OT, autosegmen-
tal phonology) for theoretical linguistics, this creates the preconditions for a system-
atic consideration of the areal dimension of linguistic variation in the ongoing
attempts to theoretically model the cognitive processes supporting language.
⫺ A focus on postmodern views of the language and space connection. In the wake of
globalization, especially the increasing speed of communication and enlarged com-
municative reach, studies have set out to explore the consequent changes in the degree
to which language is spatially bounded. At the forefront of these investigations is a
focus on the dissolution of traditional ties to space on the one hand, and on new
ways of symbolizing belonging in spatial terms (cf. place-making activities) on the
other. We will discuss this highly productive development in more detail below.
The powerful impulses currently re-orienting language and space research are not ex-
hausted by the empirical investigation of the relation of language to space in its full
complexity. At the same time, the notion of space itself is no longer taken for granted
and has become the object of theoretical reflection. Potential docking points are earlier
and ongoing discussions in geography (cf. Johnstone 2004 and in this volume or Cress-
well 2004 for a geographer’s point of view) or Simmel’s (1903) sociological theory of
space, not to mention the phenomenological tradition spearheaded by Edmund Husserl
(cf. Günzel 2006).
Any linguistic theory of space will need to acknowledge the central importance of the
empirical fact of a multilayered relationship between language and space together with
its historical development, the contours of which can be sketched as follows.
Introduction to this volume xi
The primary form of the relationship of language to space is the product of millennia
of exclusively face-to-face interactions leading to the development of commonalities and
differences in linguistic systems in pre-modern times. Speakers’ perception and recogni-
tion of language differences occurred within a spatial framework, which led to an evalu-
ation of language in terms of the basic categories of own vs. other. Spatially differentiated
speech therefore did not just provide the base medium for the interactive constitution of
social and cultural systems, themselves perceived in relation to space. Rather, linguistic
categorizations and evaluations were an integral part of these systems, and language
differences an indexical (socially symbolic) expression of them.
In two important transformations, the nature of this pre-modern “language⫺body⫺
place connection” (as Quist, this volume, puts it) has altered and become more complex.
In a first, modern transformation, this connection was dissolved by the uniformitarian
language ideology that the modern nation-state imposes upon its citizens: the individual
no longer just belongs to the local Gemeinschaft, co-extensive with Schütz’s “world
within … actual and potential reach” (Schütz and Luckmann [1983] 1989: 166) and
characterized by strong network ties based on face-to-face communication; beyond this
local Gemeinschaft, there is the imagined community of the nation-state, which is beyond
the reach of the individual subject. This community is symbolically present through its
national standard language, a language variety which is by definition distributed evenly
over the territory of the nation-state, although it is not evenly distributed across the
social layers of the population. The invention of printing plays a central role here. It
made linguistic interactions in the absence of direct personal contact possible, which in
turn enabled the emergence of written norms across larger areas and laid the foundation
for wide-scale (national) pronunciation norms.
The tension between the local vernacular (dialect) and a uniform state language estab-
lished a new dimension of sociolinguistic variability; it became a motor and symbol of
social differentiation and thereby defined a social space (Mæhlum in this volume), i. e.,
a vertical structure on top of the existing horizontal one. What used to be nothing more
than the “natural” way of speaking in a given location (“first order indexicality” in the
sense of Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006), now became, in the worst case, the
language of the underprivileged classes who had no access to education, a variety that
needed to be avoided in out-group situations, or, in the best case, a symbol of regional
or local belonging (“second order indexicality”; Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006).
The second social and medial transformation which has untied the body⫺language⫺
place connection is the post-modern one. Its wider context is the process of globalization,
which accelerated during the last quarter of the last century, a period which Bauman
(1998: 8) calls the “Great War of Independence from space”. There has been not just an
enormous increase in the speed at which capital and information flow freely around the
world (beyond the control of the nation-state), but also, for expanding groups of speak-
ers (especially migrants and elites), a fundamental shift in the spatial boundedness of life
and language. As a consequence of the effective overcoming of distance (for both face-
to-face and mediated communication), the individual’s communicative reach is enlarged.
Where people reside and where they are socialized can have less influence on their com-
municative practices than forms of communication that transcend spatial separation.
Alongside the typical, historically anchored, complex, yet monolingual registers of
groups of speakers, clusters of speakers can increasingly be observed whose linguistic
repertoires are composed of variants typical of a region, urban speech forms that have
xii Introduction to this volume
arisen among linguistically heterogeneous peer groups and pan-ethnolectal forms origi-
nating from different contact languages, etc.
But not only has this untying of the language-body⫺space connection led to a com-
plex, multilayered situation in which pre-modern and modern groups of speakers co-
exist with post-modern ones; it has also evoked counter-tendencies. The age of globaliza-
tion has given rise to a new interest in symbolizing belonging in spatial terms, in turning
abstract space into places, which are impregnated with meaning and which symbolize
belonging. People living in a location ⫺ whether born there or (more often) not ⫺ may
choose to construe a local identity for themselves. These place-making activities use the
symbols of (local) language(s):
⫺ multilingual street signs and graffiti (Auer 2009) colonize public spaces and symbolize
their producers’ claims to them;
⫺ dialects and autochthonous minority languages are revitalized in order to mark lo-
cal belonging;
⫺ dialects and minority languages may also become folklorized and commodified; they
then become part of the way in which a location presents itself to its inhabitants and
to outsiders as “special”, “genuine” or “authentic”, in order to attract tourists, etc.;
⫺ dialect stereotypes help to create identity-rich places (Johnstone, Andrus and Daniel-
son 2006 call this “third order indexicality”), usually reinforced by the media (cf.
Androutsopoulos in this volume);
⫺ fragments of both the international lingua franca (English) and some immigrant mi-
nority languages become available as resources for creating new regional (“gloca-
lized”) ways of speaking, new (supra)regional styles and lects.
Space still matters. The theoretical challenge for the future will be to analyze how, to
what degree, and why it matters for language and how language matters for space. In
order to do so, we need to model (a) the interactional and social bases of the spatial
categorization of linguistic variation under pre-modern, modern and post-modern condi-
tions, (b) the conversion of heterogeneous linguistic practices into consolidated language
change in intergenerational transmission, (c) the relevance of ethnodialectological repre-
sentations of language spaces and of place-making language-related activities for lan-
guage change and (d) the relationships between large-scale (global, international), me-
dium-scale (national) and small-scale (regional) spatial frames and language contact on
all these levels. We offer up this volume in the hope that it will provide a rich foundation
for the necessary theoretical advance.
Let us now turn to an overview of the structure of the handbook.
Vis-à-vis the relation of language to space, the first half of the handbook serves the
dual goal of (comprehensively) documenting the theoretical achievements to date and
offering impulses for necessary future development. The introductory part is dedicated
to a transdisciplinary discussion of current conceptualizations of space. The concepts of
“geographical space”, “social spaces”, “political spaces” and “transnational spaces” are
examined in historical and theoretical terms with reference to the neighboring academic
disciplines, whereby their constitutive and interactively mediated relevance to language
is made clear. Insights from the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences are productively
reflected back upon their source to reveal implicit economic and ideological dimensions,
particularly in relation to territoriality, identity and standard languages. The extent to
which place is a linguistic and cultural construct becomes manifest.
Introduction to this volume xiii
As a counterfoil, Part II introduces the impressive abundance of genuinely linguistic

approaches developed over the long history of the study of the spatial dimension of
language. These range from the foundation of an exact, empirically based investigation
of linguistics (by the neogrammarians and in early linguistic geography), through the
development of structuralism (including its generative variants) and variation linguistics,
to those approaches which are currently shaping the ongoing theoretical development
and refinement: social anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics, perceptual dialec-
tology (folk linguistics) and the new linguistic dynamics approach, which attempts to
integrate linguistic-cognitive and interactional explanatory factors. The discussion of
these approaches is decidedly critical, i. e., the specific deficits of an approach are also
made visible (e.g., the tendency towards an artificial isolation of an Ortssprache ‘village
variety’ in the neogrammarian period or the virtually unexamined relation to space in
generativist theories) and the question of potential ideological exploitation is also dis-
cussed (as with the kulturmorphologische approach).
Part III addresses the consequences that emerge from the critique of spatial monodi-
mensionality in the classification of varieties and spaces. It attempts to provide insight
into the anatomy and dynamics of variety formations. The concept of a language space
here is construed broadly, i. e., as a complex experiential space constituted out of interac-
tions in a particular language and its varieties. A catalogue of the basic dimensions of
variation is followed by studies exploring the unfolding of the key recurrent dynamic
patterns of development (horizontal and vertical convergence vs. divergence and stasis
of existing varieties and the emergence of new varieties). Language spaces are generally
perceived as contiguous but, due to past or more recent migration, they can also be
discontinuous, a situation that is discussed in separate articles, as are languages which
have developed into minority languages as a result of the horizontal diffusion of stan-
dard varieties.
The perspective shifts in Part IV. While the focus on confluent and divergent develop-
ments across time and space is maintained, in contrast to the concentration on the com-
plex “internal” structure of a single dynamic language space of Part III, Part IV turns
the attention outward, to the interplay between language spaces. In addition to founda-
tion articles from the perspectives of language contact studies and areal language typol-
ogy, there are contributions that explore specific consequences of migration and colonial-
ism (pidgins and creoles, overseas varieties, new minorities) and the special case of non-
convergence in the face of continuing language contact.
The second major division of the handbook is devoted to the methods of language
and space research. Since excellent discussions of the general methods of empirical re-
search into language variation are already available in the HSK handbooks Sociolinguis-
tics / Soziolinguistik, Quantitative Linguistik / Quantitative Linguistics and Corpus Lin-
guistics, it has been possible to refrain from revisiting such topics here. Instead, given
that the effectiveness of methods and the limitations of methodological approaches can
only be properly assessed on the basis of concrete research findings, we have included a
number of illustrative case studies. These represent the various schools (and traditions)
that characterize the current research climate; they reveal the interplay between the dif-
fering methods and the concrete object of study and, taken together, offer a good over-
view of the entire span of contemporary research into language and space.
Part V takes as its topic the basic problems of data collection and corpus-building in
areal linguistic research. The articles first address the problem of how to maintain empir-
xiv Introduction to this volume
ical standards in traditional survey methods. Part V is then rounded off with an overview
of contemporary methods for collecting linguistic and attitudinal data with varying de-
grees of (un)obtrusiveness, each assessed with respect to the linguistic observer paradox.
Part VI, “Data analysis and the presentation of results”, can also be compact, since
map-based data analysis will be the topic of a separate volume (Language Mapping).
The focus is confined to developments with specific relevance to the investigation of
language and space. For instance, there have been have marked improvements in the
various methods for measuring dialectality in recent years, and these are now becoming
something of a standard analytical tool. Advances have also been made in the modes of
data presentation through linguistic atlases and dictionaries. The printed versions have
been joined by internet-based counterparts that combine and integrate numerous sources
and, by making it possible to directly compare different classes of data across time
(dynamic atlases) and space (digital networks of dictionaries), open up new and more
exact analytical possibilities. This part is rounded out by an article which attempts to
draw together the entire sweep of analytical approaches from classical dialectology via
traditional sociolinguistics to speaker-oriented interpretative social dialectology.
Part VII demonstrates the full spectrum of research topics and methodological ap-
proaches by means of exemplary studies. Three articles are devoted to different types of
regional atlases. The Swiss German dialects are taken as an example with which to
illustrate the potentially rich findings a theoretically informed analysis of the “static”
maps of a classical monodimensional linguistic atlas can offer: the diffusion of innova-
tions emerges as neither a random process nor one that is in any simple way reducible
to the prestige enjoyed by groups of speakers. Far more decisive for the development and
maintenance of regional types are language-internal structural constraints. The principles
steering the transformation of the old European base dialects into modern regional dia-
lects can be demonstrated using the example of the bidimensional atlas of the German
dialects of the Middle Rhine, which systematically took account of social and areal
dimensions. The effectiveness of pluridimensional atlases is demonstrated using the ex-
ample of Portuguese varieties (Fronterizo) in the border regions between Uruguay and
Brazil, where clear zones characterized by differing innovation rates and orientations
can be seen to have emerged under the influence of the contact languages (Spanish and
Brazilian Portuguese).
In contrast to these studies, all of which illustrate the ongoing development of genu-
inely linguistic geographic methods of data collection and analysis, three further contri-
butions present exemplary studies of urban and transnational spaces that make use of
methods developed in and adapted from sociolinguistics, social dialectology and anthro-
pology. Taking small multiethnic groups of school pupils in Copenhagen as an example,
the establishment of “communities of practice” and the social styles that shape them are
illustrated. In contrast, a methodologically diverse Swedish project studying multiethnic
groups of school pupils in different major cities reveals the problems raised in identifying
higher order urban varieties, styles or practices on the basis of a wealth of differences at
different linguistic levels. It also shows how the perception of linguistic differences is
independent of observable language use. How and why ethnographic methods can be
applied to the investigation of transnational language spaces is demonstrated using an
example from the francophone world, in which the circulation of language, identities
and resources on a global market are elucidated. This part of the handbook is rounded
off by a résumé of various studies on the role of both the mass media and new media
in the construction and perception of “linguistic locality”.
Introduction to this volume xv
While the investigation of phonetic/phonological, lexical and, to a more limited ex-

tent, morphological variation has been of central relevance from the very beginnings of
dialectology, other linguistic levels were long neglected. There are various reasons for
this: for instance, although the significance of prosody was recognized from the outset,
there was a lack of widely accepted and manageable survey and analysis procedures.
Research into areal syntax is yet another story. Here, traditional linguistic geography
underestimated the degree to which syntactic structures played a role in the formation
of language spaces and theoretical linguistics long overlooked the analytic potential
which non-written areal varieties offered for syntax. The handbook thus concludes, in
Part VIII, with a systematic consideration of the methodological problems specific to
the various structural domains. On the one hand, this makes apparent the advances that
have been made in the field since the 1982 Dialektologie handbook was published. In
phonology and morphology new analytic procedures have been developed that are capa-
ble of being applied alongside established methods; research into areal syntax has
evolved into an international hot topic from which landmark publications continue to
emerge. On the other hand, it has also become apparent where deficits and unfulfilled
wishes remain; for instance, although areal prosody studies have profited from the by
now manageable tools of instrumental analysis and the outlines of a consensual descrip-
tive system have been developed, we are still far from an even sketchily complete descrip-
tion of prosodic spatial structures (but cf. Gilles 2005 and Peters 2006). More markedly,
the investigation of areal variation in discourse structures has yet to progress beyond
the stage of initial excursions into this field of study. It remains to be hoped that, pre-
cisely through the explication of such specific research problems and the detailing of
deficits and desiderata, the necessary impulses for future research efforts will become
clear.
Reerences
Auer, Peter
2005 Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European dialect/standard constell-
ations. In: Nicole Delbecque, Johan van der Auwera and Dirk Geeraerts (eds.), Perspec-
tives on Variation, 7⫺42. (Trends in Linguistics 163.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Auer, Peter
2009 Visible dialect. In: H. Hovmark, I. Stampe Sletten, A. Gudiksen (eds.), I mund og bog.
25 artikler om sprog tilegnet Inge Lise Pedersen på 70-årsdagen d. 5. juni 2009 [In Mouth
and Book. 25 Articles on Language Dedicated to Inge Lise Pedersen on her 70th Birth-
day, 5 June 2009], 31⫺46. Copenhagen: Nordisk Forskningsinstitut.
Bauman, Zygmunt
1998 Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chambers, J. K. and Peter Trudgill
1980 Dialectology. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Cresswell, Tim
2004 Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Enderlin, Fritz
1910 Die Mundart von Kesswil im Oberthurgau. Mit einem Beitrage zur Frage des Sprachlebens.
(Beiträge zur Schweizerdeutschen Grammatik 5.) Frauenfeld: Huber & Co.
xvi Introduction to this volume
Fujiwara, Yoichi
1974 A Linguistic Atlas of the Seto Inland Sea. 3 vols. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
Gauchat, Louis
1905 L’unité phonétique dans le patois d’une commune. In: Aus romanischen Sprachen und
Literaturen. Festschrift Heinrich Morf zur Feier seiner fünfundzwanzigjährigen Lehrtätig-
keit von seinen Schülern dargebracht, 175⫺232. Halle a.d.S.: M. Niemeyer.
Gilles, Peter
2005 Regionale Prosodie im Deutschen: Variabilität in der Intonation von Abschluss und Weiter-
weisung. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Günzel, Stefan
2006 Einleitung zu Teil II/Phänomenologie der Räumlichkeit. In: Jörg Dunne and Stephan
Günzel (eds.), Raumtheorie: Grundlagen aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, 105⫺
128. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Johnstone, Barbara
2004 Place, globalization, and linguistic variation. In: Carmen Fought (ed.), Sociolinguistic
Variation ⫺ Critical Reflections, 65⫺83. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew E. Danielson
2006 Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Lin-
guistics 34(2): 77⫺104.
Labov, William
1966 The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Ap-
plied Linguistics
Peters, Jörg
2006 Intonation deutscher Regionalsprachen. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Niedzielski, Nancy A. and Dennis R. Preston
2000 Folk Linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schütz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann
[1983] 1989 The Structures of the Life-World. Translated by Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram
Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Die Strukturen der Lebens-
welt, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.]
Simmel, Georg
1903 [1995] Soziologie des Raums. [In: Otthein Rammstedt (ed.), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7:
Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901⫺1908, 132⫺184. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.]
Wagner, Kurt
1924⫺1925 Grammophonische Aufnahmen deutscher Mundarten. Theutonista 1: 229⫺231.
Wegener, Philipp
1880 Über die deutsche Dialectforschung. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 11: 450⫺480.
Zimmerli, Jacob
1899 Die deutsch-französische Sprachgrenze in der Schweiz. Part 3: Die Sprachgrenze im Wallis.
Basel/Geneva: H. Georg.
Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt 1
1 Editorial responsibilities for the present volume were divided among the two editors. Parts I⫺IV were edited
in Freiburg, Parts V⫺VIII in Marburg. Peter Auer wishes to thank Elin Arbin and Carolyn Mackenzie for
their help; Jürgen Erich Schmidt thanks Mark Pennay for his editorial assistance with the project.
Contents
Introduction to the Language and Space series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Introduction to this volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
I. Introduction: Language and space

1. Barbara Johnstone, Language and geographical space . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Brit Mæhlum, Language and social spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3. Susan Gal, Language and political spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4. Marco Jacquemet, Language and transnational spaces . . . . . . . . . . 50
II. Linguistic approaches to space

5. Robert W. Murray, Language and space: The neogrammarian tradition 70
6. Renate Schrambke, Language and space: Traditional dialect geography 87
7. Clemens Knobloch, Language and space: The kulturmorphologische
Ansatz in dialectology and the German language and space ideology,
1920⫺1960 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
8. Sjef Barbiers, Language and space: Structuralist and generative
approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
9. David Britain, Language and space: The variationist approach . . . . . 142
10. Penelope Eckert, Who’s there? Language and space in social anthropol-
ogy and interactional sociolinguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
11. Dennis R. Preston, Language, space and the folk . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
12. Jürgen Erich Schmidt, Language and space: The linguistic dynamics
approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
III. Structure and dynamics o a language space

13. Gaetano Berruto, Identifying dimensions of linguistic variation in a
language space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
14. Beat Siebenhaar, Horizontal convergence of linguistic varieties in a
language space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
15. Unn Røyneland, Vertical convergence of linguistic varieties in a
language space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
16. Rüdiger Harnisch, Divergence of linguistic varieties in a language space 275
17. Alexandra N. Lenz, Emergence of varieties through restructuring and
reevaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
18. Reinhild Vandekerckhove, Urban and rural language . . . . . . . . . . . 315
19. Claudia Maria Riehl, Discontinous language spaces (Sprachinseln) . . 332
20. Johan Taeldeman, Linguistic stability in a language space . . . . . . . . 355
21. Claus D. Pusch, Old minorities within a language space . . . . . . . . . 375
xviii Contents
IV. Structure and dynamics across language spaces

22. Shana Poplack and Stephen Levey, Contact-induced grammatical
change: A cautionary tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
23. Walter Bisang, Areal language typology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
24. Christian Mair, The consequences of migration and colonialism I:
Pidgins and creoles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 440
25. Daniel Schreier, The consequences of migration and colonialism II:
Overseas varieties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
26. Thomas Krefeld, The consequences of migration and colonialism III:
New minorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
27. Göz Kaufmann, Non-convergence despite language contact . . . . . . 478
V. Data collection and corpus-building

28. Werner König, Investigating language in space: Methods and empirical
standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494
29. Guido Seiler, Investigating language in space: Questionnaire and
interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 512
30. Tore Kristiansen, Investigating language in space: Experimental
techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528
VI. Data analysis and the presentation o results

31. John Nerbonne and Wilbert Heeringa, Measuring dialect differences . . 550
32. Alfred Lameli, Linguistic atlases ⫺ traditional and modern . . . . . . . 567
33. Claudine Moulin, Dialect dictionaries ⫺ traditional and modern . . . . 592
34. Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Community-based investigations:
From traditional dialect grammar to sociolinguistic studies . . . . . . . 613
VII. Exemplary studies

35. Pia Quist, Untying the language-body-place connection: A study on
linguistic variation and social style in a Copenhagen community
of practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 632
36. Walter Haas, A study on areal diffusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649
37. Joachim Herrgen, The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rhine (MRhSA):
A study on the emergence and spread of regional dialects . . . . . . . . 668
38. Sally Boyd and Kari Fraurud, Challenging the homogeneity assumption
in language variation analysis: Findings from a study of multilingual
urban spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 686
39. Harald Thun, Variety complexes in contact: A study on Uruguayan and
Brazilian Fronterizo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 706
40. Monica Heller, Language as a process: A study on transnational spaces 724
41. Jannis Androutsopoulos, The study of language and space in media
discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 740
Contents xix
VIII. Structural domains: Methodological problems

42. Peter Gilles and Beat Siebenhaar, Areal variation in segmental
phonetics and phonology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 760
43. Peter Gilles and Beat Siebenhaar, Areal variation in prosody . . . . . . 786
44. Stefan Rabanus, Areal variation in morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 804
45. Dirk Geeraerts, Lexical variation in space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 821
46. Bernd Kortmann, Areal variation in syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 837
47. Norbert Dittmar, Areal variation and discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 865
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 879
I. Introduction: Language and space
1. Language and geographical space

1. Introduction
2. “The science of empire”: Geography to 1918
3. Region and culture
4. Superorganicism and social-scientific geography
5. The 1960s onwards: Towards new paradigms
6. New concerns
7. Conclusion
8. References
1. Introduction
My goal in this chapter is twofold: to encourage readers to think critically about terms
such as “geography” and “space”, and to provide an overview of the ways in which
geographers have used these terms and others like them. Linguistics and geography have
ridden the same political and intellectual currents over the past two centuries. During
that time, linguists concerned with variation and change have imagined our object of
inquiry ⫺ language ⫺ in various ways, as structure or process; as relatively orderly and
predictable or fundamentally stochastic and unpredictable; as autonomous or distrib-
uted; as a cognitive or a social phenomenon. We have paid less and more belated atten-
tion to defining the variables we use to account for the distribution of linguistic forms
across time and space, variables such as “society”, “gender”, “age” or “region”. Investi-
gating how geographers have imagined the object of their inquiry enriches our sense of
the conceptual possibilities suggested by the phrase “geographical space”. Thus this
chapter traces the history of geographical inquiry with a particular eye to the parallel
history of dialectology and sociolinguistics. Where there are explicit, cited links between
sociolinguistics and geography, I point to some of them, although I do not claim to be
tracing all of the ways in which geographers and sociolinguists have drawn on each
other’s work.
2. The science o empire: Geography to 1918

In British and American geography departments, the principal division is between “phys-
ical” and “human” geography. Physical geographers overlap with geologists, ecologists,
hydrologists, biologists, chemists and physicists in their interest in landforms and the
flora and fauna they support. Human geographers overlap with archaeologists, anthro-
pologists, sociologists and economists (and occasionally with linguists) in their interest
in how humans interact with the environment, shaping “the world” as the world shapes
us. I concentrate in this chapter on human geography. But the two branches have com-
mon origins.
2 I. Introduction: Language and space
The sixteenth-century European transition from feudalism to capitalism both enabled

and was enabled by the development of a trading system linking Europe with resources
in Africa and the “New World” (Heffernan 2003; on the history of geography in general,
see also Livingstone 1992; Dunbar 2002). This became possible in the context of ad-
vances in navigation technology. Early Modern geographers helped develop such tech-
nology as well as techniques for map-making and systems for describing the flora, fauna,
geology and peoples of the rest of the world, some of which would become economic re-
sources.
In Britain, geography began to acquire credibility as an academic discipline during
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Geographers began to present their work
in more scientific ways, and they played a role in the intellectual conversation of the day
about the relative merits of societies and civilizations. Geography was no longer seen as
just a by-product of navigation. The origin of this shift in focus is sometimes dated to
1769, the year of James Cook’s first Pacific exploration (Heffernan 2003). But academic
geography was bound, often tightly, to the imperial project (Godlewska and Smith 1994;
Bell, Butlin and Heffernan 1994).
The link between academic geography and the aristocracy was forged in part through
the rise of the aristocratic “grand tour” of the world, which often included observing,
describing and sometimes collecting artifacts and people. The grand tour helped spark
the development of geographical societies which institutionalized and underwrote jour-
neys of exploration. These societies were founded by wealthy businessmen with economic
interests in the findings of such journeys, in collaboration with aristocratic amateur sci-
entists and academic geographers. The first such society was the Association for Promot-
ing the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, founded in London in 1788. This was
followed by the Société de Géographie de Paris in 1821, the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde
zu Berlin in 1828, and, in 1830, the British Royal Geographic Society (RGS), which
became especially influential. The Royal Geographic Society’s “fellows” were mostly
amateurs, although some professional scientists were included. The society provided
funding and equipment and set goals for the journeys they sponsored. The Royal Geo-
graphic Society was involved in all of the major nineteenth-century journeys of explora-
tion in Africa. The maps and other results of these journeys fuelled the later nineteenth
century European rush to colonize Africa, both as a way of getting access to new raw
materials at the lowest possible cost and as a way to gain political influence in Europe.
During the nineteenth century, as part of the shift from often amateur Wissenschaft
or knowledge-building to expert “science” (Woolgar 1988), geography was institutional-
ized in academia, particularly in Germany and France. One argument for this was that
training in geography would help inculcate patriotism. Nineteenth-century geography
was exemplified by the German Alexander von Humboldt, who “sought to establish a
systematic science of geography that could analyse the natural and the human worlds
together” (Heffernan 2003: 7). He was the brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose
linguistic theory was linked with nineteenth-century Romanticism and nationalism in
similar ways. Like his brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt sought to describe the essential
link between peoples, landscapes and language by virtue of which shared language was
seen as one of the “pillars” of nationalist theory. According to Wilhelm, each language
has its own elements of innere Sprachform, “a peculiar property of the nation or the
group that speaks it” (Robins 1979: 174⫺175).
By the end of the century, British geographer Hugh Robert Mill could claim that
geography was “absolutely essential for our well-being, and even for the continuance of
1. Language and geographical space 3
the [British] nation as a Power among the states of the world” (Mill 1901, quoted in
Mitchell 2000: 17). Such a claim was based on the environmental determinism suggested
by the von Humboldts and further developed in neo-Lamarckian thought. Neo-La-
marckism was based on geneticist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that acquired charac-
teristics could be inherited by an organism’s offspring. In geography, this idea was used
to argue that environmental conditions create habits which are biologically transmitted
to subsequent generations. Neo-Lamarckian environmental determinism holds, in other
words, that there is an organic relationship between people and place, such that the
natural, inherited ability of a people to better themselves, shaped by their physical envi-
ronment, determines the ability of a state to prosper. Since European and European-
American peoples came from climates and continents that were particularly likely to
produce positive behavioral traits, their intervention in parts of the world with less ad-
vantageous climates and physical environments (hotter, more tropical places, for exam-
ple) was thought to be justified, if not morally imperative.
Environmental determinism (or “scientific racism”, as its detractors label it) contin-
ued to shape geography in the early twentieth century. In the United States, geographer
Ellen Churchill Semple (1911) articulated the theory most influentially. But by the 1920s
the theory collapsed, in part because it failed to provide an accurate account of variation
across space, and partly because it was no longer needed to justify imperialism and
colonization (Mitchell 2000: 19).
3. Region and culture
At the end of the nineteenth century, with the “blank spots” on the European and Euro-
American maps of the Earth mainly filled, intellectuals feared that the twentieth century
would bring a new era of conflict. World War I fulfilled some of those fears. The organic
relationship between peoples, places and languages was called into question by attempts
by nation-states to conquer others, and the brutality of the war made many feel that
human life was essentially disorderly. Geographers played important roles during the
war, particularly in developing maps for intelligence work, and geography played a
larger role in British and American school curricula after the war than it had before.
Post-war disillusionment with the idea that the nation-state was the natural condition
for global peace led to a new concern with region.
One approach, called the “science of regions”, is associated particularly with Richard
Hartshorne (1939). This descriptive approach to physical geography continued the nine-
teenth-century and earlier tradition of cataloguing the characteristics of “undiscovered”
places, and it both developed from and created links between geographers and their
colleagues in geology and other physical sciences. In response to the failure of environ-
mental determinism, another group of geographers turned to culture to explain regional
variation in human behavior. This approach was pioneered by American Carl Sauer in
The Morphology of Landscape (Sauer 1925). For Sauer, “culture, working with and on
nature, created the contexts of life” (Mitchell 2000: 21). Human life ways are not shaped
directly by nature, as environmental determinists claim. Rather, by means of agriculture,
architecture and other activities, humans shape places into the landscapes that form the
environments for their lives and the object of study for geographers. The activities that
shape landscape are cultural activities, determined by human societies’ ideas about how
to use and live in nature. Landscape is thus a manifestation of the culture that produced
it; to find out about local culture, geographers read the landscape. So while it is impor-
tant to describe the processes that create the natural (i. e., pre-human) environment, this
is preliminary to the job of exploring cultural landscapes, which should be the primary
task of geography.
Mitchell (2000: 22⫺23) links Sauer’s work with that of nineteenth-century German
linguist Johann von Herder. Herder attributed the unique characteristics of languages
not directly to nature but to the expression of the “spirit of a culture” (Mitchell 2000:
23); cultural variation was due not to the physical environment but to the relationships
people created with places as they interacted with them. Thus the authentic roots of the
nation-state can best be seen in vernacular practices such as folklore, folk music, folk
poetry and fairy-tales. The influence of these ideas can be seen clearly in nineteenth-
century European dialectology, particularly in the form of people like the Grimm broth-
ers, who were both folklorists and students of language change.
But Sauer and his students were motivated less by nineteenth-century Romantic nos-
talgia for the authentic, unitary roots of the natural nation than by the sense that West-
ern civilization was destroying what was particular about places and peoples, erasing the
differences that would allow geographers and others to trace human history though the
distribution of human artifacts and traditions. Influenced by anthropologists Boas and
Kroeber, Sauer claimed that the job of geography was to “[chart] the distribution over
the earth of the arts and artifacts of man, to learn whence they came and how they
spread” (Sauer 1952: 1, quoted in Mitchell 2000: 25). Sauer’s rejection of “causal geogra-
phy” and his focus on the landscape, an object of study that no other discipline claimed,
helped make geography more respectable as a science (Mitchell 2000: 26⫺29).
Like his colleagues in anthropology, Sauer went beyond the description of landscape.
He attempted to explain the natural and cultural processes that create the meanings of
human environments. For Sauer, cultural landscapes are constantly created and recre-
ated, and geographers seek to trace their histories by describing such things as human
artifacts, population patterns, building types, systems of production ⫺ and systems of
communication. Geography textbooks thus often mention the work of the dialect atlas
surveys about regional differences in lexicon as they reflect differences in culture and its
interaction with nature. Just as do regional patterns of barn-building (Ensminger 1992),
regional patterns of word usage track differences in how people interact with the physical
environment.
Other regional geographers were less concerned with the processes of divergence and
change that underlay regional differences, and their work sometimes consisted of de-
scriptive compendia of observations about regions and their landscapes. This gave rise
to one critique of Sauerian regional geography: it was too concerned with material arti-
facts and too mistrustful of modernity, hence overly focused on the rural, the primitive
and the archaic. Similar anti-modernist sentiment can be said to underpin (explicitly or
not) the American dialect atlas projects of the twentieth century, which are vulnerable
to the same critique. For example, both the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South
Atlantic States in the 1930s and 1940s and Ensminger’s exploration of Pennsylvania barn
types were published as or well after the kinds of regionally based cultural differentiation
they describe were beginning to break down due to such influences as radio, motorized
vehicles, urbanization and the standardization of agricultural practices and vocabularies.
4. Superorganicism and social-scientiic geography

Another critique of Sauer’s approach had to do with its use of the concept “culture”.
Because he was in the end more interested in the effects of culture than with the processes
that led to these effects, Sauer relied on a common-sense, uncritical understanding of
this idea (Mitchell 2000: 29). This critique was addressed in Wilbur Zelinsky’s (1973)
work, first published in the early 1970s. Zelinsky, a student of Sauer’s, attempted to
define “culture” more systematically. For Zelinsky, culture could be seen as (1) “an as-
semblage of learned behavior”, or, more abstractly, (2) “a structured, traditional set of
patterns for behavior, a code or template, for ideas and acts”, or, more abstractly yet,
(3) a totality which “appears to be a superorganic entity living and changing according
to a […] set of internal laws” (Zelinsky 1973: 71). The idea of culture as superorganic,
existing “both of and beyond its participating members” (Zelinsky 1973: 40), means that
individual behavior does not predict culture or vice versa.
To describe culture in this sense is to describe what unifies it, the “internal laws”
which operate behind the diversity in behavior that can actually be observed. Zelinsky
acknowledged that modernization tends to make individuals freer to decide how and
where to live and that “spurious” or “synthetic” regions created by sports fans or public
relations professionals, like “the Steeler Nation”, “Chicagoland”, or “Pennsylvania
Dutch Country”, can sometimes seem more real than more authentic regions do. How-
ever, Zelinsky’s model of culture as superorganic fits best with the “traditional region”,
the region into which people are born and in which they live their lives and in which
“an intimate symbiotic relationship between man and land develops over many centuries,
one that creates indigenous modes of thought and action, a distinctive visible landscape
and a form of human ecology specific to the locality” (Zelinsky 1973: 110).
Critical geographer Don Mitchell (2002: 30⫺33) suggests that Zelinsky’s view of cul-
ture as superorganic was a liberal reaction to the conflict and fragmentation of the 1960s,
an attempt to reassert a fundamental unity underlying differences in behavior. Critiques
of superorganicism point to how, by reifying culture and making it agentive, the theory
positions the individual as an automaton. Critics like James Duncan (1980) ask how
culture is constructed through human activity. Echoing many sociolinguists, they wonder
how culture actually works in human society and life.
With increased state regulation of national economies and the increasing profession-
alization of business in the post-World War II years, many academic disciplines also
“professionalized”, making new connections with government, industry and the military
in return for new sources of research funding (Woolgar 1988; Johnston 2003; see John-
ston 1997 on geography after 1945). The time was right for the emergence of new ways
of working that could produce “scientific” information about human behavior, and disci-
plines like economics, political science and sociology became more influential as they
turned increasingly to quantitative “social-scientific” methods, and to the research ques-
tions such methods could best answer. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, some geogra-
phers began to re-orient their work towards social science. They liked the rigor of social
scientific methods and thought that scientific rigor required quantitative methods (Greg-
ory 1962). They also realized that quantitative research would raise geography’s status.
The quantitative approaches to geographical inquiry that became dominant during
this period were known as “locational analysis” or “spatial science”. They drew on mod-
els from economics and other social sciences, including assumptions like the principle of
least effort and that of rational choice ⫺ the assumptions, that is, that people will do
the things that require the least effort and best serve their interests. Widely used text-
books that brought such ideas into geography from economics, sociology and the like
included Haggett (1965) and Morrill (1970). One influential theory that drew on social-
scientific models was “central place theory” (Christaller [1933] 1966; see also Berry 1967).
Central place theory assumes that potential consumers moving through space want to
minimize their time and effort and business owners want to maximize consumers’ spend-
ing and the rate at which the consumer population turns over. The resulting model
describes the ideal arrangement in space of smaller and larger central places that function
as business and service centers.
Sociolinguists have drawn explicitly on models of spatial flow and diffusion from
quantitative human geography. (For a useful overview of this work, see Bailey et al.
1993.) The most influential model from the point of view of sociolinguistics has been
that of Torsten Hägerstrand ([1953] 1967). Location theory is concerned with the simula-
tion and modeling of processes of change across space, and it has been applied to various
patterns of change, including the spread of disease. Hägerstrand’s “gravity model” of
hierarchical change was adopted by Trudgill (1974) in his work in Norway and by Cal-
lary (1975) in a study of the spread of urban speech forms in Illinois, USA. Bailey et al.
(1993) and Horvath and Horvath (2001) have also used elements of location theory to
account for “contra-hierarchical” patterns of change and for “space effects” and
“place effects”.
In Hägerstrand’s view, “innovation spreads in a community through a network of
face-to-face interpersonal communication such that the likelihood of adoption at a given
site is higher when it is close to a site of previous adoption” (Yapa 1996: 238). The
assumption underlying this model is that interaction becomes less frequent as a function
of distance. Diffusion can also be blocked by such things as economic and class differ-
ences or geographical factors that make face-to-face communication less likely. There are
also amplifiers of diffusion, such as tightly knit social networks or population density. In
general, according to Rogers (1983), the factors that influence diffusion across space
include the phenomenon itself (for a phonological change, this might include whether it
is a merger or a split), communicative networks, distance, time and social structure. One
effect of the need for face-to-face interaction is that innovations can either move from
cities to suburbs to rural areas, or bypass the rural areas near cities, “cascading” to
further-away urban centers where city dwellers are more likely to have contacts. Both
are types of “hierarchical” diffusion, models of the spread of change that begins in
“central places”.
The social-scientific, quantitative “revolution” in geography was codified by David
Harvey in a 1969 textbook (Harvey 1969). But by the 1970s, Harvey, along with other
geographers, had begun to look to Marxist theory for a better understanding of the
social inequality that so often serves as a barrier to spatial diffusion (Harvey 1973: 1982).
Location theory paid too little attention, it was thought, to social structures and social
systems. As Johnston explains it (2003: 62), “By reducing all decision-making to eco-
nomic criteria, subject to immutable “laws” regarding least-costs, profit-maximization
and distance-minimizing, geographers, it was claimed, were ignoring (even denigrating)
the role of culture and individuality in human conditioning and behavior”. One of the
most influential critics of social-scientific, quantitative geography was Derek Gregory
(1985), who pointed out that location theory presupposes that each member of a society
has the same likelihood of adopting change, assuming contact with it. In particular,
quantitative geographers’ “laws” were thought to describe, and thus help perpetuate, the
capitalist status quo.
One important reaction to the critique was L. A. Brown’s (1981) “market and infra-
structure perspective”, a method for paying systematic attention to differences in access
to resources. Studies taking this more socially conscious perspective came together with
studies of the diffusion of modernization from anthropology, sociology and political
science. One such model is that of Lakshman Yapa (1996), who proposes a way of
talking about innovation based on the idea that what spreads from place to place is not
simply information but a “nexus of production relations and biased innovations” (Yapa
1996: 232).
5. The 1960s onwards: Towards new paradigms

Just as in many other social-scientific and humanistic disciplines, quantitative ap-
proaches began to be questioned during the later 1960s and 1970s. New or newly discov-
ered strands of philosophy and social theory were brought to the table, many with ori-
gins in nineteenth and earlier twentieth-century European philosophy and political
theory. Geographers skeptical of the static, consensual quality of social-scientific models
began to explore Marxist and neo-Marxist social theory, with its focus on power, class
struggle and change. Feminist geographers including Gillian Rose (1993) and Suzanne
Mackenzie (1989) moved beyond describing how capitalism pins individuals into places
along an economic axis, describing “positionality” along multiple social dimensions in-
cluding that of gender and theorizing identity in terms of performance rather than social
determination. Feminists’ attention to the hybridity, mutability and particularity of iden-
tity led to a more generally postmodern geography (Gregory 1989; Soja 1989; N. Duncan
1996). Others turned to the discourse-centered philosophy of Michel Foucault, exploring
how place and space are socially constructed via a variety of knowledge-building prac-
tices. Methodologically, all these approaches suggested that qualitative, particularistic
research aimed at describing social process and practices needed to supplement or even
replace quantitative work aimed at making generalizations about the outcomes of such
processes.
In the two sections that follow, I focus on two of the post-1960s approaches to geog-
raphy that have found direct application in work about language and place: Marxist and
neo-Marxist geography and humanistic geography. I then touch on their common con-
cern with the ways in which places are created and their meanings shared through dis-
course, sketching some current approaches that draw on Foucauldian thought.
5.1. Marxist-inluenced geography
In the UK, Marxist and then feminist “cultural studies” (first institutionalized at the
University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) began to influ-
ence geographers in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Jackson 1980; Cosgrove 1983). What
Denis Cosgrove called “radical cultural geography” required increased attention to is-
sues such as race, gender, power, dominance (for geographers, often enacted in the con-
trol of space), and the production of “social space”. It also encouraged renewed interest
in landscape in the Sauerian sense, but with a more direct focus on diversity and conflict
in the creation and regimentation of landscape.
Edward L. Soja (1989) traces the beginning of “critical human geography” to the
work of the French Marxist scholar Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991). According to Lefebvre,
the production of space is a consequence of modern capitalism. Space is produced, in
Lefebvre’s sense, when it is the result of labor; the production of space is contrasted with
its creation by nature. When a space is a product, it can be reproduced and it takes on
the characteristics of an object. For example, it can be bought and sold. Spaces that are
produced may bear traces of how they were produced ⫺ how the original, natural raw
material was modified. “One might say”, according to Lefebvre, “that practical activity
writes upon nature, albeit in a scrawling hand” (Lefebvre 1991: 117). But such traces
tend to fade, and produced spaces eventually tend to become detached from the condi-
tions under which they were produced, including the labor involved. The processes that
“naturalize” produced space Lefebvre calls “forgetfulness” or “mystification”. People
forget, for example, what residential neighborhoods looked like before they were devel-
oped; various practices at home and at school encourage children to think of the neigh-
borhood as the natural environment for life and discourage them from wondering about
its history. Eventually, physical traces of the neighborhood’s production out of farmland
or forest ⫺ flattened hills or artificial contours, non-native trees and flowers, new roads
and driveways ⫺ become invisible, part of a new “natural” background. The study of
the history of space, then, looks at how the “spatio-temporal rhythms of nature” are
transformed by “social practice” (Lefebvre 1991: 117).
Space can be “appropriated” or “dominated” by human activity. The appropriation
of space occurs when space is minimally modified to serve the needs of humans. This
may result in a structure ⫺ a hut or an igloo, for example ⫺ whose form stays close to
what the raw materials dictate. Space is dominated, on the other hand, when it is trans-
formed by modern technology which introduces new forms, which are often rectilinear,
closed, emptied and sterilized. A fort or a highway would exemplify the domination of
space via technological modes of production. Lefebvre claims that most appropriation
of space in the modern era also involves its domination (Lefebvre 1991: 164⫺168).
The terms space and place and their derivatives have had many uses in geography. In
general, space is seen as the raw material for the construction, by human societies, of
landscape, or, more abstractly, place. But geographical theories differ on whether it is
possible to speak of space independent of human activity. For those who carry social
constructivism to its extreme, everything we observe is seen through one cultural lens or
another, so it makes no sense to try to describe pre-cultural spaces. Geographers like
Soja (1989) and J. Nicholas Entrikin (1991) come down in the middle, claiming that
humans’ space (or, for Soja, “spatiality”) is always interconnected with the “physical
space of material nature” and the “mental space of cognition and representation” (Soja
1989: 120). Entrikin similarly speaks of the “betweenness” of place, partly physical, but
always also partly the result of social activity. The focus of Marxist geography is, how-
ever, on the social process through which human spaces are created, maintained, strug-
gled over, and for Marxists, these processes are massively shaped by economic relations
and their historical residue.
Sociolinguist David Britain (1997, 2005) draws on the work of Marxist-influenced
geographers to add explanatory detail to the more abstract model of social networks
that Lesley Milroy (1987) and others have used in describing processes of language
change. Research by geographer John Urry (1985) for example, shows how social rela-
tions and spatial structures are connected in different ways depending on the local eco-
nomic and political system. Nineteenth-century capitalism, in England, led to the foun-
dation of towns near natural resources like coal and iron. These towns attracted laborers,
who needed inexpensive housing near where they worked; the resulting row houses led
to new social relations among members of the working class, including, perhaps, denser,
more multiplex social networks than they experienced in the countryside where they
came from.
Beginning in the 1980s, critics of “radical” Marxist geography began to claim that
Marxist approaches were too deterministic and too dependent on a static model of social
structure as shaped by an unchanging set of economic relations between labor and capi-
tal. These geographers “reemphasized the need for more sophisticated conceptions of
the forces shaping people’s subjective experiences, of the role of these experiences in
shaping people’s practices and struggles, and of the significance of subjective knowledge
in scientific accounts of social change” (Chouinard 1996: 389⫺390). Doreen Massey’s
(1984) “critical realism” is considered a classic formulation of this position. According
to Massey, there are general tendencies, in a capitalist economic system, for socio-spatial
relations to take certain forms, but the particular processes that lead to these relations
are implemented by individuals. As a result, both the situation and the individual actor
are changed. In other words, there is a continuous interplay between “structure” and
“agency”, terms drawn from sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984), who calls this dialectic
process “structuration”. Methodologically, for Massey, this means that a geographer can
explain particular locational events but not make general laws. Geographers Allan Pred
(1984, 1990) and Nigel Thrift (1991) were particularly influential in bringing structura-
tion theory into geography.
Drawing on social theorists like Zigmunt Bauman (1992), who suggest that the mass
media are now among the main technologies for the production and distribution of
culture, some neo-Marxist geographers have explored how the media function in contests
over the meaning of space. Robert D. Sack (1988, cited in Entrikin 1991) shows how
advertising can make strategic use of (and help perpetuate) nostalgia for neighborhood,
community, or region. Sociolinguists have begun to notice that linguistic forms people
think of as local can be used in such advertising, and in other planned attempts to
capture the “heritage” or “authentic” aspects of places (Beal 1999), and that these uses
may have ramifications for the trajectory of linguistic change.
Critics of Marxist-influenced geography included feminists such as Mackenzie (1989)
and Rose (1993), who pointed out that humans are positioned not only in an economic
system but along many other axes as well, one being gender. They encourage attention
to the hybridity and particularity of identity and of people’s relations with space and
place. They advocate new methods of interpretation, sometimes less theory-driven ones
such as text analysis and the analysis of narrative. For Courtice Rose (1980), doing
geography is more like reading than like traditional scientific work. Sociolinguist Greg
Myers (2006) draws on Massey’s (1994) feminist work in his discourse analysis of how
members of focus groups “formulate place” (Schegloff 1972) as they introduce them-
selves and support their positions. The turn away from the formulation of general laws
about how economic systems shape space and how it is experienced is encapsulated by
Margaret Rodman (2003: 208), “It is time to recognize that places, like voices, are local
and multiple. For each inhabitant, a place has a unique reality, one in which meaning is
shared with other people and places. The links in these chains of experienced places are
forged of culture and history”.
5.2. Humanistic geography

Another new approach with origins in the 1960s and 1970s draws on the phenomenologi-
cal strand of German philosophy. Like Marxist, feminist and other critical approaches,
it originated as a reaction to the “old” cultural geography and the abstract law-finding
of quantitative social-scientific geography. Humanistic geographers, drawing on phe-
nomenologists such as Heidegger, are concerned with how individuals experience and
“inhabit” the world, describing human interactions with the environment from the hu-
mans’ perspective, in other words our “senses of place”. Key humanistic geographers
include Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), Entrikin (1976), Edward Relph (1981) and Anne Buttimer
(1993).
According to humanistic geographers, the physical aspects of place are always medi-
ated by subjective experience. We experience a house not as a set of geographical coordi-
nates or a particular arrangement of building materials or furniture, but as a set of
smells, sounds, scenes and emotions that are shaped by repeated ways of interacting with
houses. We “inhabit” a house, making it our own, by experiencing and/or manipulating it
in a variety of ways ⫺ walking through it, touching the walls, looking out the window,
turning the water on and off, rearranging the furniture, maybe even writing a poem
about it. We experience a region, sometimes, partly through the sounds of a dialect
(Mugerauer 1985). Physical places are sometimes designed with particular human experi-
ences in mind, as when people build structures or post signs that make places more
distinctive and memorable or make sure a house is well-lit and fresh-smelling before
showing it to a potential buyer. Such manipulations have become more obvious in the
past few decades as attention to “heritage” and “authenticity” in the marketing of place
has led to the increasing commodification of senses of place: shopping malls that incor-
porate elements of the industries that once occupied their sites, towns designed to feel
“like home”, with nostalgic street names like “Cherry Lane”. Technological develop-
ments like satellite navigation and online mapping systems have also changed how we
experience space.
A sense of place comes both from immediate experience and from more abstract
modes of knowledge. Spatiality is constructed directly through bodily experience that
results from motion and sensation: vision, smell, touch and hearing (Thrift 2000; Urry
2000). Among the indirect sources of knowledge about places are art (for example, land-
scape painting, travel writing, television documentaries), education (school lessons, guide
books, maps and brochures and so on) and politics (debates over urban redevelopment
or public transit, for example) (Tuan 1977: 161⫺164). These make places visible and
encourage people to see them in common ways, or make them aware that they see
them differently.
5.3. Discourse and place

Neo-Marxist and humanistic approaches to geography, as well as other strands of post-
modern geographical thought, have in common the idea that spaces become human
places partly through discourse. “Discourse” in this sense (Foucault 1972: 1980) refers
to talk, writing and other practices involving language, as well as to the ideology that is
produced and reinforced through talk. In other words, it is through ways of talking that
arise from and evoke particular linked sets of ideas that people come to share or attempt
to impose ideas about what places mean and how to behave in them. The “linguistic
turn” to which Marxist, Foucauldian and feminist theory gave rise has shifted many
scholars’ focus throughout the humanities and social sciences, and geography is no ex-
ception. As Bridge and Watson (2000) put it in connection with urban studies, “Cities
are not simply material or lived spaces ⫺ they are also spaces of the imagination and
spaces of representation” (Bridge and Watson 2000: 7). Among the “technologies” (Ben-
jamin [1936] 1968) or “practices” (de Certeau 1984) that shape how places are offered to
the imagination are the mass media, with their particular economic goals and technical
constraints, as well as linguistic practices like narrative, which arise in particular social
and situational contexts.
Students of language and space have begun to draw on humanistic and discursive
geography (Johnstone 2004). For example, they explore how storytelling and other
genres of discourse can evoke and shape the meanings of places and ways of speaking,
encouraging people to experience them the same way and learn the same lessons from
them (Johnstone 1990; Modan 2007). Recent work on the “enregistration” of dialects,
drawing on the semiotic theory of Michael Silverstein (1993, 2003) and Asif Agha (2003),
explores how sets of linguistic forms that are hearable or visible in an area can coalesce,
in people’s minds, into “dialects”, and how dialects get linked with cities and regions
through practices like newspaper feature-writing (Johnstone, Bhasin and Wittkofski
2002; Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006), the telling of travel stories (Johnstone
2007), and nostalgic online chat (Johnstone and Baumgardt 2004). Interrogating how
linguists ourselves construct dialects and places as we talk about them may add a much-
needed layer of reflexivity to our work.
6. New concerns
It has been argued that economic and cultural developments have diminished the rele-
vance of place in human lives. The threat to meaningful places in the modern world is
often said to be the result of rapid change and mobility. Edward Said (1978: 18), for
example, speaks of the “generalized sense of homelessness” experienced by the globally
mobile.
According to Giddens (1991), the dynamism of modern life has the effect of separat-
ing place from space, removing social relations from local contexts via “abstract sys-
tems” such as currency, therapy and technology (Giddens 1991: 14⫺21). Once social life
becomes “disembedded” in this way, “place becomes phantasmagoric” (Giddens 1991:
146); an individual’s experiential world is no longer the physical world in which he or
she moves. The electronic media are often associated with a sort of liberation from
place, and new attention to what happens on the borders and at the boundaries and to
heterogeneity and adaptiveness calls into question the idea that “cultures” in the tradi-
tional sense ever existed (Bhabha 1994; Urciuoli 1995).
But local, space-based community may still have a role to play. People sometimes
attempt to “re-embed the lifespan within a local milieu” (Giddens 1991: 147), via such
activities as attempts to cultivate community pride. Cultural geographers who focus on

traditional cultures and traditional aspects of culture recognize the continued persistence
and importance of traditional sources of meaning such as localness (Entrikin 1991: 41).
Local contexts of life may be tied to human identity in more immediate ways, too. As
Stuart Hall points out (1991: 33⫺36), “the return to the local is often a response to
globalization”. Face-to-face community is knowable in a way more abstract communities
are not. Anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1996: 26⫺27) proposes that the local may still
be an important source of continuity, because “everyday life” is local. People’s earliest
experiences usually take place in a local context, and local encounters tend to be face-
to-face and long-term. Furthermore, the local is sensually immediate and immersive in
a way that more distanced forms of experience are not. Thus the principal vehicles for
the production and transmission of culture may still be local ones.
Geographers come down on both sides of this debate about whether place still
matters. For Castells (1966), economic, political and cultural globalization mean that
“flows” are replacing places and geography is in danger of losing its traditional object
of inquiry. Castree (2003) argues, to the contrary, that the role of place in human life
has changed, but not vanished. To be sure, geographers can no longer think of the world
as a mosaic of bounded places, each of which can be studied on its own. For contempo-
rary human geographers, places are both unique ⫺ the result of particular, small-scale
interactions and experiences ⫺ and the same ⫺ shaped by the same large-scale global
forces. The identities of people and places are thus “glocal” ⫺ both global and local.
Global forces play out differently in different sets of local circumstances, because par-
ticular local circumstances constrain how such forces are experienced and dealt with.
Sociolinguists are likewise noticing how the larger-scale leveling effects of language
and dialect contact can be counteracted by particular regional loyalties and patterns of
interaction, media consumption and such, which can lead to the preservation of variant
forms and the development of new differences. Like sociolinguists, geographers are now
being reminded of the importance of scale, of thinking about change not as a singular
process but as a series of incremental shifts in patterns that emerge at different grain
sizes (Herod 2003). Like sociolinguists, geographers are thinking about identity, power
and resistance (Katz 2003) and about the technology that standardizes space as well as
the local ecological systems that such technology can disrupt (Simmons 2003).
7. Conclusion
In choosing to organize this chapter chronologically, I mean to highlight the variety of

ways in which “geography” and “space” have been imagined over time. I do not mean
to suggest that subsequent approaches have always displaced earlier ones or that chro-
nology necessarily represents progress. Geographers today do many different kinds of
work; different research questions call for different conceptions of space and its role in
human life and different methods for answering these questions. The same is true of
linguists exploring language and space. We can learn from several strands of geography,
and I hope this chapter has provided a framework for doing so.
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2. Language and social spaces

1. Introduction
2. The conventionalization of linguistic practices: The linguistic market
3. The dialect user versus the standard user ⫺ a matter of the polarization of values
4. Tradition ⫺ modernity: A nexus between geographical and socio-cultural space
5. Concluding remarks
6. References
1. Introduction
Language is not only an instrument of communication or
even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power. A person
speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed,
obeyed, respected, distinguished. (Bourdieu 1977: 648)
The main topic of this article is the indexicality of language in a social and cultural
space. Language functions as a sign system with reference to significant sociocultural
features and qualities. Hence, the use of a specific variety, or any given variety, in social
interaction will serve as an indicator of the interlocutors’ social standing and identity.
The relationship between dialect on the one hand and standard spoken language
(henceforth called the standard for short) on the other, is one of the core contrasts in
modern linguistics. These two opposites have constituted a core linguistic axis in socio-
linguistic research from the 1960s up until today, and a substantial part of the present
discussion in sociolinguistics revolves around this dichotomy. At the same time, the con-
trast between dialect and standard may serve to illustrate some of the complex ways in
which we experience social space ⫺ in contrast to geographical space. As will be dis-
cussed in close detail below, the distinction between dialect and standard was originally
2. Language and social spaces 19
a geographical one, but in many contexts it is interpreted primarily as an expression of

social identity. The use of dialect, or of certain dialect markers, is often conceived of as
an indicator of a specific social position rather than as an indication of geographical
origin. In this respect, the sociocultural references of language cannot be seen as de-
tached from or independent of the geographical dimension (cf. Johnstone in this vol-
ume). In other words, the territoriality of language is intimately connected and subtly
interwoven with other aspects of language which are often regarded as expressions of
certain social features and characteristics.
This article covers three general topics, which successively support each other and
which partly overlap. The first theme addressed is the conventionalization of linguistic
practices, and this section introduces a key term and metaphor ⫺ the linguistic market.
Next follows a description of some of the most prominent values associated with two of
the “products” on this market ⫺ dialect and standard, respectively. A crucial point in
this context is how these contrasting social values can ultimately be related to the di-
chotomy between tradition on the one hand and modernity on the other. The third and
final section is a discussion of how these sociohistorical and sociocultural dimensions
can be used to elucidate and explain the dialect leveling we have witnessed over the last
decades ⫺ a development which primarily involves a shift from the traditional dialects
towards more standardized spoken varieties.
2. The conventionalization o linguistic practices:

The linguistic market
Discourse is a symbolic asset which can receive different val-
ues depending on the market on which it is offered. Linguistic
competence (like any other cultural competence) functions
as linguistic capital in relationship with a certain market.
(Bourdieu 1977: 651)
The role of language as a sociohistorical phenomenon serves as the theoretical basis of

the present discussion. A given language community, with specific, given linguistic prac-
tices, is a historical product of a complex set of social, cultural and political conditions.
In this regard, the linguistic choices made by the individual language users can be treated
on a par with a number of other social practices in any given society, and consequently
language practices can be subjected to the same analysis as other social phenomena,
such as lifestyles, leisure activities, general style preferences, etc. However, the various
linguistic expressions cannot be regarded exclusively as a reflection of society’s social
structures; language in itself is a constituting factor in the social stratification.
This juxtaposition of language and other social forms of expression is among the core
ideas in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theories of culture (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1977, 1994,
1995; for a more comprehensive account of Bourdieu’s ideas about language, see Bour-
dieu 1991). The present exposition, and also the terminology employed, is very much
inspired by Pierre Bourdieu and his theoretical works.
Bourdieu’s notion of conventionalized social practice constitutes a focal part of the
present theoretical approach. We all take part in various communities of practice ⫺
communities with unique discourse traditions. To a community of practice the repetition

of certain patterns is a vital factor in the establishment and maintenance of structures,
routines, and norms. Linell describes this dialogistic shaping of linguistic practice as
follows (1998: 59⫺60):
[L]inguistic structures, cultural routines, norms etc. do exist prior to interactions (but only
in and through the interactants’ being acquainted with them). At the same time, however,
these structures, routines and norms are interactionally generated, traded down and recon-
structed. That is, they exist prior to individual interactions, yet would not exist without a
living historical continuity of interactions. Social structures are (re)created, tried out, tested,
negotiated and modified every time they are instantiated or drawn upon. Habit is modified
by accommodation, while accommodation is enabled and constrained by habit.
As members of a community we share preferred social representations, stereotypes, and

discursive practices; these, in turn, become the backdrop against which the individual
experiences and perceives the world and which ultimately influence her actions in this
world. Put differently, every person is an actor who interprets and acts ⫺ both at the
same time. In this context Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” (cf. Thompson 1991: 12) is
of central heuristic value. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact meaning of the term as
Bourdieu uses it, and it will suffice to say that it is related to our collectively acquired
and habitual patterns of cognition, including evaluations, social preferences and concrete
actions ⫺ as these are acquired in the process of socialization:
Endowed with this habitus, which consists in universal schemas of perception and cognition,
principles of interpretation and evaluations, we live our lives. We ascribe meaning to what
we experience and we act “adequately”. Our habitus generates a form of structurally adapted
“practical knowledge” which works perfectly in all aspects of everyday life. But we are not
alone in this. Since we share the habitus with other people in the same class and class frac-
tion, we also become class members and social agents. Our individual actions become parts
of the social practices of classes and class fractions. This constitutes the basis for the social
process of recreation. (Rosenlund 1991: 28; my translation)
Consequently, we may say that habitus consists of a set of dispositions that make us
inclined both to “[…] act and react in certain ways” (Thompson 1991: 12). These disposi-
tions steer our actions and preferences in a certain direction; however, they do not prede-
termine them, “It gives them [i. e. individuals] a ‘feel for the game’, a sense of what is
appropriate in the circumstances and what is not, a ‘practical sense’ (le sens pratique)”
(Thompson 1991: 13). The practical implication is that through socialization, the various
dispositions become internalized in each individual, at the same time as the internalized
dispositions constitute the premise for the individual’s externalized actions. Through
these largely conventionalized practices, society is “constructed”, and can be perceived
as an objective reality that exists more or less independently of the people who “con-
struct” it. In other words, society is created by human beings, at the same time as human
beings are created by society; cf. Berger and Luckmann’s (1967: 61) statement that “[…]
society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product”.
It is within these theoretical frames that all forms of linguistic interaction take
place ⫺ and are conventionalized. Certain verbal conventions are often preferred in the
context of particular social activities, or social fields, and as such these conventions are
intimately connected with the social categories that are associated with or dominate the
various fields. Through these processes the various codes are assigned a symbolic value
on the linguistic market:
Linguistic utterances or expressions are always produced in particular contexts or markets,

and the properties of these markets endow linguistic products with a certain ‘value’. On a
given linguistic market, some products are valued more highly than others; and part of the
practical competence of speakers is to know how, and to be able, to produce expressions
which are highly valued on the markets concerned. […] For different speakers possess dif-
ferent quantities of ‘linguistic capital’ ⫺ that is, the capacity to produce expressions à propos,
for a particular market. Moreover, the distribution of linguistic capital is related in specific
ways to the distribution of other forms of capital (economic capital, cultural capital, etc.)
which define the location of an individual within the social space. (Thompson 1991: 18)
In other words, a condition of hegemony develops in a particular market, regardless of

whether it is a local or global market, whereby one variety attains a certain social author-
ity, legitimacy and prestige, while other varieties are situated lower in the hierarchy.
Naturally, there will be an intimate connection between this language hierarchy and the
historical and sociopolitical structures of the society in question. Recognition of the
existence of linguistic hierarchies, together with knowledge about the social values at-
tached to the different codes, is usually part of the sociolinguistic competence of the
actors that operate in a linguistic market. In other words, such knowledge is part of the
actors’ habitus and contributes to sustaining a relative consensus within a given social
community about whether the use of certain language codes is a symbolic asset, with the
prospect of future social gain, or alternatively a social disadvantage.
Over time, the values and connotations associated with different varieties often come
to appear “natural”, i. e. obvious and incontestable. In other words, they become part
of the doxa of a speech community, that is, part of the cultural ideas that are taken
more or less for granted and thus normally not subject to reflection or critical discussion.
Conceptions concerning the relationship between dialect and standard are examples of
a doxic field.
The concept “linguistic market” should primarily be understood as a metaphor for
forces and mechanisms that apply within a socially defined community. The key issue is
how the social interaction that takes place in the metaphorical market can be described
by the use of economic terminology ⫺ a form of analogy typical in Bourdieu’s theories.
Following this train of thought, all language use will be part of the “economy of every-
day living”, in which language ⫺ on a par with the goods on offer in other markets ⫺
is continuously assessed in terms of values, investments, profits and capital. One particu-
larly important dimension of the conditions of linguistic production is what Bourdieu
refers to as “reception envisaged” and “self-censorship”:
In reality, the conditions of reception envisaged are part of the conditions of production,
and anticipation of the sanctions of the market helps to determine the production of the
discourse. This anticipation, which bears no resemblance to a conscious calculation, is an
aspect of the linguistic habitus which, being the product of a prolonged and primordial
relation to the laws of a certain market, tends to function as a practical sense of the accept-
ability and the probable value of one’s own linguistic productions and those of others on
different markets. […] In the case of symbolic production, the constraint exercised by the
market via the anticipation of possible profit naturally takes the form of an anticipated
censorship, of a self-censorship which determines not only the manner of saying, that is, the
choice of language […] or the ‘level’ of language, but also what it will be possible or not
possible to say. (Bourdieu 1991: 76⫺77)
In other words, the mechanisms operating on the linguistic market presuppose a certain
consensus about the linguistic “economy” and the symbolic dominance that some vari-
eties have over other varieties on the linguistic market, and these expectations about the
sanctions that accompany certain language choices are a critical factor in the overall
picture of the conditions of linguistic production. On a more or less conscious but often
automatic level, the individual language user will make “calculations” based on those
experiences that constitute the habitus and that have implications for the values and
acceptability of the various codes in the market.
The symbolic relations of power and dominance that are outlined here are intimately
connected to the historical, political and sociocultural conditions of society. Therefore,
it must be stressed that these structures and mechanisms are by no means static or even
necessarily the same across different societies. On the contrary, what we are dealing with
are values, attitudes and patterns of action that can be negotiated and renegotiated at
any point in time. This implies that the linguistic market is not invariable and constant;
rather, it is dynamic and changeable, depending on varying sociopolitical conditions (see,
e.g., Kerswill 2007 for a discussion on language and social class, and Wolfram 2007 on
ethnic varieties).
3. The dialect user versus the standard user a matter o

the polarization o values
‘The vulgar and the refined’, ‘the particular and the general’,
‘the corrupt and the pure’, ‘the barbaric and the civilized’,
‘the primitive and the arbitrary’ were socially pervasive terms
that divided sensibility and culture according to linguistic cat-
egories. The baser forms of language were said to reveal the
inability of the speaker to transcend the concerns of the pres-
ent, an interest in material objects, and the dominance of the
passions. Those who spoke the refined language were al-
legedly rational, moral, civilized, and capable of abstract
thinking. (Smith 1984: 3)
“Only before God and linguists are all languages equal”, states a sociolinguistic adage.
This is particularly valid for the relationship between dialect and standard, a relation
that is colored by asymmetry, incongruence, and hierarchical structures. That is to say,
the contrast is typical for how the dialect user and the standard language users are
perceived ⫺ in different linguistic market places.
Before examining what these conceptions consist of, and exploring their basis more
closely, we need a basic definition of the terms “dialect” and “standard variety”. It is
important to note that we are dealing with these concepts as idealized concepts, as two
extremes that primarily exist at the level of ideal norms. The actual development of
spoken language over the last decades in fact demonstrates variable forms of interference
between dialects and a standard variety. The relationship between the two is first and
foremost a matter of degree and extent (see, e.g., Auer and Hinskens 1996 and Berruto
in this volume).
In this context, the term “dialect” will be used in the traditional meaning of
“geolect” ⫺ that is, as a variety that has a specific geographical basis. A dialect is thus
to be understood as a language system that is found within local, regional or otherwise
defined territorial boundaries ⫺ a language system which is unique to a certain geo-
graphical area within a national state. A “standard variety”, on the other hand, is a
variety that serves as a norm or ideal standard for a larger speech community, usually a
national state, and which is often codified ⫺ that is, given a standard definition in
grammar books and/or dictionaries. One crucial premise for assigning the role of supra-
regional ⫺ that is, supra-local ⫺ role to a speech variety is that the development of a
spoken variety is accompanied by the development of a written standard for this variety.
The difference referred to here in terms of the geographical affiliation of the two
varieties is, however, often understood as a social and cultural difference. The very es-
sence of the relation that conventionally exists between dialect and standard is that the
latter ⫺ compared to other varieties ⫺ is the most prestigious variety at the national
level, and it is the language that is most likely to be associated with social elites ⫺ groups
or persons with higher levels of education, authority and status. Consequently, the stan-
dard language is often associated with domains of society that are connected to author-
ity ⫺ for example within universities, the media or the public scene in general.
Before we continue to investigate which values are usually ascribed to dialect and
standard language in more detail, let us first look briefly at the historical conditions for
the emergence of the social asymmetry between the two.
Standard speech is based on a national written standard. In addition, it usually origi-
nates historically from a regional vernacular:
Naturally the spoken national standard is not a mere copy of the written language. One of
the main requirements is a geographical concentration of people from the higher classes of
society in administrative and/or ideological centers. With the introduction of the monetary
economy, these centers became our capitals. (Teleman 1979: 43; my translation)
The continuous dialectic between the written standard and its spoken variant in politi-
cally and culturally dominant regions, often in and surrounding the capital, has made it
possible for varieties that were initially considered dialects to attain the status of spoken
standard language. The key issue is the process by which certain regional language fea-
tures are “decoded” and attain a geographically unmarked, but socially marked, value.
In other words, the emergence and codification of a standard spoken language is histori-
cally a sociopolitical process: “Successful standardisation involves the creation (or ac-
ceptance) of a variety as the most prestigious one, on account of its use by those who
have status and power in the society” (Mesthrie et al. 2000: 21). The fact that one par-
ticular variety is “chosen” also necessarily implies that this variety stands in a hegemonic
relationship to all other varieties. This hierarchy of prestige is subsequently confirmed
and enhanced through different social conventions; the hierarchy becomes part of the
habitus of the language users and appears as incontestable and “natural”:
If the dominant group expects to remain dominant, then its members will assume, without
even thinking about it, that subordinate-group members will make any necessary linguistic
adjustments. As a result, they will speak their own prestige language or dialect in the normal
fashion without attempting any convergence. (Fasold 1984: 190)
Accordingly, the relationship between speakers of a standard variety and speakers of a

regional variety will be regarded in several contexts as an asymmetric social relation.
However, the exact nature of this contrast between the standard variety and a dialect
will vary a great deal across different national communities, much as different dialects
within one national community may signal highly deviating values. Still, there are good
reasons to assume that several of the basic aspects of the dialect⫺standard opposition
are to a large degree universal and shared by most language communities. Historically,
all processes of standardization are motivated by certain selection mechanisms, which in
turn are the outcome of certain sociopolitical conditions. And these basic structures
undoubtedly give rise to some premises that give the dialect⫺standard relation a univer-
sal symbolic content, which is contingent to only a minor degree on the individual lan-
guage society (see, e.g., Joseph 1987; Milroy and Milroy 1985; Milroy 2007; Muggle-
stone 1997).
How can we describe the more concrete sociocultural values that dialects and stan-
dard varieties, respectively, represent? One model that attempts to illustrate this contrast
has been developed by Maurand (1981, see below). He provides a schematic overview
of the distribution of standard French on the one hand, and Occitan on the other. In
this context it must be noted that the sociolinguistic stratification in France is known to
be extremely hierarchical and rigid, and thus the contrasts that appear in this model are
likely to be more prominent than in other language communities. Nevertheless, as a
model, which gives a schematic, idealized image of reality, it reflects some fundamental
connotations which can be connected more or less universally to the dichotomy dialect⫺
standard (see Figure 2.1, next page).
Occitan is primarily associated with the rural ⫺ with primary industries and small-
scale communities, and it is often seen as old-fashioned and associated with older peo-
ple ⫺ primarily elderly men. Standard French, on the other hand, is associated with
urban culture, higher education and public, modern society, and it also signals values
connected to youth and femininity.
One indication of the currency of these sets of values can be found in what was for
a long time the dominant methodological approach in dialectology in the western world:
Perhaps the most typical feature shared by all of the major projects in dialect geography
is the type of informant selected. No matter how diverse the culture, how discrepant the
socioeconomic climate, and how varied the topography, the majority of informants has in
all cases consisted of nonmobile, older, rural males [… i. e.] NORMs […].
(Chambers and Trudgill 1980: 33)
A slightly modified version of the ideas presented in Maurand (1981) is presented as

Table 2.1, next page (following Mæhlum 2007: 57). In this approach, the geographical
origin of the two codes is the primary concern (cf. the first point), followed by a set of
contrastive social and cultural values. Again, it is important to note that we are dealing
with idealized and stereotypical values ⫺ for example, the model does not explicitly
Fig. 2.1: Maurand’s model (1981), English version adopted from Grillo (1989: 80)
Tab. 2.1.
Dialect Standard
specific geographic origin supra-regional; geographically neutral
stigmatized; not prestigious prestigious
informal, plain, everyday formal, official
rural, remote urban, central
traditional modern
show that there are actually a number of different urban dialects (cf. especially the penul-
timate point).
The table gives an overview of the “market value” which on fairly general and some-
what simplified grounds may be ascribed to dialect and standard, respectively. The
strength of conventionalized representations is first and foremost the sociolinguistic pat-
terns that emerge from them. These patterns seem to apply more or less independently
of speech communities and are especially relevant in relation to questions like who do
we traditionally assume to be dialect users, and who do we generally assume uses a
standard variety? And in which contexts is it generally regarded as most appropriate to
use dialect or standard, respectively? Indeed there is great variation across national
speech communities (see below); nevertheless, the tendencies are so pervasive and com-
pelling that they should be considered as general. The extent of dialect use tends to be
inversely proportional to the social status and prestige of the language user. Conse-
quently, the higher the position in the social hierarchy, the more powerful the social
expectations, and hence also the probability, that one uses a standard variety. The second
basic principle, which follows almost as a consequence of the first, relates to contextual
variation: The more formal or official the situation, the stronger the expectation that
one uses a standard variety.
A selection of examples from the Norwegian speech community can give us an indica-
tion of how strong and above all how internalized such expectations are. Sociolinguis-
tically speaking, dialects are known to have an exceptionally high status in Norway. The
use of dialect is not confined to local or private spheres but extends to a number of
different public arenas (see, e.g., Wiggen 1995; Jahr and Janicki 1995). However, a study
of attitudes towards different Norwegian dialects in the capital Oslo (Strømsodd 1979)
shows that the use of dialect was generally far more acceptable among typical low status
workers than among people in more prestigious professions. One of the arguments used
to support this line of reasoning was that, for example, it would be necessary for a
lawyer “[…] to use the standard variety since it is not possible to accommodate dialects
to judicial language and legal terminology […] and to theoretical subjects that demand
a high level of abstraction” (Strømsodd 1979: 86; my translation). The notion that dia-
lects are “best suited” for people with a lower social status is in fact justified by the
argument that the extent of dialect use stands in an inverse relationship to the degree
of theoretical abstraction (see also the quotation from Smith 1984 at the beginning of
this section).
The subjects of Strømsodd’s study were largely users of a variety which is close to
what is considered the standard variety in Norway. Similar attitudes ⫺ or acknowledge-
ment of such common attitudes ⫺ are found among people who are socialized into a
different dialect community. The following quotation is from an autobiographical essay
by the Norwegian author Karin Sveen (2001) in which she talks about moving to the
capital to embark on university studies. Sveen’s linguistic background is a dialect which
is very much associated with the rural and rustic and which is traditionally grouped
among the less prestigious Norwegian dialects:
I had left my home and I was now in academia, where a different language law applied, the
law of the placeless language, the language with universal validity. I was on a new ‘linguistic
market’, in Bourdieu’s terms, and on this market my language was not in demand. It was
good currency at the laundrette and on the street corner, but not ‘here’. The solution at the
time was not to integrate these language economies, but to separate them, and there is no
doubt as to which one had to yield in order for me to win back the command of speech.
(2001: 212; my translation)
This exposition is a striking example of how linguistic varieties that originally signal
geographical identity on certain linguistic markets are indexed with values that are ex-
plicitly social in nature. In other words, the use of dialect can be perceived of as a
class marker.
A number of studies have been concerned with how dialect users or speakers with a
regional vernacular on the one hand and speakers of standard varieties on the other
tend to be associated with completely different personality traits (see, e.g., Edwards 1985;
Garrett 2007, both with rich bibliographies). People who use a standard variety usually
receive high scores in intelligence and competence, which are both classic high-status
qualities. Dialect or regional vernacular speakers, on the other hand, signal personal
integrity, friendliness and dependability ⫺ qualities associated with loyalty and soli-
darity.
4. Traditionmodernity: A nexus between geographical and

sociocultural space
Language shift occurs as the result of choices made by indi-
viduals, […] in accordance with their own motivations, ex-
pectations and goals which they may or may not share with
other members of their community. Taken together, individual
choices form collective choices that impact on the future of a
speech community and its language. It lies in the nature of
collective choice that the individuals involved in it do not
overlook all consequences of their acts.
(Coulmas 2005: 168)
Up until now the main focus has been on social mechanisms that influence language use
here and now ⫺ that is, at a synchronous level. Another crucial dimension throughout
the argumentation has been how these mechanisms must be regarded as historical pro-
ducts, that is, as products of certain social, cultural and political conditions. Within such
conventionalized social frames, some structures seem more or less natural, and partly
because of this collective habitus, certain linguistic practices are used repeatedly, and in
this way gain social currency. In the following we will explore this explicitly diachronic
dimension. An important question in this context is how the values related to the dia-
lect⫺standard dichotomy can contribute to explaining linguistic changes that appear to
take place along the dialect⫺standard axis. Or to put it in another way, how do the
changes that have been documented in dialect landscapes worldwide over the past de-
cades connect to more fundamental changes in the corresponding social spaces?
A characteristic and basic aspect of dialect development throughout the western
world over the past decades is the phenomenon of dialect leveling (see, e.g., Hinskens
1996; Røyneland 2005, and in this volume). Dialect leveling refers to the fact that lan-
guage features that have a limited geographical range, or that for some other reason are
considered as marked, are replaced by variants that have a wider range of use. As a
result, the leveling processes contribute to the emergence of varieties that either conform
to the standard variety or that are at least closer to the standard than the traditional
dialects used to be. What we witness here are different processes of linguistic homogeni-
zation. They lead to the abandonment of local differences and make the language users ⫺
partly within a specific region, partly at the national level ⫺ appear more similar than
was the case one or two generations ago.
At a more fundamental level, these processes imply that language features that indi-
cate tradition are replaced by those that are regarded as modern. Which social changes
can be held responsible for this development? The following quotation from the Norwe-
gian dialectologist O. T. Beito (1973: 225) provides an indirect answer to this question:
The development from dialect to standard must be seen against the background of and in
connection with the more general cultural development. […]. Dialects are linguistic expres-
sions for local cultural communities, and it seems a reasonable development that differences
related to dialect level out after the boundaries for these tiny cultural units burst and are
erased (my translation).
The focus here is on small-scale local communities and to the boundaries ⫺ linguistic
and other ⫺ that contribute to defining and sustaining these sociogeographical units as
frames for people’s lives. This brings us to the crux of the matter: Which sociogeographi-
cal units function as the primary basis of identification in today’s modern world? What
is the significance today of what Beito refers to as small “cultural units”? Does the
literally local environment still serve as a primary sociogeographical frame of reference
for the modern language users, or is this function taken over by other unities ⫺ at a
regional, national or at a global level?
Needless to say, there are no simple or definite answers to these questions (see, e.g.,
Johnstone 2004 for a detailed discussion). However, it is still possible to identify some
general tendencies in the development of societies, especially in the industrialized part
of the world. One of the most prominent developments is that local communities have
become more integrated into a supra-local society than was the case only one or two
generations ago. Two terms that are often used more or less as analogous to the pair
local society⫺greater society, going back to Ferdinand Tönnies, are Gemeinschaft⫺Ge-
sellschaft. This idealized dichotomy refers to the small-scale community, or local society,
as opposed to a bureaucratic, modern, urban and industrial society (for a detailed discus-
sion, see, e.g., Pløger 1997). The opposition Gemeinschaft⫺Gesellschaft is often linked
directly to the rurality versus urbanity distinction (see, e.g., Thuen 2003: 72).
One of the anticipated consequences of this integration of the local communities will
be, at one level, social and cultural homogenization. Traditional local differences and
distinctive features ⫺ material and immaterial ⫺ tend to be eliminated through these
processes, giving way to cultural elements from a shared national or global universe of
consumption and meaning. However, at a different level, the same forces are socially
and culturally differentiating. An important factor in this context are the processes that
contribute to the merging of local elements into new, synthesizing forms of cultural
expressions in which different supra-local dimensions constitute an important compo-
nent. The term “glocalization” is often used to express this ambiguity, but then it refers
to the tension between the local on the one hand, and the global on the other. The
crucial aspect for us is the social and cultural process of diversification that has taken
place in particular local communities, a process that can take place when the supra-
local is made relevant within a local context. This development has caused an increased
differentiation of the local communities into many different social segments ⫺ cultures
that co-exist, with their respective lifestyles and value systems, within the frames of the
same local society. The Norwegian sociologist A. Hompland (1991) has coined the term
“rurbanisation” to describe a striking demographic and sociocultural outcome of these
processes. “Rurbanisation” refers to a special synthesis of the rural and the urban; an
urbanization of lifestyles, business and consumption patterns without the concomitant
rise of the cities. The effects of these processes are so diverse, both in terms of their
strength and nature, that they contribute to an increase of social and cultural diversifica-
tion.
Under such conditions, each individual is exposed to a number of competing norms

and must constantly choose between alternative forms of practice. The individual be-
comes a participant in a number of different arenas ⫺ at a local and supra-local level.
Accordingly, the social freedom of choice is far greater today than it was a few genera-
tions ago. We are not tied to the same extent by loyalty and obligations to the local
communities we are born into. “We have fewer attachments, weaker supra-individual
control and more freedom. The rural community does not inhibit us as it used to do”,
to quote Hompland again (1991: 62; my translation).
This brings us to the kernel of our argumentation: the relation between tradition and
modernity. Because of their range and complexity, a general consideration of the mean-
ing of these two terms is beyond the scope of our present discussion. In what follows
the relation of tradition⫺modernity will be explored in relation to language and lan-
guage change only, with the focus on those aspects that can widen our understanding of
the connection between dialect and standard. This analytical approach will also help us
to see language change in a general sociohistorical perspective.
Tradition refers to the inherited, local practices that are passed down through the
generations. A “local tradition” refers to any process in which customs, beliefs and
values and social forms of practice are associated with a specific geographical location ⫺
a place. The term modernity, on the other hand, can almost be defined as the opposite
of inherited and place-bound values. Modernity transgresses what is specifically local
and refers to practices whose historical origin is either absent or irrelevant. What charac-
terizes modernity is a breach with the past ⫺ a breach with the more or less unconscious
commitments to tradition and traditional ways of living. Accordingly, one of the most
important corollaries of modernity is what Giddens (e.g., 1990) refers to as “disembed-
ding”, by which he means the “[…] ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (1990: 21). The
modern ways of living have distanced us from the traditional “order”; the traditional
ties of time and space loosen and social relations become increasingly disconnected from
local codes of conduct and practices. In this way modernity may give rise to processes
such as individualization and de-localization.
If we compare this to the focal semiotic values that are usually associated with dialect
and standard (cf. the figure and table above), some interesting patterns appear: Origi-
nally a dialect is associated with a geographically defined community, and the use of a
dialect signals belonging to a specific local, traditional culture. A standard variety, on
the other hand, is often associated with a supra-local and geographically unspecified
culture, and hence it can be interpreted as a severance from local and traditional
contexts. This de-localization is in itself an important precondition for the standard
variety’s intrinsic potential to signal values that are perceived as modern.
The connection between these two axes may thus contribute to explaining the changes
that have taken place in a number of dialect landscapes throughout the world: The
general shift from dialect toward a standard variety must be seen in close connection
with those changes in society which have transformed most parts of the western world
from a traditional society to an increasingly modern society. As an integrated ⫺ and at
the same time constitutive ⫺ aspect of modernity, language users have altered their
speech in a direction that is perceived as more modern; or, put differently, as less tradi-
tional.
On a social macro level, the shift from dialect to standard can therefore be interpreted
as part of a set of collective mechanisms that have influenced the “winding up” of tradi-
tional society. However, on a social micro level we need to focus on other aspects in
relation to the consequences of these social and cultural “disembedding” mechanisms.
At the individual level, modernity firstly involves more freedom of choice. The individual
language user may choose to distance herself from local norms and practices in a manner
that was not previously possible to the same degree. This increased acceptance of a break
with tradition multiplies the number of possible linguistic choices, as Coulmas has ar-
gued (2005: 31):
Postmodern societies are more mobile, have fewer class markers and are more tolerant of
heterogeneity. […] Variation is acceptable and identities are multidimensional. Dialects in
postmodern society are not distributed in the same way as in modern industrial societies
where patterns of covariation of class and non-standard speech forms are relatively clear-cut.
This also applies to the traditional forms of expressions, such as dialects. Within the
frame of modernity the use of dialect does not exclusively express affiliation with tradi-
tional values and ways of living. In many local communities today the local dialect is
one among several codes available from a wider selection of choices, much as traditional
and modern cultural features coexist in other areas as well, with boundaries between
them that aren’t always intuitive (see Røyneland 2005 for a discussion). Because of our
increased freedom to choose and combine different forms of expression, there is no
longer a contradiction between being “modern” and at the same time using a dialect.
The values ascribed to the various language varieties on the linguistic market is, as has
been emphasized in the preceding sections, the result of certain historical, political and
sociocultural conditions. These values are important components in the mechanisms that
regulate linguistic interaction in a given speech community. Because they are part of the
doxa of the community, and as such are taken for granted, they have a conserving func-
tion ⫺ that is, they contribute to consolidating current conditions and practices.
Nonetheless, these values are still subject to social negotiation. The limits of what is
considered appropriate, or what will potentially yield social gain, are constantly chal-
lenged ⫺ and transgressed. Modernity has at least to some extent released us from tradi-
tional ideas and practices and given us room for individual choices. The freedom that
modernity represents therefore functions as a counterbalance to the forces that still bind
us to inherited, traditional value sets. This is the source of a continuous conflict for the
individual language user which requires a significant amount of strategic consideration
and “socioeconomic” calculations. As such, modernity’s liberating potential is in con-
stant battle with the conserving forces of convention.
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Brit Mæhlum, Trondheim (Norway)

3. Language and political spaces 33
3. Language and political spaces

1. Introduction
2. Language ideologies and spatial representations
3. Standard languages in national space
4. Other models, other maps
5. Locality in places
6. References
1. Introduction
Speaking overcomes distance: We communicate across stretches of space, relying on

sound to travel. Linguistic messages go considerably further when they are written or
transmitted through ever more sophisticated media. Yet speaking also seems to be an-
chored in territory, that is, in geographical space as mediated by political practices.
Many forms of cultural logic link political claims to language and to territory. The most
widespread of these in the contemporary world is that of the nation-state, with its pre-
sumed ethnolinguistic unity. In this hegemonic political form, speakers are considered
authentic members of nations by virtue of their linguistic competence, and nations are
supposed to be distributed over territories that are organized politically into states.
Whatever specific political system a state adopts, its linkage to a posited nation is most
often established through the medium of a standardized language with a literary tradi-
tion, a norm of monolingualism and the assumption of linguistic homogeneity in the
polity. This presumed cultural-linguistic connection is a fundamental feature of the
state’s legitimacy. Nation-states of this type are the political ideal in the contemporary
world. Rarely do actual states show the full form. There are also many other cultural
configurations ⫺ either long-standing or newly emergent ⫺ that draw on different links
between linguistic forms and political space. In describing these less familiar patterns,
we find differences in the cultural definitions of ‘polity’ ‘language’ and even ‘space.’
Thus, I argue that the relation of language to political spaces is always mediated by
cultural systems ⫺ language ideologies ⫺ that define the very terms we are discussing.
To make this case, the second section examines the cultural assumptions about lan-
guage and location embodied in the nation-state, ones that also underlie eighteenth and
nineteenth-century linguistic science. The internationally conventional language map is
built on the perspective of the contemporary nation-state as a political form. This be-
comes clear when we consider the linguistic phenomena omitted by such maps. Maps
are constitutive of cultural notions of space. When taken to be objective representations,
they help to construct the linguistic world they claim merely to reflect. Nation-state maps
remain persuasive representations of the ethnolinguistic world even when their elisions
are revealed because there are many other practices that buttress or produce the configu-
rations such maps display. Section three discusses some of these practices ⫺ standardiza-
tion, purification, authentication ⫺ as institutionally orchestrated semiotic processes.
Even the exceptions to nation-state imagery provide evidence of the current international
strength of these ideas: When state boundaries and linguistic territories do not match ⫺
as is often the case around the world ⫺ the result is political tension, or the threat of
political mobilization.
Nevertheless, there are limits to this hegemony. Section four discusses alternative
ways of thinking about space and language by presenting cartographies that are moti-
vated by strikingly different political perspectives and cultural values. Finally, section
five takes up cases where perspectives clash and definitions of what counts as language
are explicitly contested among speakers, analysts and governments. At stake in these
conflicts is the perception of “place” or locality. The study of locality highlights the
sensuous, experiential aspects of places ⫺ rather than abstract spaces ⫺ and how their
structures of feeling and belonging are constituted by linguistic form.
2. Language ideologies and spatial representations

It is customary to trace the language ideology of ethnonationalism to German philoso-
phy in the late eighteenth century. Johann Gottfried Herder was perhaps the most influ-
ential of the many who argued that each language is unique in its poetic expression;
each has the capacity to express all the human capacities, including feeling, reason and
will. For Herder, the most salient contrasts among linguistic forms are those based on
cultural inheritance and that differentiate national languages. They are the means of
giving expression to the distinctive spirit of a people, its Volksgeist. He assumed uniform-
ity of speech among the Volk when he equated one people, one fatherland, one language.
Herder feared that the verbal traditions of Germans were increasingly endangered by
the incursions of French among the aristocracy and by the tendency of ordinary peasants
and simple city people to forget their past. Traditions must therefore be safe-guarded by
a special sort of intellectual, one who shuns foreign models and is specially attuned to the
artistry of “his” Volk. Herder’s views invoke the past to authorize current nationalism
in which language and folklore become key symbols of identity, unity and persistence
(Jankowsky 1973: 20: 53). These ideas about language continue to be characteristic habits
of thought in Europe, among elites and the general populace (Blommaert and Ver-
schueren 1998).
Recent historical scholarship has stressed a further point: When Herder’s philosophy
is seen within its historical context as a language ideology ⫺ a metadiscourse about
discourse on language ⫺ its emphasis on intertextual links with a known or imagined
past stands in direct contrast to the language ideology of John Locke, over a century
earlier. For Locke, political unity rested on reason used for public discussion, which was
made possible by the inherent properties of language. These included the primacy of
referential over emotional meaning, the arbitrariness of signs in the service of philosophi-
cal expression and the rigorous precision necessary for rational discourse in politics and
science. These properties were corrupted by appeals to history. Thus for Locke, political
legitimacy depended on severing intertextual links with the past. To be able to use lan-
guage in this way required certain forms of character and education.
It is these two opposed positions, one authorizing the nation through links to “tradi-
tion” in the linguistic past, the other locating political authority in the timeless-placeless
systematicity of language itself, that constitute the tense ideological formation we now
call “modernity” (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 190⫺196). Although Locke’s theory argues
that all languages are the same in their semiotic potential, and Herder’s theory stresses
the differences between languages in the spirit and vision they impart, the two theories
agree that a viable polity must be based on uniformity of linguistic practices among
speakers, and the guidance or mediation of properly inclined and trained intellectuals.
In this, both contribute to legitimating the ethnolinguistic perspective characteristic of
the modern nation-state. As we will see in section 3, the nation-state is a product of
“modernity” in a further sense: it relies for authorization as much on Herderian authen-
ticity as on Lockean universal reason.
2.1. Locational technologies
Herder considered geography to be an influence on national language, but how space

as an abstract notion came to seem significant is a more complex story. Though often
credited to Herder, the connection between language and nation had been stressed earlier
by French, Spanish and English as well as other German philosophers. Most scholars
agree that it was well established in European intellectual circles by the early eighteenth
century (Aarsleff 1982); others give it a much older, even biblical origin (Olender 1992;
Trautmann 1997). Leibniz and then Condillac explicitly noted that language was the
repository of a people’s history and character. The famous English contribution came
later, during Herder’s lifetime. Speaking from his post in British colonial India, William
Jones announced in 1788 the discovery of similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.
From these correspondences he deduced “family” relations among these languages
and ⫺ presuming the language/nation equation ⫺ among the peoples who spoke them.
Since the parallels Jones announced had long been known, the intellectual excitement
came rather from Jones’s explanation of these similarities. He constructed a single story
of kinship and geographical movement for Indo-European peoples that would later be
shaped into the Stammbaum theory of historical linguistics, providing a model and evi-
dentiary basis for the study of language change more generally.
To do this, Jones relied implicitly on three “technologies of location,” that is, three
frames of cultural assumptions guiding a project of mapping, ones that define abstract
representational spaces and then show how entities are situated within those spaces
(Trautmann 2006: 2⫺21). First, Jones assumed the mapping of the surface of the earth
according to latitude and longitude, a Ptolemaic practice from the second century AD
that ⫺ though often challenged ⫺ has survived the vast changes in geographical knowl-
edge since that time. Indeed, the power of the framework lies in its invisibility. Despite
their small size, their flatness, their lack of relief and paucity of other information, we
have come to take such maps to be faithful pictures of geographical space itself. Second,
like most thinkers of the period, in presenting new ethnological material from the colo-
nies, Jones had recourse to biblical categories. His terminology ⫺ Hamites, Jasephites,
Semites ⫺ invoked the schema of kinship in the first book of the Hebrew Bible that
charts the relations among the male descendants of Noah after the flood. The patrilineal
logic of these relations predicts a continual segmentation of branches over time, so that
new and related tribal units are formed. The dispersion of such patrilineal segments,
when projected onto Ptolemaic geographical space, created a concrete image of migra-
tion (Trautmann 2000: 6⫺9). Finally, the early and simple word list, initiated by Leibniz,
was a technology for the spatial redefinition of language itself. Drawing on Locke’s
notion of complex words built on earlier and simpler ones, it imagined language as
having a center and a periphery. It divided the lexical stock into what was taken to be
core elements as opposed to others that, because they were supposedly later develop-
ments, could be ignored in comparative research (Aarsleff 1982).
In sum, the scenario of a family of nations with a single source, their different
branches increasingly dispersed geographically, each with its own core language, relies
on the lamination of these three locational technologies, and ultimately allowed their
projection onto contemporary linguistic evidence as well as ancient textual sources. As-
sumptions about language, kinship and space ⫺ each coming from different historico-
political contexts ⫺ contributed to discussions in philosophy, comparative philology and
language history. These intellectual endeavors in turn have been in constant engagement
with political projects, and contributed to the idea of nation-states as ethnolinguistic
units, as well as of supranational units based on linguistic “kinship” that have authorized
political movements such as pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism.
2.2. Language maps and their limits
The culturally apprehended relationship between language and political space was fur-
ther transformed by another locational technology: the nineteenth-century census.
Meanwhile, global maps of latitude and longitude had accommodated new ideas about
sovereignty. In contrast to feudal kingship, which was organized around a center, the
modern nation’s sovereignty is “fully flat, and evenly operative over each square centime-
ter of a legally demarcated territory” (Anderson 1991: 19). Maps represented this concep-
tion iconically with solid lines marking boundaries and spaces within these lines filled
with contrasting colors to show the extent of states and their colonial holdings. The new
census created a form of information that could “exist” within those colored spaces. But
language has been an enduring problem for this technology.
Early European census categories did not include language at all. Their purpose was
tax assessment. They distinguished among categories such as merchant, serf, aristocrat,
Jew, German, thereby putting into a single series a set of classifications we would now
consider to be on contrasting dimensions (occupation, social status, religion, national-
ity). By the early eighteenth century there were attempts, such as the famous Völkertafel
of Styria, to organize a consistent chart of European national types and their characteris-
tics: clothing, favorite activity and mode of religiosity (Stanzel 1999). In contrast to these
earlier forms, the great innovation of the nineteenth-century census was to focus not on
types but on individuals and to include every individual regardless of tax-status. Each
person was made “visible” as the intersection of a set of bounded, non-overlapping
classifications representing whatever social dimensions the state recognized. As a result
of such a grid, each person could be enumerated as an instance of each exclusive cat-
egory. Operating as a paper-and-pencil panopticon, the census grid aspired to distinc-
tively locate anything ⫺ regions, people, products ⫺ in terms defined by the administra-
tive interests of states. When disseminated through print capitalism, this model enumer-
ated populations that stretched from metropoles to their colonies, and were organized
for bureaucratic surveillance and control (Anderson 1991: 163⫺185).
The attempt to include language within such a totalizing grid ⫺ and to represent it on
maps ⫺ produced technical difficulties and political battles for the many state-sponsored
statistical bureaus created in nineteenth-century Europe (Hobsbawm 1990). In a world
that assumed language ⫽ national spirit ⫽ political autonomy, multilingual empires

were deeply threatened by evidence of linguistic diversity within their borders. Aspiring
movements for independence were reliant on the same evidence, to be placed before
sympathetic international audiences. Such information remains crucial today for re-
gional and migrant populations soliciting support from the European Union (Urla
1993).
Closely related, and no less problematic, were the technical difficulties: what would
“count” as a language statistic. Dialectologists had amply documented that linguistic
forms do not have neat spatial boundaries; even borders between nation-states are
crossed by dialect chains, and social strata differ even though located in a single space.
Census-takers argued bitterly over whether and how to formulate questions about lan-
guage. Should speakers register their “mother tongue”, “community language”, “lan-
guage of the home”, “Verkehrssprache”, “Umgangssprache”, or some other category?
Each of these would produce results with different political implications. The concept of
standard language got a boost from its compatibility with the census: ideally homogen-
eous, spoken by everyone in a polity, commensurable with all other standards, bounded,
deliberately non-overlapping, one-to-a-person, easy to count.
To see how language maps work, let us consider an excellent, indeed exemplary,
minority-friendly and technologically advanced case published by the European Bureau
of Lesser Used Languages, the major clearing house for information about minority,
regional and immigrant languages in the European Union. The EBLUL map recognizes
regional and even some immigrant languages, and marks areas of bilingualism by using
stripes of two colors. It does not presume that language areas (“Sprachgebiet” “area
linguistique”) are isomorphic with nation-state boundaries. Yet, much of linguistic reality
is erased. For example: colors operate like those that represent “evenly operative” sover-
eignty in modern political maps, giving the impression that languages show no internal
differentiation, and that speakers are evenly distributed across territory without varia-
tion in language(s) used. Yet we know the density of speakers varies importantly, as does
the density and type of bilingualism: do the striped segments represent bilingual speakers
or territories inhabited by monolingual speakers of two languages? Also invisible are
degrees and modalities of linguistic competence (fluency, literacy, pronunciation), their
relative prestige and the situational distribution of the languages. Knowledge of English
and French by educated speakers of other languages is not represented; nor is knowledge
of Latin, Arabic, Church Slavonic and Hebrew by clerics. The map provides little infor-
mation about the place of a language in public life, nor speakers’ often varied stances
towards the standard languages they encounter or are said to speak.
Like any representation, this map is inevitably partial. Judging by what it omits, and
despite efforts to the contrary, it presents more a vision of what ethnolinguistic diversity
should look like from the eye-view of a nation-state or through a European supra-state’s
standardizing gaze, than a picture of actually existing linguistic practices.
3. Standard languages in national space

Language maps remain remarkably believable despite their elisions because many social
institutions support the sociolinguistic picture displayed in such maps. As Bakhtin (1981)
argued, heteroglossia ⫺ diversity of varieties, a centrifugal proliferation of styles, ac-
cents, registers, languages ⫺ is ubiquitous, the ordinary condition of linguistic life. The
centripetal, standardizing processes, however, require active construction by state-related
institutions. To be sure, print capitalism has been crucial in spreading books and newspa-
pers written in standardized orthography and creating a public to read them (Anderson
1991). But at least as significant has been the work of centralized school systems and
curricula, unified labor markets, and legions of language planners, linguists, teachers
and poets who have created dictionaries, academies, grammars and literatures. The re-
sulting corpus of standardized texts is indispensable to the process. But even more conse-
quential has been the creation of a set of naturalized beliefs about standard language.
Cultural workers have inculcated in speakers the notion of respect for standard forms
of “correctness,” and indeed an entire ideology of the standard that has had effects on
how speakers use language, what they accept as ideal models of speech, and what the
existing differences in pronunciation, grammar, lexicon and prosody come to signal for
interactants in face-to-face interaction and in mass mediated talk. Standardization does
not happen by itself, nor simply through the magic of a capitalist market.
Nation-states have differed in the timing and rate of standardization. They vary in
how strictly their pedagogical systems are centralized, how thoroughly they penetrate
the whole country, and how stringently they inculcate and enforce the standard. But
the semiotic processes of language ideology that authorize one linguistic variety as the
“standard” are more uniform across cases and as important as the institutional histories.
In general, semiotic processes consist of sign relations that link linguistic forms to social
facts; the signs are interpretable within cultural presuppositions about language, i. e.
language ideologies (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). Such sign relations include indexi-
cality (a pointing to or assumed contiguity between the sign and its object), iconicity
(resemblance between sign and object), fractal recursion and erasure (Irvine and Gal
2000; Silverstein 2003). There are several ways in which sign relations create standardiza-
tion by drawing on political geography and on abstract spatial metaphors.
First, in standardized regimes, linguistic variation is visualized ⫺ by ordinary speak-
ers and often by linguists too ⫺ as an abstract space in which the standard “covers”
other varieties, is superimposed on them, and therefore imagined to be located “above”
them. Other forms are not simply different, or typical of different geographical regions
and social strata. They are seen to be “lower,” and therefore worse. These judgments are
inscribed in the workings of institutions such as schools. Students may fail to learn
the forms designated as standard by language planners. But they invariably acquire the
disposition to accept that some forms are “better” than others. They are taught that the
standard forms have greater intrinsic, linguistic value ⫺ e.g., that they are more rational,
more precise, more beautiful. But, in a sociological view, these values are cultural endow-
ments, not inherent in linguistic form (Bourdieu 1991). Because linguistic varieties are
indexical signs of those who speak them and of the situations in which they are used,
devaluing a form means devaluing its speakers. Therefore, those who accept the high
value of a standard language that they do not themselves control usually find that they
devalue themselves. This is a process Bourdieu has called “linguistic domination.” One
aspect of standardization seen in semiotic terms is exactly this switch in perspective:
seeing oneself from the viewpoint of judgmental others.
A second kind of spatialization concerns the specific indexical significance of linguis-
tic varieties. Meanings associated with linguistic form are far more elaborate than dif-
ferential acceptance or prestige. Linguistic varieties also come to index what Bakhtin
(1981) has called “chronotopes”: cultural categories identifying a nexus of space-time

and person. “Modernity” is one such chronotope, usually associated with standards,
which are among the many insignia of modernity that nation-states are required to
display if they are to be acceptable members of the contemporary international com-
munity of states. Anthems, flags, national airlines and ⫺ in the nineteenth century ⫺
even statistical bureaus, were among the many such signs, forced on states as the price
of recognition by national ideology and its “coercive isomorphism.” By contrast with
the standard language’s modernity, regional and “non-standard” forms are assigned a
chronotope of rural distance and historical past, sometimes inflected as authenticity and
old-fashioned simplicity, at other times as country bumpkin ignorance. Hence the sup-
posed discovery of “Elizabethan English” in the isolated mountains of Appalachia, or
the nostalgic attractiveness for urban Germans of touristic visits to the villages of Ger-
man-speakers in rural Hungary.
Although chronotopes of tradition/modernity are common, there is a more complex
world of meaning, a “culture of standardization,” particular to each standardized speech
community (Silverstein 1996). In the United States, for instance, standard English is
seen as neither too precise nor too lax, neither emotional nor rational; just right for
communicating political truths. It is believed to be a product of skill, achievable through
costly training, and ⫺ like American commodities in advertisements ⫺ sold as the means
to improving one’s life chances. The regional and socially marked forms are seen, in
contrast, as lacking this balance, and often stigmatized as emotional or lazy, old-fash-
ioned commodities ready to be traded in. On another dimension, American and British
English are thought to be welcoming of foreign words and phrases, just as the countries
are “open” to migrants (Crowley 1989). The French standard is also seen by its speakers
as clear, rational and pure, but to retain its special clarity ⫺ so the ideology goes ⫺
standard French should not accept foreign words, or only after considerable domestica-
tion. This is an attitude that contrasts with the American and, as it turns out, echoes
long-standing French immigration policy. In each case, borrowing ⫺ that is, the defense
and policing of linguistic boundaries ⫺ is regimented by ideology, and thereby constrains
linguistic structure. In each case, cherished national self-images are iconically projected
onto the standard language and its speakers; internal differentiation carries the stigma
of negative self-images.
The recursive nature of standardization provides a third way in which it is connected
to spatialization. Because standards are tied to nation-states as linguistic emblems, stan-
dard ideology creates expectations that standard languages will be evenly distributed
over the state’s territory, just as modern sovereignty is. Contrary to this commonsense
view, however, standardization creates not linguistic uniformity within a state but even
more, and hierarchical, heterogeneity in speech. The creation of a standard necessarily
recasts the relation among existing varieties, bringing all forms into a unified field of
judgment and surveillance. Every attempt to standardize a regional form ⫺ e.g., to create
a standard Friulian, Basque, or Corsican ⫺ will require picking out and regularizing a
newly standard register. That step will bring with it the stigmatization of other forms
used among the very speakers whose regional linguistic practices the new standardization
was supposed to valorize. To be sure, what is seen as stigma from the perspective of the
standard and its institutions can be re-evaluated. Novel regional or class-based forms
(anti-languages) are often created and celebrated as resistance to standards. Because
standardization is fractally recursive in this way, it brings not homogeneity but more
heterogeneity (Gal 2006).
Dialectologists working in countries with standardized regimes (now virtually every-

where), can no longer simply track regional differences in speech, because “regionalism”
itself is created as a contrast with standard. How people define and evaluate regional,
non-standard, local or indeed any socially-marked linguistic form will depend, in part,
on how the standard is viewed. The indexical significance of the standard ⫺ like that of
any linguistic form ⫺ emerges as the product of a cultural project: intellectuals of all
kinds, politicians and pedagogues actively label and analyze the significance of linguistic
differentiation as supposed clues to the character, intelligence and other qualities of
speakers. Given these omnipresent efforts to lend meaning to variation, it is not geo-
graphical or social distance between speakers that creates differentiation. On the con-
trary, differentiation arises from the juxtaposition of contrastively valued linguistic vari-
eties within a single person’s repertoire, or the interaction of neighboring speakers whose
different forms signal social position. Even single sounds gain contrastive significance as
indexical and iconic signals of identity or social situation. Thus linguistic change is best
understood as a consequence of intimate contact among speakers rather than distance
(Irvine and Gal 2000).
Standards display a fourth kind of spatialization. Although historical accounts often
show that a nation-state’s major administrative center is the source of many linguistic
features adopted later as standard, the locus of the “best” and most admired linguistic
forms is not necessarily a major urban center. Often it is some particular region of the
countryside that is designated as the repository of authentic and “historically national”
speech. As with the cultural meaning of linguistic variants, so too in the location of the
“best” forms, there are cultural brokers involved in creating and sometimes changing the
ideals. The region seen as the source of the best American speech was deliberately re-located
in the early years of the twentieth century to the rural Mid-west of the country when elites
stigmatized the cities of the East Coast as corrupted by the presence of foreign immigrants
(Bonfiglio 2000). Similarly, the recent debates about the polycentric nature of Hungarian
are also arguments about what regions should be considered the “center” or norm of
Hungarian-speaking, and for what historical-political reasons (Lanstyak 1995).
Finally, the forms of authority granted to standards can be understood as the result
of conflicting spatializations. As exemplary modern phenomena, standard languages are
simultaneously credited as both “traditional, authentic” and “universal,” even though
(or because) these values are both present, though usually opposites, in modernist ideol-
ogy. The apparent contradiction is resolved by spatially distinct, comparative contexts.
When compared to regional or class dialects or minority languages internal to the na-
tion-state, the standard language is understood to be a universal solvent: it is the means
of translation among the other forms; it is the variety in which everything can be said
clearly and truthfully. By contrast, in the larger comparative context of other national
standards, emblems of other nations, the standard language is heard as specially authen-
tic to its nation, providing ways of expressing supposedly untranslatable, culturally spe-
cific concepts.
4. Other models, other maps

Standard ideology is now a common phenomenon across the globe. Nevertheless, there
are alternate visions of political geography and linguistic practice that rely on different
cultural values. As with the other representations we have discussed that claim simply
to describe the world ⫺ kinship charts, word lists, latitude/longitude maps, census
grids ⫺ these too are performative: creative, prospective models for, as well as partial
models of, the systems they describe. It is illuminating to consider some of those that
are the product of long-standing cultural principles as well as others that are relatively
novel schemas in active competition with nation-state maps. Given the acceleration in
economic globalization, it should not be surprising if some of these mappings are visions
born of migration and displacement.
4.1. Southeast Asian polities
A striking contrast to contemporary European maps is the Southeast Asian “galactic

polity” (Tambiah 1985), for which the mandala provided the basic schema. According
to Indo-Tibetan cosmology, part of Hindu-Buddhist thought, a mandala is composed of
two elements, the core (manda) and the container or enclosing element (la), with satellites
of increasingly complexity around a center. Across Southeast Asia up to the twentieth
century, this general model organized activity in virtually every cultural domain. Archi-
tectural projects and textile decoration were shaped as mandalas; the cosmos was under-
stood in myth as constituted by Mount Meru in the center surrounded by oceans and
mountain ranges. At a philosophical and doctrinal level, the relation between conscious-
ness and perception was supposed to be organized like a mandala, as was the heavenly,
spiritual order. Mandalas were geometrical, topographical, cosmological, societal blue-
prints for polities.
In fact, the physical layout of political units, on the ground, often looked astonish-
ingly like mandalas, with the most powerful ruler located in the geographical center,
surrounded by his feuding sons or heirs who were themselves surrounded by lesser rulers.
The constant conflict among rulers precluded firm boundaries, but produced an oscilla-
tion of disintegrating and reconstituting politics, each fractally replicating the central
one in organization and activity, and arranged in mandala shapes. In each region, the
most powerful court, the “exemplary center” (Geertz 1980), gained and legitimated its
power over lesser courts and their hinterlands not by military or administrative means,
but through the elaborate display of the key value of “refinement” in pageantry, festivals
and theatrical self-presentations. This demonstrated the court’s ever more precise imita-
tion of the delicacy, civilization and perfection of the celestial, supernatural order and
thereby justified and demonstrated that court’s worthiness and ability to rule.
Most important for our purposes, the linguistic aspect of exemplary political centers
was crucial to legitimate governance. In the cultural system that created power of this
kind, refinement, civilization and minute gradations of power were expressed and repro-
duced primarily through linguistic and other expressive distinctions that required the
complex ritualization of everyday interaction. The higher the lord, the more refined,
perfect and elaborate was his verbal etiquette, his comportment and sartorial display, all
of which then proved his capacity to rule. Although there was usually only one named
language involved in any one court, the rulers of Java, Bali and the lesser kingdoms of
Southeast Asia created and elaborated linguistic distinctions now called “speech levels”
that are characteristic across all the languages of this region. Errington (1988) reports
as many as five-to-seven such speech registers in Javanese. Lexicon and morphology
distinguished “levels” that precisely marked each utterance for very fine degree of polite-
ness or refinement. These distinctions created ⫺ and did not merely reflect ⫺ the hierar-
chical social order. Linguistic delicacy and the complex etiquette of displaying it
increased as one moved from the peasantry who spoke simply, to the elaborations of
ever higher-placed aristocrats.
4.2. A global constellation

The model of a galactic polity bears only superficial resemblance to a quite different
“global language system” proposed some years ago as a theory of linguistic demography
by a Dutch political scientist. De Swaan (2001) calls his model “a galaxy of languages”
in which constellations or concentric circles represent the relationship between languages
in an abstract, relational space. In contrast to the Southeast Asian model, the units
charted here are (mostly) standard languages, not ritualized registers; the value at issue
is profit, not refinement. If the galactic polity is a form with a long past, the global
system is supposed to map and understand a global future. Though presented as a social
scientific theory, de Swaan’s model is recognizable as an ideological perspective that
views economic globalization and the distribution of languages as parallel phenomena,
both growing out of the presumed universal tendency of humans to maximize benefits.
The “language galaxy” model recognizes that there are thousands of rarely-written
languages in the world, spoken by only hundreds of people each. These are termed
peripheral languages and likened to the moons that travel around planets in a solar
system. Examples would be Sulawesi, Sumba, Bayak and Javanese in Southeast Asia.
More like planets are the central languages, those that have writing systems, literatures,
many more speakers, official status in states and participate in the workings of interna-
tional organizations (i. e. standards). In Southeast Asia, Indonesian and Chinese would
be such languages. Finally the model proposes that there are supercentral languages, with
even more speakers, that are like suns in a solar system, around which the planet lan-
guages revolve. In this view, Arabic, Russian, English and French (in some parts of the
world), Spanish (in other parts), are among the 12 such languages of the world. And
finally there is a single center ⫺ English ⫺ for the 12 solar language systems. English
with its huge number of (mostly second language) speakers is the hub of the linguistic
galaxy as described by de Swaan.
According to this model, speakers try to learn languages that are further in towards
the center orbits than their native tongues, but do not learn languages further out. Bilin-
gual individuals connect the orbits of moons to planets, planets to suns, so there is a
key but limited role for multilingualism. Those at the center (i. e. the sun) of each solar
system speak to each other in English. Although the model/scheme is hierarchical, as
well as demographically and functionally oriented, and “constellation” is largely a meta-
phor, the system is not entirely abstract. There is a geographical factor, in that different
parts of the world can be mapped by specifying which languages fulfill each of the
hierarchically organized functions in a region.
This model erases much of what the jigsaw map and the galactic polity highlight. It
ignores nation-states and their boundaries, elides the problems of defining language,
linguistic difference and the significance of indexical signals. It is uninterested in the
ritual modes, genres and values (such as refinement or correctness) by which communi-
ties of speakers, within cultural systems, organize and evaluate their practices. In this
vision, all languages are merely denotational codes, all speakers are individual decision-
makers, and languages have chiefly instrumental, economic value. Speakers make ratio-
nal choices in language learning, within what their circumstances allow. This is a social
scientific schema, to be sure, but one written from the lofty perspective of transnational
corporations and their aspiring executives, whose presumed career goal is always to
move closer to headquarters, to the center. The model projects ⫺ and celebrates ⫺ a
neoliberal world in which businesses and their mobile employees make choices in ideal-
type free markets.
4.3. Diverse diasporas

Migrant populations are likely to have different visions of space, politics and language
than do nation-states, which can imagine mobile people only as problems, unless they
assimilate. However, it is not deterritorialization that migrants envision, but rather
novel, spatial connections. A case in point is the language and spatial ideology of Ha-
drami men, who are merchants and traders with origins in the region that is now Yemen.
They have been part of a centuries-old migratory pattern around the Indian Ocean (Ho
2006). Since the 13th century and continuing today, Hadrami traders have made their
way southwest, down the coast of Africa, spreading Islam and commerce, marrying the
daughters of local leaders, establishing families and often becoming local political elites.
Others in the same lineages moved to the east, through the southern coast of present-
day India and to Malaysia and Indonesia. The merchants retained individual and famil-
ial memory of where they and their male kin came from, retaining as well a tradition of
ideal return, and a set of practices ⫺ including Islam ⫺ that tied them to others from
Hadramawt.
Other practices that maintained ties among merchant families included circum-Indian
Ocean visiting, business relations and the careful ritual tending, in Hadramawt, of the
graves of returned migrants. Most informative for our purposes is the custom of keeping
genealogies, which were always written in Arabic, the language that has continued to be
the sacred if not the everyday usage of these multilingual traders. In the calligraphically
elaborate genealogical charts, written in Arabic, each man’s name is followed by the
name of his place of death (also in Arabic). One genealogical tree reproduced by Ho
(2006: xvi) names male relatives over six or seven generations ⫺ fathers, sons, brothers,
uncles and cousins of a single lineage ⫺ who died in places as diverse as India, Say’un,
two different parts of Java, the Sawahil (East Africa) and Mocha (Yemen). The values
inscribed here are tellingly selective: the vast and diverse territories around the Indian
Ocean are represented simply as points of death, unified by a single written language
(Arabic), a single lineage and the locational practice of genealogical representation.
For other populations, different visions of language and space create connection in
diaspora. The island of Mauritius is a predominantly Mauritian Creole-speaking society,
but over two thirds of the population are of Indian origin, mostly Hindu. Although
Hindi is officially recognized by the state as the “ancestral language” of Indo-Mauri-
tians, their everyday usage consists mostly of Mauritian Creole. Some, however, speak
Bojhpuri, which is a northeastern Indian variety that ⫺ although part of the long dialect
chain of northern India ⫺ is quite different from Standard Hindi, which drew on western
dialects and in any case was regularized well after the ancestors of Indo-Mauritians left
their homeland. How then do Indo-Mauritians come to recognize Hindi as “their” an-
cestral language? Politically and religiously motivated efforts to establish diasporic
Hindu identity in Mauritius depend on strengthening culturally imagined ties to main-

land India. These rely on a number of spatio-linguistic practices quite different from
those of the Hadrami merchants.
Of central importance is the annual pilgrimage to a mountain lake in the southwest
of Mauritius on the occasion of the Hindu festival of Shivratri. The event is heavily
attended and state-supported. Through the shape and location of the temples around
the lake, and the rituals enacted there, Indo-Mauritians spatially and performatively
create a sacred geography closely resembling that of Hindu pilgrimage sites on the sacred
river Ganges in North India. The continuity with a sacred Hindu landscape in India is
emphasized in legends that claim the lake is a tributary of the Ganges itself, the water
coming through subterranean sources across the ocean. In 1972 a vessel of water from
the Ganges was deposited in the lake, thereby officially consecrating the lake as a part
of the Ganges. Equally important is the use of Hindi in the religious events at the pil-
grimage site, which are understood as re-enactments of what the ancestors did at the
site. But since Hindi is not a part of the daily repertoires of Indo-Mauritians, the use of
it during the pilgrimage relies on schooling in the “ancestral language” and on the use
of Hindi in associations that organize temple activities at villages around the island
(Eisenlohr 2006).
Yet the usage in each of these contexts is not what would be recognized as Hindi by
speakers from the subcontinent. Rather, what characterizes these contexts is the use of
everyday Bhojpuri that is purified of Creole lexical elements, which are replaced by
sanskritized Hindi items. Many grammatical and phonological changes also appear, so
that the effect, for speakers of Bhojpuri, is a new and purified register of Bhojpuri, one
that is used to signal the start of Hindu genres of moral discourse. This register has the
effect of blurring the boundaries between Bhojpuri and Hindi, making persuasive
through recurring linguistic usage the connection between Indo-Mauritians and Hindi-
speakers. It also makes the ancestral Hindi taught in schools and used in sacred perform-
ances more accessible for Indo-Mauritians (Eisenlohr 2006: 66⫺110).
The Hadrami merchants created a diaspora by picturing their patrilineage as an Ara-
bic-Islamic web connecting disparate spaces. On their genealogies, they reduced the con-
ventional space of longitude-and-latitude to points made significant by family members’
lifespan. By contrast, Hindu Mauritians created a diaspora by replicating a revered
model. Indo-Mauritians become diasporic Hindus through representing events in such a
way that they bear a close, iconic similarity to events elsewhere. Through the pilgrimage
and through a hindiized register of Bhojpuri, experiences of the “homeland” become
available on Mauritius, further verifying the constructed fact that Indo-Mauritians are
indeed Indians. Spatial and linguistic replications operate as parallel synecdoches: a piece
of Mauritian landscape recreates India’s sacred geography, just as India’s linguistic mate-
rials are recreated in Mauritian linguistic practice.
5. Locality in places
The discussion so far has foregrounded representational practices in order to highlight

that a vision of space is always constructed from some imagined or actual physical point
or social perspective. Most human schemas of orientation are ego- and event-centered,
as is suggested by the universal presence of deictic systems in the languages of the world.
In English, for instance, “here/there” and “now/then” refer not to any clock time or
geographical space but rather to a point of time/space defined in relation to the speech
event in which these terms are uttered. Tense is temporally indexical in this way. Like
tense, deictics of space can be transposed from the speaker onto objects in the physical
and narrative surround. So we can talk not only about our own “front” and “back” but
also that of trees, toasters and trucks; “here/there” can be centered inside the story we
tell, as well as in the event of telling the story.
Some cultural groups, such as the Guugu Yimithirr of Northern Australia have ⫺ in
addition to such event-centric forms ⫺ what are called ‘absolute systems of coordinates.’
Instead of instructing a child to go to the left of a tree, they will tell him to go south or
east of it (Haviland 1993). The invention of absolute space in the European tradition
was a disputatious affair, linked to but not identical with the cartography of latitude
and longitude discussed earlier. It has been singularly effective. Relying on the scientific
tradition since Newton, most educated westerners assume an absolute abstract space
which is believed to be “out there” as a constant set of fixed points, and to pre-exist our
interactions and our representations. Phenomenologists, sophisticated Whorfians and
most social scientists, by contrast, think that absolute space is itself a projection from
deictically anchored, “origo-centered”, relative space (Levinson 1996). Terminologically,
“space” is most often used ⫺ as it has been in this essay ⫺ to talk about these relatively
abstract notions and their instantiation in semiotically organized cultural objects such
as pictures and charts. By contrast, “place” is the term employed for the more immediate
apprehension or experience of locality as a structure of feeling, mediated by bodily, ritual
and ⫺ most ubiquitously ⫺ by linguistic practices (de Certeau 1984).
Two questions arise from these distinctions: First, how do people project a deictic
“origo” (“here”) of face-to-face interaction onto a more fixed physical location that is
then considered their center, the “place,” and thus social home from which they look
out on the rest of the world? Although this emplacing is not necessarily political, in the
guise of “making community” it has surely functioned as the first step in many political
projects. Second, how is a sense of locality sometimes displaced, so that the speakers
consider themselves to be not at the center but at the margin or periphery of some social
world to which they orient (either positively or negatively)? This second is surely a politi-
cal-economic effect, the result of domination. By starting with the second question, we
can see how linguistic ideologies and linguistic practices are crucial to both.
5.1. Displaced centers
Linguists have long designated as “local” those languages or dialects that are demo-
graphically small, seem geographically isolated, culturally remote or exotic. Yet, the fact
of “locality” in the contemporary world is not a matter of scale, space or strangeness in
itself, but is a relational and contextual issue. No matter how remote, a linguistic form
is reproduced by its practitioners with a self-aware sense, perhaps even an explicit theory,
of what it is produced “from, against, in spite of, and in relation to.” In short, the
local ⫺ while fragile and always in need of careful tending to assure its survival ⫺ is
never separate or alone. It is always created by becoming the object of comparison to
some “elsewhere” or center which is itself culturally apprehended. “Locality” emerges as
a social fact in a national or globalized world (Appadurai 1996: 178, 184). We have
already seen one example of this process as part of standardization, in which speech
varieties are made “regional” or “deviant” once they are subsumed as the chronotopi-
cally distant or bottom of a standardized (metaphorical) space of linguistic varieties.
In this same process, geography is always involved, as is political economy, but with
surprising results. For many centuries, Europeans have perceived the continent as a
cultural territory on which prosperity, progress and civilization are distributed in a gradi-
ent: concentrated in the west and decreasing as one moves east. Arguably, the political
economic relations between European regions over the last three hundred years created
the inequalities reflected in this gradient. The Cold War division of the continent solidi-
fied the differences. Currently, the cultural image itself has political and economic conse-
quences. In the realm of language, the imagery helps to explain exceptions to the general
rule that minority languages are indexical of local solidarity but less prestigious than the
national languages of the states in which the minority is located. Through their code-
switching practices in the 1970s, the German-speaking minority in Romania demon-
strated that for them Romanian was not a prestige language, although it was the lan-
guage of state. Viewing themselves and their languages not from Romania, where they
lived, but from the perspective of the political-economic-cultural gradient to which Ger-
man-Romanians were finely attuned, they were persuaded that German trumped Roma-
nian in prestige (Gal 1987).
A more complex case comes from Indonesia. The Weyewa-speaking villagers on the
island of Sumba were settled until the 1970s in village clusters. Each such cluster had a
geographical center at which the greatest of rituals were performed, the ones at which
the voice of ancestors would be heard through men’s performance of a complex genre
of ritual speech. Spreading out from these centers like spokes on a wheel were other
settlements that were increasingly less efficacious as the location of rituals, and at which
only minor genres of ritual speech were performed. In the late nineteenth century, the
largest of the rituals fell into disuse when the arrival of Dutch colonialists led to an
increase in population, and a consequent dispersal of people away from the large central
villages. The people found themselves removed from their own ceremonial centers. The
net result has been a decrease in the importance and sheer presence of ritual speech,
especially the most important kinds. An orientation to Dutch administration easily fol-
lowed. The language itself, which was in the past considered “perfect” and “a source”
of skill and knowledge, has been devalued because it is now seen as incomplete, lacking
in elaborate ritual genres which were understood to be its most powerful and essential
characteristics (Kuipers 1998).
5.2. Place-making through linguistic practices
Locality is not simply relationality, however. It is important to analyze as well how

people make a physical location or social group into a “place” that ⫺ in comparison to
an “elsewhere” ⫺ is phenomenologically dense with meaning, familiar and legible for its
inhabitants. The creation of places in this sense implies the making of subjects with
patterns of action, ritual performances, ways of speaking and constructing events that
are recognizable for others who are thereby identified as local subjects in the same place.
The practices that make places are always in part linguistic, indeed a chronotope, and
often named or ceremonialized. We can see in retrospect that the ethnography of speak-
ing was concerned to document the linguistic details of just those everyday routines that
“emplace” their practitioners (Bauman and Sherzer 1974).
It is noteworthy that varied definitions of language are crucial in constituting place.
In the example of Weyewa-speakers in Indonesia, ritual speech was defined as the most
perfect Weyewa, the form without which the language was incomplete. In Northern
California, among Native American Tolowa-speakers, the structural patterns that lin-
guists consider the building blocks of language are of little importance. Recognition of
each other as Tolowa-speakers, and the making of a dense and meaningful Tolowa
“place,” comes from speakers’ knowing the Tolowa names of geological and geographi-
cal features in the landscape. Native speakers, linguists and government agents charged
with maintaining this endangered language are in continual conflict because of these
diverse definitions. Despite an ostensibly shared aim of maintaining the language, they
work at cross-purposes (Collins 1998). Similarly, for the Western Apache, the names of
features in the landscape are important as evidence of knowing the language. But even
more significant are the specific narratives linked to landmarks, which operate as a
communal, unwritten memorial of past activities and personages. It is the knowledge of
these stories and the ability to judge when and how to tell them that constitute the
knowledge necessary to be a complete person. The notion that “wisdom sits in places”
(Basso 1996) is an explicit ethno-theory of the relationship between language and land-
scape that lends significance to everyday life, makes the social group visible to itself,
and stands implicitly against American nation-state imagery. It is an exemplary case of
“making place.”
Knowing what to call a place is as an aspect of belonging, one that makes people
members of a social group, recognizable as local persons. In the same way, the choice
of designation for all those cities and regions in the world that have names in many
languages (e.g., Bratislava, Pozsony, Pressburg) immediately signals one way of telling
history as opposed to others and thereby a political stance for the speaker in a world of
contrasting positions. This occurs in less obvious ways too, through the indexicality of
reference that is a fundamental feature of all languages. Two English-speakers exchang-
ing stories of their winter vacations must select lexical items to identify where they have
been. The words ⫺ which need not be place names or even nouns ⫺ must be chosen
from among the huge number that can accurately achieve reference. Has the speaker
been “in the mountains”, “skiing”, “in Obergurgl”? The selection creates solidarity for
interactants, or it can exclude. The first choice presumes the hearer and speaker know
together which mountains count; the second conjures a world divided into practitioners
of contrasting sports. The final one creates a “place” of connoisseurship which can either
invite the other to celebrate a shared expertise or humiliate the hearer as ignorant (Scheg-
loff 1972).
Although place names are not indispensable for place-making, the loss of words for
places can index political changes and show how dense, ritualized and embodied senses
of place ⫺ as distinct from geography ⫺ can be erased. After the Second World War,
land was collectivized in Hungary as part of the communist era. There were rarely any
occasions on which to use the centuries-old proper names ⫺ specific to particular vil-
lages ⫺ for sections of arable land, meadow and woods. The names were remembered
in the communist era by the men and women who had participated as youth in rituals
of inheritance to which these names were crucial for identifying parcels of land. The
names were also significant as archaic sounds suggesting an ancient rural continuity.
Knowledge of the names identified elder generations who were able to evoke, through
the casual use of them, their own former selves, values, customs and sense of place. The
villages have remained, agriculture has continued and private property in land was re-
stored at the end of communism. Men and women younger than 80 may have heard the
archaic terms but cannot use them to refer to the land that has now regained its value.
Those names index a profound political shift in the countryside, one that separates the
“place” of the elders from that of co-resident, younger generations. The present owners
of the land (often the same families) are creating place in novel ways.
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4. Language and transnational spaces

1. Introduction: Media and migration
2. Deterritorialized spaces: Indexicality
3. Reterritorializated spaces: Preservation vs. recombination
4. Digital spaces
5. Transidiomatic practices
6. Conclusions
7. References
1. Introduction: Media and migration

One of the most significant aspects characterizing late modernity has been the high
degree of space-time compression caused by the increasing mobility of people, commodi-
ties, texts, and knowledge (Giddens 1990; Appadurai 1996). This compression has trans-
formed the geography of social relations and communication, leading many scholars to
focus their studies on the transnational nature of late-modern communicative environ-
ments. These studies have linked the emergence of transnationalism with the post-indus-
trial wave of migration, a wave characterized by people able to forge and sustain multi-
stranded social relations across geographic, cultural, and political borders. Transnational
migrants sustain a multiplicity of involvements in both home and host countries, a multi-
plicity made possible by their networks of interpersonal relationships. In a transnational
space, social and symbolic ties reach beyond face-to-face relationships, connecting peo-
ple who are involved in distant interaction through the same faith, class, ideology, ethnic-
ity, or nationality (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994; Faist 2000; Fist and
Özveren 2004).
As Pries (1999) pointed out, transnational spaces are characterized by triadic relation-
ships involving the host state, the sending state, and the migrants’ networks. Structured
by social networks, transnational spaces are multidimensional and multiply inhabited
4. Language and transnational spaces 51
(Jackson, Crang and Dwyer 2004). Their inhabitants develop a “triadic geography of
belonging” (Vertotec 1999) composed of their relation to place of residence, their cre-
ation of myths of homeland, and their imagination of the diasporic community. Transmi-
grants thus develop their sense of a place not only by engaging in their own surroundings
(developing cultural and communicative competencies in relation to these surroundings),
but also by activating wider flows and circuitries (allowing them to stay in touch with
distant social realities and alternative social imaginations).
Moreover, transnational spaces are experienced differently by people in different so-
cial groups and classes. As Massey (1994) discussed, transnational spaces can be imag-
ined as articulated, hierarchical moments in networks of power relations and social un-
derstandings. The globalization of social relations is yet another source of geographically
uneven development, giving rise to what Massey called a “global sense of place,” that is,
the sense that one’s spatial-temporal coordinates are constantly redefined by economic,
political, and socio-cultural relations which are stretched out over the planet at every
different scale, from the local to the global.
But how are the “global sense of place” and the “triadic geography of belonging”
enacted, produced, and reproduced? In order to answer this question, we need to explore
the communicative regimes in charge of injecting sense into the transnational situation.
New research is needed that focuses directly on the development across transnational
territories of communicative practices produced (and reproduced) by two social actors:
the transnational migrants themselves and the local and global media.
Global communication, and in particular electronic media, is much more than an
enabler of people’s interactivity and mobility: it alters the very nature of this interactivity,
transforming people’s sense of place, belonging, and social relations. Furthermore,
electronic media provide people with distinct ways of expressing themselves ⫺ “media
idioms”, in other words, which have yet to be fully explored in transnational studies.
But it is not only transnational studies that have neglected this phenomenon. Lan-
guage studies have also been slow to respond to the challenge of examining transnational
media idioms, although the literature on language and migration is well-developed (and
growing). The study of electronic media has been left to the socio-cultural anthropology
of media (the product of a serious rethinking of the field of visual anthropology; see
Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002) and to the more “ethnographic” approaches
to cultural studies (which emerged out of the encounter between sociological analysis of
the media and textual analysis, see Baudrillard 1984; Gitlin 1983; Mankekar 1999). How-
ever, Spitulnik’s critique (1993) still stands: these studies suffer from inattention to lin-
guistic details and an overdependence on textual criticism. These studies, as well as the
study of the Internet in diaspora, which has attracted considerable interest in media and
cultural studies, had paid little attention to sociolinguistic issues (Androutsopoulos
2006a, 2006b). Even linguistically oriented media analysis, which focuses principally on
the lexical components of media messages, has neglected to analyze the indexical/prag-
matic aspects of media communication and the global spread of media idioms.
It is only in recent years that language studies ⫺ spurred by the growth of cultural
studies (Bhabha 1994; Garcı́a Canclini 1995; Hannerz 1996; Jameson and Miyoshi 1998;
Tomlinson 1999; Nederveen Pieterse 2003) ⫺ started to engage with some of the concepts
developed by the analysis of globalization and produced some significant scholarship
(Woolard 1999; multiple contributions in Coupland 2003; Aravamudan 2006; Pennycook
2007). Unfortunately, even in this more recent scholarship, the link between media and
migration is still poorly understood.
In this article, I seek to remedy this situation by proposing a research paradigm

that can account for both migrants’ communicative practices and media idioms. After
discussing the three basic characteristics of transnational spaces (deterritorialization, re-
territorialization, and digitalization), this article introduces the concept of transidiomatic
practices to describe the communicative practices of transnational groups that interact
using different languages and communicative codes simultaneously in a range of com-
municative channels. This focus on transidiomatic practices leads to a discussion of the
social indexicalities and semiotic codes structured by (and structuring) the social zones
of late-modern communication.
2. Deterritorialized spaces: Indexicality
In the 1990s, the anthropological notion of “culture” gradually moved away from identi-
fication with a naturally contiguous territory or society and towards an association with
social environments freed from the constrictions of face-to-face interactions in the locali-
ties of pre-modern societies. This move allowed anthropologists and social scientists to
study social relations stretched across time and space by the movement of people be-
tween places, institutions, and groups (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Giddens 1990).
This anthropological turn was heavily influenced by the philosophical concept of deterri-
torialization developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987). The notion of deterritoria-
lization provided an alternative vision of the subject that contrasted with the dominant
understanding of subjectivity as contained within the territorial confines established by
centralized powers. Deleuze and Guattari explicated the displacement and dispersion
of a subjectivity unrestrained by territorial control. Deterritorialization served as the
cornerstone of a “nomadic” theory, in which the “nomad”, “migrant” and “gypsy” be-
came the figures for a generalized poetics of displacement.
This concept has been criticized for its metaphorical, universalistic bias (Mignolo
2000) as well as for its inability to account for transnational power relations and its
indulgence in nostalgic, colonial fantasies about nomadic movements (Spivak 1988;
Kaplan 1996). Nevertheless, it remains a powerful metaphor for representing globaliza-
tion’s central social fact, the dissolution of the supposedly “natural” link between a
geographical territory and cultural practices, experiences, and identities. As such, the
concept of deterritorialization has been adopted by social theory to account for the
cultural dynamics of people and practices that either no longer inhabit one locale (find-
ing themselves in borderlands, diasporic groups, or mixed cultural environments) or
inhabit a locality radically transformed by global cultural phenomena (Basch, Glick
Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994; Hannerz 1996; Clifford 1997; Tomlinson 1999a and b).
Through the synergy of mobile people and electronic media, the vast majority of the
planet is confronting new rules and resources for the construction of social identity and
cultural belonging. As Appadurai (1996) pointed out, when the rapid, mass-mediated
flow of images, scenarios, and emotions merges with the flow of deterritorialized audi-
ences, the result is a recombination in the production of modern subjectivity. When
Moroccan families make videotapes of their weddings to send to relatives who migrated
to Italy (Jacquemet 1996), when Hmong refugees in the United States produce documen-
taries about their “homelands” by staging them in China (Schein 2002), or when Paki-
stani taxi-drivers in Chicago listen to sermons recorded in mosques in Kabul or Teheran

(Appadurai 1996), we witness the encounter of mobile media practices and transnational
people. In this encounter, a new, deterritorialized social identity takes shape, light-years
away from the corporate logic of the nation-state. This new identity coagulates around
a sentiment of belonging that can no longer be identified with a purely territorial dimen-
sion.
The media, by operating in the interface between global forces and local processes,
have produced an intense acceleration in the dynamics of social interaction ⫺ an acceler-
ation that does not progress along straight lines, but follows the centrifugal, rhyzomatic,
and chaotic interweaving of multiple channels, voices, and audiences. What is most im-
pressive in the cultural/linguistic landscapes of late modernity are the communicative
practices, such as those described above, of people engaged in simultaneous interactions
across a multiplicity of technologically mediated sites.
In the deterritorialized world of late-modern communication, interlocutors can no
longer take the spatio-temporal contexts of an interaction for granted, as a result the
indexical information of any message becomes problematic. By indexicality, I mean the
existential relationship between a sign (called index) and its referent, based upon a physi-
cal link of “spatio-temporal contiguity” between the two. Indexes, in order to be inter-
preted, need a clear spatio-temporal context, and it is only thanks to context that we
can process statements such as pass me that book, since the demonstrative pronoun
“points” to a book nearby. This context-dependent property of an index is not only
found in demonstratives, personal pronouns, and temporal and spatial expressions, but
also in sociolinguistic markers such as phonological variations (pointing to a particular
relationship between speaker and socio-economic position) or pronominal choices (the
T/V, informal/formal system pointing to contextually relevant social coordinates of re-
spect, politeness, and hierarchy). The central property of indexicality is thus this ability
to “point” communication toward the spatio-temporal contexts and the socio-cultural
environments, to direct an addressee to attend to speech settings (for a more detailed
discussion, see Silverstein 1976; Hanks 1990).
In this logic, long-distance phone calls require a realignment of the caller’s indexical
ground in order to match the time zone of the called to avoid embarrassing, face-threat-
ening acts (such as waking the called in the middle of the night or interrupting morning
prayers). This adjustment of one’s phenomenological field carries consequences for one’s
sense of place, in some instances producing radical reframings of what constitutes “being
here.” These translocal requirements have been complexified by the widespread diffu-
sion, starting in the 1990s, of mobile telecommunication technologies (especially cellular
technology), which have the capacity to produce a simulacrum of interactional contigu-
ity no longer depended upon physical proximity. Nowadays, a considerable amount of
interactional work must be spent in aligning the indexical maps of interlocutors, i. e.,
their spatial references contextualized in the particular environments occupied by the
speakers. Consider, for instance, the case of calling a cellular phone, in which the precise
location of the call’s recipient is obviously problematic. The caller’s typical opening move
(where are you?) in this case is not a simple request for territorial information, but the
start of a sophisticated process of matching indexical maps. It also initiates a communi-
cative negotiation in which the caller seeks to find out whether the environment of the
called is conducive to talk, thus avoiding potential face damage if the call has intruded
either upon a private, “back-stage” area not usually open to interaction, or upon public
space where the recipient’s talk would be limited by social rules. It must be noted that
the “public/private” divide is rapidly being transformed by mobile technology, which
stretches the range of permissibility and possibility for phone calls, as anyone who has
taken a train next to a babbling cellularized individual knows (see Cameron 2000 on the
demise of Goffman’s “civil disattention” caused by cell phones). This in turn has created
new codes of conduct and new rules for the use of cellular phones (including their ban-
ishment from concert halls, lecture halls, and some restaurants).
The hermeneutical implications of the link between indexicality and deterritorialized
communicative practices are even more dramatic if we consider the phenomenon of
reading texts accessed through the Internet. Let me relate a recent experience that I had
while reading the on-line version of the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. An article by the
paper’s US correspondent on a socialist scholars’ conference held in New York discussed
similarities between American and Italian debates over the conference topics:
La discussione sulla crisi della forma partito, sull’egemonia dell’ideologia del mercato, sulla
latitanza dei movimenti, tutto risuona in un ritornello tante volte sentito al di qua dell’Atlan-
tico.
‘The debate over the crisis of the party-structure, on the hegemony of market ideology, on
the lack of social movements, all this sounds like a refrain heard many times on this side of
the Atlantic.’ (my translation, M. J.)
As an Italian-speaking transmigrant working and living in the San Francisco Bay Area,
I felt a deep sense of estrangement when I attempted to anchor the phrase on this side
of the Atlantic within his spatial environment. The article assumed the location of writer
and audience to be in Italy (even if the writer was reporting from New York). It also
assumed the location of the medium: Italian-language media were produced in Italy to
be consumed locally by an Italian public (very much in line with Anderson’s [1983]
understanding of the role of media in the construction of the nation-state as an imagined
community). A transmigrant’s reading of this article in a location outside of Italy (let’s
say an office on a U.S. campus) problematizes this easily taken-for-granted connection
between territory, language, and media ⫺ resulting in a serious case of indexical vertigo.
This sense of vertigo is intrinsically related to the nature of reading on-line. The
consumption of foreign newspapers is not a recent development of globalization, but the
cultural practice of accessing them through “traditional” means (going to a specialty
newsstand carrying foreign journals, locating the newspaper, checking its date ⫺ usually
at least a day earlier ⫺ buying the newspaper, holding it at eye level, leafing through
the pages) evokes a physicality that allows the reader to participate in the media event
“as if” one were still in Italy ⫺ and thus able to process “on this side of the Atlantic”
easily and without confusion.
On the other hand, the consumption of online newspapers transforms the phenome-
nological condition of “being here.” The fact that the reader could be located almost
anywhere in the world (at least, anywhere with reliable Internet connection) produces a
different processing of spatial and temporal locators. The online versions of newspapers
come with their own modalities of reception that clearly differentiate them from the
printed versions (which are, in many cases, also available for downloading as pdf files
from the papers’ websites, to make things even more confusing). By relying on specific
techniques, such as the use of hyperlinks to other publications, websites, blogs, or image
and video banks; by providing comment space for on-going discussion among readers;
and by using specific markers, such as providing the time of the last update (usually
given in GMT), online newspapers alter the taken-for-granted relationship between
reader and text and project a globalized but language-specific audience, able to access
the text from virtually anywhere in the world. Moreover, given the global dominance of
American operating systems (such as Windows, which in 2006 had a 84.7 percent share
of all computer operating systems, and Internet Explorer, which had a 78 percent share
of Internet traffic), even non-English e-journals accessed from an English-based environ-
ment are entextualized within English frames. These frames shape the phenomenological
appreciation of on-line texts. In sum, online media allow the experience of reading to be
purely deterritorialized from any point of geographical reference, and thus problematize
indexical understanding of electronically produced and disseminated textual materials.
Practices of communicative deterritorialization, such as cellular phone calls or online
reading, are usually found at the nexus of mobile people and mobile texts. The most
important new phenomenon facing the study of late modernity is, as Appadurai (1996)
discussed, the encounter between media and migration ⫺ an encounter that provides an
ideal entry point for studying the social and cultural mutations of the contemporary
world.
Ethnographers of communication, in particular, have much to gain and to contribute
by turning their attention to processes of deterritorialization, especially those produced
by the interaction of mobile people and electronic media. A linguistic analysis of media
communication would provide new evidence of the indexical dynamics of such phenom-
ena as multi-channeled communication (such as a cellular call to a radio talk show
about events which the caller is experiencing directly, Scollon 1998: 2001), asynchronous
interactions (such as voice-mail, email, or cellular messages), the linguistic ideology of
media idioms, metacommunicative techniques (as in the use of techno-political devices
in broadcast interviews), intertextuality and the construction of audiences, and the creoli-
zation of media idioms.
Finally, a focus on deterritorialization should prompt linguistic studies to examine
electronic media in the context of the late-modern human condition, and confront the
phenomenon of people whose allegiances and sense of belonging are divided between
multiple places ⫺ and whose linguistic practices reflect their experience with multiple,
transnational sites. At the same time, a focus on processes of deterritorialization should
be combined with attention to parallel processes of reterritorialization.
3. Reterritorializated spaces: Preservation vs. recombination
The most important social implication of deterritorialization is not the dissolution of

identities, cultures, or nation-states in a global environment (as some critics of globaliza-
tion theory would lead us to believe; see Held and McGrew 2000; Lechner and Boli
2000), but the interplay between global and local processes and the reconstitution of
local social positionings within global cultural flows (a phenomenon labeled “glocaliza-
tion,” see Robertson 1995). People are continuously involved in practices of reterritorial-
ization: the anchoring and recontextualizing of global cultural processes into their every-
day life (Tomlinson 1999). These practices have a broad range of social effects. At one
extreme, they can produce an ideological hardening of the local, “indigenous” identity/
code/language in opposition to translocal phenomena. At the other, they can just as well
initiate a much more creative process for the production of recombinant identities.
Social groups faced with transnational flows of people and cultural practices not
easily accepted locally may react with an ideological hardening of the social boundaries
of their “community.” Locally dominant ethnic groups strengthen in-group identities by
raising the membership bar through practices of intolerance and exclusion. As noted by
Garcı́a Canclini in his ethnography of Tijuanians, “the same people who praise the city
for being open and cosmopolitan want to fix signs of identification and rituals that
differentiate them from those who are just passing through.” (1995: 239). Among the
most pernicious practices is the imposition by socially dominant groups of limits on the
linguistic rights of transnational, lower class, or minority subjects. From the English
Only movement to the worldwide phenomenon of eradicating minority languages in
favor of national ones, we find a motley crew of different forces and groups animated
by the desire to resist globalization. Their resistance takes various and at times antago-
nistic forms, such as preserving “a common language,” avoiding ethnic strife, imposing
a sense of national unity and civic responsibility, or exploiting a national mood of isola-
tionism and xenophobia. An interesting example of this process of linguistic chauvinism
by nation-states is offered by Singapore’s initiatives for a perfect society: the “Speak
Good English Movement” and the “Speak Mandarin” campaigns to eliminate Singlish,
“a patois that has spread through our nation like a linguistic virus” according to Lee
Kuan Yew, Singapore’s senior minister (quoted in the New York Times, July 1, 2001). In
particular the “Speak Mandarin” campaign has become a serious class struggle pitching
Singapore’s middle class and state bureaucrats against the working poor, and is causing
the shift in most domains, in particular the home, from other Chinese languages to
Mandarin, producing a generation of children not being able to understand their grand-
parents (Ansaldo and Lim 2006).
Meanwhile, minority groups may respond to globalization fears with a strategic re-
treat to ideologically defensive positions, such as re-identification with cultures of origin,
reliance on symbolic membership in strong counter-ethnicities, revival of cultural inte-
gralism and traditionalism, and defense of the “purity” and “integrity” of the local lan-
guage (Hill and Hill 1986).
In all these cases, we find people who, feeling threatened by the diversity (among
other unsettling changes) brought about by deterritorialization, activate an exclusive
linguistic ideology to raise the membership bar (Anderson 1983; Crowley 1989; Crawford
1992; Silverstein 1996; Errington 2000).
On the other hand, there is some evidence that global/local interactions may also
produce a new form of reterritorialization that gives rise to recombinant identities, usu-
ally produced through encounters between global and local codes of communication.
Anyone present in transnational milieus, whose talk is mediated by deterritorialized
technologies and who interacts with both present and distant people, will find herself
immersed in practices of recombinant identities. Diasporic and local groups alike renego-
tiate their identities whenever they engage in maintaining a simultaneous presence in a
multiplicity of sites or participate in elective networks spread over transnational territo-
ries. These recombinant identities are based on multi-presence, multilingualism, and de-
centered political/social engagements.
Consider, for instance, the growing phenomenon of customer call centers located
thousands of miles away, multiple times zones apart, and in different nations from the
serviced area, such as the call centers in South Asia, in particular in India, that serve
customers in the United States or United Kingdom. The key to the success of Indian
calling centers is, for the most part, the phone operators’ ability to reterritorialize their
cultural and communicative practices to match the callers’ expectations of being served
in a nearby location by a peer. In a quest for seamless connection with clients, these
operators ⫺ most of whom are young college graduates ⫺ are required by their manag-
ers to study American or British popular culture, including food, habits, and popular
TV shows in their customers’ areas (one reported exercise consists of listening to the
soundtrack of the American TV-show Friends and the like, and then reconstructing the
dialogue). Most importantly, operators’ talk must be contextualized and experienced
within the spatio-temporal environment of their customers. For instance, operators’
computer screens show not only a customer’s time zone but also the local weather and
traffic report, so that each call can be answered with the appropriate temporal greeting
(“good afternoon” when India is already in the dark) and with small talk about, for
instance, the miserable snow storm and the resulting horrible commute (Landler 2001).
At the same time, Indian operators interact with co-workers in the next cubicle, take
breaks to eat local food, and may occasionally check local news and personal email.
This mixing of multiple languages and simultaneous local (with co-workers) and distant
(with clients) interactions binds these subjects to a world of recombinations of their
communicative, cultural, and social practices.
Many other countries have followed in India’s footsteps and developed such call
centers. In spring 2001, the New York Times published an article about how Ireland
was becoming the phone message center for many German firms. Germans (from East
Germany, where there is still high unemployment) went to Ireland to work and answer
phone calls from German customers. Since it was too expensive to pay Germans German
wages in Germany, firms paid workers Irish wages in Ireland, and saved money. America
Online, on the other hand, currently prefers an Asian country with an English-educated
population: the Philippines. Its voice hotline (800 number) takes you to an office some-
where in the Philippines, where all questions are answered by local people. (On the other
hand, a more recent development reported in the press in 2007 is India outsourcing its
economic model to countries like the Czech Republic, Morocco and China).
While individual creativity must be acknowledged in this process of recombination,
I do not want to idealize phone operators’ agency (both social and communicative) in
working tasks which are imposed upon them by managers, together with often substan-
dard and cramped working conditions. The imperative to speak proper English still
points to the linguistic dominance of this language over many local languages, as con-
temporary capitalism pushes further into all areas of production worldwide. Political,
social and cultural supremacy is in the hands of transnational governmental bodies,
multinational companies, international relief organizations and churches, and various
multinational military forces ⫺ in other words, in the hands of a globalized governmen-
tality characterized by “mobile sovereignty” (Sassen 2001; Cheah and Robbins 1998;
Ong 1998; Hardt and Negri 2000).
Mobile sovereignty is tied to the emergence of two new layers in the international
division of intellectual labor: a class made up of cosmopolitan elites (such as multina-
tional corporate executives, UN bureaucrats, the staff of international NGOs, and in-
ternational media producers) and a class made up of the local workers (phone operators,
secretaries, computer technicians, interpreters, local politicians, and so on) under the
elites’ direct or indirect control. Phone operators still occupy the lowest echelon in the
hierarchy of cognitive labor: they are the “chain workers” of the information system,
servicing the needs of others under the direct supervision of “symbolic analysts,” the
“brainworkers” in charge of the production of immaterial goods and services (Reich
1992; Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996; Ritzer 1996; Escobar 2001). Among the skills most
desired in these chain workers, knowledge of global languages takes center stage. Such
linguistic knowledge constitutes the best ⫺ and sometimes the only ⫺ opportunity avail-
able to many bright people (especially the youth in the global south) for social and
geographical mobility.
Nevertheless, these phone operators represent a new, moving frontier in class, lan-
guage, and power relations. As such, their communicative practices have a significant
impact on their everyday life and in the lives of people with whom they interact, both
near to them and in the deterritorialized environments of the virtual economy. They, like
many other workers involved in cognitive labor, are at the frontline of contemporary
capitalism’s advance upon local environments, and on the cutting edge of the creation
of new ways of speaking and communicating. Their communicative practices are an
example of how new discourses and modes of representation are reterritorialized within
the local environment and situated amid the hierarchies that structure the global politi-
cal economy.
In this light, the concept of reterritorialization provides a valuable perspective on
intercultural communication in the transnational spaces of late modernity.
4. Digital spaces
The third, and most neglected, dimension of transnational spaces is situated not in spe-
cific territorial sites but in the virtual reality of mediascapes. The transnational sensibili-
ties and multilingual communicative dynamics that we have explored so far in this paper
are made possible by global media and digital technologies. This section addresses com-
municative implications of three types of digitally-mediated interactions: virtual meet-
ings, digital navigation systems and online social networking.
Although a rich literature on virtual teams and their role in transnational spaces has
emerged in recent years from the field of organization studies (Hinds and Kiesler 2002;
Marquardt and Horvath 2001), very few studies have focused on the communicative
aspects of these virtual interactions, in particular on the communicative dynamics of
telepresence in videoconferencing or video calls. In the late 1980s, Virilio introduced the
concept of telepresence to account for the spacializing role images would have in long-
distance video communication (1988, 1990). Interactive, live transmission of video
images over great distances becomes in itself a new kind of place. The experience of
being in this place is what Virilio called telepresence, which supersedes in real time the
real space of objects and sites. Telepresence is the experience of the continuity of real
time overcoming the contiguity of real space. The impact of fiber optics, monitors and
video cameras on our vision and on our surroundings is far greater than that of electric-
ity in the nineteenth century. “In order to see,” Virilio observes, “we will no longer be
satisfied in dissipating the night, the darkness of the outside world. We will also dissipate
time lapses and distances, the outside world itself” (1990: 72).
In consonance with Baudrillard’s understanding of the new informational landscape,

Virilio advanced the notion that we no longer inhabit or share a physical public space.
Our domain of existence or socialization is now the public image, with its volatile, func-
tional and spectacular ubiquity. For Virilio, one of the most important aspects of the
technologies of digital imaging and of synthetic vision made possible by optoelectronics
was the “fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational) and the virtual,” the predomi-
nance of the “effect of the real” (1988: 128) over the physical world. The shortest distance
between two points is no longer a straight line, as it was in the age of the locomotive
and the telegraph. Today, in the age of satellites and fiber optics, the shortest distance
between two points lies in real time transmission of information between the two points.
The concept of telepresence has been picked up by the computer industry to describe
the latest innovation in videoconferencing. In this virtual environment, users scattered
around the planet communicate live via integrated voice, video and data networks, at a
speed and quality of transmission paralleling face-to-face interactions. High-definition,
multi-panel video screens reproduce the actual size of conference participants. This tech-
nology creates the illusion that the two (or more) parties to a conversation are not
continents apart but at opposite sides of the same table. Initial reports suggest that
participants in such meetings very quickly forget, or at least stop caring, that they are
not in the same room. In order to achieve this telepresence effect, rooms in remote
locations are equipped with matching conference tables that face wide screens, as well
as matching décor, so that the local table blends seamlessly with the remote table pro-
jected on the screen. The rooms are equipped with multiple cameras and speakers, sup-
ported by enormous computing power, so that meeting participants can make eye con-
tact and overlap or interrupt each other (in order to do so, the delays in audio and video
transmission must be negligible, i. e., below 250 milliseconds, the threshold at which the
human brain starts to notice the delay, see Cisco 2007).
While meetings that make use of telepresence video conference technologies may be
the wave of the future, many virtual meetings that take place today combine use of
teleconferencing with the Internet to facilitate collaboration on shared projects, but do
not simulate face-to-face interactions. Participants are still present to each other, none-
theless, as voices on the phone ⫺ and thus experience a form of telepresence. The only
ethnography of communication to date that has explored telepresence focused on this
sort of teleconferencing. Wasson (2006), in her study of the meetings of virtual teams in
a corporate workplace, analyzed how participants in such teleconferences multitasked
in more complex ways than they would during face-to-face interactions. As in face-to-
face interactions, a central situational focus was maintained within the interactional
space of the virtual meeting, but participants were also simultaneously located in their
local spaces. In their local spaces, they were often simultaneously engaged in other activi-
ties unconnected to the meeting. These multitasking skills seem to be a common theme of
all digitalized environments, pointing at the complex communicative practices occurring
simultaneously in the transnational space created by local and virtual environments.
A second type of digitally-mediated interaction is the use of digital communications
to provide directions for spatial navigation. Digital navigation has given rise to a new
way transnational agents can move in unknown territories and thus acquire the appro-
priate indexical pragmatics. Since 2000, in-dash navigation systems using Global Posi-
tioning System (GPS) technology have become either standard or optional features in
many car and truck models, and third-party systems have become widely available for
all vehicles. Portable units have been developed that could be moved from car to car,
and navigation software can now be added to laptop computers. Navigation systems
read digital maps on a CD-ROM, DVD or hard disk and display on a screen one’s
current location on a street map in real-time. Using GPS devices mobile, mobile people,
and in particular transnational ones, no longer need clear knowledge of the territory in
which they move ⫺ knowledge that was, until recently, one of the signs of belonging to
a “home” territory. Now cellular communication allows them to rely on remote, digital
interlocutors to provide the pertinent information. This offers great advantages to deter-
ritorialized subjects. Consulting maps or obtaining directions in advance is no longer
necessary. Instead, drivers can count on real-time directions while driving. A digital
navigator can match its knowledge of the territory with the driver’s progress through
it ⫺ duly described to her by voice (currently available only in “global” languages) or
via a graphic interface.
A related technology, mobile positioning, allow services to pinpoint the location of a
mobile caller or vehicle in transit. These location-based services (LBS) are used for emer-
gency purposes as well as enhanced business applications such as location-sensitive bill-
ing, traffic updates, fleet management and goods and people tracking. This technology is
also expected to become ubiquitous, in particular in conjunction with cellular telephone
communication. For instance, a person could be notified by cell phone of a sale going
on in a store he is walking by, find out whether any of his friends are in the area, or
track the location of his children’s cell phones. In particular, the use of such technologies
for social networking should become an area of concern for scholars interested in social
interaction, and in particular in human-machine interactions.
A third type of digital communication has an especially powerful impact on transna-
tional spaces: the social interactions taking place in social networking sites (such as
MySpace or Facebook) and virtual worlds (such as Second Life).
Social networking sites are becoming one of the primary communication channels
for many young adults, and the numbers are staggering: in summer 2007 MySpace
counted 200 million users, and the rapidly expanding Facebook reached the 40 million
mark, having added 36 million users in just over a year (one of the fastest rates of
growth ever recorded by an online service). In these environments, people, mostly young,
learn to expand their cultural and communicative capacities by constructing online sub-
jectivities in an open-ended process of becoming. These virtual communities are sites for
the expansion of the cultural, communicative, and subjective capacities of their users,
who are engaged in an exponential expansion of discrete nodes of both affect and affin-
ity. They do so by allowing users to communicate with people worldwide through the
creation of their personal space, where users can personalize their profile pages as they
wish with texts, images, music, varying layouts and various other items (such as links to
other websites).
According to Gamble (2007), the communicative world of the Internet and other
digital domains is doing much more than just developing in a manner that replicated
communities of practice based on speech patterns: the communicative practices played
out in these virtual communities are advancing into the domain of speech in the physical
world. It is now possible to determine which speaker has an active digital life merely by
exploring his/her vocabulary and sentence construction. In other words, the digital do-
main’s contribution to the evolution of language does much more than just blending the
virtual world with the physical one (as suggested by Dubé, Bourhis and Jacob 2006):
digital communication is now a home base for the development of language for a broad
section of the general population.
This is clearly visible in the communicative practices emerging from Facebook’s com-
munities. Facebook is proving to have a great impact on the offline world through its
offer of communicative tools, such as the “wall” and the “poke”. The wall is a space on
each user’s profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. One
user’s wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile, and different
users’ wall posts show up in an individual’s News Feed. Many users use their friends’
walls for leaving short, quick notes, whereas more private communication is produced
in a different environment, called “Messages”, where notes are visible only to the sender
and recipient(s), much like email. The act of constantly browsing through friends’ pages,
pictures and walls, but doing so without posting a comment is referred as “creeping”.
In July 2007, Facebook allowed users to post attachments to the wall, whereas previously
the wall was limited to textual content only, thus increasing the multimodality and digital
complexity of the communication. The “poke” feature, on the other hand, allows a user
to attract the attention of another one. Friends often engage in what is known as a
“poke war”, where the poke is exchanged back and forth continuously between two
users by using the “poke back” feature. The user who neglects to return the poke
promptly while still remaining an active user of Facebook is said to be the loser (Wi-
kipedia 2007). It is now frequent to encounter uses of “poke”, “wall posts”, or “creep-
ing” in youth speech patterns which could be understood as markers of cultural belong-
ing to this online community.
Online gaming and its capability to produce real time virtual communities deserves a
closer look. Every day millions of pc gamers log in to online worlds to play and interact
within a virtual community. Massively multiplayer online role playing games
(MMORPGs) ⫺ such as Second Life, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, or Everquest ⫺
allow people to don online personalities, or avatars, and duke it out in make-believe
environments. These environments typically appear similar to those in the real world,
with similar rules for gravity, topography, locomotion, and communication. Communi-
cation has, until recently, been in the form of text, but recently real-time voice communi-
cation via the internet has become available. For instance, in the simulation game Second
Life, not only can entrepreneurs buy and sell digital real estate, create their own lines of
avatar clothing and accessories, and hold virtual concerts, lectures, and sporting events;
but in addition many users have come to see these games as an enhanced communica-
tions medium for staying in touch with friends and to make new connections. The cre-
ation of elective communities spread across continents and able to interact in real time
in the virtual confines of cyberspace is pushing the limits of what constitutes social
interaction and group communication.
While by now the study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a well estab-
lished field (Herring 1996, 2003; Crystal 2006), the indexical-pragmatic functions of
CMC in transnational spaces have been largely overlooked. Moreover, existing research
on CMC has focused almost exclusively on emergent practices in English whereas, as
Danet and Herring (2007) pointed out, roughly two-thirds of Internet users are non-
English speakers (one notable exception is the study of code-switching among expatriate
South Asians on Usenet in Paolillo 1996, see also the edited volume by Danet and
Herring 2007).
What are the communicative practices taking place in transnational, digitally-medi-
ated environments, from virtual meetings to social networking sites? Ethnographically-
based, linguistically-oriented fieldwork of digital transnational spaces is still quite

sketchy and lacks in-depth analysis. As a result we are left to speculate on the complex
communicative dynamics people activate when engaging in digital interaction. As Jones
(2004) pointed out in his study of the shift from face-to-face to virtual interaction “tradi-
tional sociolinguistic conceptualizations of the terms of interaction and the contexts in
which it takes place may need to be radically rethought in light of new communication
technologies” (Jones 2004: 21). This awareness of a transformed context must inform
our investigation of these spaces.
The lenses we usually adopt in looking at language must be significantly altered to
accommodate for communicative phenomena produced by people present in transna-
tional contexts, whose talk is mediated by deterritorialized technologies, and who in-
teract with both present and distant people. We need to study the communicative prac-
tices of these subjects, even if these communicative practices cannot be recognized as
part of a single linguistic standard. To elucidate a different approach to the study of
language in transnational space, the next section will introduce the concept of transidio-
matic practice to study precisely this intersection between mobile people and digital com-
munication.
5. Transidiomatic practices
One of the most significant breakthroughs in language studies in the late twentieth cen-
tury was the introduction of the notion of communicative practice. Under the influence
of European political philosophers such as Foucault and Bourdieu, language and com-
munication scholars adopted the notion of practice to deal not only with communicative
codes and ways of speaking (some of the rallying concepts of the first wave of the
ethnography of communication), but also with semiotic understanding, power asymme-
try and linguistic ideology. By focusing on the “socially defined relation between agents
and the field that ‘produces’ speech forms” (Hanks 1996: 230), a practice-oriented ap-
proach can then explore speakers’ orientations, their habitual patterns and schematic
understandings and their indexical strategies. Hanks defined communicative practice as
constituted by the triangulation of linguistic activity, the related semiotic code or linguis-
tic forms and the ideology of social indexicality. He invoked a poetic image of practice
as “the point of conversion of the quick of activity, the reflexive gaze of value, and the
law of the system” (1996: 11).
This triangulation of linguistic activity, semiotic codes and indexicality needs to be
complexified to account for how groups of people that are no longer territorially defined,
think about themselves, communicate using an array of both face-to-face and long-dis-
tance media, and in so doing produce and reproduce social hierarchies and power asym-
metries. I propose to use the term transidiomatic practice to describe the communicative
practices of transnational groups that interact using different languages and communica-
tive codes simultaneously present in a range of communicative channels, both local
and distant.
Transidiomatic practices are the result of the co-presence of digital media and multi-
lingual talk exercised by deterritorialized/reterritorialized speakers. They operate in
contexts heavily structured by social indexicalities and semiotic codes that produced
relatively stable power asymmetries and cultural hegemonies. Anyone present in transna-
tional environments, whose talk is produced by both biological and digital means, and
who interacts with both present and distant people is engaged in transidiomatic prac-
tices.
Given the nature of economic globalization, many contemporary work environ-
ments ⫺ from the offices of international organizations to airport lounges, from interna-
tional call centers to the board meetings of multinational companies ⫺ can be classified
as transidiomatic. In addition, a great number of social settings ⫺ from living rooms to
hospital operating rooms to political meetings ⫺ experience a translocal multilingualism
interacting with the electronic technologies of contemporary communication. The world
is now full of settings where speakers use a mixture of languages in interacting with
friends and co-workers; read English and other “global” languages on their computer
screens; watch local, regional or global broadcasts; and listen to pop music in various
languages. Much of the time, they do so simultaneously.
Moreover, transidiomatic practices are no longer solely restricted to areas of colonial
and post-colonial contact, but flow through the multiple channels of electronic com-
munication and global transportation, over the entire world, from contact zones, border-
lands, and diasporic nets of relationships to the most remote and self-contained areas of
the globe. These communicative resources are activated by people needing to operate in
multiple, co-present and overlapping communicative frames. The language they use to
communicate depends on the contextual nature of their multi-site interactions, but is
necessarily mixed, translated, “creolized” (Hannerz 1992: 1996). Transidiomatic practices
usually produce linguistic innovations with heavy borrowing from English (a reminder
of the global impact of contemporary English ⫺ see Pennycook 2003 and 2007; Crystal
1997; De Swaan 2001), but any number of other languages could be involved in these
communicative recombinations, depending on specific processes of reterritorialization in
which the speakers are engaged.
Through transidiomatic practices, diasporic and local groups alike recombine their
identities by maintaining simultaneous presence in a multiplicity of sites and by partici-
pating in elective networks spread over transnational territories. These recombinant
identities are based on multi-presence, multilingualism, and decentered political/social
engagements.
While individual creativity must be acknowledged in this process of recombination,
I do not want to idealize the agency (both social and communicative) of most people
involved in transidiomatic practices. These practices are still inserted into a global indexi-
cal order which assign superior values to certain systems of communication at the ex-
penses of others. The fact that most aspiring musicians feel now compelled to have a
presence on MySpace, that managers will soon have to endure interminable videotele-
conferencing with long-distant bosses, or that the lack of knowledge on how to compose
a proper e-mail message could restrict people’s work opportunities (Shipley and
Schwalbe 2007) are all indications that communicative inequalities will continue to shape
power relations in the age of globalization. On the linguistic level, we will still encounter
a stratified, layered ideology of what to consider a legitimate communicative code; and
this legitimacy will be in the hands of the mobile sovereignty discussed above, which is
already increasingly preoccupied in assessing what kind of transidiomatic practices are
welcomed (such as those of Indian phone operators forced to speak the local English of
the area they serve) and what are considered “broken English” or gibberish.
An area of particular sociolinguistic interest for the study of transidiomatic practices

resides in tracing the transnational flow of particular discourse markers from one com-
municative environment to another. Elsewhere (Jacquemet 2005), I called such discourse
markers transidiomatic floaters. In that article, I traced the drift of the transidiomatic
floater don’t worry over multiple nation-states: from its English context to Italian adver-
tising language (where it was manipulated into representing a testimonial for a website
called “Don Uorri,” who had the typical features of a Mafia Don), then to an Italian
telenovela (where Don Uorri was in charge of the romantic troubles of Albania immi-
grants in Italy). Later, in partly thanks to the broadcast of this Italian show in Albania,
it jumped the Adriatic sea to be used in interactions between Albanians and foreigners
(drivers who lost the way, restaurateurs dealing with hungry pleas during a black out,
or local staff of international NGOs responding to the distressed calls of their supervi-
sors). In little more than five years, don’t worry/don uorri came to play a major role in
the inter-cultural repertoire of Albanian stranger-handlers. More recently, this floater
seems to have reached St. Petersburg, where it is colloquially used in the expression
“dont vori bi v kepi” (“don’t worry, wear a kepi” ⫺ a word play with the refrain don’t
worry, be happy, pointing to the penetrating power of American pop music and the
pervasive influence of Bobby McFerrin’s rather annoying vocalizations into Eastern
Europe) (Anna Yatsenko 2007, personal communication at Reed College).
The world is traversed by such floaters: Pennycook (2003) analysis of the expression
by the way as used in English-Japanese rap points to the symbolic efficacy of such terms
for Japanese rappers (and it would be interesting to compare it to the use of the online
expression btw, which has also drifted into a multiplicity of discourse contexts). Similarly,
Aravamudan’s (2006) discussion of the uptake of the term karma by Westerners (espe-
cially by practitioners of Eastern philosophy, such as the Beatles studying transcendental
mediation) could be considered another transidiomatic floater now enjoying world
wide recognition.
The transidiomatic practices and floaters of both global elites and local/transnational
semiotic workers represent a new, moving frontier in class, language, and power rela-
tions, and as such, they have a significant impact not only on the everyday life of these
mobile agents but also in the lives of people with whom these mobile people interact,
both near to them and in the deterritorialized environments of late-modern economy.
These practices, especially the floaters, found themselves at the frontline of contempo-
rary capitalism’s deterritorialized advance, on the cutting edge of the creation of new
ways of speaking and communicating. They are instances of how new discourses and
modes of representation are reterritorialized within the local environment, and as such
must be taken into account in any assessment of the impact of transnational spaces
on languages.
6. Conclusions
In this article I have argued that our notion of transnational space must be expanded to
take into account the emerging communicative geographies of the twenty-first century:
international call centers, online social networking, multilingual chat rooms, videocon-
ferencing, or Web 2.0 cellular telephones are all communicative environments which are
poorly understood. As such, they deserve our full attention.
A serious investigation of these communicative environments will necessarily prob-

lematize our taken-for-granted, common-sense knowledge of what is a “language”
(Jacquemet 2005). It is now time to examine communicative practices based on disor-
derly recombinations and language mixings until now ordinarily overlooked. We should
rethink the concept of communication itself, no longer embedded in national languages
and international codes, but in the multiple transidiomatic practices of transnational
flows. This will allow our imagination of linguistic exchanges to take shape within the
discourse of local cultural becoming, social mutations, and global identities.
This linguistic shift in turn entails a reconceptualization of what constitutes a “place.”
People’s relationships to places are primarily interactional: the sense of being in a place
is created through the interaction between the physical setting and the person experienc-
ing it. We know that spatial perception is intrinsically tied to language, the primary tool
shaping our understanding of space (Hanks 1990; Basso 1996; Gumperz and Levinson
1996). Transidiomatic practices, as much as any single territorialized language, alter
perception of such constructs as “home”, “local community” or “public place”. Places
are no longer defined in terms of scale and size, but instead in terms of interconnections
and networks. Places become interactional hubs, charged with the linguistic organization
of social and cultural flows in the context of global capitalism (Castells 2007).
The synchronic, granular and multimodal characters of transidiomatic practices
allow people to experience places no longer confined in local territories but rather con-
structed from the wider flows and circuits of contemporary transnational mediascapes.
While transidiomatic practices will have necessarily lost some of the basic communicative
characteristics we associate with locality and rootedness, they nevertheless force us to
focus our attention on the communicative role of transnational networks ⫺ and in par-
ticular on the role of these practices in connecting multiple transnational nodes in the
discontinuous space of late modernity.
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Marco Jacquemet, San Francisco (USA)

II. Linguistic approaches to space
5. Language and space: The neogrammarian tradition

1. The neogrammarians
2. The neogrammarians and their approach to contemporary dialects
3. Idiolect, dialects and languages
4. A neogrammarian program for dialect description
5. The Ortsgrammatik tradition
6. Sound change and messy dichotomies
7. References
1. The neogrammarians
Neogrammarian (a misleading translation of the German term, Junggrammatiker ‘young

grammarian’) was the name adopted by a dynamic group of brilliant philologists and
linguists originally based in Leipzig in the 1870s. The original group included Karl Brug-
mann, 1849⫺1919; Berthold Delbrück, 1842⫺1922; August Leskien, 1840⫺1916; Her-
mann Osthoff, 1847⫺1909; and later, Wilhelm Braune, 1850⫺1926; Hermann Paul,
1846⫺1921; and Eduard Sievers, 1850⫺1926, among others (see Jankowsky 1972 for an
overview). The neogrammarians were the dominant force in linguistic science for over
four decades until the ascendancy of various forms of linguistic structuralism, particu-
larly following the publication of Saussure (1916). Although the neogrammarians are
probably now best known for their claim that sound change is governed by laws that
admit no exception (Osthoff and Brugmann 1878: xiii) ⫺ a heuristic that still plays an
important role in the historical comparative reconstruction of languages and language
families ⫺ their enduring contributions are also found in the many historical grammars
of the earlier stages of the Indo-European languages that they produced, many of which
are still in use in revised editions (for example, Braune’s [1880] Gotische Grammatik,
twentieth edition published in 2004), and in the numerous detailed dialect grammars
that have been written under a neogrammarian rubric.
Anyone writing about the neogrammarians must pause and reflect on Lehmann’s
(1967: 257) warning that “students will derive greater profit by reading the outstanding
works of the neogrammarians and their predecessors than by reading about them.”
There are many factors leading to Lehmann’s comment, and the issues are complex. We
can only note here that the neogrammarians did not form some rigid scholarly monolith,
but rather formed a relatively loose collection of scholars who did not necessarily agree
on all points, and whose ideas and perspectives did not remain stagnant but rather
evolved over decades of scholarship (see Putschke 1969: 20). We are also faced with the
legacy of a polemical exchange ⫺ sometimes devoid of any intellectual rigor ⫺ in which
rival scholars could be criticized not only for things they had never claimed, but even
for things they opposed. It is only in such an atmosphere that a linguist publishing an
attack on the neogrammarians in the journal Language could state: “It is true that sev-
5. The neogrammarian tradition 71
eral [most? ⫺ see Jankowsky 1972: 234, RWM] of the opinions here attributed to the
neogrammarians have never been openly asserted by them, and have even been some-
times strongly denied” (Bonfante 1947: 377, note 23).
In an attempt to provide a well-grounded coherent overview, the present Handbook
entry draws directly on the work of a few neogrammarian scholars in discussing the
theoretical backdrop for the neogrammarian approach to the study of dialects in time
and space: particularly Paul ([1886] 1920), a codification of the neogrammarian ap-
proach that includes extensive discussion of language change and dialects, and Sievers
([1876] 1901), which lays the foundations for the science of phonetics and provides the
basis for the detailed dialect studies of the period.
2. The neogrammarians and their approach to contemporary

dialects
In spite of earlier claims to the contrary, evolution, not revolution seems to be the appro-
priate characterization of both the rise and fall of the neogrammarians (see Koerner
1981). The early period is best viewed as an attempt to formalize and give methodologi-
cal rigor to the best practices of the period (Putschke 1969: 21). Indeed, even one of the
neogrammarians’ own contemporaries and one of their most outspoken critics, Hugo
Schuchardt, argued that there was nothing new in the neogrammarian approach. In his
view, “the exceptionless operation of the sound laws is the only proposition the so-called
neogrammarian school can consider to be its very own” (1885 [1972]: 41), but, according
to Schuchardt, the proposition is false. With waning influence at the end of their period,
it is often stated that structuralism ⫺ beginning with Saussure and developed in various
streams such as the Prague School, American Structuralism, etc. ⫺ represented a dra-
matic shift away from neogrammarian theory. In fact, however, the foundations for
structuralism are explicitly evident in works such as Paul (1920) and, especially, Sievers
1901 (see Putschke 1969: 20), as well as in the dialect descriptions, particularly in seminal
works such as Winteler (1876) and Heusler (1888). In addition, of course, many neo-
grammarian positions were also accepted by the structuralists, for example, the insistence
on the study of spoken language.
In one respect, however, it is fair to say that the neogrammarian approach did repre-
sent a dramatic departure from most past practice; namely, in the importance that was
placed on the study of contemporary spoken dialects. In the German-speaking world
from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, linguistic discussion tended to focus
on the development of a standard language, a Schriftsprache, and in this discussion
dialects played, at best, a marginal role (Knoop 1982). Although the production of dia-
lect dictionaries was a common activity during this period ⫺ and even as early as 1680
Leibniz argued that a developing standard language could be enriched through the incor-
poration of vocabulary from the dialects (see Schirmunski 1962: 57) ⫺ dialects generally
came to be denigrated and even conceived of as degenerate forms of an idealized stan-
dard language.
With the publication of the first edition of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819)
came the foundations of historical linguistics and the basis for a historical understanding
of dialects, but Grimm’s grammar was primarily a work of philology that did not draw
72 II. Linguistic approaches to space
on an investigation of the contemporary spoken dialects. At first independently of

Grimm, and then strongly influenced by him, Schmeller (1821) produced the first dialect
study on a historical linguistic foundation, Die Mundarten Bayerns grammatisch darge-
stellt. However, in general, work during this period ignored the contemporary dialects
and remained primarily philological and historical (with some notable exceptions, such
as Weinhold 1853; Regel 1868; see Schirmunski 1962: 56⫺62 for an overview).
Old ideas die hard, and the conceptualization of language evolution that underlay
much of the early nineteenth century research carried out by pre-neogrammarian philol-
ogists and Indo-Europeanists did nothing to favor the study of contemporary dialects.
Schleicher (1871), for example, assumed two stages in the “life of a language:” in the
pre-historic period there is language “development” and “growth,” whereas in the his-
toric period there are only “declines both in sound and in form” (⫽ Lehmann 1967: 91)
Such a view could only contribute to the scholarly neglect of the contemporary spoken
dialects, especially since one of the primary goals of the period was the reconstruction
of Proto-Indo-European. Given that the contemporary dialects were considered the pro-
duct of a very long period of decline, it was assumed that their study could shed little
light on Proto-Indo-European.
The neogrammarians reacted very strongly against this aspect of earlier work, which
lacked an adequate phonetic foundation and in the worst cases tended toward a kind of
Buchstabenschieberei or arbitrary paper phonology. In their neogrammarian “mani-
festo,” Osthoff and Brugmann (1878: iii) complained: “Languages were intensively inves-
tigated, but there was much too little investigation of the speaker” (⫽ Lehmann 1967:
198). Sweet (1888: xi), somewhat acerbically and perhaps not entirely objectively, de-
scribes in the preface to his History of English Sounds how he welcomed the “neo-philo-
logical” (that is, the neogrammarian) reformers, especially Paul and Sievers: “We set our
faces against the ‘woodenness’ which then characterized German philology: its contempt
for phonetics and living speech and reverence for the dead letter, its one-sidedly historical
spirit, and disregard of analogy.”
It is not surprising then that the pendulum swung wide, and the neogrammarians
took precisely the opposite tack: the contemporary spoken dialects ⫺ and that of course
at the time meant spoken, spontaneous language as opposed to standard or obsolescent
languages ⫺ were elevated to the primary object of linguistic study. The commonsense
logic behind this position is again laid out in Osthoff and Brugmann’s neogrammarian
“manifesto” (see Lehmann 1976: 200⫺203): since the same physiological and psychologi-
cal factors involved in language are at work in the present as in the past (the “uniformi-
tarian principle,” Labov 1994: 21⫺23), the linguist’s skills should be honed first on lan-
guages that are directly accessible (that is, contemporary spoken dialects), and only then
directed toward the understanding and reconstruction of obsolescent languages. The
neogrammarian position is taken to its logical conclusion in Sievers’ (1901: 6) sage ad-
vice ⫺ still valid for present-day students of phonetics and phonology: “The linguist’s
own dialect, spoken since childhood, should be the starting point of all phonetic investi-
gations […]. Only once all the phonetic phenomena of the native dialect are clearly
understood should the linguist gradually move on to the investigation of more distant
dialects and languages” (similarly, Paul 1920: 30).
3. Idiolects, dialects and languages

Paul ([1880] 1920) serves as the classic neogrammarian “textbook,” which ⫺ in spite of
its dense and sometimes opaque style ⫺ directly influenced generations of linguists. The
fourth edition represents a mature rendering of the neogrammarian perspective informed
by over three decades of vigorous scholarship and debate; see, for example, various
references indicating the impact of non-neogrammarians, such as Hugo Schuchardt on
“language mixture” (1920: 390) and the inadequacy of “tree theory” (1920: 43), and
Mikołaj Kruszewski on sound laws (1920: 49). The neogrammarian perspective contin-
ued to be perpetuated in subsequent works such as Saussure (1916) and another classic
textbook, Bloomfield (1933), both of which in their historical components did not devi-
ate significantly from Paul. Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), which remains a valu-
able, if somewhat uncharitable, historiographically-based discussion of Paul’s approach
to language change and dialectology, argues that some of the most fundamental difficul-
ties of modern linguistics can be traced back to Paul’s views (for general background on
Paul, see Neumann 1996).
In an approach not dissimilar to Chomsky’s (1986) distinction between E (external-
ized) and I (internalized) language, Paul considers terms such as dialect, language and
language family to be entirely artificial and arbitrary constructs of “descriptive gram-
mar,” which has the goal of describing the grammatical forms and conditions of use in
a linguistic community at a given point in time. Since descriptive grammar does not deal
with facts, but only with abstractions derived from observable facts, and since there are
no causal connections between abstractions, but only between real objects and facts,
descriptive grammar is far removed from a scientific investigation of language (1920: 24).
For Paul it is the individual speaker’s mental and physical activities involved in the
production and comprehension of language that constitute the true subject matter of
linguistic science, so the language of an individual speaker ⫺ the idiolect ⫺ constitutes
the only real and legitimate object of linguistic investigation (1920: 24). This position
leads to an interesting consequence, which, as observed by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog
(1968: 104), Paul embraces: “Since the individual psyche is seen as the locus of the
associations and connections between language components, we realize why Paul isolates
the individual as the primary carrier of a language, and brings the argument to its logical
conclusion by asserting that ‘we must distinguish as many languages as there are individ-
uals’.” Given this fundamental precept, Paul poses and attempts to answer some of the
critical questions of the period relating to language change and dialects.
3.1. Why do languages change over time?
For Paul, an individual’s linguistic capacity is the product of a highly complex mental
object (Gebilde) operating at a subconscious level, which consists of numerous intercon-
nected groups of images or representations (Vorstellungsgruppen) (1920: 25). This object,
which Paul considers a psychological “organism,” can be viewed ⫺ perhaps somewhat
anachronistically ⫺ as a mental grammar (see Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 105).
It is self evident for Paul that the representations of the mental grammar are in a con-
stant state of change, since they are a kind of subconscious reflection of the speaker’s
own activities and what he or she is exposed to. With lack of reinforcement, established
representations weaken and even disappear, while new or altered representations are
constantly arising through “every act of speaking, hearing, or thinking” (1920: 27), and,
consequently, the associations among representations (or networks) are constantly
shifting.
Accordingly, the fact of “language” change is viewed as an inevitable consequence of
the ever-changing nature of the idiolects that constitute language. (The individual’s lan-
guage organism or grammar is the true carrier of change, and it is entirely misleading to
speak of language change.) What really changes is the individual’s internalized grammar,
although these changes may be reflected in the common language usage (Sprachusus) ⫺
an abstraction, which can be considered a kind of average deriving from a set of individ-
ual grammars ⫺ of a particular linguistic community (1920: 29).
One of Paul’s primary concerns is to provide an explanation of regular (gradual)
sound change. For Paul, a speaker’s production of a language sound depends on an
idealized sound image or representation (Lautbild ), an abstract mental target that is
formed on the basis of what the speaker both produces and hears. However, just as an
archer who is shooting arrows can miss the mark, a speaker does not precisely hit the
sound image target with every utterance, and Paul sees endless, random variation of
production around this ideal target, which, due primarily to the balancing influence of
verbal communication with other speakers of the same community (Verkehr, linguistic
“intercourse”), takes place within relatively narrow limits. Paul argues that even though
the variation occurs at a subconscious level, speakers have the ability to unconsciously
modify sound images over time based on what they hear and produce (1920: 55), so
sound change takes place without any awareness on the part of the speakers.
In this regard, Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968: 125) would seem to overstate
their case when they make reference to “the neogrammarian descriptivist conception of
a homogeneous system as the sole legitimate object of analysis.” Beyond Paul’s assump-
tion of significant idiolectal variation (which Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 104⫺
119 themselves discuss), Sievers (1901: 272⫺273), for example, observes language specific
differences in phonological variation; for example, k and x may be simple distributional
variants in one language but contrastive in another. Noting that some “languages in-
discriminately mix up phones that come across as entirely different to a more keen
listener”, Sievers states the importance of taking such language specific factors into con-
sideration when judging whether a particular sound change is completely regular or not.
In addition, Sievers explicitly discusses the synchronic layering (coexistence) of old and
new phonological material in idiolects that can result from sound change (1901: 268).
He also sees no necessity of a preferred variant winning out, and even assumes that the
gradual transition of a sound in a certain direction can be reversed (see Haas 1999: 131
for discussion of precisely such a case in Swiss German). At the same time, though, it is
true ⫺ as Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) discuss ⫺ that in Paul’s (and Sievers’)
conception idiolectal variation is not encoded in any way; for example, in terms of social
factors (see section 3.3 below).
3.2. How do dialects diverge and ultimately split?

Given the intense research in the latter part of the nineteenth century on the history of
the Indo-European languages and their development from a common source, the factors
leading to dialect ⫺ and ultimately language ⫺ split were of great interest. As expected
from the neogrammarian perspective, for Paul the determination of dialects and their
differentiation is based entirely on phonological factors. The direct transfer of other
language properties among speakers, such as lexical or syntactic, can occur without
difficulty, whereas in the case of phonology, sound material is never passed on exactly
as it is received, so ultimately a much stronger differentiation can arise (1920: 47).
Here Paul argues that his idiolectal perspective makes dialectal divergence another
inevitable fact. “The endless variation of language as a whole and the incessant develop-
ment of dialectal differences necessarily follow from the simple consideration of the
endless variation and unique formation of each individual organism” (1920: 28). In fact,
for Paul the question is turned on its head: the puzzle now is not why do dialects split,
but rather why don’t individual idiolects drift away from each other to such a degree
that extreme fragmentation results (1920: 39⫺40).
The crucial balancing factor here is the verbal communication of linguistic inter-
course, a very important factor for Paul since it is only within this context that an
individual generates language (1920: 39). Paul compares the situation to the birth and
biological development of an individual animal. By far the most important factor is the
genetic inheritance stemming from the parents and, secondarily, the chance effects of
things such as food, way of life, etc. Similarly, an individual is subject to the influences
of his or her primary companions, whose idiolects serve as the “parents” of the particular
individual’s idiolect. As individuals in verbal communication adapt their idiolects to one
another, a certain leveling and compromise effect occurs, and no idiolect will ever radi-
cally differ from the given common language usage (Sprachusus) (1920: 38⫺48). Interest-
ingly, in a somewhat controversial position at the time, Paul is explicit that a standard
language ⫺ conceived of as an abstraction constituted of an ideal norm ⫺ can never
arise naturally through such a leveling process: dialects are “sacrificed” to a standard
language, which is, in fact, a “foreign idiom” (1920: 404). Paul also accepts what seems
to be a necessary consequence of his premises; namely, that sound change is actually
favored in isolated communities, since the compromising effects of leveling brought
about by the broader linguistic intercourse found within a larger community is absent
(1920: 60). Paul’s view here is precisely the opposite of most subsequent approaches
(although see Andersen 1988: 70 for an apparently similar notion), even neogrammarian-
based ones such as the Vienna School (see section 5 below).
Again, Paul emphasizes the view that within any linguistic community there are as
many dialects as there are individuals, so “dialect split means nothing more than the
increase of individual differences beyond a certain degree” (1920: 38). At the same time,
the sum effect of the individual changes ⫺ tempered by verbal communication ⫺ is
manifested in changes in the general pattern of common language usage over time, and,
depending on the degree of linguistic intercourse within and among groups of individ-
uals, the language usage may change in different directions within different linguistic
communities. However, complete absence of linguistic intercourse is not a necessary pre-
requisite for dialect split ⫺ although such absence can lead to stronger differentiation ⫺
and Paul discusses cases such as German, where, even though a dialect continuum is
involved, mutual comprehensibility between idiolects at two given points can be lost
(1920: 40⫺42). In this regard, he refers to the “shading off” (Abstufung) of sound
changes over geographical distance being one important factor, with the High German
shift being a classic example, and Georg Wenker’s Sprachatlas providing many more
examples of the “extraordinary multiplicity” of the shading off effects (1920: 45).
It follows from Paul’s view that a clean separation of dialects and languages into
groups and subgroups is never feasible. Accordingly, a genealogical tree or table might
be useful for pedagogical purposes, but it cannot be considered an accurate reflection of
reality. With a nod to wave theory, Paul notes that a sound change can spread through
a linguistic area even after significant dialectal differentiation has taken place; for exam-
ple, the case of open syllable lengthening of Middle High German forms such as lĕsen
‘read’, gĕben ‘give’, etc. in the Low and Middle German dialects. Accordingly, he warns
against a simplistic assumption that would correlate the age of a sound change with
greater geographic spread (1920: 42⫺43).
3.3. How do sound changes spread through a linguistic community?
With a nod to Schuchardt, Paul states that “of all the questions that modern linguistics
has to deal with none is more important than language mixture,” that is, the interaction
of idiolects in contact (1920: 390). Especially from Paul’s perspective, one of the most
difficult questions is to explain how an entire set of idiolects in linguistic intercourse can
share a particular sound change (where we restrict our attention here to regular, gradual
sound changes such as the voicing of intervocalic consonants, cluster assimilation, etc.).
Paul’s theory is based on a consideration of both idiolect-internal and external factors.
The internal factors involve a kind of markedness or preference theory, which Paul
does not develop in any detail (1920: 32⫺33; see also Sievers 1901: 269). However, he
clearly envisions an interpretation in which some particular sounds, sound sequences,
etc. are more preferred or favored (bequemer “more convenient”) over others, where the
primary basis for the preference is physiological; for example, an assimilated sequence
atta is preferred over unassimilated akta. Such changes occur in tiny increments below
the speaker’s threshold of awareness, and over time, both the sound image and the
variants around the mental target move in tandem.
The external factors involve linguistic intercourse and the propensity of speakers to
adapt their speech to the speech of those they interact with. Of course, there is no
necessity for speakers to spontaneously adjust their sound image in accordance with a
particular preference, but given that some speakers have shifted their mental sound im-
age (and their output in terms of the corresponding variants), other speakers can begin
adjusting their sound images simply on the basis of exposure to the new variants.
We would seem, then, to have the seeds of a rather straightforward theory of the
spread of sound change through a linguistic community involving both innovation and
adoption. The innovators spontaneously adjust their sound image (and the correspond-
ing variants) in some preferred direction, while the adopters modify their sound image
and variants due simply to exposure to the variants produced by the innovators. It is,
however, a big leap from these basic assumptions to an account of regular sound change;
that is, the explanation of how entire sets of idiolect speakers can shift their sound
images in tandem, particularly given that regular sound changes typically carry on
over generations.
Part of Paul’s answer lies in child language acquisition, although in fact he seems to
be somewhat divided on the role of acquisition in sound change. On the one hand, he
makes no qualitative distinction between child language acquisition and the adult stage,
which he considers more stable, but still subject to change (1920: 27). Similarly, Sievers
(1901: 267) explicitly attributes no special role to child language acquisition in language
change, stating that it is likely immaterial whether an innovation begins in a particular
generation or in the transmission from one generation to the next. On the other hand,
Paul clearly views the language acquisition stage as a period of robust change and the
primary locus for the explanation of changes (1920: 34, 62⫺63). Regardless, language
acquisition takes on special importance in Paul’s theory in explaining how a sound
change can ultimately take hold in an entire set of idiolects. For even if there is a minor-
ity of potential adopters who do not adjust their sound images in accordance with the
majority, Paul assumes that the new generation will conform to the majority and the
minority will simply die out.
However, even with language acquisition added to the mix Paul still faces a decep-
tively simple question; namely, how does the majority develop in the first place? In fact,
Paul finds himself in a kind of catch-22. On the one hand, he assumes that a critical
mass within a dialectal group must be attained before adopters will begin to shift their
sound images to conform to the shifted variants they are exposed to (although he is
clear that it is not simply the number of speakers they are exposed to but the frequency
of exposure that is crucial for the adopters). On the other hand, the innovators ⫺ in
principle, every speaker within the given set of idiolects ⫺ are free to proceed along a
variety of pathways, and the possibility of creating a critical mass seems remote. Here
one might expect Paul to argue that a gradual shifting of a sound image might take hold
spontaneously within a large subset of the idiolectal grouping precisely because it is
preferred. Paul recognizes, however, that there is no possibility of explaining the develop-
ment of a majority in this way, in part because there are simply too many conflicting
preferences. He gives the example of a, which, in principle, can begin shifting in the
direction of either i or u. In the end, Paul’s answer to the question is not particularly
reassuring ⫺ he simply invokes chance: “In an area of especially intensive linguistic
intercourse, it is easy for a particular tendency to become dominate simply through the
play of chance” (1920: 61). In this case, Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968: 112) are
justifiably critical in stating that “chance is here invoked illegitimately, since we are out
to explain a specific, not random process.”
Paul seems aware of the weaknesses of his approach and mentions two other relevant
factors, although without extensive elaboration. First, he refers to the possibility that
different motivations among speakers can lead to the same output (a theme taken up
again in Evolutionary Phonology, Blevins 2004: 269): “the causes that push in a particu-
lar direction can be completely different for each individual” (1920: 61). Second, he
realizes that his interpretation requires some further invisible hand mechanism, and here
we find an incipiently structuralist approach. All languages have a certain harmony in
their sound systems (Harmonie des Lautsystems) in which the movement of one sound
in a particular direction can have impact on the other sounds in the system. Paul derives
the systemic pressures from Sievers’ notion that every dialect has a particular neutral
position (Indifferenzlage) of the speech organs (1920: 57). Regardless, in the end it is a
fact that Paul cannot explain the spread of a sound change through a particular idiolec-
tal grouping, and we must concur with Auer’s (2006) somewhat ironic conclusion;
namely, although Paul “believes that variability is genuine and systematic, both in the
individual and in the social group (1920: 55), and although he acknowledges the fact
that it is through interaction between speakers that the language of an individual is
‘generated’ (1920: 37), his theory remains (psycho-)mechanistic and non-social.”
The non-social bias is also reflected in Paul’s somewhat counterintuitive insistence

that sound change cannot spread from an individual. In fact, it is not difficult to misread
Paul on this point, and that is precisely what one of Paul’s colleagues, William Wundt,
apparently did when he refers to “the view, especially emphasized by H. Paul, that in
language something can only become usual that was originally individual, that is, it
comes from the individual.” Quoting the passage, Paul (1920: 62, note 1) is angrily
indignant at this (allegedly intentional) misrepresentation of his ideas, and vehemently
denies the possibility of interpreting his views in this way. However, Paul’s opposition is
not a necessary consequence of his premises, and he does not give substantive reasons
for rejecting this view. Sievers (1901: 367), for example, specifically states that a single
individual can be the source of a sound change. In fact, Wundt’s statement seems only
to be a kind of common sense consequence of Paul’s premises, which, interestingly,
would put Paul in the same camp as one of the most renowned opponents of the neo-
grammarians, Hugo Schuchardt (see section 6 below). In this regard, Weinreich, Labov
and Herzog (1968: 106) would again seem to overstate their case when they see “the
creation of an irreconcilable opposition between the individual and society” in Paul’s
conception. Indeed, although Paul himself did not conceptualize sound change in terms
of social factors, this item was certainly on the neogrammarian research agenda (see
next section).
4. A neogrammarian program or dialect description
A neogrammarian program for dialect study is explicitly laid out in Wegener [1880] 1976
(“On German dialect research”), a funding and research proposal approved by Wilhelm
Braune, Hermann Paul, Eduard Sievers and Jost Winteler. The primary goal of the
document was to lobby the scholarly community in support of funding and resources
from the Reichkanzler to carry out dialectology projects. As a proposal to secure govern-
ment funding, it contains some masterful strokes justifying societal need. There is a sense
of urgency based on the concern ⫺ intuitively plausible at the time but, as it turns out,
exaggerated ⫺ that the German dialects were on the verge of extinction under the influ-
ence of the standard language (1976: 14). Accordingly, as a cultural legacy comparable
to the marble pillars of Italy and the statues of ancient Greece, it was of the utmost
importance to rescue the dialect information ⫺ the building blocks of the standard lan-
guage ⫺ from oblivion, and in the process make a vital contribution to German unity
(1976: 29). The funding and infrastructure requirements are clearly identified, including:
the establishment of a government department on dialect study, the funding of dialect
questionnaires to be administered by civil servants, the establishment of a German dia-
lect library and publication subsidies (1976: 27⫺28). On this last point, it is surprising
to note that Wegener’s call still resonates into the present, as important dialect disserta-
tions, such as Bidner (1939), remain available even today in only limited copies of the
original ⫺ impenetrably handwritten ⫺ manuscript.
Wegener emphasizes the fact that the field of dialectology is still in its infancy, and
that the generally negative perception of dialects and their study can only be overcome
through a more scientific approach ⫺ that is, one that embraces the methodology of
historical linguistics (1976: 3). In keeping with Paul’s treatment of the idiolect, broad
overviews of dialect regions are rejected in favor of detailed descriptions (grammars) of

individual dialects, which are viewed as a necessary prerequisite to subsequent broader
synthetic and comparative treatments. Also, as expected, there is a strong emphasis on
phonetics à la Sievers, and ⫺ particularly because of the requirement of an extremely
detailed phonetic analysis ⫺ ideally the grammars should be written by a native speaker
of the particular dialect based on self-analysis and fieldwork (1976: 26). These grammars
came to be known as Ortsgrammatiken (village or local grammars, see section 5 below),
and the already published Winteler (1876) served as a role model.
Throughout the proposal, various theses describe the goals and structure of the Orts-
grammatik. The synchronic section is to provide a precise phonetic description of the
particular dialect, including its segments, suprasegmentals, and what can be called
phrasal or sentence phonology, including sandhi phenomena (1976: 12). The diachronic
component describes the sound changes in the dialect starting with the “old German”
stage, typically Middle High German but sometimes Old High German. Precise sound
laws are to be provided that take into careful consideration the prosodic environment,
for example, stressed versus unstressed syllable. All exceptions to the proposed sound
laws are to be explicitly listed and categorized according to the interfering factor; for
example, analogy within the dialect, borrowing from the standard language or a neigh-
boring dialect, etc. (1976: 8). In the time honored tradition of Jacob Grimm, if factors
behind an exception cannot be identified, it should be listed as unexplained. Given the
role of paradigms in analogical leveling, there is also an emphasis on morphological
description, and although phonetics and morphology are clearly the focus, there is ac-
knowledgment of the importance of syntax and semantics. Wegener also makes a distinc-
tion between what later became known as the direct and indirect method of dialect
investigation. Due to the sophisticated phonetic analysis required, the direct method
(involving fieldwork, again ideally carried out by a native speaker) is appropriate, but
for practical reasons the indirect method (that is, the elicitation of data by means of
questionnaires) is a reasonable approach to morphology, syntax and semantics (1976:
27).
Although the neogrammarians are often criticized for not considering the role of
social factors in language description and change, Wegener touches on issues of linguistic
variation due to age as well as gender factors. Social status is clearly conceived of as the
prime external factor in dialect change and, indeed, Wegener could not be more explicit
about its importance: “the question of language is essentially a question of social power”
(1976: 16). Wegener conceptualizes the operation of social factors in terms of three con-
centric circles (1976: 15). The middle point is the dialect of the educated city elite (essen-
tially a variant of the standard language), next is the dialect of the relatively uneducated
city person, and then comes an outside circle consisting of the rural dialect (Bauern-
sprache). For Wegener movement is inexorably unidirectional toward the centre; in other
words, the peripheral dialects will ultimately assimilate to the standard. Wegener pro-
motes the view that such concentric circles should be investigated within dialectology,
where “self-evidently” the starting point should be the rural dialect. As it is most isolated
from the social effects of interaction with the standard language or the language of the
urban centre, the rural dialect will best show the effects of the regular sound laws ⫺
tempered only by internal analogy ⫺ with very little dialect mixture.
5. The Ortsgrammatik tradition

Developed in the spirit of Wegener 1880, the Ortsgrammatik tradition has stood the test
of time, producing a wealth of dialect material beginning with early classics such as
Winteler (1876), Holthausen (1886), Heusler (1888), Schatz (1897) and Lessiak (1903).
The general traits of the grammars are in remarkable conformance with Wegener’s pro-
posal (see section 4 above). In the interests of avoiding issues of dialect mixture and
observing the pure operation of sound laws and internal analogy, each grammar typically
constitutes an in-depth description of one locality, or small geographical area considered
to be relatively homogeneous. In keeping with the neogrammarian precept of detailed
phonetic description, the grammars are usually written ⫺ often in the form of doctoral
dissertations ⫺ by phonetically well-trained native speakers using a combination of self-
analysis and fieldwork (the direct method). Although most of the grammars have both
a synchronic and diachronic component, they can differ in their relative emphasis. On
this basis, Sonderegger (1968: 12) distinguishes three classic subtypes of neogrammarian
dialect grammars ⫺ synchronic/phonetic (Winteler 1876), synchronic/historical (Heusler
1888) and historical (Kauffmann 1890).
Already Winteler’s seminal Ortsgrammatik leaves no doubt about the death of the
pre-neogrammarian Buchstabenschieberei and the corresponding shift in focus to the
study of living languages, with particular emphasis on phonetics and phonology. Along
with a general introduction to phonetics (17 pages), Winteler provides 66 pages of syn-
chronic description of the dialect’s vowels and consonants, including quantity, along
with 17 pages devoted to internal phonotactic and sandhi phenomena. An additional 53
pages cover the historical description of the sounds in terms of sound laws, and 41 pages
are dedicated to a description of ⫺ primarily inflectional ⫺ morphology. As is typically
the case in the Ortsgrammatik tradition, there is no syntactic or semantic description.
As the science of phonetics was still in its early stages, a symbiotic relationship
evolved between these detailed dialect descriptions and the field of Sieversian phonetics
(Wiesinger 1976). The wealth of phonetic insights in the early works is striking, and the
detailed work forms a necessary precursor to subsequent comparative and typological
research. For example, Heusler’s (1888) investigation of Basel German, with its remark-
ably sophisticated discussion of fortis, lenis, geminate and ambisyllabic consonantal
properties (see especially pp. 29⫺35) and description of the historically complex develop-
ment of stressed syllable quantity (1888: 48⫺50), can still be read today with great ben-
efit.
Although ⫺ as expected ⫺ the search for regular sound laws and the explanation of
exceptions in terms of dialect-internal analogy or dialect mixture is ever present in the
Ortsgrammatiken, it is worth noting that the term sound law here continues to have a
certain ambiguity characteristic of neogrammarian work: it can express either a dia-
chronic formula, x > y, or a synchronic phonotactic constraint (for some discussion, see
Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 115⫺116). For example, Pfalz’s (1913: 9) Law of
Middle Bavarian is a purely synchronic phonotactic statement of prosodically deter-
mined segmental properties: “Following a short vowel or diphthong carrying an abruptly
cut accent, only a fortis consonant can occur. Following a long vowel carrying a
smoothly cut accent, only a lenis consonant can occur.”
The first two and a half decades of the Ortsgrammatik tradition produced detailed
synchronic descriptions of individual dialects on the basis of a sophisticated phonetic
foundation. In this regard, there is no doubt that Wegener’s (1880 [1976]: 4) concern
that “one can never emphasize enough the difference between a letter and the sound”
had been acknowledged and was being systematically dealt with. Further, the grammars
clearly constitute crucial historical records of dialects that ⫺ it was assumed ⫺ were on
the verge of extinction. However, there was still one important ingredient missing in this
descriptive and analytic framework ⫺ actual sound recordings. This situation changed
dramatically at the turn of the twentieth century. The Austrian Academy of Sciences
Phonogrammarchiv, founded in 1899, proudly advertises itself as “the oldest audiovisual
research archive in the world” (<http://www.pha.oeaw.ac.at/>). Other recording centres
were set up around Europe shortly thereafter; for example, at the University of Zurich,
1909, and the Lautabteilung der Preußischen Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, 1920. By 1901, the
Phonogrammarchiv had developed the Wiener Archiv-Phonograph, which used Edison’s
cylinder technique to make recordings on wax discs, initially limited to one to two min-
utes. Although immediately put into use throughout the world, it must be admitted that
the earliest phonographs ⫺ weighing in at 45 kilograms ⫺ were not ideally suited for
fieldwork, especially given the fact that even in Europe as late as the mid twentieth
century the bicycle could serve as the primary mode of transport for the author of an
Ortsgrammatik (see, for example, Kühebacher 1958: ii). Special travel phonographs were
developed, and the last model in 1927 weighed “only” 9.5 kilograms. In spite of the
obvious practical difficulties, the advent of new technologies was put to good use by the
early dialectologists, with the first recording of a German dialect (Bavarian) dating to
February 1901 (Oberösterreich, Attergau). For a brief historical overview, see Wagener
(1988: 164⫺173).
Although admittedly hampered by issues of sound quality, the early recordings of the
Phonogrammarchiv, especially when combined with a detailed Ortsgrammatik, provide
a golden opportunity for the direct study of sound change in real time. For example,
Schatz’s (1897) classic description of the Imst dialect is complemented by two Phono-
gramm recordings, the first a 1904 recording of a worker, the second a 1909 recording
of Schatz himself, who, following the Ortsgrammatik tradition, was a native speaker of
the dialect. Revisiting the Imst dialect 76 years after Schatz’s original description, Hatha-
way (1973) demonstrates the value of the early material in her detailed analysis of the
sound changes that occurred in Imst over the intervening period.
Of the various approaches to dialect study that evolved into the twentieth century, the
Vienna School ⫺ focused primarily on Bavarian ⫺ remained closest to neogrammarian
principles, with a lineage that can be traced from Lessiak (1903), through Pfalz (1913)
and Kranzmayer ([1926] 1981: 1956) to Wiesinger (1970) and beyond. One of the endur-
ing contributions of this School is found in the many Ortsgrammatiken, often written by
students as their doctoral dissertations (for an overview of the first six decades of this
school, see Wiesinger 1976). There have also been impressive attempts to provide
broader German dialect overviews (for example, Kranzmayer 1956; Wiesinger 1970).
It is, however, one of the ironies of the German Ortsgrammatik tradition that the
great wealth of material presented in the individual grammars does not lend itself easily
to comparison and synthesis. In part, this is a natural consequence of the fact that we
are dealing with a body of work that has evolved over decades through the efforts of
many individual contributors. However, it must also be acknowledged that the difficul-
ties in using the grammars for synthesis and comparative work are exacerbated by the
lack of a standard, non-ambiguous transcription system, the absence of systemic, phono-
logical analyses and the tendency to provide theoretically ad hoc ⫺ and sometimes
highly idiosyncratic ⫺ phonological interpretations (on this last point, see, for example,
the mora-counting approach outlined in Wiesinger 1983).
In spite of the difficulties, the Ortsgrammatiken provide enormous potential for de-
tailed work by historical linguists and phonologists, particularly those who are interested
in the study of sound change. Although much seminal analytic work has already been
carried out, there is great need for the individual dialects and their interrelationships to
be studied within broader well-grounded theoretical and typological frameworks. Given
the enormity of data and interpretive difficulties, it is understandable that budding stu-
dents of historical linguistics and phonology might approach the Ortsgrammatiken with
great trepidation, viewing the consolidated works as some impenetrable monolith. In
fact, though, this kind of situation is typical in historical linguistics ⫺ we are simply
dealing with a manifestation of Roger Lass’s (1989: 75) statement, which can be consid-
ered a general law of history: “the closer to the present, the more confused the history
[…] becomes; this is nowhere truer than in phonology.” Lass suggests that the simplicity
of the earlier periods is illusory, a product of the fact that the linguist is “deliciously
unencumbered by hard evidence.” There is no doubt that the Ortsgrammatiken qualify
as hard evidence, but even more impressively ⫺ scratches, flaws and even missing (syn-
tactic) limbs notwithstanding ⫺ they do indeed constitute cultural gems of the first mag-
nitude, as envisioned by Wegener and others more than 100 years ago.
6. Sound change and messy dichotomies

William Labov’s presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America, entitled “Re-
solving the Neogrammarian Controversy” (⫽ Labov 1981; see also Labov 1994: 2001),
reminds us of the recalcitrant nature of the issues that the neogrammarians faced in their
attempt to develop a theory of sound change. Much of Labov’s own work has focused
on some of the dichotomies we have inherited from the neogrammarian period. Sound
change is classified as to whether it is gradual or abrupt, conscious or unconscious,
socially or non-socially driven and whether it applies across-the-board (that is, simulta-
neously to all relevant lexical forms, determined only by phonological environment
alone) or by lexical diffusion (word-by-word). There is no doubt that the assumption of
dichotomies ⫺ even if they are over-idealized or downright false ⫺ can sometimes serve
a useful heuristic function in our initial attempts to understand complex phenomena.
Ultimately, however, artificial dichotomies only serve to obscure, and here it is important
to remind ourselves that these inherited neogrammarian dichotomies are neither empiri-
cally nor theoretically well grounded.
The neogrammarians themselves attempted to distinguish two types of sound change.
As indicated in section 3 above, their primary focus was on gradual, across-the-board
sound change (Lautwandel ), now often simply called neogrammarian change, but they
were also aware, of course, that not all sound changes fit into this category. In addition,
then, they recognized a class of abrupt changes, including, for example, dissimilation,
and they made some attempt to determine non-arbitrary distinguishing properties of the
two types. For example, Sievers (1901: 270) argues that whereas gradual regular change
involves the creation of new phonological material, abrupt change does not but only
involves the redistribution of existing phonological material (an echo of this type of
approach is found in later studies such as Kiparsky 1988). Pursuing a similar type of
dichotomy, Labov (1994: 542⫺543). distinguishes: a) regular sound change or “change
from below,” which involves the gradual transformation of a single phonetic feature of
a phoneme in a continuous phonetic space” (for example, consonant changes in manner
of articulation), and b) lexical diffusion or “change from above,” which is “the result of
the abrupt substitution of one phoneme for another in words that contain that phoneme”
(for example, consonant changes in place or articulation).
In fact, it would seem that all such attempts to simplistically categorize sound changes
into two types are doomed to failure (see Blevins 2004: 268⫺278 for discussion), and
Sievers’ (1901: 272) hedge that it can, of course, be “difficult to clearly determine the
border between abrupt and regular change” takes on a prophetic tone. First, abrupt
changes that are regular and yield new phonological material have been identified (see
discussion, for example, in Blevins 2004: 276). This type of change is not expected ac-
cording to Labov’s neogrammarian-based classification. Indeed, from a strictly neogram-
marian perspective, such changes cannot be categorized at all, because “true” sound
change (that is, regular, law-governed change, Lautwandel ) must be ⫺ by definition ⫺
gradual (Paul 1901: 69). Second, there is also no doubt that gradual, regular change
(neogrammarian change, senso stricto) can proceed by lexical diffusion (see Haas 1999;
Bybee 2002).
An interrelated dichotomy is found in treatments of dialect mixture. It became obvi-
ous to the neogrammarians that the complex phonological histories of dialects at border
areas could not be explained in terms of sound laws alone. The working hypothesis
developed that neogrammarian change (gradual, unconscious, regular and non-social)
operates within a particular linguistic community, whereas in areas of linguistic inter-
course between dialects a kind of borrowing could occur involving sound substitution
(Lautersatz), which ⫺ proceeding by lexical diffusion (Wortverdrängung, “word displace-
ment”) ⫺ is abrupt, conscious and socially driven (prestige). However, it was recognized
very early, especially in the insightful work of Haag (1929⫺1930), that no clean categori-
zation of the two types could be sustained. Haag (also Lessiak 1933: 6⫺7) recognized
that, just like sound substitution, a regular sound change can be borrowed across dialects
and be socially driven (see Seidelmann 1987; Auer 2006 for discussion).
Our neogrammarian inheritance on these matters is clearly a mixed one, and we must
acknowledge that it includes some unwanted baggage, including arbitrary dichotomies,
which at this point in time would only seem to hinder progress. By contrast, it is appro-
priate to acknowledge that the fundamental insights of one of the neogrammarians’ main
contemporary critics, Hugo Schuchardt ⫺ no supporter of the dichotomies discussed in
this section ⫺ have stood the test of time. According to Schuchardt, a sound change
spreads from individual words or groups of words through the lexicon by means of
phonetic analogy. All change, whether gradual or abrupt, involves a certain degree of
(more or less latent) awareness on the part of speaker. “In regard to the manner in
which a sound change is transmitted from individual to individual, from community to
community […] I do not see by any means the exclusive play of unconscious activity”
(Schuchardt 1885 [1972]: 50). The determining factors in the spread of a sound change
within and between linguistic communities are social, and there are no essential differ-
ences between the spread of a change from one idiolect to another or from one dialect
to another (see Vennemann 1972 for a discussion of Schuchardt’s theory). The jury is
still out on the role of child language acquisition in this mixture, and here, as mentioned
above in section 3.3, the neogrammarians themselves were not in agreement. One thing
is for sure though: theories ⫺ neogrammarian, generative, or other ⫺ that ignore socio-
linguistic factors cannot account for the directionality of sound change (drift).
7. Reerences
Andersen, Henning
1988 Center and periphery: Adoption, diffusion, and spread. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical
Dialectology. Regional and Social, 39⫺83. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Auer, Peter
2006 Phonological change. In: Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier and Peter
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6. Language and space: Traditional dialect geography

1. Introduction
2. Adelbert von Keller (1812⫺1885): The initiator of traditional linguistic geography
3. The Marburg School
4. The Württemberg School
5. References
1. Introduction
This article examines the earliest “historical” approaches as they developed within tradi-
tional German dialectology: the Marburg and Württemberg Schools. The emergence of
scholarly dialectology is usually associated with the beginnings of neogrammarian dialec-
tology (cf. Murray in this volume) and with Georg Wenker’s founding of linguistic geo-
graphy. Both of these approaches received important impetuses at the same time. In
1876, Jost Winteler’s neogrammarian monograph, Die Kerenzer Mundart des Kantons
Glarus, which drew inspiration from Eduard Sievers’ Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie
(likewise published in 1876), appeared; in the same year Georg Wenker distributed his
questionnaire among the public school teachers of the Rhineland (see section 3.1). How-
ever, the roots of academic linguistic geography reach back much further than this.
Johann Schmeller is generally acknowledged as the first scholarly dialectologist, but his
studies were not followed up until much later. In contrast, the pioneering work of Adel-
bert von Keller (section 2) who, through his students Georg Wenker and Hermann Fi-
scher, became the initiator of the rapidly developing field of linguistic geography (sec-
tions 3.1, 4.1) ⫺ is generally underrated. The earliest schools of linguistic geography
concentrated exclusively on indirect data collection methods. The criticism of these meth-
ods raised by neogrammarians who oriented to the hard sciences’ ideal of exactitude,
together with direct data collection on the Romance dialects (section 3.2), led to a sys-
tematic supplementing of indirect data with direct data in confined areas (section 4.2).
Wrede, in decided opposition to the neogrammarian account of language change, went
on to develop his “social-linguistic” method, which attempted to discover correlations

between highly localized linguistic differences and historical boundaries and to interpret
linguistic boundaries as a result of old barriers to intercourse (Verkehrsgrenzen). In con-
trast, the representatives of the Württemberg School adopted a more intermediary posi-
tion and remained more closely linked to the neogrammarian tradition.
2. Adelbert von Keller (18121885): The initiator o traditional

dialect geography
In 1833 Adelbert von Keller was appointed Chair of ‘Newer Philology’ at the University
of Tübingen. Keller’s interest in spoken language, above all the empirical investigation
of dialects, reset the focus in language history. He actively advocated the broad-range
collection of dialectal materials, and in 1861 he sent out a Bitte um Mitwirkung zur
Sammlung des schwäbischen Sprachschatzes ‘Request for cooperation in the collection of
the treasures of the Swabian language’, together with extensive instructions, to school
teachers in every village in Württemberg (Keller 1855). “All of the words used in Swabia
that are not found in the written language or only with another meaning, as well as all
[…] words differing in inflection, gender or derivation, […] expressions which occur in
documents, in the proper names of people, places, rivers, in singular idioms” (Keller
1855: 10; translation R. S.) were to be collected. On the basis of these linguistic data,
Keller planned to draft a language map, which portrayed “not just the outward bound-
aries of the region”, but also “the internal dividing lines. […] The separation into larger
groups, like Upper Swabian, Lower Swabian, Highlands, Lowlands, Black Forest and
so forth remain[ed] a task for later determination” (Keller 1855: 21, translation R. S.).
An essay based on Keller’s suggestion was printed and served as a prototype for 400
essays received from 320 Württemberg village schools (Ruoff 1964: 175, 1982: 128; see
Baur 1978, map 5 on the locations). For the German language area, these papers repre-
sent the first collection of primary material from a closed dialect region for the analysis
of phonological, morphological and lexical issues; they were the precursors of the later
regional grammars (section 3.2). Keller’s contribution, Die Mundarten (1884), which re-
sulted from these essays, is the first in a series of geographical dialect descriptions which
appeared in Württemberg’s (later Baden-Württemberg’s) district descriptions from 1876
on.
3. The Marburg School

3.1. Georg Wenker (18521911): The indirect method
Georg Wenker submitted his doctoral thesis in 1876 under the supervision of Adelbert
von Keller on the language-historical topic Verschiebung des Stammsilben-Auslauts im
Germanischen ‘The Shift of the Root Syllable Coda in Germanic’. Wenker was strongly
influenced by Keller’s method of conducting empirical dialectological investigations. Af-
ter an unsuccessful attempt to classify the dialects of the Rhineland on the basis of
printed dialect samples, he turned to the teachers of the Prussian Rhine Province in 1876
with the request that they use the normal alphabet to fill out a questionnaire with 42
sentences which were to be translated into the local dialect. The teachers were provided
with diacritica for only a few vowels which could not be represented by the letters of
the alphabet. Based on the 1,500 responses (out of 2,200 questionnaires distributed)
Georg Wenker wrote a brief paper for the teachers, called Sprachkarte der Rheinprovinz
nördlich der Mosel ‘Language Map of the Rhine Province North of the Moselle’ (Wenker
1877), which featured a division into the dialect formations of Westphalian, Low Franco-
nian, Ripuarian and Moselle-Franconian that remains valid to this day (this was labeled
by Wenker as Westphalian, Low Rhenish, Low Franconian/Northern Central Franco-
nian and Central Franconian; cf. Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear).
In 1877 Wenker sent out a new version of his questionnaire, now with 38 sentences,
to the schools of Westphalia. The same year he was employed by the university library
in Marburg. In 1878 ministries in Berlin approved funding for a questionnaire survey of
all of Prussia. A few months later, a second analysis of the questionnaire was completed;
this took the form of the first linguistic atlas in the world, the Sprach-Atlas der Rhein-
provinz nördlich der Mosel sowie des Kreises Siegen, of which only a single hand-drawn
exemplar with isoglosses in color on preprinted base maps (cf. Schmidt and Herrgen, to
appear) was created. The original is kept at the Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas
in Marburg and has been published via the Internet (<http://www.diwa.info>). Over the
next two years, Wenker distributed the final, forty-sentence questionnaire. By 1881 he
had already published two phonological and four morphological maps as the Sprachatlas
von Nord- und Mitteldeutschland. Auf Grund von systematisch mit Hülfe der Volksschul-
lehrer gesammeltem Material aus circa 30000 Orten. (For more on Wenker’s early work,
see also Knoop, Putschke and Wiegand 1982: 6⫺68; Herrgen 2001: 1520⫺1525 offers a
comprehensive overview of the creation of the Deutscher Sprachatlas).
Work on these six maps made it clear to Wenker that he could not cope with the
mapping of data from approx. 30,000 surveyed locations alongside his occupation as a
librarian. He therefore sought financial support from the Office of the Imperial Chancel-
lor, which he was granted on the condition that the survey be extended to cover the
entire German Empire of that time. Thus, in 1887 and 1888, the 40 sentences were also
sent out across the southern territory (Alsace, Lorraine, Baden, Württemberg and Ba-
varia). Also included in the survey were the German dialects of Luxemburg, Bohemia
and Moravia, the Baltic governorates, Transylvania and the colonies along the Volga.
Switzerland and Austria were later added between 1926 and 1933 under Wenker’s col-
league and eventual successor, Ferdinand Wrede; in 1939 Wrede’s own successor, Walther
Mitzka, added South Tyrol. With that, the entire German-speaking territory of Central
Europe had contributed more than 44,000 sentences translated into dialect (König and
Schrambke 1999: 15). The Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs that this survey resulted in
exists as two full-color manuscripts in which 339 linguistic phenomena are displayed on
1,646 hand-drawn maps. The German-speaking territory is spread across three sheets
(the northwest, the northeast and the southeast) at a scale of 1 : 1,000,000. Unfortunately,
this detailed version of the Deutscher Sprachatlas was never conventionally published; it
is, however, now viewable on the Internet as the Digital Wenker Atlas (DiWA). Wenker’s
successor, Ferdinand Wrede, managed a partial publication, with greatly simplified
maps, under the title of Deutscher Sprachatlas (DSA) which offered an overview of the
distribution of 79 linguistic phenomena. A total of 23 installments were printed between
1927 and 1956. A reduced form of the DSA appeared from 1984 onward as the Kleiner
Deutscher Sprachatlas (KDSA) with maps of the entire DSA phonological geographical
material, but with a significantly reduced number of mapped locations compared to the
original (Veith and Putschke 1984⫺1999). Morphology was not covered by the KDSA.
The first complete publication of the language atlas material was thus the digital version,
DiWA (see above).
3.1.1. The 40 Wenker sentences
The 40 sentences were designed to cover all of phonology and some morphology. Lexical
issues played only a subordinate role; for instance, in sentence 1 (Im Winter fliegen die
trocknen Blätter in der Luft herum ‘In winter the dry leaves fly around in the air’), the
lexeme Winter serves to capture geographical variation in the root vowel in quantitative
and qualitative terms; the lexeme Blätter is phonologically and morphologically interest-
ing. But for some lexemes, Wenker found heteronyms, which cut across his phonological
and morphological questions. This gave rise to lexical maps, e.g., for Pferd ‘horse’ (Map
8), Dienstag ‘Tuesday’ (Map 26) and Wiese ‘meadow’ (Map 41) as an unplanned bypro-
duct.
3.1.2. Criticism o Wenkers data collection method
In lectures and papers, Wenker repeatedly alluded to the “decline” of the dialects (e.g.,
Wenker 1886: 192). Nevertheless, in collecting his data he concentrated not on the older
generation, but instead on the schoolchildren themselves. In his instructions to the teach-
ers, he wrote: “Let a student or some suitable students make the translation; they know
their dialect well enough and will find the work enjoyable. Only where the teacher was
born where his school is located and has complete mastery of the dialect is it advisable
to perform the translation oneself” (quoted in Stroh 1952: 423, translation R. S.). So
Wenker did not rely exclusively on a homogeneous group, neither the schoolchildren
nor the teachers, and thus neglected to control the parameters of age, occupation and
origin by the selection of informants. This was one of the main points of criticism raised
by Wenker’s neogrammarian opponents, especially his chief critic, Otto Bremer, a stu-
dent of Eduard Sievers. In his Kritik von Wenkers Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs
‘Critique of Wenker’s Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs’, Bremer writes:
If a certain region is hovering between two forms of a word, then naturally one teacher will
list one form and another the other form; this is a matter of chance. If the teacher is an
older man or if he has turned to older people as his source, then of course the older linguistic
form will be listed in Wenker’s questionnaire; if he is perhaps younger or has let his pupils
prepare the translation, then the younger linguistic form will certainly be filled out and
Wenker will have to draw a line between the two villages. If, perchance, the two teachers
had swapped roles, the map would have a completely different appearance. The Sprachatlas
offers enough examples of such uncertain lines.
(Bremer 1895: 8, translation R. S., cf. also 7, 11)
Wenker, however, was very aware of the problem of vertical variation. Indeed, he himself
wrote that the “dialects, through blending with one another and with Standard German,
are losing more and more of their purity and naturalness” (quoted from Martin 1934:
9, translation R. S.). Hence, it is also conceivable that Wenker deliberately took advan-
tage of the teachers’ cooperation, assuming that they were familiar with the local base
dialect and would intervene to correct uncertain or incorrect responses by the schoolchil-
dren.
Wenker’s immense research project could only be realized via written data collection.
His full-coverage, phonetically inexact, pupil/teacher competence-based survey thus of-
fers a counterpoint to the single-location, phonetically precise, investigator’s compe-
tence-based village grammars of neogrammarian researchers such as Jost Winteler. Criti-
cism from the ranks of the neogrammarians therefore could not be avoided. Wenker met
these attacks with the counterargument that the potential source of error of “linguistic
variation” (due to the social heterogeneity of the informants) could be corrected by the
sheer number of responses.
3.1.3. Results
The widespread opinion that it was Wenker’s goal to use the maps of the Linguistic
Atlas “to demonstrate the axiom of the exceptionlessness of the sound laws through
living dialects” (Bach 1950: 40; translation R. S.) is no longer valid (cf. Wiegand and
Harras 1971: 11⫺16; Herrgen 2001). The maps have at any rate disproved the neogram-
marian postulate, since they show that “essentially, every single word and every single
word form possesses its own zone of validity, its own boundaries in linguistic space; this
cannot be captured solely through an acceptance of the effect of analogy and the occa-
sional influence of neighboring dialects or written language admitted by the neogram-
marians, if one insists on their understanding of the ‘sound laws’” (Bach 1950: 56⫺57;
emphasis removed, translation R. S.).
The diversity of isoglosses on the very first maps also disproved Wenker’s earlier
hypothesis that “clear dialect boundaries” (Wenker 1886: 189) would emerge from his
materials. This also falsified the theory that the boundaries of dialect and tribe coincide,
as scholars prior to Wenker had postulated and Wenker too had hoped to prove. Wenker
now sought for a new interpretation of dialect boundaries; he no longer saw the atlas as
a research product but rather as a research instrument for the interpretation of linguistic
geographic findings, for which he increasingly drew upon extralinguistic factors: “[The
Sprachatlas] covers our present-day German dialects. Their gradual development into
the current multiplicity is inseparably linked to history, the divisions, displacements,
migrations, settlements and intermingling of the German tribes” (Wenker 1895a: 36⫺37;
translation R. S.).
3.2. Ferdinand Wrede (18631934): Regional (landschatsbasierte)

grammars
From 1887 on, Wenker’s colleague Ferdinand Wrede continued his cartographic work
on the linguistic atlas; as Map 56 of the Deutscher Sprachatlas he included the dialect
classification map he had been continuously developing since 1903, originally for his
lectures on the German dialects.
In 1911 he became Wenker’s successor (for an overview of Wrede’s work on the

atlas project, see Mitzka 1952: 12). The third mapper was Emil Maurmann. Once the
cartographic work was completed, Wrede took over the publication of the Sprachatlas.
Under his leadership and together with his students, the Marburg dialectological school
was formed, the great success of which was due in part to Wrede’s regular publications,
including the reports in the Anzeiger für deutsches Alterthum und deutsche Litteratur (in
issues 18, 1892 and 28: 1902), in which the results of the mapping process were made
public for fellow scholars. Another significant factor for the school’s influence was the
book series Wrede founded, Deutsche Dialektgeographie, which has been appearing since
1908 (see below).
Wrede adopted the method used by Wenker in his later phase of interpreting the data
on the basis of extralinguistic factors. He distinguished this method, which he labeled
“social-linguistic”, from the individual-centered linguistic methods of sound physiology
(Lautphysiologie) practiced in the nineteenth century. For Wrede, the term “social” im-
plied “collective”; for him, “social linguistics” was based on “mass materials” from a
“mass recording of German dialect resources”. Wrede used “mass” to evoke the “more
than 44,000 dialect translations” of Wenker’s sentences (cf. Bellmann 1986: 32). The
“social-linguistic factor”, according to Wrede, “includes all of the linguistic phenomena
and changes that cannot be explained by reference to the individual, where only the
interaction of many individuals comes into question, where manifold cultural influences
and all manner of [social] intercourse and, above all, population mixtures are at work”
(Wrede 1963: 310⫺311; translation R. S.). Thus, in applying the social-linguistic method
to dialectology, the observation and interpretation of the individual dialect within the
broadest possible dialect-geographical context and against the historical background of
the region under study formed the focus of Wrede’s research interest.
Of course, Wenker and Wrede were aware of the weaknesses of the Sprachatlas as
described by Bremer. Wenker positioned himself by stressing that his goal was “[to ob-
tain] a little from as many as possible rather than much from an inadequate number of
locations” (Wenker 1881: VIII; translation R. S.). In his reply to Bremer’s criticism of
the Sprachatlas’ indirect data collection method, he indicated that he was planning “indi-
vidual studies as a follow-up to the atlas” (Wenker 1895b: 27; translation R. S.). Wrede
viewed the Sprachatlas “as a first rough outline”, not a phonetic atlas, “but rather as
the precursor to one” (Wrede 1908: IX; translation R. S.).
These weaknesses were also manifest for the creators of the Sprachatlas thanks to the
Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF); its founder Jules Gilliéron had his student, Ed-
mond Edmont, use direct methods to collect linguistic materials in order to extract as
many phonetically precise data as possible from few locations. Gilliéron selected 639
boroughs from the French-speaking territory in which Edmont then elicited almost 2,000
words, with great attention to the dialectal vocabulary. By 1903 the first 50 maps of the
French atlas were already printed. In total the atlas included 1,920 maps with more than
a million tokens (Gauger, Oesterreicher and Windisch 1981: 120⫺132).
The advantages and disadvantages of the two very different linguistic atlases are
obvious: the linguistic diversity documented by the French method, which included only
two percent of all French settlements, lay far behind that of the German method, in
which nearly one hundred percent of all localities were surveyed. On the other hand, the
indirect data collection of the Germans necessitated subsequent interpretation whenever
phonetic details were of interest.
The need to supplement the Sprachatlas data with phonetic material was obvious.
The neogrammarian monographs which emerged at the same time as the Deutscher
Sprachatlas contained exact descriptions of the phonetic systems of their authors’ dia-
lects. In the following years, the contents of the monographs were extended and system-
atized; in some volumes the phonetic part was followed by a short summary of the
most important prosodic features, an overview of the dialect’s basic vocabulary sorted
according to the phonemes of the Middle High German reference system and a selection
of morphological special features of the dialect (for details see Schmidt and Herrgen, to
appear). These local grammars provided an ideal basis on which to selectively verify the
Sprachatlas material and check the variations in spelling in the questionnaires. Nonethe-
less, the theoretically and methodologically contradictory approaches of Wrede and the
neogrammarians led Wrede, like Wenker before him, to ignore the neogrammarian
monographs. Instead, Wrede encouraged investigations in smaller linguistic regions so
as to create an accurate phonetic basis for the interpretation of the Sprachatlas maps.
Wrede himself trained his students in phonetic transcription. In order to publish the
results, Wrede founded the Deutsche Dialektgeographie (DDG) series, originally with the
subtitle “Reports and Studies on G. Wenker’s Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs”, the
first volume of which appeared in 1908. 100⫺200 locations were examined in each
volume.
For the series’ authors, the theoretical foundations and methods remained essentially
the same for decades. They were described as follows by Gerhard W. Baur in his intro-
duction to DDG volume 55a, Die Mundarten im nördlichen Schwarzwald: “The goal of
dialect-geographical observation is to phonetically record the phonological, morphologi-
cal and lexical inventory of the base dialect as precisely as possible, to make clear the
spatial distribution of the linguistic phenomena and to explain their varying forms as
far as possible” (Baur 1967: 4; translation R. S.). As a rule, the monographs also share
the same structure. At the beginning one finds a comprehensive grammar of a survey
location, described (in true neogrammarian tradition) against the backdrop of the Mid-
dle High German reference system. Then there is an overview of the geographic, political
and religious history of the area under study. A third dialect-geographical section fol-
lows, the core of the regional grammar. At this point, Baur departs from the usual
descriptive path with its listings of examples and the corresponding locations, instead
concentrating on a cartographic depiction, dividing the grammar into a main, carto-
graphic section with phonological, morphological and lexical maps and an explanatory
subsection which complements the individual mapped phenomena. Finally, once again
following DDG convention, Baur locates the phenomena within the context of the sur-
rounding dialects, presents a linguistic classification of the entire region, compares the
course of its internal and external boundaries with prevailing natural and historical con-
ditions and notes linguistic movement. The fourth and last part concerns language
change in the area over the past hundred years (Baur 1967: 5⫺10).
An important element of the later prestructuralist DDG volumes was thus a historical
investigation of dialectal change; for this purpose, Sprachatlas data was compared with
more recent materials collected by the author; the questionnaires were also supplemented
by phonological, morphological and lexical questions relevant to the region. Baur’s in-
vestigation is based on Keller’s 1855 survey, the 40 Wenker sentences and the 200 lemmas
of the Deutscher Wortatlas (1951⫺1980; cf. Mitzka 1939). More recent DDG volumes
also took into account the results of regional dialect atlases. For Baur this was a ques-
tionnaire developed by Fischer (1908), the linguistic atlas maps from the Geographie der
schwäbischen Mundart (Fischer 1895) and the recordings of the German Sound Archive
in Tübingen (cf. Reiffenstein 1982: 32⫺33; Ruoff 2004: 19⫺20; Frahm, Sauer and
Schmid 2004: 55). The “linguistic dynamic” analysis in the DDG volumes increasingly
expanded to encompass, as in Baur’s book, variables such as occupation, age and other
sociolinguistic parameters. In this context, the “regional language” variety (for Baur:
Verkehrs- oder Umgangssprache) increasingly came to be included in the investigation.
Nearly all of the books in the DDG series included a combination map in which
isoglosses and isogloss clusters were shown as boundaries of ranked significance. This
mapping strategy can be traced back to Karl Haag (1898), who distinguished up to five
levels of boundaries in his work on the Baar dialects (for more detail, see section 4.2.1);
this method was adopted by Karl Bischoff (DDG 36), Hans Friebertshäuser (DDG 46),
Erika Bauer (DDG 43), Peter Frebel (DDG 45) and Günter Bellmann (DDG 62). The
method consisted of adding up all linguistic boundaries that separated two locations
from one another. The disadvantage of the resulting “honeycomb maps” (polygonal
maps) was that the number of records on which the classification was based varied from
author to author (for the books named above, for instance, the threshold for a third-
level boundary lay between 29 and 70 records, starting from a base value that ranged
between 0 and 18 records). Furthermore, the tokens were not weighted in qualitative
terms, i. e. with reference to parameters such as frequency of use and degree of deviance
from the standard (primary vs. secondary features); see below for more detail. Baur,
however, did not create his combination map solely on the quantitative basis of the
dialectal oppositions, but instead evaluated these in line with Haag’s guidelines, in gene-
ral on phonological grounds. This method, in contrast to the purely additive maps, was
rarely copied. Baur aside, only Rudolf Große (1955), Alfred Schirmer (1932) and Heinz
Rosenkranz (1938) published evaluative combination maps.
Wrede’s aim of being able to combine the dialect-geographical investigations of the
DDG series into a contiguous network was attained for a large portion of the German-
speaking territory. Maps 1 and 3 of the Bibliographie zur Grammatik der deutschen Dia-
lekte (Wiesinger and Raffin 1982) offer an overview of the entire territory; for the south-
west of Germany, see Maps 1 and 2 in Baur (2002).
3.3. The inluence o the Marburg School in central and northern

Europe
3.3.1. The inluence o the Deutscher Sprachatlas (DSA)
Aside from the neogrammarian ideas which were widespread in Europe, German dialec-
tology, especially Wenker’s dialect geography, also exerted much influence, particularly
in the north European countries.
3.3.1.1. Norway
In Norway, the phonetician Johan Storm conducted numerous direct data collections
from 1880 on. Influenced by Wenker, he then switched to indirect collection methods
and drafted two questionnaires, initially a short one with 300 lemmas and later a more
comprehensive one with 4,000 words, which he distributed to clergymen and teachers
across the country (Storm 1882). This collection was to serve as the basis for a historical
phonology of the Norwegian dialects. Two years later, Storm trimmed the word list back
to 2,000 lemmas, including morpho-geographical questions (Storm 1884). That same
year, under the title Norsk Lydskrift med Omrids af Fonetiken ‘Norwegian phonetic al-
phabet and sketch of Phonetics’, Storm also published suggestions for a phonetic tran-
scription system based on the dialect material he had collected; he derived this from the
Swedish transcription system published in the journal Svenska landsmål ‘Swedish dialect’
in 1879 by Johan A. Lundell.
Storm’s treatise on Norwegian phonetics was published in the first issue of the journal
Norvegia and was intended to assist the study of Norwegian dialects and folklore. In the
introduction, Storm designs a grand program for dialect research. He argues for a sys-
tematic investigation of the dialects as a primary goal, so as to provide the basis for a
classification of the Norwegian dialects. Both urban colloquial speech and the higher
class Danish-Norwegian colloquial speech were also to be included in the study.
Between 1905 and 1909, Hans Ross published a five-part account of the phonology
and morphology of the Norwegian dialects with short monographs on the principal
dialects of Norway and a dialect classification (Ross 1905⫺1909). He drew his material
from a collection of more than 40,000 words that he published as Norsk Ordbog ‘Norwe-
gian Dictionary’ (Ross [1895⫺1913] 1971).
Amund B. Larsen is acknowledged as the founder of modern Norwegian dialect stud-
ies. Like his teacher, Storm, Larsen was a gifted phonetician indebted to both the neo-
grammarian tradition and linguistic geography. Like Storm, he also gained his thorough
grounding in the Norwegian dialects through his own fieldwork, accompanied by his
teacher in 1882. In 1892 he published the first linguistic-geographical map of the dialects
of southern Norway with accompanying commentary; a second map followed in 1896
(Larsen 1892: 1896). By the end of the nineteenth century, he had completed his direct
data collection for all of Norway and was able to publish a comprehensive overview of
the Norwegian dialects in 1897 (Hoff 1968: 422⫺429; Bandle 1962: 299⫺301).
3.3.1.2. Sweden
Around the turn of the century, both Johan A. Lundell (1880) and Adolf Noréen (1903)
published distribution maps of the Swedish dialects; both concentrated on the peculiari-
ties of the Swedish marginal dialects. The Central Swedish dialects were given more
attention in the classification published in 1905 by Bengt Hesselmann (Hesselmann 1905;
also see Benson 1968: 359). Linguistic geography gained greater importance only in the
1930s with the linguists Natan Lindqvist and Delmar Olof Zetterholm at the University
of Uppsala. They initiated a written survey, the results of which were published in the
1940s (Lindqvist 1947; Zetterholm 1940: 1953; see also Benson 1968: 364). Additionally,
a number of studies which included linguistic-geographical maps emerged around Na-
tan Lindqvist.
3.3.1.3. The Netherlands and Belgium (Flanders)

In the Netherlands, the hypothesis ⫺ disproved by German dialectology ⫺ that dialectal
and tribal boundaries (Stammesgrenzen) coincide also led to a search for fresh explana-
tions for the emergence of dialect boundaries. Influenced by Wenker’s research methods,
H. Kern, based in Leiden, collected written material in the northern Netherlands in 1876;
edited and supplemented by a survey by Jan te Winkel, this was published in two parts
in 1895, after Kern’s death (te Winkel 1898). In the same year, P. Willems from Leuven
distributed a questionnaire with 2,000 words across Belgium and the southern Nether-
lands; in 1914 J. J. Verbeeten, Jos Schrijnen and Jaques van Ginneken conducted indirect
data collections in 170 boroughs in Limburg and East Brabant (Bach 1950: 45; Weijnen
1982: 192).
In 1935, Dutch translations of the 40 Wenker sentences were sent out by the Dialect
Committee of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam as a third question-
naire (Vragenlijsten 1931⫺1958). The cooperation between Marburg and Amsterdam
was the work of F. Wrede and P. J. Meertens, the secretary of the Dutch Dialect Commit-
tee. This survey was intended to enable the expansion of the boundaries of the Deutscher
Sprachatlas into Dutch-speaking territory (Meertens 1936: 123⫺124).
3.3.2. The inluence o the Deutsche Dialektgeographie (DDG) series
The book series Deutsche Dialektgeographie also attracted attention in neighboring

countries. In Norway, Ingeborg Hoff (1946) published a study that included an extensive
description of a village dialect as well as a linguistic-geographical overview of the dialects
of the entire province; the latter was supplemented by 15 maps (Bandle 1962: 303⫺304).
In the Netherlands and Flanders, over 50 village studies were published between 1884
and 1962 (for a list see Goossens 1968: 183⫺183, 186; Meertens and Wander 1958). In
1920 De Isoglossen van Ramisch in Nederland by Joseph Schrijnen appeared. In Flanders,
the local monographs were supplemented by approx. 130 unpublished doctoral and
graduate theses written primarily at the universities of Leuven and Ghent. Following the
example of the DDG volumes from 1922 on, these included linguistic-geographical maps
as well as a historical grammar. In Denmark in 1933, Karl Bock published a study about
Niederdeutsch auf dänischem Substrat as DDG number 34. His investigation was based
on responses to the 40 Wenker sentences from the Deutscher Sprachatlas augmented
by his own survey and went on to present his results in a number of maps (Andersen
1968: 338).
4. The Württemberg School

The power of the Marburg School extended to the regional research conducted in
Württemberg, where dialectology was already firmly established. As shown above, a first
connection between Tübingen and Marburg was furnished by Georg Wenker. But there
were also dialectologists in Tübingen who remained loyal to the neogrammarian method-
ology. Outstanding researchers from the Württemberg School were Hermann Fischer,
Karl Haag and Karl Bohnenberger.
4.1. Hermann Fischer (18511920): The indirect method
Hermann Fischer was a student of Adelbert von Keller from 1870⫺1871. In 1888 he
took over from Keller’s successor, Eduard Sievers, as a professor at Tübingen University.
He assumed office with an inaugural lecture on the methods and goals of dialectology
(Über Wege und Ziele der Dialektforschung). Keller gave Fischer access to the “confer-
ence papers” and 400,000 response slips that Keller had sorted as basis for a
Schwäbisches Wörterbuch (Swabian Dictionary; Fischer 1904⫺1936), thus also providing
a foundation for Fischer’s atlas, Geographie der schwäbischen Mundart (Fischer 1895).
Fischer extended this collection by a written survey based on Wenker’s methods: in 1886
and 1887 he distributed a 200-question survey of dialectal phonology to all of the more
than 3,000 parishes in Württemberg and surrounding areas. The questionnaire was re-
turned by about half of the parishes, which Fischer used as a basis for his 28-map
linguistic atlas. Fischer wanted the atlas to unburden his Schwäbisches Wörterbuch, the
first installment of which appeared in 1901, of details about the geographical distribution
of regular linguistic phenomena: “It seemed desirable to me to precede the Swabian
Dictionary with a geographical-grammatical study so as to provide orientation about
regular variation in the phonological form of individual words in advance” (Fischer
1895: III, translation R. S.).
Fischer began his work on the atlas at almost exactly the same time as Wenker. His
work was based on Wenker’s ideas, especially his Rheinischer Sprachatlas (1878) and the
beginnings of the Deutscher Sprachatlas as described by Ferdinand Wrede in the Anzeiger
für deutsches Alterthum und deutsche Litteratur. Although Fischer’s atlas is among the
most significant dialect geographical contributions in the German-speaking world, it
produced little reaction in comparison to the Deutscher Sprachatlas.
Fischer, like Wenker and Wrede before him, was concerned with the most hotly dis-
cussed topics of his time ⫺ the regularity of phonological change and the correspondence
of dialectal and other boundaries. Fischer had always been skeptical of the neogrammar-
ian ideas; in the end he made his opposition public. Like Wrede and later Haag, he was
convinced that the boundaries for individual words with the same vowel do not coincide
regularly and concluded that “[a] sound law cannot apply with the necessity of a law of
nature; otherwise it would always have had effect everywhere” (Fischer 1895: 83; transla-
tion R. S.). His main concern was the relationship between the old Germanic tribes and
the current dialect boundaries, which had been discussed before and after Wenker up
until the mid-twentieth century (cf. Nübling 1938; Moser 1951⫺1952, 1961). For Fischer,
there is no Swabian dialect as such; instead, “every particular characteristic linguistic
phenomenon has a closed territory and definite borders” (Fischer 1895: 82; translation
R. S.). Every linguistic innovation, according to Fischer, arises in a certain location (or
possibly several locations), from where it spreads out over a greater or smaller area. He
thus aligns himself with Johann Schmidt’s wave theory, which he saw as “the only
[theory] with which one succeeds at all in explaining the history of language” (Fischer
1895: 83; translation R. S.). These linguistic innovations stop at natural or political
boundaries.
From his maps, Fischer ⫺ again in agreement with Wenker and Wrede ⫺ was able
to detect neither a coincidence of tribal and dialect boundaries nor telltale features which
could characterize Swabian as an old tribal dialect. Although there were clusters of
boundary lines on Fischer’s combination map (for instance in the northeast, where Swab-
ian Alemannish borders on East Frankish, and in the east, where it adjoins Bavarian),
Fischer drew no further conclusions from this. In the foreword to his atlas he wrote:
“Combining the boundary lines from my first 25 maps on a single map reveals a picture
of extreme lawlessness. The lines run in every conceivable direction and there are only a
few localities on the map with no boundary of some kind running through them” (Fi-
scher 1895: 82; translation R. S.).
4.2. Small-scale linguistic geography in the Württemberg School:

Karl Haag and Karl Bohnenberger
4.2.1. Karl Haag (1860-1946)
Keller’s method of conducting small-scale dialect geographical research on an empirical

basis was taken up by Karl Haag. He abandoned the “murky atmosphere of armchair
hypotheses” (Haag 1900: 139, translation R. S.) to undertake a “collection of recordings
from over 200 locations, which form a closed area of almost 60 square miles” using
direct methods which he supplemented by an indirect collection of data with the help of
teachers in order to fill “the unfortunately constantly recurring gaping omissions” (Haag
1898: 3⫺4; translation R. S.). He thus achieved the ideal combination of the research
methods applied by the Deutscher Sprachatlas and the Atlas linguistique de la France.
Just how much he followed Marburg research in doing so is indicated by the fact that
he intervened in the dispute between Bremer, Wenker and Wrede.
Haag’s combined material forms the basis for his monograph, Die Mundarten des
oberen Neckar- und Donaulandes, a seminal work for the entire field of dialect geogra-
phy ⫺ not in the least thanks to Haag’s new cartographic procedures, which also occu-
pied an essential place in all of his subsequent dialect-geographical papers. In his fore-
word to this first large dialect-geographical study he writes:
The accumulated phonological geographical material could only be made clear with a map;
this became increasingly central to the work, especially when, in searching for an explanation
for the lines that emerged, I made the happy discovery that there was a surprisingly extensive
agreement with old political boundaries. This led to a division of the work at hand into four:
a monograph on [Schwenningen], a comparative account of the entire area, an investigation
of the nature of the boundaries revealed by the map, and a modest collection of samples.
(Haag 1898: 4; translation R. S.)
Haag was the first dialectologist to insist that the features used to delimit a dialect region
must be weighted: “The significance with which we credit individual boundaries is to be
judged in three ways: the number of forms affected by the sound change, the frequency
of use of these forms, and the degree to which they have changed” (Haag 1898: 93,
translation R. S.). These three criteria are narrowed down by Haag. On point 1, “The
question of the number can only be answered by the most comprehensive collection of
material. This effort would facilitate a statistical analysis of sounds and allow the sorting
of the MHG word and form inventory into phonetically meaningful units: initial sounds,
final sounds with short vowels, [and final sounds] with long vowels would need to be
posited” (Haag 1898: 93, translation R. S.). On point 2:
Phonological change affecting the core vocabulary of a language ⫺ pronouns, particles,

modal verbs ⫺ is of especially great consequence for the interpretation of the boundaries;
thus the group of ân: hân, stân, gân, lân is of more weight than that of ht, although it has
five times as many forms. Statistics on the rate of occurrence of frequently used words would
also be a precondition for an accurate assessment here. (Haag 1898: 93, translation R. S.)
On point 3, “The auditive salience [Ohrfälligkeit] of the phonological change, that which
beyond the boundary is felt to be particularly odd, is an important, subjective dimension
of the change. This reflection is, however, precisely due to its subjective character, only
permitted little room on the map” (Haag 1898: 93, translation R. S.). Haag concludes:
“Considerations of this kind […] lead to a numerical ranking of the boundaries, as
drawn on the map. Five border strengths are distinguished: the border lines are 4, 3, 2,
1, ½ mm in breadth; the number and frequency of the forms they circumscribe increase
almost in an exponential relationship: (more than) 200, 100, 51, 21, 10” (Haag 1898:
93⫺94; translation R. S.).
Haag’s polygon map of the Baar dialects reveals 78 boundaries for individual dialec-
tal features (Haag 1898: Appendix). Haag calculated the relative strength of every
boundary by counting and weighting the common features of each enclosed segment.
This method of display produced a central “core area” in every “linguistic landscape”
surrounded by a transition zone, a “fringe area” or, as Haag later termed it, “a vibration
area”. Haag was convinced that the boundaries of the linguistic landscape were con-
nected with the political traffic (intercourse) controls of the late medieval territories.
Since, according to Haag, former political boundaries do not persist in language for
longer than 300 years (Haag 1900: 139), there is no connection between old tribal bor-
ders and dialect boundaries unless an old tribal boundary coincides with a later political
border (Haag 1946: 3⫺4). Geographical barriers are less relevant for the establishment
of boundaries than political ones. Whether these boundaries are linguistically reinforced
depends in the final instance on the “intercourse” that effects the spread of a linguistic
innovation; if it halts at an obstacle, the linguistic adjustment is also interrupted. For
Haag, the second important factor for the spread of a linguistic innovation is the higher
prestige of a form. Haag agrees with Fischer that the extent of the spread is in line with
Schmidt’s wave principle.
Between 1925 and 1930, Haag expanded his linguistic geographical research to cover
all of Württemberg. In his Die Grenzen des Schwäbischen in Württemberg (1946) he at-
tempted a demarcation of the individual linguistic regions:
We determine them according to the strength of the strands of the phonological boundaries
that traverse the state, and in so doing keep an eye out for the boundaries of the erstwhile
political areas to which they are oriented. The Roman Empire of the German Nation, in all
its remarkable variegation with its princes, churches, knightly and civil governances, will
then provide the names for labeling the linguistic regions.
(Haag 1946: 10; translation R. S.)
Haag distinguishes fifteen linguistic regions, but concedes that “only the urgent need to
clamber from the confusion of diversity to a vantage point [is] redressed” (Haag 1946:
10; translation R. S.). Fischer’s account of the “lawlessness” of the boundaries was thus
disproved; in fact, Fischer later agreed with Haag’s linguistic geographic approach.
Haag’s significant findings on the exceptionlessness of the sound laws were a result of
his empirical data collection methods. According to Haag, there are two kinds of sound
change: “current” and “older”. Current change is found where a sound law is still in
effect. It includes all words belonging to the affected cohort without exception; this
sound change is triggered by minor articulatory shifts of which the speaker remains
unaware. “Relaxing lip closure makes every b into a w; fronting the stricture makes of
every ix an iç; opening makes of every ir an e˛r, every ı̄n becomes an ēn; closing the nose
denasalizes all vowels” (Haag 1929⫺1930: 28; translation R. S.). For Haag, these results
can only be derived from directly collected linguistic data: “The transmission from indi-
vidual to individual, from dialect to dialect resembles unconscious infection; neighboring
dialects display only subtle differences of degree, like a slow increase or decrease in a
phenomenon; their geographic spread is therefore only rarely precisely determinable; this
present-day sound change thus has largely fluid boundaries” (Haag 1898: 88; translation
R. S.). Haag sees this sound change as extremely important, because many words are
affected. “Older sound change”, in contrast, is sound replacement in which only single
words belonging to a cohort are borrowed from a neighboring dialect via “conscious
importation” (Haag 1898: 89; translation R. S.).
Haag’s suggestion, never enacted, was to conduct direct recordings across all of Ger-
many. The Deutscher Sprachatlas was to be divided into sectors, the results coordinated
and depicted on a single map (Haag 1928: 167).
4.2.2. Karl Bohnenberger (18631951)
The phonetic and grammatical lectures of his neogrammarian teacher, Eduard Sievers,
provided decisive impetuses for Karl Bohnenberger. Yet while Sievers had no interest
in the linguistic geographic material of his predecessor, Adelbert von Keller, on which
neogrammarian axioms could have been tested, linguistic geography was a central topic
of research for Bohnenberger. Like Karl Haag, he was an empiricist; the two dialectolo-
gists from Tübingen collected linguistic data in the field at the same time. His reserva-
tions about the Deutscher Sprachatlas, which he never shook off (Bohnenberger 1902:
329), were a result of (among other factors) the differing approaches to data collection.
Steadfast in the neogrammarian tradition, he argued against the collection of written
data, which in his opinion obscured the causes of language change, an issue that con-
cerned him as much as it did Karl Haag. In his Über die ostgrenze des alemannischen he
emphasized in “Digression 3, On the extent of sound change and the causes of linguistic
boundaries” (1928b: 63, translation R. S.) that statements about the phenomena of lan-
guage change are only possible when based on direct data collection: “Here again in
many things a clear distinction arises between researchers who proceed principally from
written sources and those who principally proceed from spoken and heard speech” (trans-
lation R. S.). He also criticized not just Fischer’s questionnaire methods “with all due
respect to the services that this atlas has provided and continues to provide” (Bohnen-
berger 1928b: 54⫺55; translation R. S.), but also “the Marburg pronouncements”, espe-
cially Kurt Wagner’s results published in 1927 in his work Deutsche Sprachlandschaften
(DDG 23): “Thus it appears to me incomprehensibly daring, when K. Wagner […] in-
dulges in opinions about Alemannish or Bavarian” (Bohnenberger 1928b: 55, footnote
1; translation R. S.). He praised all the more the direct recordings initiated by Wrede:
“Obviously, the excellent and very useful direct dialect recordings from individual dis-
tricts in central and northern Germany, commissioned by the Marburg Center and in-
cluded in Wrede’s familiar collection, must be considered field-based research.” (Boh-

nenberger 1928b: 56, footnote 1).
Bohnenberger posits two kinds of linguistic change: on the one hand, indigenous,
inherited (überkommen) phonological change and on the other, constant and sporadic
change. Most linguistic boundaries can be attributed to inherited sound change and the
effects of analogy. Again in agreement with Karl Haag, Bohnenberger sees the triggers
of language change in the higher prestige of a linguistic form; this is dependent on the
political and economic primacy of certain regions and the standing of the speakers,
especially with regard to their occupation (Bohnenberger 1953: 259⫺260).
Unlike Wenker, Fischer or Haag, Bohnenberger saw reflections of former tribal bor-
ders in contemporary linguistic boundaries; later research did in fact vindicate this view,
at least in some instances (cf. Moser 1951⫺1952, 1961; Nübling 1938: 241⫺242).
Whether or not these tribal boundaries were maintained depended on the communicative
intercourse (Verkehr; cf. Bach 1950: 66; Bohnenberger 1953: 225; Engel 1964: 225); thus
Bohnenberger, like Haag, assigned communication a decisive role in the establishment
and maintenance of dialect boundaries.
Bohnenberger analyzed his material in many papers; they provided the basis for the
internal and external classification in Die Mundarten Württembergs and the comprehen-
sive account of Die alemannische Mundart (Bohnenberger 1928a, 1928b: 1953) . It was
above all in Über die ostgrenze des alemannischen (1928b) that he intensively considered
a “classificatory scheme” for dialects, especially for the fixing of border lines. Although
he distinguished full Alemannic from a band of contiguous transitional dialects, he main-
tained that a sharp delineation was possible here, too: “Pre-boundary lines separate full
dialects from transitional dialects” and “total boundary lines separate complete dialects”
(Bohnenberger 1928b: 30; translation R. S.).
5. Reerences
Andersen, Poul
1968 Dänische Mundartforschung. In: Ludwig Erich Schmitt (ed.), Germanische Dialektologie.
Festschrift für Walther Mitzka zum 80. Geburtstag, vol. 2, 319⫺347. (Zeitschrift für
Mundartforschung, Beihefte NF 6.) Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Bach, Adolf
1950 Deutsche Mundartforschung. Ihre Wege, Ergebnisse und Aufgaben. 2nd ed. Heidelberg:
Winter.
Bandle, Oskar
1962 Die norwegische Dialektforschung. Ein Überblick über ihre Geschichte und ihre heutige
Situation. Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 29: 289⫺312.
Bauer, Erika
1957 Dialektgeographie im südlichen Odenwald und Ried. (Deutsche Dialektgeographie 43.)
Marburg: Elwert.
Baur, Gerhard W.
1967 Die Mundarten im nördlichen Schwarzwald. (Deutsche Dialektgeographie 55a, b.) Mar-
burg: Elwert.
Baur, Gerhard W.
1978 Bibliographie zur Mundartforschung in Baden-Württemberg, Vorarlberg und Liechtenstein.
(Idiomatica 7.) Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Baur, Gerhard W.
2002 Bibliographie zur Mundartforschung in Baden-Württemberg, Vorarlberg und Liechtenstein
von den Anfängen bis zum Jahr 2000. 2nd ed. (Idiomatica 7.) Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Bellmann, Günter
1961 Mundart und Umgangssprache in der Oberlausitz. Sprachgeographische und sprachge-
schichtliche Untersuchungen zwischen Schwarzwasser und Lausitzer Neiße. (Deutsche Dia-
lektgeographie 62.) Marburg: Elwert.
Bellmann, Günter
1986 Zweidimensionale Dialektologie. In: Günter Bellmann (ed.), Beiträge zur Dialektologie
am Mittelrhein, 1⫺55. (Mainzer Studien zur Sprach- und Volksforschung 10.) Stuttgart:
Steiner.
Benson, Sven
1968 Die Erforschung der schwedischen Mundarten. In: Ludwig Erich Schmitt (ed.), Germani-
sche Dialektologie. Festschrift für Walther Mitzka zum 80. Geburtstag, vol. 2, 348⫺368.
(Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung, Beihefte NF 6.) Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Bischoff, Karl
1935 Studien zur Dialektgeographie des Elbe-Saale-Gebietes in den Kreisen Calbe und Zerbst.
(Deutsche Dialektgeographie 36.) Marburg: Elwert.
Bock, Karl Nielsen
[1933] 1974 Niederdeutsch auf dänischem Substrat. Studien zur Dialektgeographie Südostschles-
wigs. (Deutsche Dialektgeographie 34.) Walluf: Sändig.
Bohnenberger, Karl
1902 Sprachgeschichte und politische Geschichte. Zeitschrift für Hochdeutsche Mundarten III:
321⫺326.
Bohnenberger, Karl
1928a Die Mundarten Württembergs. Eine heimatkundliche Sprachlehre. (Schwäbische Volks-
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Bohnenberger, Karl
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Renate Schrambke, Freiburg (Germany)
7. Language and Space: The kulturmorphologische

Ansatz in dialectology and the German language
space ideology, 19201960
1. Aim and scope
2. German dialectology after World War I
3. Dialect, standard language and their respective cultural impact
4. The discourse environment of cultural morphology
5. Metaphors of space (and how they change)
6. Stamm, Raum, Volk ⫺ competing key terms of the dialectological debates in the 1930s
7. Conclusion
8. References
1. Aim and scope

Among the schools of German dialectology, the kulturmorphologische Schule (lit. ‘cul-
tural morphology approach’) is special in many ways. Established in the 1920s in the
context of the Institute for Rheinische Landesgeschichte (‘Regional history of the Rhine-
land’) in Bonn, it soon became legendary. For several decades, cultural morphology was
considered to be a most promising perspective for dialect geography. Mitzka even refers
to it as “das Hochziel der Dialektgeographie” [‘the highest aim of dialect geography’]
(Mitzka 1943: 17). The founding document outlining the principles of this historical-
cultural approach to dialectology (Aubin, Frings and Müller 1926) puts the vast carto-
graphic material collected by Wenker and Wrede to a completely new use. What was
originally designed to represent synchronic traits of German dialects at the time of data
collection (from 1876 onwards), now was reinterpreted as the frozen result of a long
cultural-historical process during which linguistic traits had spread along routes of trade
and communication (Verkehr) and medieval territorial boundaries, and were structured
and bundled in and around cities. Surely, Wrede had already begun to transform the
aims of his dialect atlas towards a dynamic view of Soziallinguistik ‘social linguistics’,
but what really seemed revolutionary to his contemporaries was the fact that, within the
framework of cultural morphology, the spreading of dialectal traits was shown to be a
prototypical, model case for the spreading of culture in space. Reevaluating the carto-
graphic material of the Sprachatlas within the framework of historical-cultural theory
solved, as will be shown below, a major problem faced by the field of dialectology at
the time: once a well-respected field of linguistics, dialectology had faded into the back-
ground in terms of relevance and popularity. Upon being seen as a model case of cultural
historiography, the reputation of practical relevance was once again restored to the field
of dialect research.
At the time when the kulturmorphologische Schule was established, the dominant par-
adigm was that of the neogrammarians (cf. Murray in this volume). Dialectology was
primarily associated with sound laws, questions of speech physiology and at best folklore
or the boundaries of old tribal territories. Nothing dialectologists used to concern them-
selves with attracted much public interest, nor did dialectology have any impact or influ-
ence on historiography and social science.
As pointed out by Auer (2004), dialectology in Germany was, from the very begin-
ning, part of a nation state ideology. During the nineteenth century, dialects were con-
nected to the standard variety by ethno-romantic constructions from which the ancient
Stämme were derived (the tribes such as the Swabians or the Bavarians who had given
their names to the German dialects). The Stämme were in a sense “imagined communi-
ties” (Anderson 1983) living and interacting in their dialects, which in turn had laid the
grounds for the German standard language. Although this romantic view had been seri-
ously challenged by the findings of the dialect atlas from the very beginning, modified
versions of it survived much longer, as will be shown. Cultural morphology provided a
promising perspective for the reentry of dialectology into a modernized interdisciplinary
national project, characterized by key terms such as Volk, Kultur and Verkehr. Thus,
from today’s point of view, cultural morphology can be viewed in two ways. On the one
hand, it is an integral part of the aggressively expansionist ethno-science (Volks-
forschung) that evolved in the 1920s and supplied Nazism with expertise for their plans
to push the boundaries of the Reich far into the west (Westforschung, cf. Dietz, Gabel
and Tiedau 2003) and into the east (Ostforschung, cf., e.g., Oberkrome 1993). On the
other hand, cultural morphology is part of the history of a sociolinguistic perspective
on language change, language contact and language expansion in space. Lately, modern
sociolinguists have had a tendency to list cultural morphology among the ‘extralinguistic’
approaches to variation and do not seem willing to trouble themselves further with this
aspect of their tradition (cf. Barbour and Stevenson 1998: 73⫺74). For instance, in Herr-
gen’s (2001: 1524) historical account of German dialectology, there is only one single
sentence which reminds the reader of the fact that cultural morphology once existed: the
sentence refers to the fact that the atlas maps were interpreted historically and correlated
with extralinguistic data. Prior to that time, however, cultural morphology had been
considered to be a most prominent part of the dialectological enterprise (cf. Grober-
Glück 1982). Historiographers praised cultural morphology for being the leading school
of German dialect geography from the moment it entered the field:
In der zweiten Hälfte der zwanziger und zu Beginn der dreißiger Jahre entwickelte sich die
Dialektgeographie zur führenden Forschungsrichtung innerhalb der Dialektologie. Aus-
schlaggebend für den nachhaltigen Einfluß, den diese Disziplin auf die Dialektologie und
die Sprachwissenschaft insgesamt ausübte, war die Kulturraumforschung.
‘In the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s dialect geography developed into the leading
approach within dialectology. This lasting impact of the discipline on dialectology and lin-
guistics in general was due to research on cultural spaces.’ (Wilking 2003: 66)
It is clear that the kulturmorphologische Ansatz cannot be equated with historical-cultural

approaches to dialectology as a whole, but it still is emblematic of the antagonist forces
that influenced German dialectology in the first half of the twentieth century. With cul-
tural morphology, dialectology became a part of the broader enterprise termed Kultur-
raumforschung by historiographers. Emerging in the 1920s, this was (as Ditt 2003: 929
notes) a modern, innovative and interdisciplinary branch of historiography, oriented
toward cartographic representations of social and cultural everyday phenomena, and
serving the political need to reinvestigate the basic traits of the German Volk and its
Raum (which was considered to be the central aim of the Geisteswissenschaften).
2. German dialectology ater World War I

It is symptomatic for the situation of German linguistics (and for the humanities in
general) after World War I that a sense of a deep crisis prevailed (Knobloch 2005: 193⫺
208). The days of the unquestioned hegemony of German linguistics were thought to
have come to an end. French sociology of language (Antoine Meillet, Jules Gilliéron,
Charles Bally) rapidly gained popularity and attractiveness throughout Europe. The
leading figures in German Geisteswissenschaft were convinced that only Geist would be
able to get the country back to the top where, in their minds, it definitely belonged.
Geist, Volk, Kultur and Raum were the key terms designed to counter western positivism
and sociology and to regain ground for Germany and its tradition in the sciences and
humanities. Neogrammarian method and theory were dismissed as “positivistic”. Lin-
guistic nationalism rapidly gained ground in the 1920s, within the linguistic profession
as well as other areas. Leo Weisgerber, who like Theodor Frings and Adolf Bach was
closely associated to the Institut für geschichtliche Landeskunde der Rheinlande in Bonn
(founded in 1920; now known as IGL), provided a linguistic manifesto in his book
Muttersprache und Geistesbildung ‘Mother Tongue and Education of the Mind’ (Weis-
gerber 1929), which would become exceptionally influential in the decades to follow. The
political manifesto of linguistic nationalism was first articulated by Georg Schmidt-Rohr
in Muttersprache (1933). Both books converge in the belief that it is the native language
that actively shapes the forces and qualities of the Volk. In the context of ethnic radical-
ization, these elements of Herder’s and Humboldt’s thinking competed with race for the
status of a new key term. Hutton (1999) has referred to this segment of the evolving
Nazi ideology as “mother-tongue fascism”.
Questioning and de-legitimizing the political borders fixed by the Treaty of Versailles
became an obsession of public discourse, and the humanities tried to prove their newly
acquired relevance by contributing to it in the best way they could. The common denom-
inator of all branches of culturalist Volksforschung was correcting political history and
political boundaries that assigned regions and territories to states whose language and
culture had not shaped the space in question. Raum (and in particular cultural space)
was semantically opposed to political government, and it was semantically coordinated
with Volk.
At that time, dialectology differed significantly from other fields of linguistics. Re-
search on dialects was well-organized and centralized (in Marburg), as well as rooted in
the regions and supported by a large body of collaborating school teachers and lay
persons. Dialect had always been seen as the language of the people (Volkssprache), so
aligning themselves with a new ethnic science (Volkswissenschaft) was relatively easy for
dialectologists. Therefore, restructured humanities saw dialectology among the winners
(cf. Ehlers to appear), while the remaining fields of linguistics had a hard time adjusting
to the new standards of ethnic thinking. Dialectology had been Gemeinschaftsforschung
long before the word turned programmatic after 1933.
In the IGL in Bonn, the models and methods of cultural morphology evolved through
close cooperation between dialectologists, historicists and other social scientists in the
context of Westforschung. For some time it had been questioned whether the current
border between Germany and France should mirror the old tribal boundaries between
the settlements of Germanen (by which the speakers of Germanic languages were meant)
and (romanized) Franken. Research within the IGL, inspired by Wrede’s Sprachatlas
methods, focused on patterns of everyday culture that spread together and shaped cul-
tural space: ways of settlement and house building, naming traditions (toponomastics),
dialect features and customs. The patterning of these features was considered to shape
a cultural space in which the lines of different cultural elements could be shown to
converge. The result of IGL research was that a large portion of northern France, Bel-
gium, and the Netherlands had originally been germanischer Kulturboden ‘Germanic cul-
tural space’, while the contemporary linguistic (and political) borders reflected Ausgleichs-
linien ‘lines of compromise’ fixed by the patterns of cultural contact and conflict between
Germanen and Romanen (cf. Petri 1937; Steinbach and Petri 1939). It has been argued
by Ditt (2003: 931), that the IGL-findings could serve opposing political options: either
to underline common (European) ground in the Western border regions or to support
(German) claims to legitimate possession of these territories. It was the second option
that was favored by the political contexts until 1945, and it was the first option that
ensured the survival of cultural morphology after 1945 (Rusinek 2003). In retrospect it
was, of course, easy to emphasize that it was a “European” program all along.
3. Dialect, standard language and their respective cultural impact

In volk-oriented German linguistics until 1945 there was a deep divide over the respective
cultural impact of dialect and standard language. Was it the (mainly rural) dialects of
the settlers that rooted German culture in space, or was it the cultural force of the
educated standard speakers that kept the ethnic Germans abroad in close ties with the
Germans in the Reich? Walther Mitzka, who from 1934 was the head of the most power-
ful institutions of German dialectology (namely the Sprachatlas, the Kartell der Mund-
artwörterbücher ‘The Association of Dialect Dictionaries’, and the section Volkssprache
of the Reichsgemeinschaft für deutsche Volksforschung ‘The Association for German Folk
Research’), advocated the superiority of dialect. Mitzka himself was in fact critical of
cultural morphology and favored a modernized and dynamic version of the Stämme-
model (see Wilking 2003 for more detail). Contrary to Verkehr ‘trade and communica-
tion’, another key term, which Theodor Frings had borrowed from Hermann Paul and
the Neogrammarians, Mitzka (1941, 1943) maintained/contended that it was prestige
and socio-cultural evaluation that conditioned the expansion of linguistic features in
space. The lasting results of the colonization in eastern regions were interpreted as hav-
ing proven that rural dialects (Bauernsprache) indeed attached themselves to occupied
ground and that urban centers of trade and commerce were less important (at least in
the eastern regions) than the IGL-linguists had thought.
The question of the cultural impact of dialect and standard language was far from
academic since it had very practical consequences in key matters of the politics towards
the Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum, i. e., the Germans living outside the German terri-
tory (see Knobloch 2005: 111⫺136 for the role of Auslandsdeutschtum in German linguis-
tics). While the proponents of dialectal superiority advocated strengthening the ties be-
tween peripheral Germans and the Reich by cultivating their dialects, their opponents
tried to overcome the cultural limitations inherent in the dialect and to establish the
standard variety as a reference in school, administration and media. The conflict is
clearly demonstrated in quotes such as the following:
Die Mundart verbindet uns stärker als die Schriftsprache mit unsern völkischen Ursprüngen.
Volksfremde Denkweise, wie sie die Politik überwunden hat, wird von ihr sowieso übersprun-
gen. Daher ihr volksbiologischer Wert.
‘Dialect links us more strongly to our origins as a Volk than written language can. Thinking
that is alien to our Volk, which has now been left behind in politics, is fully disregarded in
dialect anyway; thus its innate folk-biological value.’ (Mitzka 1943: 5)
In Mitzka’s ethno-romantic view, dialect is believed to have the strength and vitality to
resist the corrupting forces of modernity. This position was, however, far from uncontro-
versial. It was challenged by many of the leading figures in linguistics and language
policy. Georg Schmidt-Rohr writes on the linguistic situation in the Alsace:
Die alemannische, die fränkische Mundart ist schon als Mundart grundsätzlich schwächer,
weniger lockend und werbekräftig als die französische Hochsprache. In Familien, in denen
die deutsche Mundart nur Haussprache ist, während französische Schulen besucht, franzö-
sische Zeitungen gelesen werden, muß notwendigerweise die Sprache des größeren Kreises
(die Schriftsprache) allmählich die Sprache des engeren Kreises (die Mundart) verdrängen.
‘The Alemannic and the Franconian dialect are as such weaker, less attractive and less allur-
ing than the French standard language. In families where the German dialect is only spoken
at home, while French schools are attended and French newspapers are read, the language
of greater linguistic reach and influence (the written language) will gradually and inevitably
encroach upon and marginalize the language of lesser linguistic reach (the dialect).’
(Schmidt-Rohr 1933: 346)
For Schmidt-Rohr, standard and written varieties symbolize ethnic unity, while dialects
stand for diversity, isolation, lack of communicative reach and lack of social recognition
in modern societies. It is significant that the rhetoric on space served both the modernist
and the conservative factions. Raum can be conceived as ground (Boden), as the soil for
growing in the fields (Scholle), but also as dynamic space mediating trade, communica-
tion and exchange. The connotations of Raum spread in opposite directions, and this
fact evidently contributed to the success of spatial metaphors after World War I (Köster
2002: 101⫺118; see section 5).
In this controversial field, the strategy of cultural morphology involved the use of
Sprachatlas maps as a resource for a new approach to the history of the German written
standard variety (Frings 1956: 1⫺21), by opting for a dynamic interpretation of maps,
and for a diachronic reading of the synchronic distribution of linguistic traits. Like
Hermann Aubin (who left the IGL to teach in Breslau), Theodor Frings took the IGL-
views and the Bonn IGL-network with him to the eastern part of Germany. From 1927
onwards, he taught at Leipzig University and sought to apply the methods developed in
his Rheinische Landesgeschichte to the linguistic data of eastern Germany. The construc-
tion of the emergence of the written German standard language in the fourteenth century
that Frings offers has all elements of a unification myth, and it goes as follows: In
the west, the modern borderline between the French and German speaking areas is an
Ausgleichslinie ‘line of compromise’ between romanized Franks and those Germanic
tribes who had maintained their ethnic and linguistic traditions. A standard language
could not develop here. On the contrary, the river Rhine attracted waves of trade and
traffic between the north and the south which led to maximal diversity and relic areas
on both sides of that main axis of communication. The romanized western Franks took
the lead in developing a central state and a unified written standard:
Die Sprachgrenze ist nicht, wie man geglaubt hat, ein Ergebnis der Völkerwanderungszeit,
sondern eine späte Ausgleichslinie zwischen romanischen und deutschen Franken. Jenseits
der Linie, im Westreich, entstehen Einheitsstaat, Schrift- und Hochsprache, diesseits, im
Ostreich ⫺ und das ist der tragische Augenblick im germanisch-deutschen Sprachgesche-
hen ⫺ erlahmte die Kraft. Die Franken schenkten Frankreich die Grundlage der sprachlichen
Einigung, nicht Deutschland.
‘The language border is not the result of the Great Migration as once believed, but a recent
line of compromise between romanized and German Franks. Beyond that line, in the western
empire, a unified state, written language and a standard language emerge, while in the eastern
empire ⫺ and this is the tragic moment in the Germanic-German language history ⫺ the
forces become weak. The Franks gave the foundations of linguistic unification to France,
not to Germany.’ (Frings 1956: 12)
If it is not the west that has brought linguistic unity to the Germans, where should we
look for it then? It cannot come from the east either, because civilization spreads from
west to east and never the other way around. The Marburg-maps according to Frings
show that the main features of the standard language converge along the river Main
between Mainz, Würzburg and Bamberg:
Das ist gewiß eine Herzlage und eine Sammelstelle, auf die wir schon einmal stießen, aber
ohne staatliche Bedeutung, ohne Stoßkraft, in Eigenleben befangen wie die anderen Räume.
[…] Dem deutschen Altland war die Kraft der sprachlichen Einigung entschwunden.
‘This is indeed a core territory and point of convergence, which we have encountered once
before, but without state relevance, without outward energy, preoccupied by a life of its own
as is true of the other spaces […]. The old German land has lost the power of linguistic
unification.’ (Frings 1956: 15)
Yet this region of the Altland is known to be a starting point of the German settlement
in the east, and so the central features of the (now) written standard move east with the
Mainfranken, mix with other varieties and finally settle by forming an Ausgleichssprache
‘koine’ that is backed by the state of Wettin and by Leipzig as an urban centre. It is
through the dynamics of the Ostkolonisation that linguistic unity is brought about. Nei-
ther educated humanists nor the chancelleries are credited with the “invention” of the
standard variety. This proves to be incompatible with the myth of the creativity of the
Volk (yet compatible with the myth of the educated middle-class citizen or the admin-
istration of the state). It is the settlers moving east that build linguistic unity, not great
individuals or a central state (like in France):
Das neue Deutsch war im Munde der Ostsiedler vorgeformt und wurde gesprochen lange
bevor es seit dem 13. Jahrhundert in die Schreibstube einzog. Es ist ein Gewächs des neu-
deutschen Volksbodens, eine Schöpfung des Volkes, nicht des Papiers und des Humanismus.
‘The new German had existed in the minds and mouths of the settlers in the east and was
spoken long before it entered the clerks’ offices. It grew on new German soil, and was a
creation of the people, not of paper and humanism.’ (Frings 1956: 16)
Interestingly enough, this mythic conception of linguistic unification was not only sup-
ported by the humanities of the pre-National Socialistic and National Socialistic eras,
but also by communist post-war Germany (where Frings continued to hold his chair at
Leipzig in the German Democratic Republic). All in all, cultural morphology held a
middle course in the conflict on the cultural impact of dialect or standard language, as
did Mitzka, who in his 1941 contribution to the infamous volume Kriegseinsatz der
Geisteswissenschaften ‘War Deployment of the Humanities’ attributed the formation of
German to the impact of Bauernsprache ‘farmers’ language’ and Bürgersprache ‘citizens’
language’ (cf. Mitzka 1941: 87).
When dialectologists at the time (like Martin 1939) described the role of the dialects
in the development of German, they use metaphors of force and vitality: Urkraft, der
breite alte Strom der Mundarten, Quelle deutschen Volkstums, Grundlage unseres Sprach-
lebens [‘original power’, ‘the broad, ancient pulsing current of the dialects’, ‘source of
the German folk’, ‘foundation of our language life’] (Martin 1939: 4⫺5). Metaphors for
the written standard tended to be taken from culture and order instead:
Die Schriftsprache ist strengen Regeln unterworfen im Wortschatz, Formenbildung, Satzbau

und Ausdruck (sic); sie führt ein Leben in Zurückhaltung, in steter Anpassung an das geistige
Leben der Nation. In ihr erklingen die Werke der Dichter, Gelehrten; sie muß in Zeitung und
Rundfunk angewandt werden, in ihr wünschen wir die großen Reden unserer Volksführer zu
hören. […] Sie ist das Sinnbild der deutschen Einheit.
‘The written language is subject to strict rules of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and expres-
sion; it leads a life of restraint, continually adapting to the mentality of the nation. It echoes
the works of poets and scientists; it must be printed in the newspaper and heard on the
radio, as it is the written language that we wish to hear used in the great speeches of our
people’s leaders. […] It is the symbol of German unity.’ (Martin 1939: 5)
While dialectology attempted to cash in on the spiritual warmth of Heimat ‘homeland’

connotations, standard varieties seemed to lack this feeling. Simple minds like Bernhard
Martin even emphasize that the written variety preserves the best of the various dialectal
achievements, but still has no Heimat:
Während die Schriftsprache das ihr Gemäße auswählt und festhält aus dem sprachlichen
Gute aller Stämme und Landschaften, dadurch nirgends und überall daheim ist, steht die
Mundart mit festen Füßen auf der heimischen Erde, ist ein Ausdruck dieser Heimat selbst.
'‘While the written language selects that which is appropriate, retaining the linguistic good
of all tribes and regions, it is thus nowhere and everywhere at home, whereas the dialect is
firmly grounded on the soil of the homeland; it is an expression of this homeland in itself.’
(Martin 1939: 9)
4. The discourse environment o cultural morphology

In the dialectological writings of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, cultural morphology is
held in high esteem. Frings and his followers (such as Friedrich Maurer, Adolf Bach,
Ernst Schwarz) are said to have overcome the isolated existence of dialect research and
to have promoted the status of this branch of the humanities to a ground-breaking and
integral partner of German cultural history (see Schwarz 1950: 193; Martin 1939: 92). It
is repeated almost ritually that cultural morphology has shaped our perspective on the
large scale dynamics of cultural traits in space.
The term cultural morphology was selected, as it could easily be associated with
Spengler’s popular philosophy of emerging and declining cultures, well-known among
the educated people of the 1920s (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, printed first in 1918⫺
1922). In Spengler’s Kulturkreislehre, the vitality of cultures in history is assessed in terms
of competition with rival cultures. By calling dialect geography kulturmorphologisch, it
was implied that dialectological maps could serve as evidence for the description of these
cultural dynamics in space, elevating Spengler’s philosophy of culture to the level of
sound empirical research.
Dialectological cultural morphology was by far not the only attempt to benefit from
Spengler’s immense popularity. In 1936, the philosopher Eduard Spranger published a
short volume entitled Probleme der Kulturmorphologie, claiming to help “die Aufgaben
verstehen, die die kommenden Kulturbegegnungen uns auferlegen werden” [‘to under-
stand the tasks which coming cultural encounters will impose on us’] (Spranger 1936:
40). What happens when dynamic and expanding cultures (either by settling outside their
territories, or in colonization, or in the remote contacts of trade and communication)
interact with other cultures in space? The settings in question mirror exactly the factors
assumed to be relevant for dialect dynamics: settlements abroad, colonization, trade and
commerce. Spranger suggests that the results of cultural contact differ widely according
to the circumstances of the contact: settlement and colonization confront cultures in the
same space, so traits have to either mix and mingle, or else the superior one destroys
and replaces the others. Trade, communication, and political exchange do not take place
on the same territory, and they are said to result in a leveling (Ausgleich, Spranger 1936:
7⫺8). The examples discussed by Spranger include the spread of Christianity, the ex-
change between Romanen and Germanen in the West, and the German colonies lost
during World War I. In reading Spranger’s text, we also understand that the new human-
ities (among them dialectology) lay claim to political relevance:
Die tiefgehende nationale Selbstbesinnung, zu der das deutsche Volk seit kurzem wieder
erwacht ist, legt die Frage nach dem Eigenen und Ursprünglichen der deutschen kulturfor-
menden Kräfte nahe.
‘The deep-rooted national self-reflection to which the German people re-awoke a short while
ago brings the question of what is proper and original in the forces which shape German
culture into the foreground.’ (Spranger 1936: 9)
Returning to dialectology proper, we find that towards the end of the National Socialist
era, there were two competing models claiming to account for the spread of dialectal
features in space, and both, in a broad sense, had accepted the innovations brought
about by Theodor Frings and his followers in cultural morphology. The model advocated
by Frings himself was based on the idea of sequences of “waves”, piling up and overlap-
ping with other waves, pushing features continually forward, surrounding and isolating
obstacles. The populations in this space could either show reluctance or eagerness in
adopting new features. This model gives prominence and strength to urban centers of
trade, communication and political power. It is these factors that send the waves of
change towards the periphery, and the more distant they become, the less impact they
have. The competing model, advocated by Walther Mitzka, included primarily rural,
loosely-knit networks of isolated settlements (Streusiedlungen), that combined into larger
networks and finally dominated the territory in question completely, thereby isolating
the old features and serving as models to adopt the new ones. There was no privilege
for urban centers in this model. The practitioners of the Sprachatlas (such as Martin
1939: 106⫺107) had no qualms accepting either model. They were convinced that the
two models were compatible with one another and that they both had areas to which
they could be profitably applied. It is remarkable though that adherence to one or the
other of the positions correlates highly with the commitment to the cultural superiority
of either dialect or written standard. The followers of Frings’ model (many of whom
were outside of dialectology proper, like Leo Weisgerber or Hennig Brinkmann) argued
that the unity and strength of the Volk depend primarily on the cultural reach of written
standard, while dialects are seen as a source of fragmentation. The followers of Mitzka,
on the other hand, underlined the stabilizing forces of dialect.
However, the basic tenets of cultural morphology, reshaping the dynamic interrela-
tions of folklore (Volkstum) and the land (Landschaft), can be considered common
ground in the early 1930s. Adolf Bach, a close follower of Theodor Frings, also makes
reference to cultural spaces, “die auf deutschem Volksboden von den Mächten einer
schicksalhaften Geschichte ausgeformt worden sind” [‘which where formed on the Ger-
man space by the powers of a fateful history’] (Bach 1934: 168). At the same time he
recommends that cultural spaces and the dynamics investigated by cultural morphology
be made the fundament of an “organic” restructuring of the provinces of the Reich.
He continues:
Dies Ziel wird dort von besonderer Bedeutung sein, wo wir hinausgehen über die gegenwärti-
gen Grenzen des Deutschen Reiches. Den jenseits von ihnen wohnenden Volksgenossen (und
denen, die Gewalt über sie haben) kann hier aufs nachdrücklichste zum Bewußtsein gebracht
werden, daß politische Grenzen dort sinnlos gezogen sind, wo sie keine Rücksicht nehmen
auf das Volkstum einer Landschaft.
‘This aim will become particularly relevant once moving beyond the present borders of the
German Reich. It will most emphatically enter the consciousness of the compatriots living
beyond the borders (and the consciousness of those who have power over them) that political
borders there have been thoughtlessly drawn and fail to take the Volkstum of a region into
consideration.’ (Bach 1934: 168⫺169)
Cultural morphology established itself as the interdisciplinary study of the dynamic rela-
tions between Volkstum and Landschaft (‘region’ is only an approximate translation)
with the help of dialectology. It was widely accepted even by competitors in the same
field.
5. Metaphors o space (and how they change)

It is a linguistic truism that political as well as scientific key terms can only be fixed in
relation to their antonyms. Programmatic expressions should not be understood in terms
of what they stand for, but rather in terms of what they stand against. The changing
semantics of Raum ‘space’ in the German history of ideas have been described in detail
by Köster (2002). The public career of Raum compounds in Germany before 1945 is
evidently related to imperialism, where the semantics of Raum were meant to cover
national territories together with spheres of (colonial) interest outside the state borders.
From the beginning, Raum was opposed to official state borders. This line of opposition
was of course enforced by the territorial losses of Germany after the war in the Treaty
of Versailles. As of this point in time, there were a number of regions which could be
said to be part of the German space, but did not belong to the German state territory.
There is, however, a second line of reasoning, a second semantic opposition which is
less evident. We tend to think of Raum as static, but it can be shown that in the 1920s
popular compounds underline its dynamic meaning. Raum is seen as a scene of potential
action, a place where forces meet and compete, as a dynamic scene for competing actors.
Köster (2002: 12) cites contemporary sources according to which Raum was interpreted
as a metaphor for the chance to use ones own forces. It is essentially by this dynamic
connotation that the Raum-semantics could be used simultaneously to entail territorializ-
ing and de-territorializing ambitions: the forces that shaped any given cultural space
would at the same time be the forces transcending any spatial limits. From this point of
view, languages that resisted territorialization (like Yiddish) were particularly fascinating
(Auer 2004: 150). In the late 1920s, pioneers of sociolinguistics in Germany (such as
Heinz Kloss, Franz Thierfelder; cf. Hutton 1999: 200⫺205) described Yiddish as a lan-
guage that could help to expand the influence of German in Eastern Europe. The con-
trast between dialect and standard could easily be paralleled with the contrast between
static, spatially bounded varieties on one side and expanding (space-transcending) vari-
eties on the other. This is why Yiddish could not be considered a German dialect: it had
no territorial boundaries. It is evident that early sociolinguists (Georg Schmidt-Rohr as
well as those mentioned above) were convinced that the cultural superiority of written
standard languages depended exactly on their forces as “raumüberwindende Mächte”
‘space-transcending powers’ (cf. Schmidt-Rohr 1934), while dialects were considered to
be static. German language politics abroad (developed by institutions such as the

Deutsche Akademie in Munich) trusted in the ability of the German standard language
(with its tradition in culture, science, philosophy) to gain new ground abroad and eventu-
ally overcome spatial boundaries.
This interpretation of Raum as a dynamic scene where forces meet and compete was
especially compatible with the psychological twist that Georg Simmel, Kantianist phi-
losopher and sociologist, gave to spatial semantics (Simmel 1992: 687⫺687, Köster 2002:
81⫺88). According to Simmel, space is a mental construct; it is the way we perceive the
scenes for all forms of social interaction. Borders are not real in Euclidean space, but
are the results of social constructions, which evolve from interaction between individuals;
we perceive them as features of the territory:
Nicht der Raum, sondern die von der Seele her erfolgende Gliederung und Zusammenfas-
sung seiner Teile hat gesellschaftliche Bedeutung.
‘Not space, but the mental structuring and unification of its parts have social meaning.’
(Simmel 1992: 688)
It can easily be shown that this ambiguous mix of naturalist and territorializing concep-
tions of space on one hand, and psychological and interactive conceptions on the other,
was also relevant in the above-mentioned controversies regarding cultural morphology.
Walther Mitzka’s critical attitude towards cultural morphology is related to his psycho-
logical concept of space which attributes cultural superiority to the individuals’ positive
attitudes towards their dialect, while the model of cultural morphology is much more
dependent on the results of physical barriers, medieval political territories and routes of
trade and communication. But, of course, this type of conflict is quite common for
hegemonic key terms. They can be considered key terms because every person in the
discursive field has to clarify his own position and perspective on its implications, not
because there is consensus on these implications. All word compounds ending in Raum
though ⫺ such as Lebensraum (life-space), Volksraum (ethnic space), Sprachraum (lan-
guage space), Wirtschaftsraum (economic space), Kulturraum (cultural space) ⫺ which
flooded discourse during the 1930s, related the social activities of the Volk to the realm
of political power and geography. Operating on common (ethno-Darwinist) ground, the
proponents of spatial concepts disagreed widely on the importance of language, econ-
omy, culture, race for space. Linguists, of course, tended to believe that it was language
that created the Volk. In an attempt to sort out the various concepts, Schmidt-Rohr
(1936) writes:
Der Volksraum, der als geopolitische Größe oft übersehen wurde, ist der geographische
Raum, insofern er von einer wesenseinheitlichen Bevölkerung bewohnt wird. Diese Gebiete
sind wesentlich Einheiten infolge eines einheitlichen geistigen Verkehrs. Die Grenzen sind
wesentlich da gezogen, wo Verschiedenheit der Mittel des geistigen Verkehrs die Möglichkeit
dieses Verkehrs aufhebt, wo verschiedene Sprachen aneinander stoßen.
‘The Volksraum, which is often overlooked as a geopolitical factor, is the geographical space
inasmuch as it is inhabited by a population similar in kind. These territories are relevant
units because of a unified, shared mentality. The borders are by and largely drawn where
the differences in the means of communication render discourse impossible, in other words,
where different languages meet.’ (Schmidt-Rohr 1936: 242)
And while Schmidt-Rohr, a critic of dialectal fragmentation in Germany, predicted that

in contact situations the winning language will be the one that is structurally superior in
culture, literature, press, dialectologists like Mitzka claimed the superiority of the dialect
by stressing its closer psychological ties to the speakers and their local identities.
Spaces of language contact are determined by the dynamic value differences (“dynam-
ische Wertverschiedenheit”, Schmidt-Rohr 1936: 243) and by the cultural reach of the
languages involved. Bilingual settings do not last, they are considered to be unnatural.
One of the languages will have to retreat eventually. The power of (written standard)
languages to overcome distances in space is amplified by technical means, as Schmidt-
Rohr states (1934: 203). There are no limits governing the extent to which languages
create and enlarge intellectual spaces for their speakers. Proto-sociologists of language
such as Schmidt-Rohr (1936: 243) or Heinz Kloss (e.g., 1929) tend to identify the cultural
scope and value of a language with its political force.
By this equation, strengthening the cultural and intellectual community of one’s
mother tongue becomes a political program. Emigrants from Germany are thought to
be part of the Volk as long as they still command their mother tongue ⫺ hence the
political wish to reinforce their loyalty by strengthening their linguistic ties to the Reich.
In border regions and linguistic enclaves (Sprachinseln; see Kuhn 1934), people have to
be protected against the temptations and seductions of attractive contact languages they
are exposed to. And abroad, in the territory of the enemy, minority languages (like the
Celtic languages in France, Ireland, Wales) have to be encouraged in their struggle
against the linguistic centralism of the state. The basic principle of linguistic nationalism
was that political borders should mirror linguistic borders, which tends to render politi-
cal power illegitimate for linguistic minorities in any state. These in turn find their pro-
tector (Schutzmacht) in states, where their mother tongue is the official language.
6. Stamm, Raum, Volk competing key terms o

the dialectological debates in the 1930s
From this point of view, it was a severe disadvantage of the traditional key term of
dialectology, the Stamm ‘tribe’, that it had no dynamic connotations; instead, it presup-
posed stable territorial grounding and particularism with respect to the standard lan-
guage. In the nineteenth century, dialect borders had been explained by the settlement
borders of the old tribal groups going back to the age of the Great Migration. Their
dialects were neither written nor vehicles of social advancement, nor fit to be propagated
by modern means of communication. The tribes were thought to be leftovers of a world
that had been overcome by the rise of nation-state. In the eyes of modernists (like Bach
1934), the rhetoric of the Stamm suggested that dialects (and dialectologists) were living
in the past. While England and France looked back on centuries of political and linguis-
tic centralism, German Stämme (and their linguistic correlates, the traditional dialects)
served as reminders that behind the short history of the German central state there
lurked the remains of primitive social bodies.
The archaism behind tribal rhetoric, however, does not give the whole story. In the
Weimar Republic, the German Stämme were part of the political agenda and even pres-
ent in the text of the constitution, which had “das deutsche Volk einig in seinen
Stämmen” [‘the German people united in its tribes”] (cf. Oberkrome 2004: 15). Among
the most popular works of literary history was Josef Nadler’s Literaturgeschichte der
deutschen Stämme und Landschaften. The proceedings of the Siebenter deutscher Soziolo-
gentag in Berlin 1930 provide evidence that the most prominent speakers of German
humanities seriously debated the problem of Stämme. The reasons for this untimely
boom are not easy to grasp. Firstly, the appeal of the Stämme reflects the high priority
that was given to the Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum as a field of political relevance in
the new humanities. Linguistic and cultural identities of Germans abroad were thought
to be heavily impregnated by their tribal loyalties. Secondly, it was the Stämme that
marked the semantic opposition towards the waves of western popular culture (Stam-
meskultur versus Massenkultur) that proved to be so threatening for the German conser-
vative middle class identity. Strengthening regional and cultural ties seemed to be an
effective means of protection against the temptations of western popular culture. Thirdly,
being communities of descent placed the tribes closer to racial categories.
Therefore, within German dialectology, there remained influential groups of research-
ers who relied on a modernized Stämme terminology, among them Walther Mitzka. In
order to modernize tribal rhetoric in dialectology, it had to be separated from the old,
static concept of space and adjusted to the new, dynamic one propagated by cultural
morphology. Ironically, it was of all people Hermann Aubin, co-founder of cultural
morphology, who set out to modernize this relationship between Stamm and space, the
same person who denied any credit to the archaic and static model of the German tribes
with their invariable nature-like properties, their common descent and stable settlement
places. Aubin redefined Stämme as historical and cultural subjects, shaped by the ever
changing influences of geography, politics, religion, ideology, commerce and contact with
other groups. In short, the formation of tribes was considered to be an ongoing affair,
not an accomplished fact of history (Aubin 1931; Oberkrome 2004: 16⫺17). Max Hilde-
bert Boehm, a famous spokesman of the conservative branches of the humanities in
1930, subtly dissected the key terms of his time in his programmatic sketch of the human-
ities as Volkswissenschaften ‘ethnic sciences’:
Wir brauchen aber dem Abstammungsmoment nur eine kleine Wendung zu geben, um die
Vorstellung vom Stamm als natürlich bedingter Art auf eine bezeichnende Weise zu verän-
dern. […] Wir leben als Stammesgenossen von heute in der Vorstellung, nicht bloße Anlagen,
sondern eine bestimmende Art und einen besonderen Geist geerbt zu haben. Damit aber
verschmilzt die naturhafte Artprägung des Stammes mit einem partikularen geistigen Über-
lieferungszusammenhang und einem darauf gegründeten Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Der Stamm
fühlt sich älter als das Volk. Er hat sich als gefestigte Volkspersönlichkeit aufgegeben, aber
seine besondere Volksart nicht nur leiblich, sondern auch geistig bewahrt. Und dies sein
verdämmerndes, gestalt- und willenlos gewordenes Sondersein erscheint ihm auch auf der
geistigen Ebene als ein Stück Natur im Vergleich zu der formenden, fordernden, normsetzen-
den Kultur des Volkes, in die der Mensch erst durch Erziehung und Lehre völlig hinein-
wächst. […] Aber das Stammestum erhält sich im Gefühl des Menschen gleichsam als ein
umhegter Bereich des Mütterlichsten. […] Und dieser lebendige Stamm ist es, der sich mit
Behelfen aus dem Bestande der naiven Popularwissenschaft seiner Zeit den Glauben an Artg-
leichheit, gemeinsame Abstammung, Taten der Väter, umgreifbares Gemeinschaftsgut und
dergleichen mehr auferbaut. Wie trügerisch dieser Glaube sein kann, hat beispielsweise die
jüngste deutsche Mundartforschung gezeigt.
‘But we only need to give a small twist to the notion of descent in order to change the view
of the Stamm as a naturally conditioned kind in a characteristic way. […] Today, we people
of the same Stamm believe to have inherited not only predispositions, but also a certain way
of being and a special Geist. In this way, the natural formation of the Stamm becomes
amalgamated with a particular mental tradition and a feeling of togetherness which is based
on it. The Stamm thinks of itself (sic) as being older than the people. It has given up itself
as a solid Volk personality but has maintained his special ethnic way of being not only
physically, but also spiritually. And this gloomy specialness of being that has lost shape and
will, now appears to it as a piece of nature on the spiritual level, when compared to the
forming, demanding and norm-setting culture of the Volk, into which man only grows com-
pletely by education and teaching. […] But in man’s emotions the Stamm is in a sense pre-
served like a cherished area of the most motherly. […] And it is this lively Stamm which
construes the belief in similarity of the kind, in common descent, deeds of the fathers, em-
braceable shared values and so on with props from the repertoire of naı̈ve popular science.
Recent German dialectology, for instance, has shown how this belief can be deceiving.’
(Boehm 1932: 107⫺108)
Boehm was definitely hostile towards the Stämme. From his perspective, the use of tribal
discourse implies that a nation is incapable of doing away with its origins. Such a nation
will dissolve and fall apart and eventually be nothing more than a collection of tribes,
which in his opinion is a dim and miserable fate, exemplified by Luxemburg (Boehm
1932: 110). The allusion to late German dialectology in the end of the citation is aimed
at cultural morphology. Some of the proponents of cultural morphology (in particular
Adolf Bach; see Bach 1934: 46) did not even use the word Stämme without distancing
quotation marks ⫺ this shows that the discourse of the Stamm in its pure and unrefined
form was incompatible with cultural morphology as well as with the ideology of the
standard language.
It was also Walther Mitzka who re-implemented modernized Stämme in the heart
of German dialectology, the Sprachatlas. Whereas dialectology in the traditions of the
nineteenth century had only known the Stämme, Mitzka introduced a two-way terminol-
ogy, consisting of Altstämme and Neustämme (paralleled with Altland and Neuland). Cul-
tural-historical dynamics, introduced into the debate by Aubin, were seen mainly on the
side of Neustämme which were thought to have been formed in colonization and settle-
ment movements of German origin in Eastern Europe. It is important to keep in mind
that the role of Stämme was still debated in German dialectology as late as the 1960s
(cf. Moser 1961).
Cultural morphology on the whole, however, pursued Ferdinand Wrede’s position on
the Stämme, which amounted to the statement that they were widely irrelevant (Wrede
1902). As the only evidence available for tribal boundaries was dialectal evidence, they
were suspected to be circular. For Wrede, only if later medieval territories reflected and
continued tribal territories, the latter were considered to be relevant at all. Even Mitzka
(1943: 40) states explicitly that the relevance of old Stamm borderlines cannot be proven,
if later territorial boundaries are drawn along the same lines: the dialectal line in that
case could also be of later origin. It should also be noted that vague, romantic notions
such as Stamm had no place in sober neogrammarian dialectology which was already
fairly sociological in the 1890s (e.g., Wegener 1891). Cultural morphology adds the idea
that many traits of local dialects cannot be explained by local tradition alone. In addi-
tion, the radiations of cultural centers (such as cities, administrative and religious cen-
ters) must be taken into account (Martin 1939: 101).
Interlocking dialectal regions with urban centers were seen as a result of trade and
communication in cultural morphology. It is important to note that Mitzka’s construc-
tion, though different in argument, serves very similar purposes. For him, the compact
dialectal unity of the Altstämme is lost in their expansion towards the East. German
speaking settlements, partly urban and partly rural, are pushed forward into territories
with different dominating languages. These outposts, with their developing ties and net-
works, transform primary dialects into Verkehrsmundarten ‘regional dialects’, varieties
with a broader reach (Mitzka 1943: 87).
Mitzka and the proponents of cultural morphology shared a certain type of linguistic
frontier myth: while the majority of the other European countries had well-defined terri-
tories and long standing centralized states, the Germans had been continually battling
at their western and eastern frontiers and formed their cultural and linguistic identities
in these battles. Due to (as Frings 1956: 5 writes) the German expansion of territory for
two millennia, it is not surprising to find that they accomplished their linguistic unity at
a meaningful moment of their colonial history. For Mitzka, the most dynamic regions
of the whole process are the border regions and not the cultural and economic centers.
He claims that in the Prussian Northeast, linguistic space was formed by the rural dialect
alone, without any urban influence (Mitzka 1943: 16). Evidently, Mitzka preferred a
version of the frontier myth that credited the persistence of the German Volk mainly to
the peasants with their attachment to the soil, while Frings and the rest of cultural
morphology tended towards a more modernist version of the same myth.
A final point is of interest. There had been a rather paralyzing tendency towards
increasingly fine grained localism in German dialectology until the 1920s. For the popu-
larity of cultural morphology it was certainly helpful that Theodor Frings and his follow-
ers promised to refocus on the “global” tendencies and dynamics of dialects in Germany.
In a programmatic sketch of cultural morphology, Frings and Tille (1925⫺1926: 1) write:
Aus der Kleinarbeit, die F. Wredes Schüler in ihren Dissertationen zum SA geleistet haben,
ist allmählich ein neuer verheißungsvoller Gesichtspunkt entstanden: das Studium der Groß-
bewegungen, die das alte deutsche Stammland von den Alpen bis zur Nordsee durch die
Jahrhunderte mit gleichem, immer wiederkehrendem Rhythmus, in immer wieder erneutem
Südnordstrom durchflutet haben.
‘Out of the detailed work completed by the students of Wrede in their dissertations for the
Sprachatlas, a new, promising point of view has finally emerged: the study of the large
movements that have flooded the old German land from the Alps to the North Sea through
the centuries in the same, ever-repeating rhythm and ever-renewing stream from the south
to the north.’
When we compare to this the theories and models of Mitzka and the Sprachatlas of the
1930s, it becomes apparent that they too were trying to reconnect dialectal localism with
the global accomplishments of German cultural history, although it was their belief that
it was the colonization of Eastern Europe that kept the Volk together.
In the end, it is under the unifying roof of Kulturraumforschung ‘research on cultural
space’ that the different schools of German dialectology meet. Again ironically, the polit-
ical context after 1945 supported a renaissance of cultural morphology (with its inclina-
tion to the West) as well as a renaissance of Stämme dialectology that had become part
of Ostforschung. While the former recoded their western frontier framework in terms of
the common history of Europe and the occident, the latter turned from eastern coloniza-
tion to the fate of the German refugees (Vertriebene). Both schools had in fact mixed
and mingled in the 1920s and 30s. Hermann Aubin (Breslau) and Theodor Frings (Leip-
zig) had moved to the east. Walther Mitzka (Marburg) had been an early activist for
eastward oriented Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum before he became head of the Marburg
Sprachatlas. Adolf Bach spent a few years at the German Reichsuniversität in Strassburg
before he had to return to Bonn and the IGL. Ernst Schwarz, head of the Sudeten-
deutsche Mundartforschung in Prague, went to Erlangen after the war.
7. Conclusion
Cultural morphology was shaped in strategic competition with the rising French sociol-
ogy of language and dialect. Even the name cultural morphology is reminiscent of Emile
Durkheim’s morphologie sociale (1897), a branch of sociology that was to investigate the
elementary forms of social life, such as housing, distribution of population, communica-
tion. In German Geisteswissenschaften, the empirical fields of French sociology were
usually replaced by compounds with either Kultur or Geist. At the same time, the name
cultural morphology also related to Oswald Spenglers immensely popular and alarmist
Der Untergang des Abendlandes where the great cultures of world history are shown to
follow timeless laws of rise and decline.
Cultural morphology was a promising approach for dialectologists. It lead linguists
out of their bemoaned isolation from the other humanities, and instead secured meth-
odological leadership for them: nothing was equal to the Sprachatlas and its dynamic
cartography of culture. The Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde ‘Atlas of German Folklore’
(founded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/Notgemeinschaft in 1928 as a national
flagship project of ethnic science) followed the methods that had been tested in dialectol-
ogy by the Sprachatlas and that had been refined by cultural morphology. Proponents
of cultural morphology initially had a strong position in this atlas, and dialectologists
tried to establish the Wortatlas within it (which was later successfully established by
Mitzka in Marburg). Ethnography and historiography both felt indebted to the dialectol-
ogists. In 1936, Hermann Aubin, one of the leading proponents of cultural morphol-
ogy, wrote:
Modern linguistics has taught us to recognize transformations and assimilations in regional

cultural provinces. Words and forms spread from original localities, the varieties of which,
for some reason or other, are particularly highly valued and therefore imitated as superior.
These forms compete for dominance with the native ones they encounter; they often conquer
wide areas and spaces. The same goes for other cultural traits.
(Aubin 1936: 12; translation C. K.)
Reframed as cultural morphology, dialectology turned modern, dynamic and sociologi-

cal. As a model approach within Kulturraumforschung, it managed to gain prominence
and high reputation among the Geisteswissenschaften, as well as generous funding by the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German Research Council (Ehlers to appear).
While neogrammarian dialectologists were ridiculed as unworldly Lautschieber (sound
shifters), cultural morphology became the most prominent branch of applied linguistics
in Germany and remained in a hegemonic position for at least 40 years. With cultural
morphology, dialectology turned “operative”, for there was something it had to offer to
(ethno)politics. While the impact of cultural morphology is currently down-played in
textbooks of dialectology, one must acknowledge that many social dialectologists and
sociolinguists who are considered modern today were inspired by cultural morphology.
Reference to Aubin, Frings and Müller (1926) can be found in Uriel Weinreich’s Lan-
guages in Contact (Weinreich 1977), and the first generation of “applied” dialectologists
and sociolinguists devoted to “ethnopolitics” (e.g., Walter Kuhn and Heinz Kloss), is
still present in the text books of our day.
8. Reerences
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1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London:
Verso.
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Aubin, Hermann
1936 Schlesische Siedlung beiderseits der Sudeten. Schlesisches Jahrbuch 7: 9⫺28.
Aubin, Hermann, Theodor Frings and Josef Müller
1926 Kulturströmungen und Kulturprovinzen in den Rheinlanden. Bonn: Röhrscheid.
Auer, Peter
2004 Sprache, Grenze, Raum. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 23(2): 149⫺180.
Bach, Adolf
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delberg: Winter.
Barbour, Stephen and Patrick Stevenson
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Boehm, Max Hildebert
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Ditt, Karl
2003 Die Politisierung der Kulturraumforschung in Dritten Reich. Das Beispiel Franz Petri.
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Durkheim, Emile
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to appear Staatlich geförderte Sprachforschung von 1920 bis 1970. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Frings, Theodor
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1925⫺1926 Kulturmorphologie. Teuthonista 2: 1⫺18.
Grober-Glück, Gerda
1982 Die Leistungen der kulturmorphologischen Betrachtungsweise im Rahmen dialektgeo-
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Putschke and Herbert Ernst Wiegand (eds.), Dialektologie. Ein Handbuch zur deutschen
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1999 Linguistics and the Third Reich: Race, mother-tongue fascism and the science of language.
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Kloss, Heinz
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Martin, Bernhard
1959 Die deutschen Mundarten. 2. ed. Marburg: Elwert.
Mitzka, Walther
1941 Bauern- und Bürgersprache im Ausbau des deutschen Volksbodens. In: Franz Koch et al.
(eds.), Von deutscher Art in Sprache und Dichtung, vol. 1. 67⫺96. Berlin: Kohlhammer.
Mitzka, Walther
1943 Deutsche Mundarten. Heidelberg: Winter.
Moser, Hugo
1961 Noch einmal: Stamm und Mundart. Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 28: 32⫺43.
Oberkrome, Willi
1993 Volksgeschichte. Methodische Innovation und völkische Ideologisierung in der deutschen
Geschichtswissenschaft 1918⫺1945. Göttingen: VR.
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Schmidt-Rohr, Georg
1936 Mensch und Raum. Die badische Schule 3: 242⫺244.
Schwarz, Ernst
1950 Die deutschen Mundarten. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
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Spranger, Eduard
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Steinbach, Franz and Franz Petri
1939 Zur Grundlegung der europäischen Einheit durch die Franken. Leipzig: Hirzel.
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8. Language and space: Structuralist and

generative approaches
1. Introduction
2. Structuralist approaches
3. Generative approaches
4. Conclusion
5. References
1. Introduction
In their strictest versions, structuralist and generative approaches to language research

are not concerned with language external determinants of linguistic variation such as
geographical space. This becomes clear when the goals of these theoretical approaches
are compared with the goals of traditional dialectology.
The goal of traditional dialectology is to describe and compare individual dialect

systems and to show the geographic distribution of their linguistic properties. The focus
is on variation in the lexical, phonetic and morphological domain. Geographic maps are
the primary output of this research. These maps show dialect areas and (bundles of)
isoglosses, the borders between different dialect areas defined by one or more linguistic
variables. On the basis of these geographic maps, the interaction between isoglosses and
external factors are studied, such as the influence of natural communicative boundaries
(e.g., swamps, rivers, mountains), political boundaries etc. Geographic maps are also
thought to represent and help study historical change and the way linguistic properties
propagate across a geographical area. Under the assumption that synchronic geographi-
cal variation reflects the diachronic development of a linguistic property, dialectologists
seek to order different synchronic variants in terms of stages of a language, using the
oldest stage as a point of reference.
In structuralist approaches to language variation, an individual language variety is
taken to be a synchronically closed system. The goal of structuralist research is to un-
cover the structure of this system, which is thought to be the sum of the relations be-
tween elements of this system. Linguistic elements cannot be studied in isolation, but
only in their synchronic relations with elements within the same system. Since a linguistic
element is defined by the set of relations it entertains with other elements within the
same system, an element of language variety A that appears in a shape identical to that
of an element of language variety B need not be structurally identical with it as it may
be part of different sets of oppositions in the two systems.
As a result, structuralist research of dialects has often been restricted to a description
of the phoneme inventory of a language variety (or a subsection of it) by analysis of the
linguistic distribution of these phonemes within this variety and to an analysis of pho-
nemes in terms of distinctive features. Structuralist research on dialects at the level of
the lexicon, morphology or syntax has been much less common. The structuralist per-
spective does not immediately invite comparison of diachronically or synchronically re-
lated language varieties and consequently does not yield as many geographical maps as
traditional dialectology. Yet comparative structuralist dialect research does exist, starting
with the influential work of Weinreich (1954) (cf. section 2). Jongen (1982) provides a
good overview of structuralist dialectology and points out that structuralist dialect geog-
raphy has made a major contribution to our understanding of language system internal
conditions for innovation and language change, in addition to the language external
conditions that are central in traditional dialectology. Important work in this domain
includes Moulton (1961), Goossens (1969) and Wiesinger (1970).
If language varieties are synchronically closed systems and should be studied individ-
ually, the delimitation of individual language varieties is important. Since what laymen
call a language or dialect is in reality an aggregate of language varieties with partially
overlapping linguistic properties, this is a serious problem. The most extreme solution
to this problem, in particular in American structuralism, is to break down the object of
description to the idiolectal level, i. e., the total set of speech habits of a single individual
at a given time. However, this is only an apparent solution, as the resulting object usually
will still be heterogeneous: e.g., every speaker masters different styles, and many dialect
speakers also speak the regional and standard varieties related to their dialect.
Generative linguistics can be seen as the successor of structuralism and it shares some
central assumptions with it. In this approach, the description and analysis of language
systems is only an intermediate step towards the eventual goal, which is to characterize
the innate human capacity to acquire a language and to explain the process of language
acquisition. This innate human capacity is taken to be a set of abstract linguistic structur-
ation principles that all natural languages have in common and which define the limits
of language variation. Generative linguistics, in particular in its early stages (i. e. the
1960s and 1970s), explicitly abstracts away from external factors and from much of the
variation. Like structuralism, in its strictest sense, generative grammar studies idealized
idiolects as these would most closely represent language competence. In theory, then, it
would be sufficient to study the language variety of one speaker in great depth to reach
these goals.
In practice, however, the comparative method has played a major role in generative
linguistics. Initially this involved the comparison of genetically less closely related lan-
guages. From the 1990s on, comparison of closely related dialects has been gaining
ground rapidly as well. Some examples are Benincà (1987), Kayne (2000), Poletto (2000),
Zwart (1997), Barbiers et al. (2005, 2008) for syntax and Antilla (2006) for phonology.
To the extent that such research produces geographic maps, these maps are not the goal
of the research but only a helpful tool. Analysis of the external distribution of linguistic
features has a very low priority.
While the structuralist approach is largely restricted to the (morpho-)phonological
system, in the generative approach both (morpho-)phonology, (morpho-)syntax and se-
mantics are central research domains. The study of the lexicon and thus lexical variation
is less prominent and the same holds for phonetic variation. Finally, the generative ap-
proach differs from structuralism and dialectology methodologically. The latter ap-
proaches can be characterized as primarily descriptive. Generative linguistics is more
theoretically oriented and uses the hypothethicodeductive method for data collection
and analysis. In view of its structuralist roots and its increasingly micro- and macrocom-
parative orientation current generative linguistics can be seen as an eclectic combination
of dialectological, structural, typological and formal-theoretical approaches.
2. Structuralist approaches
The structuralist approach to language variation developed out of the Vienna tradition
of the Neogrammarians (e.g., Pfalz’s 1918 Reihenschritttheorie; cf. Murray, this volume,
and Schmidt, this volume, for the relation between the neogrammarian and the structur-
alist approach), and is usually taken to start with the publication of de Saussure’s Cours
de Linguistique générale in 1916. De Saussure (1949: 20) defines as the task of general
linguistics to describe all the linguistic systems of the world. Weinreich (1954: 390) argues
that if this means that idiolects in the sense described above are the object of study, the
task of structuralist linguistics would be inexhaustible, and its results would be trivial
and hardly worth the effort.
Comparison of language varieties therefore requires a more flexible version of struc-
turalism. To make a structuralist approach to spatially determined variation possible,
Weinreich proposes that so called diasystems should be the object of structuralist re-
search. The linguistic analyst can construct a diasystem out of two or more systems that
have partial similarities. Diasystems are not just the linguists’ constructions but have
psychological reality for bilingual (or: bidialectal) speakers. Structural dialectology is the
investigation of the problems arising out of the joint treatment of different systems which
show partial similarity. In its focus on the language internal properties of linguistic sys-
tems, structuralist dialectology can fruitfully abstract away from extra-structural factors
such as geography, ethnography, political and cultural history.
In fact, the study of diasystems had already been an important part of traditional
dialectology before the advent of structuralism. However, the structuralist approach to
diasystems yields questions and results that are considerably different from the results
of dialectology. This holds both at the level of the analysis of the system and at the level
of the geographical description (mapping) of linguistic variables. The main difference
between the diasystems constructed by traditional dialectologists and those constructed
by structuralists is that traditional dialectologists tend to ignore the structures of the
constituent varieties. Weinreich (1954: 392) notes that dialectology compares linguistic
elements belonging to different systems without sufficiently stressing their intimate mem-
bership in those systems. This amounts to a non-phonemic (or phonetic) approach to
variation in the domain of sounds.
An example from Weinreich (1954: 392⫺393) serves to illustrate the different analyti-
cal results of the dialectological and structural approaches. Suppose four speakers of a
language pronounce the word man in the following ways: (1) [man], (2) [man], (3) [mån]
and (4) [mån]. On the basis of these pronunciations alone, a non-structural analysis
would conclude that (1) and (2) should be grouped together and distinguished from the
group formed by speakers (3) and (4). Suppose now the following hypothetical system.
Informant (1) speaks a variety in which vowel length is a distinctive feature, such that a
short vowel in a word cannot be replaced by a long vowel without changing the meaning
of that word. The form of informant (1) is then phonemically /măn/. Informant (2)
does not distinguish vowel length and has /man/. In the system of informant (3), the
pronunciation of [å] in [mån] is a positional, non-distinctive rounded variant of [a] show-
ing up between /m/ and /n/. Phonemically, informant (3) has /man/. The fourth variety
does not have this positional variation. Informant (4) has /mon/. Thus, according to this
structural analysis, system (2) and (3) are the same and group together, while systems
(1) and (4) are different.
The dialectological analysis of this hypothetical system yields a map of the /a/ area
that is split into two parts by the isogloss between [a] and [å]. According to the structural
analysis, however, this isogloss is less important than the one between [mån] ⫽ /man/
and [mån] ⫽ /mon/. The latter isogloss is absent on the dialectological map as it does
not correspond to any difference in pronunciation.
Thus, structural dialectology can make its own important contribution to our insights
about the geographical distribution of diasystems and that of the individual language
varieties within such systems, despite the fact that it is primarily concerned with the
system-internal properties of language varieties. This is relevant for traditional dialectol-
ogy, too, with its focus on the external distribution of linguistic variables. At the same
time, structural dialectology with its central hypothesis of language varieties as syn-
chronically closed systems needs the methods of traditional and modern dialectology to
be able to delimit the language varieties and diasystems of which it wants to investigate
the structural properties. This gives rise to advanced statistical analysis of the corre-
lations between linguistic variables within one linguistic level (e.g., phonology), across
levels (e.g., correlations between phonological and syntactic variables) and between lin-
guistic variables and language-external factors.
Jongen (1982) provides a more extensive introduction to structural dialectology in-
cluding many illustrative case studies.
3. Generative approaches
Generative linguistics investigates I-language, the internal mental representation of a
language variety as a specific instantiation of Universal Grammar, the hypothesized set
of innate abstract linguistic building principles that define the limits of linguistic varia-
tion. E-language, the external properties and distribution of linguistic variables in social
and geographical space and time, does not belong to its research domain. Like structur-
alism, generative linguistics studies language competence, not language use. As a result,
generative linguistics initially abstracted away from a large part of variation, including
dialectal variation. This does not mean that dialects cannot be the subject of generative
research, since every dialect is just another instantiation of Universal Grammar. How-
ever, until the early 1990s, dialects played a very minor role in generative research,
mainly for methodological reasons. Since native speakers’ intuitions about linguistic con-
structs are the primary source of data in generative linguistics and since the intuitions
of the researcher and his or her circle, often speakers of a standard language, are the
most directly accessible ones, there were hardly any attempts to shift the attention to dia-
lects.
At the same time, it was clear from the start of the generative enterprise that compar-
ing different language varieties is necessary to discover universal properties, and it was
also clear that any linguistic theory based on the Universal Grammar hypothesis, should
be able to explain the attested variation. In practice then, until the 1990s, generative
grammarians on the one hand investigated the (morpho-)phonological, (morpho-)syn-
tactic and semantic properties of usually standard or national languages, and developed
explicit formal grammars that were designed to generate all and only the well-formed
structures of a language. Obviously, these always were partial grammars, since the tre-
mendous complexity of languages and the delimitation problem made it impossible to
formulate grammars for entire language varieties. On the other hand, by comparing the
grammars of different languages, a theory was developed to account for the attested
variation between these languages (macrovariation). However, a theoretical and meth-
odological apparatus for investigating intra-language variation (microvariation) was
lacking.
If we assume the generative period to start with Chomsky (1955, 1957), the period
from 1955 until today can be roughly divided into two: a rule-based part and a con-
straint-based part. In (morpho-)syntax, primarily rule-based approaches gradually devel-
oped into constraint-based approaches such as the Principles and Parameters model (cf.
Chomsky 1981) and the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1992: 1995). In phonology, the
switch to a constraint-based model coincides with the beginnings of Optimality Theory
(McCarthy and Prince 1993; Prince and Smolensky 1993).
3.1. Phonological microvariation
3.1.1. Rule-based approaches to phonology
Generative phonology starts with The Sound Pattern of English (SPE; Chomsky and
Halle 1968). It presents a comprehensive view of the phonology of English, and is a
landmark in the field of phonology. Like Chomsky’s syntactic work, SPE is based on
the assumption that the mental grammar has a modular organization. The lexical, pho-
nological and syntactic components of this grammar are relatively independent but in-
teracting modules. In this view, phonology can be studied as a linguistic subsystem,
separate from other components of the grammar. The phonetic form uttered by a
speaker is the result of applying context-sensitive derivational rules to an underlying
phonemic sequence. As in structuralism, phonemes are not primitive units but bundles
of plus-or-minus valued features based on articulatory and perceptual properties of
sounds such as vocalic, high, back, anterior, nasal, sonorant, etc. The oppositions be-
tween these features define the inventory of phonemes of a language variety. The phono-
logical component of each lexical entry is considered to be a linear sequence of these
feature bundles.
Derivatives of SPE have made modifications by changing the inventory of segmental
features, considering some to be absent rather than having a positive or negative value,
or adding complexity to the linear, segmental structure assumed by Chomsky and Halle.
Two major successor theories are Lexical Phonology and Morphology, and Autosegmen-
tal Phonology.
Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982) involves a theory of the organi-
zation of grammar. It deals with the relationship between phonology, morphology and
the lexicon and has as its basic claim that all morphological processes, and many phono-
logical ones, are located in the lexicon. Phonological rules fall into two classes, lexical
rules, which may interact with morphological rules (see below), and postlexical rules,
which may not interact with morphological rules. Morphology and phonology apply in
tandem. After every word-formation rule, lexical phonological rules re-apply. The effect
of this is that lexical phonological rules apply cyclically.
Autosegmental Phonology was developed by Goldsmith (1990 [1976]) based on ideas
of Bloch (1948), Firth (1948) and Hockett (1955). According to this theory, phonological
representations consist of more than one linear sequence of segments. Each linear se-
quence constitutes a separate tier. The co-registration of elements (or autosegments) on
one tier with those on another is represented by association lines. Each phonemic feature
in a language appears on exactly one tier. A large part of phonological generalizations
are interpreted as a restructuring or reorganization of the autosegments in a representa-
tion. For example, two vowels that are separated by a consonant in a linear sequence
can be adjacent on their own tier, which explains why assimilation processes between
linearly non-adjacent vowels are sometimes possible. Some important examples of the
usefulness of autosegmental analysis include the study of vowel and nasal harmony sys-
tems (Clements 1976) and the vocalism and consonantism of Arabic (McCarthy 1981).
3.1.2. Microvariation in rule-based phonology
In a rule-based theory, the potential loci of (for instance, dialectological) variation within
a language include: (i) variation in the inventory of distinctive features that are active in
a language variety, and thus variation in the phoneme inventory (cf. Weinreich’s hypo-
thetical example discussed above involving the absence of the distinctive feature vowel
length); (ii) variation in the transforming rules that are active, including the optional or
obligatory character of their application; (iii) variation in the linguistic context in which
a rule applies; (iv) variation in the order in which different rules apply (cf. Bailey 1973);
(v) variation in the levels at which different rules apply (e.g., root, stem, word, post-
lexical).
The rule-based approach to microphonological variation, in particular the effect of
rule ordering and optionality of rule application, can be illustrated with the following
Finnish case taken from Antilla (2006). The relevant rules of the phonological system of
Finnish are given in (1), each with an example. The degemination rule applies to all
geminate stops in the given context.
(1) Vowel deletion a J Ø / _i huuta-i J huuti

‘shout-past’
Assibilation (optional) t J s / _i huut-i ~ huusi
‘shout-past’
Degemination tt J t / _VC ott-i-n J otin
‘take-past’
Apocope (optional) i J Ø huus-i ~ huus
‘shout-past’
These rules must apply in the order given in (1) to derive the facts:
(2) a. Vowel deletion feeds Assibilation

/huuta-i / J huuti J huusi ‘shout-past’
b. Degemination counterfeeds Assibilation
/otta-i-n / J ottin J otin (*osin) ‘take-past-1p.sg’
c. Apocope counterfeeds Degemination
/hakkat-i / J hakkasi J hakkas (*hakas) ‘beat-past’
d. Vowel deletion feeds Degimination
/otta-i-n / J ottin J otin ‘take-past-1p.sg’
e. Apocope counterbleeds Assibilation
/huuta-i / J huuti J huusi J huus ‘shout-past’
This ordering of rules predicts a four-way variation, given that assibilation and apocope
apply optionally:
(3) /lentä-i/ /lentä-i/ /lentä-i/ /lentä-i/

Vowel Deletion lenti lenti lenti lenti
Assibilation (optional) ⫺ lensi ⫺ lensi
Degemination ⫺ ⫺ ⫺ ⫺
Apocope (optional) ⫺ ⫺ lent lens
[lenti] ~ [lensi] ~ [lent] ~ [lens]
Southeastern Finnish is an example of a dialect in which exactly these four variants

occur. The extrinsic ordering of rules is crucial. If Assibilation were to follow Apocope,
a three-way variation was predicted: lenti ~ lensi ~ lent, but no *lens, since the relevant
environment for Assibilation is lost after Apocope of /i/ from [lenti]. There are no Finnish
dialects with this three-way variation.
Optionality in the phonological system is often not completely free: the application
of a rule is frequently determined by language-external (sociolinguistic) factors. Labov
(1969) and Cedergren and Sankoff (1974) developed a statistical technique to estimate
the relative weight of internal and external factors based on corpus frequencies. They
proposed to associate the resulting weights with the structural descriptions of SPE-style
rules, giving rise to so called variable rules.
3.1.3. Constraint-based approaches to phonology
The constraint-based approach to phonology currently known as Optimality Theory

(OT) started with Prince and Smolensky (1993 [2004]) and McCarthy and Prince (1993)
and has now almost completely replaced the derivational rule model of SPE and its
successors. In the OT paradigm there are no derivational rules. The central idea of OT
is that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting
constraints. An OT grammar has three basic components (cf. Archangeli and Langen-
doen 1997; Kager 1999; Antilla 2003 for good introductions):
(i) The lexicon, which provides the set of underlying forms. A crucial hypothesis of
OT is that there are no language-specific constraints on the input (the so called
richness of the base): Every grammar is able to deal with every input. For example,
the grammar of a language that does not allow complex consonant clusters should
tell us what happens with the underlying form /flask/. Two options are vowel epen-
thesis (e.g., falasak) and consonant deletion (e.g., las).
(ii) The generator (GEN) generates the list of possible outputs, or candidates, on the
basis of the input from the lexicon. Lexical items, i. e. linear phoneme sequences,
are the input to the generator. GEN is maximally permissive, i. e. any output candi-
date is permitted for any input candidate within the limits of structural well-
formedness. Thus, in the example in (i), vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion
are not rules or operations, but terms that describe differences between the input
and the output.
(iii) The evaluator (EVAL) contains a universal constraint set (CON). There are two
types of constraints. Faithfulness constraints prefer the output that most closely
resembles the input. Markedness constraints prefer the phonologically least marked
output. All constraints are active in all languages, but languages differ in the rank-
ing of the constraints. On the basis of this constraint ranking, the evaluator selects
the least offensive candidate from among the output candidates. This is the optimal
candidate and the actual output.
3.1.4. Microvariation in constraint-based phonology
Here is an example from Antilla (2003: 214⫺215) to illustrate how this theory works.
The relevant constraints are given in (4). We assume the ranking in (5) for a hypothetical
dialect of English, where X >> Y means that X outranks Y.
(4) Onset Onsets are required (markedness)

*CxCod No coda clusters (markedness)
Max(C) No consonant deletion (faithfulness)
(5) Onset >> *CxCod >> Max(C)
Suppose the input form is /m=st/ and two relevant output forms delivered by the Genera-
tor are [m=st] and [m=s]. Both variants have an onset and thus satisfy Onset. The variant
[m=st] has a coda cluster [st] and therefore violates the constraint *CxCod. The vari-
ant [m=s] has no coda cluster but violates the constraint Max(C) because the final
consonant [t] is deleted. According to the ranking in (5), the identity of the input to
the output (faithfulness) imposed by Max(C) is less important in this dialect than
the markedness of a coda cluster. As a result, [m=s] is the optimal candidate even
though it violates Max(C).
In this hypothetical dialect, then, final [t] is invariably deleted to avoid coda clusters.
If the ranking of *CxCod >> Max(C) were the reverse such that it would be more
important to not delete the consonant than to have a complex coda, we would get a
dialect in which the final [t] is invariably retained.
Thus, according to OT, language varieties do not differ in the constraints that are
active, but in the rankings of universal constraints. The language particular rankings of
constraints are the primary locus of cross-linguistic variation in OT. In a diasystem, we
expect minimal differences in the ranking of constraints to capture the minimal differ-
ences between the language varieties, and we expect more rigorous rerankings to yield
different diasystems.
Constraint ranking is not the only locus of variation in OT. Antilla (2003) mentions
the following additional loci: tied violations, pseudo-optionality, multiple grammars,
stratified grammars and continuously ranking grammars.
We have a tied violation if two or more candidates incur exactly the same violations
with respect to all the constraints of a grammar. Since the grammar in such a case
defines two equivalent outputs, this gives rise to intradialectal optionality.
Pseudo-optionality arises when the lexicon is the locus of variation. There is a lexical
choice between two minimally different lexical items, while the constraint ranking is
constant. For example, a language variety has two items in its lexicon which both mean
‘cost’: /cost/ and /cos/. These two variants will not be compared in the competition
between constraints, they each survive their own competition. An argument in favor of
this approach is that different (socio-)linguistic information may be associated with the
lexical items, e.g., that /cos/ is typical for working class colloquial speech. Pseudo-optio-
nality can account for variation both within and across language varieties.
The central hypothesis of the Multiple Grammars Model (Kroch 1989: 1994) for
(morpho-)syntactic variation is that an individual can simultaneously possess several
grammars. This hypothesis is necessary to account for multilingualism. Applying it to
microvariation implies that every speaker is considered to be multilingual. In OT, the
Multiple Grammars Model means that a single speaker commands a set of distinct total
rankings of constraints. This model makes interesting quantitative predictions, as the
following example from Antilla (2003: 219) shows. Suppose a speaker commands three
grammars with the three rankings in (6):
(6) Input Ranking Output

a. /m=st/ Onset >> *CxCod >> Max(C) /m=s/
b. /m=st/ Onset >> Max(C) >> *CxCod /m=st/
c. /m=st/ Max(C) >> *CxCod >> Onset /m=st/
If the three grammars are equivalent, this means that there is 1 : 3 chance that the output
will be /m=s/ and a 2 : 3 chance that it will be /m=st/. This is expected to correspond with
usage frequency. The speaker is predicted to use /m=s/ 33 percent of the time and /m=st/
67 percent.
Special cases of the Multiple Grammar Model include Stratified Grammar (Antilla
2006), which consists of internally unranked strata of constraints which are externally
ranked, Floating Constraints (Reynolds 1994) and Partially Ordered Grammars (Antilla
and Cho 1998).
Finally, a variant of OT that deserves mentioning is the Continuous Ranking Model
(Zubritskaya 1997; Boersma 1998; Boersma and Hayes 2001). According to this model,
ranking of constraints is not discrete but continuous. Each constraint defines a range
that may (temporarily) overlap with the range of another constraint, giving rise to varia-
tion. Boersma and Hayes (2001) developed the Gradual Learning Algorithm that is able
to learn continuously ranked grammars. They also show that Continuously Ranked
Grammars predict the empirical frequency of different variants of a form quite precisely.
3.1.5. Rule-based vs. constraint-based approaches
There are several advantages of OT over the derivational rule model (Roca 1997): (i)
Constraints play an important role in the derivational model too, but in an unprincipled
way and at various levels of the derivation. The derivational model has the disadvantage
that ungrammaticality has two sources: the rules themselves and the constraints. In OT,
only the constraints are responsible for filtering out output structures. (ii) OT provides
a direct formal framework for representing universality and markedness, because both
GEN and the constraints are assumed to be universal and related to markedness. (iii)
OT provides a fertile ground for explaining the learnability of the system, because GEN
and all constraints are included in UG, such that the learnability burden reduces to
constraint ranking (and establishment of lexical representations, in common with tradi-
tional generative theory). (iv) OT dispenses with the power inherent in rule interaction.
(v) OT allows parallel operation of the constraints, and thus a declarative (as against
procedural) formulation of them.
An important problem for OT approaches is Opacity, which becomes clear when we
try to model counterfeeding phenomena of the type discussed in section 3.1.2 in terms
of constraint ranking. The logic of the problem is as follows (adapted from Roca 1997):
Suppose we have a rule A J B /A__ that derives AB from the input AA, and a second
rule B J C /__ ] that changes string final B into C. The first rule feeds the second rule;
together, they turn AA into AC. Suppose we give these two rules the converse order.
Rule B J C /__ ] now does not apply because the string AA does not contain B. Rule A
J B /A__ does apply and this time the output is AB. By the external ordering of rules,
rule A J B /A__ cannot feed Rule B J C /__ ], a counterfeeding relationship. The result-
ing output, [AB] is opaque in the context of this grammar, because it meets the structural
description of one of the rules of this grammar (Rule B J C /__ ] ) to which nonetheless
it has not been subjected.
In an OT approach, the two rules can be translated into the constraints *AA and
*B], disfavoring a sequence of two A’s and a string final B respectively. If these con-
straints work on the input AA, the result will always be AC, regardless of constraint
ordering. The output string AA violates *AA, the output AB violates *B], whereas the
output AC violates neither. Consequently, the string AB which can be derived by rule
ordering in a derivational rule model cannot be accounted for in a constrained-based
model. One approach to solve this problem is Stratal Optimality as proposed in Kipar-
sky (2003) and Antilla (2006). As noted above, in Stratal Optimality constraints belong
to different strata depending on whether they apply in stem phonology, word phonology
or post-lexical phonology.
3.2. Syntactic microvariation
3.2.1. Rule-based approaches to syntax
The development from rule-based to constraint-based approaches discussed for phonol-

ogy in the previous sections has also taken place in syntax. Here as well, the derivational
rule model dominant from the 1950s onwards (Chomsky 1955: 1957) has developed
into the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1992: 1995), a model with a very impoverished
generative module and a major role for constraints. However, the role of constraints in
Minimalism is less clear than in Optimality Theory. In most Minimalist work, constraints
are not ranked and there is no claim to their universality. There is an Optimality theoretic
branch of generative syntax starting with Pesetsky (1997), but this is much less influential
than it is in phonology.
There are various other branches of generative grammar, including Relational Gram-
mar (cf. Perlmutter 1980; Blake 1990), Lexical Functional Grammar (cf. Bresnan 2001),
Categorial Grammar (cf. Steedman 1996), Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar
(Gazdar et al. 1985), Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994).
But since the Chomskyan version of generative grammar, most recently the Principles
and Parameters model (Chomsky 1981) and the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1992:
1995), is by far the most dominant approach to syntactic variation, the discussion will
be restricted to this version.
A rule-based syntax should characterize the syntactic competence of the speaker, i. e.
the knowledge that is necessary to produce and interpret all and only the grammatical
sentences of a language. A rule-based generative syntax has the following components:
(i) Lexicon. This specifies the idiosyncratic (i. e., unpredictable) phonological, morpho-
logical, syntactic and semantic properties of a lexical item. Morphology is usually
taken to be part of the Lexicon, too.
(ii) Rewriting rules. A set of context free rules operating on syntactic categories. Exam-
ple: PP J (AdvP) P NP states that a prepositional phrase consists of an (optional)
adverbial phrase, a preposition and a noun phrase (e.g., right on my head). Phrases
expand to sequences of categories. These categories are then substituted by lexical
items of the relevant category.
(iii) Transformations. A set of operations that change the structures that are the output
of the rewriting component. Examples of transformations are movement of a con-
stituent (e.g., fronting of a wh-word) and deletion.
(iv) Semantic component. A set of rules to interpret the output of the transformational
component semantically. This component interacts with other, non-linguistic cogni-
tive modules.
(v) Phonological component. A set of rules that interprets the output of the transforma-
tional component phonologically. This component is the input for phonetics.
Each module is restricted by universal and language specific constraints.
3.2.2. Microvariation in rule-based syntax
All of the grammar components can be loci of cross- and intralinguistic syntactic varia-
tion. An example of lexical variation is the particle verb bijhebben, lit. ‘by-have, have
with’. In Brabantish, sentence (7a) is grammatical due to the fact that the combination
bij ‘by’ and hebben ‘have’ is lexicalized and expresses a reflexive verb. The same sentence
is impossible in Standard Dutch (7b), in which bijhebben is not lexicalized and bij re-
quires an overt reflexive (7c). The absence of zich in (7a) cannot be explained by assum-
ing deletion or a silent version of the reflexive in (7a), as the reflexive normally cannot
be left out in Brabantish when combined with bij and a different verb (cf. Barbiers and
Bennis 2003; Barbiers et al. 2005):
(7) a. De timmerman heeft geen spijkers bij. Brabantish

the carpenter has no nails by
‘The carpenter has no nails with him.’
b. *De timmerman heeft geen spijkers bij. Standard Dutch
the carpenter has no nails by refl
c. De timmerman heeft geen spijkers bij zich. Standard Dutch
the carpenter has no nails by refl
The rewriting rules can be a locus of syntactic (micro-)variation, too. For example, at
the macrolevel, prepositional (e.g., English) and postpositional languages (e.g., Japanese)
can be distinguished by the rules PP J P NP and PP J NP P. An example at the
microlevel is the expansion of noun phrases. A possessive NP with a third person mascu-
line possessor is expressed as (8a) in Standard Dutch. Colloquial varieties of Dutch have
(8b). The difference can be captured in the rewriting rules in (8c) (irrelevant details and
expansions of the rule are omitted):
(8) a. zijn boek Standard Dutch

his book
b. hem zijn boek Colloquial Dutch
him his book
c. Standard Dutch: NP J PossPron N
Colloquial Dutch: NP J Pron PossPron N
This example also shows that it is not a priori clear which component of the grammar
is the locus of a particular case of variation. An alternative analysis of the contrast
between (8a) and (8b) would be to assume that both Standard and Colloquial Dutch
have the rewrite rule NP J Pron PossPron N, but that only Standard Dutch has a
deletion operation (i. e., a transformation in syntax or phonology) that removes the
personal pronoun.
A possible example of macrovariation in the transformational component is the dis-
tinction between wh-moving languages (e.g., English) and wh-in-situ languages (e.g., Chi-
nese). On such an account, the wh-movement transformation would be absent in lan-
guages like Chinese. Alternatively, languages have been taken to differ in the level at
which a transformation applies, overtly in syntax as in English or covertly at the level
of semantic interpretation (LF: Logical Form) (Huang 1982).
The example of microvariation given in (9) can also be interpreted as a difference in
the transformational component, with the relevant transformational rule in Standard
Dutch being blocked (but see below):
(9) Brabantish/Dutch Brabantish/*Dutch

a. één zo’n raar kind b. zo’n raar kind één
one such a strange child such a strange child one
c. Transformation: Move [NP zo’n raar kind ] across [één].
3.2.3. Microvariation in constraint-based syntax
A central hypothesis of the currently most dominant version of generative grammar, the
Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), is that there is no variation in the rewriting com-
ponent and the transformational component and that there is no optionality in syntax.
All syntactic variation is supposed to be reducible to the lexicon, more specifically to
morphosyntactic feature specification of functional elements, and to the level of phono-
logical form (PF), where the output of the syntactic module is turned into a phonological
structure. It is often assumed that morphology is not part of the Lexicon, as in the pre-
minimalist times, but part of PF, as in Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz
1993).
There are various reasons for this shift in the analysis of linguistic variation. Both
the rewrite component and the transformational component had been impoverished to
a minimum before Minimalism started. Thus, the rewriting component, containing lan-
guage and category specific and partially optional rules was reduced to a general X-bar
theory (Jackendoff 1977) generalizing over all categories and capturing the hypothesis
that at an abstract level the architecture of phrases is the same for all categories. Later
reductions of this component include Chomsky’s (1995) Bare Phrase Structure that does
away with categories and projection labels and leaves Merge (the merger of two elements
or constituents) as the only structure building principle, and Kayne’s (1994) Antisymme-
try, according to which all syntactic structures in all languages are uniformly binary and
right-branching. Similarly, the transformational component was reduced to one opera-
tion, Move, which is the operation Merge applied to a constituent that is already part
of the constituent that it is remerged with. The structures built by Merge are subject to
various universal conditions, such as structural conditions on the operation Move (e.g.,
agreement, locality) and conditions of semantic interpretation (e.g., a verb should have
all the arguments that it is specified for in the lexicon). An advantage of locating variabil-
ity in the Lexicon and at PF is that it makes the task of language acquisition easier:
lexical items have to be learnt anyway and variation at PF is directly observable. Syntac-
tic principles are innate and universal and don’t have to be learnt.
This framework can be called constraint-based because it has a very general structure
generating and manipulating component and a set of conditions or constraints that filter
out ungrammatical structures. The constraint-based era in generative syntax in fact al-
ready started with Chomsky’s (1981) Principles and Parameters (P&P). But other than
in the Minimalist Program, in P&P syntactic variation still can be located in the syntactic
module of the grammar, where building principles are parameterized, the value of
parameters being set in the process of language acquisition on the basis of the input.
The idea of parameters was abandoned in the 1990s as too powerful a mechanism leading
to an explosion of merely descriptive parameters.
In the Minimalist framework, word order variation as exemplified in (9) cannot be
explained in terms of variation in the syntactic component. Rather, movement of the
constituent [NP zo’n raar kind ] across [één] is universally allowed provided that there is
morphosyntactic agreement between these two elements. In Brabantish, there is agree-
ment as the numeral [één] is overtly inflected for gender and agrees with the NP that is
lexically specified for gender. In Standard Dutch, there is no agreement because there
are no gender distinctions on [één], while the NP is lexically specified for gender. Thus,
word order variation is here the result of the interaction between Move, the universal
condition on movement Agree and variation in the morphosyntactic feature specification
of [één]. This effectively reduces this case of syntactic variation to the lexicon (cf. Bar-
biers 2005).
A possible case of reduction to phonological form can be made on the basis of the
data in (10), four variants that occur in varieties of Dutch.
(10) Ik weet niet (‘I don’t know’)

a. wie of dat er komt
who if that there comes
‘who comes’
b. wie of er komt
c. wie dat er komt
d. wie er komt
We assume that the syntactic structure of the left periphery of the embedded clauses in
(10) is identical, consisting of three positions, a wh-word position, a position for interrog-
ative complementizers and a position for unmarked (declarative) complementizers. At
PF, some of these positions can be silent up to recoverability. For example, the unmarked
complementizer dat [finite, subordinate] in Dutch can not be left out except when it co-
occurs with the interrogative complementizer of that has a superset of the features of
dat: [finite, subordinate, interrogative].
An important difference with Optimality Theory is that the constraints in Minimalism
are not ranked and language variation is not modeled as variation in the ranking of
constraints. An Optimality branch of generative syntax does exist, however, starting with
Pesetsky (1997). A recent example is Broekhuis (2008), a framework in which the univer-
sal properties of language are part of the generator and the variable properties part of
an OT type evaluator. Broekhuis (2008) also provides a more extensive comparison of
the various stages of generative grammar with OT.
4. Conclusion
In conclusion, spatially determined phonological and syntactic microvariation play an
important role in current generative theory, in the search for a theory capturing universal
and varying properties of natural language. The main motivation is to enlarge the empir-
ical basis of generative research. Another important motivation is that in Minimalism,
syntactic variation is hypothesized to be the result of minor lexically specified morpho-
syntactic differences. Research into closely related language varieties is an excellent test-
ing ground for this hypothesis, as the effects of minimal morphosyntactic differences on
syntactic structure can be directly observed. The advantage of micro- and macrocom-
parison of large numbers of language varieties is also that potential correlations can be
tested statistically (cf. Spruit 2008). Geographical maps can be helpful in visualizing such
correlations. Eventually, an overall theory of linguistic variation should explain both the
internal and the external factors determining such variation, a goal that is still far away.
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9. Language and space: The variationist approach

1. Introduction
2. The sidelining of the spatial in early variationism
3. Early geolinguistics
4. Subsequent geolinguistic work
6. References
1. Introduction
In this chapter I discuss the extent to which variationist sociolinguistics has (and has
not) engaged with concepts of geographical space and spatiality over the past half cen-
tury. Three clear issues will become apparent. Firstly, variationism has at worst largely
ignored spatiality and at best treated it quite distinctly and separately from other social
factors until relatively recently. Secondly, when it has engaged with space, it has tended
to be a socially devoid, Euclidean, distance-is-all type of space, rather than a socially
rich spatiality, which recognizes that “the fact that social processes take place over space
9. The variationist approach 143
and in a geographically-differentiated world affects their operation” (Massey 1985: 16),

again until relatively recently. And thirdly, space has not, yet again until relatively re-
cently, seen the sort of critique in sociolinguistics that has been witnessed by concepts
such as style (Labov 1966; Bell 1984; Eckert and Rickford 2001; Coupland 2007), gender
(Eckert 1990; Meyerhoff 1996), age (Eckert 1997) and so on.
Below, I discuss how space has been integrated into variationist sociolinguistics. Un-
surprisingly, the conceptualization of space in modern studies of language variation and
change has tracked the development of the same in human geography, but a generation
or so later (Britain 1991: 2002). Perhaps more surprising, however, is the fact that a lot
of early variationist work drew inspiration from economic rather than human geography,
and this heritage survives until the present-day, in, for example, the way that gravity
models still seem central to much work on innovation diffusion (see the critiques of the
application of gravity models to dialectology in Britain 2002, 2004, 2005).
2. The sidelining o the spatial in early variationism
It must have been particularly exciting to be a sociolinguist in the 1960s. A new disci-
pline, radically different both from the emerging giant of generative linguistics and from
traditional dialectology, but drawing inspiration from both (from the former at least in
the very early days, with the concept of variable rules, surviving today in the statistical
package, Varbrul), was busy addressing, amongst other things, the many pressing ques-
tions encapsulated in Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968). The social embedding of
change, captured through the perspective of quantitative variation within the apparent-
time model, was one of the most important breakthroughs in these early heady days,
and one which continues to drive sociolinguists in their research. As the discipline ma-
tured, so many of the tools of the trade were refined, many social categories unpicked
and explored, but the fundamental question of how change was embedded in social
practice endured. That social embedding, however, did not contemplate a place for
space. Space was, instead, treated in a number of ways. Sometimes it was quite simply
ignored. Since most very early sociolinguistic research was conducted in cities (with one
extremely important exception, to be discussed below), and other social factors seemed
more pressing than geography at the time ⫺ class, ethnicity, gender ⫺ and, since random
sampling was used (so there was a nagging pressure to hold all other factors constant
to enable the careful control and analysis of the chosen variable social constraints), space
didn’t enter the picture. Labov’s (1966) study of “New York City”, for example, was a
study of just the Lower East Side of NYC and, even then, only a part of it (Labov 2006:
104). So space was carefully controlled out of the study, and spatial variation within the
neighborhood (let alone within the city) itself not examined. Trudgill’s (1974a) study of
Norwich, however, random-sampled from five different parts of the city, since doing so
“opens up the possibility of investigating geographical variation” (Trudgill 1974a: 22).
He addressed geographical variation within the city specifically in the analysis of (ō) (the
reflexes of ME ō in words such as boat and goat), showing that in the suburb with areas
of newest housing ⫺ Lakenham ⫺ peripheral to the urban centre, more diphthongs were
found than in other suburbs, when social class was held constant. But these were rare
forays into geographical variation in the new urban sociolinguistics. It was seen as dis-
tinct from the crucial social factors of the day and, if mentioned at all in more theoretical
work, was conceptualized largely as a surrogate for time. Here is Weinreich et al. (1968:
155): “the problem of accounting for the geographical transition of dialects across a
territory […] appears to be symmetrical with the problem of accounting for the transition
of dialects through time in one community”. It was typical of the time in the social
sciences to see geographical patterns as fossilizations or slices of time, betraying a histori-
cism much chided by geographers. As Soja has reiterated:
An essentially historical epistemology continues to pervade the critical consciousness of mod-

ern social theory. It still comprehends the world primarily through the dynamics arising from
the emplacement of social being and becoming in the interpretive contexts of time […]. This
historicism […] has tended to occlude a comparable critical sensibility to the spatiality of
social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the life-world of being creatively
located not only in the making of history, but also in the construction of human geographies,
the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical
landscapes. (Soja 1989: 10⫺11)
With the apparent-time model at the very heart of the variationist enterprise, it is per-
haps not too surprising that, in the early days at least, this historicism also pervaded
studies of language variation and change.
There are understandable reasons why space was downplayed in early variationist
studies. Partly it could have been a reaction to the largely rural focus of traditional
dialectology. I have argued before (Britain 2002) that, beyond the wonderful maps of
the dialect atlases, there was actually very little that can be considered truly geographical,
let alone spatially sensitive, in the work of the traditional dialectologists who had a
historicist agenda every bit as keen as the later variationists. The role of space was
largely reduced to that of a canvas onto which dialectological findings could be painted.
A combination of the rejection of the rural focus of a largely asocial “map-heavy” tradi-
tional dialectology, on the one hand, and the view, on the other, that cities represented
the best places to find the most fluid, heterogeneous, complex communities, facilitating
investigations of the social embedding of change “where it’s all happening”, led varia-
tionist sociolinguistics to throw the rural baby out with the traditional dialectological
bathwater. In the preamble to the Social Stratification of English in New York City ⫺
one of the key texts of early variationism ⫺ Labov (2006 [1966]) contrasted his earlier
work on largely rural Martha’s Vineyard (Labov 1972) with the current research on the
Lower East Side, making it clear that the latter represented “a much more complex
society” (Labov 2006: 3). Nonetheless NYC was ultimately distilled down to the variables
of age, class, ethnicity and gender, factors, which, as is made very clear (Labov 1972:
4⫺6), are also some (but not all) of the key pivots of social diversity in Martha’s Vine-
yard. There, groups of speakers of Portuguese, Native American and other miscellaneous
ethnicities made up half if not more of the population (Labov 1972: 6), even before we
take into consideration a small resident population coming originally from the Mainland
and the large numbers of tourists. In addition, these populations were not distributed
geographically evenly across the island, and were, naturally, engaged in a range of eco-
nomic activities. As the results of Labov’s analysis made it clear, the community showed
considerable sociolinguistic diversity with respect to age, location, occupation, ethnicity,
orientation towards the island and desire to stay or leave (1972: 22, 25, 26, 30, 32, 39).
In terms of social and linguistic structure, Martha’s Vineyard hardly fitted the rural
stereotype of quiet and sleepy pastoralism, or of traditional dialectological NORMs,

as Labov showed. By contrasting a highly rural area with a highly urban one, Labov
demonstrated that there are large-scale social(-linguistic) processes which are perhaps
most obviously and vividly expressed in cities but are not confined politically, sociologi-
cally or epistemologically to an urban context. However, this perspective was not picked
up and the resulting urban turn in sociolinguistics had significant consequences on the
direction that variationism took. Urbanism still pervades much of the discipline ⫺ the
rural is still portrayed as the insular, the conservative, the backward, the isolated, the
static, as an idyll of peace and tranquility rather than as composed of heterogeneous
communities, of contact, of change and progress and conflict. (See, for example, in the
human geographic literature, Cloke 1999, 2005; Cloke and Little 1997; Macnaghten and
Urry 1998; Shucksmith 2000; Short 2006; for further discussion of the irrelevance of the
urban-rural divide, see Britain to appear b). Indeed variationism is sometimes even de-
fined in terms of its urban focus: “urban sociolinguistics” or “urban dialectology” are
terms used to describe variationism in general by scholars such as Chambers (2003: 1),
Chambers and Trudgill (1980, 1998), Coupland (2007), Walters (1988: 119). To engage
in a variationist analysis of an isolated rural area is, if we are to follow this nomencla-
ture, to engage in urban dialectology. Others are careful to make the point that diver-
sity ⫺ social and linguistic ⫺ can be found everywhere: “No matter how small and
seemingly homogeneous the community, social status differences play an essential role
in shaping dialect differences and can never be entirely discounted” (Wolfram and Schil-
ling-Estes 1998: 32), and there are (just) a few early and significant examples of varia-
tionist studies of rural areas (e.g., Wolfram and Christian’s (1974) analysis of Appala-
chian English). The fetishism of the urban which struck sociolinguistics at the time was
not, of course, confined to this discipline but was prevalent right across the social sci-
ences in the post-war period (Britain 2002), and came under sustained critique from
social theorists such as Harvey (1973) and Castells (1977) from the 1970s onwards. As
Johnston makes clear from that point “urban areas changed their roles within geogra-
phy: rather than being the focus of attention per se, they became the contexts within
which cultural, economic, social and political processes and conflicts were played out”
(Johnston 2000: 878).
3. Early geolinguistics
During the burgeoning period of sociolinguistics in the 1960s, there was relatively little
variationist geolinguistics. Indeed a review of what had gone on in the field in 1980
(Chambers and Trudgill 1980) listed little more than the work of the authors themselves.
In the 1970s and early 1980s it was Chambers and Trudgill who did most to consider
applying geographical perspectives to variationist research, Chambers by quantifying
and performing spatial analyses of data from the Survey of English Dialects (e.g., Cham-
bers 1982; Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 106⫺118), and Trudgill by adopting and adapt-
ing work from time geographers such as Torsten Hägerstrand, and introducing quantita-
tive gravity models from economic geography to variationist sociolinguistics to shed
light on innovation diffusion (e.g., Trudgill 1974b, 1975: 1983). Trudgill (1974b) began
by discussing how cartographical methods for displaying behavioral variability (in this
case the uptake of motorcars in Southern Sweden, from Hägerstrand 1952) could be
applied to dialect data by placing a grid of equally sized “cells” across the landscape
under investigation, sampling from each cell and calculating the proportion that different
variants of a variable are used, on average, in that cell, enabling both contrasts to be
made with other cells and, consequently, the proportions of variants used in different
geographical areas to be compared and explained. Trudgill argued, like Hägerstrand,
that we should attempt to “ascertain the spatial diffusion of ratios” (Trudgill 1974b: 222,
his emphasis) and that the work could be applied to examine the geographical dissemina-
tion of linguistic innovations. He proposed that such approaches would enable us to
compare different time periods, using the apparent time model, as well as consider physi-
cal and social barriers to uptake of innovations (as Hägerstrand had done). Then,
through an analysis of phonological variation and change on the Brunlanes peninsula
near Larvik on the south coast of Norway, Trudgill was able to show the geographical
distribution of a change in progress ⫺ the lowering and backing of /æ/ from [e] to [aœ≈] ⫺
and point to higher levels of innovation in the urban centers of the peninsula than in
the intervening rural areas. His work was an early example of the urban hierarchy model
of linguistic innovation diffusion, whereby innovations descend down an urban hierar-
chy of large city to city to large town, to town, village and country. The usual explana-
tion for this model is that whilst the distance between the diffusing centre and the receiv-
ing location plays some role, interaction between urban centers in modern societies is
likely to be greater, and therefore a more frequent and effective channel for the transmis-
sion of new forms than between urban and rural, an account which owes much to
Christaller’s (1933) famous central place theory. Transportation networks tend to link
urban with urban, economic and consumption infrastructures tend to be based in and
oriented towards urban centers, with the ensuing consequences for employment, com-
muting and leisure patterns, and these feed the hierarchical nature of diffusion (Britain
2002, 2005, 2006). Trudgill then went further, adopting gravity models from economic
geography to see whether it is possible to predict which places will come under a greater
influence from a vigorous innovation than others. He examined the extent to which three
East Anglian urban centers in England were likely to be affected by the deletion of /h/,
assumed to be spreading from London. In order to estimate the likely influence (includ-
ing linguistic influence) that one place would have over another, the gravity models
employed took into consideration two factors: the distance between the two places and
the populations of the two places:
Pi Pj
Mij ⫽
(dij)2
where M ⫽ the interaction between the two places i and j, P ⫽ population and d ⫽ dis-
tance. Trudgill added a third factor, a weighting to take into account how similar the
accents of the different interacting urban centers already were. The model predicted that
the city of Norwich would be affected by the innovation most and the smaller town of
King’s Lynn the least, and subsequent studies of h-dropping in these places confirmed
these results. Callary’s (1975) research on the raising of /æ/ in Northern Illinois, USA
supported the urban hierarchy model more or less ⫺ towns with a population of over
10,000 had greater levels of raising than smaller settlements, and a subsequent gravity
model analysis by Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 185) of the Illinois data demonstrated
a good, though admittedly not perfect fit with the data.
4. Subsequent geolinguistic work

The 1980s saw little rapprochement between “urban” sociolinguistic variationism and
the rather sporadic engagement with geolinguistics. A similar period of disengagement
had taken place in the social sciences too, but somewhat earlier. Massey notes that “in
terms of the relation between the social and the spatial, this was the period of perhaps
the greatest conceptual separation […]. For their part, the other [non-geographic; DB]
disciplines forgot about space altogether” (Massey 1984: 3) and “continued to function,
by and large, as though the world operated, and society existed, on the head of a pin,
in a spaceless, geographically undifferentiated world” (Massey 1984: 4). Geographers
were expected to “take up a position at the end of the transmission belt of the social
sciences, dutifully mapping the outcomes of processes which it was the role of others to
study” (Massey 1985: 12). Spatial patterns, at that time, were seen merely as the out-
comes of processes of non-geographical kinds. So it was none too surprising that there
was little interaction between sociolinguists and geolinguists either. Let’s make it clear,
the two sides were not in dispute, but simply they proceeded as if neither needed the
other ⫺ there was little geographical input to “urban” variationism and the geolinguis-
tics of the time was largely asocial. Both camps agreed both that more had to be done
and that the geographical dimension of variationism was underexplored. Chambers and
Trudgill (1980), in the first edition of Dialectology, for instance, having presented the
limited amount of work that had been carried out in this framework, presented geolingu-
istics as a potential future avenue for sociolinguistic investigation. Labov, in his summary
paper of the first twenty years of variationism, firmly separated “spatial” contributions
to language change from the “social”, and treated the study of linguistic heterogeneity
in space, society and time as a “natural alliance” (Labov 1982: 20), but of separate
disciplines. He (Labov 1982: 42) went on to state that “the study of heterogeneity in
space has not advanced at the same tempo as research in single communities”. The
division implies that heterogeneity in both time and society are somehow not in space,
and that spatiality has not shaped the evolution of social variation in the communities
under investigation. But this view was typical of the time (see further Britain 2002, to
appear b).
Human geography began to move beyond this theoretical and methodological separa-
tion of space and society in the late 1970s and 1980s finding a space for itself again,
remembering the importance of place and that “the fact that social processes take place
over space and in a geographically-differentiated world affects their operation” (Massey
1985: 16). From this point on, human geographers focused on conceptualizing spatiality
as a contingent effect contributing to the contextual conditions mediating the operation
of causal powers under the banner of “the difference that space makes” (Massey 1984;
Sayer 1985; Cochrane 1987; Cooke 1989a, 1989b; Duncan 1989; Savage et al. 1987;
Johnston 1991). This rediscovery of the relevance of, for example, place and region led
to a recognition that these are dynamic entities, always in a state of evolution, in which
social and economic processes are constantly being played out through a geographically
differentiated filter. “Space and spatiality in general is socially constructed […]. That
process of construction is constantly evolving. The spatialities of our lives are the pro-
duct of continual ‘negotiation’, the outcome of the articulation of differentially powerful
social relations” (Allen et al. 1998: 138). This rediscovery also triggered a concerted
effort to develop critical perspectives on the geographies of socially marginalized groups,
such as those of gender, childhood, sexuality, ethnicity, ill-health and disability and
“otherness”.
Variationist sociolinguistics is slowly beginning to come to terms with this turn in
human geographic thought and so more recently, there has been a raised interest in how
a richer, socially sensitive approach to space within the discipline can shed light on
variation and change. I examine some of the most salient, which fall broadly within three
categories: innovation diffusion, dialect supralocalization and the increasing adoption of
identity and practice based approaches in variationist sociolinguistics.
4.1. Innovation diusion
The literature to date on the spread of new linguistic forms has proposed a number of
different models or patterns:
⫺ wave or contagion diffusion (Trudgill 1986; Bailey et al. 1993; Britain 2002, 2004),
whereby innovations, like the ripple effect caused when a pebble is dropped into a
puddle, radiate over time out from a central focal area, reaching physically nearby
locations before those at ever greater distances. Bailey et al. (1993: 379⫺380) suggest
that contagion diffusion is operating to spread lax nuclei of /i/ in words such as field
across Oklahoma, in the US, and Labov (2003: 17) suggests that contagion diffusion
was at work in the spread of the term hoagie to represent a long filled bread roll from
Philadelphia across the state of Pennsylvania;
⫺ urban hierarchical or cascade diffusion (Trudgill 1974b, 1983, 1986; Callary 1975; Ger-
ritsen 1988; Gerritsen and Jansen 1980; Bailey et al. 1993; Hernández Campoy 2003,
Britain 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006; Labov 2003) whereby innovations descend down a
hierarchy of large city to city to large town, to town, village and country. In Britain
(2004), for example, I show how the diffusion of l-vocalization into the East Anglian
Fens appears to be reaching small towns before the surrounding countryside, and
Kerswill’s (2003: 235⫺236) investigations of the diffusion of labiodental variants of
/θ Î/ in Britain show that [f v], having diffused, he claims, from London, have reached
the cities of Bristol, Derby and Norwich before the nearer but smaller towns of Rom-
sey and Wisbech. It has been from within the urban hierarchical model that gravity
models, adopted from economic geography, have been applied to dialectological data
(e.g., Trudgill 1983; Chambers and Trudgill 1998; Hernández Campoy 2003 etc.);
⫺ cultural hearth diffusion (Horvath and Horvath 1997, 2001, 2002) whereby the inno-
vation gains a foothold in both town and country in one particular region before
diffusing to other parts of the country; Horvath and Horvath (1997) use the model
to show how /l/-vocalization has taken hold in the area around Adelaide and coastal
South Australia, before diffusing further afield in the country, and;
⫺ contra-hierarchical diffusion (Trudgill 1986; Bailey et al. 1993), whereby innovations
diffuse against the urban hierarchy, arising in rural areas and spreading to urban ones
(also cf. Vandekerckhove, Section 4.1. in this handbook). Trudgill (1986) demon-
strates that smoothing processes ⫺ reducing triphthongs to diphthongs or long vow-
els ⫺ appear to be spreading southwards from rural north Norfolk in Eastern England
into rural and urban areas of the rest of the county and into neighboring Suffolk,
and Piercy (2007) shows that the diffusion of long back vowels in the BATH lexical
set is spreading against the urban hierarchy in Dorset in the South-West of England,
despite the attrition of rhoticity operating hierarchically.
The type of diffusion found appears very much to be context-dependent, however, and
there are examples of the same variable diffusing differently in different places. Labov
(2003), for example, reminds us that while urban hierarchy diffusion seems to be operat-
ing in the diffusion of the cot-caught merger in Oklahoma (Bailey et al. 1993), this merger
is not diffusing in the same way across the border from Canada into the United States
(Boberg 2000).
The adoption of models of geographical diffusion in the variationist literature owes
a lot to the work of the Swedish time-geographer Torsten Hägerstrand who pioneered
the modeling of the spatial spread of innovations (e.g., Hägerstrand 1952). It was his
work, as was mentioned earlier, that inspired Peter Trudgill’s application of the method
to dialectological data most notably in southern Norway and in Eastern England (Trud-
gill 1974b: 1983) . The evolution of human geographic thought has not, however, been
particularly kind to Hägerstrand’s approach. Both Blaikie (1978) and Gregory (1985)
made cutting critiques of this approach to diffusion, highlighting its lack of sensitivity
to social context and its reliance on outdated application of spatial laws and spatial
processes (see also Britain 2009, to appear b). Problematically, Gregory (1985) argued,
for example, the investigation of the spatial diffusion of innovations has proceeded
a) on the assumption that the diffused form, in spreading spatially, totally levels away
the formerly used traditional forms in its path, whereas, for example, dialectological
research has shown that often diffusing innovations “mutate” en route. Contact be-
tween innovations and local traditional forms occasionally results in hybrid forms
characteristic of neither the original innovation nor the conservative dialect (see, for
example, Trudgill 1986; Britain 2005), and it is not unknown at all for the social
evaluation of an innovation to change as the innovation spreads too. Glottal stops,
most characteristic, perhaps, of informal working class speech in the South-East of
England (though today they are diffusing across the country and spreading to middle
class and more formal speech) have been found more among middle class women
than working class speakers in both Cardiff (Mees and Collins 1999) and Newcastle
(Watt and Milroy 1999). In Cardiff, Mees and Collins (1999: 201) argued that a shift
to glottal stop use represented a shift to “more sophisticated and fashionable speech”;
b) on the assumption that non-adoption of the innovation is a “passive state where the
friction of distance applies a brake to innovation […] rather than ‘an active state
arising out of the structural arrangements of society’” (Gregory 1985: 319). So rather
than considering very slow moving or fossilized innovations (such as the diffusion
of /a:/ in the BATH lexical set and /v/ in the STRUT lexical set in southern British
English) as having simply “run out of steam”, we should expect to find active lines
of resistance to those innovations. Indeed, as Wells (1982: 354) suggested, even middle
class people in the north of England “would feel it to be a denial of their identity as
northerners to say BATH words with anything other than short [a]”. As Gregory
(2000: 176) made clear, resistance to an innovation “connotes a process of sustained
struggle: considered and collective action on the part of people whose evaluation of
the available information may be strikingly different to that of the ‘potential
adopters’”;
c) paying little attention to the structural contradictions on innovation adoption (Greg-
ory 1985: 323) ⫺ in other words, to mention a dialectological example sometimes the
linguistic system of an accent in the path of a diffusing innovation may be incompati-

ble with that innovation and consequently slow down or block its adoption. An exam-
ple of the combination of this factor and the previous one is the widespread resistance
in the English of Liverpool to the adoption of glottal stops for /t/ reported by Watson
(2006). He found that despite the prevalence of glottal stops across a large swathe of
contemporary England, including the North, not one glottal stop was found in pre-
pausal position in his data from Liverpudlian adolescents (Watson 2006: 59). In addi-
tion, the use of [h] for /t/ reported in earlier work on Liverpool English by Knowles
(1973: 234) only following short vowels in small monosyllabic function words (e.g.,
at and what) and not found at all in the surrounding areas of the North-West, or
indeed elsewhere in England, not only remained robust in those contexts in the speech
of the Liverpudlian adolescents, but had also spread to polysyllabic non-function
words where the /t/ was preceded by an unstressed vowel (e.g., biscuit, bucket, choco-
late) (Watson 2006: 59). Liverpool is also known for spirantization of oral stops in
intervocalic and word-final position (Watson 2007; Honeybone 2001; Sangster 2001).
A shift from a fricated form to the use of glottal stops consequently would entail a
more complex change than in varieties without the spirantized forms, and Watson
comments that the glottal stop is extremely restricted in Liverpool English to contexts
preceding /l/ and other syllabic consonants such as /n/. But Liverpool also has an
extremely distinctive local identity and a distinctive demographic history, and its
avoidance of glottal stops could be seen as part structural contradiction, part social
rejection and local loyalty;
d) paying little attention to social constraints on innovation adoption (Gregory 1985:
323). Gravity models used in the dialectology of diffusion, for example, assume that
everyone who uses the innovation has an equal chance of passing it on and that
everyone in the geographical path of the innovation has an equal chance of adopting
it. However, we live in a socially differentiated world, where access to the resources
enabling mobility and contact are unevenly and unequally distributed. Gravity mod-
els do not take the complexity of social structure into account, leading Gregory (1985:
328) to argue that such diffusion models “failed to cut through the connective tissue
of the world in such a way that its fundamental integrities are retained” and that
there is a need “for a more sensitive intellectual surgery”. He argues that gravity
models and diffusion theories have operated through “the detachment of ‘potential
adopters’ from their social moorings and the displacement of subjects from social
struggles” (1985: 328). Few attempts have been made to enrich linguistic diffusion
models with social information about the speakers. A few sociolinguists have con-
ducted comparative analyses of diffusion across the sorts of social categories typical
of early variationist studies (e.g., contrasting ages, sexes, etc.; see, for example, Trud-
gill 1983; Britain 1991; Horvath and Horvath 1997, 2001, 2002), and Boberg (2000)
demonstrates the effects of a national boundary in undermining predictions based on
gravity models. Most notable, perhaps, however, is the important work of Wolfram
and Schilling-Estes (see for example, Wolfram 1997, 2002; Wolfram and Schilling-
Estes 1995; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999) contrasting patterns of change in two
seemingly similar communities: Ocracoke off the East Coast of North Carolina and
Smith Island in the Chesaspeake Bay of Maryland in the United States. Both were
once relatively isolated but today more and more speakers from both islands are
coming into contact with people from the mainland and are moving away to seek
better employment prospects. Both share some distinctive dialect characteristics: a

back and raised nucleus of /ai/: [v= ] and a front gliding realization of /au/: [æ= ]. How-
ever, on the one hand, Ocracokers appear to be losing these distinctive features, while
on the other, Smith Islanders are increasing their use of them and continuing to
diverge from neighboring dialects (see Wolfram 2002: 770). The important socio-
demographic distinction between the two communities is that while Ocracoke is be-
coming a popular destination for short and long term residence by non-islanders, few
people are moving onto Smith Island and many are leaving, resulting in a concentra-
tion of the dialect in the mouths of the few that remain. Such communities are, of
course, becoming increasingly rare, but the important point here is that the types of
change underway on the islands are indicative of differences in their socio-spatial
“becoming” (to use a term from Pred 1985: 338);
e) paying little attention, furthermore, to the structural and social consequences of the
adoption of the innovation (Gregory 1985: 304). If the innovation is adopted, does
this adoption serve to dismantle social and linguistic divisions? If it is not adopted,
does this rejection serve to bolster local identities as being distinct from those of the
promoters of the innovation?
In fact, Gregory (2000: 177), fifteen years after his original critique of diffusion theory,
concludes rather pessimistically about the current state of this approach, suggesting that
there had been little development in the search for a socially and contextually rich ac-
count of spreading innovations. Even in one of the more well-trodden topics of enquiry
in the human geographic diffusionist literature, the spread of HIV/AIDS infection, he
claims that much research had been “subordinated to the objectivist logics of spatial
science” (see Brown 1995 for a noteworthy exception).
4.2. Supralocalization o dialects
Diffusion, as became clear in the previous section, should be conceptualized as a form

of varietal contact. Consequently, and not surprisingly, where breaks in contact fre-
quency are found, we also find that linguistic breaks ⫺ isoglosses or dialect transitions ⫺
occur (Chambers and Trudgill 1998; Britain 1991, 2001: 2002). These breaks sometimes
arise because of physical barriers to inter-regional communication. They are also shaped,
however, by breaks in routinized social practice within speech communities (Britain
1997, 2002, 2005, 2009, to appear a, b). Giddens has argued that routines form “the
material grounding of […] the recursive nature of social life” (Giddens 1984: xxiii), and
channel everyday human behavior into a set of self-perpetuating socio-geographical
“grooves”. Dialect boundaries and transitions are often found in breaks between the
socio-spatial networks of these “grooves”.
The geographies and histories of our social networks and those of the social, eco-
nomic and political institutions which guide our daily lives in the West are played out,
routinized and reproduced within functional zones usually centered around (or in the
sometimes distant shadow of) one or a number of urban areas. Subsequently, the socio-
geographical trajectories of speakers and their institutions are often strongly guided by
past practices, by attitudinal considerations and by physical factors, and hence regions
are formed (Britain 2002). As Johnston states,
places differ culturally, in terms of […] the ‘collective memory’. For a variety of reasons,
some associated with the local physical environment, people’s responses to the problems of
surviving collectively vary from place to place, at a whole range of scales. How they respond
becomes part of the local culture, the store of knowledge on which they draw […]. That store
[…] becomes the inheritance of those who succeed, being transmitted intergenerationally to
others who will modify it as they in turn tackle problems old and new.
(Johnston 1991: 50)
Intra-regional mobility, whilst breaking down networks and routines at the very local
level, reinforces supra-local structure, and with, for example, improvements in trans-
portation routes, the shift from primary and secondary to tertiary sector employment as
the backbone of the economy, higher levels of university attendance (at sites often well
away from the local speech community), the normalization of long-distance commuting,
labor market flexibility and the consequent geographical elasticity of family ties and
other social network links, these supralocal functional zones are probably larger than
ever before (see Britain to 2009; Sayers 2009).
The previously mentioned social and geographical mobility within these supralocal
zones has led to dialect contact between the varieties spoken within them. The result has
been the emergence over time of regional koines ⫺ leveled supralocal varieties which are
replacing some of the linguistic diversity that once reigned within individual regions. We
now have a good deal of variationist evidence that intra-regional mobility is breaking
down local varieties (though there are of course exceptions ⫺ see the Liverpool example
earlier) in favor of larger supra-local ones, creating a smaller number of geographically
expansive regiolects (see, among many, Milroy; Milroy and Hartley 1994; Milroy et al.
1994; Milroy 1999; Watt and Milroy 1999; Watt 2002; Watts 2006; also cf. Berruto and
Herrgen in this volume). Milroy, Milroy and Hartley (1994), for example, demonstrated
that in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the highly local [?t] variant of /t/ is losing out, particularly
among younger female speakers, in favor not of the standard [t] variant, but, as we saw
earlier, the regionally more widespread but non-standard glottal form [?]. And Watt
(2002) found that the regional Northern non-standard variants [e:] and [o:] of the FACE
and GOAT variables respectively were taking over in Newcastle from the much more
locally current [=e] and [we] variants (also discussed earlier), with the national standard
forms serving as insignificant minority variants and used only among middle class
speakers.
Similarly, research by both Mathisen (1999) and Watts (2006) has suggested that [ng]
forms of (n) may well be “rejuvenating” to become a supra-local form of the Midlands
and parts of the North-West. Watts examined dialect contact and diversity in Wilmslow,
a town situated some 20 km south of Manchester. Wilmslow is a predominantly middle
class town, where many of Manchester’s wealthier business people, white-collar workers
and football stars live. In the 1970s, a large local authority-run housing estate ⫺ Col-
shaw ⫺ was built on the side of Wilmslow to rehouse people who had previously been
living in substandard housing in Manchester. Watts (2006: 147, 294, 170) found that
while the middle class residents of Wilmslow used extremely low levels of many wide-
spread non-standard forms (e.g., less than 14 percent /=n/ in unstressed <-ing> words
(94 percent in Colshaw estate), less than three percent th-fronting in words such as think
and mother (> 43 percent in Colshaw), non-standard [ng] forms of stressed (n) (in words
such as sing and ring) were used in more than 50 percent of tokens (and over 80 percent
among the 11⫺18 year olds). Mathisen (1999: 120) found a very similar pattern for
speakers in Sandwell, near Birmingham. A number of other studies suggest its retention
among young speakers across the Midlands and parts of the North-West, e.g., Redditch
(Ryfa to appear a), the Wirral (Grainger 2005) and Liverpool (Watson 2007).
Such supra-local koineization is also underway, as Ellis (1889) noted over a century
ago, in south-eastern England, much to the excitement of journalists and politicians, the
emerging regiolect having been named “Estuary English” (for discussions see Maidment
1994; Parsons 1998; Peys 2001; Przedlacka 2001; Ryfa to appear b, etc.). Torgersen and
Kerswill (2004), for example, have demonstrated that the somewhat different vowel sys-
tems of the towns of Reading and Ashford in south-east England are converging and
Britain (2005) has highlighted the variable acquisition of supralocal south-eastern forms
in the Fens. There is, of course, variation within this regiolect, and local varieties still
exist. Regional supralocalization is still underway, only affecting certain features and not
others, and distinct local dialects form part of the mix that has engendered the regiolect
in different places ⫺ the East Anglian version of the regiolect is distinct from, say, the
Sussex version, since, obviously, East Anglian dialects helped shape its very emergence.
Allen, Massey and Cochrane (1998) investigated the growth of the “South-East” as the
focus of Thatcher’s neo-liberal project of the 1980s, and, using a number of measures
such as income levels, wage increases, house price inflation, hi-tech employment growth,
government public spending increases, revisited the “region” as a geographical concept.
They emphasized that the South-East isn’t “out there”, well defined and demarcated,
waiting to be documented, but is created, shaped and reworked by practice, both individ-
ual and institutional, within it. The region is both fluid and diverse. Dialectological
evidence from this region highlights that at some levels it shows considerable linguistic
homogenization, but at others provides examples of considerable linguistic diversity. Re-
cent work on relative pronoun marking in the South-East of England emphasizes that
there is still considerable intra-regional differentiation. Cheshire, Fox and Britain (2007),
comparing London and the Fens (150 km apart, but both in the “South-East”), show
radically distinct choices of pronoun marking. As Figure 9.1 shows, the two varieties
Fig. 9.1: Distribution of relative markers in subject and object function in (inner) London and the
Fens (from Cheshire, Fox and Britain 2007)
agree in only one respect ⫺ the avoidance of which as a relative pronoun. Regions are
still complex, diverse and fluid entities and the dialect patterns of the south-east of
England exemplify that supralocal homogeneity is far far from complete.
Mentioned earlier was the fact that both physical barriers and breaks in routinized
communication networks can be the cause of dialect boundaries. Important, though,
also is the recognition that these physical and social factors, along with attitudinal ones,
together can serve to reinforce and recreate boundaries. The Fens in Eastern England is
the site of a large bundle of isoglosses separating East Anglian dialects from East Mid-
land ones as well as “Northern” ones from “Southern” ones (see Britain 1991: 2001).
But social, physical as well as attitudinal considerations need to be taken into consider-
ation to account for why this area is host to so many dialect transitions. Before the
seventeenth century, the area was largely boggy marshland with sparsely distributed
communities settled on small patches of higher ground which were often subjected them-
selves to regular flooding; because of their impenetrability, the area served as a regional
and military frontier. Both the place and the people were stereotyped negatively by non-
Fenlanders. Darby (1931: 61) claims that there arose “a mythical fear of a land inhabited
by demons and dragons, ogres and werewolves”, and he quotes both Felix who claimed
the Fens were “especially obscure, which ofttimes many men had attempted to inhabit,
but no man could endure it on account of manifold horrors and fears and the loneliness
of the wide wilderness ⫺ so that no man could endure it, but everyone on this account
had fled from it” as well as the famous diarist Samuel Pepys who in an entry on 18
September 1663, describes his travels “over most sad fenns, all the way observing the
sad life which the people of the place do live, sometimes rowing from one spot to another
and then wading”.
These physical and attitudinal and political reinforcements of the Fens as a boundary
led to social routines respecting this boundary too, and thereby (to recite Giddens), a
set of self-perpetuating socio-geographical “grooves” developed which reinforced the
view of the “Fens-as-barrier”. Nowadays, connections across the Fens are much easier,
but the traces of the historical frontier can be still be seen in the geographical patterning
of all but the very most recent linguistic innovations arriving in the area. Britain (1991,
1997: 2001) provides linguistic evidence of the north-east/south-west dialect boundary in
the Fens which mirrored the path of the historical “frontier”, and Britain (2002: 612⫺
616) shows how at a more local level, public transportation networks, drainage channel
systems, relative population densities, political boundaries, local rivalries and competi-
tion between two urban centers with competing service, employment and entertainment
provision reinforce local (and highly salient) dialect boundaries. Very much more recent
innovations from southern England, especially non-salient, supra-regional ones, such as
the vocalization of /l/, have ignored these local contextual conditions and created north-
south differences in the Fens, rather than east-west differences. These differential geo-
graphical patterns can, of course, only be fully understood through an appreciation of
the contextual historical, social, political, attitudinal, economic and geographical devel-
opment of the area.
4.3. Practice-based approaches

The examples above have highlighted how social practice helps create and reinforce
spatial distributions of linguistic features at the regional and subregional level. Research
at the very local level, at the level of the local neighborhood, has also been fruitful in
demonstrating how our variable social geographies as speakers can serve to create and
reinforce variable linguistic geographies.
Two recent research projects are particularly notable. Firstly, at the very local level,
is Eckert’s (2000) investigation of the relationship between dialect, adolescent communi-
ties of practice in Detroit and the appropriation of space in and outside school by those
young people (also cf. Eckert and Quist in this volume). Eckert shows, for instance, how
engagement in out-of-school urban and suburban sites, hanging-out in parks and cruis-
ing along the streets connecting the suburbs with more central parts of Detroit are all
intertwined with language change. Strong correlations between the use of advanced vari-
ants of changes in progress and engagement as a cruiser or a frequenter of the urban
parks show that those adolescents who brave the freedom, excitement and danger of
these activities are those most likely to be leading many of the changes in Eckert’s study
(cf. Eckert in this volume). For example, the backing of /v/ to [c], a change led clearly
by “Burnouts”, shows clear positive correlations with cruising activity, while /v/ fronting
to [e], on the other hand, a “Jock”-led change, correlates negatively with cruising (Eckert
2000: 151⫺152). Eckert concludes that “[t]he use of urban variables […] is a resource
for the entire population in the construction of linguistic styles related to engagement in
urban practice” (Eckert 2000: 153).
Secondly we can look to the work of Barbara Johnstone and her colleagues examin-
ing how dialect features arise, become associated with and stereotyped to a particular
place, and how speakers then synthesize local attitudes, media representations and other
discourses concerning this stereotype to “trademark” or “enregister” the dialect of the
place as a commodity, highlighting that a multitude of sources can together create a
context for, shape and renew local patterns of language variation. Johnstone, Andrus
and Danielson (2006), drawing data from corpora of newspaper reports about the Pitts-
burgh dialect, from interviews with local city residents and from extensive ethnographic
observation, show how the monophthongization of /au/ to [a:] has taken the journey
from indicator to marker to stereotype (in Labov’s (1972) parlance), both in terms of
sociolinguistic patterning in the speech community and in terms of media and other
commercial representations of the dialect, and in so doing has joined a small number of
local dialect features which are clearly above the level of speaker consciousness. These
features have become “legitimized” through ever more serious exposure in the media,
and speakers use them as a resource for marking identity, “performance” and other
discourse strategies, signaling, importantly for our discussion here, a link between lan-
guage and place. Johnstone et al. (2006) make it clear that /au/ > [a:] originally signaled
“working class” and “male” but not necessarily “Pittsburgh”, but that the evolution of
the form in the speech community, its representation in the local Pittsburgh media, and
its subsequent commodification in the city (in the form of T-shirts and mugs with dialect
forms printed on them) have recycled or reallocated what were class and gender associa-
tions into place-based ones.
Besides these more socially sensitive approaches to geographical language variation,
another branch of geolinguistics which has seen somewhat of a revival in recent years is
dialect cartography (cf. Nerbonne and Heeringa and Lameli in this volume), a revival
sparked both by improvements in cartographical technology and software, and by a
desire, following Labov’s (1994) important work theorizing patterns of phonological
merger, split and vowel chain shifts, to investigate the geographical dispersion of those
important language changes affecting North America. Telsur, a large-scale project col-
lecting and analyzing recordings of telephone interviews with over 750 speakers from
across the US and parts of Canada culminated in the publication of the Atlas of North
American English (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006) showing the geographical distribution
of a wide range of the changes addressed in Labov (1994). Labov et al.’s examination of
the maps that resulted from their analyses of the Telsur data led to similar conclusions
as those based on the English Fens data and the evidence of supralocalization discussed
above: regional dialect boundaries from the past (for example from much earlier dialect
atlas work, often concentrating on lexical items rather than phonological variation) had
often persisted to the present day and where the modern boundaries were different this
was often a result of the most recent changes in the speech community. Labov, Ash and
Boberg argued that “regional dialects are becoming increasingly differentiated from each
other […] within most of the regional boundaries, linguistic changes in progress have
the effect of solidifying and developing the regional pattern. Many local dialects are
indeed disappearing, but they are assimilating to larger regional patterns rather than to
a national or international model” (2006: 119). The cartographic work carried out by
Labov and his associates is exemplary, but it is so because it is grounded in a thorough
theoretical understanding of the nature of phonological change in the US based on
decades of careful empirical investigation and on sophisticated acoustic analysis of large
corpora of carefully collected data.
All in all, variationism has not fully or adequately engaged yet with socially rich theori-
zations of geographical space. It has tended both to fetishize some types of space (e.g.,
urban spaces as opposed to rural ones) as well as, often, to divorce space from social
structure and language from the geographical “becoming” of the speech community.
Interestingly, differences in academic focus have meant that it has been hard to contrast,
for example, whether the many parts of the English speaking world are all undergoing
similar types of geolinguistic change in the early twenty-first century. The recent focus
in British variationism on consonantal change has led to an academic focus on diffusion,
leveling and convergence, whereas the North American focus on vowels has led to a
broader discussion of differentiation and divergence. Yet, as we have seen, both appear
to be undergoing supralocalization and thereby reinforcing regional dialect areas. The
examination of mergers, splits and chain shifts in North America, on the other hand,
has not been particularly successfully applied to changes currently afoot in British Eng-
lish, where in the South, researchers have found contact-based approaches more fruitful
to explain recent phonological developments (see, for example, Torgersen and Kerswill
2004; Fox 2007) and where in the North, changes underway have been explicitly excluded
from Labov’s (1994) typological focus on vocalic chain shifts.
But a welcome critical consciousness about the role of space is beginning to enthuse
scholars of language variation and change, and this volume, as well as others (e.g.,
Lameli, Kehrein and Rabanus to appear) are symptomatic of a blossoming of interest
in the language-space interface that extends well beyond variationist sociolinguistics.
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10. Whos there? Language and space in social

anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics
1. Introduction
2. The place of ethnography in the study of variation
3. The nature of meaning in variation
4. Space and the construction of meaning
5. Conclusion
6. References
1. Introduction
A theory of variation has to include a theory of meaning, for whatever its role in linguis-
tic change and whatever it can tell us about grammatical structure, variation constitutes
a robust social indexical system. Space is central to the study of social indexicality,
because space is imbued with social meaning, and the distribution of linguistic forms
across space is key to the construction of meaning in variation. Social practice is located
in space, it constructs space, and the social itself is a metaphorical space. The meaning
of sociolinguistic variation invokes geography at all levels from the neighborhood hang-
out to the international and the transnational, and social space from the family to imag-
ined communities. Understanding the meaning of variation, therefore, requires that we
engage with space in all these senses. Focusing on the ethnographic study of variation,
the following pages will emphasize that dialectological, survey and ethnographic ap-
proaches to the study of variation provide complementary information about the social
life of sociolinguistic variation, and that we can only understand the social value of
variation ⫺ its meaning ⫺ if we combine all three. But it is only at the ethnographic
level that we can gain access to meaning in variation as it is constructed in day-to-day
social practice, in other words, as it functions in speakers’ sociolinguistic competence.
2. The place o ethnography in the study o variation
An ethnographic study of variation allows us to focus on quite specific people, observing

how they deploy variables in practice across situations, over time, and in groups whose
dynamics we understand. It also allows us to talk to speakers repeatedly and to be
present when they talk with others. We can learn where they go and whom they interact
with, whom they would like and not like to interact with, how they view the world
around them and who they see as occupying that world. We can learn how people view
language in the world from their local perspective ⫺ what kinds of social distinctions
they make and how they connect those distinctions to linguistic differences. And while
an ethnographic study might be located in a community that we define in advance, these
people will eventually lead us beyond the boundaries that we’ve attributed to it. In this
process, we learn that social space is never circumscribed by a fixed physical space, but
extends into adjacent, distant and even imagined spaces, and the meaning of variation
is constructed across them all.
The study of variation has ranged from a broad survey approach examining distribu-
tions of variables over large populations, to ethnographic studies focusing on the use of
variation in face-to-face communities. The survey approach examines the differential use
of variables among demographic categories (particularly, class, age, gender, ethnicity),
which provide a kind of abstract map of social space (cf. Mæhlum in this volume).
Ethnographic studies, on the other hand, examine the local categories and practices that
underlie the demographic patterns. Class, age, gender and ethnicity are broad categories
that structure societies, but they are experienced on the ground in more local ways.
When we find, for example, that women overall use more standard grammar than men,
we mean that there is a general, repeated, and replicable statistical result by which
women, in the aggregate, use standard grammar more than men. This says nothing about
why this pattern exists, what kinds of behaviors and ideologies underlie these patterns,
what kind of meaning people attach to standard forms, who does and doesn’t fit the
pattern and why. It says nothing about the relation between gender as a social phenom-
enon and language use, and it says nothing about why the same generalization applies
to class stratification ⫺ not only women, but middle class people, use more standard
grammar than men and working class people. “Be a man” and “sit like a lady” invoke
the global gender binary of male and female, but they do not have the same significance
everywhere. Being a man or sitting like a lady is part of an individual and local history
of admonishments, invoking not gender globally, but a local construction of gender (and
class and age and ethnicity), just as “hold your fork properly” is part of a local construc-
tion of class (and gender and age and ethnicity). In other words, these demographic
categories are abstractions, and they interact intensely, so that while the global patterns
of correlation of linguistic variables with these categories provide a social map, they do
not provide explanations for the shape of that map. Explanations for global patterns lie
in the relations among the myriad local practices that add up to produce them. How is
gender or class constructed in a particular place at a particular time? How do these

combine to create the global pattern ⫺ and what of those who do not conform to this
pattern? The large-scale distributions of survey studies are the outcome of differential
behavior of speakers living their daily lives in very different places in society, and those
daily lives, in turn, are structured by their location in the larger political economy. Thus
global patterns and local practices are not simply complementary, but are in a mutually
reproductive relation (Bourdieu 1977a).
Class, gender, age and ethnicity are categories that structure social life on the ground.
They constrain the kinds of communities of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992)
that people participate in, and the practices in these communities in turn shape the local
construction of the categories. Gendered divisions of labor, childcare practices and lei-
sure activities are constrained by the material conditions that constitute class. This may
involve the formation of particular types of social networks, particular kinds of commu-
nities of practice, particular ways of doing things, particular needs, desires and emotional
lives. And these in turn reproduce people’s place in the social order and the social order
itself. The construction of meaning in variation is part of people’s participation in these
networks and communities of practice, hence of the process of social reproduction. Vari-
ation is part of speakers’ active participation in, and construction of, the social world
and of the construction of selves in that world.
Much of current theorizing about variation is still based on the demographic catego-
ries of survey studies, with some serious consequences. The demographic categories used
in these studies are so embedded in social science that they are commonly taken as pre-
ordained ⫺ as pre-existing the variation that correlates with them. The view of variation
as reflecting a pre-existing and relatively static social order has a variety of implications
that require examination. First, it yields a view of variation as a reflection or an expres-
sion of social address, and leads to a view of the acquisition of variable competence as
a simple learning of the (adult) social structure and of the variables that go with that
structure. It views change as spreading across the social map, and social analysis has
focused on who the change reaches when, or who adopts or resists the change. The
ethnographic view reminds us that changes in progress constitute a very small subset of
the forms that make up the system of social variation. And most variables ⫺ even
changes in progress ⫺ are always present in the community, to be taken up or not, by
all speakers. Social stratification of the variables, then, it is due to selective use, not to
a spread of accessibility through the socioeconomic hierarchy. Finally, it views variation
as resulting from, and marking, demographic categories. The move from correlation to
the notion of marking skirts the issue of meaning as linguists label certain variables as
“local” or “working class” or “vernacular” or “female-led changes”. But clearly, people ⫺
even women ⫺ are not saying “I’m a woman” when they use a “female-led” change.
Rather, that variable means something that is in turn related to gender. The very fact
that the same variables may stratify regularly with multiple categories ⫺ e.g., gender,
ethnicity and class ⫺ indicates that their meanings are not directly related to these cat-
egories, but to something that’s related to all of them (Ochs 1991).
The demographic patterns must be understood in a broader perspective ⫺ one that
encompasses the social agency (not to be confused with intentionality) of speakers as
they use variation in day to day practice. The reactive view of variation ignores the role
of variation in the actual production of social categories. Social categories can exist only
inasmuch as they can be distinguished, and linguistic differentiation is a fundamental
way of creating distinctiveness. Variation, then, emerges at the nexus of structure and
change, as integral to social practice rather than as a simple output of structure. The
explanation for much of what we see in variation lies in the meanings that are associated
with variables ⫺ in how those meanings come about and how they change.
3. The nature o meaning in variation
We can assume that the meaning of variation is indexical ⫺ that is, variables gain their
value contextually, specifically through association with the categories of speakers who
use them. In its simplest sense, indeed the sense emanating from the survey tradition,
the use of a variable “points to”, or indexes, a category of speaker. But this indexicality
is not fixed; on the contrary, much of its value lies in its indeterminacy. The association
of a variable with a category of speakers may be taken, for example, to pick out some
characteristic of those speakers, yielding an additional indexical value in a growing set
of associations ⫺ an indexical order (Silverstein 2003). Thus, for example, if working
class men are viewed as tough, a variable that is primarily used by working class men
(first order index) may later become associated with toughness (second order index).
This variable, then, could become available to other categories of people to index tough-
ness. It is crucial to emphasize that at this point, the original association loses its primacy
in the indexical system, so the status of first order index is purely historical. Indeed, we
have no way of knowing in most cases how the many values that an index may have
came about. But a variable can take on a variety of meanings in this way, yielding what
one might call an indexical field. Which of the potential meanings is invoked by the use
of a variable depends on the context and on the style in which it is embedded (I will
return to this below).
A linguistic form (in this case, a variable) becomes an index when speakers come to
distinguish it from other forms and to associate it with some social distinction. The
social distinction is reinforced ⫺ perhaps created ⫺ in this association. A social distinc-
tion does not have to be just a category of person, but can be a mood, a stance, which
may or may not be associated with a particular category of person. Negative concord (I
didn’t do nothing) is socially stratified throughout the English speaking world. It is associ-
ated with working class status and with lack of education, and one cannot say that one
of these meanings is primary. Indeed, class and education are inseparable, along with
differences in occupations, leisure activities and consumption patterns. And negative
concord is inseparable from other patterns deemed “vernacular” which may or may not
differ across the English speaking world. But in every place, the linguistic and the social
distinction go hand in hand. The production of distinction has been described in detail
by Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (Irvine and Gal 2000), as involving three semiotic proc-
esses: erasure, recursivity and iconicity. The distinction between a category of people seen
as working class and as middle class involves (1) a selective ignoring of similarities be-
tween these two groups of people and of differences within the groups ⫺ both social
and linguistic (erasure); (2) an embedding of multiple distinctions in this opposition ⫺
other linguistic differences as well as, for example, consumption patterns, dress, educa-
tion (recursivity); and (3) the forging of an apparently natural connection between the
two, for instance viewing both negative concord and the working class mind as illogical
(iconicity). This process is central to the workings of variation, and is a process that
speakers engage in as part of moving around in the world.
Presumably this process begins very early in development ⫺ infants differ their voice
pitch depending on their interlocutor, and children certainly notice early on the linguistic
cues for parental affection, reprimand, anger and joy. And many of the cues to these
emotions function in broader patterns of sociolinguistic variation ⫺ sounds of adult
power in the home are heard from the mouths of teachers in school, thus moving from
the personal to the more institutional and public. Development is, among other things,
a gradual expansion from the most intimate to the most impersonal and public. And
this expansion involves a continual interpretation of the world around, of the types of
people that inhabit that world, and of the ways of speaking that go with different places
and people. It makes sense to assume that the analytic abilities that allow the small child
to construct a grammar from the language he or she hears are at work throughout life
as speakers interpret the relation between linguistic variation and social characteristics.
This interpretation does not take place at the level of the individual person or the
individual variable, however, but at the level of style. Style has traditionally been treated
in variation as a continuum of formality ⫺ a link that emerged from a methodological
focus on the effects of speakers’ monitoring their own speech. Labov (1972) reasoned
that a speaker’s most ingrained and automatic patterns emerge when they are paying
little attention to their speech, and that attention to speech leads prestige norms to
interrupt these patterns. He defined style, therefore, as a continuum of formality-infor-
mality ⫺ a continuum that to some extent replicates the socioeconomic stratification of
features within the speech of individuals. This approach to style is uniquely related to
Labov’s desire to elicit automatic speech (the vernacular). In every other field that deals
with style, style is a socially distinctive system. In all areas of art, style is what constitutes
schools, periods and individuals. Style has this function in everyday language use as
well, and this kind of style, which is orthogonal to the formality continuum, is the best
level for approaching the meaning of variation. The view of style as audience design
(Bell 1984), based in studies of speech accommodation, indeed focuses on the socially
distinctive view of style. In this case, though, the focus is on individuals’ style shifting
as they speak for different (present or imagined (Bell 2001)) audiences. It’s one step
further to extend our view of style beyond accommodation to speakers as defined by
dialects, to a view of style as constituting a far more complex persona ⫺ a persona that
is not only from Boston, female, middle class, white ⫺ but that is sexy, flirtatious, politi-
cally conservative and ⫺ at this particular moment ⫺ angry at her kid. For not all
variables are related to geographic space or social address, but they can be related to
things as fleeting as attitude, mood, emotions, sexual desire. These in turn, used more
regularly, can become personal qualities, along with such things as political orientation,
religiosity, sluttiness, independence, comicalness. Stylistic practice, in other words, is
the production of persona. And in stylistic practice we identify, segment, produce and
reproduce personae.
4. Space and the construction o meaning

As discussed at length in this volume and elsewhere (Johnstone 2004), physical space is
imbued with social meaning. My use of the term physical space here only distinguishes
it from the purely metaphorical term social space when referring to “place” in the social
order. Residential patterns, local territories, rural and urban spaces, regions and nations
all involve the physical placement of distinctive populations and linguistic varieties. And
this placement in turn plays a role in reproducing distinctiveness. Social differences in a
single locality can invoke space at all levels ⫺ from very local territories to the transna-
tional, as people move about in, and orient differently to, the world around them. As
they do so, they encounter and adopt (or not) new linguistic features.
Spaces also serve as soundscapes (Inoue 2003). People circulate in spaces with quite
distinctive sounds and come to associate those sounds with their understanding of what
those spaces are about. Richard Bauman, in a study of market calls in Mexico (Bauman
2001), points out that children walking through the market will hear stylistic innovations
that vendors use to elaborate their calls, and may associate these innovations with their
impressions about the market scene. A child growing up on the upper west side of New
York City will hear different things all day long than a child living even just across town.
Peasants in the French Pyrenees used to frequent one of two restaurants in town when
they went to market. The noisiness of this “peasant” restaurant stood in stark contrast
to the other, quiet, bourgeois restaurant. This quiet, peasants told me, was highly suspi-
cious ⫺ a sign that the occupants had something to hide. The noisiness of the peasant
restaurant, meanwhile, connects to life back in the village, where one hears loud voices
continually, as people call to their animals and to each other as they pass in open spaces,
or as they gather in the village café. It is also related to the public nature of life in the
intimate social milieu of the village, where secrets cannot last. Here, the doors of homes
are open for the visitor to step in and shout out, as opposed to the closed (and locked)
doors of bourgeois as they talk quietly in their homes in town.
But speakers are not just passive hearers and potential recipients of spatially distrib-
uted styles ⫺ they are also purveyors (or hoarders) of style. Pierre Bourdieu (1977b,
1982) defines linguistic competence as not simply the ability to produce grammatical
utterances, but the ability to have those utterances heard and the ideas in them taken
up. If we view space from this perspective, we can see the clear relation between lan-
guage, space and power. Speakers who dominate central visible spaces, including particu-
larly the media, are in a position to have their utterances heard. And the central venue
lends weight to those utterances and to the variety in which they are made. Since a
linguistic variety is closely related to social groups, the construction of a distinctive
variety highlights that group, thus a group wishing to achieve visibility and ascendance
will also want to develop and display the variety. (Concomitantly, a group that seeks
invisibility may want to enhance a variety for purposes of their own solidarity, but keep
it out of the public eye.)
The opportunity that dominating a soundscape gives for making one’s own language
heard emerges clearly in schools. An ethnographic study of two elementary schools in
Northern California (Eckert 1996) followed an age cohort as it approached adolescence.
Space emerged as an important commodity as the cohort transformed itself into a peer-
based social order. This process, which takes place in elementary schools across the US
(and no doubt beyond) requires the appropriation and distribution of adult power into
the age group. Transcendence of the teacher-dominated classroom and control of central
school space is fundamental to this process, and the establishment of a peer hierarchy is
closely tied to the reorganization of space.
A heterosocial “popular crowd” emerges in late primary school, as certain small
friendship groups enter into alliances, creating a significant mass of collaborating boys
and girls. It is the crowd’s express purpose to become a social force and to gain power
and status by leading their age cohort into adolescence. Central to their joint practice is
the construction of a heterosexual market, as the crowd collaborates in pairing up indi-
vidual boys and girls as “couples”. The crowd’s socially “advanced” activities make them
highly visible, and they enhance this visibility by controlling central spaces as stages for
their activities. Their games, negotiations, dramas and stylistic performances take up the
center of the playground while their peers can watch from the periphery. As their alli-
ances bring together kids from multiple classrooms, they transcend the space of the
classroom and the adult domination symbolized by that space. Their behavior in their
own classrooms underlines their spatial dominance as they are scattered throughout the
class, dominating space with their looks, gestures, note-passing and coordinated per-
formances. This visibility allows them to achieve symbolic dominance, as their public
performances highlight stylistic innovations. These kids lead their cohort in the use of
flamboyant styles, in which the California Vowel Shift is accelerated. Their language use
defines “cool” ⫺ from their use of new speech activities and speech acts (e.g., friendship
and heterosexual drama and compliments) to their use of phonological variables.
4.1. Communities and local identity
People give meaning to space, from the back yard to gang territories to meeting places,
malls, towns, regions, continents and countries as part of making sense of themselves,
each other and the world. The meaning is based on their perceptions of what goes on in
these spaces and of the people that they see as inhabiting and claiming this landscape.
The defined speech communities of variation studies are typically analytic strate-
gies ⫺ “convenient fictions” that allow the linguist to delimit a population. These com-
munities are also, one hopes, selected as sufficiently salient to the population to explain
the variation of the speech within. The very notion of speech community seems to be
designed to define an inward-looking linguistic unit (Pratt 1988). This is not to say that
variation studies study speech communities in complete isolation from the outside, but
that they generally treat the outside as undifferentiated. While variation studies have
located communities with respect to regions and conurbations, the focus is generally on
variation within the community rather than the relation between this variation and the
outside and commonly the identity of this community is taken for granted. The notion
of “local identity” is often invoked, but only vaguely with respect to what constitutes
the local. Is it the neighborhood? The town? A particular group of people living in some
specific place? The very notion of local can exist only in a discursive space that constructs
the “other”, and social practice in any community constructs the borders and the out-
side. How people situate themselves in their own communities, as individuals and as
groups, is inseparable from how they situate themselves with respect to the rest of the
world. A study of social variation in space is best done, therefore, by suspending the
boundaries of local communities, and focusing on how different speakers use space and
how they view space ⫺ from the closest to the most remote.
The first quantitative ethnographic study of variation, William Labov study of Mar-
tha’s Vineyard (1963), was very much about local identity. This study showed variation
to be a resource for the construction of quite specifically local meaning, but meaning
that was located in turn within the broader sociogeographic context. At the time of
Labov’s study, Martha’s Vineyard was facing a growing incursion from the mainland US
as the tourist economy and the purchase of summer and even year-round homes by
mainlanders threatened many islanders’ sense of history and autonomy. Labov related
the pronunciation of /ay/ to differing ideologies with respect to mainland incursion in
the island economy. A specifically island feature, the centralization of the nucleus of /ay/
appeared most frequently in the speech of categories of people who were associated
with the long-standing local English fishing community and resisting the growing tourist
economy. It was not “island” identity that was associated with centralization, but a
specific kind of island identity. And this specific kind emerged in a local contestation of
the meaning and the future of the island in opposition to local people who welcomed
the opportunities that come with the tourist industry. In this way, a person’s place in
island society was inseparable from his or her orientation to the mainland, and to main-
land people and interests on the island. Local identity is not a simple identification with
a delimited space, but with a particular, and often contested, construction of that space.
4.2. Moving through local space
Another aspect of the local is the way social practice unfolds in local physical space.
Local identity has been more widely associated with the working class and the lower
middle class ⫺ people that Labov (2000) has labeled “centrally located groups”. The
relation between class and the local has been central to the study of social constraints in
variation. The repeated socioeconomic patterning of variation shows an inverse relation
between class level and the local distinctiveness of speech. Thus working class speakers
have the most locally distinct speech while the upper middle class have a speech pattern
that transcends the local and even the regional. This corresponds to a variety of ways in
which working class people engage with the local, while upper middle class speakers
disengage in favor of networks and institutions that transcend the local. Lesley Milroy’s
work on social networks (1980) is based on the fact that working class networks are
more locally based than middle class networks. Patterns of resource management (jobs,
homes, etc.) lead to locally-based networks, whose greater density and multiplexity, Mil-
roy argue, leads to the concentration of local features as speakers encounter local norms
across situations and communities of practice. Labov (2000) has argued that leaders in
sound change are women with many network ties both in their neighborhood and out-
side the neighborhood ⫺ in other words, people who move around locally; not people
who are locked in some static social and geographic unit. In addition, though, the work-
ing class and lower middle class are the people whose work is locally-based. These are
the people who are responsible for the local community, whether by maintaining the
local infrastructure (e.g., people in the building trades, storekeepers) or by protecting
the local community (e.g., police officers, fire fighters). A sense of local ownership, or
of cultural citizenship, therefore, is fundamental to working class and lower middle class
ideology. The local community, though, is not the neighborhood or the town, but encom-
passes the surrounding area that provides resources to the immediate locality.
This pattern begins well before adulthood. The relation between class and geographic
circulation emerged as central in the ethnographic study of adolescents in Detroit subur-
ban high schools (Eckert 1989: 2000). Detroit suburban adolescents operate in a space
that is defined above all by race and class, as the predominantly African American pop-
ulation of the city of Detroit gives way to a predominantly White suburban population.
And as one moves outward from the city, the socioeconomic level rises gradually as the
area becomes decreasingly urban. Each high school has a socioeconomic character that
is related to its place in the suburban continuum, and class merges with urban culture
as kids ⫺ and their schools ⫺ closer to the city are identified as poorer, more urban,
hence more streetwise, more self-sufficient, tougher. Within each high school, class differ-
ences are realized in opposed social categories ⫺ students who organize around alien-
ation from the school (burnouts) and constitute a working class culture, and students
who organize around engagement with the school institution (jocks) and constitute a
middle class culture. While family socioeconomic status does not completely predict
affiliation in one category or the other, the burnouts and jocks come primarily from the
lower and upper ranges, respectively, of the local socioeconomic hierarchy. The daily
practices of jocks and burnouts bring together orientation to school with an orientation
to the conurbation in which the school is located. Set within the gradual difference in
socioeconomic status across the suburban area, this yields the kind of recursivity de-
scribed by Irvine and Gal (2000). An additional recursivity is within the approximately
two thirds of the student body who do not identify as jocks or as burnouts, but refer to
themselves as in-betweens, and who designate their place in the social order on a contin-
uum between the two.
In schools throughout the Detroit conurbation, burnouts gather in marginal spaces ⫺
such as loading docks and parking lots. Jocks, on the other hand, gravitate to, and
control, the spaces that are central to school life ⫺ eating and athletic spaces, areas
around lockers, front halls and activities offices. This territorial specialization gives each
category the space to consolidate, and the proximity of territories enhances the visibility
of each category to each other and to the rest of the school population. This mutual
exposure facilitates the construction of opposed styles. The burnouts’ marginal territory
puts them closer to the outside, making it easier to avoid the adult gaze and to leave
school surreptitiously, while the jocks’ territory makes it easier for them to control school
resources. The burnouts’ orientation to the outside is not simply a negative orientation
to school, but a positive orientation to the community around the school ⫺ and to
the entire conurbation. The social networks that make up the burnout community are
continuations of age-heterogeneous neighborhood networks in childhood, so that spatial
orientation has a deep history imbued with the particular kinds of ties and preoccupa-
tions of these networks. And school, with its strict age grading, interrupts and stigma-
tizes the burnouts’ neighborhood-base networks. Burnouts value continuity and loyalty
to childhood friends, while jocks value relationships based in institutional participation.
Jocks come often from families in which parents maintain more control over their friend-
ships, arranging play dates in childhood rather than letting them loose in the neighbor-
hood. School offers the first opportunity for the jocks to make their own friends, and
their friendship groups remain school-based, and they focus their activities and their
identities on the school itself. Their neighborhoods do not function as significant social
spaces, and they carry out their social activities in the school and in suburban public
spaces, limiting their use of urban space to institutions ⫺ museums, stadiums and malls.
The class-based orientations to space, then, are not superficial, but deeply rooted in
kids’ ideologies and emotional lives. This fundamental difference also structures their
use of the space defined by the wider conurbation. The jocks may establish collegial
relations with jocks from other schools if they come in contact through institutional
activities. But their friendship groups remain located in their own school and are tied to
school loyalty. The burnouts’ local orientation extends beyond the neighborhood and
town towards the urban center. They claim neighborhood school yards as hangouts, but
they also frequent parks closer to the urban center. Burnouts from schools across the
suburbs follow set cruising roots ⫺ streets that lead into the city, where they converge
in the evening on a few popular strips. Burnouts strive to extend their networks towards
the city, looking to the wider conurbation for resources, excitement and opportunities.
They view kids coming from the urban end of the conurbation as strong and streetwise ⫺
qualities that they admire. The burnouts’ local and urban orientation is reflected in their
significantly greater use of sound changes that are moving outwards from the urban
center. The backing of /uh/ and the raising of the nucleus of /ay/ are both robustly more
advanced closer to Detroit, and in every school examined in the suburbs, the burnouts
use more of both of these variants than the jocks. Furthermore, among the in-betweens,
those who place themselves closer to the burnouts ⫺ kids who cruise Detroit ⫺ also use
more of these variants than those who do not. The use of urban variables, in other
words, indexes qualities associated with urban life.
While the burnouts expand into urban space, jocks dominate institutional space. This
gives them access to the formal venues that confer legitimacy. Their words are heard by
larger audiences, and imbued with institutional gravitas. For the jocks, institutional
status is primary, and the more engaged students are with the school ⫺ even within the
jock category ⫺ the less they use non-standard grammar and urban phonology. So, for
example, the most standard, least urban speakers among the jocks are those that domi-
nate student government as opposed to those who participate primarily in sports.
4.3. The meaning o that place
The survey studies that characterized the “first wave” of variation studies (Eckert 2005)
were generally studies of regional dialects, as spoken in a major urban center: e.g., New
York (Labov 1966), Detroit (Shuy et al. 1967), Norwich (Trudgill 1974), Tehran (Moda-
ressi 1978). In these studies the place of the community in geographic space was relevant
only insofar as it located the speech community within a dialect area, thus defining the
linguistic features to be studied. The social analysis did not take local identity or the
sociogeographic surroundings into consideration, but focused on demographic catego-
ries that abstract away from the local inasmuch as they can be found in any community.
The speech community itself, then, was incidental ⫺ simply a container for the dialect
and for the social hierarchies that structure its use. In this sense, the theory viewed local
features, whatever the locality, as equivalent. But there can be little question that to the
extent that linguistic features are associated with localities or regions, the reputation of
that locality or region must affect their indexical value both at home and elsewhere.
The study of the local construction of “Pittsburghese” (Johnstone, Andrus and Dan-
ielson 2006) makes it clear that the character of cities has great local salience, which
must play a role in the indexical value of particular local variables much as the historic
fishing culture was linked to /ay/ centralization on Martha’s Vineyard. Qing Zhang’s
work on Beijing Mandarin (2005) offers a rich view of phonological variables that are
tightly linked to place through the relation between social types and local meaning.
Zhang traces ⫺ both through literature and through speaker reports ⫺ a connection
between some phonetic features of Beijing dialect and classic Beijing social personae.
Rhotacization (including the rhotacization of finals and the lenition of obstruent initials)
is emblematic of Beijing, and is commonly said to contribute an “oily” “smooth” sound
to Beijing Mandarin. This oiliness and smoothness is further iconically linked to a fabled
male Beijing character ⫺ a type who appears in novels as a social operator who always
manages to come through anything by virtue of his “smoothness.” The double icon-
icity ⫺ of rhotacization with oiliness, and oiliness in turn with a particular character
type ⫺ makes this feature iconic of Beijing. The other Beijing type that Zhang discusses
is the “Alley Saunterer” ⫺ a feckless individual who wanders around the back streets of
the city waiting for something to happen. This type is associated with another Beijing
feature, the interdental pronunciation of /z/. Once again, this link is to be found in
popular literature, and emerged as well in Zhang’s conversations with Beijing speakers.
Place, then, takes on character through the construction of local types ⫺ types that are
in turn part of the construction of Beijing’s particular urban character.
These features play a complex role in the indexical landscape in Beijing. Zhang com-
pared the speech of managers in state-owned businesses with managers of equal educa-
tional and professional status in the foreign-owned financial sector. While the state-
owned businesses maintain a local base, the new financial sector is a new and fast-paced
transnational milieu, and a cosmopolitan persona is essential to success in this sector.
The people working in this sector are the new Beijing “yuppies” ⫺ an emerging social
category that is carving out an entirely new highly consumptive life style. And integral
to this style is the construction of a cosmopolitan linguistic style. Zhang found that while
managers in state-owned businesses used the Beijing variables described above quite fre-
quently, managers in the financial sector did not. Further, while male financial managers
made some use of the “smooth operator” variable, which is not completely at odds with
desirable business characteristics, they did not use the “alley saunterer” variable which
is at odds with the dynamic business persona. Yuppie women, on the other hand, com-
pletely avoided both of these variables. At the same time, both male and female yuppies
reach out beyond Beijing and beyond mainland China into the transnational Mandarin
sphere, to enhance the cosmopolitan sound of their style. The yuppies, and the yuppies
alone, adopt a tone feature that is characteristic of varieties of non-mainland Mandarin
associated with capitalism. In Beijing Mandarin, unstressed syllables are sufficiently re-
duced that they lose distinctive tone, assimilating to the tone of the preceding syllable.
In non-mainland varieties, however, these syllables are less reduced and maintain their
distinctive tone. The managers in the financial sector often use this full tone, giving their
speech a cosmopolitan flavor, and, by virtue of the very different rhythm this yields, a
“crisp” sound which itself has iconic value in a fast-moving capitalist style. Thus reputa-
tions of cities, regions and countries enter into the meaning of linguistic forms associated
with them, and ultimately make these forms potentially available for bricolage elsewhere.
New York and Jewishness are closely tied in the American imagination, as New York
is known for its early large, powerful and intellectual Jewish community. The late come-
dian Lenny Bruce’s famous quote pretty much wraps up the relation between place and
type in this case: “Even if you’re Catholic, if you live in New York you’re Jewish. If you
live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.” This Jewish
imaginary appears to play a role outside of New York. In a study of an affluent com-
munity in Michigan, Rebecca Knack (1991) found that Jewish speakers were less likely
than their Gentile neighbors to front /oh/ as part of the Northern Cities Shift. She found,
further, that the extent to which female speakers resisted this change was related both
to the extent to which they were integrated into the local Jewish community, and to the
extent that their social networks included New Yorkers. The diphthongization and rais-
ing of /oh/ is arguably the most salient feature of New York City area speech, since it is
the only one not shared in some way with other North American dialects. In Michigan,
this amounts to a reversal of the Northern Cities change. Whether the non-fronters of
/oh/ hear that change as “goyish” or if they disidentify more generally with the Mid-
west as a goyish region, or whether they hear the New York backing as sophisticated
and/or Jewish is unclear. This is a point at which experimental methods could build
profitably on the ethnography.
Variability above the local level ⫺ regional and national dialects ⫺ is the most loaded
with indexical meaning. Variables can be less adaptable across dialects, and it is probable
that only variables that are not part of an incompatible systemic shift will move across
regions. The north-south divide is a powerful linguistic and ideological line in the US
(and in many other countries) and plays an important role in variation. Work in percep-
tual dialectology shows that Americans are acutely conscious of a north-south dialect
boundary and that they have strong ideologies about these two regions and their dialects.
In some respects regional stereotypes are shared on both sides of the boundary. The
social evaluation of southerners and of their speech as uneducated has been robustly
shown in perceptual dialectology studies (Preston 1989 and in this handbook), suggesting
that the indexical value of southern features is somewhat uniform across the US. It is
part of a wider set of values commonly found between standard and vernacular varieties
(Lambert et al. 1960), in which northern speakers are heard as intelligent and educated
while southern speakers are heard as casual, friendly and down-to-earth.
(ING) varies everywhere in the English-speaking world between a velar [-=n] and an
apical [-en] variant. This is not generally thought of as a regional feature ⫺ rather, in
all communities examined, the apical variant correlates inversely with socioeconomic
status and with formality of style. In an experimental study of this variable in the US,
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Campbell-Kibler 2005) found that speakers overwhelmingly
associate it with educational level. But this association interacts further with an associa-
tion with region ⫺ people from both north and south associate the apical variant with
southern speech. And they also associate southern speech with lack of education.
At a higher level of geographic abstraction, the opposition between American and
British speech is extremely salient. The dynamic between Britain and the US involves
shared stereotypes of Americans as crass and uncultured and the British as cultured
and refined. Many aspects of British English, therefore, carry connotations from these
stereotypes ⫺ most particularly the non-raising of /ae/ and /t/ release. Lowered /ae/
simply sounds pretentious in most dialects of American English (this is changing in
California, where the lowering of /ae/ appears to be a change in progress). But the /t/
release is an American variable with an apparently complex relation to British /t/ release.
In casual American speech, intervocalic /t/ is flapped, and word-final /t/ is either flapped
or not released at all. Studies have shown the use of released stops in these two positions
to be associated with a range of groups that would appear to have nothing in common.
Mary Bucholtz’s study (Bucholtz, 1996) of a Northern California high school included
a group of girls who lay claim to an intellectual identity by styling themselves as “nerds”.
They shared an “intellectual” linguistic style that included the use of /t/ release. In her
study of an Orthodox Jewish community, Sarah Benor (2002) found that /t/ release was
more common among boys than among girls and that boys who had been to Yeshiva
led everyone in the use of /t/ release. The link between /t/ release and talmudic learning
was supported by the observation that this feature emerged in conversation when boys
were making important points. /t/ release has also been associated with gay speech
(Podesva, Roberts and Campbell-Kibler 2002). Rob Podesva’s study (2004) of a gay
doctor as he moves from situation to situation particularly underlines the significance
of this variable. Podesva found that the doctor made significantly greater use of /t/
release in the clinic with patients than in informal interactions. But further, the perform-
ance of gay diva that he often adopted in informal situations with his friends might have
had fewer /t/ releases, but those /t/s that were released had significantly longer bursts
than in the clinic. Clearly, stop release can have a general meaning associated with educa-
tion and articulateness in the general American population, and there are no doubt
several sources contributing to this indexical value. It is reasonable to assume that at
least part of the indexical force of stop release comes from the contrast between British
and American speech and the popular association of British English with education,
refinement and high culture. Indeed, an over-use of flapping is a common device for
constructing a “loutish” American style. This international difference coincides with
more local ⫺ even iconic ⫺ uses of /t/ release. It is a feature of clear speech and of
emphatic speech. Children may hear parents releasing their /t/s when giving pointed
instructions, when they are scolding, when they are angry. Teachers may release their
/t/s when they are being explicit ⫺ as well as when they’re impatient and scolding. At
the same time, both parents and teachers may scold a child for not speaking clearly,
setting an example for clear speech that is rife with hyperarticulation. This sets up an
indexical field for /t/ release that encompasses clarity and emphasis, but extends as well
into negative feeling, power, education and refinement (Eckert 2008). Furthermore, this
indexical field leaves room for exaggeration through lengthening the burst, yielding an
impression of prissiness in a gay diva performance.
Other languages are also powerful contributors to the repertoire of variables. The use
of foreign accents in Disney films (Lippi-Green 1997) exploits and, in the process repro-
duces, a powerful set of linguistic stereotypes. Similarly, the use of mock Spanish (Hill
1993) across the US ⫺ by using Spanish phrases badly ⫺ serves as a force of pejoration.
A true variable has emerged from substratum effects in bilingual communities. The inter-
dental fricatives /th, dh/ are most commonly pronounced as alveolar stops by first gener-
ation English speakers. Their easy adaptability into English phonology as /t, d/ is no
doubt responsible for the common survival of the stop pronunciations in the ensuing
generation of native speakers of English. It has been found in Polish, Cajun, German
and Mexican communities, and it very quickly takes on indexical value based on the
nature of the community. The frequency of the stop variant has been found to correlate
with the strength of the speaker’s ethnic neighborhood ties in the Polish neighborhood
of Hamtramck in Detroit (Edwards and Krakow, 1985). Dubois and Horvath (1998)
also found that it has been commodified along with ethnic identity in the Cajun tourist
industry. In a Wisconsin farming town, Mary Rose (2006) has found it to be associated
with the family farming and hard work ethic characteristic of the local German popula-
tion, but not with a particular speaker’s German-ness. Norma Mendoza-Denton (2008)
found this variable to correlate in a Chicano community with gang affiliation, and to be
used almost categorically in expressions that invoke common community knowledge
(and everything).
5. Conclusion
The role of linguistic variation in weaving a level of indexical meaning into day-to-day
speech is fundamental to linguistic and social practice. Speakers live in a vast and contin-
ually changing sociogeographic landscape, and throughout life are engaged in constant
sense-making in that landscape. They come to associate types of people with places, and
to associate those people’s speech styles with social types. This involves a complex social
and linguistic analysis as they assess what is socially distinctive about the types, and then
which bits of their linguistic patterns relate to those distinctions. This continual analysis
allows speakers to identify resources, and to appropriate them, incorporating them into
their own repertoires, recombining them with other resources to construct new meanings
in an ongoing process of bricolage (Hebdige 1984). People tweak their styles to take
stances and to present themselves as particular kinds of people. These particular kinds
are not defined simply by age, class, gender or ethnicity, but are more specific types
located at, but not defined by, the intersections of these categories. And it is their linguis-
tic practice at these locations that creates the large-scale patterns that emerge in survey
studies. This act of tweaking thus affects not only the person’s way of speaking, but
yields a tiny change in the stylistic landscape, the system of social meaning, the social
system that style represents, and the meaning of the variable itself.
The study of variation has so far only scratched the surface of the variable features
that speakers use to make social meaning, as the focus has been on variables that define
regional, class, or ethnic dialects. If we move away from our focus on dialectal features
and changes in progress, we come upon a congeries of resources that make up the system
of variation ⫺ emotive features, features of “baby talk”, prosodic, morphosyntactic,
discourse and lexical features are only the beginning of a vast list that are constantly in
use. But none these resources occur in isolation. Their meaning is dependent on ⫺ and
contributes to ⫺ the style in which they occur. For it is ultimately in styles and their
relation to personae and social types that the indexical value of variation is grounded in
the social.
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11. Language, space and the folk 179
11. Language, space and the olk

1. Introduction
2. Similarities and differences
3. Hand-drawn maps
4. Dialect maps ⫺ maps that aren’t quite maps
5. Where are you from?
6. Conclusion
7. Appendix
8. References
“Space ⫺ the final frontier”

(Captains Kirk and Picard, from the American
science fiction television program “Star Trek”)
1. Introduction
When people ask me where I am from, I hesitate. I was born in the United States in
southern Illinois but grew up in southern Indiana (see the Appendix for a map of the
US with state names). From a linguistic point of view, that move was probably uninter-
esting; they are both in what US dialectologists would call the “South Midlands,” and
I still have many of its characteristics ⫺ conflation of the vowels in such pairs as pin
and pen; second person plural you all (not the more southern y’all); such double modals
as ought to could and might could (but not the more southern may can); partial monoph-
thongization of /ay/; the same vowels in off and on; [z], not [s], in the verb grease and
the adjective greasy (but not in the noun grease), and so on. I hesitate partly because
many people want to know where one is from now, and, at the time of writing, I lived
in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, where none of the above speech characteristics
exist, except among older immigrants like me, and some of their descendents, although
Evans (2001) has shown that the third generation of South Midlanders in Michigan have
little or no trace of their native dialect. Like many people worldwide, my birthplace, my
childhood home, and my current residence are different, and such differences may have
linguistic repercussions. If I say I am from Michigan, people sometimes even overtly
observe that I don’t sound like I am from there. What lies behind nonlinguists’ observa-
tions of areal differences? This article deals with folk or nonspecialist notions of how a
language is distributed in space ⫺ a perceptual dialectology.
As in professional dialectology, the primary folk notion of language and space is that
of region or area, and the defining characteristic of area is boundary. Nonlinguists know
that groups of people form bounded zones of linguistic similarity, and the principal task
in a perceptual dialectology is to find out where they believe those boundaries are. How
can these folk notions be determined?
2. Similarities and dierences

The oldest cognitive mapping method asked respondents to rate surrounding areas on
the basis of their similarity to or difference from their own speech. The construction of
maps from these ratings caused the first controversy in the field of perceptual dialectol-
ogy: the Dutch scholar Antonius Weijnen believed that Japanese scholars did not find
good correspondences between perception and traditional or production dialectology be-
cause they asked the wrong question. The Japanese work focused on where respondents
found dialects to be different while, for Weijnen, the proper question was to ask where
a respondent felt surrounding varieties were similar, since, in his opinion, respondents
in places like the Netherlands and Japan would always find some little difference between
their own speech and that of even very nearby and linguistically similar villages (Weijnen
1968 [1999: 132]).
Whether seeking similarity or difference (or both), a number of techniques were devel-
oped in the Netherlands and Japan to infer folk dialect boundaries from such respondent
characterizations. In the Netherlands, the prevailing method was known as the Pfeilchen-
methode (‘little-arrow method’), in which an arrow was drawn from one area to another
when a respondent in the first said that the second area’s speech was the same as his or
her own. This technique was developed in the late nineteenth century by Pieter Willems,
who died before his work was finished (1886), but a detailed account of this earliest
work on perceptions can be found in Goeman (1989 [1999: 138⫺139]). Map 11.1 shows
an application of this technique.
The dark, thick lines are the traditional dialect divisions, and the perceptual areas
are determined by clusters of sites connected by arrows. That is, one may outline percep-
tual areas by drawing boundaries around all areas where there is a gap between little
arrow connections. I have outlined these latter with lighter gray lines (not done in the
original). In the northwest (i. e., upper left) section of Map 11.1, for example, the respon-
dent from W (Willemstad) indicates that no nearby community sounds like W by draw-
ing no arrow towards any, and since no surrounding communities have identified W as
similar, no arrows are drawn towards it; therefore, the gray circle around W indicates
that it is a perceptual isolate. In contrast, the respondent from D (Dinteloord) believes
that the variety in F (Fijnaart) is the same as D, and the respondent from F returns the
favor; hence, an arrow from D to F and one from F to D. The F respondent also
identifies K (Klundert) as the same, but this perception is not reciprocal. Again, a gray
boundary line indicates this perceptual region, and, although it is easy to see that W is
an isolate, one must consult the arrows in detail to see the different relationships between
D and F (reciprocal), F and K (one-way, F to K), and D and K (mediated by an
intervening site).
A more complex relationship exists in the area just to the east. There, Z (Zewenber-
gen) identifies M (Moerdijk, just to the north) as the same, although reciprocal identifi-
cation is not given, and Z itself is identified as the same by a respondent from one site
to its southwest. In both these cases, however, the production boundary just to the east
is not crossed. A respondent from Z, however, asserts the similarity to Z of both ZH
(Zevenbergschen Hoek) and L (Langeweg) across the production boundary, although
the respondent at neither ZH nor L identifies Z as similar. This one crossing, however,
creates a very large perceptual unity, one that runs across the entire east-west area of
the territory. A better representation of the perceptual areas might be made by circling
only the most densely clustered areas of arrow linkages, but there do not appear to have
been any early proposals about how that might be done quantitatively (but see Goeman
2002). Rensink (1955) provided the first general map of Dutch-speaking areas based on
the perceptions, in which lines are drawn around the bundles of little arrows, as I have
done with thick, gray lines in Map 11.1.
Map 11.1: The westernmost section of the North Brabant, showing production boundaries (dark
thick lines), little arrows of respondent similarity perceptions, and perceptual areas (gray thick lines)
(enlarged and adapted from Weijnen 1946)
In general, the principal motivation in this early Dutch research seemed to have been
a desire to give production dialect boundaries greater or lesser weight by establishing
their folk validity, combining folk and scientific notions of linguistic space. This is thor-
oughly discussed by Weijnen (1968) and is explicitly realized in Daan (1969) who, in an
ambitious study of contiguous Dutch-speaking areas, provides a map based on both
perception and production data. Kremer (1984) is another interesting little-arrow study
of the perception of varieties by German and Dutch speakers within and across national
boundaries. All these studies, however, make use of the technique of drawing perceptual
boundaries around areas not crossed by any little arrows, i. e., judgments of dialect
similarity by folk respondents.
In Japan different methods were developed to realize maps from respondent judg-
ments, and I will illustrate this with only one study, that of Mase (1964) from alpine
Japan. He first mapped responses to two questions ⫺ which sites sound the same and
which sites sound a little different from the home site of the respondent. Map 11.2 shows
how he combines these results in constructing his map.
Map 11.2: The subjective dialect boundaries indicated by a respondent at site #57 (Mase 1964)
The respondent at #57 in Map 11.2 has identified #58 and #59 as the same. He has
also noted that #62, #63, #56, #55 and several sites in Nagawa are a little different.
Speakers from #58 and #59 agree, not only that their own regions are similar to one
another and #57 but also that the same sites in Nagawa are a little different. Finally,
not shown in Map 11.2, respondents from surrounding areas classify #57, #58, and #59
together in their evaluations. In short, the perceptual dialect area made up of these three
sites is based on reciprocal perceptions of similarity, on similar perceptions of minor
degrees of difference, and on the perception by surrounding areas of their similarity to
one another.
Mase also calculates places that respondents refer to as “quite different,” “totally
different,” and “incomprehensibly different” and assigns higher scores to higher degrees
of difference. Map 11.3 shows a map for the entire alpine area studied, combining all
respondents’ ratings for all degrees of difference and similarity; thicker lines indicate
greater differences, and dotted lines indicate areas regarded as only slightly different.
Note in the bottom left of the map that #57, #58, and #59, shown as similar in Map
11.2, are, in fact, rated considerably different from all surrounding areas when all these
similarity and difference rankings are taken into consideration.
This method, however, reduces our ability to distinguish which regions are identified
on the basis of similarities (exclusively or predominantly) and which are identified on
the basis of differences. Nevertheless, Mase’s treatment of boundaries is quantitatively
sophisticated in comparison with the little arrow technique, in which only one connec-
tion (i. e., one similarity judgment) appears to cause a site to be included in a perceptual
area. Other Japanese mappings of degrees of similarity and difference include Grootaers
(1964), Nomoto (1963) and Sibata (1959).
The mapping of similarity and difference has reappeared in several newer studies of
perceptual dialectology, in which the respondents are asked to determine differences
between areas such as states or other regional or political zones pre-selected by the
Map 11.3: A combined perception map of an alpine area of Japan (Mase 1964)
researcher (Montgomery 2007). For example, Preston (1996: 317⫺20) compares the rat-
ings for “degree-of-difference” on a four-point scale (1 ⫽ same, 2 ⫽ slightly different,
3 ⫽ different, and 4 ⫽ unintelligibly different) for all fifty US states, New York City, and
Washington, D.C. from the point of view of three geographically distinct sets of respon-
dents in the US. Since such studies predetermine the areas asked about and use a scale,
means scores and area shadings (and more sophisticated statistical techniques) can be
used to represent the degree of difference or similarity perceived by a group of respon-
dents about surrounding areas (and, of course, their own). In Preston (1996), for exam-
ple, respondents from southeastern Michigan found a much larger area of similarity to
their own speech (six bordering or nearby states) than did those from southernmost
Indiana (only two bordering states). This style of degree-of-difference study has been
used in other areas of the US and in France (Kuiper 1999), Turkey (Demirci and Kleiner
1999), French-speaking Canada (Evans 2002), Switzerland (L’Eplattenier-Saugy 2002),
and Spain (Moreno Fernández and Moreno Fernández 2002). In several of these studies,
demographic subdivisions within the group studied have been elaborated on statistically.
Moreno Fernández and Moreno Fernández (2002), for example, find interesting differ-
ences in Madrid perceptions of regional Spanish according to sex, age, and education of
the respondents.
Tamasi (2003) provides an interesting option to all these respondent-centered tech-
niques of identifying similarity and difference. In a technique borrowed from cognitive
anthropology called pile sort, she asks respondents to sort into as many piles as they
like the regions whose speech practices are the same. She then provides maps of these
pile sorts based on cluster analyses that allow specification of clusters at different levels
of agreement. Map 11.4 shows a .25 agreement level for her respondents from Georgia.
Map 11.4 makes it clear that several states are either viewed as single dialect areas or
that there is insufficient agreement to align them with other areas (California, Hawai’i,
Alaska, Florida and Texas). The remainder of the country was sorted into six zones at
this level of agreement.
Cognitive or folk maps of dialects, however, can be derived even more directly than
from respondent views of similarity and difference.
Map 11.4: A pile-sort mapping at a .25 level from a cluster analysis of the fifty states by Georgia
respondents (adapted from Tamasi 2003: 66)
3. Hand-drawn maps
The next method to be used in mapping folk dialect spaces followed work done in the
general area of mental maps (e.g., Gould and White 1974) and has relied on the most
straightforward way to determine what the folk think about the limits of language
areas ⫺ have them draw a map. The earliest collection of hand-drawn maps of respon-
dent ideas about language distribution is apparently Preston (1981, 1982). Map 11.5 is a
typical hand drawn map of a speech area, in this case by a respondent from Hawai’i,
who was asked to outline and label on a US map containing only state lines the areas
of the US where people spoke differently.
Map 11.5 shows that respondents do not make exclusive use of state lines or other
guides given them for orientation. For example, “Texas drawl” does not include all of
the state of Texas but does include all or almost all of three other states (Oklahoma,
Arkansas and Louisiana) and sizeable portions of two others (Kansas and Missouri).
This map may be the cognitive or mental map of US regional speech areas for this
respondent, but such ethnographically interesting but perhaps idiosyncratic maps have
been combined to reveal speech community rather than individual mental maps of dia-
lect areas. These combinations were first done by tracing all respondent boundaries for
a single area onto a map and tallying the correspondences. Map 11.6 shows such a map
Map 11.5: A Hawai’i respondent’s hand-drawn map of US regional speech areas (from the author’s
personal collection)
of the outlines of the Tohoku dialect area (in the northernmost part of Honshu, the main
island of Japan) as drawn by 60 respondents from Aichi Prefecture (also in Honshu, but
quite south of Tohoku, between Tokyo and Osaka).
Map 11.7 shows the results of combining the lines that occurred most frequently in
the same place. For example, all sixty respondents agreed that Tohoku dialect was spo-
ken in the area in solid black farthest north, but in the area just to the south of this one-
hundred percent agreement, the east is regarded as more Tohoku-like (50 to 59 respon-
dents) as opposed to the west (only 40 to 49 respondents). Such distinctions allow re-
searchers to look for both linguistic and other cultural notions that might support such
a heavier concentration of the Tohoku dialect identity in the east.
This technique of combining numerous hand drawn lines to determine a perceived
speech area boundary has been used in a number of studies, including Preston (1981,
1986, 1988: 1989), Dailey-O’Cain (1999), Kuiper (1999), Evans (2002), Benson (2003),
and Montgomery (2007).
A slightly different approach to generalizing lines drawn by respondents is taken by
Inoue (1996), Hartley (1999, 2005), Lance (1999), Demirci (2002), and Fought (2002).
Inoue, for example, in determining the folk dialect boundaries of England, determines
which counties have been included by respondents in their line-drawing task and then
prepares a mental map on that basis. Lance uses US states and Demirci areas surround-
ing principal Turkish cities in much the same way. If political or other zones within the
area to be studied are small enough or can be reasonably subdivided into subzones, this
approach may be a viable alternative to tracing the precise pathways of individual lines
and determining where they cluster. Interestingly, in an attempt to follow the clusters of
lines using the first approach to the determination of general boundaries, Long and Yim
(2002), in their study of mental maps of Korean dialect division, found this second
Map 11.6: A map showing 60 Aichi respondents’ boundaries for the dialect area of Tohoku (Long
1999: 180)
approach preferable since nearly all their respondents drew lines along prefectural
boundaries.
In still another technique developed by Preston and Howe (1987), outlines of areas
were traced onto a digitizing pad and percentages of respondent agreement about bound-
aries were calculated. Map 11.8, for example, shows the results of such a computational
procedure for 147 hand drawn maps of US dialect regions provided by respondents from
southeastern Michigan when a fifty percent agreement criterion is used.
This computational approach has been used, with adaptations to local territories, by
Long (1999), Long and Yim (2002), and Montgomery 2007.
Whether done by deriving boundary lines by simply counting co-occurrences of hand
drawn lines, by combining political or other districts contained within hand-drawn lines
into dialect areas, or by deriving boundaries computationally from hand drawn lines,
this approach to cognitive dialect boundaries asks respondents to represent directly on
a map their notion of the number and extent of distinct speech areas. In this style of
research, respondents are not asked to use their own speech as a measure of difference,
as in the little arrow, Japanese, and degree-of-difference methods outlined above, al-
Map 11.7: A composite map of 60 Aichi respondents’ hand-drawn maps of the Tohoku dialect area
(Long 1999: 183)
Map 11.8: A computationally generalized map of US dialect areas derived from 147 hand-drawn
maps (at a fifty-percent level of agreement) provided by southeastern Michigan respondents (Pres-
ton 1996: 305)
though that might indeed be a criterion used by the respondents in constructing their
maps. For that reason, post-task interviews that try to uncover such respondent strate-
gies are highly recommended (e.g., Preston 1999: xxxiv).
The work carried out within newer mental map traditions is more focused on the
agreements about boundaries of speech differences from the perspective of a single
speech community and, like much more recent sociolinguistic work, focuses on drawings
or judgments from a large number of respondents from a single area. This allows testing
of typical sociolinguistic demographic differences within a group of respondents. De-
mirci (2002), for example, contrasts hand-drawn maps of Turkish dialect areas by gender.
Not surprisingly, the older efforts in the Netherlands and Japan focused on single respon-
dents from a number of sites, just as traditional dialectology often chose a single, exem-
plary speaker from an area.
Perhaps more importantly, the newer mental maps tradition has focused equally on
nearby and distant places for judgment; the earlier tradition asked respondents to evalu-
ate nearby places only, or, at least, did not insist on or imply that judgments of distant
places were required. It is not surprising, therefore, that research that has focused on
local areas will find more local details in the respondent representations and that work
that focuses more globally will find less local detail. When Benson (2003) asked respon-
dents to draw maps of linguistic differences in Ohio, she found two, three, and even
four-part divisions of the state. In contrast, in earlier (unpublished) work with sixteen
Ohio respondents who were asked to map the entire country, I found that eleven did
not divide Ohio at all and only five divided it into two areas ⫺ northern and southern.
Only three of Benson’s eleven respondents did not subdivide the state while four found
two areas, three outlined three, and one found four.
Other work on mental maps of dialects has derived boundaries of linguistic space by
referring to concepts quite different from those usually considered by dialectologists.
4. Dialect maps maps that arent quite maps
The Japanese dialectologist Fumio Inoue was the first to develop a strategy for mapping
dialects based on concepts other than the respondent’s ability to rate similarities or dif-
ferences in surrounding regions or to outline or identify speech regions on the basis of
their identities. Inoue was so convinced (e.g., 1996) that nonlinguistic geographic knowl-
edge (e.g., political boundaries) guided respondent answers to requests to draw bound-
aries that he devised a method for determining what he called the dialect image (Inoue
1995) of an area, a method in which the mental position of a dialect was derived from
the attitudinal factors associated with places and speakers. In short, Inoue wants to
know how different areas are related to one another in the conceptual space allotted to
them by different nonlinguistic factors. To accomplish this he borrows heavily from
the semantic differential technique adapted to language attitude studies (e.g., Shuy and
Fasold 1973).
Inoue first elicits from native respondents a number of evaluative words that describe
the dialects of the region he is interested in. A multidimensional analysis of these items
shows that they can be grouped and that the grouping can be shown along axes in
Fig. 11.1: Multidimensional distribution along two axes of evaluative words provided by British
university students (Inoue 1995 [1999: 153])
multidimensional space. Figure 11.1 shows the two-axes groupings of sixteen evaluative
words for English accents given by British university students (Inoue 1995 [1999: 153]).
The two dimensions (horizontal and vertical) are clearly polarized, and Inoue labels
the right side of the horizontal dimension “STANDARDNESS” and the left side “AC-
CENTEDNESS.” He calls the vertical dimension “PASTORAL (RURAL)” at the top
and “URBANITY” at the bottom. He then assigns these ratings to varieties and pro-
duces the multidimensional plot shown in Figure 11.2.
This is indeed a mental map that does not correspond to geographical space at all,
but it clearly shows that British university students have much stronger ideas about
nearby varieties; the extremes of the axes are Liverpool and Cambridge University on the
“Class Difference” or “STANDARDNESS” horizontal axis and London and Villages in
Norfolk on the “Urbanization” vertical one.
Fig. 11.2: Multidimensional distribution along two axes for selected English varieties provided by
British university students (Inoue 1995 [1999: 154])
Inoue has also applied this multidimensional scaling technique to hand-drawn map
results using only the frequency of combination of counties and has shown a strong
horizontal axis for a north-south dimension (Geordie to Cockney) in English dialects
but a strong vertical dimension for an east-west distinction for dialects in only the south
of England (“Eastern Norfolk” to “Western”) (Inoue 1996: 153).
Other applications of this multidimensional scaling technique have sought to deter-
mine dialect images of areas for other factors. For example, Kuiper (1999) provides
multidimensional plots (with embedded cluster analyses) of French respondents’ ratings
of French dialect areas for degree-of-difference, correctness, and “pleasantness.” Hartley
does the same for ratings given by residents of the state of Oregon in the US (1999) and
for residents of Boston, Massachusetts (2005), both for the entire US, and Evans (2002)
does the same for Montreal French-speaking students’ ratings of French varieties world-
wide. It is clear that clustering and multidimensional scaling techniques add to our un-
derstandings of the mental images respondents have of language distribution, even if the
distributions are in created mental spaces rather than predetermined geographic ones.
Such work as Inoue’s and others’, if fully considered, might make this article twice
as long. In addition to geographic space and the demographic features that clearly in-
teract with the folk respondent’s cognitive construction of it, the folk also map language
in social space. This, however, makes useful but metaphorical sense of the notions space
and map. We could map (perceptually) an individual’s and a speech community’s percep-
tions of all the sociolinguistic commonplaces ⫺ sex, gender, age, ethnicity, community
of practice, etc. There is no doubt of the folk respondent’s awareness of these categories.
To take only ethnicity as an example, folk respondents have been shown to be sensitive
to this feature in language varieties on the basis of global or overall speech styles (e.g.,
Giles and Bourhis 1976) and on the basis of specific linguistic features (e.g., Graff, Labov
and Harris 1986; Purnell, Idsardi and Baugh 1999). This article deals only with those
cases in which such demographic factors clearly interact with the folk respondent’s con-
struction of space in its more ordinary geographic sense.
Map 11.9: The sites in the US from which nine well-educated, middle-aged male voice samples were
taken (Preston 1996: 322)
5. Where are you rom?

Finally we ask how people relate language and space when they hear actual speech rather
than prompts based on regional labels or evaluative words. An early example of this in
my own work was the submission of nine well-educated, middle aged, male voice samples
placed at fairly even intervals along a north-south continuum in the middle of the
US. The samples contained no lexical or grammatical clues that would help identify their
provenience.
The respondents discussed here, all from southeastern Michigan, were shown Map
11.9 and asked to identify which of these sites each voice, played in a scrambled order,
was from. Since these respondents were those from whom the composite mental map of
US dialects was derived based on their hand-drawn representations, one might expect
the boundaries of voice perception to be in roughly the same place as those shown in
that cognitive map (i. e., Map 11.8) and with the same degree of salience (i. e., drawn by
a greater number of respondents) indicated there. If that is so, then one would expect
the following placements:
(1) Nashville TN and Florence and Dothan AL would be most consistently recognized
as “South” and provide the strongest boundary (94 percent in Map 11.8).
(2) Saginaw and Coldwater MI and South Bend and Muncie IN would be consistently
recognized as “North” and provide the second strongest boundary (61 percent in
Map 11.8).
(3) New Albany IN and Bowling Green KY would be consistently recognized as “Inner
South” and provide the third strongest boundary (30 percent in Map 11.8).
(4) Nashville TN would be recognized as “Inner South” rather than “Southern” and
provide the fourth strongest boundary (30 percent in Map 11.8).
Map 11.10: Results of an ANOVA test on the site identifications of the nine voice samples; areas
colored the same were not statistically different
(5) Muncie, IN is so close to the southern edge of area #2 and New Albany IN is so
close to the northern edge of area #6 that they might be grouped together to form
a minor (fifth place) boundary or each form a separate minor boundary.
An ANOVA analysis of the assignment of voices to sites was performed, and the results
are shown in Map 11.10.
Prediction (1) was confirmed. The three southernmost areas form a region; prediction
(2) was partially confirmed; three of the four northern areas form a region, although
Coldwater MI was excluded from this group and was combined instead with New Al-
bany IN and Bowling Green KY. Prediction (3) was confirmed; New Albany IN and
Bowling Green KY formed an area, although, as noted above, Coldwater MI was sur-
prisingly identified with them rather than with the other northern areas. None of the
less salient predictions suggested in (4) and (5) were confirmed. As Map 11.8 shows, the
most salient perceptual regions along this continuum of voices (areas #1, #2, and #6)
had sample voices correctly positioned in them with the exception of one northern one,
and the evidence given the respondents was only that of regional pronunciation.
In other regional speech identification work, Diercks (1988) in a study in northern
Germany used sample voices and asked respondents to determine how far from their
home site such voices are, usually with accurate results. Williams, Garrett and Coupland
(1999) asked Welsh teachers and students to identify fourteen regional voices (two each
from six sites in Wales and two English “RP” voices, all male adolescents). Although
teachers made more correct assignments than students, overall correct placement was
low, around 50 percent accuracy for the teachers compared to about 30 percent for
students (351), and there was a great deal of variation even in the recognition of two
voices from the same region. For example, adolescent judges from Cardiff correctly
identified Cardiff voice #2 100 percent of the time but Cardiff voice #1 at only a 43.5
percent rate (352).
An innovative alternative procedure for relating voice sample recognition to percep-
tual areas is provided in Montgomery (2007). He asked respondents, all from the north
Fig. 11.3: Starburst pattern of Carlisle respondent placements of a voice sample from Carlisle
(Montgomery 2007: 295)
of England, to put an “X” on a blank map of the country to indicate where they thought
a voice sample was from. He then calculated the distance between the respondent place-
ment and the actual voice site. When lines are drawn from the actual site to the respon-
dent placement, the result is a starburst. Figure 11.3, for example, shows the starburst
pattern of the placement of a voice from Carlisle (near the English-Scottish border in
the northwest of the country) by respondents from Carlisle.
Note that some respondents actually place Carlisle off the 175 mile limit of this dia-
gram but that all such displacements are to the southeast. Since Carlisle is near the
coast, they could not place it to the west, but nothing would prevent them from putting
it farther north except the understanding that it could not be Scottish, and nothing
would prevent it from being placed farther east except the understanding that it could
not be a Newcastle (“Geordie”) variety.
These results, and the results of Carlisle respondents’ placements of six other regional
voices, are superimposed on an actual map in Map 11.11.
Interestingly, the Carlisle respondents’ placements of the local voice are the worst
(the purple lines from the “starburst” in Figure 11.3), but, in general Montgomery shows
that most respondents from Carlisle (and other sites he studied) actually placed sample
voices within the perceptual territory he determined for that respondent group from a
hand-drawn map and boundary task previously submitted.
In addition to these general voice placements, perceptual dialectology also hopes to
discover not only what factors from the nonlinguistic world make people think about
language and space the way they do but also how sensitive speakers are to various
linguistic forms as they construct language and space relationships. Plichta, Rakerd and
Preston (2005) selected a well-known southern US speech stereotype (/ay/ monoph-
thongization) and resynthesized a sample of the word guide so that it increased in mon-
ophthongization in seven regular steps from a fully diphthongal form to a fully monoph-
thongal one. The seven voice samples (one male and one female) were played three times
Map 11.11: Carlisle respondents’ placements of seven regional voices, with the starburst patterns
superimposed on a map (Montgomery 2007: 298)
at each of the seven steps for a total of forty-two judgments. In each case, the respondent
was to assign the word to one of the nine sites shown in Map 11.9. The sites were
numbered one through nine (Saginaw to Dothan) so that a numeric base could be used
to ascertain if degree of monophthongization was perceived by the respondents (from
all over the US) as an increasingly southern feature. Table 11.1 shows the results.
An ANOVA post-hoc test shows that each of these mean scores is significantly dif-
ferent from every other one, revealing considerable sensitivity to very minor changes
in degree of diphthongization and very clearly showing a strong association between
monophthongization and the respondents’ perception of its southernness.
At every one of these seven steps, however, there was also a significant difference
(based on independent t-tests) between the male and female voice scores. The female
voice, at the same degree of monophthongization as the male one, always has a lower
Tab. 11.1: Mean scores based on regional values assigned each step of the increasingly monoph-
thongized versions of /ay/
Step Mean Region
1. Saginaw
1 2.85 2. Coldwater
2 3.17 3. South Bend
3 3.87 4. Muncie
4 4.89 5. New Albany
5 5.99 6. Bowling Green
6 6.58 7. Nashville
7 7.02 8. Florence
9. Dothan
(i. e., “more northern”) score. This finding surely tells us that mental maps are based on
cultural stereotypes already well known to sociolinguists. Women are regarded in nearly
all the sociolinguistic literature as more likely users of standard speech (e.g., Trudgill
1972), but this finding is apparently also a folk stereotype, for our respondents regard a
female voice with no distinctive characteristics other than sex identity as “more north-
ern” (a feature characteristically regarded as “more standard” in US folk linguistics, e.g.,
Preston 1996). Mental maps will have to be cognizant of such sociocultural stereotypes
as formative in the construction of linguistic mental spaces.
In other work on specific features or types of features, Clopper and Pisoni (2004)
conducted a study that asked respondents to place characteristically regional voices from
across the US within broadly defined dialect regions. A regression analysis revealed that
the respondents were especially sensitive to only four (out of a potential seven) robust
phonetic indicators of region, and, although the ratings were better than chance, they
were accurate overall at only about a 30 percent rate. Van Bezooijen and Gooskens
(1999) played sample voices from several English and Dutch sites with various types of
filtering, allowing a focus on segments, voice quality, and prosody. In general, they found
that respondents were best at identifying regional speech on the basis of segmental evi-
dence, although the degree of success was considerably different across languages. Frid-
land, Bartlett and Kreuz (2004) showed that respondents were better at identifying some
resynthesized vowels as “southern US” if they were ones represented in their own pro-
duction and if they were ones more uniquely related to the area.
6. Conclusion
A continuing issue in perceptual dialectology is, with any of these techniques, whether
respondents judge areal linguistic differences on the basis of their experiences with and
knowledge of language and linguistic details or on the basis of other factors that have
to do with regional delineation. Dann ([1969] 1999: 21⫺22) is suspicious that many folk
speech areas may be constructed on the basis of nonlinguistic features (e.g., religious
differences), and a part of an early argument in the study of folk dialectology mentioned
above had to do with just this theme. Researchers in Japan (e.g., Grootaers 1964 and
Sibata 1959) concluded that the “consciousness” of dialects was based on the folk knowl-
edge of such matters as geographical barriers, political boundaries, and even school
districts (but see Mase 1964 and Nomoto 1963). Inoue (1996) came to a similar conclu-
sion after preparing his perceptual map of British dialects: “Stereotypical images of a
place or of people living there help form dialect images” (158). While all researchers
recognize that some such boundaries as school districts and the like might actually corre-
spond to production boundaries, in general, the Japanese researchers were less likely
than the Dutch to note extensive correlations between production and perception bound-
aries. Recall that Weijnen (1968), however, found that lack of correlation to be the result
of a methodological flaw in not observing the different responses one might get by asking
respondents where the speech of others was “different” rather than by asking where it
was “the same.”
It is very doubtful that many respondents form their general notions of space on the
basis of language differences, although that awareness may play a bigger role where there
are linguistic correlates to tribal or clan divisions, particularly in areas where exogamous
marriage or some other cultural practice is based on linguistic differences (e.g., Stanford
2007). Since we know from work in cultural geography that different respondents have
very different notions of even the physical spaces around them, it has perhaps been
inappropriate to provide respondents with even minimal outlines of areas on which to
draw their mental maps of linguistic differences. Perhaps one ought first to determine
the general, nonlinguistic mental map of respondents and only then allow them to go
on to characterize the speech regions of it. On the other hand, the mental map a respon-
dent has of an area in general might have a very different outline from that same respon-
dent’s map of linguistic differences in the same area. Perhaps we will have to content
ourselves with investigating the folk mental maps of space with regard to language,
comparing them, on the one hand, with maps of actual (production) language differences
and, on the other, with other folk mental maps of constructs such as physical space,
desirability of residence, political climate, and the like.
However we conduct this perceptual research, it is very unlikely that we will find the
mental map of an individual or a group. The various studies outlined above show varia-
tion among the same respondents when given different tasks, and that is surely the
most likely outcome when we seek a cognitively based but learned rather than innate
characteristic of human behavior. When we foreground sex in some aspect of the task,
then sex will probably play a role in our respondents’ positioning of language in space;
when we highlight a linguistic feature or a status related linguistic factor, those elements
will figure prominently in the folk notion of how language is distributed in space. We
expect this sort of variability in linguistic performance; why would it not appear in
linguistic regard and, in this case, in the folk realizations of language as it is distributed
in space?
7. Appendix
8. Reerences
Benson, Erica J.
2003 Folk linguistic perceptions and the mapping of dialect boundaries. American Speech
78(3): 307⫺330.
Clopper, Cynthia G. and David B. Pisoni
2004 Some acoustic cues for the perceptual categorization of American English regional dia-
lects. Journal of Phonetics 32: 111⫺140.
Daan, Jo
1969 [1999] Dialekten. In: Jo Daan and D. P. Blok, Von Randstad tot Landrand, 7⫺43. (Bijdra-
gen en Mededelingen der Dialecten Commissie van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akade-
mie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam 37.) Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche U.M. [Eng-
lish translation: Dialects. In: Preston (ed.), 9⫺30.]
Dailey-O’Cain, Jennifer
1999 The perception of post-unification German regional speech. In: Preston (ed.): 227⫺242.
Demirci, Mahide
2002 Gender differences in the perception of Turkish regional dialects. In: Long and Preston
(eds.), 41⫺50.
Demirci, Mahide and Brian Kleiner
1999 The perception of Turkish dialects. In: Preston (ed.): 263⫺281.
Diercks, Willy
1988 [2002] Mental maps. Linguistisch-geographische Konzepte. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie
und Linguistik 55(3): 280⫺305. [English translation: Mental maps: Linguistic-geographic
concepts. In: Long and Preston (ed.), 51⫺70.]
Evans, Betsy E.
2001 Dialect contact and the northern cities shift in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Unpublished PhD
dissertation, Michigan State University.
Evans, Betsy E.
2002 Attitudes of Montreal students to varieties of French. In: Long and Preston (eds.), 71⫺93.
Fought, Carmen
2002 California students’ perceptions of, you know, regions and dialects? In: Long and Preston
(eds.), 113⫺134.
Fridland, Valerie, Kathryn Bartlett and Roger Kreuz
2004 Do you hear what I hear? Experimental measurement of the perceptual salience of acous-
tically manipulated vowel variants by Southern speakers in Memphis, TN. Language
Variation and Change 16(1): 1⫺15.
Giles, Howard and Richard Y. Bourhis
1976 Voice and racial categorization in Britain. Communication Monographs 43: 108⫺114.
Goeman, A. C. M.
1989 [1999] Dialectes et jugements subjectifs des locuteurs. Quelques remarques de méthode a
propos d’une controverse. Grenoble: ELLUG, Université Stendhal ⫺ Grenoble 3. [Eng-
lish translation: Dialects and the subjective judgments of speakers: Remarks on contro-
versial methods. In: Preston (ed.), 135⫺144.]
Goeman, A. C. M.
2002 Perception of dialect difference: Standard and dialect in relation to new data on Dutch
varieties. In: Long and Preston (eds.), 135⫺149.
Gould, Peter and Rodney White
1974 Mental Maps. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Graff, David, William Labov and Wendell Harris
1986 Testing listeners’ reactions to phonological markers of ethnic identity. In: David Sankoff
(ed.), Diversity and Diachrony, 45⫺58. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 53.) Amster-
dam: Benjamins.
Grootaers, Willem
1964 [1999] La discussion autour des frontières dialectales subjectives. Orbis 13, 380⫺398. [Eng-
lish translation: The discussion surrounding the subjective boundaries of dialects. In:
Preston (ed.), 115⫺129.]
Hartley, Laura C.
1999 A view from the west: Perceptions of U.S. dialects by Oregon residents. In: Preston (ed.),
315⫺332.
Hartley, Laura C.
2005 The consequences of conflicting stereotypes: Bostonian perceptions of U.S. dialects.
American Speech 80(4): 388⫺405.
Inoue, Fumio
1995 [1999] Classification of dialects by image ⫺ English and Japanese. In: Wolfgang Viereck
(ed.), Verhandlungen des Internationalen Dialektologenkongresses, Bamberg, 29. 7.⫺4. 8.
1990, 75⫺77 and 355⫺368. Stuttgart: Steiner. [Reprinted in Preston (ed.), 147⫺159.]
Inoue, Fumio
1996 [1999] Subjective dialect division in Great Britain. American Speech 71(2): 142⫺161. [Re-
printed in Preston (ed.), 161⫺176.]
Kremer, Ludger
1984 [1999] Die niederländisch-deutsche Staatgrenze als subjektive Dialektgrenze. In: Grenzen
en Grensproblemen. Een Bundel Studies Uitgegeven door het Nedersaksisch Instituut van
de R. U. Groningen ter Gelegenheid van zijn 30-jarig Bestaan, 76⫺83. (Nedersaksische
Studies 7 / Driemaandelikse Bladen 36.) [English translation: The Netherlands-German
border as a subjective dialect boundary. In: Preston (ed.), 31⫺36.]
Kuiper, Lawrence
1999 Variation and the norm: Parisian perceptions of regional French. In: Preston (ed.):
243⫺262.
Lance, Donald M.
1999 Regional variation in subjective dialect divisions in the United States. In: Preston (ed.):
283⫺314.
L’Eplattenier-Saugy, Caroline
2002 A perceptual dialect study of French in Switzerland. In: Long and Preston (eds.), 351⫺
365.
Long, Daniel
1999 Geographical perceptions of Japanese dialect regions. In: Preston (ed.): 177⫺198.
Long, Daniel and Dennis R. Preston (eds.)
2002 Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, vol. 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Long, Daniel and Young-Cheol Yim
2002 Regional differences in the perception of Korean dialects. In: Long and Preston (eds.),
249⫺275.
Mase, Yoshio
1964 [1999] Hôgen ishiki to hôgen kukaku. In: Misao Tōjō (ed.), Nihon hôgen kenkyûkai, 270⫺
302. Tokyo: Tokyodo. [English translation: Dialect consciousness and dialect divisions.
In: Preston (ed.), 71⫺99.]
Montgomery, Christopher
2007 Northern English dialects: A perceptual approach. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Uni-
versity of Sheffield.
Moreno Fernández, Juliana and Francisco Moreno Fernández
2002 Madrid perceptions of regional varieties in Spain. In: Long and Preston (eds.), 295⫺320.
Nomoto, Kikuo
1963 [1999] Kotoba no ishiki no kyôkai to jissai no kyôkai. Jinruikagaku [Anthropological
Sciences] 15, 271⫺281. [English translation: Consciousness of linguistic boundaries and
actual linguistic boundaries. In: Preston (ed.), 63⫺69.]
Plichta, Bartłomiej, Brad Rakerd and Dennis R. Preston

2005 The /ay/s have it. In: Tore Kristiansen, Nikolas Coupland and Peter Garrett (eds.), Acta
Linguistica Hafniensia 37(9): 107⫺130.
Preston, Dennis R.
1981 Perceptual dialectology: Mental maps of United States dialects from a Hawai’ian perspec-
tive (summary). In: Henry Warkentyne (ed.), Methods IV / Méthodes IV, 192⫺198. (Pa-
pers from the 4th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology.) Victoria, BC:
University of Victoria.
Preston, Dennis R.
1982 Perceptual dialectology: Mental maps of United States dialects from a Hawai’ian perspec-
tive. In: Dennis R. Preston (ed.), Working Papers in Linguistics 14(2): 5⫺49. [Department
of Linguistics, University of Hawai’i.]
Preston, Dennis R.
1986 Five visions of America. Language in Society 15(2): 221⫺240.
Preston, Dennis R.
1988 Methods in the study of dialect perception. In: Alan Thomas (ed.), Methods in Dialectol-
ogy, 373⫺395. Clevedon/Avon/Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Preston, Dennis R.
1989 Perceptual Dialectology. Dordrecht: Foris.
Preston, Dennis R.
1996 Where the worst English is spoken. In: Edgar Schneider (ed.), Focus on the USA, 297⫺
360. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Preston, Dennis R. (ed.)
1999 A Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, vol.1. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Preston, Dennis R. and George M. Howe
1987 Computerized generalizations of mental dialect maps. In: Keith M. Denning, Sharon
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NWAV-XV at Stanford, 361⫺378. Stanford: Department of Linguistics, Stanford Univer-
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1999 Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal
of Language and Social Psychology 18(1): 10⫺30.
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1955 [1999] Dialectindeling naar opgaven van medewerkers. Mededelingen der Centrale Com-
missie voor Onderzoek van het Nederlandse Volkseigen 7: 20⫺23. [English translation:
Informant classification of dialects. In: Preston (ed.), 3⫺7.]
Shuy, Roger W. and Ralph W. Fasold
1973 Language Attitudes: Current Trends and Prospects. Washington, DC: Georgetown Univer-
sity Press.
Sibata, Takesi
1959 [1999] Hôgen kyôkai no ishiki. Gengo Kenkyû 36, 1⫺30. [English translation: Conscious-
ness of dialect boundaries. In: Preston (ed.), 39⫺62.]
Stanford, James
2007 Dialect contact and identity: A case study of exogamous Sui clans. Unpublished PhD
dissertation, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.
Tamasi, Susan L.
2003 Cognitive patterns of linguistic perceptions. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University
of Georgia.
Trudgill, Peter
1972 Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. Lan-
guage in Society 1(2): 179⫺195.
12. Language and space: The linguistic dynamics approach 201
Van Bezooijen, Renée and Charlotte Gooskens

1999 Identification of language varieties: The contribution of different linguistic levels. Journal
of Language and Social Psychology 18: 31⫺48.
1946 De grenzen tussen de Oost-Noordbrabantse dialecten onderling [The borders between the
dialects of eastern North Brabant]. In: Antonius A. Weijnen, J. M. Renders, and Jac van
Ginneken (eds.), Oost-Noordbrabantse Dialectproblemen [Eastern North Brabant Dialect
Problems], 1⫺15. (Bijdragen en Mededelingen der Dialectencommissie van de Konin-
klijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wettenschappen te Amsterdam 8.) Amsterdam: Noord
Hollandsche Uitgevers.
1968 [1999] Zum Wert subjektiver Dialektgrenzen, Lingua 21: 594⫺596. [English translation:
On the value of subjective dialect boundaries. In: Preston (ed.), 131⫺133.]
Williams, Angie, Peter Garrett, and Nikolas Coupland
1999 Dialect recognition. In: Preston (ed.), 345⫺358. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Willems, Pieter
1886 De enquête werd gehouden in 1886, de antwoorden zijn het eigendom van de Koninklikke
Vlaamsche Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde, en worden daar bewaard [The inquiry was
done in 1886; the responses are the property of the Royal Flemish Academy of Languages
and Literature in Ghent where they are preserved]. Microcopies are held at the Institute
of Dialectology and Phonetics in Leuven, the Catholic University Nijmegen and the P. J.
Meertens Institute Amsterdam.
Dennis R. Preston, Oklahoma State (USA)
12. Language and space: The linguistic dynamics

approach
1. Introduction
2. Spatially distributed language as a research laboratory for a theory of language (change)
3. Theoretical consequences
4. A rudimentary explanation of twentieth-century dialect dynamics
5. References
1. Introduction
The research goal of the linguistic dynamics approach can best be presented in contradis-
tinction to that of classical dialectology. Traditional dialectology was shaped by an ax-
iom of dissolution: the dialect change observable from the outset was interpreted as a
process of rapid disappearance as a result of the increasing prevalence of standard vari-
eties. Research focused on the reconstruction of dialects, assumed to have been stable
for centuries before the dissolution process set in. Accordingly, the research goal was the
description of the spatial distribution of the oldest and least standard forms of language
in isolation and its explanation in terms of historically remote processes.
In contrast, the primary research goal of the linguistic dynamics approach is the
precise analysis of the dynamic processes at work within complex language systems and
their explanation in terms of individual cognitive and interactive-cum-communicative
factors. The data basis consists of directly observable empirical processes of stabilization
or modification. For a (linguistic) dynamic dialectology, this means that the continuing
development dialects have shown since they began to be studied is not a source of inter-
ference in the reconstruction of a putative “initial state”, but rather an ideal source of
detailed insight into the processes acting on data samples distributed across space (both
groups of speakers and varieties) and time. The same is true for variation within a
dialect at a particular point in time. Concurrent variants do not obscure an idealized
homogeneous variety; they need instead to be analyzed as an integral aspect of the
constant varietal flux.
Shifting the research goal necessitates a modification of the observational basis in
line with Labov’s (1994) requirement that apparent-time and real-time analyses be
linked. Within the linguistic dynamics approach, a research tool has been developed to
this end: the dynamic language atlas, which allows the accurate tracking of selected data
on the linguistic competence and performance of various groups of speakers across space
and time. This new “research laboratory for a theory of language (change)” is introduced
in section 2. It can be located in a tradition reaching back to neogrammarian linguistics,
in which extensive dialectological studies are recruited to empirically test and further
develop theorems of language change. Section 2.1 presents the new research possibilities
opened up by such broad-scale real-time analyses and the opportunities for validation
that arise when the data presented in dialect atlases are systematically related to more
comprehensive surveys and direct performance records (village and regional grammars,
sound recordings) and modern language variation studies. Section 2.2 aims to make
visible the theoretical challenges raised by this new research tool. To this end, four sur-
prisingly clear-cut preliminary findings from the to-date most advanced dynamic lan-
guage atlas (the Digital Wenker Atlas) are presented. They reveal completely unexpected
developments which require a fundamental readjustment of the explanatory schema.
Section 3 describes how the theoretical consequences of these findings have been
elaborated under the rubric of the “linguistic dynamics approach” by the Marburg re-
search team (cf. Schmidt 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2008; Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear;
Herrgen 2006; Lameli 2004; Lenz 2003; Rabanus 2008; Kehrein 2006, 2008). The theoret-
ical core is the concept of synchronization (section 3.1), developed in response to the
Saussurean idea of synchronie in light of Hermann Paul’s model of dynamic individual
competence. The root cause of linguistic dynamics is seen as the constant calibration of
an individual’s language competence through linguistic interaction (i. e., language per-
formance), leading to either a stabilization or modification of the participants’ linguistic
competence. Mesosynchronizations, in which groups of speakers in direct contact with
one another construct common linguistic knowledge over extended periods of time, are
the decisive factor in the dynamic of regional varieties. The second pillar of the approach
is the linguistic dynamic understanding of variety (section 3.2). This concept distin-
guishes between elements of linguistic knowledge that an individual can easily overrule
within a specific synchronization act and those elements modifiable only through phases
of active learning, i. e., usually only in the course of generational change. The latter
include the sign-generating (phonological, prosodic) and combining (morphosyntactic)

rules that form the foundations of linguistic competence. They are also the basis of full
varieties (Vollvarietäten) like the dialects and regiolects. The theory’s third stanchion is
the concept of a modern regional language (section 3.3). It is impossible to study the
development of a dialect in isolation without ignoring the fact that dialects have long
been an integral part of a dual variety formation and that all twentieth-century and
contemporary dialect speakers from countries where a well-developed school system pro-
vides instruction in a standard variety have bivarietal competence (in dialect and regio-
lect). Alongside the well-documented horizontal dialect formations (of coexistent base
dialects; Dialektverbände), sketchily studied vertical regional language formations have
emerged in the past 200 years or so. Their historical origins and varietal structure are
explored here.
In a closing section it will be shown how the unexpected findings from the new “re-
search laboratory” can be explained with the help of these elements of the linguistic
dynamics theory.
2. Spatially distributed language as a research laboratory

or a theory o language (change)
One hundred and thirty years ago, the neogrammarians recognized that the meticulous
examination of an individual dialect (as in the village monographs, cf. Winteler 1876)
represented an outstanding resource for the development and validation of theories of
language change and hence of language itself. At roughly the same time, the initial
findings of dialect geography (Wenker 1878) were rapidly proving a theoretical challenge
par excellence to the contemporary account of language change (cf. the highly informa-
tive overview in Auer 2005). Early dialect geography challenged the neogrammarian
attempt to explain change in isolated varieties in terms of internal (sound laws, chain
shifts) and cognitive factors (“analogy”; cf., respectively, Paul 1886: 46⫺65, 85⫺98; Pfalz
1918; the overview in Murray in this volume) with its finding that “every word has a
history of its own” (Malkiel 1967; cf. Wenker 1889: 22⫺23) and developed an alternative
attempt to account for the palpably observable distribution of linguistic phenomena in
space through external (sociodemographic/interactive) factors. In so doing, correlations
between (bundles of) isoglosses and geographical, historicopolitical and denominational
borders were explained as the ultimate effects of former barriers to communication or
“intercourse” (Verkehrsgrenzen; cf. Wrede 1903: 30⫺35; Frings 1924: 8).
To this day, the central questions which arose continue, in modified forms, to domi-
nate theories of language change. This is true of the old conundrum of whether a sound
change equally affects all the words of a variety in the same phonological context (“Does
sound change proceed one word at a time. Or does it change phonemes as a whole?”
asks Labov [1994: 502]). But it is equally true of the far more basic issue of the nature
of the relationship between internal and external factors. Can a simple allocation of
these to the distinct stages of every language change (emergence vs. spread of an innova-
tion) be made, as Croft seems to assume? (“The phonetic and conceptual factors […] are
responsible only for innovation, and social factors provide a selection mechanism for
propagation” [Croft 2000: 39].) Or does a causal nexus of function and structure charac-
terize the process by which linguistic innovations become established under the agency
of variation and selection (as in the theory of diachronic adaptation, cf. Haspelmath
1998; see also Andersen 1973 on abductive change)?
The opportunities to clarify these fundamental questions on the basis of accurate
empirical data have improved dramatically since the neogrammarian era. Whilst the
individual “living” dialect, (apparently) independent of written language, could be
viewed as a test bed for a theory of language (change) in 1876 and, much later, Moulton
(1962: 25) could answer his own question of whether “there is any laboratory in which
we can test the working hypotheses of structural linguistics” with the suggestion “that
such a laboratory exists in the material of a linguistic atlas”, we have at our disposal
today, for the first time in the history of linguistics, the opportunity to accurately trace
the development of language in time and space using empirical data. This new, much
improved “research laboratory” is introduced in this section.
2.1. The new research laboratory: Dynamic language atlases

as broad-scale real-time studies
The great dialect atlases of classical dialectology mapped (usually word-for-word) the
areal distribution of samples of sectors of the linguistic competence (for example, the
phonology and morphology of the “dialect” variety) of selected speakers from particular
social groups (e.g., schoolchildren or sedentary farming folk) at particular times. Wher-
ever we have such early surveys of linguistic competence at our disposal ⫺ whether very
wide ranging (e.g., Wenker’s Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs [surveyed around 1880],
Gilliéron and Edmont’s Atlas Linguistique de la France [1902⫺1969], or Jaberg and Jud’s
Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz [1928⫺1960]) or confined to specific
regions (e.g., Kurath’s [1939⫺1943] Linguistic Atlas of New England) ⫺ we have the
opportunity to track the development of linguistic competence across space and time
through a fresh survey of the same sectors of competence among the descendants of the
original group of speakers. In some cases, such (in part multiple) reinvestigations have
indeed been made on a grand scale. For instance, because of the obvious methodological
weaknesses or gaps in the early supraregional atlases (Wenker: indirect data collection
from elementary school teachers using the spelling rules of the time; Gilliéron: just 992
survey locations for all of France; Jaberg and Jud: only 405 localities surveyed for Italy
and southern Switzerland), regional atlases with a dense net of survey locations have
been created in France, Germany and Italy from 1950 onwards. These partly incorporate
the investigative programs of the old supraregional atlases but have, at least until now,
only rarely been exploited for comparative mappings.
Such linguistic atlases as do not just permit a comparison over time but systematically
present directly comparable linguistic data collected at different times, we refer to as
dynamic language atlases (sprachdynamische Atlanten). The earliest example of such an
atlas is the Schlesische Sprachatlas (Bellmann 1967), which, for the vanished German
dialects of Silesia, presents data from the Wenker survey of 1880 together with sound
recordings of the Wenker sentences from 1962⫺1966 in a series of paired maps, the
uppermost of which (the more recent data) is reproduced on tracing paper. The most
comprehensive and sophisticated dynamic language atlas to date is the Digital Wenker
Atlas, published across the internet (Schmidt and Herrgen 2001⫺2009; <http://www.
diwa.info>). Its special value for precise linguistic dynamic analyses is closely bound up
with the history of German dialectology. Because the 40 Wenker sentences are the basis
of the only extant survey of the entire German-speaking area (Wenker’s Sprachatlas des
Deutschen Reichs), because the latter with its c. 50,000 individual locations is also the
world’s densest survey of the dialects of a language, and because of intrinsic methodo-
logical flaws, the Wenker lemmas have been sampled time and again in the history of
German dialectology. They have, for example, been considered in most dialect mono-
graphs (since 1890) and included in extensive sound recordings from 1950 on; since 1970
they have formed an element of the German regional linguistic atlases, including the
post-1980 polydimensional regional atlases that surveyed differing social groups; and
they are often still an element in the extensive investigative armory of contemporary
language variation studies. As a rule, the Digital Wenker Atlas presents the data collected
at different times from a range of social groups in a manner which facilitates direct
comparisons (cf. Kehrein, Lameli and Nickel 2005): the historical Wenker maps can be
called up over the internet, the original survey forms can be viewed, more recent sound
recordings containing the mapped lemmas can be played, and the corresponding maps
from modern regional atlases can be overlaid semi-transparently. For all of the other
data sets (traditional village monographs, dialect-geographical investigations, contempo-
rary language variation studies) the internet publication offers georeferenced research
aids.
The enhanced research opportunities offered by this new geolinguistic laboratory are
manifest: (a) real-time analysis of language (data segments) across space, (b) combina-
tion/cross-linkage of these data segments with thorough descriptions of the phonological
and morphological subsystems of a variety at various points in time, and (c) combina-
tion/cross-linkage of the dialect variety data segments with a full description of the verti-
cal dimension of a language across space (i. e., dialect⫺standard variation).
Re (a): Dynamic language atlases’ most obvious advantage is the possibility of genu-
ine real-time analysis they afford (see Labov 1994: 73⫺112 on the fundamental problems
of real-time analyses, usually of a tightly constrained area). Traditional, unidimensional
dialect atlases represent a sample of linguistic data at a particular “point in time” (or
better, during a survey period). From a diachronic perspective, such a synchronic state
represents a “frozen random sample” of the development of a language across space and
time. Naturally, there have been (in part laborious) attempts to interpret the observable
spatial distribution of the linguistic data as the result of antecedent processes of change.
This can proceed in a relatively simple manner, as for instance when traditional dialect
geography interprets wedge formations on maps as “vanguards of innovation” or mar-
ginal strips as “relicts” and “explains” them with the presumed prestige of historical
language bearers and cultural currents (Kulturströmungen; cf. Schrambke in this vol-
ume). It can also proceed with virtuosity, as when the selection and adaptation (of the
variants) of various innovative impulses is deduced from their functionality in compari-
son to the linguistic structure of antecedent systems (cf., for example, Seiler 2003 or
Haas in this volume). The methodological problem remains the same: the assumptions
regarding previous language states remain uncertain. As a rule, they can only be sup-
ported by isolated findings from older written sources or assumptions about historical
frames of reference or be based on inferences from the synchronic data of an atlas. At
best, a relative chronology can be postulated. In light of this problem, more recent
geolinguistics has attempted to harness the sociolinguistic apparent-time approach (cf.
Labov 1994: 43⫺72) to the investigation of language change across space. For instance,
for those regions of South America characterized by high mobility and intensive lan-
guage contact, the pluridimensional language atlas has been developed (cf. Atlas Lingüı́s-
tico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay [Thun and Elizaincı́n 2000⫺]). In contrast to
unidimensional dialect atlases, the catalog of questions and the number of locations are
reined in radically and phenomena believed to be currently subject to change are espe-
cially targeted. This makes it possible to extend the survey of linguistic competence to
cover various social attributes (age, gender, education, mobility, etc.) and to collect per-
formance data from these speakers in a range of contexts (interview, reading aloud,
spontaneous material). The goal is to be able to analyze the sociocontextual and spatial
distribution of data as a series of simultaneous windows onto a complex process unfold-
ing in time (cf. Thun 2000: 83). Of course, the fundamental methodological problem for
any apparent-time approach remains unresolved: synchronic variability is interpreted as
change across time despite having no systematic control over the temporal dimension.
With a dynamic language atlas, language change processes can be tracked precisely
through space and time for various speaker types and contexts. Since these processes are
observable through empirical spoken language data from a particular time, correlations
with contemporaneous external factors can be studied exactly. Even more significant is
the fact that the linguistic structure of antecedent systems, within the framework of
which functional adaptations occur through language change processes, does not need
to be posited, but is known from empirical observations.
Re (b): Since historical language atlases always represent small samples of the linguis-
tic competence of particular groups of speakers of a variety, knowledge of the full set,
that is, the complete prosodic/phonological and morphological structure of the historical
dialect, is of decisive significance in any linguistic dynamic analysis. This is exactly what
is described in the phonetically precise village monographs and early dialect geographical
studies, which also include a virtually complete catalog of the correspondences between
phonemes and lexemes, described in terms of historical reference systems. In the German
language area with its extremely dense net of such monographs, they also furnish a
vital tool for validating Wenker’s survey method using (nearly) contemporaneous data,
particularly his imprecise transcriptions.
Re (c): Only when the vertical dimension of linguistic variation can be included is a
full analysis of fundamental language change processes possible. It is not widely recog-
nized that, to a degree, this can even be done for past language states. In Germany,
socially differentiated sound recordings of dialect speakers began being made in 1922,
capturing the “individual languages of the same location, of people of varying age, gen-
der and status” (Wagner 1924⫺1925: 230; my translation). In the fifties, Zwirner made
5000 recordings of the “everyday language” of various social groups (cf. Zwirner, Maack
and Bethge 1956). In the absence of appropriate analytic tools, these recordings have,
however, barely been evaluated, but the opportunity for retrospective analyses with up-
to-date methods now exists. Far more imperative, however, is the opportunity to com-
bine a systematic investigation of a language’s variation spectrum with an analysis of
the material furnished by a dynamic language atlas. Any modern investigation of the
overall variation structure of language areas needs to be designed to also function as the
endpoint of a true panel (cf. Labov 1994: 76⫺77), i. e., to represent a fresh survey of the
same data sample effectively tracked through time by a dynamic language atlas (cf.
Elmentaler 2006 and, on the “REDE” project, <http://www.regionalsprache.de> and
Kehrein 2008).
2.2. Preliminary indings rom the new laboratory as a challenge

or language (change) theory
With the help of the Digital Wenker Atlas, the development of the German dialects over
almost exactly a century can thus be closely followed, albeit for a restricted sample of
linguistic data (viz., the lemmas of the 40 Wenker sentences) but a very large language
area. For large parts of the Middle and Upper German language areas, regional atlases,
whose data date from between 1970 and 1990, i. e., about a century after Wenker (1880),
are available. Intermediary stages are documented in a relatively dense net of mono-
graphic studies (from between 1890 and 1960) and sound recordings (post-1950 in high
quality). It will be some time until the final results of this first large-scale attempt at a
linguistic dynamic real-time analysis are available. But the potential that these analyses
harbor and the theoretical challenge they pose are already apparent in the preliminary
findings which have emerged so far: despite the dramatic social upheavals of the twenti-
eth century in Germany (the transformation from an agrarian to an industrial to a
relatively mobile service-based society), there is no reason to believe in a rapid decline
in the currency of dialects between 1880 and 1980. Overall, the situation is one of relative
stability (cf. Herrgen in this volume). Far more fascinating is, however, the fact that
while the dialects of an area have remained completely unchanged for over a century
with regard to some phenomena, the repeatedly postulated convergence on the standard
language can in fact be observed for other phenomena, and ⫺ most surprising of all ⫺
that yet other dialectal phenomena are diverging from both the standard and the dialect!
Naturally, the theoretical challenge lies in explaining why the individual cases have devel-
oped so differently. The spatial distribution of the various developments also offers new
potential insights. This is illustrated in the following in a simplified and in part schema-
tized form. It should be made clear in advance that the analyses to date show that
there is an absolutely dominant external factor driving dialect change in Germany in the
twentieth century. It is not, as is widely expected, the familiarity of all speakers with the
written and spoken standard. Rather, it is ⫺ as a result of broader social trans-
formations ⫺ the supplantation of the local (locality-based) network of communicative
relationships still dominant in the nineteenth century by the thoroughgoing regionaliza-
tion of such interaction. (On this “supralocalization” or “de-localization” see the articles
by Britain and Mæhlum in this volume, as well as Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear.)
Type 1: Absolute stability over a century
Absolute constancy over a century without any variation in either language area, A or
B, is primarily observed when the isogloss separating the two variants coincides with the
historical boundary between two dialect formations (Dialektverbände). An example is
southern was versus northern wat (‘what’) in West Middle German. This seems easy to
explain with existing language change theories. The theoretical challenge first becomes
clear when closer examination of an actual case reveals (1) that all speakers in areas A
and B have active mastery of both variants (a is also the Standard German variant, b the
dialectal variant), (2) that no barriers to intercourse (Verkehrsgrenzen) or other external
Fig. 12.1: Absolute stability over a century (Type 1)
distinctions currently separate language areas A and B, and (3) that a and b are linguisti-
cally marginal (single-word) opposites, completely detached from the phonological struc-
ture of the dialects in A and B (cf. Schmidt 2005c: 24⫺30).
Type 2: Development away rom both the standard language and

the old dialect
Type 2 is illustrated by a verbal inflection example (cf. Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear:
4.2.1). In Standard German, bringen ‘to bring’ is neither a strong (class b, e.g., singen⫺
sang⫺gesungen ‘SING’) nor a weak verb (class c, e.g., sagen⫺sagte⫺gesagt ‘SAY’), but
rather a rare case of mixed inflexion (bringen⫺brachte⫺gebracht; class a). Ongoing psy-
cholinguistic studies (cf. Niedeggen-Bartke 2002, described in Schmidt and Herrgen, to
appear: 4.2.1) show that German children acquire the past participle (gebracht) very late
and that before the age of four, the verb is usually inflected following the rules for class
Fig. 12.2: Development away from both the standard language and the old dialect (Type 2)
c (*gebringt) or class b (*gebrungen). Such innovation thus arises spontaneously in the

normal course of child language acquisition in line with the principle of analogy, well
explored since the neogrammarian era.
In dialect area B in 1880, the a and b forms stood juxtaposed, a as the old, standard-
conform dialect form, b a highly salient dialect form. In four sets of data from three
different periods (1880, 1939, older speakers in 1980, younger speakers in 1980), the
spread of the innovation can be traced very clearly. It can be empirically demonstrated
that form b “spread out” in stages and ultimately took over the entire dialect area B
(Rhine Franconian left of the Rhine). In that this innovation repeatedly recurs, it can
be seen as a “natural” language change, upon closer investigation surprising only for
the fact that the clear standard language norm and the negative evaluation of the variant
have not hindered its spread. It is much more of an issue to explain why the innovation
does not spread to the neighboring areas of A and C. These differ from B primarily in
their phonological structure (they are “structural regions”, see section 3.3); the morpho-
logical structure in the innovation zone in B generally corresponds to that of A and C.
Hence, the linguistic preconditions for a functional adaptation were identical. Nor can
the differential effects of any external factors be discerned ⫺ here too, both variants are
well known to all the speakers in all of the areas under observation.
Type 3: Broad-scale transormation o the phonological structure

o dialect areas
The examples for Types 1 and 2 depict relatively isolated phenomena, for which the
ongoing influence of the historical boundaries between dialect formations or “structural
boundaries” within them present explanatory challenges for linguistic theory. Type 3
involves broad-scale phonological change and shifts in the phonological boundaries be-
tween former dialect formations. One example is the change in the old dialectal diph-
Fig. 12.3: Broad-scale transformation of the phonological structure of dialect areas (Type 3)
thongal phoneme corresponding to MHG /o:/ (e.g., /ou/, /au/ or /oa/ in words like groß
‘big’, Rose ‘rose’, Loos ‘sow (female pig)’, rot ‘red’, tot ‘dead’, Brot ‘bread’, hoch ‘high’)
in six different Middle and Upper German dialect areas (cf. Schmidt and Herrgen, to
appear: 4.2.3). In 1880, all of the individual isoglosses for such words coincide in some
of the dialect areas (e.g., area A in the schematic map shown as Figure 12.3). In these
cases (e.g., in the southern Palatinate), there is no language change to be seen, even 100
years later: the dialect areas are stable, their phonological structure has not changed, the
isoglosses for the individual lemmas are still superposed. The situation is completely
different in dialect areas B and C, where in 1880 the isoglosses for the various words
did not coincide. Here, in every case we have examined, the individual lemma boundaries
have shifted over the course of the past century. In most cases, the erstwhile diphthong
phoneme has been replaced by whichever former dialectal phoneme is phonetically most
similar to the phonemes of the surrounding dialect areas (e.g., /oa/ in Bavarian Swabia
replaced by /ou/, /ou / or /o:/). The old diphthong then either becomes a single lemma
relict (area B, e.g., western Upper Bavarian) or vanishes completely (area C, e.g., the
Bavarian Swabian transition zone). The clarity of this finding is striking. (1) For phono-
logically relevant phenomena (i. e., phonemic splits and mergers), the old aphorism “ev-
ery word has a history of its own” implies that a very long term (in this instance phono-
logical) change is in progress. A long-standing language change process has not yet
been completed. (2) The phonological transformation proceeds via a lexeme-for-lexeme
phonological redistribution. It is equally clear that, where the individual lemma bound-
aries of a phoneme in two different periods coincide, a (more recent) language change
process has not yet set in.
Type 4: The role o unctionality in structural change in dialectal

subsystems
A further important early finding out of the new linguistic laboratory can be described
without recourse to a map. In Rabanus (2008), changes in the inflectional morphology
of person, number and case was investigated in 43 small-scale areas. German pronominal
and verbal inflection has long been characterized by increasing syncretism (the collapse
of inflective categories). The one-hundred-year comparison shows how this long-term
change has unfolded in specific cases. For instance, there is total case syncretism of
second-person plural pronouns in certain North Bavarian dialects ⫺ in 1880, nom IHR,
acc/dat ENK; in 2000: nom/acc/dat ENKS. In other dialects the verbal inflexion has
syncretized, e.g., beißen ‘to bite’ ⫺ in 1880: 3sg BAES-T, 2pl BAES-TS; in 2000, 3sg/
2pl BAES-T. The astoundingly clear upshot of this very extensive analysis is that there
must be an internal factor, for which the boundaries of the linguistic sub-areas are irrele-
vant, that acts to limit or stop the morphological change. It emerges that there is a
functional lower limit to the spread of syncretism: the retention of a distinction when
decoding semantic roles in minimal sentence pairs. Rabanus employs the methodological
tool of the “minimal sentence”, in which the syntactic slots for predicate, subject and
object(s) are filled with just the inflected verb plus pronouns. Through the interplay of
the verbal and pronominal inflectional categories he can then show how preserving the
functional lower limit controls language change (Rabanus 2008: 260⫺271). For the cho-
sen example, this means that complete case syncretism of second-person pronouns (i. e.,
ENKS in all cases) has not developed in a single village dialect in which verbal inflection
syncretism also occurs ⫺ that would have led to ambiguous minimal sentence pairs of
the type ENKS BAES-T DEI, in which case cannot be unequivocally assigned (Ihr beißt
sie [2pl.nom bite.2pl 3sg.fem.acc] ‘You bite her’ or Euch beißt sie [2pl.acc bite.3sg
3sg.fem.nom] ‘She bites you’).
3. Theoretical implications
The implications of these findings for a theory of language (change) have been explored
by the Deutscher Sprachatlas team in Marburg in numerous publications under the ru-
bric of the linguistic dynamics approach (LDA; cf. section 1). Linguistic dynamics
(Sprachdynamik) is defined as the study of the influences acting on the constantly shifting
complex of language and the resultant modifying and stabilizing processes.
The starting point is the assumption that linguistic changes arise because (groups of)
speakers in interaction with other (groups of) speakers, who have other lingual system
and register competencies, apply cognitive, usually unconscious, optimization strategies
in keeping with their communicative goals. The key theoretical gambits are fourfold:
(1) supplanting the Saussurean dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony with the
concept of synchronization; (2) resorting to the idea of individual competence as the basis
for theoretical explication in linguistics; (3) propounding a simple, purely linguistic con-
cept of variety that can discriminate between full and sectoral varieties; and (4) setting
out a structural analysis of the entire dynamic language system which posits several
clearly distinguishable vertical variety formations (regional languages) below the level of
the standard language and its norms.
3.1. The concept o synchronization
The concepts of system and of structure were introduced into linguistic theory in 1867
(cf. Whitney 1867: 50) and taken up by the neogrammarians (cf. Sievers 1876: 3⫺4). Not
many people are aware that the famous charge of atomism was in the nineteenth century
directed exclusively against the pre-neogrammarian theory of language, especially
against August Schleicher (cf. Paul 1877: 322 and Gabelentz 1888 [1966: 258]). It was
clear in the neogrammarian theory of language that the analysis of linguistic change had
to involve the analysis of (synchronic) language states (see Reis 1978: 180⫺183 on Paul’s
comprehensive concept of Sprachgeschichte, which included both synchrony and dia-
chrony). It was Saussure who stridently rejected such an integrative analysis. Based on
the justifiable assumption that systemic relationships can only pertain between elements
that coexist (1916: 227), as is true of the individual competence vis-à-vis a single specific
act of language production, but not of langue, he believed he needed to demand a strict
separation of synchrony and diachrony “at any price” (cf. the “panchronie” polemic,
Saussure 1916: 226, 2003: 105⫺109, 154⫺155). In hindsight it is fascinating to re-
construct how prodigiously productive the “Copernican revolution in linguistics” (Ver-
burg 1950: 224) associated with Saussure’s name has been in the history of the discipline,
even though it was very soon and very prominently made clear (cf. Schuchardt 1922
[1917]: 265⫺267), that the strict separation of synchrony and diachrony fell short of its
intrinsically heterogeneous and constantly changing object, language ⫺ “actual syn-
chrony is dynamic” (Jakobson 1980 [1962: 53]). Language is not a semidynamic system,
as suggested by Saussure’s famous example of the chess game. In a semidynamic game
of chess there are indeed static states which can be analyzed completely independently
of their emergence (i. e., they are temporally isolated, atemporal). In contrast, truly dy-
namic systems like language, the solar system or the stock market are constituted by the
time-dependent relations between their elements and can therefore not be adequately
analyzed without involving the time dimension.
The linguistic dynamics approach builds on Paul’s concept of dynamic individual
competence (1880: 27⫺39 [1886: 21⫺34]; cf. Schmidt 1993: 182⫺185). Speakers do not
progress from synchronic state to synchronic state, they actively and interactively “syn-
chronize” their complex and distinct systems of linguistic knowledge (their individual
competencies). By synchronization we mean “the calibration of competence differences
in the performance act”, which results in a “stabilization and/or modification of the
active and passive competencies involved” (Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear: 2.1.3).
What does this mean? Partners in an interaction synchronize their language so as to
conform to the cooperation principle (Grice 1975), that is, the desire to be understood,
or at least not misunderstood. Interactions consist of acts of language production and
of language comprehension. In every act of production a speaker applies the linguistic
knowledge he/she has acquired over the course of a lifetime (individual competence) to
match it to his/her partner’s communicative expectations and ability to understand. He/
she anticipates their capacity to comprehend (are they a child, a tertiary educated expert,
…?) and their expectations regarding linguistic appropriateness (spouse, casual acquaint-
ance, examiner, …) and activates appropriate segments of (conscious or unconscious)
linguistic knowledge that may well have been acquired long before (e.g., knowledge of
regional variants learned from grandparents). The dynamic of the individual interactions
is essentially a result of feedback from the conversation partner (on interactionist ap-
proaches, see Auer 1990: 26⫺28; Milroy 2002; Meyerhoff 2002; Keller 2003: 132⫺143).
Has the partner signaled a complete lack of comprehension (e.g., with a questioning
glance), partial comprehension (You think?), the non-fulfillment of a behavioral expecta-
tion (e.g., through implicit or explicit correction), or complete comprehension and fulfill-
ment of my behavioral expectations (e.g., through a confirmatory signal like the particle
hm)? Each type of feedback effects a modification or stabilization of the applied language
production strategy. Temporality and dynamism are thus constitutive characteristics of
every interaction, no matter how elementary. We are dealing with the apriority of time
in linguistic interaction.
Whether such modifications and stabilizations remain temporary or whether they
effect a profound cognitive reflex (usually a restructuring of individual competence) de-
pends upon how the interaction is evaluated, the interaction partner and the context in
which it takes place. Correction by a caregiver or role model during the long language
acquisition phase or even an embarrassing use of language can invoke an instant and
ongoing restructuring, whereas a failed interaction with a little valued counterpart often
tends to remain inconsequential (cf. Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear: 2.1.2). The elemen-
tary synchronization act just described (the calibration of the individual competencies
within a single interaction) is referred to as microsynchronization. It underlies all of the
other types.
To understand the dynamic of a language and its varieties we need to observe micro-
synchronizations and their outcomes over a period of time. The time-dependent relation-
ships which constitute truly dynamic systems are based not only on the immanent tem-
porality of the individual interactions but also on periods in which subjects interact
with varying frequency, thereby synchronizing their linguistic knowledge and situation-
dependent linguistic conventions. What do we mean by this?
In the course of his/her life, any individual interacts with only a (small) fraction of
the total language community; even with these he/she only interacts in certain periods
(phases of life); the interactions in these phases only cover a portion of the situations
relevant for the individual (e.g., occupational or domestic communication); and even the
communicative contexts divided among particular phases of life vary in their subjective
significance. It is of central importance for a realistic picture of the dynamic of an entire
language to remember that individuals participate in the totality of synchronization acts
in any period, whereby they find themselves in clearly different phases with regard to
their linguistic knowledge, i. e., in periods of accelerated or retarded change. The periods
in which speakers learn the fundamental rules of the semiotic system of language, the
periods in which they actively and deliberately conform to the (language) behavioral
expectations of others, the periods in which mutual unconscious accommodation takes
place, and the periods of retardation in which changes are rare or language loss can
even occur, all vary constantly from one individual to the next.
The system of language is thus doubly dynamic ⫺ on the basis of individual factors
and of socio-interactive factors. If we want to understand the dynamic system as a whole,
we have to clarify which factors lead to divergence and which to convergence. Since the
cooperation principle applies to every interaction, if individuals interact over an ex-
tended period in a context that is important for all participants (cf. Eckert and McCon-
nell-Ginet 1992; Wenger 1998), e.g., a primary school class, a youth peer group, or
other “communities of practice”), this leads to a series of parallel synchronizations. The
cognitive repercussions of such a series of microsynchronizations depend on the length
of the period over which the communication partners mutually interact (e.g., in a mar-
riage), the frequency of the interactions (Kommunikationsdichte), and the biographical
relevance the communication partners see in the enduring collective context. Where there
is sustained duration, high communicative density and high individual significance, the
participants develop similar optimization strategies. The result is a partial congruence in
the linguistic knowledge of the participants, more precisely: an extensive congruence in
that segment of their linguistic knowledge which enables the communication partners to
successfully negotiate the situation in which they are participating. Such a series of paral-
lel acts of synchronization, performed by individuals in personal contact situations,
which lead to the establishment of common context-dependent linguistic knowledge, we
term mesosynchronization (Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear: 2.1.3.2).
Mesosynchronization is thus always an integrative force within a circumscribed seg-
ment of the complex dynamic of the language in toto. Mesosynchronizations are respon-
sible for the establishment of group and context⫺dependent linguistic conventions and
thus, in the final instance, for the formation of varieties. In terms of the language as a
whole, they can have either a divergent or an integrative influence. They are divergent
to the extent that the groups which enact them develop special knowledge and integrative
to the extent that the mesosynchronizations are interlinked, i. e., where similar or even
parallel optimization strategies are developed in interconnected situations. It should be
clear that the concept of synchronization is the key to a unified account of linguistic
divergence and convergence.
Macrosynchronizations play a decisive role in integrating the language as a whole.
We use macrosynchronization to refer to synchronization acts via which the members of
a linguistic community orient themselves to a common norm.
Practically all members of a linguistic community or a larger social grouping in which
personal contact between members is not a given undertake macrosynchronizations.
Viewed over the long term, the boundaries of collective macrosynchronizations define
the boundaries of the dynamic system of a particular language. For its speakers, they
are (identical with) the boundaries of a particular language.
We must differentiate between macrosynchronizations which align with the written
norm and those which align with the oral norm (the pronunciation standard). In Ger-
man, a common language only arose when writers developed a mutual written norm and
then aligned their macrosynchronizations with it. Conversely, a linguistic community
disintegrates to the degree that its major constituent groupings begin to orient their
macrosynchronizations to differing target norms. The all-embracing effects of macrosyn-
chronization processes can be clearly observed in the development of German and
Dutch. Historically, there was a continuum between the two at the base dialect level (cf.
Kremer 1979: 133⫺134). The long-term orientation toward two separate standard norms
(German and Dutch) led the complete variety systems to diverge, so that today there is
a linguistic divide (a “sprachliche Bruchstelle”, cf. Kremer 1993: 26, 36; Smits 2007:
312⫺313) between even the least standard varieties. The beginnings of a much more
recent divergence can currently be observed between German and Luxembourgish (cf.
Gilles 1999: 261; see Gilles and Moulin 2003 on the standardization of Luxembourgish).
Within a dynamic language as a whole, the written standard exhibits the slowest rate
of change, in that here all of the “conservative forces” come to bear. The primary func-
tion of writing is to transcend the immanent volatility of oral communication (short-
term memory) and ⫺ by preserving them ⫺ to extend the period over which linguistic
acts can exercise communicative effect (as in the delivery time of a letter or the reception
of a novel over decades or even centuries). The codification of a written language (e.g.,
in dictionaries) and the institutionally backed prescriptive norms (e.g., the maintenance
of orthographic and grammatical rules over decades) lead millions of individuals to
make, consciously but independently of one another, parallel retroactive microsynchro-
nizations (looking things up, learning norms), which act together to reduce the speed
of change.
The oral norms on which the members of major groupings base their macrosynchro-
nizations have been distributed by the mass media (radio and television) for around 70
years. Although participation in these macrosynchronizations is primarily receptive, it
can still be demonstrated to have an impact on the development of the complete variety
system of a language. This is true for both the near-standard varieties (significant reduc-
tion of regionalisms in the regiolect of speakers socialized in the radio era, cf. Lameli
2004: 108⫺111) and the spoken standard itself: since the oral norms have mainly been
spread by nationally organized mass media, national pronunciation norms have been
able to prevail, e.g., in American vs. British English or Austrian, Swiss and German
standard pronunciations, despite the integrative influence of largely congruent written
norms.
3.2. The linguistic dynamic concept o variety
The linguistic dynamic concept of variety was introduced in Schmidt (2005b). The key
point is that varieties cannot be satisfactorily delimited from “outside”, i. e., through
statements about the frequency of variants even when correlated with social and
contextual factors. This temporal, social and contextual continuum stands in contrast to
a clear linguistic/cognitive division. While lexical and pragmatic differences can be easily
overcome in acts of synchronization, the same is not true of phonological/prosodic and
morphosyntactic differences, because these are the fundamental sign-generating and link-
ing rules which form the core of an individual’s linguistic competence. Actively overcom-
ing a competence gap here requires restructuring one’s central linguistic knowledge: the
mapping of phonemes to lexemes has to be relearned sign by sign, new morphological
categories must be acquired, and the assignment of syntactic functions to both these and
existing categories is reorganized. Most speakers do not fully succeed in learning new
prosodemes, and they are clearly aware of this linguistic/cognitive barrier. In reception
mode, they react to failed attempts (such as hypercorrections, cf. Herrgen 1986) with
sanctions (linguistic ridicule, shibboleths); in production mode with avoidance strategies.
For an individual to overcome gaps in fundamental competence thus requires extended
phases of learning. The linguistic dynamic concept of variety therefore distinguishes be-
tween full varieties, which exhibit such fundamental dissimilarities, and sectoral varieties,
which do not. Full varieties can be specified as sectors of linguistic knowledge defined
by independent prosodic/phonological and morphosyntactic structures on the basis of
which individuals or groups of speakers interact in particular situations. The full varieties
of a language are semi-discrete and interdependent. The minimal and necessary criterion
is the presence of at least one “idiovarietal” element or structural feature in the prosodic/
phonological or morphosyntactic subsystems.
Full varieties must be distinguished from (1) sectoral varieties such as technical jar-
gons (Fachsprachen), which are based on a full variety (whether standard or dialect) and
feature restricted, sectoral, usually lexical distinctions and substitutions and in which an
individual’s competence is subject to continual, lifelong change and from (2) speech
levels (Sprechlagen), which arise from conventional allophonic and allomorphic variation
within a full variety in correlation with social, contextual and spatial factors. Speech
levels’ lack of inherent distinguishing features means that, in practice, the relationship
between linguistic and socio-contextual constellations (i. e., types) has to be specified
case-by-case using statistical tests (cf. Lenz 2003: 218⫺222).
3.3. Duplex (horizontal and vertical) variety ormations:

Modern regional languages
We are now in a position to explore a linguistic constellation that suggests an explana-
tion for the unexpected results from the new “research lab” of the dynamic language
atlas discussed in section 2.2. This is a two-dimensional (horizontal and vertical), duplex
variety formation, for which we suggest the label of modern regional language.
What is meant by this can be best explained by taking as an example the language
most thoroughly investigated in this regard, German. Certain horizontal variety forma-
tions have long been recognized and extensively studied, viz., the old dialect formations.
If one takes into account all of the horizontal differences between the erstwhile local
dialects, including the lexical distinctions and one-off phonological contrasts, the spatial
distribution pattern which emerges is a continuum interwoven by a confusion of iso-
glosses. The achievement of structuralist dialectology was the creation of a dialect classi-
fication scheme that did not foreground isolated phenomena, but was instead based
solely on linguistic/structural criteria. The classification principle was whether there were
phonological/prosodic and morphosyntactic similarities between the dialects of an area
A that distinguished them from those of area B. The dialect formations so defined in
German, or the structural regions within them (cf. Wiesinger 1983) thus delimit full
varieties, the speakers of which possess fundamental similarities in their core linguistic
competence.
Vertical variety formations have been subject to little study and our linguistic under-
standing of them is inadequate. They arose in German between 1720 and 1800 (cf.
Schmidt 2005a), as larger groups of speakers, initially in the cities, began to base their
speech on the written language that had arisen out of a purely written accommodation
process. These speakers could only draw on their own fundamental levels of competence
when pronouncing such (combinations of) graphemes, i. e., on the dialectal phonologi-
cal/prosodic structures available to them. As a consequence of congruent mesosynchron-
izations all oriented to the written forms, oralization conventions for the new spoken
variety emerged. Under the selective principle of maximal communicative range, consen-
sus could only develop as far as the underlying dialectal uniformity of phonological
structure permitted, i. e., within the old dialect formations. With the introduction of
compulsory schooling from 1800 on, these oralization conventions became norms that
were propagated in literacy lessons (speaking in chorus as a synchronization act). The
new oral variety is known as regional (or landschaftliches ‘landscape-based’) High Ger-
man. Spoken German thus became a two-variety language, shaped by the coexistence
of a large number of duplex ⫺ horizontal and vertical ⫺ variety formations: the old
horizontal dialect formations each with their own, structurally anchored regional Hoch-
deutsch.
The duplex variety formation of the nineteenth century has been retained only in
German-speaking Switzerland, although of course both varieties have changed here too,
thanks to the regionalization of communication (cf. Christen 1998: 292⫺294 on dialect)
and the general spread of the Swiss German pronunciation norm via the broadcast me-
dia. In contrast, a completely different linguistic constellation has emerged in Germany.
In 1898, on the basis of the regional High German of northern Germany (cf. Vietor
1890: 12), Siebs established a pronunciation norm for the stage (Bühnenaussprache) that
has been disseminated via radio since 1930 and (in modified form) via television since
the second half of the twentieth century. This means that all speakers have been subject
to constant macrosynchronization with the federal German spoken standard, which has
at a very minimum altered their passive competence. Outside of northern Germany this
led to a southwards diffusing devaluation of the former regional High Germans, now
no longer seen as equal to Standard German, but rather as colloquial, linguistically
nonstandard (more precisely substandard) forms, for which we suggest the label of regio-
lect. Thus, in Germany too, the old duplex variety formations have generally endured.
But their linguistic status and dynamics have been fundamentally altered by the preva-
lence of the federal German spoken standard. They are now perceived to be regionally
confined: they have become regional languages (Regionalsprachen; cf. Schmidt 2009).
A modern regional language can be defined in the light of the historical origins of
these variety formations and their current linguistic status; it is an aggregate of varieties
and speech levels unified by mesosynchronizations and bounded horizontally by the
structural boundaries of the dialect formations or regions and vertically by its differences
to the national oralization norms of the standard variety.
The term thus encompasses all full varieties and speech levels that exist beneath the
standard variety. A regional language is therefore also a language and not a regional
variety. The (variation) linguistic structure of the various regional languages is primarily
dependent upon whether additional vertical varieties exist alongside the regiolect, defined
as a supraregional nonstandard full variety, namely dialects, understood as the least
standard and most local (regionally restricted) full varieties.
3.4. Structure and dynamics o the modern regional languages
Contemporary spoken German is in this view determined by the horizontal coexistence

of regional languages, which in turn represent vertical variety formations within which
the horizontal structural boundaries of the least standard varieties (the old dialect forma-
tions) coincide with the boundaries of the regiolects. This can be schematized as in Figure
12.4. With one notable exception (cf. Kehrein 2008), no studies directly comparing the
linguistic structure of the various modern regional languages (cf. Schmidt 1998) exist.
The most comprehensive study to date of the variation structure of a single regional
language is Lenz (2003). Service sector employment now dominates the formerly agricul-
tural hinterland of a small Moselle-Franconian town, the region in which Lenz’s 50
speakers were raised. None of them has an active command of the spoken standard,
although the younger, better educated speakers in particular take pains to achieve it.
They fail at the phonological boundary between the regiolect and the Standard German
oralization norm, leading to hypercorrections, but all have command of the regiolect. A
comparison of regiolect performance in various constellations of speakers and contexts
reveals, with the help of multivariate and implication analyses, three distinct speech
levels: the regional accent, the upper nonstandard and the lower nonstandard. Linguisti-
cally, the speech levels can be differentiated by virtue of the fact that, in addition to
the common phonological features that define the entire Moselle-Franconian regional
language and hence also the regiolect of this subregion, lone-word regionalisms occur in
Fig. 12.4: The linguistic structure of modern regional languages

the upper nonstandard, and with greater frequency in the lower. These regionalisms are
of two kinds: either they are common to all the varieties of the greater region or they
are subregional allophonic deviations from the standard. Viewed sociolinguistically, it is
above all the younger speakers that live in town who also make active use of the near-
standard speech levels of the regiolect, while the older speakers from the surrounding
villages are proficient only in the less standard speech levels. The key linguistic criterion
for mastery of a speech level is primary language socialization. Are we dealing with
bivarietal speakers who were raised in dialect and only subsequently acquired the regio-
lect, or with monovarietal speakers, whose primary language socialization was con-
ducted exclusively in the regiolect? The key contextual criteria for the choice of speech
level are the conversation partners and their usage: in interaction with speakers of one’s
own regional language, the least standard speech levels of the regiolect are employed,
but when talking with standard-speaking strangers, the regional accent is adopted. The
ongoing reevaluation process is well illustrated by speakers’ subjective evaluations of the
various speech levels. Whilst older, more rural, bivarietal speakers still consider the lower
nonstandard to be Hochdeutsch (Standard German), the younger, town-dwelling, mono-
varietal speakers classify even the regional accent as bad or incorrect German
(“schlechtes oder nicht richtiges Hochdeutsch”). Using the same method, Lenz was able
to identify two speech levels within the dialect variety, the base dialect, which still in-
cludes truly local features (older speakers), and the regional dialect, characterized by
(sub)regional features (younger speakers).
It surely needs no spelling out that the dynamic of the regiolect described by Lenz
can be interpreted in light of the apparent-time hypothesis as an ongoing convergence
on the spoken standard. The two real-time studies to date have produced contradictory
results. Whereas Spiekermann (2006) observed (among other things) an increase in re-
gional allegro speech features in the Upper German area that he interpreted as increasing
regionalization of the standard, Lameli (2004: 215⫺217), working with the same type of
speaker in the same situation (city council meetings) in the Middle German area, was
able to establish a convergence on the standard over forty years for one group of speak-
ers, for another group even a shift from regiolect to the colloquial standard (Kolloquial-
standard ), a speech level of Standard German that, although linguistically and objec-
tively still characterized by regionalisms, is considered standard by listeners from the
most diverse regions of Germany. In a North German city in contrast, Lameli recorded
absolute stability in the speech levels over a forty-year period. While there are still too
few studies to allow an exploration of the dynamic of the regiolect, an investigation of
dialect dynamics is already possible on the basis of the very clear findings from the
linguistic research laboratory introduced in section 2, the dynamic language atlas. How
such an investigation might proceed with the help of the linguistic dynamics approach
is illustrated in the following section.
4. A rudimentary explanation o twentieth-century dialect

dynamics
By the end of the twentieth century, all German dialect speakers had acquired active
bivarietal competence (in dialect and regiolect) and at least passive competence in the
standard spoken language. The comprehensive regionalization of communication had
decisively reshaped all interaction. Of the surprising findings reported in section 2.2,
those which do not concern purely internal factors (i. e., all except Type 4) cannot be
explained through an isolated analysis of the dialect variety and its dynamics. An expla-
nation only becomes possible when the structure of the modern regional languages and
their constitutive mesosynchronizations are included in the analysis. Let us begin with
Type 1, the juxtaposition of individual lemmas on the borders of two dialect formations
that remains stable over more than a century, although barriers to communication be-
tween the regions no longer exist and all speakers have an active command of the neigh-
boring region’s variants, or can at least read them aloud. These oppositions, which reveal
no connection whatsoever to the phonological structures of the dialect areas, involve
those features common to both the dialect and the less standard speech levels of the
regiolect. They are thus employed in all interactions within each of the regional lan-
guages, leading to a constant stabilization via mesosynchronizations conducted in the
regional language (cf. Schmidt 2005c: 25⫺28).
A very similar process is involved in Type 2, the single lemma change in inflection
class that, within a century, has prevailed over both Standard German and the old dialect
throughout an entire area and has only been halted at the former boundary of the
neighboring structural region. Since this is a “natural” language change and the innova-
tion zone (area B) has essentially the same morphological structure as its neighboring
regions, here too an isolated analysis of the dialect variety cannot explain the change.
Thanks to the thoroughgoing regionalization of interaction patterns, all of the speakers
of areas A, B and C are familiar with the inflectional variants which deviate from both
the dialect and the standard (passive competence). The decisive difference lies in their
evaluation. While the speakers in the innovation zone consider the variants to be dialec-
tal alternatives drawn from their own regional language, this is not the case in the adjoin-
ing areas. Hence, when children acquiring dialect overgeneralize in the direction pro-
voked by the irregular German linguistic structure, they are not corrected by adults
living in B, since the forms are treated as appropriate regional language variants (i. e.,
stabilizing mesosynchronizations occur). The natural language change can proceed un-
trammeled. The situation in the neighboring areas is completely different. Here the vari-
ants, which arise in the normal course of language acquisition, whilst recognized, are
evaluated as extraneous to the resident’s own regional language and hence corrected
(i. e., modifying mesosynchronizations occur). The corrective behavior of those effecting
linguistic socialization, typical of the entire German language area apart from B, does
not change, and a language change that might be thought natural is inhibited.
The explanatory potential of the linguistic dynamics approach is seen most clearly in
Type 3, where broad-scale phonological change progresses via word-by-word phonologi-
cal redistribution (Umphonologisierung). The concurrence of the isoglosses of a phoneme
at some point in time indicates that a process of language change has not yet started;
“staggered” isoglosses mean that the change is in progress at the time of the survey. But
this finding is outweighed by the new opportunity to use the dynamic language atlas to
very precisely determine which factors are responsible for why in certain subregions (A)
no language change takes place, while in others (B and C) it very much does. The exter-
nal factors of “regionalization of communication” and “familiarity with standard lan-
guage forms” apply equally across all subregions. Analysis shows that it is the specific
nature of the phonological differences between each of the subregions A, B and C and
their adjacent dialects (cf. the “white space” on the map of Figure 12.3) which triggers
language change in one situation and not in another. Because of the specific nature of
the phonological differences (the “internal” factor), using the former dialect’s phoneme
system in Areas B and C in regional communication with speakers of the surrounding
dialects (the external factor) leads to faulty decodings (misunderstandings or incompre-
hension). For example, differences in the assignment of phonemes to lexemes automati-
cally lead to faulty decodings in the Bavarian-Swabian transition zone, where the erst-
while dialectal phoneme /oa/ (in, e.g., Brot, Rose, tot, Seife, Weizen, or Geiß) is misunder-
stood in the neighboring Bavarian dialects, e.g., Broat is heard as breit ‘broad’, not Brot
‘bread’ and Roas as Reise ‘journey’ not Rose ‘rose’. This instigates a constant stream of
modifying synchronizations that in the longer term sets a process of language change in
motion. The situation in Area A is different: the phonological differences can be sur-
mounted during the performance act, without giving rise to errant decodings (thus pro-
ducing stabilizing synchronization acts). How the lexeme-for-lexeme phonological redis-
tribution proceeds is also extremely revealing. The end target of the change is not the
equivalent phoneme from the standard language, but rather that phoneme from the
original local dialectal register that shares the greatest similarity with its equivalent in
the neighboring regions (cf. Schmidt and Herrgen, to appear: 4.2.3.7). The role of the
standard language, in which all bivarietal speakers have passive competence, is restricted
to the mental connection (via lexemes) between two old dialectal phonemes. It functions
as a cognitive “bridge” and determines the “target phoneme” of the phonological shift
when an erstwhile dialectal phoneme causes interactive complications in variety contact
situations. The degree to and order in which lexemes assigned to an old dialectal pho-
neme are involved in the phonological redistribution process depend upon their social
and contextual relevance. Lexemes which can potentially be implicated in any regional
language interaction (e.g., Brot ‘bread’) are subject to early and complete phonological
reordering, whereas lexemes whose use is confined to narrow communicative contexts
(e.g., Loos ‘sow’) are the last to be rephonologized. It is fascinating, finally, to reflect
on the long-term communicative advantages of successive lexeme-based phonological
rearrangement. Thanks to the fact that, initially, only a few of the lexemes relevant in
intragenerational regional communication are implicated in the phonological change,
the old dialectal phonemic system can generally be maintained over decades, minimizing
interactive complications in communication with earlier generations. Clearly, we are
dealing with a perfect, albeit unconscious, optimization strategy.
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III. Structure and dynamics o a language space
13. Identiying dimensions o linguistic variation

in a language space
1. Dimensions of variation and the architecture of a language
2. Linguistic variables and linguistic varieties
3. Diatopic varieties
4. Diastratic variation and diastratic varieties
5. Diaphasic variation and diaphasic varieties
6. Variation in a language space as a multidimensional continuum
7. References
1. Dimensions o variation and the architecture o a language
A language space is made up of language varieties and at the same time a language is
conceivable, broadly and metaphorically speaking, as a language space, i. e., a scene
occupied by linguistic entities. This space, which constitutes a language, is by no means
a homogeneous space; on the contrary, it is a realm of linguistic heterogeneity and differ-
ences of various kinds, which form on the whole the inner variation of a language.
Variation permeates all languages, has a socio-cultural as well as a biological foundation
and shows itself in multifarious manners with an adaptive significance (Chambers 1995:
206⫺253). For the purpose of the present article, it is in particular noteworthy that “the
underlying cause of sociolinguistic differences, largely beneath consciousness, is the hu-
man instinct to establish and maintain social identity” (Chambers 1995: 250).
The aim of this article is exactly to try establishing a certain order in this hetero-
geneity, which means identifying dimensions of variation and aiming at modeling them
in a congruent way. In spite of the sometimes diverging terminology, there is a wide
consent among linguists on most subjects and issues dealt with in this founding article:
therefore, the following presentation will be mostly apodictic.
As a first approach in order to capture the major generalizations pertaining the inner
variability of a language or a language space it is useful to sketch out some main dimen-
sions of variation, picking out classes of correlations (co-occurrences) between values of
linguistic variables and relevant extra-linguistic (environmental, social, pragmatic)
factors in a linguistic community.
The main factors in the societal structure of a given linguistic community that can
co-occur with (inner) linguistic differences fall into four types. First, time and space;
then, social stratification; and last, social situations. Correspondingly, we can formulate
four axioms: (i) a language varies with the passing of time; (ii) a language varies with
the geographical distribution of its speakers; (iii) a language varies with the social class/
group of its speakers; (iv) a language varies with the communicative situations in which
it is employed. Consequently, there are four main dimensions of variation: the temporal,
13. Identifying dimensions of variation 227
historical dimension; the spatial, geographical dimension; the social dimension; and the
situational dimension.
These main dimensions representing the impact of extralinguistic macrofactors on
linguistic structures have been singled out since the first theoretical approaches of lin-
guistics to the study of the life of language in society, see, e.g., Gabelentz (1891: 267⫺
283) in Europe or Whitney (1875: 153⫺160) and Bloomfield (1933: ch. 3.4⫺3.8) in Amer-
ica; and their phenomenology as it appears in linguistic facts has been widely analyzed in
sociolinguistic theory and research from Labov (1966) on. In the continental European
tradition the distinction has been often treated unitarily in terms of the “four dia-dimen-
sions”, in accordance with the terminology of classical Greek flavor adopted by Eugenio
Coseriu in the tradition of Leiv Flydal (see Coseriu 1980; Albrecht 1986: 2003): (i) dia-
chronic dimension (diachronia): variation across time; (ii) diatopic dimension (diatopia):
variation across space; (iii) diastratic dimension (diastratia): variation across socio-eco-
nomic classes and social groups; (iv) diaphasic dimension (diaphasia): variation across
situations. At any given time, diachronia is out of action, so that attention must be paid
only to the three synchronic dimensions: diatopia, diastratia and diaphasia. However,
studies by William Labov and other authors (cf., e.g., Labov 1994, 2001) have demon-
strated how the synchronic dynamics of the inner variation often mirrors language
change in progress, so that synchrony and diachrony should not be separated from each
other. The synchronic dimensions work together inside a linguistic space that can be
metaphorically depicted as a cube or a parallelepiped, in which the horizontal base axis
(length) represents diatopia, the vertical axis (height) represents diastratia and the hori-
zontal orthogonal axis (width) represents diaphasia. The whole is in a dynamic relation-
ship and moves along the independent temporal axis. In synchrony, any point inside the
cube, therefore, represents a certain combination of language variation factors concern-
ing a given location in the geographical space, a given position on the social scale and a
given type of socio-communicative situation. Of these three main dimensions, European
dialectology has concentrated its attention at length upon geographical variation,
whereas American variationists following the example of Labov (1966) have mostly fo-
cused on the social and stylistic (diaphasic) variation.
The three dimensions together with their reciprocal relationships constitute what in
the Coserian tradition is called Architektur der Sprache (‘a language’s architecture’). Ev-
ery language or every language space has its own architecture, depending both on the
extent of geographical variation or on the weight of social variation etc., as well as on the
reciprocal correlation and the hierarchical relationship between the varieties belonging to
different dimensions. In the Italian language space, for example, until recently diatopia
appears to be a major differentiating factor (Berruto 1989a), whereas in the British and
American language space diastratia seems to have more importance than the other di-
mensions, and in the French language space diaphasia (Gadet 2003) is prevailing.
However, by and large, the diatopic dimension has a great relevance, at least because
it is the first to draw the observer’s attention. It is common sense to say that “every
place in the world has its own language, in every place in the world one finds a different
way of speaking”. “Place, in one form or another ⫺ nation, region, county, city, or
neighborhood ⫺ is one of the most frequently adduced correlates of linguistic variation”
(Johnstone 2004: 65). The same author discusses also the double nature of place, “place
as a location” and “place as meaning”, and points out that place is to be conceived not
only as a physical entity, but also as a socially constructed context, shaped and consti-
tuted by people “through shared experiences and shared orientations” (2004: 69).
228 III. Structure and dynamics of a language space
At a first and very wide glance, geographical diversity already works at the general
level of the human language faculty (the Saussurean faculté de langage): the six thousand
and more languages existing today on earth (approximately 6800 are listed by the web
site Ethnologue) can be considered to be varied forms of the human verbal language.
More significantly, all languages show widespread differentiation depending on the geo-
graphical zones where they are spoken. A standard language spoken as national lan-
guage in different countries can easily develop partially different standard forms in each
country, in particular as far as the lexicon is concerned, so that it ends up having dif-
ferent norms in different nations (“pluricentric language”, Clyne 1992). In a given coun-
try, a language or a language space (these two terms are employed in this article as near-
synonyms) displays regional variation; in a given region, a language displays subregional
variation; and so forth, up to the minimal “language point”, even a very small com-
munity settled in a given geographical point, maybe a single individual. For instance,
German is a typical pluricentric language with slightly different but clearly recognizable
national standards in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Thus, in the language (space)
German (Ammon 2003: 5; also see Ammon 1995) one finds a geographically “unmarked
form (general German), nationally marked forms (e.g., Austrian German), regionally
marked forms (e.g., Northern Germany), and forms marked sub-regionally by the area
of a single state (bayrisch referring to Bavaria) or the region of a dialect (schwäbisch
‘Swabian’)”. Swabian itself takes different colors in the various Swabian towns, villages
and countryside.
The diastratic dimension gives every geographically identified variety an internal so-
cial “depth”. It is commonplace to note that people reveal in their ways of speaking not
only their geographical origin but also their social position and education, so that social
class markers are recognizable in all languages. Thus this car, it needs washing said by a
British subject, with pronunciation of postvocalic /r/, identifies the speaker as presum-
ably Scottish (by a phonetic trait indicating geographical localization), while this car, it
needs washed, with postvocalic /r/ and washed (a morphosyntactic feature implying social
characterization) rather than washing (Trudgill 1995: 6), suggests the speaker is Scottish
and of lower social class.
A third very important range of variation within a language or a language space and
even within a given socio-geographical variety is added by the intervention of the diapha-
sic dimension. Every type of social and communicative situation is characterized by a
certain language use: every speaker in a speech community has the ability to change his/
her way of speaking in relation to the manifold factors present or activated in a situation,
choosing the appropriate variety for that type of situation. Halliday (1978: 34⫺34, 225;
also see Gregory 1967) has emphasized that a major distinction between diatopic and
diastratic variations and varieties and diaphasic variation and varieties (both authors
call the latter diatypic varieties) is that the former are chosen “according to the user”
(because they are “the linguistic reflection of reasonably permanent characteristics of the
user in language situations”) and the latter “according to the use” (because they are “the
linguistic reflection of recurrent characteristics of the user’s use of language in situa-
tions”). This means that a given speaker speaks spontaneously one diatopic variety,
which refers to his/her geographical provenance, and one diastratic variety, which corre-
lates to his/her position in the social stratification within a society; simultaneously he/she
is able to speak several diaphasic varieties according to the various communicative situa-
tions.
2. Linguistic variables and linguistic varieties

Variation implies linguistic (or better, but less common, sociolinguistic) variables. The
sociolinguistic variable is a very crucial concept for analyzing language internal varia-
tion. The rise of sociolinguistic, variationist studies in linguistics started in the 1960s
with the seminal work by William Labov on linguistic variables (Labov 1966). A sociolin-
guistic variable is, in a nutshell, one point of the system of a language (a phonetic/
phonological unit, a morphological item, a syntactic structure, a construction, a semantic
unit and so on) that admits and shows different realizations, with the same referential
meaning, in correlation with extralinguistic (geographical, social, situational) factors and
properties (see Tagliamonte 2006: 70⫺98). Thus, a sociolinguistic variable, as a linguistic
form carrying social meaning, represents the minimal sociolinguistic unit in which lan-
guage and society (in the broadest sense) closely correlate; it is the stitch that sews
together language and society. Each realization of a given variable is one of the values
of this variable. Therefore, each value is a variant of a variable; a sociolinguistic variable
is a set of linguistic variants. This technical sense of “(socio)linguistic variable” has noth-
ing to do with the broad meaning of the expression sociolinguistic variable that is some-
times found even in sociolinguistics; for instance, what is meant by a title such as Age
as a Sociolinguistic Variable (Eckert 1998 is that age is a social variable possibly correlat-
ing with linguistic phenomena or showing linguistic significance, but by no means, of
course, that age itself is a “sociolinguistic variable”.
The pronunciation of the -ing suffix in British English represents a good, simple ex-
ample of a variable; its final sound can have two different realizations: alveolar nasal [n]
and velar nasal [n]; each realization bears a social significance, since [n] is the standard
pronunciation and occurs, therefore, in educated speech, while the non standard [n]
occurs in uneducated speech. Usually, notation marks for variables are put in round
brackets: thus, in this case we have the (socio)linguistic variable (ng), with two variants,
[n] and [n]. A sociolinguistic variable can occur at every level of the linguistic system
and embody units of any extension; Cornips (1998) shows how the variable can concern
even the setting of a parameter, in the sense of generative grammar, in syntactic variation
(for a wider overview on this topic, see Cornips and Corrigan 2005).
The distribution of variants in a language space is not random. On the contrary they
are arranged in such a way that they tend to occur together with some given extralinguis-
tic, social features. The tendential co-occurrence of variants gives rise to linguistic vari-
eties. Therefore, a linguistic variety is conceivable as a set of co-occurring variants; it is
identified simultaneously by both such a co-occurrence of variants, from the linguistic
viewpoint, and the co-occurrence of these variants with extralinguistic, social features,
from the external, societal viewpoint. Thus, a linguistic variety bears a double characteri-
zation, as a linguistic as well as a social entity, it is made of linguistic variants together
with their social value. In simple words, a variety of language is “a set of linguistic items
with similar social distribution” (Hudson 1996: 22).
Linguistic varieties, i. e., the varieties of a given language, can be classified in relation
to the main dimensions of the architecture of a language: we have indeed geographical
or diatopic varieties, social or diastratic varieties, situational or diaphasic varieties. Some
authors have raised doubts about the suitability of a variety-based model of language
variation, since varieties are often difficult to identify and defining their presence in any
given text can be problematic. Hudson (1996: 22⫺22, 48⫺49), for instance, argues rather
for a model based on the notion of “item”. Even if the definition of varieties raises
doubts on many issues (but these are partially removed if varieties are conceived as
particular points in a continuum, cf. section 6), the notion of variety brings about so
many advantages in terms of generalization and abstraction when one deals with varia-
tion phenomena, that this notion seems difficult to replace or eliminate.
3. Diatopic varieties
The most typical diatopic (geographical) variety is a “dialect”. Dialect seems to be a

simple category, but it turns out to be a very controversial one. First of all, for American
and British linguists dialect is often understood as a synonym for (language) variety,
designating any particular language form with at least some differences in structure and
grammar with respect to any other language form. Dialect is simply “a neutral label to
refer to any variety of a language which is shared by a group of speakers” (Wolfram
and Schilling-Estes 1998: 2). In other words, every socio-geographically recognizable
language variety is a dialect. Similarly, Gregory (1967) distinguishes between “dialectal
variation” and “diatypic variation” as the two basic aspects of language variation, with
respect to society in a broad sense and to situations (see above). In this way, e.g., Stan-
dard English is to be conceived as a dialect of English: “Standard English is a dialect
[…]. Subvarieties of languages are usually referred to as dialects, and languages are often
described as consisting of dialects” (Trudgill 2002: 165); a conception which undermines
the fundamental opposition between standard language and dialect as two mutually self
determining concepts. For linguists from the European continent, dialect (French dia-
lecte, German Dialekt/Mundart, Spanish dialecto, Italian dialetto, Russian диал´кт, etc.)
is better understood as any language variety spoken in a given place or region in con-
comitance with a more prestigious superimposed variety (the latter being a standard
language), so that its diatopic characterization comes crucially to the fore. For a conti-
nental linguist “Standard English is a dialect” might therefore be a rather odd, confus-
ing statement.
Moreover dialect is a category sensitive to the different sociolinguistic situations and
to the particular characteristics of linguistic repertoires, and can mean somewhat dif-
ferent things in different situations (Britain 2004). While, for example, in the USA dia-
lects are simply spoken varieties of English with some differences in pronunciation and
lexicon (cf. Chambers and Trudgill [1980] for a general Anglo-Saxon perspective, and
Wolfram and Schilling-Estes [1998] for the USA), in Germany as well as in Italy dialects
are mostly spoken regional linguistic systems with a noticeable structural distance from
(Standard) German and (Standard) Italian, and with an autonomous history and devel-
opment. As a consequence, it can be observed that in Italian and in German speaking
countries not only two (dialects and standard) but three kinds of diatopic variety exist.
Between dialect and standard there is an intermediate variety (cf. section 6), representing
the way in which a standard language is regionally/locally spoken under the influence
of a local dialect: the Umgangssprache or Substandard German in Germany or in Austria
(see, e.g., Barbour and Stevenson 1990, Dittmar 1997: 193⫺201), the italiano regionale
in Italy (Berruto 1989a). In a number of situations, in particular where we find a constel-
lation of “diaglossia” (Auer 2005a) or “dilalia” (in which both the “low” and the “high”
variety are employed in ordinary conversation; Berruto 1989b; Dittmar 1997: 150⫺151),
intermediate varieties such as regional dialects and regional standards emerge from in-
tensive contact between local dialects and national standard. The former are relatively
standardized varieties of the dialects under interference from national language and hav-
ing a superlocal range; the latter are varieties of the standard language with local color-
ing due to the interference of the dialect and representing the regional socially unmarked
form of the national standard.
It is useful at this point to introduce a distinction made by Coseriu (1980) between
primary dialects and secondary dialects. Primary dialects are the varieties existing in a
given language space before the formation of a standard, that is to say the “sister”
varieties of the (future) standard, sharing the same origin with the variety which will
later become the standard one. Secondary (and tertiary: but the present article will not
deal with this further distinction proposed by Coseriu) dialects are regional varieties
evolving after the establishment of a standard, as a result of its local differentiation.
Another useful notion in this context is that of a “roof language/roofing language”
(Dachsprache): with this term the German sociologist Heinz Kloss designates the (stan-
dard) language which, as a metaphorical roof, covers the dialects which are clearly re-
lated to it (existing in the same country and having the same origin), the language in
question being taught at school to the native speakers of these dialects (see Ammon
1989: 38⫺43).
Clearly, the distinction between dialect and (standard) language is by no means a
linguistic one, but rather a by-product of social, historical and cultural factors. “Dialect”
proves to be in a dialectical way a concept opposed to standard, in need of sociolinguistic
definition. From a merely linguistic point of view there is no difference between standard
and dialect; it is impossible to define an existing language form as a dialect or as a
language on the grounds of purely linguistic features. The difference rests on their posi-
tion in society: dialect is a geographically restricted variety, mainly spoken and lacking
of (overt) prestige, occupying the “low” level in a linguistic repertoire; standard, instead,
is a prestigious variety with a wider geographical range, which occupies the “high” level
in a linguistic repertoire and is employed in written and more formal usages. In short,
one could say with Hudson (1996: 36): “there is no real distinction to be drawn between
‘language’ and ‘dialect’ (except with reference to prestige)”. Normally a standard lan-
guage is superimposed on many dialects (or, better, it “covers” them as a Dachsprache).
What these dialects precisely are depends on the nature of the repertoire to which they
belong and on the history of any given linguistic community.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that a dialect, as any language or language space,
can easily display inner variation across the three synchronic dimensions: diatopia, di-
astratia and diaphasia. The extreme limit of sociogeographical variation is the single
individual, and consequently the minimum sociogeographical variety is the so called
idiolect, the language form of a single individual. The extreme limit of variation generally
speaking, i. e., including the diaphasic dimension, is the variety spoken by a given single
individual in a given actualized situation (for which no specific technical term is currently
in use).
The sociolinguistic counterpart of a dialect is a standard variety. A standard is a
language form which, gaining prestige due to literary tradition, cultural acceptance, po-
litical or religious reasons, socio-economic factors and so on, has attained to a full elabo-
ration (Ausbau) and has become through a codification process the reference norm (the
“good language”) in a linguistic community and the correct model taught at school.
Thus a standard is ⫺ in contraposition to a dialect ⫺ supraregional, homogeneous,
explicitly codified (i. e., with an overt norm and an acknowledged corpus of reference
texts, grammars, dictionaries), typically written and normally linked to the upper middle
class (Ammon 1986: 2004).
However, besides dialect many other terms are in use to refer to diatopic varieties:
vernacular, patois, basilect, koiné, regiolect and accent are amongst the most recurrent of
them. Both vernacular and patois can be viewed as near-synonyms of dialect, bearing
different nuances. By vernacular linguists usually mean a dialect in so far as it is the
mother tongue of a definite group or community of speakers (see Macaulay 1988); patois
designates, mostly in the French tradition or with reference to French or Galloroman
speaking areas or also to Creole languages (and sometimes with a slight depreciatory
nuance), a local dialect lacking any prestige. Basilect is instead a term adopted in creolis-
tics (see, e.g., Bickerton 1973), where it has been employed to mean the most local,
marked and least prestigious varieties within a variety continuum (cf. section 6), showing
at the one end these basilects, at the other end the most prestigious standardized variety
(the acrolect), with intermediate varieties (the mesolects) in between. The terms refer to
the idea of the continuum as a metaphorical triangle, at whose base there are many
basilects and at the top (Greek a¬κρον ‘extremity, peak’) one acrolect.
While vernacular, patois and basilect are all varieties at the bottom of the sociogeo-
graphical scale, koiné and regiolect (lect, from dia-lect and similar expressions, is some-
times employed as a neutral term for “language variety” and serves as formative for the
names of other classes of varieties) are located at the top. A koiné, from Greek κοινή
‘common (language)’, is “the stabilized result of mixing of linguistic subsystems such as
regional or literary dialects” (Siegel 1985: 363), often characterized in negativo by the
reduction of too locally marked features: a typical koiné is a regional koiné, that “usually
serves as a lingua franca among speakers of the different contributing varieties” (Siegel
1985: 363), i. e., of the various partially different local dialects spoken in the region.
Often, it is an “amended” variety of the dialect of the principal town that works as a
koiné in a given region. Regiolect is a term sometimes employed, mainly by German and
Dutch speaking linguists, to refer to the dialect of a whole region, with a superlocal
range. Finally, accent means a diatopic variety marked in pronunciation only, charac-
terized exclusively by phonetic (segmental and/or suprasegmental) features.
4. Diastratic variation and diastratic varieties
As American and British variationists have shown since Labov (1966) in New York City
and Trudgill (1974) in Norwich, social variation in its strict sense often takes on the
form of a “sociolinguistic pattern”, in which for each considered variable there is con-
tinuous variation (“fine stratification”) based on differences in frequency and showing
no sharp breaks, rather than a plain opposition of the “all-or-nothing” kind: “A major
finding of urban sociolinguistic work is that differences among social dialects are quanti-
tative and not qualitative” (Romaine 1994: 70). The same source reports a simple exam-
ple concerning two opposite sociolinguistic patterns: the variable “postvocalic r” as ana-
lyzed by Labov and Trudgill (Table 13.1).
Tab. 13.1: Percentage of post-vocalic /r/ pronounced in New York and Reading (Romaine 1994)
New York City Reading Social class
32 0 upper middle class
20 28 lower middle class
12 44 upper working class
0 49 lower working class
The inverse distribution of variants is socially significant insofar as the amount of

the standard, more prestigious form in both speech communities (i. e., the realization
of /r/, as prevalent in General American, in New York, and its deletion, according to the
Received Pronunciation, in Reading) progressively increases along the social scale. In
Reading, no tokens of nonstandard pronunciation were recorded among the informants
of the upper middle class, while the greatest proportion of occurrences was found in the
lower working class. This pattern is overtly symmetrical, with inverse values (no realiza-
tion of /r/ by members of the lower working class, the greatest amount by the upper
middle class), to the one found in New York City by Labov.
There is no stabilized term for diastratic varieties, analogue to dialect for diatopic
varieties. A diastratic variety is normally referred to as a social dialect, or more specifi-
cally as a social-class dialect. However, the term sociolect is also employed, in particular
by German speaking sociolinguists, either as a synonym of social dialect or with more
specific meanings (Durrell 2004).
On the diastratic dimension, a language can co-vary with many different social
factors. Besides social class, the main social factors which intervene to determine di-
astratic variation are age, sex or better gender (the sex of a person as reflected in social
position, status and role and their attributes), ethnicity and social network. In many
societies membership in social or professional groups or religious faith can also be rel-
evant factors of language differentiation. Over the last decades a type of variety which
for some authors can be traced back in extenso, and in certain regards, to the diastratic
dimension has increasingly gained in importance: the interlanguages (learner varieties)
of foreign immigrants.
In spite of its importance as an obvious first reference point in diastratic variation,
social class is by no means a clear-cut and undisputable category: it is often difficult to
establish in what precisely a social class consists, being undoubtedly in itself a plurifacto-
rial concept, that includes in various mixtures ingredients such as education, occupation,
income, attitudes, life styles and so on (some of them hardly quantifiable; Georg 2004).
Social class membership moreover depends on the different social patterns and the dif-
ferent shapes the social stratification takes in different societies. Establishing how many
social classes should be taken into account in correlating language and society, as well
as defining exact boundaries between social classes within a society, are also questionable
matters. In early sociolinguistics, four classes were preferably taken into account (see
Table 13.1); a higher number of classes, five or six or even nine (upper class, middle class
and lower class, each subdivided in upper, middle and lower), was also sometimes taken
into consideration. Trudgill (1974) in his survey in Norwich assumed five socio-economic
classes, calculated on the basis of an index resulting from six components: occupation,
fathers’ occupation, income, education, locality, housing. In Romance sociolinguistics a
more descriptive, albeit methodologically less articulated, representation of social class
has been often adopted: Sanga (1981) for instance deals with Italian sociolinguistic strati-
fication in the 1970s by means of six classes such as bourgeoisie (⬵ middle class), petite
bourgeoisie du tertiaire (⬵ lower middle class, traders), classe ouvrière (working class),
artisans et couches moyennes pré-industrielles (⬵ craftsmen and pre-industrial lower mid-
dle class), paysans (peasants) and marginaux (outcasts). Lately, though, it has become
increasingly difficult to deal with the social stratification in globalized societies through
categories of this kind.
Since the work of Milroy (1980) sociolinguists often prefer to work with social net-
works rather than social classes as the main social factor correlating with language varia-
tion. Social network, a structured set of social relations connecting a person and the
people with whom this person interacts, seems to correlate very well with the distribution
of socially significant linguistic features and has the advantage of being less abstract and
more flexible than the concept of class. It involves not only the social position of an
individual in a group but also the actual interactions in which he/she takes part. Close-
knit networks, i. e., dense and multiplex networks (“density” and “multiplexity” are two
important criteria in defining types of network) appear to correlate with conservative
variants, while loose-knit networks (networks with little density and low multiplexity)
appear to correlate with innovative variants in the dynamics of language change (Milroy
1992). Furthermore, a social network perspective is perfectly compatible with a social
class perspective, for, on the one hand, certain network shapes turn out to be (more)
typical of certain classes and, on the other hand, socialization patterns as well as com-
municative habits are important in characterizing both social class and social network.
5. Diaphasic variation and diaphasic varieties
The first sociolinguistic surveys already reported a recurrent behavior of many variables.
A variable such as (ng) in Norwich (Trudgill 1974; cf. section 2) varies at the same time
with social stratification and, for each socio-economic class, with what has been called
style: the more nonstandard realizations [n] are recorded, the less controlled language
use is, i. e., the less formal the situation is perceived. This means that (ng) presents a
stylistic variation pattern. Each language variety that depends on the relative formality
of a communicative situation is a “style” (sometimes specified as “contextual style”; cf.
Eckert and Rickford 2001 on the whole issue of style). Relative formality is an important
parameter correlating with the diaphasic dimension. There are obviously other param-
eters which play an important part in diaphasic variation. The most remarkable among
them are the activity carried out in interaction and the subject matter of discourse, both
needing typical syntactic and textual patterns and a particular lexicon. Any language
variety depending on the activity and topic dealt with in a communicative situation is
a “register”.
If all linguists agree in distinguishing register and style as the two main genres of
diaphasic varieties, the definition of these notions is slightly blurry, and the terminology
is in need of further elucidation. According to many sociolinguists, register is rather an
overarching term, generally designating any “variety according to use” and, therefore,
on the same rank as the notion of dialect, the “variety according to the user”. In a
functional perspective, Halliday (1978; see also Gregory 1967) identifies within the situa-
tional or contextual variation three interacting dimensions, called field, tenor and mode.
Field refers to the nature of the social action carried out in the situation and includes
the subject matter of discourse as a special aspect; tenor concerns the role structure
governing the relationships between participants; mode has to do with the function the
discourse is assigned to in the given situation and also includes channel or medium, i. e.,
the distinction between speaking/speech and writing. Any variety selected on these three
interplaying dimensions is a “register”; within register, style concerns the aspect corre-
sponding to tenor. Any language includes numerous registers, chosen by the manifold
situational configurations in different domains (Biber and Finegan 1994). A special type
of register is the so-called “foreigner talk”, namely the simplified language native speak-
ers use in certain circumstances with foreigners little competent in the native speakers’
mother tongue (sometimes also called xenolect).
The distinction between written and spoken language is such a pervasive differentiat-
ing factor in all languages that some authors have suggested a fourth main synchronic
dimension of variation, namely the “diamesic” dimension. Even if the medium of com-
munication is in principle selected by the situation, a reasonable ground for postulating
an independent “diamesia” lies in the wide range of differences one normally finds be-
tween written and spoken language, including pragmatics and textuality, lexicon, mor-
phosyntax, etc. (Halliday 1985; Koch and Österreicher 1990).
In order to avoid confusion or overlapping with the meaning of “style” as a literary
and rhetorical term, other sociolinguists call registers what have been called styles above,
i. e., different ways of speaking according to the degree of formality of a given situation
and the relationship with the addressee. According to this terminology (Berruto 1995:
148⫺150), the varieties depending primarily upon the type of activity and upon the
subject matter of discourse (and hence governed by the “field”) are variously called
sectorial languages, subcodes, or special languages. Subtypes of these with a link to the
technical or professional areas in which they are employed and which require a specific
lexicon are called Fachsprachen, Sondersprachen, langues de specialité, languages for spe-
cial/specific purposes, technolects, jargons and so forth. In this approach, no general term
for the varieties on the diaphasic dimension is employed.
A particular notion of “sociolinguistic style” has been developed by German sociolin-
guists from an interpretative perspective. Dittmar (1995: 156) considers sociolinguistic
style as a complex and ordered system of preferences of language use, selecting forms of
expression from the individual linguistic variety space and combining them by means of
co-occurrence restrictions (see Auer 1997), in order to realize/achieve speakers’ goals and
purposes through accommodating to the interactional partners’ speech.
6. Variation in a language space as a multidimensional continuum
The arrangement of varieties in the language space constituting a language takes the
form of continua. The concept of continuum implies an ordered set of elements arranged
in such a way that between two adjacent entities of the set (in this case, language vari-
eties) there are no sharp boundaries, but rather a gradual, fuzzy differentiation, each
variety sharing some sociolinguistically marked features with adjacent varieties. The very
notion of a continuum in variational linguistics arose in geolinguistics, where the dialec-
tal landscape is often viewed as a dialect continuum: between two neighboring village
dialects in a linguistic area one finds little difference, while differences increase cumula-
tively as one considers progressively more distant villages, the greatest difference being
recorded at the extremities of the continuum. In other words, linguistic distance between
local dialects seems to be a function of their geographical distance, no clear-cut bound-
aries being perceived between contiguous dialects.
To this view two considerations must be added. First of all, dialectometric analysis
of phonological distance between Dutch dialects (Heeringa and Nerbonne 2001) has
shown that differences along the continuum are not simply cumulative, but aggregate in
relation to recognizable dialect areas, so that the continuum presents a certain disconti-
nuity at the points coinciding with isoglosses defining traditional dialect areas. These
appear to be separated by unsharp borders. Jörgensen and Kristensen (1995) likewise
showed by means of quantitative methods that within a dialect continuum there is at
least one clear boundary, i. e., the one between one of the poles (extremities) of the
continuum and the rest. On the other hand, the very notion of border deserves some
reflections, since borders turn out to be not only plainly objective boundaries in space,
based on external criteria, but also depend on subjective attitudes and perceptions defin-
ing an identity and resulting in a socially constructed, cognitive space (cf. section 1).
Applying such a cognitive approach to space, Auer (2005b) shows how German dialect
continua across state borders develop (converging or diverging both in linguistic features
and in the structure of the linguistic repertoires) in relation to ideological constructed
borders delimiting “imagined communities”. Gerritsen (1999), moreover, has examined
how very similar dialects around the Belgian⫺Dutch⫺German border diverge because
of their exposure to the influence of different standard languages.
The geographical dimension is only one of the dimensions in the architecture of a
language. In order to capture the complex nature of the latter, it is useful to consider
polarized continua such as those suggested by creolistics (Rickford 1987): in fact, each
dimension of variation is conceivable as a continuum, so that the resulting general pic-
ture of variation in a language space takes the form of a sum of intercrossing continua,
one nonpolarized (the diatopic variation) and two polarized (the diastratic and diaphasic
variation), as sketched in Figure 13.1.
As Downes (1984: 28) points out, “the linguistic side of any variety […] is a clustering
tendency within a continuum”. Thus, the result is a Kontinuum mit Verdichtungen (Ber-
ruto 1987, “continuum con addensamenti”); varieties in this continuum represent concen-
tration areas, where a variety, though not clearly-cut separated from other varieties, is
identified by a particular frequency of certain variants, by the co-occurrence of several
features and possibly by some diagnostic traits, which appear in that variety only. A
variety appears where such a concentration, or condensation, takes place. A variant, an
item or a linguistic feature can spread along a certain sector of a dimension or even over
several dimensions. This is for instance evident in the case of diastratia and diaphasia,
because an item (i. e., a certain pronunciation or a certain morphemic opposition or
construction or syntactic structure or lexeme etc.) can appear in the lower part of the
diastratic dimension as much as in the lower part of the diaphasic dimension. There is
no room here for discussing the idea of Bell (1984), that stylistic variation is a subset of
social variation. When such a particular item occurs with high frequency and in co-
occurrence with other features, thus forming a belt of concentration, the whole may
constitute a variety.
Fig. 13.1: Architecture of a language as a multidimensional continuum
The intersecting continua are additionally structured by the fact that the diastratic
and diaphasic dimensions stretch from a high pole to a counterposed low pole. The high
pole corresponds to a prestigious, socially preferred position, being occupied by formal,
written and elaborated varieties on the situational dimension and by the variety of edu-
cated, upper class people on the social dimension; the low pole corresponds to low
prestige, socially dispreferred positions, occupied by informal, spoken varieties (casual
speech, slang, etc.) and by the variety of uneducated, lower class people respectively.
Thus, every linguistic item is simultaneously characterized by a position over the three
interplaying continua. For instance, a particular pronunciation of a phoneme or a par-
ticular morphological realization could be, roughly sketching, “Scottish, lower class,
informal” or “Swabian, middle class, formal” and so on. This is the status of all sociolin-
guistically marked elements. There are of course also a good number of linguistic traits
that are neutral with respect to the social variables and are, therefore, sociolinguistically
unmarked. A speaker adopting a certain variant or employing a certain variety places
him/herself not only at a given point of the linguistic space he/she lives in, but also in a
particular position within the speech community, because each variety has a symbolic
value such that its use amounts to an “act of identity” (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller
1985).
The standard variety occupies the high poles of the diaphasic and diastratic dimen-
sions. What does not belong to the standard is labeled nonstandard by Anglo-Saxon
linguists, while in the European continent the term substandard is often preferred. In
German dialectology, there is a tendency to see substandard varieties as a series of more
or less marked, intermediate varieties between standard and dialect, from the near-stan-
dard to the most localized and typical dialect (Bellmann 1998), but there is wide agree-
ment on the fact that the concept of substandard is not exhausted by the dichotomy
standard/(geographical) dialect, since everything, in the architecture of a language or a
language space, which is simply below the standard, can be referred to as substandard,
whether it is dialectal or not (Albrecht 1986; Mattheier 1990).
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14. Horizontal convergence o linguistic varieties

in a language space
1. Introduction
2. Some terms and definitions
3. Diachronic and synchronic evidence
4. Factors leading to convergence
5. Conclusions
6. References
1. Introduction
In traditional diachronic map-based dialectology, priority is given to divergence in an

originally uniform language space (cf. Schrambke, this volume; Harnisch, this volume).
Dialect divergence is explained in terms of natural or man-made borders which limit the
spread of a change in that they impede communication and interaction (Bach 1969: 80⫺
81; Murray, this volume; Paul 1920: § 22⫺25; Trudgill 1986). Auer (2004) suggests a
cognitive interpretation of these borders as mental boundaries that crystallize out of
cultural and political borders.
In contrast to this, the focus of this article is on the convergence of varieties in a

language space. Convergence is a process by which similarities between varieties increase.
It implies a historical dimension and therefore language change. If one reverses the above
argument, convergence and the leveling of varieties should be the result of communica-
tion between speakers, or of the speakers’ sense of a common belonging. Leveling and
mixing lead to less diversity and greater uniformity, which can imply convergence
towards a common standard variety along a dialect ⫺ standard language dimension (cf.
Røyneland, this volume). On the other hand, there are processes of mixing or leveling
between dialects that lie beyond the dialect ⫺ standard language dimension. This article
on horizontal convergence deals with such processes. However, in areas with an estab-
lished standard language it is often difficult to clearly separate horizontal convergence
from vertical convergence (cf. Hinskens, Auer and Kerswill 2005; Radtke 2006).
2. Some terms and deinitions

Convergence in a broad sense refers to the reduction of differences between varieties.
Divergence, in contrast, refers to an increase in such differences. But convergence and
divergence are often just two sides of the same coin: when the differences between one
variety and another are reduced, the differences between the first variety and yet another
are usually increased, as already argued by Martinet (1962: 105). For instance, the con-
vergence of the varieties of Lëtzebuergesch towards central Luxemburgish involves the
abandonment of east Luxemburg features and, therefore, a divergence away from the
Moselle-Franconian dialects of German (Gilles 1998: 1999). Similar developments are
shown in Siebenhaar (2008), where particular aspects of regional convergence in Bern in
Switzerland imply a divergence from features of neighboring varieties, even though these
are closer to standard German. Developments of regional convergence which imply a
divergence from the standard variety have also been documented in the West Middle
German area (Bellmann 1998).
2.1. Maniestations o convergence
In historical linguistics, in the aftermath of the neogrammarian approach (cf. Murray,

this volume), a principal focus was laid on explaining language change in terms of a
concept of divergence reducible to sound laws that allow of no exception. This concept
is visualized and idealized in the family tree diagrams of historical linguistics. However,
the sound laws do show exceptions. Besides analogy, the main explanation for these
exceptions was sought in lexical borrowings. Borrowings are induced by interaction be-
tween speakers and were therefore conceived as externally motivated language change.
The consequences of borrowings are dialect mixing and leveling between dialects and
thus a reduction of differences, i. e., convergence.
Convergence on the horizontal level can manifest itself in three forms. Firstly, there
may be a displacement of isoglosses. In these cases, the variety borrowing a feature from
a neighboring variety converges on this variety and at the same time diverges away from
other varieties that maintain this feature. The displacement of isoglosses has often been
described in martial metaphors as driving a wedge into a linguistic area, repelling or

driving back a variant (cf. the models of areal distribution of linguistic forms in Goos-
sens 1977). A classic example is the traditional interpretation, in the work of Theodor
Frings for instance, of the Rhenish fan, which represents the High German consonant
shift across space.
As a second manifestation, there can be a dialect leveling, i. e., a convergence of
varieties in an area. Each of these varieties loses those features that distinguish it from
the surrounding majority of varieties. Leveling can therefore be seen as the minority
variety converging upon the majority variety. In this sense leveling is unilateral and
corresponds to Mattheier’s (1996: 34) concept of advergence. For example, Hinskens
(1996) discusses the loss of the /x ~ ç/ allophony rule in the Limburg dialect region of
Holland, where /ç/ wins out and occupies the place of /x/ in standard Dutch. Christen
(1998: 179⫺185) documents the loss of local phonetic and morphological variants in
favor of regional forms in Swiss-German dialects. For instance, the local diphthongs
[e=4 /ow4] for MHG ê / ô, â in parts of the canton of Schwyz (as in Leirer ‘teacher’, Oubed
‘evening’) are given up in favor of Leerer, Aabed, which are general Zürich variants.
Bothorel-Witz and Huck (2000) document among other phenomena the loss of the Alsa-
tian palatalization of MHG u: Hünd becomes Hund ‘dog’, Lümpe becomes Lumpe ‘floor-
cloth’. All these “winning” forms have a broader acceptance in the dialectological space
and partially correspond to standard German. In these cases it is therefore difficult to
separate horizontal and vertical convergence.
A third form of convergence is koineization, which is the emergence of a de-localized
variety. Unlike leveling, where one dialect loses features not present in the other, koinei-
zation involves a mixing of features from different dialects leading in a stabilized com-
promise dialect as a result of contact between speakers of mutually intelligible varieties
of a language. Koineization therefore cannot be described at the level of single features.
It necessarily involves a set of different features. Kerswill (2002) describes the emergence
of a de-localized variety in the new town of Milton Keynes. Trudgill (2008) argues that
dialect mixture in the colonial varieties of European languages, such as Brazilian Portu-
guese, Canadian French and Australian English, is an inevitable result of dialect contact.
A koiné, however, does not necessarily imply that the basic dialects are abandoned. In
ancient Greek, the koiné did not replace the dialects, it was used as a lingua franca
between speakers of different dialects. In New Zealand, on the other hand, where the
speakers of the traditional British English dialects were delocalized, the English koiné
emerged as a new vernacular, as the old dialects had lost their speech communities (cf.
Lenz, this volume).
2.2. Linguistic variables: From the lexicon to phonetics and pragmatics
In principle, convergence in space can be found at every level of the linguistic system.
However, research has concentrated on the traditional dialectological fields of phonetics,
morphology, and lexicon, and it is harder to find studies on phonology and pragmatics.
Convergence in syntax is often the focus of typological studies.
Since the neogrammarians, lexical borrowing has been seen as a primary trigger of
horizontal convergence. Borrowings are easily integrated into the open system of the
receiving language’s lexicon. Such borrowings are more often observed in vernacular
varieties near the language boundary than in the interior of a language area (cf. the
documentations of French borrowings in Swiss German by Steiner 1921, in Alsatian by
Bothorel-Witz and Huck 2000, in the Saarland dialects by Braun and Treib 2008). Lexi-
cal borrowings, however, are more likely in closely related varieties than across lan-
guages. The Swiss-German dialects are all Alemannic dialects, and mutually intelligible.
In the linguistic atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS: IV, 83) the verb ‘to nudge’
is represented by 15 lexical types with some phonetic variants. In the midlands there is
an eastern type stupfe/stüpfe and a western type mupfe/müpfe. The areal distribution with
its wedge-shaped isogloss suggests that the eastern type stupfe/stupfe has been borrowed
into the western area, thereby driving back the traditional mupfe/müpfe type. The lexical
difference between the two dialects is decreasing, and the dialects are leveling out, i. e.,
they are converging.
Borrowings on the lexical level normally mark the first step of convergence, referred
to as Mischung ‘mixing’ by the Neogrammarians, while morphemes and sounds are only
transferred later, on the basis of a large number of borrowed words (Paul 1920: § 274⫺
285). An example of such a morphological convergence emerging from language contact
is the import of French derivational suffixes into medieval German and English. A
multitude of French loan words from the courtly milieu ending in -erie caused the
transfer of this French suffix into MHG (-erı̂e > -erei) and ME -erie > -ery. The suffixes
are still productive and can be used with Germanic stems as in Bäckerei/bakery, Schwei-
nerei/piggery. Again, morphological borrowing from one dialect to another within a lan-
guage is more common than borrowing between languages because the morphemes can
be transferred directly and do not need to be derived from a class of borrowed words.
For instance, Renn (1994: 106⫺107) reports borrowing of the Bavarian verbal flexion -s
for the second-person plural into eastern Swabian dialect areas around Augsburg: Swab-
ian ihr geh⫹t ‘you (pl.) go’, which corresponds to standard German ihr geh⫹t, is pushed
back in space by the Bavarian form ihr geh⫹ts. It is one of many variables that show a
convergence of this traditionally Alemannic dialect region onto the dialect of the political
centre within the state of Bavaria (cf. SBS 1997⫺2008).
Another example comes from the Swiss midlands, where there are two paradigms for
the verbal plural: the western dialects still show the two forms -e, -ed, -e as in standard
German, while in the eastern dialects we find a newer uniform suffix (-ed ) for all three
persons. However, there are two distinct isoglosses, one for the suffixes of the full verbs
and one for the monosyllabic short verbs (such as sii ‘to be’, haa ‘to have’, tue ‘to do’,
gaa ‘to go’, staa ‘to stand’, choo ‘to come’). While the isogloss for the full verbs follows
the river Reuss, the isogloss for the short verbs lies forty kilometers to the west. Between
these two isoglosses there is a region with two different paradigms, one for full verbs
and one for short verbs. Bangerter (1951: 6 and 110) interprets this situation as one in
which the western forms are advancing while Hotzenköcherle (1961 [1986: 90]) believes
that the eastern forms are spreading. His interpretation is supported by recent empirical
evidence (Siebenhaar 2000: 141⫺146). In the central part of this region a new compro-
mise form has even emerged for the full verbs: the combination of the eastern uniform
plural and the western morphemes of the first and third persons plural has resulted in
an -e-plural for all three persons, accommodating the paradigm of the full verbs to that
of the short verbs. Leveling in this region is not only borrowing, it results in a fusion of
the two paradigms. Therefore, paradoxically, convergence results in a new paradigm that
leads to divergence from both neighboring areas in this area.
Convergence on the phonetic and phonologic level can follow the same patterns. In
neogrammarian terminology, this is referred to as sound substitution (Lautersatz) in
opposition to sound change (Lautwandel), which is discussed below. Once again, con-
vergence between dialects is more common but often less evident than convergence be-
tween languages, because in most cases the phoneme system is not affected; it is only
the substitution of a sound in specific words (Lautersatz) or the substitution of words
(Wortverdrängung) that increases the relative frequency of a sound. However, these sub-
stitutions may lead to phonological reorganization. For example, the region around
Zürich has a highly differentiated system of closing diphthongs with traditionally six
closing diphthongs (/ow4/ /æw4/ /ø=4/ /œ=4/ /e=4/ /æ=4/) (cf. Fleischer and Schmid 2006). But
western dialects of Switzerland have only three closing diphthongs with a close-mid first
segment (/ow4/ /ø=4 ~ œ=4/ /e=4/), while we find three corresponding variants with an open-
mid or open first segment in the eastern Swiss-German dialects (/æw4/ /œ=4/ /æ=4/). The
Zürich system is now in a stage of reorganization as the close-mid diphthongs (/ow4/ /ø=4/
/e=4/), which have a low type frequency, are replaced by the more open variants (/æw4/
/œ=4/ /æ=4/) that have a high type frequency. Fleischer and Schmid (2006: 248) already
report the merger of /ø=4/ and /œ=4/. Recent recordings in the eastern (Siebenhaar, unpub-
lished) and western parts (Siebenhaar 2000) also unveil insecurities in the use of tradi-
tional /ow4/ and /e=4/. So frei ‘free’ can now be found with the traditional /e=4/ as well as
with a new /æ=4/, Sou ‘sow’ is realized with traditional /ow4/ and with new /æw4/. This
substitution of sounds will result in a merger of /e=4/ and /æ=4/ and /ow4/ and /æw4/, respec-
tively. The mergers level out a difference between the Zürich dialect region and the
eastern dialects, where these sounds merged long ago; we are therefore dealing with an
instance of convergence in space. However, it is also possible to link this change to the
standard German system, which for the closing diphthongs is the same as that of the
eastern Swiss-German dialects; in this case this change would have to be interpreted as
a case of vertical convergence (Røyneland, this volume) that would have nothing to do
with space.
The Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005) provides modern
examples of the spreading across space of sound changes that seem not to originate from
a word-by-word adoption, but from a system-internal principle of maximal dispersion
corresponding to the neogrammarian concept of Lautwandel. These maps document the
phonetic dynamics of sound changes in progress and their phonological implications.
Labov, Ash and Boberg base their maps not only on auditory transcriptions but also on
acoustic measurements of formants, which allows them to discover sound changes in
progress and to reconstruct the progression of a sound change in geographical space.
Implicational relationships between phonologically coherent developments shed light not
only on the notion of divergence from a uniform American English, but also on regional
convergence in the new vernaculars.
As historical pragmatics has only moved into focus in recent decades, aspects of
pragmatic convergence have not yet been studied in detail. For instance, address systems
have changed in most European languages (as documented in the volume edited by
Taavitsainen and Jucker 2003), but this prominent pragmatic change is not discussed
within the concept of convergence, although interrelations between the different systems
are often mentioned. An example may be found in the German dialects of Bern and
Freiburg, which are adjacent to the French language area. These dialects have conserved
the honorific second-person plural pronoun and verbal form, while in most German-
speaking areas the third-person plural forms are used to express politeness. Convergence
towards the new German system has therefore not yet had an influence in this area.
However, the penetration of the third-person plural forms has been deplored by dialect
purists over the years. Likewise, changes in communicative genres can be analyzed as
part of a cultural history of communication (Linke 2007). It is possible to interpret these
changes as pragmatic convergence. To date, they have rarely been linked to the spatial
dimension. Yet, this connection could revitalize the interdisciplinary cooperation be-
tween cultural anthropology and dialectology that was characteristic of the first half of
the twentieth century in the German-speaking area.
The following example is illustrative of this phenomenon. On the level of dialect
contact, Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams (2005) discuss the use of the discourse particles
like and innit in three British towns: Hull, Milton Keynes and Reading. Like as a focus
marker and a marker of reported speech has been observed not only in Britain but in
urban centers throughout the English-speaking world. Its origin is supposed to lie in
southern California. The rapid spread of like has been associated with youth culture
with an international dimension. Space can only be referred to here in the metaphoric
sense of a global village, where distance no longer plays a crucial role. However, in
young people’s speech there is a social class difference in Hull, with the middle class
using like more often than the working class, while in the other towns there are no such
differences. The discourse marker innit has been reported to be in use among young
people in London for twenty years, and it is now also used by middle class Londoners.
London working-class youth use it non-paradigmatically, and it is exclusive to working-
class speakers in Hull, Milton Keynes and Reading.
Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams (2005: 156) suggest that, due to their international
dissemination by US films and TV shows, the convergence in the use of globally innova-
tive features such as like is not led by any single social group. The spread of like demon-
strates that a convergence need not be bounded by space or social class; the communica-
tive space transcends the traditional geographical understanding of space. Innit, on the
other hand, spreads in a regionally and socially defined way. Convergence here follows
the classic path from one social group to another and from one region to another.
However, Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams (2005: 158) problematize their results, asking
if convergence in this case can be tied to the use of a new, invariant tag, or whether it
represents a convergence in interactional style, which becomes more involved and ad-
dressee-oriented and includes new politeness strategies.
Up to now, convergence has been discussed mainly with a focus on individual phe-
nomena. But convergence understood as a loss of structural differences normally affects
more than individual features. For instance, von Polenz’ (1954) description of the relict
area of Altenburg in Thüringen shows a bundle of concentric circles around the town.
Swiss-German dialectology has described the Brünig-Napf-Reuss boundary (Haas 2000;
Weiss 1947), where many isoglosses separating eastern and western linguistic forms coin-
cide. Wiesinger’s (1983) map of the German dialect areas shows core dialect areas with
only a few isoglosses and transition zones that are marked by isogloss bundles. Such
distributions, where many isoglosses coincide, suggest that the spread of new forms will
also stop at the isogloss bundles. Additional isoglosses therefore increase divergence at
these borders and increase convergence within the more coherent areas. Actual data on
this aspect is rare, albeit some evidence can be found in the MRhSA (1994⫺2002). Here,
ongoing changes in the realization of MHG â, MHG a or MHG üe seem to bundle at
the isogloss dividing the voiced and unvoiced variants of /z/. Similar results for the
Main-Franconian area are reported by Schunk (1999). In this area, the isogloss separat-
ing palatal and velar realizations of a is reinforced by the actual development of regional
dialects, themselves the result of dialect convergence.
3. Diachronic and synchronic evidence

Convergence has an intrinsically diachronic dimension. Research on language in space
collects data in different places so as to represent spatial diversity. Adding a diachronic
perspective at least doubles the amount of data needed. Moreover, over the years re-
search interests change, so that directly comparable data recorded with the same method
at different times and places are rarely available. In most cases the old questionnaires
and methods are adapted to the new questions (e.g., Bigler 1979; Cornips and Corrigan
2005; Schifferle 1995). Yet Bailey (2002) stresses that even small differences in sampling
procedures may have significant effects on the results. Furthermore, demographic
changes influence the results and must not be confused with actual linguistic change.
Panel studies, conducted with the same subjects after a certain interval, pose practical
problems. It has to be kept in mind when interpreting the results that individual speakers
can change their linguistic behavior in different ways, as documented in Bausch (2000)
or Siebenhaar (2002), to name two of the few panel studies on German dialects.
Although a direct analysis of convergence or, generally, language change in space is
therefore often not possible, synchronic evidence can be substituted for the real-time
diachronic dimension. Since Labov’s (1963, 1966) famous studies on Martha’s Vineyard
and in New York City, the apparent-time construct, which interprets synchronic varia-
tion as change over time, has become an established substitute for real-time observations
of language change. One of the atlases that use the apparent-time method is the Linguis-
tic Atlas of the Middle Rhine (MRhSA 1994⫺2002, cf. the methodological discussion in
Bellmann 1986). Many phenomena are presented in two maps, one displaying the tradi-
tional dialect of the NORMs, while the other represents the realizations of the more
mobile middle-aged generation. Differences between corresponding locations can be in-
terpreted as language change. When these changes occur in coherent areas or when they
bundle to one side of the isoglosses, they can be interpreted as changes in space.
Map 14.1 gives an example of biserial mapping, where the data from the younger
and the older subjects are combined. The red symbols indicate places where the younger,
more mobile subjects use another variant than the older informants. The map shows
that along the lower Moselle the younger mobile subjects replace the voiceless labioden-
tal fricative ⫺ dominant across the greater part of the investigation area and, moreover,
consonant with the standard German form ⫺ (here, in the intervocalic position within
the word pfeifen ‘to whistle’) with a new, voiced bilabial or labiodental fricative. The
apparent-time construct allows this difference to be interpreted as language change, in
this case convergence towards a regional dialect.
Another, more traditional substitute for the temporal dimension is of course areal
distribution. Based on the assumption that language change spreads through space, lin-
guistic maps can be interpreted historically. An example is given in Map 14.2 which
shows the distribution of the personal pronoun uns ‘us (dat and acc)’ in the Swiss-
German dialects. The Old High German accusative form unsih is first transformed to
Map 14.1: West Germanic p: pfeifen ‘to whistle / to pipe’ (MRhSA 1994⫺2002: vol. 4, 320); the red
symbols mark differences between the first (older speakers) and the second (younger
speakers) data series
üns (following German sound laws: umlaut [u > ü before i] plus syllable reduction). This
form of the pronoun is still found to the southwest of Bern. Emanating from this form
we find two developments. The result of the first development is insch/ünsch in eastern
Wallis and Graubünden. Here, s is palatalized to sch [s] and ü [y] is in part unrounded
to i. The second development again starts from the üns form: the area with the form üs
[y6s] shows elision of n and a lengthening of the vowel, a development known as Staub’s
law. In the area with öis, then, the long vowel is diphthongized. Finally, in the northeast
(Basel), the standard German form is adopted, which is the reflex of the dative form
OHG uns. Following this line of argument, the areal distribution reflects diachronic
change. Any of these steps is a divergent step away from the previous variant.
Map 14.3 shows the classic example of the Rhenish fan, the gradual progression of
the High German consonant shift in space which results in a graded landscape (Staffel-
landschaft). In the southern dialects all voiceless plosives are affected by the consonant
shift. The northern German dialects do not take part in this sound change, whereas in
the central German dialects, the sounds are only partially affected, and furthermore only
in certain contexts. In the entire upper and central German area, intervocalic voiceless
plosives became geminated fricatives (maken/machen in Map 14.3), and postvocalic ones,
Map 14.2: uns ‘us (dat/acc)’ (Hotzenköcherle 1961: 221)
Map 14.3: Rhenish fan (Wolf 1983: 1118)

in final position, single fricatives. However, the isoglosses for the highly frequent articles
(dat/das in Map 14.3) run further to the south and those for the pronouns (sik/sich, ik/
ich) further north. In initial position, in the geminate and after a consonant, the voiceless
plosives /t, p, k/ became affricates /ts, pf, kx/; /pf/ was later simplified to /f/ after liquids.
The shift /t/ > /ts/ affected all central and upper German dialects, while /k/ > /kx/ only
affected the south Alemannic and south Bavarian dialects. The shift /p/ > /pf/ shows a
gradual distribution in the central German dialects: a shift after a liquid consonant south
of the Eifel (dorp/dorf in Map 14.3), an additional shift after nasals and in the geminate
to the south of Speyer (appel/apfel in Map 14.3), and finally some kilometers further
south, a shift in all positions (pund > pfund).
Frings (1957, based on earlier studies) interprets this areal distribution as a develop-
ment that started in the southern dialects and affected more and more northern dialects;
it therefore reflects a convergence of the northern dialects towards the southern ones.
However, this monogenetic approach is not uncontroversial today (cf. the discussion in
Wolf 1983).
4. Factors leading to convergence

Convergence is generally understood to be contact induced and therefore externally mo-
tivated. Yet internal factors such as homogenization, simplification and the reduction of
system-internal quantitative variation can also play a part in convergence. Internal and
external factors are often hard to distinguish. Moreover, what begins as an internal
sound change in one variety can be transferred to another by borrowing and lexical
diffusion. The contraction of the diphthong system in Zürich discussed above is an exam-
ple of this pattern of an ongoing contact-induced phonemic merger. On the basis of the
opening and closing of vowels, Haas (1978) has shown how internal changes within one
dialect can spread to other dialects through contact. In the different dialects which have
adopted the features, the new sounds can lead to different system-internal homogeniza-
tions and thus to different systems. And these new systems can in turn be diffused again.
The following sections try to differentiate internal and external motivations for con-
vergence in space.
4.1. Sociolinguistic actors
Traditionally, differences between dialects are explained in terms of natural or man-

made borders which impede or restrict communication (Bach 1969: 80⫺81; Murray, this
volume; Paul 1920: § 22⫺25; Trudgill 1986). As a consequence, linguistic features are
kept from spreading, and the coherence of the systems on both sides of the border is
strengthened, as Schifferle (1995) shows for the border separating Germany and Switzer-
land, and Harnisch (this volume) for the former border between East and West Ger-
many. Schönfeld, Reiner and Grünert (2001) document the linguistic differences in the
formerly divided city of Berlin, where the dialect converged on FRG or GDR norms on
the western and eastern side of the border, respectively. Another example is the Northern
Cities Shift in American English. The shift does not cross the political border between
the United States and Canada (Boberg 2000; Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005). In reversing
the argument, Aubin, Frings and Müller (1926) use linguistic borders to reconstruct and
explain cultural history (cf. Knobloch, this volume). Since the political boundaries in
Europe have become less relevant in recent decades, and since modern means of trans-
portation easily surmount natural barriers, one would expect the linguistic effects of
such borders to disappear; nevertheless, the linguistic borders coinciding with the politi-
cal borders remain and are even reinforced, as Auer (2004) shows for the political bor-
ders of Germany. He argues that political borders do not directly influence communica-
tive and linguistic borders, but that divergence at these borders is instead a result of
cognitive structures; the idea of a linguistic space, which is bound to (former) political
borders, also creates linguistic borders. The consequence is that speakers who believe
they speak the same dialect abandon linguistic features that separate them from the
group they want to belong to. Convergence is therefore a consequence of speakers’ belief
that they speak the same variety.
Mobility and migration favor convergence as the contact between formerly distinct
varieties increases. This aspect is important not only for language contact, but also for
convergence between dialects, which are affected by commuters’ movements and by
small-scale internal migration. Convergence occurs as migrants from nearby areas do
not or only partially adapt to local forms that then disappear as a result. Wolfensberger
(1967) has illustrated this process in an early apparent-time study in the small town of
Stäfa that came within the linguistic sphere of influence of the Zürich metropolis. The
opposite holds for commuters (Muhr 1981; Siebenhaar 2000), who disfavor local variants
and adopt variants with greater regional acceptance, again leading to convergence.
Convergence is a notion operating on an interactional, an individual and a grammati-
cal level and it is one of the key concepts of communication accommodation theory
(Giles and Powesland 1975: 154⫺170). Within this interactionist theory, the focus lies
on the performance of the individual. In an interaction, an individual accommodates to
his interlocutors in either a convergent or a divergent way. In converging, he or she
avoids the distinctive features of his/her own variety or even adopts those of his/her co-
participant. Converging accommodation ⫺ linguistically and on other behavioral dimen-
sions ⫺ is seen as a psychologically motivated effort to gain the interlocutor’s respect or
to show solidarity. Based on Bell’s audience design (Bell 1984: 2006) and LePage and
Tabouret-Keller’s acts of identity model (1985), Auer, Barden and Großkopf (1998) pro-
pose an identity projection model. In this model speakers converge not only towards
their interlocutors, but also towards linguistic stereotypes of positively connotated
groups. On the other hand, accommodation can also be divergent: in order to indicate
dissent, a speaker can increase the linguistic and behavioral distance from his or her
interlocutor. This short-term accommodation within an interaction is not permanent.
However, if speakers regularly accommodate in a similar way over a longer period of
time, this can lead to a long-term accommodation (Trudgill 1986: 11⫺38). If it stabilizes,
it leads to a convergence at the level of the linguistic system.
In recent years, many publications have identified prestige and attitudes as driving
forces in language change. Along the vertical dimension prestige seems to be one of the
prominent factors in convergence. Up until now, however, there is no clear support for
this claim on the horizontal dimension. Three recent studies on language change and
positive attitudes towards a place (Ortsloyalität) carried out in Switzerland (Hofer 1997;
Leuenberger 1999; Siebenhaar 2000) are quite critical with respect to the causal link
between attitudinal factors and language change. On the other hand, Barden and Groß-
kopf (1998) can establish attitudes as an explanatory factor for long-term accommoda-
tion among former GDR citizens in the west of Germany.
For Schirmunski (1930), the salience of primary dialect features is a major stimulus
for convergence. Without reference to Schirmunski, Trudgill (1986) identifies salience as
one of the factors favoring accommodation as well, thereby moving the focus from
language change to individual adaptation. However, salience is still a difficult concept
to define, as subjective factors such as attitude, prestige and stigmatizing effects, as well
as objective factors like frequency, system-internal transparency and linguistic contrast
are involved independently of one another. Furthermore, Auer, Barden and Großkopf
(1998) have shown that objective and subjective salience factors play different roles in
the accommodation of lexicalized and non-lexicalized features. Salience thus seems to
be important for convergence of dialects, but it is nevertheless only a necessary, not a
sufficient condition for a linguistic feature to be affected by accommodation.
4.2. Structural actors
Although external factors are seen as the main reason for convergence, there are some
structural aspects that have to be taken into account. Horizontal convergence in space
may be supported by the standard variety, if the standard has the same form as the
converged-upon dialect. The opposite may hold if dialects converge in order to increase
the distance from the standard. The expansion of l-vocalization from the western to the
eastern Swiss-German dialects (Christen 2001), the emergence of regional substandard
varieties in northern Germany in the sixteenth century (Elmentaler 2005) and the spread
of the coronalization of the voiceless velar fricative [ç] > [C] in western Germany (Herr-
gen 1986) are examples. In general, structures that are already similar favor convergence
while distinct structures favor divergence.
For the structuralists, intrasystemic coherence is the main factor in internally moti-
vated language change. As early as 1918, Pfalz formulated the theory that vowels change
in “rows” (Reihenschritte), meaning that front and back vowels of the same height and
tension undergo the same sound changes. Wiesinger (1970) applied this concept to all of
the German dialects. Likewise, Labov’s principles of vowel shifting (1994: 116) for Eng-
lish can be seen in the context of intrasystemically coherent sound change. As internal
and external factors co-occur (cf. Torgersen and Kerswill 2004), it can be observed that
a change is often not of a solitary nature; instead, structurally related aspects change
along with it in a similar way. This applies not only to the sound system but also to
morphology. Siebenhaar (2000) has shown that convergence affects the parts of a subsys-
tem in a similar way; convergence in one subsystem, however, need not affect other
subsystems. For the dialect of the small town of Aarau in Switzerland, factor analysis
revealed that the vowel system tends to converge towards the western dialects and stan-
dard German, while morphology tends to converge on the eastern dialects.
A growing number of studies within the framework of Optimality Theory discuss
phonological and morphological change in regional substandard varieties (cf. Bresnan,
Deo and Sharma 2007; Herrgen 2005; Wegener 1999). Convergence within this model
can be seen as a transfer of constraints or rankings of constraints from one variety to
another, which may ⫺ but need not ⫺ result in convergence in the surface systems.
4.3. Frequency
Another relevant factor is the frequency of the respective form, as already pointed out
by Jakobson (1931). Highly used positions with a high functional load in a phoneme
system are strengthened, while weakly used positions with a low functional load tend to
be lost (see Martinet 1955: 91 for another formulation of this position). Frequency in
this sense means the frequency of linguistic structures. However, the frequency of social
contacts can also be important. Bloomfield (1933: 476) postulated a principle of density
which says that people automatically influence each other’s language whenever they
speak to each other. This principle is applied again by Labov (2001) who believes that
the diffusion of a linguistic change can be reduced to a simple calculation and that
the principle of density implicitly asserts that we do not have to search for a motivating
force behind the diffusion of linguistic change. The effect is a mechanical and inevitable one;
the implicit assumption is that social evaluation and attitudes play a minor role.
(Labov 2001: 20)
However, the concept of frequency is not as simple as it seems: type frequency and token
frequency have to be separated, different levels of the linguistic system may interfere with
different frequencies, and measuring frequency in spoken interaction is still a challenge.
Frequency effects have thus rarely been analyzed in actual research on convergence.
5. Conclusions
Convergence is a process by which varieties become more similar due to frequent com-
munication between speakers or due to the speakers’ belief that they speak a common
variety (and belong to one social group). It is observed both on the vertical dialect ⫺
standard language dimension and on the horizontal dialect ⫺ dialect dimension. A clear
distinction is often not possible. Convergence can be observed at all levels of the linguis-
tic system, from phonetics to pragmatics. Nevertheless, lexical borrowings are often seen
as the starting point of convergence. Out of lexical borrowings, morphological or phono-
logical elements can be generalized, which may lead to grammatical convergence. How-
ever, if the varieties are closely related, it is also possible that morphemes, phonemes
and phonetic features are directly borrowed from one system into another. On the hori-
zontal level, convergence becomes manifest in (a) a displacement of isoglosses, (b) uni-
lateral convergence or advergence or (c) koineization, which is the emergence of a de-
localized variety. Most often convergence can be found in closely related varieties whose
speakers are in intensive contact. Methodologically, convergence can be documented
through real-time comparison. The apparent-time construct interprets synchronic varia-
tion as a consequence of changes over time and is used as a substitute for real-time
observation. The areal distribution of linguistic features may also be interpreted as a
function of time. Convergence is most often explained as contact induced and therefore
externally caused. Explanations for convergence in space can be seen in such structural
factors as a roofing language that influences horizontal convergence or frequency. How-
ever, external aspects are generally believed to be the main factors: socio-geographic or
mental structures, migration, overt and covert prestige, attitudes and salience have been
considered to have an impact on convergence. Most of these explanations can be directly
or indirectly related to an accommodation model of speech.
6. Reerences
1926 Kulturströmungen und Kulturprovinzen in den Rheinlanden. Geschichte, Sprache, Volks-
kunde. Bonn: Röhrscheid.
Auer, Peter
2004 Sprache, Grenze, Raum. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 23(2): 149⫺179.
Auer, Peter, Birgit Barden and Beate Großkopf
1998 Subjective and objective parameters determining “salience” in long-term dialect accom-
modation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2: 163⫺187.
Auer, Peter, Frans Hinskens and Paul Kerswill (eds.)
2005 Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages. Cambridge: Cam-
Bach, Adolf
1969 Deutsche Mundartforschung. Ihre Wege, Ergebnisse und Aufgaben. 3rd ed. Heidelberg:
Winter.
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15. Vertical convergence 259
15. Vertical convergence o linguistic varieties

in a language space
1. Introduction
2. Standardization and national spoken standard varieties in Europe
3. Examples of vertical convergence and its results
4. Conclusion
5. References
1. Introduction
This article deals with the notion of vertical convergence, how it comes about, the socio-
cultural mechanisms behind it, and how it is manifested both linguistically and sociolin-
guistically. After a general discussion of what vertical convergence is and how it is related
to horizontal convergence, a series of illustrative examples of vertical convergence and
its results will be presented. There will also be a discussion concerning the hegemonic
status of some linguistic varieties, how they have achieved this status (historically), and
how this status may be changing. A language space is understood here as a multidimen-
sional space which includes both geographical and social-cultural axes.
1.1. Vertical convergence
The term vertical convergence refers to the process whereby a certain range of linguistic
features of a variety is substituted by features that enjoy higher standing than the origi-
nal ones. Hence, vertical convergence arises from direct or indirect contact between vari-
eties where the converged-to variety holds a higher status in social space than the con-
verging variety. In many cases the converged-to variety is an overarching spoken stan-
dard variety, but it does not have to be. The main point is the asymmetrical relationship
between the converging and the converged-to variety, be it a national standard, an urban
high-status variety or another hegemonic variety. The most prominent example of such
an asymmetrical relationship between varieties is, however, that between traditional dia-
lects and a national spoken standard variety. Several of the examples in this article will
therefore present dialect-standard relationships in different parts of Europe, particularly
Scandinavia (cf. section 3). In many cases, however, one may question what the target
of vertical (or semi-vertical) convergence is: the standard proper or a substandard (but
still socially prestigious) variety.
Vertical convergence is intimately connected to its counterpart, horizontal con-
vergence, and the two types of linguistic convergence are in many cases difficult to distin-
guish. Due, for instance, to isomorphism it may be impossible to determine whether a
certain contact innovation should be mapped as vertical or horizontal convergence. It is
therefore often an empirical challenge to find unambiguous examples of either type.
Moreover, given that most cases of convergence may be traced back to asymmetrical
relationships between varieties ⫺ that is, to differences in status or prestige ⫺ one could
argue that all cases of convergence might in that sense be labeled vertical. For the sake
of conceptual clarity, however, it may be useful to reserve the term vertical to con-
vergence between dialect and a standard or standard-like variety and horizontal to con-
vergence between basilectal varieties where the relative difference in prestige is smaller.
Even so, as these considerations indicate, it is not always easy or trivial to draw a clear-
cut line between vertical and horizontal convergence.
Vertical convergence of linguistic varieties will normally reduce the degree of inter-
systemic variation. Intra-systemically, however, the degree of variation may increase
since speakers can choose linguistic variants from a larger repertoire. Decreasing con-
trast between varieties does not necessarily imply a loss of traditional forms. Old and
new forms may co-exist for some time, at least in the beginning of the process. However,
in the long run, features from the converging variety tend to be abandoned. The long-
term effect of the process is therefore most probably also a reduction of variety-internal
variation. In discussing the phenomenon of vertical convergence ⫺ and the relationship
between inter- and intra-systemic variation ⫺ it is thus important to distinguish between
the process and its outcome (cf. Auer 2000). Obviously the outcome of vertical con-
vergence will be a reduced distance between asymmetrically placed varieties, but it al-
most always involves a reduced distance between horizontally placed varieties as well
(cf. Auer and Hinskens 1996). This means that vertical convergence has the potential to
change a language space, both geographically and socially speaking, and maybe even to
create new language spaces.
By contrast, reduced horizontal distance ⫺ that is, between dialects ⫺ does not neces-
sarily imply less distance between dialect and standard. Horizontal dialect-dialect con-
vergence may in fact increase the structural distance to the standard, as shown by Hin-
skens (1996) in his study of dialect leveling in Limburg, the Netherlands (cf. Siebenhaar
in this handbook).
1.2. A multidimensional model o linguistic convergence
Auer and Hinskens (1996) propose three different scenarios of the process of vertical
and horizontal convergence and its products. Figure 15.1 shows different degrees of
focusing and reduction of the linguistic repertoire, which can be seen as three stages of
development (from left to right). If we consider the repertoire of a speech community
with extensive vertical and horizontal convergence, variants from different varieties will
compete on the linguistic market. Hence, the normal situation will be that the amount
of variation within the repertoire increases in the beginning of the process (as displayed
in Figure 15.1, [i] and [ii]). At the termination of the process, however, some variants
will normally win out and others will disappear, meaning that the total scope of variation
will be reduced (as shown in Figure 15.1 [iii]). Generally, features with a restricted geo-
graphical and social distribution tend to disappear first, whereas features with a wider
extension in language space have a greater potential of surviving. The expected result of
the process is thus the emergence of new lects (see Figure 15.1 [ii], where the bars in the
rectangle illustrate new, more or less focused lects), but more diffuse situations may also
emerge with a range of non-discrete structures within the dialect-standard continuum
(as illustrated in Figure 15.1 [i]).
Fig. 15.1: Multidimensional model of linguistic convergence (adapted from Auer and Hinskens
1996)
1.3. Dialect leveling
An important consequence of vertical convergence between dialect and standard (or

semi-standard) is that of dialect leveling. Dialect leveling is probably the most distinct
tendency in modern European dialect change, and vertical convergence perhaps the most
powerful contributing force. Dialect leveling is understood here as a dynamic and multi-
dimensional dialect contact phenomenon that leads to the reduction of inter-systemic
variation by a gradual abandonment of local dialect features in favor of more regional
or standard ones. This definition of dialect leveling is inspired by Trudgill (1986) and
Hinskens (1996), but it does not include the dimension of “markedness”. Trudgill (1986:
98) defines dialect leveling as “reduction or attrition of marked variants”. As pointed
out by Auer (2000: 13), there are several examples of convergence where the structurally
more marked feature is the converged-to feature: for instance in the case of phoneme
splits, as they occur in dialect convergence towards a standard variety. By leaving out
the question of markedness, leveling and convergence may be equated. The term dialect
leveling is used here in the sense of “bottom-up” ⫺ that is, as the formation of regiolects,
and not “top-down”, in the course of demotization or de-standardization (see section
3.1).
An important question is whether vertical convergence necessarily implies a direct
adoption of the target forms, and hence dialect loss, or if vertical convergence may result
in the emergence of new forms (compromise forms, innovations) that are neither present
in the dialect nor in the target variety.
In the following we will take a closer look at some examples of dialect leveling in
different parts of Europe with particular focus on vertical convergence between dialects
and a hegemonic variety. As noted above, the existence of a hegemonic spoken variety
is a prerequisite for vertical convergence. The most typical example of such a hegemonic
variety is a spoken standard norm (i. e. orthoepy). For this reason, before turning to
specific cases, we will briefly discuss the concept of an oral standard and present a brief
overview of the status of some spoken standards in present-day Europe (for a detailed
account of dialect/standard constellations in Europe see Auer 2005).
2. Standardization and national spoken standard varieties

in Europe
Broadly put, a standard language may be defined as that variety of a language which
has gained literary and cultural supremacy over the other varieties and which is accepted
also by the speakers of the other varieties as a more proper form of that language than
other varieties (cf. Bull 1992). As Haugen (1972: 246) puts it: “It is a significant and
probably crucial requirement for a standard language that it be written” [my italics].
Nevertheless, a standard language may also be spoken. In Europe the emergence of oral
standards is intimately linked to and dependent on the formation and codification of
written standards. Thus, we may take the existence of a written standard as a prerequisite
for an oral one. When discussing the ontological status of a spoken standard within a
language community, not necessarily as a codified norm, but as an operative norm, it is
important to have a look at the history and status of the written standard.
By definition, an oral standard covers a wide range of functions. It is typically in-
volved in code switching and is clearly the preferred variety in formal situations; it has
the position of the H-variety in diglossic speech communities; and it is often the con-
verged-to variety in dialect leveling situations. It has an overarching function with re-
spect to other varieties within the same dia-system and sometimes even over varieties of
other dia-systems (e.g., exoglossic standards such as Latin and Arabic). A spoken stan-
dard may be regionally unmarked in the sense that it may be impossible to place a
standard speaker geographically. However, as we will see below, a spoken standard norm
is often based on the speech of the upper classes in the capital or in the most important
cities of a country and as such it may be highly geographically localizable. In most cases
it is also possible to place the speakers of an oral standard in social space. The spoken
standard is often regarded as a symbol of good manners and a signal of a particular
sociocultural, symbolic capital that gives the speaker access to certain social circles (see
Mæhlum in this volume for a more detailed discussion of the indexicality of spoken
standards as compared to dialects).
The model presented in section 1.2 presupposes that a national spoken standard exists,
that there is at least one dialect, and that both are part of the same dia-system. As pointed
out by Auer and Hinskens (1996: 6), the two last presuppositions do not necessarily hold
for all language communities in Europe today. One may, however, question even the
assumption that spoken standards exist in all parts of Europe. As we will see below, this
issue has been a hotly debated point within the Norwegian language community.
As stated by Deumert and Vandenbussche (2003: 2) in their introduction to a volume
on the different histories of standardization, the Germanic languages “provide a wide
range of highly diverse standardization scenarios”. Some Germanic languages developed
written standards in medieval times (like Danish and Icelandic), others during the nine-
teenth century (like Norwegian (Nynorsk and Bokmål) and Afrikaans), and some lan-
guages are still in the process of developing a standard language (like Luxembourgish
and Scottish).
2.1. Contrasting history and status o spoken standards

Schematically, one may represent the communities in Europe today on a continuum,
running from those with indisputable and generally acknowledged spoken standards to
communities where the standard is weak and contestable with respect to both content
and status. In this article this contrast will be illustrated through examples taken from
the Scandinavian language area. Here we find linguistic communities that have been
intimately linked to each other, but that have had very different developments regarding
the emergence and status of oral standards, as well as with regard to the status and
sociolinguistic situation of the traditional dialects and the amount of vertical and hori-
zontal convergence in the communities’ linguistic repertoires. The linguistic communities
I will focus on are Denmark and Norway ⫺ countries with a shared national, political
history until 1814, when Norway gained its independence from Denmark. While the
existence of an overarching oral standard is treated as an accepted and indisputable
“truth” in present-day Denmark, it is a disputed issue in Norway. With respect to this
contrast, the Danish language situation may be taken as the “normal case”. As far as
the status of the spoken standard and the dialect-standard relationship are concerned,
most European countries are undoubtedly closer to the Danish end of the spectrum than
the Norwegian.
In Denmark, upper class Copenhagen speech is clearly associated with the standard
and is generally acknowledged as the “best” and most “normal” way of speaking Danish.
In Norway, on the other hand, whether the upper class variety spoken in the capital,
Oslo, may be conceived of as standard speech is a contentious issue. While dialects in
Norway enjoy a relatively high status and are accepted as legitimate means of communi-
cation within most social domains, negative attitudes towards dialects and pronounced
dialect leveling are typical of Denmark. It is not surprising, therefore, that vertical con-
vergence is a prominent force in modern Danish dialect change, whereas its role is dis-
putable in Norway. A look at the countries’ respective standardization processes rein-
forces this point.
In Denmark the first developments towards a spoken standard were undertaken in
the sixteenth century ⫺ that is, more than three centuries after the emergence of the
written standard, and social prestige was the most important element in its formation
(see Kristiansen 2003a: 73; Skautrup 1947). Over the centuries, written Danish has un-
dergone relatively small changes whereas spoken Danish, in all its varieties, has moved
further away from the common Nordic origin than the other Scandinavian languages
have done (cf. Kristiansen 2003a: 78; Vikør 1995; Haugen 1976). Since the phonetic
spelling approach has had only minimal impact on the codification of Danish orthogra-
phy, there is a substantial gap between written and spoken Danish, and Brink and Lund
(1975) show that the majority of the changes in spoken standard Danish during the last
two centuries have increased rather than decreased the distance between the written and
the spoken standard (for examples see Kristensen 2003).
During the second half of the eighteenth century, a social stratification of Copen-
hagen speech took place, and two separate varieties ⫺ so-called high and low Copen-
hagen speech ⫺ gradually emerged. High and low refer to the position of the varieties
in social space. The national spoken standard variety, which took shape during the first
half of the nineteenth century, is often referred to as rigsmål and was primarily based
on high Copenhagen speech. Today, however, rigsmål as spoken by the younger genera-
tions is also influenced by what used to be considered low Copenhagen features ⫺ that
is, downward convergence towards the low-Copenhagen variety has taken place (cf.
Kristensen 2003: 33; see section 3 below). The case provides an illustration of the dy-
namic relation between convergence and standard formation. Synchronically, two ver-
sions of the spoken standard exist; the traditional one based on high Copenhagen speech
and a more recent version which also includes re-allocated low Copenhagen features.
The former version is primarily used by the older generation whereas the latter is more
common among younger speakers ⫺ hence, the different versions of rigsmål are age-
specific. This has led to a situation where features from older rigsmål have been substi-
tuted by new features among young people in Copenhagen, while still being used by
young people outside of Copenhagen: young people in peripheral areas may use old
Copenhagen features, which were once part of rigsmål, but which have now fallen out
of use even by the oldest rigsmål speakers in Copenhagen (cf. Kristensen 2003: 33). This
may potentially create new distinctions ⫺ social, cultural, generational and geographic.
However, as we will see below, in present-day dialect convergence in Denmark, the more
influential of the two varieties is the younger rigsmål.
In Norway the question of a spoken standard norm is more problematic. Norway was
under Danish rule from 1450 until 1814. During this time no separate written standard of
Norwegian existed; that is, the written language in Norway was Danish, and the dialects
spoken in what constitutes Norway today were regarded as dialects of the common
Dano-Norwegian language. After the separation from Denmark, a long-lasting language
struggle started, which resulted in the recognition of two written standards in 1885 (now
Bokmål and Nynorsk). Bokmål was based on the Danish written standard, but was grad-
ually Norwegianized through a series of official language reforms. The target of this
reform process was the Dano-Norwegian dialect of the upper middle classes in the capi-
tal Christiania (today Oslo). Nynorsk, on the other hand, was based on a wide range of
rural, Norwegian dialects. During the first half of the twentieth century, the goal of the
official language planning policy was to unify the two standards into a single written
standard by using linguistic material from rural and urban dialects. This policy, however,
has now been officially abandoned (see Jahr 2003 for details).
Today there are two official written standards of Norwegian ⫺ Bokmål and Nynorsk.
Both standards are quite heterogeneous, to the extent that it is possible to identify two
major varieties within each of them. Unsurprisingly, agreeing on a common spoken stan-
dard is problematic. Like the situation in many other European countries, there is no
officially sanctioned spoken norm in Norway: there are no authoritative dictionaries
of how “proper”, “correct” Norwegian should be pronounced. In fact, the Norwegian
Parliament decided in 1878 that no particular spoken standard should be taught in ele-
mentary and secondary schools. This principle is still valid today, and in Norwegian
schools there is no tradition of correcting pupils’ dialects. This historical background
has no doubt been essential for the continued use of local dialects in Norway even in
polylectal communication and it explains the relatively weak position of the spoken stan-
dards.
Attempts at establishing a spoken Nynorsk standard have never met with great suc-
cess. A spoken standard based on Bokmål, on the other hand, has been much more
successful. Spoken Bokmål may be pronounced with a range of different accents, but
south-eastern Norwegian phonology, particularly as it appears in and around the capital,
Oslo, seems to have achieved a hegemonic status and is commonly regarded to be the
most “normal”, “neutral” and even “correct” way of speaking Norwegian (cf. Røyneland
2009 for further discussion). It is often referred to as the east Norwegian standard, it is
the mother tongue of many people, and it is used by many speakers in the region in
order to conceal exactly where they come from (cf. Sandøy 1998). This variety is often
reported to be the converged-to variety (cf. Røyneland 2005). It has rather fuzzy borders
and, as is the case in Denmark, one may distinguish between two versions of the spoken
standard: a “conservative” standard associated with upper middle class Oslo speech and
a “modern” standard that reflects younger Oslo speech. The status of these spoken stan-
dards is somewhat unclear ⫺ not all members of the Norwegian speech community
would acknowledge them as such. Nevertheless, while they may not fully meet the cri-
teria of a standard proper, they certainly share, as demonstrated, some of the key charac-
teristics of oral standards.
In the following we will take a closer look at the role of vertical convergence in
communities where the status of both the standard and the dialects differs substantially.
We will consider particular results of vertical convergence such as dialect leveling, shift
or death, the formation of new (regional) varieties and the emergence of intermediate
and hybrid forms.
3. Examples o vertical convergence and its results
Vertical convergence between a converging and a converged-to variety may have a range
of different results. As will be demonstrated by the examples below, vertical con-
vergence ⫺ or more precisely, advergence ⫺ towards another variety may (but does not
necessarily have to) imply a direct adoption of the target variants. In many cases, con-
vergence is only partial and may even lead to the emergence of completely new, hybrid
forms. Vertical convergence is a powerful force in language change ⫺ not only at linguis-
tic markets where there is a commonly accepted, strong and unquestioned standard
spoken norm roofing the dia-system, but also in communities where the standard norm
is fuzzier and its status more unclear. In some cases the target of vertical (or semi-
vertical) convergence may not even be a standard proper, but a socially prestigious vari-
ety which has achieved some sort of hegemonic standard-like status.
Vertical convergence may contradict principles of language change, and may produce
a re-categorization of constraints within non-standard dialects, even where this leads to
more marked or complex forms. It is, for instance, a common belief that innovations
can create mergers, but not reverse them. If two words have become identical through
a phonetic change, they can never be differentiated by phonetic means (cf. Gardes’ prin-
ciple, Labov 1994: 311). However, mergers may be undone in vertical convergence, as
Labov (1994: 342) argues: “Given the right social conditions, it is reasonable to think
that a distinction can be reintroduced into a speech community in a consistent way”.
An example of this may be found in the south of Spain where overt prestige pressure on
speakers in Andalucı́a has enhanced vertical convergence towards the standard distinc-
tion of coronal fricatives. In the traditional dialects of the area, the alveolar fricative /s/
as in tasa (tax) and the dental fricative /u/ as in taza (cup) are merged into /s/; that is,
both words would traditionally be pronounced as /tasa/. At present this merger is not
viewed as particularly trendy, and young, urban Andalusians tend to avoid it. This trend
of vertical convergence is relatively recent, is favored by inter-dialect contact and seems
to have affected the youngest and most educated speakers (Villena-Ponsoda and Vida
Castro 2005: 5⫺6).
In the following, examples from the Danish and Norwegian speech communities will
be brought forward as illustrative examples of the varied results that vertical convergence
may have. The differences in results reflect the contrasting poles of the spectrum of
dialect-standard relationships in present-day Europe.
3.1. Dialect leveling, dialect death and the ormation o regional

(standard) varieties
The Danish case provides an example of a language space where vertical convergence
has lead to massive dialect leveling and even to dialect death and where one may see
the emergence of regional (standard) varieties (cf. scenario [iii] in Figure 15.1). In their
introduction to the sociolinguistics of Danish, Kristiansen and Jørgensen (2003: 1) state
that “almost all living mother-tongue speakers of Danish speak the Copenhagen stan-
dard or a variety very close to it”. Until 1900 Denmark was a fairly heterogeneous
linguistic area, compared to the geographical space it occupies. By the end of the twenti-
eth century, the situation has dramatically changed (cf. Kristensen 2003: 29). Language
variation has decreased substantially along the geographical dimension in the direction
of a de-dialectalization of the area, i. e., most dialect features are on the brink of extinc-
tion. Only minor segmental differences are found today, though some supra-segmental
differences may still be encountered. However, language variation has increased within
varieties. Thus, individual speakers are offered the possibility of a wider linguistic reper-
toire. The radical de-dialectalization and standardization of Denmark is “the result of
pervasive influence from the spoken language of Copenhagen” (Kristensen 2003: 30),
combined with “a strong standard ideology” (Pedersen 2003: 10), or, in other words, a
result of extensive vertical convergence.
From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, much of the Danish dialect vocabu-
lary was lost and specific local variants were substituted by variants with a wider geo-
graphical range. These variants were often, but not always, closer to the standard lan-
guage. The dialects converged to each other and to the standard, that is, both horizon-
tally and vertically, resulting in leveled or modernized dialects (cf. Pedersen 2003: 21).
At this time, dialects were still transmitted from one generation to the next. During the
1960s, however, the number of dialect speakers declined dramatically. New generations
simply acquired a (regional) standard language instead of their parents’ local dialect.
Pedersen explains this dramatic shift as a consequence of large-scale societal changes
such as urbanization, modernization and a restructuring of the country’s labor force.
The primary industries underwent a precipitous decline; the number of people employed
in agriculture fell rapidly and their sociocultural standing was eroded. Since dialect use
in Denmark was connected largely with rural, agricultural ways of life, an effect of this
restructuring was that dialects quickly lost ground as a means of communication beyond
the private sphere. This kind of dialect loss, however, cannot be described as a result of
convergence. Rather, it is a case where abrupt societal changes disrupt the traditional
ways of life sustaining dialect use.
The predicted development in Denmark is that the traditional dialects will disappear
completely, the linguistic centralization and standardization will proceed and the few
inter-systemic differences between different regional varieties that still exist will diminish
(Kristiansen 2003b; Kristensen 2003; Pedersen 2003: 2008). One may, in other words,
expect a development that corresponds to the third and last triangle (iii) in Figure 15.1
(the multidimensional model of linguistic convergence by Auer and Hinskens 1996)
where the base dialects are lost and new (regional) standard varieties with a few regional
traces, particularly supra-segmental features such as regional intonational patterns, have
emerged. These regiolectal forms may now be considered the most basilectal way of
speaking. Danes seem to have become highly sensitive to subtle phonological and pho-
netic differences. Thus, even if the linguistic differences are small and as such may seem
insignificant, they can still function as important signals of social and geographical dis-
tinction.
An important question is whether regional standard varieties have come into exis-
tence as a means of signaling regional affiliation and identity. At the level of language
use, non-arbitrary but fuzzy boundaries within the continuum between dialect and stan-
dard may be detected, as shown by Kristensen and Thelander (1984). According to Kris-
tensen (2003), the regional standard varieties of Danish are defined by particularly resis-
tant dialect features that are shared by a larger region and combined with features from
rigsmål and low Copenhagen speech. The users of these regional standard varieties are
found in larger geographical regions of Denmark such as Zealand, Funen, northern,
western, eastern and southern Jutland, and are neither (base) dialect nor standard rigs-
mål speakers. However, there are no sharp boundaries between the different regions, the
varieties are rather heterogeneous both inter- and intra-individually and one may ques-
tion whether there are clear norms and social functions associated with them. Kristiansen
(2003b) raises doubts as to whether such regional standard varieties have in fact emerged
in Denmark ⫺ at least if we consider their social reality for the speakers and their
function as symbolic markers of regional identity. According to Kristiansen (2003b),
there is no regional linguistic consciousness among Danes, and regional varieties of
Danish lack any positive group-marking function of the sort that may be used as a
means of distinction or to display regional allegiance in opposition to a centralized cul-
ture of the capital. As pointed out also by Kristensen (2003: 41), the regional standard
varieties tend to be perceived as a variety of the standard, or even as the standard proper,
by the language users themselves; it is simply perceived as the “correct” language. At
the socio-psychological level, then, the regional varieties are not varieties in their own
right. Nevertheless, at the level of language use, regional standard varieties can be distin-
guished.
It is primarily vertical convergence that has reshaped the Danish linguistic landscape,
although horizontal convergence also came into play particularly at an early stage. How-
ever, as stated above, the present-day development is not only characterized by vertical
convergence towards the standard, but also by a restructuring of the standard itself
through what one may denote a process of demotization (“Demotisierung”; Mattheier
1997). This is a process of downward convergence where features from so-called low-
Copenhagen speech are included in young people’s perception of standard Danish. The
standard does not necessarily become less important or lose any of its functions (i. e., it
is not de-standardized), but it becomes more popular and less connected to a high socio-
economic stratum of the population.
It is, as pointed out both by Pedersen (2003) and Kristiansen (2003b), still an open
question whether Danes outside the capital actually strive towards total convergence
with high or low Copenhagen speech, or if they are trying to maintain certain subtle
phonetic features as a means of displaying regional affiliation. If the former is the case,
Denmark would, as pointed out by Pedersen (2003: 26), “be a good candidate to be the
first country to accomplish total linguistic standardization.”
Norway provides a contrasting case. Generally speaking, dialects in Norway are well-
preserved and, hence, dialect diversity is still considerable as compared, for instance, to
modern Sweden and Denmark (e.g., Pedersen 2003; Kristiansen 2003b; Edlund 2003;
Vikør 1995; Kristensen/Thelander 1984; Thelander 1980). Whereas dialect use in Den-
mark is seen as appropriate only within the private sphere, dialects in Norway are gen-
erally used within all social domains (cf. Røyneland 2009). However, the differences may
be more quantitative than qualitative. In both countries, dialect use is associated with a
traditional, rural lifestyle and with informal, everyday speech events, whereas standard
speech is associated with a modern, urban lifestyle and formal, official speech events (cf.
Mæhlum in this handbook). The conceptions of the prototypical dialect speaker versus
the standard speaker have, thus, some of the same characteristics in the two countries,
but dialect use is still generally perceived more positively and has a higher value on the
linguistic marketplace in Norway than in Denmark. However, not all dialects in Norway
have the same social standing. Dialects close to the larger cities and particularly those
close to the capital, Oslo, are more exposed to negative stereotyping than, for instance,
dialects from the west coast or from mid-Norway (for a more detailed discussion see for
instance Mæhlum 2007; Røyneland 2009).
In spite of the supposed egalitarian linguistic ideal and the uncertain status of a
spoken standard norm in Norway, vertical convergence is also a powerful force in mod-
ern Norwegian dialect change ⫺ not necessarily towards an acknowledged spoken stan-
dard, but towards a hegemonic operative norm. As noted, a Bokmål-based variety with
south-eastern Norwegian intonation shares important characteristics with a spoken stan-
dard. The current linguistic situation, then, is no doubt marked by increasing dialect
leveling and even in some areas by regular dialect shift. In western regions horizontal
convergence seems to dominate (cf. Akselberg 2005; Sandøy 2004; and for a diverging
account see Solheim 2006), whereas vertical convergence is clearly the dominating force
in other parts of the country (cf. Mæhlum 2007; Røyneland 2005: 2009).
Changes in the vowel system provide a clear instance of vertical convergence.
Throughout the country, dialects with a phonemic inventory containing more vowel
phonemes than the east Norwegian urban standard (with its nine monophthongs and
four diphthongs) show a clear tendency towards reducing the existing vowel system,
bringing it closer to the standard system. In the consonant system we also find examples
of mergers which reduce the number of phonemes or allophones. As we will return to
below, however, convergence towards the standard is not always complete (see section
3.2).
As in the case of the Danish standard, there has been a restructuring of the Norwe-
gian standard through demotization. Today one may distinguish between two versions
of the spoken standard: a “conservative” standard associated with upper middle class
Oslo speech and a “modern” standard that reflects younger Oslo speech. Studies of
dialect leveling in Norway indicate that the “modern” standard is clearly the most expan-
sive, whereas the “conservative” standard is losing territory (see Vikør 1999; Skjekkeland
2000 for further references). As noted above, this also seems to be a tendency in other
parts of Europe (e.g., Pedersen 2003; Kerswill 2000).
In summary, although vertical convergence is a powerful force in modern Norwegian,
it is not nearly as dominating as it is in Denmark. The standard itself and the standard
ideology do not have a particularly strong position in Norway. Dialects in Norway enjoy
a relatively high status and are relatively well preserved. Still, the Norwegian linguistic
landscape is undergoing a restructuring which is marked by dialect leveling, but also by
a demotization of the standard. It is, as yet, unclear whether regiolects or regional stan-
dard varieties are in the process of establishing themselves ⫺ both at the level of language
use and at the level of attitudes. The first triangle, (i) in Figure 15.1, where there are still
no focused new lects, but rather a range of non-discrete structures within the dialect-
standard continuum, is probably the one that describes the Norwegian language space
most accurately.
3.2. Incomplete convergence and the emergence o hybrid orms
As discussed extensively by, for instance, Trudgill (1986) and Auer (2000) the adoption
of a target variant does not have to be complete ⫺ either because speakers only converge
partially to the target variant or because they simply miss the target and in turn create
a new variant. One example of incomplete adoption mentioned by Trudgill (1986: 22,
58) is the variable use of [d] rather than [d4 ] as a realization of intervocalic /d/ by middle
class Americans living in England. Another example mentioned by Trudgill (1986: 59) is
incomplete adoption linked to lexical diffusion. Northern English accents have a five-
vowel system (/=, ε, a, w, c/) whereas southern accents have a six-vowel system (/=, ε, æ,
w, v, A/). Hence, in southern accents could and cud, put and putt are distinguished /w, v/,
whereas northern accents have /w/ throughout. The southern six-vowel system is grad-
ually spreading northwards, but in a transition zone speakers replace /w/ by /v/ only in
certain words. These speakers do not modify their phonological system as such to resem-
ble the target variety. Rather, they change the pronunciation of individual lexical items
to make them sound more like those of the target variety; hence, speakers’ motivation
is, according to Trudgill (1986: 58), phonetic rather than phonological. These are both
examples of partial convergence where the original and the new variant co-exist. This
co-existence may last over time and create what Trudgill (1986) calls mixed dialects.
Increased intra-systemic variability is also a typical result of vertical convergence ⫺ at
least in the beginning of the process. However, features from the converging variety tend
to be abandoned over time (see discussion in section 1.1).
Adoption of a target variant may also be phonetically, and not only lexically, partial
and hence give rise to what Trudgill (1986) calls fudged lects ⫺ that is, phonetically
intermediate lects. Thus, the linguistic form which is transmitted from a converged-to
variety does not have to be identical to the form eventually adopted in a converging
variety. This may occur when converging speakers miss the target or when speakers more
or less intentionally choose a compromise between the converging and the converged-to
variant. The result may be the emergence of compromise forms ⫺ either completely new
forms that previously did not exist in either of the contact varieties, or forms that could
already be found in the converging variety but only in other contexts. An example of
phonetically intermediate variants mentioned by Trudgill (1986: 60) is the emergence of
the intermediate vowel quality [¥] in the /w/ ⫺ /v/ transition zone between northern and
southern England. In cases of vertical convergence, speakers may overshoot the target
and generalize the new variant to contexts where it is not used in the converged-to variety
(i. e., hypercorrection). An example mentioned by Auer (2000: 12) is the avoidance of
/ç/-coronalization; in many German dialects convergence towards standard phonology

has lead to hypercorrect /ç/ in words such as Menschen ‘people’ (standard: /mεnsn/).
Another example of incomplete vertical convergence towards the standard may be
found in dialects in northern and central Norway where the dialectal palatals [M], [Y],
[c], [n] are replaced by the retroflexes [U], [l], [t], [K] instead of the corresponding standard
alveolar variants [n], [l], [t], [d]. Palatalization of long alveolars and alveolar clusters
used to be a very widespread rural feature in the north, west and central parts of Norway,
but it is currently disappearing in most of these areas (e.g., Hanssen 1990; Mæhlum
1992; Røyneland 2005). The feature deviates from the standard, and from most urban
varieties, even those of the urban centers in the palatalizing area. Generally, there is a
high social awareness of this feature, and it is often regarded as “broad”, “rural” and
“peasant-like”. The retroflex variants represent a regional development and can, percep-
tually speaking, be understood as compromises both in linguistic and social terms. In-
stead of converging completely to the standard alveolar variants, or sticking to the dia-
lectal palatal forms, an intermediate form (which already existed in the dialects, but in
other contexts) is preferred. This demonstrates that vertical convergence may result in
the emergence of regiolectal forms, and maybe even regional varieties as in the Danish
case. It is possible, however, that the emergence of intermediate forms is an unintended
result. As mentioned above, it may well be that the speakers are actually aiming at the
standard, but are simply missing the target. Hence, it is an open question whether or
not the emergence of regiolectal variants or varieties is intentional and whether they are
used as a means of displaying regional affiliation and identity.
In some cases, what may be understood as deviance from the standard at one linguis-
tic level may be analyzed as vertical convergence towards the standard at another. An
example of this may be found in historical reflexes of the Old Norwegian syllable balance
rule. The syllable balance rule has had different historical effects in different parts of
Norway, and has traditionally been the most important variable that dialectologists have
used to divide Norway into different dialect regions. The east Norwegian urban standard
does not have any reflexes of the syllable balance rule. In central Norway, the traditional
system is an apocope in most infinitives and nouns (those which had a long root syllable
in Old Norwegian) and maintenance of the final vowel in the minority (those which had
a short root syllable in Old Norwegian), ex. [hc6p] ‘to jump’ versus [vær6a] ‘to be’. How-
ever, apocopated forms are spreading in the region so that infinitives and nouns that
traditionally should have retained the final vowel are apocopated, thus resulting in a
more homogenous class of items: [vcr6c/vær6a] > [væ6r], standard [væ6re] ‘to be’,
[scvc] > [sc6v], standard [sc6ve] ‘to sleep’, [v⁄k6⁄/væk6a] > [⁄6k], standard [⁄6ke] ‘week’
(cf. Røyneland 2005: 2009). This development diverges from the standard as far as the
number of syllables in the affected words is concerned, but at the level of phonology
there seems to be a tendency to prefer root vowels whose quality and quantity corre-
spond to that of the standard. In this sense, one could argue that there are both vertical
and horizontal convergences at work; vertical convergence towards standard phonology
and horizontal convergence towards regional dialect morpho-phonology (cf. [hc6p] ‘to
jump’, [kast] ‘to throw’, [vi6s] ‘a song’). This combination of vertical and horizontal
convergence results in the emergence of a new hybrid variant that did not exist in either
of the contact varieties.
In some cases, it may be difficult or even impossible to determine whether vertical
convergence is the driving force behind a given change due to isomorphism between the
involved varieties. If the standard, the urban dialects in the area, as well as the surround-
ing dialects all have the same variant, it is of course impossible to decide what kind of
convergence we are dealing with. In those cases, it is reasonable to assume that several
processes are at work at the same time. Many studies demonstrate that local and regional
varieties deviate substantially from the standard at the level of the lexicon (Sandøy 2008).
It is probably at this linguistic level that we find the most pronounced vertical con-
vergence, in the sense of direct adoption of standard words. At this linguistic level, too,
it is easiest to determine whether the standard is unambiguously the ideal norm, and
hence the target of convergence.
4. Conclusion
As we have seen, vertical convergence is a powerful force in modern European dialect

change. The impact of such convergence, however, is not the same in all linguistic com-
munities ⫺ as the cases of Denmark and Norway clearly demonstrate. Denmark pro-
vides an example of a language space that has changed dramatically over the last 40⫺
50 years ⫺ both geographically and socioculturally ⫺ particularly due to vertical con-
vergence. Linguistic diversity has decreased substantially along the geographical dimen-
sion, and regional standard varieties covering larger geographical areas have emerged at
least at the level of language use, (but maybe not as a means of signaling a regional
identity). Linguistic diversity has also decreased along the social dimension where Low-
Copenhagen features have extended their reach at the expense of High-Copenhagen fea-
tures. In sum, this leaves a much more homogenous language space. Nevertheless, new
distinctions may emerge where old ones disappear and more subtle linguistic differences
may function as symbolic markers of social, cultural, ethnic or geographical distinctions.
One recent development which contributes to a more heterogeneous linguistic picture
is the emergence of multiethnolectal speech styles among adolescents in multicultural
environments in urban Copenhagen (cf. Quist 2005). In Oslo as well, multiethnolectal
speech styles are emerging among young people in culturally diverse areas (cf. Svendsen
and Røyneland 2008). At the same time, traditionally low-status Oslo features are re-
allocated and may now arguably be seen as part of the “modern” standard. The Norwe-
gian language space has also undergone restructuring due to vertical convergence, but
the result in Norway has not been the emergence of regional varieties and/or dialect
death, but rather a more moderate dialect leveling. The developments are not the same
throughout the country, but tendencies towards vertical convergence may be detected in
all areas. The result, however, often differs from the standard itself and may contribute
to the establishment of new intermediate variants and to the creation of new distinctions.
The Danish and the Norwegian cases demonstrate that vertical convergence may ap-
pear both within language spaces that are characterized by a well-defined spoken stan-
dard and a strong standard ideology, and in language spaces where the spoken standard
and the standard ideology have a relatively weak status. Vertical convergence toward a
hegemonic variety may be complete (or almost complete), or it may be realized to a
significantly smaller degree. In the latter case, the result may be the formation of inter-
mediate forms and eventually intermediate varieties. Vertical convergence, thus, results
in a restructuring of the language space. As the Danish and Norwegian cases clearly
show, the result of vertical convergence may be the emergence of new lects, dialect death
or simply dialect leveling. In many cases, developments such as the ones we have seen
in Denmark and Norway may amount to linguistic simplifications. However, as the case
of the split of coronal fricatives in Andalucı́a clearly illustrates, simplification need not
be the result. Here, in fact, vertical convergence has produced a system of greater com-
plexity. The impact of vertical convergence on language spaces can vary greatly, and will
be mediated by such sociocultural factors as the relative social standing and indexicality
of the converging and converged-to varieties.
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16. Divergence 275
16. Divergence o linguistic varieties in a language

space
1. Linguistic divergence: Term and concept
2. Research overview and examples
3. Types of linguistic divergence
4. Parameters of linguistic divergence
5. References
1. Linguistic divergence: Term and concept

Divergence is a kind of change by which relatively uniform linguistic varieties become
more dissimilar. Divergence is therefore a diachronic process per se and, as such, is
dynamic over time. The divergence of linguistic varieties becomes apparent within a
geographical space and/or within a social stratification, thus it shows diatopic and/or
diastratic dynamics as well. We speak of “horizontal” divergence as far as diatopic dis-
similation is concerned, and “vertical” divergence concerning diastratic dissimilation.
As the term “relative uniformity” shows, the starting point of dissimilation is not
identity. Absolute uniformity may occasionally occur when a variety is split into several
subvarieties, for instance as a consequence of the migration of its speakers (see Riehl in
this volume). “Relative uniformity” means that in the unmarked case the varieties before
dissimilation form a continuum. In this sense, divergence amounts to a break within
a continuum.
Varieties may diverge in particular structural features or in bundles of such features
to different degrees. Only in theory will a linguistic space split in all structural features
which then define and delimit the emerging new spaces exhaustively. For this reason, the
denominations of linguistic spaces according to the dialects which “occupy” them ⫺ e.g.,
“Bavarian” or “Eastern Franconian” ⫺ give an unrealistic, highly idealized picture.
2. Research overview and examples

Research on the divergence of dialects has been disregarded for a long time. The reason
for this, according to Kremer (1990: 86), is that during the past decades dialectology has
concentrated on the so-called base dialects which seemed to fulfill the ideal of purity
(Henzen 1954: 41). But it is also true that traditional dialectology had an elementary
interest in dialectal dissimilarity in so far as it attempted to explore the boundaries
(isoglosses) of “old” language spaces along which the variants of certain linguistic fea-
tures or bundles of features differed. After establishing these language spaces and their
boundaries, traditional dialectology sought to explain the conditions and factors of their
emergence (e.g., political or economic territories, areas of communication, lines of trans-
portation). On the whole, spatial difference was considered very static. There was more
emphasis on the results of divergence, i. e., the existing dialect spaces, than in dialectal
divergence itself (cf. Radtke 2006: 2189).
After the sociolinguistic turn in dialectology, phenomena of recent change came to

the fore and with them the questions relating to their social and pragmatic conditions.
Social dialectology turned to “dialect leveling” (Dialektabbau) by researching the vertical
convergences of dialects and standard languages, mostly in the form of unilateral ad-
vergences of the dialects to the standard languages (Auer 2004: 170). Later, phenomena
such as the “restructuring” of former local dialects (Dialektumbau) and their “regionali-
zation” (Schunk 1999) were considered as well, i. e., cases of horizontal convergence of
neighboring dialects.
Only recently, however, have the processes of dialect change that led to these diver-
gences been analyzed. The impetus came from a school of research that worked on the
problem of how recent political borders can turn into language boundaries.
The first to deal with this question were Kremer and Niebaum (1990) with a volume
on central and western central European language situations where former dialect con-
tinua are cut through by political borders. Kremer (1990: 86) points out that the Euro-
pean tradition of organizing linguistics according to national language philologies has
for a long time been “fatal” for research of this kind. Taking the border zone between
Germany and the Netherlands for an example, which has become a model for recent
research into linguistic divergence, he states that German and Dutch dialectology con-
fined themselves to their national territories and for too long were unable to look beyond
them. This was hardly reasonable and unwarranted, at least up until the middle of the
twentieth century, in that Dutch and (Low) German dialects at the Dutch/German bor-
der could be called “Dutch” and “German” respectively only on the basis of sociolinguis-
tic criteria ⫺ that is, because they were roofed by the Dutch standard language on the
one side and the German standard language on the other. Apart from that, the two
dialect areas were part of a continuous Continental West-Germanic language space in
which, as a rule, the state frontiers were not identical with significant dialect boundaries.
Auer, Hinskens and Mattheier (1996), Auer (1998) and Kallen, Hinskens and Taelde-
man (2000) contain studies on the borders between Ireland and Northern Ireland, Scot-
land and England, Finland and Russia, etc. In another anthology dedicated to this sub-
ject (Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill 2005), Woolhiser (2005) deals with divergence in the
eastern and southeastern European language space, such as in the Czech Republic, for-
mer Yugoslavia and its now independent republics (particularly Serbia and Croatia), in
the contact areas of Macedonia and Bulgaria, etc. In this article I confine myself to
the Continental West Germanic language space and its neighboring areas. The essential
parameters and their constellations can be shown in this restricted language space as
well.
Divergence of varieties in a language space will be described on the basis of recent
developments in the following sections, because in these instances the data base is much
more solid than in historical situations. Accordingly, the factors that will be shown to
cause and influence such processes, e.g., state borders, political territories (in contrast to
the medieval forms of personally organized governance), are “modern” ones. Neverthe-
less, identical or at least comparable factors hold for processes of divergence in historical
times as well, that is, e.g., for the emergence of the traditional dialect areas which were
the objects of traditional dialectology. Political borders, albeit not yet “political” in the
modern sense of the word, but governmental with reference to pre-modern fragmented
areas of power, have always played a role in the formation of distinct, likewise frag-
mented, language areas. Some factors, e.g., religions denomination, have lost their force
16. Divergence 277
over the course of time. Others, including factors of economic exchange, interpersonal
communication and, within certain limits, factors of “natural” geomorphology, are still
now as influential on the emergence of separate (divergent) linguistic spaces as they were
in the past.
3. Types o linguistic divergence

The types of linguistic divergence will be exemplified by cases in the Continental West-
Germanic language space. The criterion will be the kind of language roof (cf. Kloss 1978
for the concept of linguistic roofing):
⫺ varieties beneath one roofing language
(e.g., German at the German⫺Swiss border along the Upper Rhine)
⫺ varieties beneath two cognate but different roofing languages
(e.g., German and Dutch at the border between Germany and the Netherlands along
the Lower Rhine)
⫺ varieties beneath non-cognate roofing languages
(e.g., German and French at the Baden⫺Alsatian border along the Upper Rhine).
The focus of this article is horizontal divergence in space. Vertical divergence will not be
treated in the same depth, but will be taken into account in relevant cases. Before we
enter the discussion of present-day examples, two historical instances of vertical diver-
gence will be mentioned: the emergence of French and German standard languages.
Endeavors to establish common (standard) languages above dialects which continue in
existence always lead to vertical divergence. When the dialect of the Île de France (the
Paris basin) was installed on top of the French dialects (patois) and extended to the
whole area of the langue d’oı̈l, a diglossic situation emerged, in which two vertically
divergent varieties, a higher and a lower one, co-exist. Vertical divergence arises, too,
when a koiné on the top of the dialects is established, as within the German language
space from the fifteenth century onwards. In principle, the French, centralistic way of
raising the dialect of a politically and economically powerful region to a nationwide
standard language above the patois had the same effect as the German way of creating
a compromise language (Ausgleichssprache) out of and above the local and regional
dialects. Linguistic stratification and vertical divergence were the result of both proc-
esses. Once established, however, any standard variety causes linguistic homogenization.
Standard language and the dialects below it vertically converge, mostly by advergence
of the low varieties to the high one. Horizontal convergence of diatopic low varieties is
a secondary result in the long run.
3.1. Divergence beneath the same rooing language
3.1.1. Divergence in the German language space
Divergence beneath the roof of the German standard language will be described with
reference to the situation at the former inner-German state border between Thuringia
(German Democratic Republic, GDR) and Bavaria (Federal Republic of Germany,

FRG). Following World War II, this border completely separated a formerly homoge-
neous dialect space for four decades (Petzold 1993; Harnisch, Reinhold and Schnabel
2008). The resulting divergence shows, for example, that when one compares the former
syllable-initial r-articulation with the current one (Reinhold 1997; Schnabel 2006: 41,
following Harnisch 2004a in methods). The traditional spatial distribution of this feature
is as follows. In East Franconian apical [r] was spoken, in Thuringian uvular [r]. Four
decades of state and language separation had the effect of aligning the borderline be-
tween the two r-articulations with the political border: regions in the GDR in which
apical [r] had been spoken adapted themselves to the Middle German hinterland with
its uvular [r] articulation, and regions in the FRG in which uvular [r] had been spoken
adapted themselves to the Upper German hinterland with its apical [r] realization. Thus
divergence resulted from forces of adaptation on both sides of the border, which were
opposite in effect but similar in manner (cf. Maps 16.1a and 16.1b).
The horizontal divergence of the former homogeneous base dialect at the border is
conditioned by processes of horizontal convergence between the diverging dialect zones
Map 16.1a: r-boundary in 1935
Map 16.1b: r-boundary in 1994 (young generation)

16. Divergence 279
and their hinterlands. On the FRG side, speakers took over the [r]-sound of their East-
Franconian hinterland; on the GDR side, the [r]-sound of the Thuringian hinterland. It
cannot be ruled out that the process was supported by the r-variants of regional varieties:
in East Germany by the uvular [r] spoken in the East Middle German vernacular and
favored by the German orthoepic standard norm, in West Germany by the apical [r]
used in the East-Franconian language space as well as in other Upper German vernacu-
lars. Even in the South German standard variety, including the Austrian and Swiss Ger-
man language space, it is at least socially unmarked (cf. Part IV of Ammon et al. 2004,
in particular Harnisch 2004b). The German standard pronunciation norm, however, fa-
vors the northern and western uvular, more prestigious [r]-variant. In this regard, the
new [r]-articulation that was introduced into the dialects on GDR soil close to the Fran-
conian border after World War II at the expense of the older [r]-articulation vertically
converges with the Standard German target norm, too. The new [r]-articulation, how-
ever, that entered FRG soil after World War II and replaced the old [r]-articulation,
does not correspond with the Standard German norm, but implies vertical divergence
from the standard.
This horizontal divergence of linguistic features at a political border is usually accom-
panied by a change in linguistic attitudes. For the inhabitants of the GDR, the articula-
tion of the apical [r] was generally associated with “Bavarian” (Bayerisch), here under-
stood as the name of the political territory. (The dialect space in the FRG next to the
border, which is part of the state of Bavaria, belongs to the East-Franconian area.) In
other words, when “Bavarian” was used as an ethnolectal term, its meaning was “a
variety spoken by people from the Federal State of Bavaria that differs from our own
variety”. After the alignment of the dialectological border between the different r-articu-
lations with the political border between East and West Germany (or nowadays between
Thuringia and Bavaria), the expression Bavarian in the sense of the political term Baye-
risch based on the feature of the apical [r] is even more justified.
The example demonstrates that speakers can be aware of the form of their own lan-
guage and that of the language of others and can evaluate them in an ethnolinguistic
manner: from over here vs. from over there (von hüben vs. von drüben), in the political
sense of from the East vs. from the West; in the geographical sense as northern vs. south-
ern; or as closer to vs. further away from the written standard language in the sociolin-
guistic sense. Thus, the change from the [r] of the elder generations to the [r] of the
younger generations on the Bavarian side can be interpreted as a turning away from a
shibboleth sound associated with coming from over there (the GDR) and as the simulta-
neous turning to a South German vernacular, which is more prestigious in the eyes of
the younger generations. It therefore seems to be rather improbable that this re-orienta-
tion took place unconsciously, i. e., as a consequence of turning to what now is heard
more often and turning away from what now is heard less frequently. At any rate, the
[r]-variant preferred in the standard language was not taken as a model.
The same political border was the scene of a process of horizontal divergence of a
different kind. It was driven not by horizontal convergences with differing hinterlands
at a base dialectal level, but by vertical convergences of the base dialect towards higher
varieties whose strength differed on each side of the border. Before the division of Ger-
many, speakers from that area used words like [veis] ‘meadow’ and [geisn] ‘to water’,
[neibe] ‘over there’ and [kei] ‘cows’, [stoup] ‘room’ and [fous] ‘foot’, i. e., a mid-rising
diphthong. In the course of 40 years of political separation, however, a horizontal diver-
gence emerged as the consequence of the fact that the diphthong remained stable on the
FRG side whereas the younger generation on the GDR side gave up this feature and
replaced the diphthong with a long monophthong, as found in the East Middle German
vernacular and Standard German (Schnabel 2006): [vi:s, gi:sn, ni:be], etc. Traditional
(socio-) dialectology would have accredited this process to differing amounts of dialect
leveling. On the one hand, it can be assumed that the rising diphthong is a “primary
dialect feature” in the sense of Schirmunski (1930), which became stigmatized and was
consciously abandoned for this reason (upward vertical convergence). On the other hand,
one could claim that the decline of the dialects on the GDR side was due to the influence
of the Thuringian hinterland whose dialects also have long monophthongs and that
therefore the loss of the diphthongs is supported or even caused by horizontal con-
vergence, as in the case of [r]. However, in the FRG no convergence took place, neither
vertically towards “higher” varieties nor horizontally towards neighboring East-Franco-
nian dialects, which also lack the rising diphthongs and have long monophthongs, as in
the standard language, instead.
Another process of divergence had the opposite effect: in Sparnberg in the GDR, the
old centralization of all vowels and the [A]-articulation of unstressed final -er in words
like Eier ‘eggs’, Fuder ‘cartload’ etc. were preserved, whereas Rudolphstein in the FRG
adapted to the linguistic hinterland, which has standard, non-centralized vowels and [B]
for final -er. In the pre-unification FRG, both Middle German features carried the
stigma of “sounding GDR”. Schnabel (2006: 41) analyzed the data of the five oldest and
the five youngest interviewees and found the distribution shown in Table 16.1 (every
“⫹” or “⫺” represents one person). The language change on the FRG side is therefore
complete.
Tab. 16.1: Articulation of unstressed final -er

The five oldest interviewees The five youngest interviewees
Former GDR Sparnberg ⫹⫹⫹⫹⫹ ⫹⫹⫹⫹⫹
Former FRG Rudolphstein ⫹⫹⫹⫹⫹ ⫺⫺⫺⫺⫺
Divergences also took place in the urban variety systems of the politically divided
city of Berlin (Schlobinski 1997). These are linked to the social prestige of the Berlin
vernacular. During the post-war decades the interactional style associated with this Ber-
lin vernacular, the Berliner Schnauze (Berlin bluntness), became stigmatized in the middle
and upper classes of West Berlin, whereas it persisted as a variety of broad social accept-
ance in East Berlin. In the western part of the city this devaluation of the vernacular led
to the emergence of a prestigious urban standard language and therefore to vertical
divergence. With regard to their present-day systems of urban varieties, West and East
Berlin diverged horizontally as well (cf. Figure 16.1).
Horizontal divergence on the level of vernaculars, sometimes also on the level of
standard languages (in the sense of regional or national standard varieties), can be ob-
served on both sides of the German⫺Austrian border (Scheuringer 1990: 372). In this
area, on the Lower Bavarian and the Upper Austrian side of the river Inn, different
vernaculars have emerged, the one being based on the model of the Vienna urban variety,
16. Divergence 281
West Berlin L East Berlin

H-variety higher urban variety
C Berlin jargon
L-variety Berlin jargon
L horizontal divergence C vertical divergence
Fig. 16.1: Divergences in the Berlin vernacular
the other on the model of the Munich urban variety. Influenced by the Viennese urban
variety, the vernacular speakers on the Austrian side tend to articulate au and ei as
monophthongs ([hc:s] ‘house’, [ve:s] ‘white’) whereas the speakers on the Bavarian side
preserve the articulation of these segments as diphthongs ([haws], [va=s]). A particularly
salient feature of this horizontal divergence at the state border is the reading pronuncia-
tion of the a-vowel as [a] on the Austrian side and as [c] on the Bavarian side.
Another kind of horizontal divergence between the Austrian and the Bavarian lan-
guage space is caused by different ranges which linguistic features can occupy on the
standard/dialect scale. For instance, in Austria, Kren ‘horseradish’ occupies all levels on
this scale, including the national standard variety, whereas in Bavaria (in the Bavarian
and the East-Franconian dialect space) this lexeme is replaced by Meerrettich in stan-
dard-near ways of speaking (Meerrettich is the standard word in the Federal German
language space).
Considering the long-standing political inclusion of the now Austrian Inn district
(Innviertel) in Bavaria (until 1779), it is very likely that the common Bavarian variety
used as a lingua franca before that time was closer to the regiolect spoken on the Bavar-
ian side today than to the one now spoken on the Austrian side. With the new political
inclusion, the distance between the Inn district base dialect and the Austrian common
variety based on the Viennese urban variety was much wider than that between the base
dialect and common Bavarian based on the Munich urban variety. To this day it remains
true that when speakers of the Austrian Inn district switch from their base dialect to
common Austrian, more ⫺ and more salient ⫺ linguistic features are involved than when
speakers of the Lower Bavarian Inn area switch from their base dialect to Munich-based
common Bavarian. It is thus not the “natural border” of the river Inn that caused a
linguistic divergence, but rather the fact that this river was declared a political border.
Divergence is also taking place at the border between Austria and Italy, between
North and South Tyrol. In the old undivided Tyrol, dialectal borders ran between East
and West, but none separated North and South (Mall and Plagg 1990). After the annexa-
tion of South Tyrol by Italy after World War I, however, a particular sociolinguistic
space emerged due to the fact that urban vernaculars could not develop in South Tyrol.
One reason for this was that the German-speaking population was rather immobile.
Another reason was that the South Tyrolean dialects were so similar that they were
mutually comprehensible and did not cause the speakers to switch to a super-local vari-
ety. Furthermore the South Tyroleans quickly shifted to Italian in public domains. With
regard to the language system itself, the South Tyrolean varieties inevitably diverge from
the North Tyrolean ones by integrating large amounts of lexical material into the stan-
dard as well as into the dialect. This is due to the fact that in germanophone South Tyrol
the heterogenetic Italian language constitutes a second roof on top of the homogenetic
German language.
A vertical divergence between base dialect and standard variety can also increase
when speakers in a “pluricentrically” organized language space (cf. Ammon 1995 with
regard to germanophone states, Ammon 2005 and Clyne 1991, 2004 in general) switch
to another standard variety further away from the dialects than the old one. An example
is provided by the German-speaking South Tyroleans who are said to adapt their stan-
dard to that of Germany (instead of the Austrian standard traditionally used) because
of the many German tourists coming into the region.
Another example of horizontal divergence at a political border is the Swiss-German
state border in the Upper Rhine area (Schifferle 1990: 318). The difference between the
German and the Swiss language space is already hinted at in the terms for the respective
dialectal varieties. On the Swiss side the dialects are called Schwyzerdütsch ‘Swiss Ger-
man’, a political reference; on the German side they are called Alemannic, without any
reference to a political space. On the Swiss side there is strict medial diglossia charac-
terized by the use of dialect(s) in any oral, even public and official, domain and the use
of the standard language in written domains only. On the German side, the use of stan-
dard and dialect is controlled by situational and social factors. The dialect is not spoken
in public situations, but remains restricted to more private spheres. The dialects on both
sides of the border are structurally similar and mutually comprehensible without prob-
lems. But they are not used by the Germans (from Baden) in conversation with their
Swiss neighbors, nor vice versa, because the diglossic Swiss situation is not compatible
with the diaglossic German situation (cf. Bellmann 1998 for the concept of diaglossia).
In addition to this divergence in variety use, in recent times divergences concerning
the dialectal features themselves have come into being. On the German side the spiranti-
zation or affrication of Germanic k is retreating word by word in a conscious process.
Apical [r] is retreating, too, in favor of the uvular [r] that is preferred by the standard
language norm in Germany. This feature is very salient and has far-reaching conse-
quences for the perception of the language spaces. Linguistic innovations advancing
from north to south in Germany stop at the political border nowadays. For instance,
the new preterite form of ‘to be’ (war ‘was’) is replacing the old forms with the perfect
Tab. 16.2: Diglossia and diaglossia in the contact zone of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria
written spoken
The Swiss and Liechtenstein Rhine valley:
H standard German
M dialect
—
L
Vorarlberg (Austria):
H standard German
M vernacular(s)
—
L dialect
16. Divergence 283
participle gsii (< gesı̂n ‘been’) in Germany but does not cross the border into Switzer-
land.
The contrast between medial diglossia on the one hand and diaglossia with vernacular
intermediate levels on the other also holds for a linguistic region in which three countries
meet: Switzerland (Rhine valley of the St. Gallen canton), Liechtenstein and Austria
(Vorarlberg). In Liechtenstein there is medial diglossia as in Switzerland, whereas Vor-
arlberg goes along with the Austrian diaglossia (Banzer 1990). In a cross-classification
of diastratic levels (H ⫽ high, M ⫽ middle, L ⫽ low) and medial representations (written
versus spoken), two models oppose each other at the border (see Table 16.2).
As far as the repertoire and the social regulation of variety use are concerned, the
Vorarlberg speakers of Austria behave like the Baden speakers of Germany, i. e., they
differ from the Swiss model.
3.1.2. Divergence in the Dutch language space
Structural divergence on the level of regional standard varieties (cf. section 3.5.) as well
as on the dialectal level can also be observed along the border between the Netherlands
and Belgium (Taeldeman 1990). For instance,
⫺ the Dutch dialects in the Netherlands gave up syntactic patterns that they originally
had in common with the Flemish dialects at their western outskirts (durven ‘to dare’
⫹ infinitive) in favor of standard Dutch patterns (durven ⫹ te ‘to’ ⫹ infinitive);
⫺ word geographic areas on both sides expanded towards the political border (e.g.,
Netherlands Dutch spijker ‘nail’ vs. Flemish nagel);
⫺ the Flemish variety, in contrast to the Dutch variety in the Netherlands, has inte-
grated French loan words on a huge scale and, when word stress was variable (motóor
vs. mótor), it has generalized the French word-final stress (Flemish motóor/motéur vs.
Netherlands Dutch mótor);
⫺ conversely on the Flemish side, anti-French purism replaced loan words from French
with Germanic words (general Dutch punaise ‘thumb tack’ > Flemish duimspijker);
⫺ speakers of Netherlands Dutch prefer to construct new terms out of Dutch elements
(koppeling ‘clutch’) and resort to loan words from English (rubber), whereas on the
Belgian side the French terms are used (embrayage, caoutchouc).
With regard to the socio-dialectal situation, there is divergence at the political border,
too. The dialect is used more on the Belgian side than in the Netherlands, and the
standard on the Belgian side shows interference from the dialect, above all in the Bra-
bant, whereas the standard language in the Netherlands does not. Finally, different atti-
tudes on both sides of the border bring about divergence. The Dutch are indifferent
towards their Flemish fellow speakers at best or they look down on them and their
language. The Flemish view the Dutch and their “smart” articulation with reserve or
even disapproval.
Dutch is also telling when we consider what influence the age of a border has. For
instance, Map 16.2 on the vowels in the Dutch word drie ‘three’ shows that the phono-
logical and political boundaries run parallel along the older border between the Nether-
Map 16.2: Boundaries of vocalism in West Germanic ‘three’ (based on Taeldeman 1990: 282)
lands and Belgium (Old Flanders and Old Brabant, see left and middle third of the map),
whereas phonological boundaries disregard the political ones where the border is more
than 250 years younger (Limburg, see rightmost third of the map).
3.2. Divergence beneath homogenetic but dierent rooing languages
3.2.1. The contact zone o Germany and the Netherlands
Divergence beneath the roof of different but homogenetic languages can be observed at
the Dutch⫺German border inter alia. Again structural features as well as socio-prag-
matic factors are involved. Since World War II with its negative consequences on (lan-
guage) contact across the border, the former dialect continuum has broken down. The
example of the Dollart and Vechte region shows how a former diglossic situation on
both sides of the border is transformed into a quasi-monoglossic situation in which
mostly (regional) standard German or Dutch is spoken (Niebaum 1990). The German
and the Dutch standard languages are of course very different (though homogenetic),
and the political border has therefore turned into a linguistic boundary ⫺ not only
between two standard languages but also between the substandard varieties that have
assimilated more (Germany) or less (Netherlands, cf. Giesbers 2008) to the respective
standard languages. In this respect, a further divergence can be observed. The dialects
on the Dutch side are much more tolerant of transferences from the standard because
dialect and standard are similar in vocabulary and grammatical structure. This does not
apply to the German side because the Low German variety and the High German stan-
dard language differ greatly in these respects. For instance, in the Netherlands, the old
cross-border serialization of perfect participle ⫹ finite verb in the verb phrase of subordi-
nated clauses, as in dat [de Eerappels] aanbrannt binn’n lit.: ‘that [the potatoes] burnt
16. Divergence 285
are’ is transformed into the standard language serialization of finite verb ⫹ perfect parti-
ciple (dat [de Eerappels] binn’n aanbrannt ‘that [the potatoes] are burnt’).
Investigating the section of the German-Dutch border that follows in the south,
Kremer (1990) adds further observations concerning the question of how a language
continuum can break up at a state border. On the basis of examples of vocabulary,
phonology and morphology, he proves that the spread of innovations caused by transfer-
ences from the standard language into the dialects has stopped at the border in recent
times. Processes of interchange and balance that are essential for continua cease to apply.
For instance, the distributionally conditioned reflexes of West-Germanic sk adapt to the
respective standard languages on both sides of the state border. The standard Dutch
diminutive ending -tje advances from the west towards the state border and replaces the
diminutive ending -ken which was the former cross-border variant. The same holds for
the standard Dutch future tense with gaan-auxiliary, which replaces the old base dialect
future tense with the auxiliary zullen or the use of the present tense to denote events in
the future. On the eastern side, the serialization type dat heff he nich betalen wollen lit.:
‘that has he not (to) pay wanted’, i. e., ‘he did not want to pay that’ in verb phrases
formed by negation ⫹ infinitive ⫹ infinitive-like participle which is influenced by Stan-
dard German replaces the old pattern negation ⫹ infinitive-like participle ⫹ infinitive
(i. e., dat heff he nich wollen betalen), which the Low German dialects had shared with
dialects on the Dutch side. The state border is perceived as a strong dialect border in
the subjective view of the speakers on both sides. When asked in which villages the
(approximately) same dialect was spoken, informants positioned almost all villages on
their side of the border in their answers.
3.2.2. The contact zone o Germany and Denmark
At the German⫺Danish border, divergence can be observed with regard to several vari-
eties (Dyhr 1990). North of the state border, the South Jutland variety assimilates to the
standard Danish language; south of the border it shows interferences from German
varieties. The Standard Danish language in its South Slesvig variant (in Germany) devi-
ates from Denmark Standard Danish on all structural levels. Interferences from Stan-
dard German and North German substandard varieties are responsible for this.
3.3. Divergence beneath heterogenetic rooing languages
3.3.1. The contact zone o France and Germany
The language space along the Upper Rhine, with the Alsatian area roofed by French
and the Baden area roofed by German, may serve as an example of divergences of
linguistic features and of language use beneath heterogenetic roofing languages (Klaus-
mann 1990: 2000). On the Baden, but not on the Alsatian side, for instance, linguistic
features from higher varieties leak into lower ones and influence the dialects, while on
the Alsatian, but not on the Baden side, the dialect borrows French words. These lexical
innovations from French stop at the river Rhine today, whereas in the past Alsace-
German (elsasserdütsche) lexemes could sometimes cross the Rhine because of the lin-
guistic influence of the big Alsatian cities Strasbourg and Colmar. Due to the inclusion
of germanophone Alsace in France, Alsatian became a “roofless outer dialect” (dachlose
Außenmundart in Kloss’s [1978] terms), and no German regiolect (and therefore no dia-
glossia) could emerge on the French side of the Rhine as it did on the German side (see
Table 16.3).
Tab. 16.3: Types of variety stratification in the contact zone of Germany and France
Alsace Baden
Level of roofing languages Standard French Standard German
Level(s) of vernaculars ⫺ regiolectal German
Level of base dialects Alsatian (Alemannic) dialectal German (Alemannic)
Horizontal divergence is caused by the fact that there is a continuum of forms be-
tween the standard variety and dialect on the Baden side, whereas on the Alsatian side
the speakers who want to switch from the dialect into a higher level are compelled to
use French (see Harnisch [1996: 419⫺422] on the two-language type of diglossia). The
origin of the Alsatian situation after the Thirty Years’ War is another example of how a
so-called natural border was turned into a political one and finally developed into a
linguistic boundary along which structural, sociolinguistic and pragmatic features
increasingly diverge.
3.3.2. The contact zone o France and Belgium
The divergence of originally similar dialects at the border of two states with different
roofing languages can be a preliminary stage of divergence of a language as a whole at
this border. With regard to Flemish, this can be observed at the Belgian⫺French border.
Innovations in phonology, grammar or vocabulary start in the eastern (Belgian West
Flanders) as well as western (French Flanders) part of the language space, but these
usually stop at the state border nowadays. The eastern innovations (e.g., vis, mens replac-
ing visch, mensch ‘fish’, ‘human being’; brandde/ebrand replacing bron/ebronnen ‘burnt.
pret/p.p.’) turn the French part of the Flanders area into a relic zone, whereas the west-
ern innovations that also come to a standstill at the border (e.g., the weak preterite
ending in -ste; increasing number of borrowings from the French which are not used in
Belgian West Flanders) cause the same area to appear to be a divergent progress zone
(cf. Ryckeboer 1990: 2000).
3.4. Divergence in contact zones with dierent types o linguistic roos
3.4.1. The contact zone o Germany, Luxembourg, and France
In the so-called SaarLorLux region, three areas (belonging to different states) that share
the Moselle-Franconian base dialect border on one another: East Lorraine (originally
German speaking and roofed by the French language), Saarland (roofed by German)
16. Divergence 287
and Luxembourg (with its threefold roof of German, French and Luxembourgesch [Let-
zebuërgesh]) (cf. Hoffmann 1990). Due to these quite different types of roofing, the dia-
lects are increasingly drifting apart in the respective areas. Heterogenetic French as the
only roof in East Lorraine exerts the strongest effects and causes the most far-reaching
retreat of dialect use. In Saarland, the dialect does not retreat in the same way, as Ger-
man is the roofing language, but the dialect is less stable than in Luxembourg where it
became an ausbau language and thereby a third roof (Kloss 1967; as far as Luxembourg
is concerned, cf. Kloss 1978, ch. 2.1.2). The different types of local roofing between
Saarland and Eastern Lorraine have become so strong that the state border will eventu-
ally become the Germanic⫺Romanic language boundary (see Table 16.4).
Tab. 16.4: Emerging differences of dialect use in the Saar-Lor-Lux region

East Lorraine Saarland Luxembourg
French as heterogenetic German as homogenetic Roofing languages: French (hetero-
roofing language roofing language genetic), German, Letzebuërgish
(homogenetic)
Sociopragmatic divergence of dialect use

strong retreat of dialect moderate retreat of relative stability of dialect
dialect
Structural divergence by transference from …

… French … Standard German … French
Result: state border as
language boundary
In Luxembourg one can see how recent efforts of language planning have produced
vertical divergence. The Letzebuërgesch standard language was created out of and in-
stalled above the West Moselle-Franconian dialects by koinéization, following the con-
cept of “willful and deliberate trilingualism” (Kramer 1986; Fröhlich 1996). Now this
Letzebuërgesch standard language diverges vertically from the dialects that were its base
(see Figure 16.2).
This vertical, Luxembourg-internal, divergence results in horizontal German⫺Lux-
embourgish divergence. The regional varieties above the local dialects differ in status
German as supranational and national language

Luxembourg- Letzebuërgesch elaborated to become a
internal national roofing language German regiolect(s)
processes of
A Luxembourg-wide koiné
vertical
divergence Alzette Sauer Moselle Oesling … … …
dialect dialect dialect dialect
West Moselle-Franconian dialects …
Fig. 16.2: Vertical Luxembourg-internal and horizontal German⫺Luxembourgish divergence

since Letzebuërgesch resulted from language-planning processes, whereas the German

regiolects emerged without such planning and have no official status. In addition, a
diglossic relationship between the Letzebuërgish ausbau language and the Luxembour-
gian base dialects has developed, whereas on the German side the West Moselle-Franco-
nian regiolect (Umgangssprache) covers the intermediate space between standard and
local base dialects on a diaglossic scale.
3.4.2. The contact zone o Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium
Another case in point is the contact zone between Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and
the Netherlands. Using lexical criteria, Cajot (1990) statistically proved a certain degree
of divergence at the respective borders, both between states like Germany and Belgium
and between administrative regions within a state, like the originally germanophone so-
called “Old” and “New Belgium” (cf. Hinderdael and Nelde 1996). The continua on the
dialect level are increasingly interrupted by horizontal convergences of dialects on all
sides of the political border, above all, however, by the dialects converging vertically
with the standard (or roofing) languages of the respective states.
The Limburg dialect area is mainly stable on both sides of the Belgian⫺Dutch state
border, because Belgian Flanders and the Netherlands are roofed by more or less the
same language (Gerritsen 1999). In contrast, there are tendencies to dialectal divergence
at the Dutch⫺German border. They result from a unilateral loss of dialects (Dialektab-
bau) on the German side.
3.5. Diverging processes within one rooing language
On the level of standard languages, horizontal divergence can often be observed when
states with a formerly homogeneous standard language fall apart. A linguistic disintegra-
tion of the standard which orients itself towards the recently emerged state borders is
the result. In the beginning, this disintegration proves to be attitudinal only. Salient
linguistic differences are still absent. Examples for this early phase are the attempts
within early GDR language policy to establish two German state or even national vari-
eties (cf. Ammon [1995, ch. 8] on the difference between the two) and to claim diverging
sociolectal diastrata in the GDR and in the FRG (Lerchner 1974: 264). However, beyond
the institutional, political and ideological nomenclature of the East German state
(Staatsrat ‘council of state’, Arbeiterklasse ‘working class[es]’, Kollektiv ‘team’), not even
an everyday vocabulary typical of the GDR developed (cf. Fleischer 1987), to say noth-
ing of a GDR-typical grammar. At most, words such as Broiler ‘roast chicken’ vs.
(Brat-)Hähnchen (Eichhoff 1977⫺2000, vol. 4, map 36), die Plaste, less frequent der
Plast ‘plastic’ vs. Plastik (Eichhoff 1977⫺2000, vol. 2, map 77) and Zielstellung ‘target,
objective’ vs. Zielsetzung (Ammon 1995: 390) could be given as examples. Only a few
old regional expressions such as Eierkuchen ‘pancake’ vs. Pfannkuchen formed a word-
geographical area that became congruent with the political territory of the GDR. Words
from the language of administration such as Fahrerlaubnis ‘driver’s licence’ (GDR) vs.
Führerschein (FRG, Austria) vs. Fahr-/Führerausweis (German-speaking Switzerland) vs.
Patent (South Tyrol) clearly demonstrate that areas of governmental and administrative
16. Divergence 289
terminology are congruent with the respective governmental and administrative territo-
ries and thus likely to linguistically diverge from each other (Eichhoff 1977⫺2000, vol.
3, map 48).
Another example of divergence on the standard language level is provided by efforts
in the Slovak language policy to stress the relatively minor differences between Slovak
and Czech. They already existed at the time of the Czechoslovakian confederation but
were reinforced after Slovakia gained autonomy in 1993. Czech influences were elimi-
nated in order to purify the language as a symbol of national sovereignty and identity
(Lubaś 2006: 1824).
After the disintegration of the Yugoslavian state, efforts were made to split up the
Serbo-Croatian language ⫺ itself only the product of convergence over a relatively long
period ⫺ into separate Serbian and Croatian standard languages again and possibly to
expand these endeavors to the creation of additional standard languages such as Bosnian
or Montenegrin (Greenberg 2000; Woolhiser 2005: 244): first by renaming the separate
languages, but later by language planning, too. In post-war Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian
was not an official state language but a lingua franca consisting of variants of equal
status. In the sovereign states that came into being after the disintegration of the Yugo-
slavian confederation the status of Serbo-Croatian changed. It was divided into two (and
more) official state languages, and this separation was connected to the search for diver-
gent linguistic features themselves. In order to increase the differences, features of the
other variety were sorted out and the variety’s own archaic and dialectal words were
revitalized (Kunzmann-Müller 2000; Neweklowsky 2006: 1827⫺1827, 1834). This
amounts to a de facto dissimilation from below.
Differences between the national standard varieties of German in Germany and
Austria (as well as German-speaking Switzerland), are not limited to the terminology of
political and other state institutions but reach the level of ordinary vocabulary. For
example, the area in which the word Tischler is used for ‘carpenter’ is congruent with
the state territory of Austria (including South Tyrol). It is sharply limited against South
German Schreiner. In Alemannic-speaking Western Austria the variants Tischler and
Schreiner co-exist, making for a transition towards Swiss German Schriener ⫽ Schreiner
(Eichhoff 1977⫺2000, vol. 1, map 20). Food vocabulary (e.g., Austrian Karfiol vs. Fed-
eral German Blumenkohl ‘cauliflower’) also shows many divergences at the level of na-
tional varieties and has a high symbolic value for Austrian identity (Muhr, Schrodt and
Wiesinger 1995; Muhr and Schrodt 1997). Attempts of language patriots to establish
grammatical features as symbols of a national variety have failed, however (e.g.,
Austrian ich pendel-Ø ‘I commute’ instead of standard German ich pendl-e) (Ammon
1995: 387).
4. Parameters o linguistic divergence

Based on the empirical analysis of concrete instances of divergence, generalizations can
be made about divergence. The relevant parameters, binary or ternary for the most part,
are italicized in the following.
Horizontal divergence takes place on all diastratic levels: on the base dialectal level
on the one hand, on the standard language level on the other. It also occurs between
these extremes, in the regiolectal sector.
The processes of horizontal (i. e., diatopic, geographic) and of vertical (i. e., diastratic,
social) divergence of linguistic varieties are mostly intertwined with processes of horizon-
tal and vertical convergence. Thus, divergence and convergence cannot be strictly sepa-
rated from one another, and the same holds for the horizontal and vertical orientation of
these processes. This intertwining is clearly flagged in the title of the paper “Converging
divergence and diverging convergence” by Trumper and Maddalon (1988). Horizontal
divergence may emerge because a formerly uniform variety splits into parts that either
converge horizontally with differing neighboring varieties or converge vertically with a
higher variety to differing degrees. Horizontal convergence that causes divergence in a
part of a formerly uniform dialect area can be, and often is, accompanied by vertical
convergence, i. e., by advergence to the standard language. But sometimes horizontal
convergences that cause divergence in a part of a formerly uniform dialect area imply
vertical divergence from the standard language, because substandard features of a cer-
tain prestige are adapted (see below).
Features of divergence can be structural in nature. Here, grammar in the broadest
sense (phonology, morphology, syntax) and/or the lexicon (vocabulary, word formation)
are concerned. They can be pragmatic in nature as well. This concerns the composition
and the structure of the repertoire of varieties and the domains of their use. Finally,
divergence can be attitudinal in nature. This includes the perceptual evaluation of the
varieties by linguistic laypeople. These evaluations appear as mental linguistic maps
when they apply to the spatial distribution of the varieties, and they appear as sociolin-
guistic stereotypes when they apply to the social value of the varieties. These attitudes
influence the use of the varieties and can have effects on their structural shape. For
instance, so called “primary” dialect features of phonology, morphology and syntax
(Schirmunski 1930; Hinskens 1986) may be more or less consciously avoided and replaced
by the speakers, due to the overt or covert prestige of these items. In contrast, there is
also an unconscious change of phonological, morphological and syntactic items which is
not influenced by attitudinal factors.
The more consciously speakers change their language, the more they orient them-
selves to social or socio-geographic linguistic models such as super-regional or standard
varieties or a neighboring dialect of high prestige. Sometimes the speakers also orient
themselves to urban varieties, often over great geographic distances. But a change that
causes divergence, especially an unconscious change, can also be autochthonous, i. e.,
without influences from prestigious neighboring or more distant varieties. In this case,
the reasons are intra-linguistic (structural), not extra-linguistic (social).
In some language spaces, the speakers’ repertoire has only two poles: standard and
(base) dialect (strict diglossia). In other language spaces, the repertoires include interme-
diate levels (regional dialects, regional standards). Structurally, these intermediate levels
are less rigidly organized than base dialects or standard varieties. As a result, they are
suited to form a continuum between the polar ends of the repertoire (diaglossia).
By definition, varieties in a diglossic model diverge to a higher degree than those in
a diaglossic model. They can even become more divergent, for example when processes
of standardization or (re-)dialectalization occur. On the other hand, very often the vari-
eties in a repertoire converge. These processes of vertical convergence can cause horizon-
tal divergence when they differ in strength in the different areas of a language space.
Such differing degrees of vertical convergence, which make a formerly uniform language
space diverge horizontally, cannot develop as easily under strict diglossia as under dia-
glossia.
16. Divergence 291
Diglossia (in the post-Ferguson conception) exists within one and the same language
(a repertoire of homogenetic varieties) as well as in a sociolinguistic situation where more
than one language is involved (a repertoire of heterogenetic varieties). Diaglossia, how-
ever, can only exist within one and the same language. The languages “roofing” the sub-
standard varieties (dialects, vernaculars) play a decisive role in the determination of
types of linguistic divergence. Either the roofing language itself can be affected by diver-
gence, for instance, when a uniform language space splits up, first politically and then
linguistically or the roofed substandard varieties can be affected by divergence. In the
latter case, divergence can either occur beneath the same (homogenetic) standard lan-
guage or beneath a different (heterogenetic) standard language. Different but cognate
roofing (standard) languages, i. e., languages belonging to one and the same language
family such as Dutch and German, take an intermediate position.
Intra-linguistic factors of structural, pragmatic and attitudinal divergence correlate
to a greater or lesser degree with extra-linguistic factors. Extra-linguistic factors of diver-
gence are so-called natural spaces and boundaries as well as political spaces and bound-
aries in the widest sense. In some instances, such political spaces and boundaries are
declared to be natural ones in order to pursue a policy of (linguistic/political) expansion.
Depending on their strength, extra-linguistic boundaries can more or less support or
obstruct trade, contact and communication. The speakers’ knowledge of extra-linguistic
spaces and boundaries, particularly political boundaries, plays an important role in
speakers’ ideas about linguistic spaces and boundaries and in their linguistic behavior,
which may even result in structural divergence.
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17. Emergence o varieties through restructuring

and reevaluation
1. Introduction
2. The emergence of varieties through reevaluation
3. The emergence of standard varieties through restructuring und reevaluation
4. The emergence of dialects through restructuring und reevaluation
5. The emergence of regiolects through restructing and reevaluation
6. The reevaluation and restructuring cycle
7. References
1. Introduction
The history of the cross-linguistically varied dialect/standard constellations we encounter

in contemporary European languages is dynamic on (at least) two different but closely
connected levels. Simply put, these levels can be identified as “objective” versus “sub-
jective”. Whereas linguistic variation and change can be considered objective processes,
attitudinal dynamics play out on a subjective level. Objective and subjective dynamics
can not only give rise to structural and attitudinal changes in existent varieties, they can
also lead to the emergence ⫺ the formation and entrenchment ⫺ of new varieties or
types of varieties. In line with the focus of this handbook, this contribution concentrates
on the emergence of the most important varieties within dialect-standard constellations,
namely on (new) standard varieties, (new) regiolects and (new) dialects.
The analysis of the emergence of varieties presupposes the formulation of a distinc-
tion between the emergence of a new variety and processes of linguistic change within
an existing one. As the boundaries between these types of processes are fluid (cf. Kerswill
and Trudgill 2005), they are not easily distinguishable. From the abundance of hotly
debated concepts of variety within variational linguistics (cf. Berruto 2004 and in this
volume; Lenz and Mattheier 2005) it seems best to select a narrow concept in the quest
for clarification. Here, variety is defined as a subsystem of a language characterized by
internal linguistic cohesion, clear system boundaries (separating it from other varieties),
well-defined pragmatic functions and an emic status (cf. Lenz 2003, 2004b, 2005a).
Building on this definition of variety, dialect can in turn be defined as the “lowest”
(most linguistically divergent from the standard) and the most spatially confined variety
in the dialect⫺standard constellation. Like a variety in general, a dialect is not a homo-
geneous construct, but a variable subsystem with a varying degree of internal substruc-
ture, which can exist alongside other dialects or “beneath” other diatopic varieties with
a greater areal distribution. Divergent attitudinal, functional and structural characteris-
tics of dialects on the one hand, and coexistent “middle” varieties on the other, motivate
a terminological distinction between these two types of varieties, frequently designated
dialect and regiolect in the research literature (cf. also Schmidt, this volume).
Among the European languages, the most disparate dialect⫺standard constellations
can be found, especially with regard to the number of varieties and their linguistic and
sociolinguistic structure. The extreme poles of standard and dialect are the constitutive
elements of these dialect⫺standard variety constellations, whereby the standard-lan-
guage pole is historically younger. According to Auer (2005: 8), a standard variety is a
“variety of a language […], which is characterized by the following three features: (a) it
is orientated to by speakers of more than one vernacular variety (which does not neces-
sarily imply that it is mastered by everybody), (b) is looked upon as an H-variety and
used for writing, and (c) it is subject to at least some codification and elaboration”. In
the prevalent triangle or pyramid model (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1980: 10⫺11), the
status of the (“highest”) high variety, the standard, is symbolized by its placement at the
apex, canopying the other varieties (Überdachung). The horizontal level of this model
stands for the areal/diatopic dimension of language; the vertical level represents the di-
astratic dimension.
The analysis of the overall linguistic and attitudinal dynamics of a complex dialect⫺
standard constellation presupposes a fundamental knowledge of the dynamic structure
of the individual varieties and their complex relations. Research desiderata here espe-
cially concern the vertical axis between dialect and standard and the “intermediate vari-
eties” (regiolects) which have to be positioned on this axis. Language variation research
to date can be seen to have focused mainly on variation and change at the extremes,
whereas the “mittlere Bereich” (‘middle zone’; Bellmann 1983) has increasingly attracted
interest in the past few decades. Extensive research literature can be found concerning
the emergence of standard varieties and the consequences for their dialects. The fact that
less research has been conducted on the emergence of “intermediate/middle varieties”
can surely be attributed to the fact that regiolects often emerge out of a dialect/standard
“diglossia” (Ferguson 1959) and are thus “younger” than the poles. In addition, the
analysis of emerging varieties has generally concentrated on objective/linguistic dy-
namics, with only secondary attention devoted to attitudinal aspects (including processes
of reevaluation).
2. The emergence o varieties through reevaluation

A look into the research literature reveals that in the past the emergence of varieties has
mainly been described on the objective level. The hypothesis that attitudinal processes
also make a central contribution to the emergence of varieties has been hitherto more or
less neglected. Attitudes are commonly conceptualized as beliefs and valuations that ⫺
according to the mentalistic concept of Allport (1954) ⫺ are compounds of cognitive,
evaluative and conative elements (cf. Rosenberg and Hovland 1960; Hewstone, Man-
stead and Stroebe 1997). They are not innate, predefined and invariable constants, but
dynamic and processual features which emerge, further develop and vary in socially
interactive processes from sedimentations of individual and transferred experience (cf.
Deprez and Persoons 1987). Variety reevaluation processes, and the restructuring which
they imply, are subject to the general dynamics of attitudes. This includes all forms of
attitudinal dynamics, especially the ebb and flow of prestige. Linguistic and attitudinal
dynamics form a complex relational network from which new varieties can emerge,
which in turn can initiate and support new linguistic and attitudinal processes. Within
the history of European dialect⫺standard constellations, three primary patterns for the
emergence of varieties through reevaluation can be reconstructed:
Type A: Reevaluation of a vernacular variety as a high variety.

Type B: Reevaluation of a vernacular variety as a low variety.
Type C: Reevaluation of a high variety as a low variety.
The first type of reevaluation process (Type A) is found in the case of a monocentric
selection and implementation of a standard variety which emerges from the growing
prestige of an existing variety, for example. This variety increasingly becomes an orienta-
tion norm for other diatopic varieties among which it originally existed as more or less
an equal. The reevaluation of a vernacular variety as a high variety is sketched in Figure
17.1. This depiction, like Figures 17.2, 17.3 and 17.7, draws on Auer 2005, but here the
aspect of (re)evaluation is emphasized. A more detailed discussion of this reevaluation
type follows in section 3.
Fig. 17.1: Reevaluation of a vernacular variety as a high variety (Type A: Emergence of a standard
variety via monocentric selection)
The concomitant reevaluation of the other vernacular varieties as dialects represents

an example of the second type of reevaluation process (Type B, see Figure 17.2). It is
only through the existence of their standard counterpart that dialects become a relational
and constitutive element of the dialect⫺standard constellation (see section 4).
Similarly, regiolects ⫺ which can be located on the vertical axis as “middle” varieties,
“above” the dialects but “below” an overarching standard variety ⫺ presuppose the
Fig. 17.2: Reevaluation of vernacular varieties as low varieties (Type B: Emergence of dialects, in
the sense of relational diasystems)
existence of both relational poles. In the research literature, the emergence of regiolects
is mostly explained as a complex interplay of vertical and horizontal convergence proc-
esses (cf. Bellmann 1983; Siebenhaar, this volume; Røyneland, this volume). Alongside
convergence processes which effect structural changes on the dialect⫺standard axis, re-
evaluation processes have to be taken into consideration in explaining the emergence of
regiolects. As can be illustrated by the test case of German (see section 5.3), intermediate
varieties may be identified as “old” high varieties, which are devalued as a result of the
“superimposition” of a new high variety and take on a modified position and function
within the variety spectrum (Type C, see Figure 17.3).
Fig. 17.3: Reevaluation of an erstwhile high variety as a low variety (Type C: Emergence of regio-
lects by “superimposition”)
In general, the evaluation and reevaluation of varieties presents a complex and highly
challenging object of research (cf. Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill 2005: 38⫺39). Evidence
for a variety’s changing prestige can be provided by so-called “hyperforms”, which are
(primarily) the result of a speaker’s inadequate approximation of an intended target
variety and which can in certain cases even attain system-internal status (see Herrgen
1986; Pargman 1998). In linguistic terms, hyperforms are “motivated” by a partial con-
trast between varieties, i. e., where no one-to-one correspondence between the varieties
in contact can be formulated. The generation of hyperforms can be explained as false
analogy, namely the overgeneralization of rules of correspondence (“Korrespondenzre-

geln”, Auer 1993: 8⫺9) between these varieties. According to Auer (1990: 274), rules of
correspondence have the cognitive function of connecting the phonemes and morphemes
of one variety with those of another. In the case of hyperdialectalisms, the low variety is
the intended but only partially mastered variety, whereas in hypercorrections, a high
variety is the target variety (cf. Lenz 2004b, 2005a). Since hyperforms are sociolinguis-
tically motivated by the intention to reach/approximate a particular variety, they can tell
us something about the prestige of varieties, about change in prestige and not least
about cognitive processes. For example, not only do hyperforms provide evidence for
an increasing prestige of high varieties (especially standard varieties), they can also be
interpreted as evidence of a speaker’s minimal, emergent competence in the intended
prestige variety (cf. Besch 2000: 188; see also section 5.3).
3. The emergence o standard varieties through restructuring

and reevaluation
Standardization is primarily a sociopolitical phenomenon. Its starting point is compar-
able across the European languages (for the Germanic languages see Deumert and Van-
denbussche 2003; for standardization in general see Haugen 1966: 1987). At the begin-
ning of a standardization process, different autochthonous local and highly regional
varieties, none of which has the status of a norm, coexist. Horizontal processes of level-
ing between these vernacular varieties occur only marginally. During the first phase of
standardization, the selection phase, one variety increasingly assumes the role of a su-
praregional norm. In the case of polycentric selection, this is a new, previously nonexis-
tent and more-or-less constructed lead variety (Leitvarietät). Examples for polycentric
selection, which “seems to be rather more common in language history” (Deumert and
Vandenbussche 2003: 4), include the standard varieties of German and Norwegian (see
Mattheier 2003 and Jahr 2003, respectively). Whereas the selection of the New High
German standard variety had already begun in the fifteenth century, the philologically
supported, planned construction of the Norwegian standard variety only has a relatively
short history which does not predate Norwegian independence from Denmark in 1814.
From the outset, two different paths were chosen in the search for a Norwegian standard,
resulting in two official standard varieties which still coexist (cf. Røyneland 2009; Jahr
2003)
In contrast to polycentric selection, in which a previously nonexistent variety is also
“materially” created, the monocentric selection of a standard variety is primarily an act
of reevaluation, in which a variety is extricated from its old horizontal variety constel-
lations and imposed “above” the other varieties (Type A reevaluation, see Figure 17.1).
An example of monocentric selection is provided by the standardization history of
Danish (see Pedersen 2005; Kristiansen 2003), characterized by the increasing supraregi-
onal prestige and orientation norm status of the dialects of Zealand/Copenhagen. The
onset of the monocentric selection process is marked by a reevaluation in which the
selected prestige variety’s [⫹diatopic] dimension increasingly becomes a background fea-
ture while its [⫹diastratic] and [⫹diaphasic] features gain emphasis (for the dimensions
see Coseriu 1988: 24). The validity of the new lead variety initially expands within the
written domain where it gradually supersedes the former allochthonic high varieties (ex-
oglossic standards). Through the emergence of an endogenous standard variety the pre-
viously monoglossic language community becomes increasingly diglossic (cf. Auer
2005: 12).
In the standardization process, the selection phase is followed by a codification phase
in which the new prestige variety is structurally elaborated via the codification of linguis-
tic and communicative norms. Official institutions support this codification. The gradual
spread and implementation of the codified norm across the diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic
and medial (from oral to written) domains takes place in the implementation phase,
which Deumert and Vandenbussche (2003: 7) call the “Achilles heel” of the standardiza-
tion process. For instance, it took until the second half of the eighteenth century for the
East Middle German written variety of Meissen to diatopically supersede the competing
common German (Gemeine Deutsch) with Upper German flavor (cf. Mattheier 1997,
2003). In Norway, two competing standard varieties are still confronting each other and
the medial spread to the oral domain is only in its initial phase (cf. Røyneland 2009).
Standard varieties are subject to attitudinal dynamics, which produce fluctuations in
prestige. Their “value” ⫺ together with the evaluation of varieties in general ⫺ is not
separable from the evaluations of the speakers prototypically associated with them. For
example, from the point of view of Middle and Upper German speakers, spoken
“proper” Standard German was and is connected with the German of the North Ger-
mans whilst their own, regionally colored Hochdeutsch is contrasted with the Northern
German prototype (cf. Lenz 2003: 313⫺327; König 1997: 250). The belief that oral stan-
dard competence is limited is still widespread in the German language area (cf. Hues-
mann 1998: 105).
Counter-developments to standardization have been observed in a whole range of
standard languages, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. These develop-
ments involve highly disparate linguistic and attitudinal processes often lumped together
under the heading of destandardization (see Auer 1997; Mattheier and Radtke (eds.) 1997;
Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003; Daneš 2006; for Dutch see Willemyns 1997, 2003;
Stroop 1998; for Italian see Scholz 1997; for German see Mattheier 1997, 2003; Spieker-
mann 2005; for Danish see Kristiansen 2003; Pedersen 2005; for English see Nevalainen
2003; for Swedish see Teleman 2003; Sandøy 2002; for Norwegian see Røyneland, in
press; for Polish see Mazur 1997). For example, Daneš (1968/1982) observes a diastratic
narrowing of the Czech standard variety which involves decreasing competence in and
prestige of the standard among the younger generation. Stroop (1992: 162) suggests that
destandardization tendencies are causally connected with dialect loss in the Dutch situa-
tion (see also the discussion about “Poldernederlands” and “Schoon Vlaams”, Stroop
1997; Goossens 2000). Extralingual factors such as better education, greater social mo-
bility and growing norm skepticism are also thought to contribute to destandardization.
4. The emergence o dialects through restructuring and

reevaluation
As mentioned, areal linguistic research has focused primarily on processes at the objec-
tive/linguistic level. “New dialect formation”, narrowly defined, “refers to the emergence
of distinctive, new language varieties following the migration of people speaking mutu-
ally intelligible dialects to what, to all intents and purposes, is linguistically territory”
(Kerswill and Trudgill 2005: 196). In this narrow conception, the emergence of a new
dialect is interpreted as the result of an extreme, often very rapid process of convergence.
The foremost scenarios for the emergence of a dialect are new territorial settlements, the
founding of towns or language and dialect islands (see Kerswill and Williams 2000;
Trudgill 2006).
The emergence of a new dialect can be divided into partially overlapping subprocesses
(cf. Kerswill and Trudgill 2005; cf. also Trudgill 1986, 1998; Trudgill et al. 2000). At the
beginning one finds a coexistence of variants (“mixing”), which can still be attributed to
dialect varieties in contact. Certain variants are then selected and incorporated in the
emerging dialect variety (on leveling and koineization see also Hinskens 1996; Gilles
1999). The factors which support the selection of a particular variant (or set of variants)
can vary. Sometimes subjective/attitudinal considerations are involved, of which the
factor “salience” has received special attention within the research literature in recent
decades (cf. Auer, Barden and Großkopf 1996; Auer 2001; Kerswill and Williams 2000;
Lenz 2003: 21⫺21, 194⫺203; Auer, Hinskens and Trudgill 2005: 43⫺45). It is not un-
common for “old” variants to survive in the new dialect variety after receiving an attitud-
inal boost (see reallocation, Trudgill 1986: 110). Aside from attitudinal aspects, linguistic
factors must of course also be considered as forces in the leveling process. Among these,
Kerswill and Trudgill emphasize the factor of “simplification” which “means a decrease
in irregularity in morphology and an increase in invariable word forms, as well as the
loss of categories such as gender, the loss of case marking, simplified morphophonemics
(paradigmatic leveling), and a decrease in the number of phonemes” (Kerswill and Trud-
gill 2005: 198). Alongside “old” variants which can be attributed to the original source
dialects, a “new” dialect (in the sense defined above) also features new variants not
found in any of the sources. The final subprocess of “new dialect formation” is that of
“focusing”, which contributes to the sociolinguistic stabilization of the newly emerged
dialect (cf. Le Page 1980). This stabilization is manifest in the furnishing of the new
variety with (at least subsistent) norms, additional emotional value (e.g., “covert pres-
tige”, Trudgill 1983: 177) and explicit communicative and sociopragmatic functions.
A definition of dialect as the “deepest” pole of the dialect⫺standard spectrum presup-
poses the existence of such a spectrum. In terms of the emergence of dialects (understood
as relational diasystems), this means that this type of diasystem can only occur when a
dialect⫺standard axis exists. The emergence and generalization of standard varieties (see
section 3) has attitudinal, not just linguistic consequences for the entire constellation
which they crown. These consequences are not confined to current destandardization
tendencies, but are also evident at the outset of the standardization process, when the
selection phase begins. The emergence of standard varieties is accompanied by massive
reevaluation and reorganization processes in the previously nonsubordinate diatopic
varieties. Herrgen (2001: 1515) sketches the effects which the emergence of standard
varieties have on the reevaluation and the initial vertical grading of dialects as diasystems
(see Figure 17.2) for the German language area:
With the step-by-step establishment of a supraregional compromise variety (New High Ger-
man Standard), but especially through the formation of this variety’s own pronunciation
norm, the dialects first gained the counterpole which allowed them to command awareness
as systematically distinct and areally restricted. The New High German standardization proc-
ess was not simply the historical precondition for the perception of the dialects as German
areal varieties, it was simultaneously the trigger for the displacement of the spectrum of the
dialectal domain.
5. The emergence o regiolects through structuring and

reevaluation
5.1. Terminological aspects
Not only did the emergence of standard varieties have far-reaching consequences for the
erstwhile vernacular varieties (lantsprachen), it was (and is) the precondition for the
formation of regiolects, the latter being standard-divergent varieties with broader re-
gional distribution that can be located between dialects and standard varieties. Just as
the perception of dialects as systemically different and regionally limited varieties presup-
poses the emergence of a standard counterpart, regiolects too are first perceptible as
“intermediate” varieties in the presence of standard varieties. Whereas the terms dialect
and standard have reached some degree of international validity, regiolects are subject
to varied terminologies, even within the same philological tradition, e.g., (regionale)
Umgangssprache (Dittmar 2004), regiolect/Regiolekt (Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill 2005;
Lenz 2005a), Alltagssprache (Elspaß 2007), Neuer Substandard (Bellmann 1983), regional
varieties (Hughes, Trudgill and Watt 2005), intermediate variety (Coetsem 1992), urban
vernacular (Milroy 1982), italiano regionale (Berutto, in this volume). This terminological
effusion can be interpreted as a reflection of the often discussed difficulty in separating
intermediate varieties from dialects or the standard variety (on this discussion, see Gilles
1997: 164). The knotty question of where standard varieties or dialects end and where
middle varieties start is often avoided through the adoption of a continuum model:
“[m]ore usually, the space between base dialect and standard is characterized by non-
discrete structures (standard/dialect continuum)” (Auer 2005: 22, see also Figure 17.5).
But, as a rule, the continuum posited by linguists stands in stark contrast to speakers’
very clear ideas about a structured variety spectrum (cf. Mattheier 1990a: 8). Current
results from the German language area, based on linguistic and sociolinguistic data,
provide evidence for the thesis that there is no necessary contradiction between a contin-
uum and a variety model (cf. Lenz 2003). For example, in large parts of the West Middle
Fig. 17.4: Variety structure of the West Middle German nonstandard (cf. Lenz 2004b, 2006: 2008)
German area, we find evidence for a continuum from the local base dialects up to the
Regionalakzent ‘regional standard’, which can however be divided into two varieties,
dialect versus regiolect (see Figure 17.4).
Neither variety is a homogeneous entity; both feature internal variability. With the
aid of various linguistic variationist methods (e.g., cluster analysis, implicational scaling,
hearer evaluations), Sprechlagen ‘speech levels’ (also termed Verdichtungsbereiche ‘con-
centration zones’) characterized by relative internal cohesion can be identified within
both the dialect and the regiolect. In other words, the variation within a concentration
zone is smaller than the variation between two concentration zones. Further, for speak-
ers/hearers, the speech levels within a variety are not separated by categorical bound-
aries, whereas a clear and conscious boundary is held to divide dialect (known as Platt)
from regiolect (Umgangssprache).
Regiolects (as defined above) assume different positions and functions which can vary
from case to case (cf. Scholz 1997 for Italian; Lenz 2003 and Figure 17.4 for German).
They can function as the highest individual variety of a “bivarietal” speaker who also
has an active dialect competence; secondly they may represent the lowest pole of an
individual’s variety spectrum where the highest variety is the (interference-free) oral stan-
dard; thirdly, the regiolect may be the only variety within an individual speaker’s compe-
tence. In that case, we deal with a “monovarietal” speaker who “shifts” (cf. Auer 1986:
1990) between a “lower” and a “higher” concentration zone within the regiolect. It is
possible that there are also “trivarietal” speakers, who have active mastery of the stan-
dard, the regiolect and a dialect, but as yet there is no evidence of them.
5.2. Regiolects as a result o horizontal/vertical convergence
There is no consensus on exactly how a diaglossic spectrum with (more or less con-
tinuous) intermediate forms evolves from a diglossic situation, in which a clearly discrete
standard variety and dialects structurally and functionally coexist (see Figure 17.5). But
such a diaglossic repertoire is found in large parts of the European language area,
in those areas of Norway in which Bokmål is the standard variety (particularly in the south-
eastern part), in some parts of the Netherlands excluding the Randstat area, in most of
Flemish-speaking Belgium, in many southern parts of Germany (Alemannic and Eastern
Franconian, as well as the Rheno-Franconian and Moselle-Franconian area), in the larger
Vienna area in Austria, in Scotland, in Moravia […], in Poland with the exception of the
previously German parts, in which the loss of the dialects has further progressed […], in the
south of Spain […], in the Catalan language area, in Cyprus […], in Bulgaria […], in Sweden,
in Finland, in most parts of England and presumably in areas of Italy, etc.
(Auer 2005: 24⫺25)
As the arrows in Figure 17.5 suggest, regiolects are usually interpreted as the result of a
complex dynamics both at the extremes of the dialect⫺standard spectrum and within
the intermediate zone. Among these processes are horizontal convergence between dia-
lects and vertical convergence between dialects and standard varieties (see Siebenhaar,
this volume; Røyneland, this volume; Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill 2005). But it is impor-
Fig. 17.5: From diglossia to diaglossia repertoires (Auer 2005: 23, Figure 5)
tant to recognize that it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish between vertical and
horizontal dynamics (cf. Auer 1997: 131).
On a linguistic level, Dialektabbau ‘structural dialect loss’ can often be observed as a
trigger of or concomitant with the emergence of regiolectal varieties, beginning with
variation and possibly leading to change in the dialectal system, i. e., to a reduction in
local dialectal elements and their transformation into (regionally) more widely distrib-
uted varieties, usually nearer to the standard. The linguistic convergence processes are
often accompanied by a sociolinguistic Dialektaufgabe ‘functional dialect loss’ which
entails an increasingly curtailed use of dialect or special dialect features (cf. Mattheier
2004). The two types of process, linguistic and sociolinguistic, are mutually conditioning.
If the use of a dialect variety is reduced, its linguistic structure is also affected (cf. Hins-
kens 1996: 11). The filling of the functional gap created by dialect loss is sometimes
looked upon as a decisive factor driving the emergence and success of mid-range varieties
(cf. Stroop 1992: 162).
Alongside convergence within the dialectal range, processes active at the other end of
the dialect⫺standard axis are also cited as invoking or supporting the emergence of
regiolects. These processes involve attitudinal/functional and structural changes in the
standard variety, mostly subsumed under the label of destandardization (see above). To-
gether, horizontal interdialectal convergence and vertical convergence on the dialect⫺
standard axis lead to a reduction in the gap between the previously distinct and diglos-
sically distributed extremes (cf. Scholz 1997 for Italian; Bellmann 1983 for German).
5.3. Regiolects as a result o superimposition processes German as a

test case
German can serve as a test case for the thesis that, processes of horizontal/vertical con-
vergence aside, diatopic exchange processes ⫺ more precisely, processes of the superim-
position of external prestige varieties ⫺ also have to be taken into consideration as
explanations for the emergence of regiolects. Mihm (2000) argues that the emergence of
the modern German regiolects (Umgangssprachen) is due to (at least) two superimposi-
tion processes. The first superimposition phase (starting in the sixteenth century) was
due to the increasing prestige of High German, especially East Middle German, varieties.
In this phase, High German high varieties with varying Low German substrates spread
out across the Low German area, first in written, then in oral domains. At the same
time, West Middle and Southern German varieties also drew on East Middle German
elements, leading to a horizontal convergence of the varieties. However, these new re-
gional standards were not yet overarched by a spoken national standard. This overarch-
ing structure developed within the framework of a second superimposition phase begin-
ning in the early eighteenth century. During this phase, the upper bourgeoisie of North-
ern and Middle Germany aspired to a pronunciation of German that was closer to the
written form, and which had emerged among the educated classes of the Eastphalian
towns. This oral standard variety increasingly dominated the older regional high prestige
varieties, which were reevaluated and converted to intermediate varieties:
[t]he second-order superimposition of a (new) standard variety on an already existing stan-

dard-dialect repertoire redefined the former standard variety as an intermediate, non-stan-
dard variety in terms of its areal and social reach, and its prestige. Thus, the first-order
standard variety remained in use, but was “lowered” to a regional standard or regiolect. The
result of the second superimposition of a national standard variety is a continuous, nondi-
glossic repertoire structure (diaglossia […]). (Auer 2005: 23)
Current studies demonstrate that, within the German language area, the second reevalu-
ation process is not yet complete. The present variety spectra represent the result of
centuries of linguistic and attitudinal dynamics which have taken different courses in the
various regions of the German language area and have reached different stages (see
Ammon 2003; Besch 1983, 2003; Mattheier 1990a, 1990b, 2000 and 2003; Mihm 2000;
Schmidt 1998; Wiesinger 2000). It is likely that the diatopic extension of the various
regional pronunciation norms of present-day German continue to coincide with the dia-
lect areas (Dialektverbände) as illustrated in Figure 17.6. (For further details, see
Schmidt, this volume and 2005a.)
Fig. 17.6: Reevaluation of the older German variety clusterings as modern regional languages
(Regionalsprachen; Schmidt 2008)
The Middle German area is a particularly suitable research site for the analysis of
reevaluation and restructuring processes. Different types of speakers can currently be
found here in synchronic coexistence. Their interindividually distinct variety spectra ef-
fectively represent different diachronic stages of vertical reevaluation in apparent time.
The “second superimposition” (Mihm 2000: 2112) phase of the subordination of the
former high varieties to the supraregional oral standard variety can be observed here in
vivo, both “objectively”, via speech data, and “subjectively”, on the basis of the speakers’
language concepts and attitudes.
People who have been linguistically socialized in a West Middle German region usu-
ally have at least an active regiolectal competence but no dialect competence. They usu-
ally shift within the regiolect in all communicative contexts, whereby their “deeper”
regiolectal speech levels perform the sociocontextual functions the dialects formerly had.
The level closest to the standard is usually the Regionalakzent ‘regional standard’, but a
few speakers can, with effort, attain a supraregional standard variety (interferenzfreie
Standardsprechsprache; see König 1989).
While older West Middle German speakers do not normally further differentiate their
Hochdeutsch ‘Standard German’ category, most younger informants do. The various
types of subjective Hochdeutsch categorization are summarized in Figure 17.7 (cf. Lenz
2003: 263⫺387). Education, mobility, interregional contact and other factors all contrib-
ute to challenge the initial “normality” of regiolectal elements. Some elements attain
the status of manifest, highly salient regional identity markers employed under certain
situational/pragmatic conditions. Lexicalized regiolectal variants in particular ⫺ mostly
also elements of the dialect ⫺ can be found among these “stereotypes” in the Labovian
sense (1972: 237, 248). Among those who differentiate their Hochdeutsch further, we find
both speakers who (can) only vaguely and tentatively describe their subcategories and
others who draw clear distinctions between their subjective categories. On the diachronic
axis, the latter can be identified as younger standard-oriented speakers who in Figure
17.7 would be at Steps 2 to 4.
Fig. 17.7: Steps in the reevaluation processes in the West Middle German regiolect (schematized)
For speakers at Step 2, their subjective best Standard German (“bestes Hoch-
deutsch”) can be identified linguistically as the regional accent (regional standard). The
more definitely the subjective boundary is drawn and hence metacommunicated, the
more likely the deeper speech levels of the regiolect are classified by the speaker as
colloquial language (“Umgangssprache”) and therefore as non-standard (see Step 3). In
a further step along the reevaluation process (see Step 4), the former category of Stan-
dard German (“Hochdeutsch”) is completely reevaluated as colloquial language (“Um-
gangssprache”), and only the supraregional (accent-free) standard variety is called Stan-
dard German within the evaluation schema of these most progressive speakers. The
growing sensitivity towards regiolectal features is accompanied by an increasing aware-
ness of the features which distinguish the regiolect from the supraregional (accent-free)
standard variety. This awareness of variety boundaries sometimes finds expression in
hypercorrections (cf. Lenz 2004b, 2005a).
The various objective and subjective speech level spectra made evident in synchronic
interindividual comparisons of West Middle German speakers schematize the different
stages of the superimposition process posited for the superimposition of the Northern
flavored New High German oral standard variety upon the antecedent high varieties of
Central Germany. In Central Germany, this process is ongoing. Whereas speakers at
Step 4 are still a minority in the rural regions of the West Middle German area (cf. Lenz
2003), they are increasingly prevalent in the larger towns of the area, as Lameli’s (2004)
real-time study has shown for the city of Mainz.
6. The reevaluation and restructuring cycle

Regiolects are not simply the products of reevaluation processes. Their emergence in
turn can have massive reevaluation and restructuring effects on the variety spectrum to
which they belong. Whilst the emergence of intermediate varieties presupposes the exis-
tence of both dialects and standard varieties, it is not rare for these to compete with the
former at a later stage. For instance, structural and attitudinal changes at a dialectal
level may play a key role in the emergence of or attitudinal support for regiolects. But
later, these new intermediate varieties can replace the old dialects. The devaluation of
dialect varieties can be seen as an indicator preceding a general dialect loss (cf. Willemyns
1997: 130).
The devaluation of dialects is followed in a next step by a deletion of the whole
dialectal system (see Figure 17.8; Auer 2005: 28). Dialects, which in antecedent genera-
Fig. 17.8: Loss of local low varieties (cf. Auer 2005: 28)
tions still had covert prestige, are functionally and attitudinally replaced by regiolects.
For instance, in the more urban regions of the West Middle German area, the regiolect
currently fulfills the sociocontextual functions and bears the covert prestige which in
more rural regions is still predominantly the preserve of the dialect. While dialect here
is called for in special domains and local networks, there the regiolect takes over the
emotional/integrative and other functions formerly performed by the dialect (cf. Lenz
2003: 412). Comparable processes of dialect loss are further advanced in East Middle
German (cf. Schönfeld 1992).
It is not uncommon for selected dialectal variants to “survive” within the regiolect,
when their [⫹diatopic] feature is reevaluated via “reallocation” (Trudgill 1986: 110) to
the benefit of other sociopragmatic connotations. Covert prestige aside, other saliency
factors which disfavor loss (Abbauresistenz; Lenz 2003: 187) of a (set of) dialectal vari-
ant(s) have to be considered (cf. above).
Just as dialects and regiolects can support and undermine one another, the relation-
ship between standard varieties and regiolects is complex and ambivalent. On the one
hand, standard varieties can function as a motor of horizontal and vertical interdialectal
convergence processes which lead to the emergence or stabilization of regiolects. On
the other hand, processes of superimposition and destandardization contribute to the
emergence and stabilization of regiolects. While the standard variety thus directly or
indirectly supports the regiolects, the growing prestige of the standard varieties can also
weaken or even completely sidetrack the regiolects. But they in turn can also weaken
the standard variety. In the most extreme scenario, regiolects are broad-based prestigious
varieties which compete with the standard variety (cf. Auer 1997: 137).
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18. Urban and rural language

1. Urban and rural language: Changing perspectives
2. The expansion of urban language
3. Urban insularity
4. Rural dynamics
5. References
1. Urban and rural language: Changing perspectives

Until a few decades ago dialectologists generally focused on geographical variation in
rural areas. Although traditional dialectology produced a number of studies on city
dialects as well (e.g., Sivertsen 1960; Heike 1964; Taeldeman 1985), the discipline mani-
fested itself essentially as “rural dialect geography”: space was a central issue and re-
search was carried out mainly in the countryside. One of its main aims was the recording
of the authentic local dialect and rural speakers were assumed to be the best guardians
of the old local varieties. Urban speakers were supposed to mix with other social groups
and were therefore considered less representative of local speech. Moreover it was ex-
pected that language changes occurred “at a relatively slower rate in areas of lower
population density relative to areas of high population density” (Hamilton 2001: 418⫺
419). The preference for rural informants manifests itself from the beginning of the
twentieth century in larger dialectological research projects such as Gilliéron and Ed-
mont’s Atlas Linguistique de la France. Furthermore informants usually were NORMs
(non-mobile old rural males, see Chambers and Trudgill 1980). For instance, for the
Survey of English Dialects (SED), carried out by the University of Leeds between 1950
and 1961, the fieldworkers were instructed to select elderly men and women. Since
women were said to encourage the social upgrading of the speech of their families, there
was a preference for male informants who were born locally (Orton, Sanderson and
Widdowson 1978: 3). Rural life was and is often associated with lack of mobility and
(linguistic) stability. Apart from reflections on the ideal profile of the informants, tradi-
tional dialectology showed little interest in the social determinants of language variation.
The innovative work of Labov in the US in the early 1960s and the subsequent rise
of the discipline of sociolinguistics involved a shift from the study of geographic lan-
guage variation towards the study of social language variation. This shift was paralleled
by a shift from research on rural language towards research on language variation in
urban speech communities. Symptomatic of the changing perspective is the fact that
early sociolinguistic research by Labov and his colleagues has often been labeled “urban
dialectology”. The name reveals both the roots of the discipline and the “new” focus on
urban speech. Since research within this branch focused (and still focuses) on the correla-
tion between social variation and linguistic variation, from now on the social profile of
the informants (including parameters such as age and gender, but also social class and
ethnicity) was diversified systematically (Foulkes and Dochterty 1999: 2).
The focus of traditional dialectology on the recording and preservation of local
speech and the related preference for rural and older informants may have reinforced
an assumption which pervades a great many dialectological and sociolinguistic studies:
the idea of rural language being static and urban language being innovative. The latter
even more so since the use of the apparent time method in many (urban) sociolinguistic
studies led to a distinct interest in the dynamics of speech and opened up new perspec-
tives for the study of language change in progress. “Researching in the city was most
probably seen as the way to gain access to the most fluid and heterogeneous communi-
ties, and therefore to tackle the issue of the social embedding of change ‘where it’s all
happening’”. The rural, on the other hand, is “still portrayed as the insular, the isolated,
the static, as an idyll of peace and tranquility rather than as composed of heterogeneous
communities, of contact, of change and progress, and of conflict” (Britain 2002: 607⫺
608).
At the same time, recent research has shown a growing awareness of the unfound-
edness of this dichotomy (e.g., Besch 1981, 1983; Hinskens 1996; Vandekerckhove 2000):
“Language varies and changes in rural as well as urban communities” (Britain 2002:
608). The changing perception is also linked to the fact that, in many respects, the di-
chotomy between rural and urban areas and their respective communities proves difficult
to hold nowadays. As Auer and Hinskens (1996: 4) point out, processes of industrializa-
tion, urbanization, increasing geographical mobility and ease of communication at re-
gional and supraregional levels have brought about dialect contact to an extent hitherto
unknown (see also Watt and Milroy 1999: 26). In Europe at least, living in the country-
side does not imply immobility and isolation anymore. In the past decades, many closed
rural village communities have been broken open by migration from rural into urban
areas and vice versa. Many people from the country move to the city for their profes-
sional career while others commute there every day for professional and other purposes.
On the other hand, city people seek living space in the surrounding countryside, a proc-
ess which has been called “counterurbanization”. Moreover, in the worldwide process of
urbanization, many small villages have been swallowed by neighboring towns and cities.
All these processes lead to intensive dialect contact and result in the dissolution of closed
networks and the local language norms which need such close-knit networks in order to
remain intact (Watt and Milroy 1999: 42).
The developments mentioned above do not imply that the distinction between urban
and rural or non-urban language varieties has been completely blurred in Europe. Nor
does it mean that city dialects and non-urban varieties do not develop their own dy-
namics anymore. But their dynamics is often the product of contact between several
varieties. Even in former times there was linguistic exchange between city and country-
side on the one hand and between several cities on the other hand (cf. Goossens 1992;
Taeldeman 2005), but this contact is more intensive today than ever. This might explain
why recent research shows a major interest in the interaction between urban and rural
language and in the influence of urban varieties on their rural surroundings. These topics
will be the main focus of this article.
2. The expansion o urban language

2.1. Contagious and hierarchical diusion
Cities are commercial, economic and cultural centers and as such they are often attrib-
uted a certain prestige by the rural hinterland and/or by other cities. The inhabitants of
a city generally derive prestige from being part of that city and sharing an urban life
style. Among the many (possible) markers of urban life style, speech may play a promi-
nent role. And since prestige is a well-known catalyst of imitation, the adoption of char-
acteristics of urban speech often appears to be part of a (conscious or subconscious)
strategy of people living in small towns or in the countryside aimed at acquiring a share
in the prestige associated with urbanity and urban life style. The expansion of urban
vernacular features has been attested in many (socio-)dialectological studies in the past
decades (e.g., Milroy 1992; Bailey, Wikle and Tillery 1993; Taeldeman 2005). In the
literature a distinction is made between two models, the contagious diffusion model,
better known as the wave model, and the hierarchical diffusion model.
The wave model is less well represented in the literature than the hierarchical diffusion
model, but as Britain (2002: 623) puts it, it is a kind of “iconic representation of diffu-
sion”, “with diagrams resembling the ripples created by raindrops falling in a puddle of
water”. In the wave model, distance is the major determinant: innovations spread from
an urban center to the hinterland, first affecting the regions neighboring the city and
step by step also affecting more distant locations. The bigger the distance between the
“trend-setting” city and a community in its hinterland, the longer it takes before the
expansive features reach the place. Wave-like diffusions from city to hinterland have
been attested in several socio- and geolinguistic studies (cf. infra), but most changes and
innovations do not spread like a wave or an oil stain, i. e., gradually, with decreasing
force. By adopting gravity models from social geography, Trudgill (1974) was able to
demonstrate that the size of the communities involved interacts with the distance be-
tween them: linguistic innovations follow a pattern of urban hierarchy, from larger city,
to smaller city, to larger town and smaller town till they finally reach the countryside
via those smaller towns or villages. The formula which Trudgill used to predict the likely
influence of place x on place y incorporated both the distance between both places and
their relative sizes.
In recent years the predictive power of the gravity model has been criticized because
of its neglect of structural-linguistic factors on the one hand and socio-psychological
factors, like the mutual appreciation of urban centers and hinterland, on the other. Both
factors, especially the latter, are hard to account for in a formal model. And yet, as was
demonstrated by Taeldeman (2005), these factors may either stimulate the spread of a
feature or, conversely, inhibit the spread of an innovation which, judging from the grav-
ity model, would be extremely likely to diffuse. However, this has not undermined the
value of the hierarchical diffusion model. On the contrary:
[I]nteraction between urban centers in modern societies is likely to be greater, and therefore
a more frequent and effective conduit for accommodation and transmission of innovations,
than between urban and rural. Transportation networks tend to link urban with urban, the
socioeconomic and consumer infrastructure tends to be based in and oriented towards urban
centers, with the ensuing consequences for employment and commuting patterns, and these
obviously feed the hierarchical nature of diffusion. (Britain 2002: 623⫺624)
Many recent studies reveal an intensive linguistic influencing of urban centers (cf. section
2.2). In modern societies, marked by great geographic mobility and, on the linguistic
side, dialect loss and dialect leveling, the influence of some cities and their characteristic
speech appears to be strong enough to create a new dynamics which can stand up or
even run counter to the increasing impact of the standard language.
2.2. Both diusion models exempliied
The expansion of Cockney features to other cities, some of them quite remote from
London, offers a well-known example of innovations spreading according to the hierar-
chical diffusion model. Foulkes and Docherty (1999: 11) state that research conducted in
the past decades produces plenty of evidence to support Wells’ speculation that London’s
“working-class accent is today the most influential source of phonological innovation in
England” (Wells 1982: 301). Glottalization of intervocalic and word-final /t/, th-fronting,
labiodental realizations of /r/ and vocalization of /l/ are the most prominent features
which seem to have spread from London, first affecting large urban centers before reach-
ing smaller towns or villages. Some authors warn not to be too eager to interpret the
presence of these features in other urban vernaculars as direct borrowings from Cockney.
In some cases, they may be the result of independent developments in different locations
(Britain, to appear). Moreover the source of these changes is often not identified as
Cockney but as “Estuary English”, which is said to occupy an intermediate position
between Cockney and RP and contains some features present in most of southeastern
England. Foulkes and Docherty (1999: 11) claim that Estuary English features are
spreading “not because Estuary English is a coherent and identifiable influence, but
because the features represent neither the standard nor the extreme non-standard poles
of the continuum”. So some caution may be needed when interpreting the diffusion of
features which could have originated in Cockney. And yet, there can hardly be any doubt
that the prestige of the capital in many cases formed the basis for the spread of London
features. For instance, Mees and Collins (1999: 201) discuss glottalization in Cardiff
English. They find that it is an attractive feature for speakers of Cardiff English because
it is associated with “sophisticated and fashionable speech”: “Nowadays glottalization is
associated with London Life, metropolitan fashions and trend-setting attitudes”. It has
become a prestige feature, although in London and in the south of England it is a
marker of male and working class speech (cf. Britain 2009: 140). This interpretation
demonstrates the importance of so-called socio-psychological factors (cf. supra: Taelde-
man 2005). London life style is regarded as worth imitating and so is London speech,
even if the borrowed features are (or were) not prestigious at all in the place of origin.
From the 1980s onwards, Trudgill has described the diffusion of London forms across
urban East Anglia (see Britain 2009 and Trudgill 1983, 1986, 1988, 1999). In Trudgill
1986 for instance, the shift in the production of voiced and voiceless /th/ attested in the
language of Norwich teenagers is directly linked to the Cockney merger between /v/
and /Î/ on the one hand and /f/ and /θ/ on the other. Other linguists have described the
presence of this feature and other prototypical London or southeastern features like
labiodental /r/, vocalized /l/ and t-glottalization in cities and towns all over England,
more specifically in Colchester, Reading, Milton Keynes, The Fens, Derby, Birmingham,
Hull, Liverpool, Sheffield, Middlesbrough and Newcastle (Britain 2009: Table 1). Once
again, not all of the innovations in these city vernaculars can be attributed to (direct)
London influence, but in many cases London features have been found to jump to other
urban centers, often leaving the hinterland unaffected (at least for some time). In some
cases the hinterland may lag behind for a very long time. Milroy (1992: 197) refers to
the historical spread of /h/-dropping in British English, which also appears to have pro-
ceeded along an urban hierarchy and adds: “despite the long history of /h/-dropping,
there are still rural (but not urban) dialects in southern England which do not /h/-drop”.
The same holds for parts of East Anglia, where /h/-dropping is a more recent phenome-
non which has spread from London: in urban centers such as Norwich it was already
well established in the 1980s but it did not occur in the rural areas of the region (Taelde-
man 2005: 270, see Trudgill 1983, 1986).
A similar pattern can be found all over western Europe. Røyneland (2009) describes
the rapid expansion of the regional East Norwegian “urban standard”, with the capital
Oslo as its center, to many southeast Norwegian cities and towns. Strikingly similar to
the Cockney case is the re-evaluation or re-allocation of low status urban features (cf.
the popularity of London Cockney features in England):
In Norway in general, as in the other Scandinavian countries, we observe a development

where traditional low status urban features appear to be spreading at the expense of tradi-
tional high status ones, both in the cities and in the surrounding areas.
(Røyneland 2009: 20)
These features no longer function as markers of social class, but have become markers
of urbanity and urban life style (Røyneland 2009; see also Røyneland 2005).
France has been subject to more dramatic dialect loss than any other western Euro-
pean countries due to the long lasting expansion of the Parisian vernacular all over the
country. But today the homogenizing effects of Paris may meet “countervailing centrifu-
gal pressures” which might result in the development to supra-local regional dialects.
The gradual emergence of these supra-local varieties, leading to greater regional diversifi-
cation in the linguistic landscape in France, is rooted in some larger urban centers and
restricted to the northern and southern peripheries. Cities like Lille in the north of
France and Marseille in the south are far enough away from Paris “to resist the pressure
from the capital and sizeable enough to diffuse local forms outwards to their own hinter-
lands” (Hornsby 2007, 2009).
So time and again, recent research confirms the trend-setting role of urban centers
and the linguistic interaction between bigger and smaller cities or towns. Time and again
Map 18.1: Northern Belgium (Dutch-speaking Belgium, Flanders) with its five provinces; the left
one is the province of West Flanders
also, urban centers are the driving force for the expansion of urban vernacular features
at the expense of (more) standard colloquial speech, even and especially in recent times.
These features diffuse from major urban centers to smaller cities or towns, but that does
not mean they never reach the smaller communities in between them. In many cases the
diffusion is a combination of the hierarchical and contagious pattern. Taeldeman (2005)
illustrates this complementarity, but at the same time the dominance of the hierarchical
over the contagious pattern, on the basis of data from the Dutch-speaking part of Bel-
gium. According to Taeldeman (2005: 265) uvular /R/ was still confined to urban centers
in the 1970s in the Flemish and Brabantine dialect area. It had become general in
Brussels and in the East-Flemish city of Ghent, and it was also well represented in some
other large centers such as Antwerp, Bruges and Leuven too (see Map 18.1). In some
smaller towns, however, it scored only ten percent at that time. Twenty years later, the
uvular /R/ had spread from the city of Ghent to its hinterland. Rogier (1994) distin-
guished three concentric circles around the city and studied the presence of /R/ in the
speech of the youngest generation in each of these circles. He found that 83.9 percent of
the children and teenagers living in the circle closest to Ghent realized /R/ instead of /r/,
in the middle circle 75.7 percent of the youngsters had /R/ and, finally, in the zone most
remote from the city 47.6 percent produced /R/. This gradual expansion of /R/ at the
expense of the /r/ offers a perfect example of contagious (or wave) diffusion of a linguistic
innovation. But it is clear that in the first phase of the expansion of the feature in the
Flemish and Brabantine dialects, only city dialects were involved. It took some time
before the innovation spread to the hinterland of some cities (see also Tops 2005).
Vandekerckhove (2000, 2005a, 2005b) also offers several examples of contagious dif-
fusion. The research area was in this case the south-east of the province of West Flan-
ders, and more particularly the small town of Deerlijk, in the eastern hinterland of the
West Flemish city of Kortrijk (see Map 18.1). The study, which had both a real time and
an apparent time dimension, showed that both Kortrijk city dialect features (like the
word initial consonant cluster /sk/ for Dutch /sx/ in words like schoen ‘shoe’) and general
West Flemish features (like the diphthong /oe / for Dutch /o/ in words like boot ‘boat’)
had gradually spread east of the city since the beginning of the twentieth century. The
city dialect of Kortrijk appeared to be the donor language for most of the changes
observed. However, the role of this urban center could not be interpreted unidirection-
ally. It functioned both as a source language and as a recipient language (Van Coetsem
1988), in some cases passing on dialect features which it had borrowed itself from other
West Flemish dialects (Vandekerckhove 2005a, 2005b). The city of Kortrijk offers an
interesting case since it illustrates the complex behavior of city dialects. Kortrijk is a
provincial city of a modest size, but it has a long history as an urban and economic
center in the south of West Flanders. Bruges is its counterpart in the northern part of
the province. Kortrijk may look up to the prestigious city of Bruges, but seems to have
been self-confident enough to resist innovations spreading from Bruges. For instance,
Goossens (1992) discusses the diffusion of compound pronouns of the type of winder
instead of wider ‘we’, with an inserted /n/ (derived from the object and possessive pro-
noun hunder ‘them’ or ‘their’), an innovation which appears to have originated in Bruges
and consequentially spread to some smaller West Flemish towns like Roeselare, but was
not adopted by the city dialect of Kortrijk. And yet, in its recent history the Kortrijk
dialect in some respect converged to the western and northern West Flemish dialects, in
a complex interaction of attraction and distancing and of hierarchical and contagious
diffusion.
2.3. The explanatory orce o social network theory
Social network theory as designed and applied by J. Milroy and L. Milroy offers a
good model for interpreting patterns of hierarchical diffusion, with linguistic innovations
hopping from one urban center to another, and for explaining why hierarchical diffusion
is dominant over contagious diffusion (see J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1985; L. Milroy
1987; J. Milroy 1992). The explanatory value of social network theory for linguistic
innovation is to be found in the use of the relative strength of network ties as a predictor
of language change. The model is based on the idea that “to the extent that ties are
strong, linguistic change will be prevented or impeded, whereas to the extent that they
are weak, they will be more open to external influences, and so linguistic change will be
facilitated” (Milroy 1992: 176). In close-knit communities strong network ties often func-
tion as a barrier against innovations which originate outside the network. Strong net-
works ties are “norm-enforcing mechanisms”. Milroy (1992: 176) adds: “behind this lies
an idealization which predicts that in a community bound by maximally dense and multi-
plex networks ties linguistic change would not take place at all”. Such communities do
not exist, but some communities are marked by relatively weak networks and others by
relatively strong ones and that may explain why linguistic changes are more likely to
affect the first type of community than the latter. On the level of the individual, the
network model predicts that “mobile individuals who have contracted many weak ties,
but who as a consequence of their mobility occupy a position marginal to some cohesive
group, are in particularly strong position to carry information across social boundaries
and to diffuse innovations of all kinds” (Milroy 1992: 180⫺181). When confronting these
principles with the geographic diffusion of many linguistic innovations, it is easy to see
why innovations tend to spread according to an urban hierarchy. Although in modern
times we should not overemphasize the gap between urban and non-urban ways of living
(cf. section 1 of this article), geographic and social mobility and the weak network ties
which are the product of both are still more typical of urban communities than of rural
ones. Strong social networks can certainly be found both within urban and within rural
communities. And so can people with weak network ties, occupying a marginal position
with respect to one or more strong social networks, but it is beyond doubt that there
are many more of them in urban centers than in rural communities. An innovation
cannot be said to have been integrated in the speech of place x or y, if it is only used by
individuals that are operating at the fringe of the community. The innovation should be
adopted by a considerable part of the population, which means that it should be used
by central members of the community as well. But it may seem unlikely that a central
member, being part of a strong social network, is willing to converge towards the speech
of a peripheral individual. This apparent bottleneck leads J. Milroy to add two “condi-
tions” that are crucial for the practicability of network theory as an explanatory model
of language innovation and change: first of all, peripheral people will only be successful
in transmitting innovations to central members of the group if they are quite numerous.
“The existence of numerous weak ties is a necessary condition for innovations to
spread”, because “adopting an innovation that is already widespread on the fringes of
the group is much less risky” for central members of the group than adopting an innova-
tion which is used by a (very) small number of people weakly linked to the community
(Milroy 1992: 181⫺182). Since transportation networks tend to link cities to cities and
since there is much economic and cultural interaction between urban centers, it is easy
to understand that this results in numerous weak ties between them. The individuals
embodying these weak ties transmit innovations from city x to city y. They may be
successful in getting them accepted if they are well-represented numerically in city y.
Once again, this certainly does not imply that the non-urban hinterland of a city does
not establish weak links with the urban center. But the people establishing (weak) ties
both with the donor city and with the recipient hinterland may in many cases form too
small a minority within the rural or at least non-urban community.
The second necessary condition for an innovation to be adopted is a psycho-social
one: “this is that speakers from the receptor community want to identify for some reason
with speakers from the donor community” (Milroy 1992: 182). In other words, they
should benefit from adopting an innovation. Speakers from a smaller town or city may
adopt features from a larger city because they look up to that city and its urban life style
(cf. section 2.2). By adopting a fashionable urban feature, people may aim at sharing the
prestige of a large city. If however, by adopting an innovation, people will be considered
disloyal in their local community, violating norms of group solidarity, they will not be
inclined to do so. The pressure of local solidarity norms is likely to be stronger in non-
urban than in urban communities, but again we should be careful not to present differ-
ences of this type in absolute terms: non-urban communities may be susceptible to the
prestige of urban centers as well and that prestige may prevail over local solidarity
norms. The differences between the urban and the non-urban as dealt with in this section
are always relative, which may explain the dominance of the hierarchical diffusion of
linguistic innovation, without excluding contagious diffusion.
Network theory also appears to be a most valuable explanatory tool for explaining
dialect maintenance versus dialect loss in contexts of large-scale migration. Bortoni-
Ricardo (1985) illustrates the correlation between social network indices and “dialect
diffusion”. His subjects were rural migrants in the Brazilian city of Brazlândia. Like
other Brazilian cities, Brazlândia was exposed to massive rural migration in the second
half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s only ten percent of the Brazilian population
lived in a city, in the 1980s this figure had risen to 67.6 percent (Bortoni-Ricardo 1985:
20). Whereas the studies of J. and L. Milroy focus on network strength as a predictor
of language maintenance and change, with a strong focus on multiplex and dense net-
works as norm enforcement mechanisms or ⫺ using the terminology of Bortoni-Ri-
cardo ⫺ mechanisms that support dialect focusing, Bortoni-Ricardo develops network
indices designed to deal with dialect diffuseness. In his study, dialect focusing implies
the use of “a highly focused form of rural vernacular, which contains virtually the whole
set of non-standard features that define a sharp distinction between rural and urban
varieties” (Bortoni-Ricardo 1985: 20). Diffuseness is not viewed necessarily as an assimi-
lation of the standard language but rather as a movement away from the stigmatized
rural dialects, which manifests itself as a gradual shift from isolated rural vernacular
towards urban speech (Bortoni-Ricardo 1985: 105). In order to predict dialect diffusion,
Bortoni-Ricardo uses an “integration index” and an “urbanization index”. The former
measures the number of persons with whom his subjects have a personal relationship,
the latter represents an urbanization profile of the members of each migrant’s personal
network. These indices function as indicators “of the migrants’ process of transition
from an insulated network of kinsfolk and pre-migration acquaintances to a more
heterogeneous integrated network” (Bortoni-Ricardo 1985: 167). As migrants switch to
more heterogeneous networks they are more exposed to mainstream urban culture and
urban language. As a consequence their dialect becomes more “diffuse”. Bortoni-Ri-
cardo shows that “the migrants’ urbanization is a complex process during which the
migrant [is] permanently faced with the ambivalence between out-group identification,
motivated mainly by pragmatic reasons, and need for the in-group psychological and
social support” (Bortoni-Ricardo 1985: 119). Consequently, although the loss of rural
vernacular due to massive migration into large metropoles is inevitable, it is no straight-
forward process.
3. Urban insularity
3.1. Three types o urban insularity
As urban centers are generally ahead of their hinterland in adopting linguistic innova-
tions, they often constitute islands on language maps which reflect the spatial diffusion
of linguistic features. In section 2.2, several examples of this phenomenon were discussed:
in the past two centuries h-dropping diffused from London to cities in East Anglia (e.g.,
Norwich) but not (or to a minor extent) to their hinterland, uvular /R/ spread to several
cities in Flanders long before it reached the rural surroundings of these cities, etc. In
many cases this so-called urban insularity is a temporary pattern, since hierarchical diffu-
sion is often followed by contagious diffusion. Taeldeman (2005) presents three types of
urban insularity, which are distinguished on the basis of the factors causing the isolated
position of urban dialects. Urban insularity as the inevitable side effect of hierarchical
diffusion constitutes one of these types. As the latter phenomenon was dealt with exten-
sively in the preceding paragraph, we focus on the two other types in the rest of this sec-
tion.
The second type of urban insularity discussed by Taeldeman (2005) is “innovative

urban insularity”. In this case, “urban dialects can themselves generate an innovation”
(Taeldeman 2005: 268). Cities often play a pioneering role, not only in adopting innova-
tions from other cities, but also in generating innovations themselves. For instance, the
Flemish city dialect of Ghent has been a very innovative dialect in its relatively recent
history. Most of these innovations have been adopted by the hinterland and have to a
large extent determined the make-up of the present day East-Flemish dialects. Quite
surprisingly, however, some of these innovations which clearly originated in Ghent, were
rejected by the city once they had reached the non-urban hinterland, thus giving the city
its island-like position (see Taeldeman 2005: 271⫺273). This remarkable urge to keep up
a distinct profile for the Ghent city dialect will also be apparent from the third type of
urban insularity discussed below.
Taeldeman (2005: 269) also refers to a special type of innovative urban insularity
caused by the emergence of new towns and the consequential emergence of new dialects
through a process of koineization: “As a result of enduring contact between relocated
speakers of mutually intelligible varieties of the same language a “new” koine comes
into being through a process of mixing, leveling, and simplification”. Of course this
process, which does not take place in the hinterland of the new town, gives the new
urban center an island-like position, at least for some time. In a later phase, the leveled
variant may spread to the hinterland. Kerswill (2002) deals with new dialect formation
through koineization in the case of Milton Keynes, a large town about 45 miles north-
west of London (see also Kerswill and Williams 2000). Milton Keynes, designed as a
new town in the 1960s to relieve housing congestion in London, attracted people from
several towns in northeast England, thus stimulating the emergence of a linguistic koine.
As it is situated within the sphere of influence of several cities, the most prominent one
being London, and consequentially adopted linguistic features from those cities, Milton
Keynes seems to combine innovative urban insularity with urban insularity caused by
hierarchical urban diffusion of linguistic innovations (cf. the presence of certain London
Cockney features or Estuary English features in Milton Keynes, section 2.2).
A remarkable type of urban insularity is the third and final one to be discussed here,
i. e., “conservative urban insularity”. In some cases urban dialects do not fulfill their
prototypical pioneering role, but, on the contrary, resist innovations, even when these
innovations have been adopted by the dialects of the hinterland. A striking example of
urban conservatism can be found in the recent linguistic history of the German city of
Hamburg. Goossens (1988) describes the gradual replacement of Low German dialect
features by their High German counterparts in northern Germany in the twentieth cen-
tury. The process started in the cities, with the bigger cities being ahead of the smaller
cities, but Hamburg, the biggest city in northern Germany, showed strong resistance to
the loss of Low German. This finally gave the city dialect an isolated position in the
northern German linguistic landscape (see also Taeldeman 2005: 270).
Conservative urban insularity also applies to the city dialect of Ghent. The realization
of old intervocalic /sk/ in the East-Flemish dialects illustrates once again the peculiar
behavior of this dialect. In most Flemish dialects old intervocalic /sk/ has been replaced
by /s/. Verstegen (1942) found that a large area north and south of Ghent, including
Ghent itself, preserved an intermediate stage of the development, /sx/ (e.g., in words like
vissen ‘to fish’: vi[sk]en > vi[sx]en > vi[s]en). More recent data show that the intermedi-
ate realization has been replaced by /s/, except in Ghent, which has resisted the final
phase in the development of the cluster and still has intervocalic /sx/ (Taeldeman 2005:
276, 1985: 231).
3.2. Urban language as an urban identity marker
Whenever the dynamics of city dialects, whether innovative or conservative, leads to

urban insularity, the effect is that the city dialects (or their speakers) acquire a distinct
profile with respect to the hinterland and that may be exactly their intention. In the
interpretation of this recurrent dynamics, the socio-psychological dimension undoubt-
edly holds a prominent place. Since the pioneering study of W. Labov on language
change on Martha’s Vineyard (Labov 1963), it is beyond doubt that displaying a “local
identity” may be the driving force behind language behavior and language change. The
notion of identity is a complex one, and often “identity” is reformulated as the “aware-
ness of identity”, or the identification and recognition of a number of characteristics as
being constitutive for an individual or a group. Language may be one of these character-
istics, since it is not only an instrument to talk about one’s identity but also a component
of the process of identity construction itself (Frijhoff 2004). For town people it may be
an important marker of their “urban identity”, expressing their “großstädisches Selbstbe-
wußtsein” (‘urban self-awareness’; Goossens 1988). This may lead to divergent behavior:
Divergence is deemed a tactic of intergroup distinctiveness of individuals in search of a

positive social identity. By diverging one’s communicative style […], members of an ingroup
can accentuate the differences between themselves and a relevant outgroup on, usually, a
highly valued dimension of their group identity. (Giles 2001: 195)
In practice, feelings of superiority combined with a positive evaluation of belonging to

the same urban community often appear to lead to a collective distancing of the urban
population from the dialects and vernaculars of the non-urban hinterland. Country peo-
ple and people from smaller towns for their part often look up to the city life and all
characteristics associated with urban life style (including the vernacular of the city) and
are eager to adopt these characteristics (see sections 2.2 and 2.3). This process of distanc-
ing and assimilation leads to the continuous dynamics of innovation and change in all
the varieties involved (Goossens 1992: 30).
The importance of linguistic identity markers for creating a distinct urban profile has
been attested both in older dialectological studies and in present day sociolinguistic re-
search. To give just one example for the latter: Eckert (2000, and in this volume) dis-
cusses the language behavior of children and teenagers in the Detroit area. “Urban” and
“suburban” for these youngsters are identity markers in many respects and “urban and
suburban kids” can be discriminated on the basis of linguistic features.
A very interesting symptom of the linguistic tension between several communities
(whether urban or non urban) are mocking rhymes (Weijnen 1961). However, they do
not function as descriptive evidence of dialect differences, since the speakers aim at
distancing themselves from the “owners” of the vernacular which they try to portray.
Thus, in former days, citizens of the West Flemish city of Bruges expressed the superior-
ity of their dialect to that of the city of Kortrijk by producing the following nonsensical
sentence: ’t is een skande van die skone skorte te skeuren [Dutch: Het is een schande om
die mooie schort te scheuren ‘it’s a shame to tear up that beautiful apron’]. In the sentence
the cluster /sk/ is clearly overrepresented. This consonant cluster was a typical Kortrijk
city dialect feature, which has spread to the hinterland by now. In former days, however,
it functioned as a shibboleth of the Kortrijk vernacular. By overemphasizing this feature,
the Bruges citizens distanced themselves from Kortrijk and its dialect and reinforced
their own urban identity and their allegiance to their own dialect. In the past decades,
the Kortrijk cluster [sk] spread to the smaller city of Roeselare (see Map 18.1), but it
never conquered the city of Bruges (Vandekerckhove 2003). Town people may display a
remarkable linguistic solidarity, not only in distancing themselves from other (smaller)
towns, but even more so in distancing themselves from the non-urban hinterland. Pre-
serving a structural distance between the city dialect and the dialects of the hinterland
contributes to preserving a distinct urban, or non-rural or even non-peasant identity.
This may explain urban conservatism with respect to language innovations present in
the hinterland. It also explains why some cities get rid of features which once were
markers of the city dialect but which have spread to the hinterland and consequentially
can no longer fulfill their function as urban identity markers (see the case of Ghent
discussed in section 3.1).
4. Rural dynamics
4.1. Rural prevailing over urban: Contrahierarchical diusion
In the preceding sections it has been shown that linguistic innovations prototypically
spread from urban to non-urban or less urban(ized) centers, along an urban hierarchy.
Exceptionally, however, innovations diffuse in the opposite direction. Bailey, Wikle and
Tillery (1993: 371⫺373), who describe the diffusion of the quasi-modal fixing to from
rural to urban Oklahoma, label this pattern “contrahierarchical diffusion”. Trudgill
(1986) presents another example: smoothing processes found in rural north Norfolk dif-
fuse southwards to urban centers in the country of Suffolk (see Britain 2002: 626). The
West Flemish city of Bruges has been subject to contrahierarchical diffusion as well. In
former days the Bruges dialect was a trendsetting dialect, the innovations of which were
eagerly adopted by the hinterland (cf. section 2.2). Though they are not well documen-
ted, there are some indications that in recent times many of the typical features of the
old Bruges city dialect tend to be replaced by more “general” West Flemish features,
present in the Bruges hinterland. The darkening of /e/ in front of /l/ (gald instead of geld
‘money’), for example, was a typical feature of the Bruges city dialect which was resisted
by the hinterland. Nowadays, probably due to pressure from the hinterland, the city
dialect itself has nearly given up this feature (Devos and Vandekerckhove 2005: 55). The
pronouns with inserted /n/ (section 2.2) offer another example: they originated in Bruges
and they are still well represented in the Bruges dialect, but nowadays they compete with
their West Flemish counterparts without /n/ (Vandekerckhove 2005b). The motivation
behind this relatively unusual process of city dialects being (partially) swallowed by the
dialects of the (rural) hinterland may well be found in the status of the particular city
dialect features. The darkening of [e] in the Bruges dialect was and is typically associated
with working class speech. Middle class people moving into the city have not been willing
to adopt it and the autochthonous middle class has probably been eager to drop it. But
explanations like this remain tentative and rather ad hoc. The examples discussed in 2.2
show that the working class nature of urban features need not be an impediment for
their survival and diffusion to other areas. So, most probably, there are other factors
which contribute to the negative evaluation of these city dialect features. The make
up of the population of the city may be one of them, but we cannot enlarge on that
aspect here.
4.2. From local to regional dialects
Urban language can generally be said to be more susceptible to change than rural lan-
guage. However, this does not imply that rural language is static. Stable dialects, resisting
any kind of external influence, are an unrealistic idealization. In former days (for many
regions in western Europe until the beginning, for others until the middle of the twenti-
eth century), the inhabitants of rural settlements operated in an area with a radius of
five to maximally seven kilometers on a more or less daily basis, a distance which corre-
sponded to approximately an hour’s walk, provided that there were no obstacles of
whatever kind (rivers, mountains …). The neighboring settlements were generally situ-
ated within this distance: patterns of settlements with an average distance of about five
to six or seven kilometers from each other were found in many western European re-
gions, e.g., in certain regions of the Netherlands and in southern Germany (Hoppen-
brouwers 1990: 16; Pacione 1984: 28; Dieleman 1971). Regional markets in the nearby
town or city forced country people to cover longer distances, but they certainly did not
do so on a daily basis and the maximal distance people tended to bridge for these mar-
kets was probably approximately 20 kilometers, though 10 or 15 kilometers may have
been more common (see for Flanders Taeldeman 1987). So country people were not
immobile, but their geographic mobility was very limited. Except for some villages that
were completely isolated due to geographical circumstances (e.g., some mountain vil-
lages), most villages had at least some contacts with other rural or urban communities.
This may explain why even in “pre-modern” times there was a dynamics of convergence
and divergence between country dialects and city dialects, leading to changes in both.
But these changes certainly did not take place at the same rate and with the same inten-
sity as they do nowadays, since contact with other communities was not only much more
limited than it is at present, the make up of the villages also guaranteed the preservation
of local features: old villages were small, tightly knit and marked by strong social net-
works, which are very efficient at reinforcing local norms and resisting external influ-
ences (cf. 2.3). They offered the ideal habitat for the local dialect. These circumstances
often brought about enormous dialect diversity within one and the same region (“every
village having its own dialect”) and they guaranteed that this diversity was not threat-
ened at all for centuries.
Urbanization, counterurbanization, industrialization, increased mobility and
increased ease of communication led to the dissolution of many old rural villages and
consequentially to dialect contact to an extent hitherto unknown (Auer and Hinskens
1996: 4, see also section 1). In some cases rural or non-urban dialects simply appear to
have been swallowed up by the city dialect of an expansive city, the inhabitants of which
often moved to the neighboring towns or villages in search of space (i. e., so-called
“counterurbanization”). A well-known case in point is the city dialect of Antwerp: the

former dialects of many of the (also former) villages neighboring Antwerp have com-
pletely disappeared. Nowadays, the dialect spoken in these places, many of which are
highly urbanized, is the Antwerp city dialect (De Schutter and Nuyts 2005: 26).
In many rural or formerly rural areas, however, the socio-economic processes named
above, have not led to such a drastic dialect loss. In the past decades, all over western
Europe, dialect contact in rural areas led to dialect leveling, i. e., a gradual reduction
of interdialectal differences. The sociolinguistic and sociodialectological literature offers
numerous examples. Vandekerckhove (2005b) shows that in the West Flemish dialect
area dialect features with a limited geographical diffusion have been replaced by dialect
features with a wider diffusion. This tendency could be illustrated for several phonologi-
cal and morphological features. One is the diminutive morpheme. Of the many variants
of the diminutive morpheme present in the West Flemish dialects in former days, only
those with a relatively wide diffusion have “survived”. As Hinskens (1996) put it: in
dialect geography, leveling results in an increase in scale. When communicating with
peers (but not with their children), young West Flemish adults nowadays still use dialect,
but dialect forms which are marked in supraregional contacts because of their limited
diffusion do not longer belong to their idiolect. The dialect of the younger generations
is not a copy of the dialect of their parents and grandparents. It is gradually developing
into a dialect with a wider geographical range.
People still operate in strong networks, but these networks are often less “local” than
before. As a consequence the medium of communication is less local too. When old
networks are disrupted, people seek to develop new network ties and these new ties may
result in the “(re)establishment and subsequent social enforcement of a more focused
koineized linguistic system” (Britain 2002: 616). Ortsloyalität (or ‘loyalty to one’s home-
town’, cf. Mattheier 1980) in its narrow sense is replaced by a more general regional
affiliation (cf. Giddens 1991). Research on dialect leveling in Norway also leads Røyne-
land to the conclusion that identification with the local town or village is decreasing.
She assumes that regionalization explains why “mixed ways of speaking” are more ac-
cepted among young people: “The region gradually replaces the local community as the
important linguistic and mental orientation unit ⫺ it becomes gradually more important
to display regional affiliation and identity than strictly local” (Røyneland 2009: 8).
Whether rural dialects are subject to leveling, koineization or mixing, or, in many
cases all three of these, the outcome is the same: the old authentic village dialect becomes
a relic of the past. Time and again studies on dialect change and dialect loss lead to the
conclusion that dialects or regional varieties (“regiolects”, cf. Hoppenbrouwers 1990)
still survive or even revive in Europe (cf. Auer 2005, Britain and Vandekerckhove 2009),
but the small scale local village dialect marked by many features with a limited diffusion
is definitely dying.
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19. Discontinuous language spaces (Sprachinseln)

1. Definition
2. The history of language island research (Sprachinselforschung)
3. The history of language islands
4. The current state of language islands
5. Factors determining language maintenance in discontinuous language spaces
6. Other types of discontinuous language spaces
7. Conclusion
8. References
1. Deinition
The concept of Sprachinsel is difficult to define. As Mattheier (1996: 812) points out, the
numerous attempts which have been made to devise a definition are closely connected
with certain research traditions on the one hand and with the history of language islands
on the other (see section 2). A widely accepted definition among German linguists was
suggested by Wiesinger (1983: 901), who asserts that language islands are either discrete
or areal and are relatively small, enclosed linguistic settlements situated within a rela-
tively large area where another language is used (for a similar definition, see Hutterer
1982).
Mattheier (1996), however, questions some of the criteria specified in this definition.
For example, Wiesinger’s restriction to either rural communities or miner settlements
tends to overlook the importance of urban settlements, which already existed in the
19. Discontinuous language spaces 333
past and have become more common in the modern era. Moreover, the construct of
Geschlossenheit (‘unity’) includes the notion of a linguistically and ethnically homoge-
nous area. Many settlements, however, are characterized by multiethnic constellations
and are primarily defined in terms of tightly-knit socio-communicative networks and an
awareness of ethnic difference (e.g., in Hungary).
Other definitions stress the aspects of “isolation” and “roofing” by a majority lan-
guage, e.g., Protze (1995: 55). In this definition, language islands are mainly charac-
terized by minimal contact with not only the motherland but also the surrounding speech
community. The minority language is roofed by the standard variety of the majority
language and the communities are linguistically and culturally isolated. The roofing ar-
gument, however, is not historically valid. Prior to the Second World War, a stable
diglossia existed in many German-speaking language islands throughout Eastern
Europe. This diglossia included dialectal German and Standard German; even speakers
of the majority group had a solid command of the German language (Riehl to appear;
Mattheier 1996: 814; for further definitions Földes 2006).
The difficulties in defining a Sprachinsel are primarily due to the fact that the term
cannot be readily detached from the historical-political constellations and social changes
connected with the emergence of language islands (i. e., the colonization of Eastern
Europe and the New World, cf. Mattheier 1996: 815). With the rapid change of these
constellations and conditions which took place after World War II, some of the defining
criteria became inadequate (see section 4.1). If, however, the notion Sprachinsel is not
to be considered obsolete (a suggestion posed by Földes 2006), the focus should be
placed on other, mainly sociolinguistic aspects. As Mattheier (1994: 334) suggests:
A language island is a linguistic community which develops as a result of disrupted or de-

layed linguistic cultural assimilation. Surrounded or enclosed by a linguistic and/or ethnic
dominant culture, such an island is made up of a linguistic minority that has become sepa-
rated off from its original roots; and, as a function of its unique socio-psychological disposi-
tion (i. e., its “island mentality”) is held separate and apart from the majority culture with
which it maintains tangential contact. [Translation by Iman Laversuch]
Mattheier (1994: 335) argues that a language island cannot only be defined in terms of
linguistic and dialectological criteria. The main characteristic is a “delayed assimilation”
which is based on many different factors. Chief among them is the speakers’ attitude
toward the linguistic majority. Therefore, language islands exist “rather in the minds of
speech-islanders than on the landscape” (Mattheier 1994: 106; see also Eichinger 2003).
Mattheier even goes on to assert that members of language islands are able to mark their
ethnic identity without a language of their own, but through its reflexes in vocabulary,
intonation as well as personal and place names.
As attitudinal factors are also relevant for other types of minorities, it is important
to consider the ways in which language islands differ from them. Edwards (1990) distin-
guishes between three different types: (i) minorities who are unique within one nation
(Bretons); (ii) non-unique minorities dispersed across several states (Catalans, Basques);
(iii) non-local minorities who are minorities in one setting, but a part of the majority
elsewhere. Further parameters are adjoining vs. non-adjoining and cohesive vs. non-
cohesive. According to this typology, language islands can be defined as “non-local, non-
adjoining minorities”. They have to be distinguished mainly from two other types of
minorities (cf. Riehl 2004: 55⫺57):
1. ethnic minorities without motherland (e.g., Sorbs, Ladinians or Bretons), who are
defined as unique and non-adjoining. They are old settlements that were excluded
from the nation-building processes and therefore do not have a linguistic motherland
that provides a standard variety and literary tradition. Consequently, they have to
codify their own variety as a written language (cf. Pusch 2005). By comparison, lan-
guage islands can use an external standard and may even converge toward it. They
are influenced by language developments in the motherland and by its language policy
(e.g., support of a minority school system, see Mattheier 2002: 132).
2. so-called “border minorities” (e.g., the German-speaking minorities along the Ger-
man-Romance linguistic border and the Hungarian minorities located in various
countries bordering on Hungary, Romania, Croatia). They are defined as non-local
and adjoining and have constant contact with the motherland. As a result, they can
establish communicative networks across borders.
While there is a clear difference between language islands and ethnic minorities without
linguistic motherland, the distinction between language islands and border minorities is
less clear-cut. Mattheier (1996) suggests using the concept of Sprachhalbinsel ‘language
peninsula’ for this type of minority. Moreover, the factor of “geographical isolation”,
which had been valid for centuries, is no longer crucial for non-adjoining minorities (see
section 5). At this point, another important issue in the definition of language islands
comes into play: the relationship between language and space. In this case, one has to
differentiate between “minority” and “regional” languages. Linguistic minorities can be
described in terms of ethnic and religious membership, whereas regional languages are
defined by the region in which they are spoken (cf. Wirrer 2000). Therefore, speakers of
regional languages are a part of the ethnic majority and adopt an additional regional
identity (e.g., speakers of the Occitan or Gaelic language). Inhabitants of language en-
claves usually describe themselves as constituting a distinct ethnic group, belonging to
the ethnos of the linguistic motherland. As a consequence, their ethnic origin becomes a
fixed component of the community’s name. They call themselves, for example, Ungarn-
deutsche, Rumäniendeutsche, Teuto-Brazileiros or Texas Germans. This pattern does not,
however, hold for language islands that have lost their visible connection to the
motherland. An example here would be the so-called Cimbri in Venetia (see Hornung
1994; Rowley 1996). In cases such as these, where mixed language varieties are emerging,
the distinction between language islands and ethnic minorities becomes exceptionally
fuzzy.
In conclusion, two main characteristics crystallize out of the definition criteria of
language islands: (i) the relationship to (or dependence on) a linguistic motherland. This
can be seen as a form of spatial isolation from the linguistic motherland which entails a
discontinuous language space; and (ii) the socio-psychological disposition of language
island communities or in other words their collective “awareness of being different”
(Mattheier 1996: 815).
A special situation arises when language islands find themselves within the language
space of other linguistic minorities. This, for example, is the case with the Walser colonies
in the Val’ d’Aoste region in North-West Italy. The region in question is an autonomous
French-speaking province within an Italian-speaking country (see Zürrer 1999). An even
more striking example is that of the Landler communities, an Austrian dialect enclave
within the Low German based language island of Transylvania (Schabus 1994: 1996). In
most of these cases, we find a complex polyglossic situation, where the language island
population alternates between using its enclave variety, the regional minority varieties
and the majority language.
Another special case is the so-called “dialect islands” (i. e., a dialect enclaves within a
dialect space where a different variety of the same genetic origin is spoken). Two examples
of this type are the Palatine dialect enclave located within the dialect area of Eastphalia
(Karch 1978) and the Ligurian dialect enclaves situated in Sicily (see section 3.2).
2. The history o language island research (Sprachinselorschung)

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of a Sprachinsel is by no means a typical German phe-
nomenon. The term Sprachinsel was, however, coined in the German research tradition.
It was later borrowed into English where it emerged as language enclave and language
pocket. Language island studies have remained a well-established field of research within
German dialectology, including dialect geography and areal-linguistic methods, as well
as the neogrammarian tradition (see Murray in this volume) and Kulturraumforschung
(cf. Knobloch in this volume). The latter concentrated mainly on Middle and Eastern
Europe (cf. Rosenberg 2003: 200). The concept of Sprachinsel is therefore strongly con-
nected with the German research tradition. By contrast, non-German approaches gen-
erally subsume this type of minority groups within the category “linguistic minorities”
(cf. Mattheier 1996: 812; Edwards 1990).
The notion of Sprachinsel first appeared in 1847 in order to describe a Slavonic speech
community within a German speaking area near Königsberg (Eastern Prussia). At this
time, the term Sprachinsel competed with the term Sprachkolonie (cf. Mattheier 1996:
812) which refers to the historical context in which language island phenomena were
first discussed, i. e., the colonization of the East (Ostkolonisation). Since the beginning
of the twentieth century, Sprachinsel has become more popular than the notion Sprach-
kolonie, which is still in use in the Romanophone research tradition (see Kattenbusch
1998). (For other terms such as Enklaven, Sporaden, Außensiedlungen, etc., see Geyer
1999).
The main focus of language island research was initially on the origin and history of
these enclaves, aspects of areal linguistics, processes of language merger and analysis of
the dialects used in the respective communities (see Hutterer 1982). A major objective
at that time was to describe language change. On account of their isolation from their
respective native countries, these communities were also supposed to have preserved
linguistic phenomena that had either receded or completely disappeared in the German
inland area, as Gehl (2000: 292⫺293; translation by Iman Laversuch) asserts:
The existence of language islands provide a detailed demonstration of the developmental

pathway taken by language. Similarly, language island variants often help address difficult
questions concerning the historical development of minority languages located within Ger-
many. Thanks to their uncommon resilience, these sociolinguistic communities have a strong
tendency to retain for much longer periods of time antiquated linguistic forms which were
long since lost in German minority languages, due to their own penchant for linguistic inno-
vation and change.
Studies carried out during the first period of research were conducted by German dialec-
tologists. One of the pioneers of dialectology, Andreas Schmeller, included the dialects
of language islands in Venetia (the so-called Sette communi) in his dictionary of the
Bavarian language. Research concentrated on old language islands like Transylvania,
the Zips (former Hungary) and Venetia (Italy), the first descriptions of which go back
to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (cf. Kuhn 1934). In the nineteenth century,
language islands which had developed more recently in Slovenia and Hungary/Romania
(Gottschee, Banat) became subjects of investigation; and from 1870 on, language islands
in Pennsylvania and Australia were included (see Rosenberg 2003: 200).
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in Russia, so-called Arbeits-
stellen für Sprachinselforschung were founded by, among others, Schirmunski, Dinges
and Dulson (see Berend and Jedig 1991). These research units aimed to explore the laws
governing dialect merger, the chronology of language change and dialect contact. In
addition, they were interested in identifying reasons for the emergence of new dialect
borders and the influence of the Russian language (see Berend and Jedig 1991; Domasch-
new 2000). A similar tradition, the so-called Donauschwäbische Dialektologie, was estab-
lished by Gideon Petz in Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century and was carried
on by Claus Hutterer and Karl Manherz (see Schwob 1971; Gehl 2000). Between the
World Wars, the number of studies on German language island varieties increased
rapidly ⫺ most of the research, however, was highly ideologically biased (cf. Knobloch
in this handbook, for some reasons).
Early studies tried to reconstruct the Urheimat, or origin, of the respective varieties
and considered the dialects spoken in language islands as “pure”, “uncontaminated”
and “homogenous”. Researchers of the Russian Arbeitsstellen für Sprachinselforschung,
however, found that most of the linguistic spaces under investigation not only used a
mixture of different dialects, but also developed their own koiné, especially in the so-
called “daughter” colonies of the old settlements. It is against this background that
Schirmunski (1930) introduced the discussion of “dialect levelling” (Dialektausgleich)
and the distinction between primary and secondary dialect features. Primary features
are defined as being the most salient and those which are most often avoided when
communicating with speakers of other dialects. In dialect contact, they are also the first
to disappear. By comparison, secondary features are preserved in communication among
speakers of different dialects and do not disappear in contact situations. The Schirmun-
ski distinction is somewhat problematic, given the fact that salience is not defined by
linguistic criteria, but by the self-evaluation of the speakers (see Rosenberg 2003). Some-
times speakers also retain emblematic elements to mark their distinctness (see Asfandia-
rova 1999). Moreover, if Schirmunski refers to the difference which exists between the
speaker’s “way of speaking and the norm of the written language” (Rosenberg 2005:
225), that means that the salience of features is defined with in the context of the written
code. However, at the time of dialect merger in the Russian German colonies, standard
(written) German was rarely available.
The main geographical focus of dialect-based research was on language islands in
Russia, Hungary, Romania, Northern Italy and Slovenia. These studies are mainly in-
debted to traditional dialectology research which relied on questionnaires, word-geogra-
phy and dialect atlases (e.g., Berend 1997; Naiditsch 2006; Gehl 2000; and almost 20
volumes in the series Beiträge zur Sprachinselforschung edited by Maria Hornung). How-
ever, this kind of research now faces considerable challenges given the rapid decrease of
German speakers in the island areas (see section 5). Recently, there has been an emer-
gence of studies focusing on urban vernaculars (Gadeanu 1998; Gerner, Glauninger and
Wild 2002).
As mentioned above, the paradigms of language island research are strongly con-
nected with historical developments. In the nineteenth century many language islands
were dialectal enclaves that had minimal contact with a standard variety (whether geneti-
cally related or not) and a low rate of literacy. In modern times, there has been a steady
increase not only in the accessibility of the genetically related standard (in this case
New High German), but also the contact with the surrounding majority language. This
development has led to diglossic or triglossic situations in which the majority language
has increasingly replaced Standard German as a high-prestige variety (see section 4.2).
More recent research on language islands therefore must take multiple factors into
account: linguistic and sociolinguistic changes of language island dialects; language mix-
ture and language contact with relevant surrounding and contact languages; communica-
tive structures within the island communities; and language attitudes of the speakers.
This was particularly true for language island research on German in the last decades
of the twentieth century in the United States (Louden 1994, 2003; Keel 2003), in Latin
America (Kaufmann 2004, Auer, Arnhold and Bueno-Aniola 2007) and in Australia
(Clyne 1994; Kipp 2006). More recent studies on language islands in Eastern Europe
and Upper Italy include Blankenhorn (2003), Deminger (2004), Gerner (2006), Knipf-
Komlósi (2003), Zürrer (1999) and Boas (to appear). Furthermore, new research para-
digms have also combined sociolinguistic parameters (identity) and linguistic develop-
ment features (Auer, Arnhold and Bueno-Aniola 2007; Kaufmann 2004).
Recent attempts to compare historical, linguistic and sociolinguistic developments
and language attitudes across different island constellations are Rosenberg (2003) on
Russia and Brazil, Kaufmann (1997, 2004) on Mennonite groups in the Americas (see
also Kaufmann in this volume) and Eichinger, Plewnia and Riehl (2008) on the German-
speaking islands in Middle and Eastern Europe.
In contrast to the German research tradition, studies on other non-local minorities
have not primarily focused on dialectological issues, but on language contact and socio-
linguistic issues (language maintenance and language shift). Dialectological research on
rural communities that originated in the nineteenth century (e.g., Pugliese in Crimea,
Friulian dialects in Romania, Venetian dialects in Mexico) only emerged in the 1970s
and has been more sporadic than systematic (see Corrà and Ursini 1998; Wössner 2002).
3. The history o language islands
The fact that there are German-speaking settlements in so many parts of the world
remains a unique phenomenon of this particular ethnic group. The reasons are mainly
historical: in Europe there has been nothing comparable to the German colonization of
the East. While German settlers emigrated in the Middle Ages mainly as a reaction to
overpopulation not experienced in any other European country, there was a second
major reason for modern German based emigration to Russia and Eastern Europe ⫺ a
ban imposed on the recruitment of settlers by many other European countries (Gottas
1995). Also the foundation of rural settlements overseas remains a mainly German phe-
nomenon (with the exception of Italian settlers, see below). An explanation might be
that other major European nations (e.g., France, England, Spain) were colonial powers
which had colonies at their disposal to which settlers could be sent.
Nevertheless, there are colonies all over the world. The first examples date back to
antiquity and include, for example, the Greek colonies in Asia Minor. Many settlements
have naturally disappeared over time and traces of their existence can be found sporadi-
cally in select lexemes of the majority language such as place names. Such is the case
with many medieval settlements like those of the Mozarabian Christians in Northern
Spain (see Kattenbusch 1998). Other interesting groups in the context of European mi-
gration include the Albanians who from the thirteenth century immigrated to Greece
(i. e., the so-called “Arvanites”, see Sasse 1998) and to Southern Italy (Calabria, Sicily,
cf. Breu 2005) or the Hungarians who settled in Slovakia, Romania and on the Balkans.
Moreover, there are language colonies outside Europe that meet the criteria of discontin-
uous language spaces, e.g., enclaves of Portuguese in West Africa, of French in Southern
Africa, Urdu-speaking communities among Hindi minorities in Northern India (see Ro-
senberg 2005: 222). However, as mentioned above, these communities are mainly dis-
cussed as “linguistic minorities” and there is no common research tradition comparable
to the German Sprachinselforschung (see section 2). Moreover, many of these groups
only partly meet the criteria defining language islands (e.g., they have lost contact to the
motherland and developed their own language and identity). Thus, in this survey, the
focus will be on German-speaking islands, with some supplementary examples from
Romance-speaking minorities (see section 3.2).
3.1. The history o German-speaking language islands
Aside from missionary activities or famines, the major push factors for emigration in
the Middle Ages are of social origin. The restructuring of the feudal and economic system
brought many farmers to the verge of ruin (Göllner 1979: 19⫺20). In the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, almost 400,000 settlers relocated to the east of the Elbe and Saale
Rivers, and moved on to Bohemia, Poland and the Baltic. Smaller groups settled in
Transylvania and the Zips, following the invitation of the Hungarian kings. The so-
called “colonization of the East” was fostered by lords of the manor who wanted to
take advantage of the progressive agrarian techniques and economic organization of the
German settlers. In exchange they offered certain social privileges (Gottas 1995: 16). In
Transylvania, the Siebenbürger Sachsen (Transylvanian Saxons) were even granted the
status of a nation with autonomous economic, clerical and cultural institutions. On the
contrary, medieval emigration to upper Italy (Val d’Aosta, Venetia ⫺ Sette e tredici
Communi) was only partly initiated by the bestowal of privileges by, for example, the
bishops of Vicenza. It rather consisted in a trans-border movement to the Southern edge
of the Alps. The immigrant populations mainly settled in completely isolated, unpopu-
lated regions in the alpine valleys or plateaus. Due to this extreme isolation, most of the
population, mainly females, remained monolingual in the settler variety up to the twenti-
eth century (see Hornung 1994; Pohl 2005).
A second wave of emigration started at the end of the seventeenth century and contin-
ued until the end of the nineteenth century, when many settlements were founded in
Southeastern and Eastern Europe (e.g., in Hungary, Northern Romania, the Banat and
Bačka; in Russia in the Volga region and the regions around St. Petersburg and the
Black Sea). This movement has been characterized as a population movement that was
planned and guided from above (Gottas 1995: 19). It was initiated by the Austro-Hung-
arian monarchs and the Russian empress Catherine the Great. As settlers came from
very different parts of Germany, these areas became home to a unique diversity of dia-
lects that triggered different convergence processes.
At the same time, people emigrated overseas to the Americas, Australia and South
Africa. The majority of them settled in towns and assimilated very quickly (Elitenwan-
derung and Arbeitswanderung, cf. Rosenberg 1998: 263). But there was still the so-called
Siedlungswanderung (Rosenberg 1998), as in previous centuries: In South America, set-
tlers were offered land and privileges by the big landowners, especially in Brazil and
Argentina, in order to facilitate the development of the tropical forest, the establishment
of military boundaries and the forging of ties between Europe and America. Emigration
into rural settlements in the USA was additionally motivated by the desire for religious
freedom. Such was the case, for example, of the Amish communities who moved to
Pennsylvania in 1730 (for a general overview, see Born and Dieckgießer 1989; on Latin
America, Rosenberg 1998).
Further interesting developments originated from the migration of inhabitants of lan-
guage islands to other environments. In 1877 and 1878, German settlers from the Black
Sea (especially the Mennonites) moved to Argentina. At the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, Russian Germans from the Volga region also came to Argentina and Kansas (Be-
rend 2003). Mennonites who had settled in Ukraine, first moved to Canada and then to
Mexico. This translocation was motivated by the worsening political conditions that
impeded the open expression of their religious ideas and obliged them to do military
service. These spiritual communities are of particular interest, first because of the ways
in which they have managed to maintain an archaic variety of Standard German for
liturgical purposes; and second because they have adopted elements from different con-
tact languages and have thus developed different attitudes toward the majority society
(see Kaufmann 1997, 2004).
Depending on the age of the settlement, the separation from the motherland and the
heterogeneity of linguistic varieties spoken language islands caused different diatopic
varieties to develop: from local vernaculars (colonies in Upper Italy, Slovenia) to merged
or leveled dialects (Hungarian varieties, e.g., different Donauschwäbisch dialects) to koi-
nés (Hunsrückisch in Brazil, Volga German).
3.2. Migration o Romance-origin settlers
During the Middle Ages, we find population movements in many places of the Romance
world, but primarily in Italy. People from Piedmont and Liguria moved to Southern
Italy and Sicily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and settled in dialect enclaves
among a majority which spoke a different dialect. This migration wave was triggered by
the social and economic disaster in the Ligurian hinterland on the one hand and exemp-
tions and other privileges provided by the Almerian kings on the other (see Trovato
1998: 556). As Kuhn (1934: 388) mentions, some French language islands even preceded
the German settlements in Eastern European trading towns (Bratislava, Prague etc.),
but these islands assimilated quite quickly.
A religious group of Waldensian origin which spoke Provençal varieties immigrated
to Calabria in the fourteenth century. This community was able, despite a ban imposed
by the Inquisition, to retain its language for a considerable period of time thanks to
geographical and social isolation. The Franco-Provençal language islands of Faeto and
Celle in Apulia also go back to the fourteenth century. Their specific origin is, however,
unclear (see Kattenbusch 1998: 532⫺534).
The difference between the Romance and the German migration in the Middle Ages
does not only lie in different push and pull factors, but also in the fact that all of these
settlers moved to another Romanophone region. As a result, the genetic relationship
between the minority and majority languages may have accelerated the interference or
even shifting processes. In this case, it is also difficult to differentiate between language
islands and dialect enclaves (cf. for instance the Ligurian settlers in Sicily). Exceptions
are the immigration of Romanian shepherds into the Balkan region (Kattenbusch 1998:
536) and religiously motivated immigrants such as the French Huguenots in other Euro-
pean Protestant countries (who immigrated later to the USA and South Africa). Al-
though they normally assimilated very quickly, some Huguenot communities in Ger-
many were able to preserve their language and traditions until the Prussian invasion of
1866 (Corrà and Ursini 1998: 561).
The large wave of emigration from Romance-speaking countries started at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. It especially involved movement from Southern Europe
into the Americas. The immigration to Middle and South America is comparable to the
German one: recruited by agents, settlers mainly populated rural areas and were largely
composed of people from Northern Italy (see Lo Cascio 1987; Corrà and Ursini 1998).
In Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Italians even developed a Venetian-based dialectal koiné
(Corrà and Ursini 1998). Most of these rural settlements were founded in virgin environ-
ments in complete isolation and have been able to preserve their local dialects up to
today (see Wössner 2002 on a Venetian language island in Mexico). Nevertheless, the
vast majority of migrants, especially those from the beginning of the twentieth century
on, did not settle in rural but in urban environments (see section 6).
4. The current state o language islands
4.1. Sociolinguistic perspectives
Today the original dialectal varieties spoken in the island communities are likely to
become extinct. This holds true to a great extent for the German-speaking language
islands in Eastern Europe, where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, more than
90 percent of the German-speaking population was expelled. This dramatic development
had three main consequences (see Riehl 2006):
1. Due to the emigration of German-speaking settlers and the immigration of majority
language speakers, the number of communicative contexts for second-language usage
increased, thereby facilitating language contact and code-switching.
2. Speakers from villages using different dialectal varieties came into contact, creating
new contexts of variety contact and dialect convergence.
3. The significant increase in the number of interethnic marriages in which children were
raised monolingually in the majority language and were consequently only able to
develop a passive command of the minority dialect.
In many Eastern European language islands, language use among the generations is as
follows. The oldest generation (born before 1932) has at its disposal the German dialect
and (regional) standard German as L1-system and a relative command of L2. The sec-
ond generation (born between 1932 and 1952) speaks both German dialect and the ma-
jority language as their L1, but Standard German is maintained only in rudimentary
form. The following generation (born between 1952 and 1975) uses the majority language
as its L1 and some interlanguage version of Standard German as L2. Those born after
1975, who are also majority language L1-speakers, might (depending on the respective
access at school) have a very good, sometimes near-native command of Standard Ger-
man, but only as a L2 high-prestige variety that is not usually used in in-group conversa-
tions (see Knipf-Komlosı́ 2003 and others).
The exception in the Eastern European context is Romania, where schooling in the
mother tongue was permitted despite major difficulties, during the communist regime.
Here, the dialect is being increasingly replaced by the German Standard. The reason
for this development is the balanced bilingualism (German⫺Romanian) or trilingualism
(German⫺Romanian⫺Hungarian) of the minority speakers that has caused the reduc-
tion of the complex pluriglossic system Standard German⫺Saxon dialects⫺Romanian
(⫺Hungarian) (see Rein 1999; Szabó 2000). Nevertheless, schooling in L1 and minority
rights and protection seem to guarantee language maintenance in these particular lan-
guage spaces (see below section 5).
In the language islands in Upper Italy the lack of access to Standard German or even
the complete loss of ties with the German motherland, has resulted in the near loss of
the island varieties among the younger generations. Only the Walser dialect seems to be
more vital (cf. Zürrer 1999: 2000).
Within the Anglophone context (the USA and Australia), the German language is-
lands have also become nearly extinct: the combined social and economic restructuring
of American society during the Great Depression and World War II led to a massive
rural exodus and a general breakdown of previously established communicative net-
works. As a consequence, there was accommodation to English and a gradual attrition
of the native language (Keel 2003). These developments were accelerated by anti-German
sentiments and emerging Anglo-American national identity. In Australia as early as the
1970s English replaced the German dialect as a means of in-group communication
among almost all of the speakers of the language islands, excluding of course the very
oldest members (see Clyne 1994; Kipp 2006).
Exceptions here are the various religious communities such as Amish and Mennon-
ites. These groups continue to use Standard German in their worship services and the
respective dialect varieties in everyday life. Social isolation has been crucial to maintain-
ing the minority language (“maintenance by inertia”, Louden 2003 and below). Although
all members are bilingual and English is exclusively used as the written variety and the
primary language of instruction, it is deemed unsuitable for intra-group domains. In
contrast to many other minority groups, Pennsylvania German has not only managed
to survive since the eighteenth century, due to high birth rates it is even “experiencing
dramatic growth” (Louden 2006: 105).
While the situation in Middle and South America is similar to that of North America
(with the aforementioned exception of religious groups, see Kaufmann 1997, 2004), a
somewhat different situation is found in Brazil. Here, the relative stability of the German
variety mainly in Rio Grande do Sul is due to the economic and administrative isolation
of the speakers and the extremely rural character of the German population (Damke
1997). Additionally, these colonies enjoyed a comparatively long period of revitalization
thanks to the steady influx of newcomers until 1924. Suspension of educational and
minority rights in 1940 has progressively led to the de-standardization of the standard
variety and a movement toward an acrolectal form of a supra-regional variety, the so-
called Hunsrückisch (see Auer 2005; section 4.2).
4.2. Linguistic developments
As mentioned above, one of the most frequently discussed linguistic phenomena relevant
for the development of language island varieties is linguistic convergence. There are three
main types: (i) convergence between dialects; (ii) convergence of dialects toward a (ge-
netically related) standard variety; and (iii) convergence of settler varieties toward the
surrounding majority language. While the first two types were the focus of traditional
language island research (see section 2), more recent studies have begun to concentrate
on convergence toward the contact language.
Convergence between dialects can be seen as a process of leveling. In older language
islands where there was no roofing standard, a complex struggle took place between
salient and non-salient features. According to the Schirmunski criteria, those forms more
distant from the standard sometimes were able to win out over less distant features (e.g.,
[y:] over [u:] for the standard diphthong [au] in some Mennonite varieties of the Ural).
The reason for this development is sociolinguistic in origin. Features which are more
distant are often perceived as being more authentic. Consequently, they are better suited
to serving the role of a group symbol (cf. Rosenberg 2005: 226⫺227). At the morphologi-
cal level, we can observe a different pattern of leveling. In some cases, it is the form
which simplifies the morphological system that is selected. However, in most cases, the
form that is the closest to the standard is chosen (examples from the Hunsrückisch koiné
see Auer 2005).
One of the processes involved in convergence toward the contact language is case
merger (i. e., the replacement of the dative by the accusative case) (examples from Rus-
sian German, see Berend and Riehl 2008):
(1) a. Auf den Platz sin Leit [instead of: Auf dem Platz]
‘There are people in the square.’
b. Haben wir Deutsch gesprochen mit die Mama [instead of: mit der Mama]
‘We spoke German with our Mummy.’
c. In die Felder habn se geschaffen [instead of: In den Feldern]
‘They have worked in the fields.’
While the results of many initial studies on German-American varieties (Huffines 1994;
Louden 1994; and others) seem to indicate that convergence (toward English) was highly
probable, the results of more recent investigations involving Russian German and other
Eastern European varieties (see Eichinger, Plewnia and Riehl 2008) with a rich case
system have suggested other explanations which seem far more plausible. As Rosenberg
(2005: 233) points out, case reduction in German language islands is to a great extent
internally (i. e., typologically) motivated.
A comparison made between different island varieties also reveals that ⫺ despite
variation due to geographic location, age and contact with Standard German ⫺ reduc-
tion processes follow a clear path, starting with feminine nouns and including the plural
forms in noun groups with definite articles. Subsequently, the indefinite articles, all gen-
ders and possessive pronouns are affected:
(2) Der woar bei sei Leit [instead of: seinen]

‘He visited his people.’ (Pennsylvania German, cf. Born 2003: 155)
The personal and demonstrative pronouns are retained the best and only undergo reduc-
tion in some of the American varieties:
(3) … wann ich sie Blumme bringe deet [instead of: ihr]
‘… when I would bring her some flowers’
(Pennsylvania German, cf. Huffines 1994: 51)
The comparatively high retention of case in the pronominal system is also typical of
most other Germanic languages and may be motivated, among others, by the type of
storage (full listed vs. decomposition), frequency and the degree of animacy (cf. Rosen-
berg 2005).
Other processes of convergence can be seen at the syntactic level. One phenomenon
is the deconstruction of the so-called “brace construction”. Typical for German, this
construction is marked by the finite and the infinite parts of the verb framing or encapsu-
lating other components of the clause (e.g., Hans hat heute das Haus geputzt, lit. ‘Hans
has today the house cleaned’). In language island varieties, components are often placed
after the infinite verb part (so-called “extraposition”):
(4) a. Am besten hat gesprochen die Ältste

[instead of: Am besten hat die Ältste gesprochen.]
‘The oldest one spoke best.’ (Russian German, see Berend and Riehl 2008)
b. Ohren haben gehört etwas. [instead of: (Die) Ohren haben etwas gehört.]
‘(My) ears have heard something.’
(Russian German, see Berend and Riehl 2008)
This development may be motivated by a cognitive principle. Called “the principle of

proximity”, this phenomenon was identified by Givón (1990: 970⫺971). According to
Givón, there is a general tendency to keep grammatical operators near their operands.
This principle is also evident in the fact that the relative proximity of grammatical mor-
phemes to the stem can be used to indicate conceptual scope relations. Another instance
of convergence concerns the gradual removal of verb final position in the German subor-
dinate clause. This leads to a generalization of the verb second position in the affirma-
tive clause:
(5) a. Vorher schon, weil ich hab gelernt auf Kaufmann.

[instead of: … weil ich auf Kaufmann gelernt habe.]
‘Even before, because I have been trained to be a merchant.’
(Ukrainian German, unpublished data)
b. das hilft … die Fremdsprachen viel besser zu behalten oder erlernen, dass sie
können die deutsche Sprache [instead of: … dass sie die deutsche Sprache können.]
‘That helps to keep foreign languages better in mind, so that they know the
German language’ (Hungarian German, unpublished data)
These developments are generally interpreted as being instances of simplification and

reduction (see Gilbert and Fuller 2003: 175). This is due to the destabilization of norm
certainty and norm loyalty which in turn accelerates language change (Rosenberg 2003:
217). However, there are also instances where complex structures emerge. One example
includes the grammaticalization of optional native constructions. In Pennsylvania Ger-
man, the copula ⫹ am ⫹ infinitive is used for aspect marking (marking of the pro-
gressive aspect):
(6) Er is in die Schtadt an gehe nau

‘He is going to town now.’ (Pennsylvania German, see Louden 1994: 85)
In this case, a latent semantic category (that is presently undergoing grammaticalization

in substandard varieties of German) is expanded and the optional construction becomes
grammaticalized (cf. Heine and Kuteva 2005). This process might be interpreted as being
a true instance of convergence toward the contact language.
Generally speaking, the external linguistic context has an impact on certain internal
tendencies. It accelerates language development following a particular typological direc-
tion and according to certain cognitive principles (see Riehl 2004: 95⫺96, Riehl to ap-
pear). Thus, as Clyne (1991: 179) points out:
The speech of bilinguals will diverge from that of monolinguals in the heartland of the
immigrant language not only because of the effects of the dominant language but also be-
cause in the relative isolation of the immigrant situation, changes in accordance with the
dominant typology of the language are accelerated in the language.
In this context, the lack of a roofing standard for the same diasystem is responsible not
only for the retention of archaic features, but also for the acceleration of internal change.
This process, however, need not necessarily only include simplification processes (as the
example of the aspect construction shows).
These observations seem applicable to all language contact situations. For language
island research, this commonality facilitates drawing a comparison between the island
variety with not only varieties of the so-called “motherland”, but also with other vari-
eties of language islands. Such comparisons are useful in demonstrating the interdepen-
dency which exists between the degree of transference and the amount of cultural pres-
sure. As predicted by Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 74⫺76), typological changes in
syntax and morphology only take place in language contact situations where the pressure
exerted by the majority language is comparatively high. Consequently, it is common to
find that typological changes such as the generalization of V2-position are more ad-
vanced in settings where contact with the surrounding language(s) is greater in frequency
and/or intensity. In this sense, comparative language island research would seem to be a
promising field of research which is useful for obtaining critical insights into the complex
interconnections which exist between typological, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic
aspects of language change (see Rosenberg 2003; Riehl 2004).
5. Factors determining language maintenance in

discontinuous language spaces
One of the major factors for language maintenance in the history of language islands is
the type of the settlement, e.g., closed, monolingual settlements such as the Volga Ger-
mans or the settlements in the Banat, or mixed communities as found in the Bukovina.
In settlements of the latter type, there was neither a common regional identity, nor was
there a leveling between different varieties, but rather coexistence (Protze 1995). This also
holds true for many urban settlements. Towns play an important role in the emergence of
regional standard varieties. The vernaculars in these areas gained a certain cultural pres-
tige and were also acquired by non-native speakers (e.g., the urban vernaculars of Czer-
novic and Timisoara in the nineteenth century, see Gadeanu 1998).
More recently, one major criterion for language maintenance (also mentioned by
Kloss 1966) is the number of speakers: the smaller the community, the more it is neces-
sary to speak other languages. Although language shift is fostered by multilingualism, it
is not necessarily a consequence of it. Other factors, such as language awareness can
also contribute to language retention (see Riehl 2005).
Similar importance is ascribed to the prestige of the minority language in comparison
to the surrounding majority language: Mainly in the Eastern European context, some
languages are commonly considered to be less prestigious than others (e.g., Czech and
Romanian, which have low prestige as opposed to Hungarian, which has comparatively
high prestige). Normally, the reputation of a language coincides with the social prestige
of its language communities. The change of alliances and shift in influence of a certain
group may lead to a subsequent change in prestige level. Such was the case with the
plummeting reputation of Germany after World War II.
Another factor that has to be considered is the level of institutionalization of the
minority language and its juridical status. In areas where the minority language functions
as a language of administration, it also frequently serves as the language of instruction,
public life and media. When no minority status is granted, developments such as shifts
in the local control of schools, parishes and newspapers toward more supra-regional
control (as has been seen in the USA) might also cause shifts toward the majority lan-
guage (Louden 2003: 135).
There are two other important factors to mention here: endogamy and religious com-
mitment to the language. When a high percentage of the marriages in minority communi-
ties are intra-ethnic, the language can be used in the family domain. The use of the
native language in the religious domain plays an important role, because in liturgical
contexts a standard variety will mainly be employed. Although in most language islands,
speakers will have only a passive competence in this variety, the use of the minority
language in church can also have a considerable impact on the prestige of the language.
The factors mentioned so far also apply to other types of minorities. The most crucial
factor for discontinuous language spaces is the contact with the linguistic motherland.
This contact can be established either via the settlement of new speakers from the
motherland or the relocation of young people to the motherland for education. The first
pertains not only to new urban migratory contexts, but also for language islands (e.g.,
Bukovina and the Brazilian colonies, see above); the latter is historically pertinent for
Transylvania and is relevant for more recent language islands, e.g., in South America.
In both cases, language island speakers are confronted with new developments of the
standard variety in the motherland and have a literary tradition at their disposal. Today,
contact can also be maintained by television transmitted via satellite.
Many language islands were able to survive for comparatively long periods of time
because speakers were able to use their dialect variety as a medium of communication
almost exclusively. Only a few members of the community (so-called “gate keepers”
responsible for out-group communication, Mattheier 2003: 24) had an active command
of the majority language. The increase of literacy and the introduction of compulsory
schooling eventually made it necessary, however, to acquire and use the majority stan-
dard variety. In most of the German-speaking communities, Standard German could be
used as a language of schooling until the first few decades of the twentieth century. In
this case, a stable diglossia with German dialect or regional koiné and German standard
was established. Consequently, the contact with the linguistic motherland was also very
important. Only when formal instruction in German had stopped and the second lan-
guage became important in more and more domains, did a relatively unstable triglossic
situation between German dialect, Standard German, a second language and in some
cases additional varieties or languages, emerge. As evident in Romania, the diasystem
was frequently reduced in such cases, i. e., the use of German was reduced to the stan-
dard variety only. This was true for most cases, excluding those where the dialect had a
strong in-group prestige or functioned as marker of identity (Pennsylvania Dutch, Vene-
tian dialects in Mexico, Plaudietsch varieties of Mennonites).
In conclusion, there are three types of settlements which have proved to be conducive
to language maintenance:
1. Rural, agrarian settlements that have existed in isolation over many centuries due to
geography and infrastructure (e.g., settlements in remote mountain valleys such as
the Walser in Val d’Aoste, or the Sette e tredici communi, or in isolated unpopulated
regions like the Provençal speakers in Lucania in Southern Italy and the Tyroleans
in Pozuso, Peru).
2. Rural settlements which have been isolated due to their religious beliefs (e.g., the
Waldenser population, the Amish and Mennonite communities in the Americas and
Russia).
3. Settlements which have been granted a high degree of autonomy with own admin-
istration and school system. In these cases, speakers have had access to a standard
variety of their language of origin and were able to use it in many different domains
(e.g., German-speaking communities in Transylvania; settlers of the Volga region be-
fore 1941; German-speaking communities in Rio Grande do Sul).
The first two situations coincide with factors already mentioned by Kloss (1966): rural
isolation, endogamy, limited social and demographic mobility. When these conditions
changed, some effort was needed to maintain the language further (i. e., scholastic educa-
tion and institutional support by clubs, religious organizations and media).
However, all these efforts failed if the speakers themselves lacked the socio-psycho-
logical predisposition to maintain their “otherness” and a positive attitude toward their
native language. In such cases, it is important to take into account the kind of variety
speakers consider to be their “language”. When dialectal varieties are not roofed by a
standard vernacular, the restricted communication radius and a negative attitude of the
majority group toward dialects might affect the speakers’ attitude toward the minority
language. Exceptions are those religious groups that define themselves through their
outsider status.
6. Other types o discontinuous language spaces

As we have seen, the factors involved in language maintenance of language islands are
mostly defined by the relative isolation of the group over an extended period of time.
Historically, these isolated groups have lived in rural settlements that had little or no
access to higher education and the accompanying institutional use of a high-prestige
variety (excluding that is the formal language used for religious purposes and local ad-
ministration).
Changes in immigration patterns from the nineteenth century onward stimulate the
question whether the new emerging urban settlements meet the criteria of language is-
lands, especially the criterion of delayed assimilation (Mattheier 1994, see section 1).
Historically, this can be said of urban ghettos in the Americas (e.g., Little Italies, s.
Corrà and Ursini 1998: 571⫺573) and currently for Turkish-speaking communities that
concentrate in certain quarters of Middle-European cities (Brussels, Amsterdam, Ham-
burg, Berlin). Such speech communities to a great extent follow the life circle paradigm
of language islands as suggested by Mattheier (2003). This paradigm predicts criteria
that are valid for language maintenance in the second generation: closed networks, en-
dogamy, productive exchange with the motherland via newcomers who join the com-
munity, long visits in the motherland during the holidays, the presence of well-established
media (newspapers, television, broadcasting), most of which apply to urban settlements
as well, especially to the Turkish-speaking community. Despite its relatively low reputa-
tion among majority language speakers, the Turkish language has a conspicuous covert
prestige among native speakers and other migrant groups (see Dirim and Auer 2004, and
for more details, Krefeld in this volume). Moreover, as there is no institutionalization of
the minority language, most second and third generation speakers have no command of
a written variety. This development is comparable to the loss of a standard roof and the
use of dialectal or regional varieties in language island settings. In addition, we also can
observe convergence processes toward the German language (cf. Rehbein 2001; Rehbein
and Karakoç 2004). Taking all this into account, it could be of considerable interest to
apply methods of Sprachinsel research on this kind of urban settlements as well.
7. Conclusion
Discontinuous language spaces are ⫺ despite the obsolescence of the metaphor Sprach-
inseln ⫺ still an interesting field of research. The most important criteria in defining
Sprachinsel involve the relationship of the speakers toward their linguistic motherland
and its standard variety and the awareness of ethnic difference among the minority
group.
In the first case, seen from a linguistic point of view, the typological development of
a particular language can be observed under different circumstances. In the second case,
observed from a sociolinguistic point of view, it is possible to explore the impact of
language and space on language attitude and ethnic identity.
Modern language island research has to adopt general methods of other minority
research traditions. Interesting insights could be gained not only by comparing German
language islands in different constellations, but also by comparing them to minority
islands of different linguistic origins. Furthermore, as most of the older language islands
are facing an imminent death (see Mattheier 2003), new emerging communities such as
urban settlements should be included in research paradigms of discontinuous language
spaces.
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20. Linguistic stability in a language space 355
20. Linguistic stability in a language space

1. Linguistic stability: Some preliminary considerations
2. Stability in European languages
3. Conclusions
4. References
1. Linguistic stability: Some preliminary considerations

In general, linguistic stability tends to be(come) a more and more marked situation in
Europe. That this is not merely an impression becomes clear when we consider a number
of important recent publications on language change, such as Auer, Hinskens and Mat-
theier (1997), Kallen, Hinskens and Taeldeman (2000), Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill
(2005), Delbecque, van der Auwera and Geeraerts (2005) and Hinskens (2006). All these
books report on the results of recent conferences in which linguistic variation, as an
instantaneous reflection of language change (and, more particularly, of processes of con-
vergence and divergence) formed the central theme. Panta rhei!
It is not difficult to indicate the main sources of the increasing marginalization of
linguistic stability: factors such as an immense geographical and social mobility, the ever
growing impact of the mass media, a high level of education and the overall informaliza-
tion of public life have brought about spectacular shifts in the European dialect-standard
language constellations (see Auer 2005). More particularly, almost everywhere in Europe,
these changes have resulted in the replacement of older, relatively stable situations of
diglossia (in which the standard languages and the dialects were at a considerable struc-
tural distance and displayed an almost complementary functionality) by diaglossic con-
stellations, which are mainly characterized by verbal continua from dialect (henceforth:
DIA) to standard (henceforth: SL) and hence by the development of intermediate vari-
eties with overlapping functions (type C in Auer’s typology).
Linguistic (in)stability should be dealt with from different angles. I distinguish two
distinct dichotomies: (1) functional vs. structural (in)stability and (2) horizontal vs. verti-
cal (in)stability.
⫺ Functional stability: in this situation the functions of a variety remain stable through-
out a certain period.
⫺ Structural stability: by this we mean that no structural changes take place within the
linguistic system.
⫺ Horizontal stability: this implies that there is stability among the varieties of the same
horizontal layer on the dialect⫺standard dimension (e.g., no shifts or leveling proc-
esses among the dialects of the same region).
⫺ Vertical stability: there are no changes in the place that linguistic elements occupy on
the vertical dialect⫺standard axis.
We may expect that these types of (in)stability will interact in many ways, depending on
a number of intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors. Exploring the huge amount of
literature on linguistic (in)stability, we find that these factors and their impact may differ
from variety to variety (depending on their place on the vertical dialect⫺standard axis).
For this reason we have decided to organize our exploration of linguistic (in)stability by
vertical kind of linguistic variety (see section 2): 2.1 Stability in standard varieties; 2.2
Stability in dialects; 2.3 Stability in intermediate varieties.
In every subsection a number of hypotheses will be formulated and evaluated against
linguistic facts and situations from across Europe. Most attention, however, will be paid
to the linguistic community where I live and which I have studied in depth for a number
of decades, viz. Dutch-speaking Belgium (Flanders).
2. Stability in European languages
2.1. Stability in standard varieties
In general, and certainly with respect to diaglossic language communities (type C in the
typology of Auer 2005), we may hypothesize that spoken standard varieties are subject
to loss of homogeneity and structural stability. Everywhere it is possible to observe an
increase of variation as a reflection of ongoing processes of change. In order to find out
which factors promote or reduce stability in standard varieties, we will compare the two
national standard varieties of Dutch: the northern or Netherlandic one and the southern
or Flemish one. Especially in oral usage, standard Flemish Dutch is (much) more stable
and displays less variation than standard Netherlandic Dutch. In the domain of phonol-
ogy, this has been convincingly demonstrated by Van de Velde (1996): whereas pronunci-
ation in standard Flemish Dutch remained quite stable during the period between 1935
and 1990, the northern standard was subject to dramatic phonological changes (e.g.,
devoicing of word-initial fricatives, development of a retroflex postvocalic r (the so-
called Gooise r), lowering of the diphthongs ei, ui and ou, diphthongization of the long
mid vowels ee, eu and oo, etc.).
In my view, there are at least four factors that may explain this diverging development
in the two national standard language (SL) varieties.
1. In Flanders the oral usage of the SL has remained (even up to the present day) a
kind of a privilege of a cultural elite (see also Willemyns 2003: 299⫺338). This is
mainly due to the fact that in Flanders the standardization process started relatively
late (the end of the nineteenth century). Before that (and even up until the 1930s)
French functioned as the (exoglossic) SL of the economic, social and cultural elite.
Moreover, standardization in Flanders was not the result of a real process but a
matter of imposition. After a fierce ideological struggle between the “particularists”
(who aimed at creating a Flemish standard) and the “Groot-Nederlanders” (who
wanted to adopt the SL-norm from the Netherlands in order to erect a strong barrier
against French), the latter group won and started imposing (to a certain extent) the
northern SL, which differed greatly both structurally and psychologically from the
Flemish regiolects and dialects. This is the main reason why this Netherlandic norm
never reached the lower social strata of the Flemish community. In the Netherlands
on the other hand, larger and more diverse segments of the population use the SL
daily and in a wider variety of situations. This even started a process of destandardi-
zation to the extent that Stroop (1998) even in the title of his book referred to it as
“the decline of the standard language”. This leads us to the first hypothesis
20. Linguistic stability 357
(I) If a variety (also a standard variety) obtains a symbolic value for a specific
group (in the social and/or geographical and/or ethnic sense), variation will tend
to be more limited.
To put it differently: if more people with different social, regional or ethnic profiles
use the SL, an increase of variation and change is proportionally more likely.
2. In the Netherlands, the intermediate (substandard) varieties are structurally much
closer to the SL than in Flanders (see for instance Geeraerts 1999). This also applies
to the dialects, but here we should add that in both areas the upward processes of
dialect and regiolect leveling do not take place at the same speed. In both the Nether-
lands (see for instance Hagen 1990) and in Flanders (see Willemyns 1997) we have to
make a distinction between (relatively) central and (relatively) peripheral areas: in the
central areas the leveling towards the SL has already progressed (much) further than
in the peripheral ones. Table 20.1 illustrates the situation. Observations such as these
lead us to a second hypothesis:
(II) If the structural distance between the SL and the intermediate/substandard vari-
eties is smaller, an upward transfer of [⫺SL] elements is proportionally easier
and, hence, the SL will be less stable.
Tab. 20.1: Central and peripheral zones in the Dutch language area
central peripheral
Netherlands the ‘Randstad’ northeast
(Amsterdam, The Hague) southeast
Flanders Brabant Limburg (to the east)
(including Antwerp) West Flanders (to the west)
3. In the Netherlands, there is more functional overlap of standard and nonstandard

varieties than in Flanders. In the former area, speakers switch from one variety (SL)
to the other (substandard) more often. In Flanders, there is a stronger tendency to
restrict the use of SL to formal situations, whereas in (relatively) informal situations
a “lower” variety will be used: an intermediate variety (called tussentaal) by younger
Flemings and dialect or regiolect by older ones. Normally speaking, younger Flemings
should be able to switch to SL rather easily (but they refuse to do so, unless the
situation is very formal); among older Flemings (especially those who do not belong
to the cultural “elite”) the (very) restricted use of SL is mainly due to a limited com-
mand of this variety. However this may be, in Flanders there is less functional overlap
of [⫹SL] and [⫺SL] varieties. This results in a third hypothesis:
(III) If [⫹SL] and [⫺SL] varieties display more functional overlap, the standard vari-
ety will be less stable.
4. In Flanders the normative control of the SL has always been much stronger than in
the Netherlands. Whereas there is no prescriptive authority in the Netherlands, several
Flemish institutions have taken on a normative task. For example, there is a corps of
language advisors in the government of the Flemish community in Belgium, and an
expert in Dutch monitors correct usage of the standard variety at the official broad-
casting station (the VRT). This more rigid normative control in Flanders obviously
has its roots in linguistic history: it can be related to the exoglossic threat of French
until the late 1930s and the fact that an imposed standard had to be spread through-
out the Flemish community (which was considered a social duty).These observations
engender a fourth hypothesis with respect to the (in)stability of standard varieties.
(IV) If there is stronger normative control of the SL, this variety will be more stable
and homogeneous.
If we broaden our horizon to other language areas in Europe (see Auer 2005 for an
interesting synopsis), we can conclude that the Flemish situation (with a rather high
degree of stability) is the more marked one. The four factors which we discussed in the
preceding paragraphs and which in our view account for the relative stability of the SL
in Flanders, do not seem to cooperate so strongly and in such a combined way anywhere
else. Surveying the wealth of relevant reports (especially the books referred to in the first
paragraph of this article), we can state that: (1) in most language areas (in Europe) the
SL has already percolated further; (2) on average, the structural distance between [⫹SL]
and [⫺SL] varieties has become smaller; (3) there is more functional overlap between
[⫹SL] and [⫺SL] varieties; and (4) the normative control of the Flemish type is becoming
something of an anachronism, even in countries such as France, Spain and Sweden,
which have a language academy. There is a more tolerant attitude towards variation in
standard and substandard varieties everywhere.
2.2. Stability in dialects
On the basis of the literature on processes of language change in almost all of the linguis-
tic communities of Europe (see for example Auer 2005 on the shifts in Europe’s stan-
dard⫺dialect constellations), we may say that the local basilects are or will be the big
victims or losers of changes in progress. Even in a “dialect paradise” such as the Ger-
man-speaking part of Switzerland, there are recent reports on dialect leveling (see, for
example, Christen 1998). Dialects everywhere are liable to two kinds of leveling proc-
esses, although their speed and intensity may differ from region to region. Eventually
these processes will result in the (gradual) loss of the basilects. First of all, there is
horizontal dialect leveling. This means that dialect A loses features by borrowing the
corresponding features from dialect B. Second, vertical dialect leveling may take place
as well: in this case dialects lose features by the downward infiltration of features from
a “higher” variety. Both leveling processes may result in convergence in the sense that
they reduce structural differences within the verbal repertoire of a language.
There are lots of reports on dialect leveling and the effects on the (in)stability of
dialects and dialect features (see for example Auer 1998; Bellman 1997; Berruto 2005;
Hinskens 1998; Hoppenbrouwers 1990; Kerswill 2003; Pedersen 2005; Thelander 1980;
Tsiplakou et al. 2006; Villena Ponsoda 1996).
Time and time again, the same observations can be made: (1) one dialect is more
resistant to both kinds of leveling processes than another; (2) one dialect feature is more
resistant to change by leveling than another; (3) stability of a dialect (feature) is increas-
ingly becoming a marked phenomenon.
2.2.1. Re (1): Dialect A vs. dialect B
Many reports on dialect leveling and (in)stability show that the degree of stability of a
dialect may vary considerably for each language area, but also ⫺ within the same lan-
guage area ⫺ from region to region. Whereas the Swedish and the Danish dialects, for
example, are subject to spectacular leveling processes (see for instance Thelander 1980;
Kristensen and Thelander 1984 for Sweden, and Pedersen 2005 for Denmark), the dia-
lects of the German-speaking part of Switzerland display a relative stability (see for
example Haas 1992), which only recently has started to break down (cf. Christen 1998
and Siebenhaar 2000). In the Netherlands, the situation tends to resemble the Scandina-
vian rather than the Swiss German one (see for example Hoppenbrouwers 1990 and
Hagen 1991), although Willemyns (1997) correctly points out that there are considerable
differences with respect to leveling processes in the more “central” and in the more
“peripheral” dialects. In the more “peripheral” regions, the structural distance to the SL
is bigger but leveling proceeds along two “lines”: leveling towards the SL and leveling
by the development of regional koinés (see Hinskens 1993 for a transparent description
of the two co-occurring types of leveling in southeast Limburg).
In Flanders, too, the dialects display quite different degrees of stability, but here the
difference between (relatively) “central” versus (relatively) “peripheral” regions is less
relevant. I shall illustrate this on the basis of three dialect groups: the Brabantine, the
East Flemish and the West Flemish ones (see Map 20.1 for the geographical situation of
the three groups).
Among these three groups, the West Flemish dialects display the highest degree of
stability (see for example Vandekerckhove 1993), although there are recent reports on
processes of horizontal leveling (cf. Vandekerckhove 2002). These may result in internal/
inward regional koinéization, but also in external/outward leveling, in the sense that
traditional dialect variation, at least partially, is eliminated and replaced by borrowing
some features from the Brabantine dialect, which in Flanders functions as a kind of
“superdialect” (see section 2.2.1.3 for this notion).
The Brabantine dialects (and more particularly the Antwerp dialect) and the East
Flemish dialects are to a much higher degree subject to several kinds of leveling proc-
esses. Yet there are also remarkable differences between the two regions: whereas in the
Map 20.1: Main dialect areas in Dutch-speaking Belgium

province of Antwerp the leveling processes are almost exclusively of the horizontal kind
(leveling towards the urban Antwerp dialect), the East Flemish dialects are subject to
vertical (i. e., towards the SL) as well as horizontal leveling (i. e., reduction of the internal
variation by leveling out of local phenomena while elements of the Brabantine/Antwerp
“superdialect” are adopted). We have now reached the point at which we have to raise
the question of which factors trigger the different degrees of (in)stability among dialects.
In my view, at least three factors (which may interact to a considerable extent) are of
crucial importance in this respect. These will be discussed in the next subsections.
2.2.1.1. The unctional strength o (a group o) dialects

Both the Swiss German and the West Flemish dialects still possess a very strong func-
tionality. Dialect is still the medium of primary socialization and dialect is still spoken
in all relatively less formal situations. In order to compare the functional strength of the
West Flemish and the East Flemish dialects, I will mainly refer to two Master’s theses
from the University of Ghent (prepared under my supervision): Strijkers (1995) and
Sabbe (2005). Both (former) students carried out similar research projects in two com-
parable places, viz. in Melle (a suburban residential location near Ghent in East Flanders
with 10,000 inhabitants) and Zedelgem (a similar kind of place near Bruges in West
Flanders, 8,400 inhabitants), respectively. See Table 20.2.
Tab. 20.2: The use of dialect in two suburban Flemish places

Melle Zedelgem
Average functionality of dialect in ten less formal situations 58,5 % 80,2 %
Use of dialect among parents and children 21,4 % 75,0 %
It is clear that in Zedelgem (and in West Flanders in general) the local dialect is still
transmitted to most children and that the entire local community still uses DIA in almost
all less formal situations. In Melle (and in fact in the entire East Flemish dialect area),
the local dialect has lost much of its functionality. On the basis of several other East
Flemish Master’s theses (Jacobs 1990; Dermaut 1999; De Vogelaer 1999; Van Lerberghe
1999; Coessens 1999; De Bruycker 2001) we may conclude that in East Flanders barely
fifteen percent of the children are still brought up in dialect. In West Flanders this
number is at least four times as high.
Keeping this in mind we formulate our first proposition: dialects with a strong func-
tionality are more likely to display a high(er) degree of stability.
2.2.1.2. The symbolic value o a dialect

In regions and places where the local dialect still has a high symbolic value (i. e., where
it still functions as a marker of local or regional identity), DIA is more likely to maintain
a high degree of stability. In this case the local or regional dialect may be(come) the
medium for manifesting his or her “Ortsloyalität” for a speaker (see Mattheier 1985 for
this notion). To a very high degree, this is still the case in West Flanders and (the prov-
ince of) Antwerp, but much less in East Flanders. It is not an accident that in the latter
area leveling processes often result in vertical leveling (in the direction of the SL). In
Antwerp, horizontal leveling towards a regional koiné is much more likely.
In my own research on the (in)stability of the Flemish dialect landscape (see Taelde-
man 1986, 2000 and 2006), I systematically distinguished between so-called “central
areas” (German: Kerngebiete) and transitional zones (at the border of two central areas).
Areas of the second type are characterized by an intensive spectrum of local variation
(in the structural sense), rather abrupt transitions, a relatively high degree of awareness
of the spatial oppositions and a strong association of a particular DIA-variety with a
particular place. In such areas it is quite possible that the local dialect becomes the
favored medium with which to express one’s “Ortsloyalität”. This may have a stabilizing
effect and may even lead to the polarization of dialect oppositions. We now formulate
our second proposition: If a regional or local dialect becomes a marker of membership of
the local community (“Ortsangehörigkeit”), the chance of relative stability will become
higher.
2.2.1.3. The social-economic-cultural basis o a dialect (group)

It seems quite logical that dialects of regions with a strong social, economic, or cultural
basis are more resistant to leveling processes from outside, both horizontal (proceeding
from other dialects) and vertical (proceeding from “higher” varieties). It is much more
probable that they will play an agentive part on both axes: they may be the innovators
of horizontal leveling towards dialects of regions with a weaker social-economic and
cultural basis, and they may also pass on particular features to “higher” varieties. This
was, for example, the case of Paris and the Île-de-France in France, the London area in
England, Copenhagen in Denmark (see Pedersen 2005), the Stockholm area in Sweden
(also Pederson 2005), Sofia in Bulgaria (see Videnov 1998), the “Randstad” region in
the Netherlands (see for example Hagen 1991) and in recent times the city of Luxemburg
in the Grand Duchy (cf. Gilles 2000). In more extreme cases, such regions or cities may
even have a destabilizing effect on existing SL varieties (i. e., destandardization).
In Flanders, Brabant (and more particularly the city of Antwerp and its immediate
surroundings) forms the region with the strongest socioeconomic and cultural position.
The urban area of Antwerp has some 650,000 inhabitants. Its harbor district is the eco-
nomical heart of Flanders and the city functions as the cultural capital of Flanders.
Antwerp is also the trendsetter in political developments. The Antwerp dialect hardly
ever plays a recipient role, not even vis-à-vis the standard variety of Belgian Dutch. It
takes a dominant position in the formation of new Flemish intermediate varieties (see
also below, section 2.3.) and is the epicenter of considerable horizontal dialect leveling
(not only in the province of Antwerp, but also elsewhere in Flanders, see above). In this
context I refer to the gradual replacement (in the “Kempen” region) of the long mid
vowels [ε:] and [œ:] (the equivalents of Standard Dutch ei/ij and ui) by the “heavy”
diphthongs of the Antwerp city dialect (e.g., [aes] ⫽ ijs ‘ice’ and [c.es] ⫽ huis ‘house’).
It is fascinating to compare the role of the Antwerp city dialect with that of the
dialects of the capitals of the old County of Flanders: Ghent (in East Flanders) and
Bruges (in West Flanders). Ghent (225,000 inhabitants) is Flanders’ second largest city
and occupies a strong industrial and cultural position, but in general its socioeconomic
strength is rather well balanced with the rest of the province. Its dialect has remained
quite vital within the city boundaries, but, unlike Antwerp and the Antwerp dialect, it
exports very few of its urban features to the rest of the East Flemish dialect area. In fact
it holds a very insular position in the East Flemish dialect landscape. This insular posi-
tion is so strong that Wondelgem, a suburban district which was integrated into the
Ghent conurbation in the 1950s, only took over the city dialect features for which the
Ghent dialect is closer to the SL (see Oosterlinck 1992). So the changes in the (more
rural) Wondelgem dialect (and in the other East Flemish dialects outside Ghent) must
be attributed to convergence to the Belgian Dutch SL or to a Flemish intermediate
variety (so-called tussentaal) with Brabantine characteristics, much more than to the
influence of the Ghent city dialect (although the latter variety is a bit more resistant to
influence of the SL).
Bruges (110,000 inhabitants) is now a smaller regional centre, whose major asset is
its great attraction to tourists. The town’s socioeconomic impact has become very limited
since all industrial activities have been transferred to zones outside the town and espe-
cially to the port of Zeebrugge. The typical features of the traditional city dialect (e.g.,
diphthongization of long mid ee, eu and oo J eei, eui and oou) are being leveled out
(even within the city walls) in the direction of a general rural West Flemish koiné (bear-
ing witness to horizontal leveling from outside).
Observations of this kind generate a third thesis: the stronger the social/economic/
cultural basis of a place or a region, the more resistant the related dialect will be against
leveling processes from outside. It will develop a considerable degree of “agentivity”: it
will impose its characteristics horizontally (i. e., in dialect leveling) and even vertically
(by contributing to the creation of intermediate varieties (cf. the role of Antwerp in
Flanders) and even sometimes in destandardization processes).
2.2.2. Re (2): Dialect eature a vs. dialect eature b
Much recent variationist research focuses on the fact that within a particular dialect
(area) one feature can display a (much) higher degree of stability than others. In the
relevant literature we see three important lines of investigation that may shed light on
this phenomenon. These will be discussed in the following three paragraphs.
2.2.2.1. Primary vs. secondary vs. tertiary DIA-eatures

In his (now famous) article on German Siedlungsmundarten ‘settlement dialects’ in the
Soviet Union, Schirmunski (1930) made a distinction between dialect features that are
quite liable to loss (which he called “primary”) and dialect features that more strongly
resist any kind of accommodation (so-called “secondary” features). In fact, he consid-
ered these two types as conglomerates of characteristics. The so-called “primary” fea-
tures are characterized by (1) a limited spatial distribution, (2) a remarkable structural
distance to the competing elements and (hence) (3) a high degree of salience and aware-
ness. Schirmunski concluded that primary features are (much) more liable to change
than secondary ones. More than fifty years later, a new generation of variation linguists
rediscovered this issue and confronted Schirmunski’s insights with contemporary linguis-
tic facts. Thelander (1982) and Hinskens (1986 and 1993) offered convincing evidence
for the proposition that DIA-features with a small-scale spatial diffusion are more liable
to change than features with a wide diffusion. In this context, we should also mention
Trudgill (1986) because of his introduction of the notion of “salience” and the discussion
this aroused (see Hinskens, Auer and Kerswill 2005: 43⫺45). In an article on this matter
(Taeldeman 2006), which was based on observations in the Flemish dialect landscape, I
tried to extend and refine Schirmunski’s basic proposal in two ways: (1) next to “pri-
Tab. 20.3: Characteristics of tertiary, secondary and primary features

TERTIARY (accent) SECONDARY PRIMARY
⫺ a relatively big area ⫺ intermediate ⫺ a relatively small area
⫺ gradual transitions ⫺ intermediate ⫺ sharp transitions
⫺ very stable ⫺ changes are possible ⫺ strong liability to change
⫺ if any changes, then very ⫺ changes are more gradual ⫺ changes are absolute in all
slowly, gradually in all in nature respects (distance may be big,
respects (distance, lexically, no intermediate forms)
intermediate forms)
⫺ a very low degree of ⫺ an intermediate degree of ⫺ a very high degree of
awareness (if any) awareness awareness
⫺ no attitudinal engagement ⫺ no attitudinal engagement ⫺ a high attitudinal markedness
with respect to the home with respect to the home
form form
⫺ no Ortsloyalität ⫺ (almost) no Ortsloyalität ⫺ high (chance of) Ortsloyalität
B B B
difficult to suppress not difficult to suppress easy to suppress
mary” and “secondary” features, I also distinguished “tertiary” DIA-features. Features

of the latter type constitute what is commonly called a “regional accent” (cf. Walsh and
Diller 1981, “low order processes such as pronunciation [which, J. T.] are dependent on
the early maturing and less adaptive macro-neural circuits, which make a foreign accent
[e.g., a standard accent, J. T.] difficult to overcome after childhood)”; (2) for the three
types I designed a more extended conglomerate of characteristics. See Table 20.3 (taken
from Taeldeman 2006: 247).
From this table we can draw some conclusions with respect to the degree of stability
of DIA-features:
1. Tertiary features are very difficult to suppress and are as such marked by a high
degree of stability. Normally speaking, they will also be transferred to “higher” vari-
eties (intermediate, substandard or even standard, see, e.g., Rys and Taeldeman 2007).
2. Secondary features are not difficult to suppress; hence their liability to change de-
pends on a variety of mainly extralinguistic factors. Usually they will not be transfer-
red to “higher” varieties.
3. Primary features are easy to suppress, but whether or not they are suppressed depends
mainly on socio-psychological factors: in case of strong external pressure or a negative
attitude they may or will disappear quickly (cf. Schirmunski 1930), but in case of a
positive attitude they are very likely to survive (but will, normally, not be transferred
to “higher” varieties).
Especially when a primary feature becomes strongly associated with Ortsloyalität, it may
result in polarization (the central theme in Taeldeman 2000 and 2006). When a dialect
opposition is polarized, the following four phenomena co-occur:
1. Polarization and its spatial correlate, i. e., an abrupt transition between dialects, go
hand in hand with at least two other polarization phenomena on the linguistic level:
a. the linguistic distance (between two opposing features) tends to be either stabilized
or maximized and no intermediate (compromise) forms arise;
b. the linguistic scope (i. e., the linguistic material that takes part in the opposition)
also tends to be maximized, so no exceptions and no lexical diffusion would be ex-
pected.
2. On the spatial level, at least one of the participating variants has a small-scale diffu-
sion.
3. On the mental level, there is a high degree of awareness of the opposition.
4. On the socio-psychological level, people take a strong attitudinal position towards
the variant of their homeplace. The positive association of one or more linguistic
forms with the home location may become so strong that a kind of “Ortsloyalität”
may maintain the opposition (at least over a certain period).
I admit that all the clear cases of polarization that I discovered in the Flemish dialect
landscape are situated in relatively rural areas, where the overall conditions for a linguis-
tic panta rhei (see the first paragraph of section 1) are not adequately fulfilled.
As a kind of illustration, let me briefly outline a remarkable case of polarization in
Flanders, and more particularly in the transition zone between the Brabantine and the
East Flemish dialect area (see Map 20.2 for a more detailed localization).
Map 20.2: Short front vowels in the Flemish and Brabantine dialects
In this transition zone, there are two villages, Vlekkem (300 inhabitants, Vl on Map
20.2) and Ottergem (500 inhabitants, Ot on Map 20.2), which are not more than two
kilometers apart. One of the “deep” phonological oppositions between the East Flemish
and the Brabantine dialects relates to the aperture of the short front vowels: these are
much higher on the Brabantine side than in the old County of Flanders (to the west).
Within the Flemish area, however, the short front vowels have their most open realiza-
tion in Vlekkem and a few neighboring East Flemish settlements (including the small
town of Wetteren): so [vis] ‘fish’ and [pyt] ‘pit’ in the Brabantine dialect of Ottergem
contrast with [ves] and [pœt] in Vlekkem. In most of this transition zone, the transition
is more gradual (with intermediate forms such as [ves] and [pøt]), but in and around the
two villages mentioned the phonetic distance is extremely large. Precisely at this point
there are five already mentioned dimensions of polarization: an abrupt (spatial) transi-
tion, extreme phonetic contrasts, no exceptions, an extremely high degree of awareness
and of “Ortsloyalität”.
2.2.2.2. Structural stability and structural embedding

There are many reports on the fact that the (degree of) stability of DIA features strongly
correlates with (and depends on) the degree of (structural) embedding within the linguis-
tic system. To a lesser degree, this is true for varieties which are also written, since written
(SL) varieties have a strong conservative effect on their spoken equivalent. Dialects only
make use of spoken registers and in the absence of a socially imposed norm they are
more open to natural changes that act on “structural imbalances in the language system”
(Van Marle 1997: 24). Van Marle quite clearly demonstrated that in (the Dutch) dialects
exceptions in the mainly rule-governed components (syntax, morphology and postlexical
phonology) are the first candidates to undergo “regularization processes” (mainly by
analogy). Most of his examples are taken from the morphological component and related
domains (morphophonology and morphosyntax) of the Dutch dialects. For example, he
points out that verb paradigms which display (among other things) vowel alternation,
are “regularized” much more rapidly in the dialects than in the SL (e.g., in some modal
auxiliaries: standard ik mag ⫺ wij mogen becomes dialect ik mag ⫺ wij magge ‘I am ⫺
we are allowed’). The same applies to the so-called “strong” verbs (e.g., ik las J ik leesde
‘I read (past)’, ik ving J ik vangde ‘I caught’). With respect to the latter case, I can add
an interesting observation for the Flemish dialects: in this area this tendency is by far
the strongest in the East Flemish dialects (where forms such as ik leesde ‘I read’, ik
slaapte ‘I slept’, ik vergeette ‘I forgot’, ik zwemde ‘I swam’ and ik zoekte ‘I sought’ occur
very frequently), which is, not by accident, the dialect group with the weakest functional
strength (see section 2.2.1.1). Another example from Van Marle (1997) deals with regu-
larization processes in the system of the personal pronouns and more particularly with
the tendency (at least in the plural) to equate the subject forms and the object forms,
see Table 20.4.
In general, we can say that linguistic elements which are rule-governed to a high
degree also display a high degree of stability. This became very clear to me when I
studied the phonology of my own dialect (the dialect of Kleit, a village between Bruges
and Ghent): postlexical processes appeared to be much more stable than lexical phono-
logical aspects (see Taeldeman 1993). In this perspective I also refer to some very interest-
ing findings by Rys (2007), who investigated the acquisition of phonological aspects of
a dialect by children and adolescents who had not been brought up in that dialect (at
Tab. 20.4: Personal pronouns in standard Dutch and in Netherlandic dialects

Subject form(s) Object form(s)
Standard 1st person wij, we ons
2nd person jullie jullie
3rd person zij, ze hun, hen
Dialect 1st person ons ons
2nd person jullie jullie
3rd person hun hun
home they spoke a “higher” variety of Belgian Dutch). One of her findings was that, on
average, rule-governed aspects of this dialect (as a second variety) were acquired better
than lexically determined elements. I presume that the same speakers, if they are con-
fronted less intensively with this dialect at some later stage, will better retain the rule-
governed aspects of the dialect. In connection with this, the notion of “rule-governed”-
ness deserves some refinement: rules have a context and one context may be more com-
plex than the other. In general, we may state that linguistic elements which are governed
by a rule with a relatively simple context are more stable than elements which are gener-
ated by rules with a more complex context. In the latter case, language change by rule
simplification is all but implausible (see, for instance, Taeldeman 2003 for several exam-
ples in the phonology of the Flemish dialects). Yet, we should remain cautious with
respect to this. In the Flemish dialects I discovered a number of morphophonological
rules with complex conditions which nevertheless displayed a remarkable degree of sta-
bility. I shall briefly discuss one example. In the Flemish dialects, adnominal words
(articles, demonstrative and possessive pronouns and adjectives) end in -en before mascu-
line nouns, but the inflectional -n only surfaces if the next word starts with a vowel, t-,
d- or b- (see De Wulf and Taeldeman 2001 for more details). This is not an “elegant”
rule since t/d/b do not constitute a natural class. However, t/d/p/b form the natural class
of anterior stops, t/d form the natural class of coronal stops and d/b constitute the
natural class of voiced anterior stops. One would expect that rule (context) simplification
might take place, either to t/d/p/b, to t/d or to d/b. In reality, however, the unnatural
condition holds out, across both space (cf. De Wulf and Taeldeman 2001) and time. The
oldest dialect inquiry in Flanders and large parts of the Netherlands dates from the
1880s. In this material we also found the same unnatural context. The big problem with
such regularization or simplification processes is that it is impossible to predict whether
they will take place and, if they do, where and when this will happen. One factor seems
to have universal validity: a (very) high frequency (both with respect to token frequency
and type frequency) may protect irregularities or structural imbalances against regular-
ization for quite some time (consider for example the paradigms of ‘to be’, ‘to have’ and
‘to go’, which in many languages even display suppletion).
2.2.2.3. Stability in the various components o a dialect

In the literature of the last 25 years on language change and linguistic (in)stability, we
often find rather casual statements in which the degree of (in)stability is related to a
particular language component (e.g., syntax vs. morphology vs. phonology vs. [parts of]
the lexicon). Yet, at least in my perception, there has not been massive research into this
matter. An interesting exception to this is Van Bree (1990), who thoroughly investigated
the stability (within the dialect ⫺ standard continuum) of syntactic, lexical, morphologi-
cal and phonological dialect features in Twente, in the northeast of the Netherlandic
area. He focused mainly on syntactic and lexical elements. I summarize his most impor-
tant findings:
(1) Syntax:
a. It is impossible to situate the entire syntactic component en bloc at one particular
point of a stability scale.
b. Special regional constructions (e.g., in his case ik heb de band lek ~ SL mijn band
is lek ‘I got a puncture’) are more stable than more straightforward aspects of
word order (e.g., … dat hij gekomen is vs. … dat hij is gekomen ‘… that he
has come’).
(2) Lexicon:
a. It is impossible to situate the entire lexicon at one particular point on a sta-
bility scale.
b. Function words (e.g., articles and subordinating conjunctions) are more stable
than adverbs of time and place and these adverbs in turn are more stable than
full content words (e.g., concrete nouns).
Discussing his findings, Van Bree refers to the degree of awareness and (with reference
to Trudgill 1986) to the connected notion of “salience” as the most important stabilizing
factor(s): if dialect speakers are more aware of (the “dialecticity” of) a linguistic element
(and the more salient it is), there is a bigger chance that it will be leveled out by the
“higher” varieties. Secondly, he also refers to the degree of spatial diffusion, frequency
and the structural distance (between DIA and SL): if these factors are stronger, they will
tend to promote dialect stability more. Van Bree’s article revealed that the four main
components of a linguistic system cannot be situated en bloc on a stability hierarchy. In
the preceding section we also demonstrated this point with respect to the phonological
component: tertiary features appeared to be more stable than secondary ones, secondary
features are more stable than primary ones and the latter usually display the lowest
degree of stability, unless they are backed up by a (very) positive attitude and a high
symbolic value, which may turn them into markers of Ortsloyalität. In general, it is my
opinion that time and again we arrive at the same factors that determine the degree of
stability: the degree of awareness or salience, the scope of spatial diffusion, the connec-
tion with positive or negative attitudes, frequency and ⫺ in the structural field ⫺ the
degree of embedding in the system and the structural distance between DIA and SL and
between DIA1 and DIA2. For the sake of completeness, we might also add the degree
of abstractness: on average, content aspects are more stable than form aspects.
2.3. Stability in intermediate varieties (?)

Auer (2005) rightly states that in most of the European language areas a kind of diaglos-
sia (implying a verbal continuum from SL to DIA) has been created. The idea of a
continuum goes hand in hand with the idea that within the intermediate field between
the two poles (DIA and SL) there is no more or less stationary intermediate layer: no
commonly distinguishable “interlect” (Dutch: tussentaal). The notion of diaglossia seems

more reconcilable with a situation in which every member of a particular language com-
munity selects his or her own mix of dialectical and more or less standardized elements.
(This is the reason why the title of this section is followed by a question mark.) Yet, in
the literature of the last few decades there are indications that also in this intermediate
field between local dialects and (sub)standard varieties intermediate lects may ⫺ at least
to a certain extent ⫺ come into existence. In the direction of the dialectical/regiolectical
pole there are quite a few reports on koinéization processes (see e.g., Sobrero 1996 and
Berruto 2005 for Italy, Kerswill 1994, 2002 and Kerswill and Williams 2000 for Britain,
etc. and Kerswill and Trudgill 2005 for a multilingual overview). In Auer and Hinskens
(1996: 3; italics are mine, J. T.), koinéization is defined as “the development (through
dialect mixing, simplification and reduction) of a regional lingua franca”. The question
now is whether in the “higher” part of that continuum (but clearly below SL) similar
processes of stabilization and acceptance may come about, which in fact result in the
development of a substandard koiné, which contains not just SL elements and DIA el-
ements but also new elements (mostly compromise forms). Almost everywhere in Europe
there appear to be symptoms of such developments, but to my knowledge one of the
clearest examples of such a development in the direction of a substandard koiné can now
be observed in Flanders (Dutch-speaking Belgium). In what follows I briefly examine the
ingredients of this new variety (see section 2.3.1) and discuss the factors that determine
and explain this process (see section 2.3.2).
2.3.1. Ingredients o the Belgian-Dutch substandard koiné
Most ingredients of this Flemish tussentaal are borrowed from the Belgian variant of
the Dutch SL, but there is also a surprisingly strong interference of the dialects and
regiolects and especially of the Brabantine “superdialect” (see also section 2.2.1). If we
analyze the “dialectogene” ingredients in more detail, it is striking that for some reason
they were all designated as very stable and vital (cf. the previous section). They have
much in common with what we have termed tertiary dialect features: a rather low degree
of awareness and salience, a broad spatial diffusion and the absence of an attitudinal
marking. A brief survey of the phonological and grammatical characteristics follows.
1. Phonology. Here we can distinguish two categories of features: (a) tertiary features in
the sense of regional “accents” and (b) phonological features that are present in (al-
most) all of the dialects of Dutch-speaking Belgium. Referring to Rys and Taeldeman
(2007) I mention (b.1) phonological alternations in the short function words which
historically (and also in the Dutch SL) end in -t (dat, wat, niet, met), (b.2) deletion
of final -e if the following word starts with a vowel (e.g., onz’ arbeiders ‘our workers’),
(b.3) the tendency in …V(C)C #V… sequences to transfer the final consonant to (the
onset of) the next syllable (resyllabification) (e.g., ont-erven ‘to disinherit’ J on-terven)
and (b.4) the assimilation of t ⫹ d to [t] (e.g., uitdoen ‘to put off’ J ui[t]oen). Whereas
the features under (1) cause regional diversity, the features under (2) have a leveling
effect.
2. Grammar. Here I restrict my overview to the five dialectisms or regionalisms that
obtained the highest score in an extensive corpus of spontaneous spoken Belgian
Dutch by 38 Flemish politicians (see Van Laere 2003 for more details): (2.1) the
inflection of adnominal words (e.g., ne langen dag ⫽ SL een lange dag ‘a long day’),
(2.2) expletive dat as an intensifier after a subordinating word (e.g., ’k weet nie hoe
da(t) ’k da(t) moet doen ⫽ SL ’k weet niet hoe ik dat moet doen ‘I don’t know how
to do it’), (2.3) the generalization of gaan as an auxiliary of the future (e.g., da(t)
gaa(t) nie(t) meer gebeuren ⫽ SL dat zal niet meer gebeuren ‘this won’t happen
again’), (2.4) the intrusion of nonverbal constituents in the final verb group (e.g., …
da(t) we moeten bezig zijn ⫽ SL … dat we bezig moeten zijn ‘…that we have to be
busy’) and (2.5) the use of the pronominal ge-system (e.g., ge moet u realiseren dat …
⫽ SL je moet je realiseren dat … or u moet zich realiseren dat … ‘you have to realize
that …’).
Again these (and other) grammatical features are quite common throughout the Flemish
dialect landscape.
In general we may say that in Flanders an intermediate substandard variety (between
the Belgian variant of Standard Dutch and the Flemish dialects) is developing and is
becoming stable. The peculiarity of this process lies in the fact that it comprises all
components of the language. In most other language areas of Europe the development
of such an interlect (Flemish: tussentaal) seems to be related predominantly to the do-
main of phonology (regional “accents”) and much less to the grammar and the lexicon.
2.3.2. The (socio)linguistic context
It looks as if in Flanders a rather exceptional standard ⫺ dialect constellation is being

shaped in that between the two polar varieties a clearly recognizable, rather stable sub-
standard variety with a kind of roofing function is developing. In general, we may con-
sider this as a trans-componential conglomerate of (a) Belgian SL elements and (b) el-
ements which are rooted in the Flemish dialects but for quite some time have been
spreading all over Flanders. This tussentaal mainly results from three (socio)linguistic
motives:
1. A deliberate dissociation from the “lower” varieties with too local or regional a flavor.
These dialects or regiolects are increasingly considered to be incompatible with social
prestige and, with the exception of a regional “accent” (tertiary phonological fea-
tures), this will result in the loss of the traditional dialects.
2. A deliberate dissociation from the Belgian variant of the Dutch SL, which never
could percolate through to the “lower” social strata. For this reason, the use of SL
has always been felt as too rigid, too unnatural for everyday informal contacts. This
negative attitude has been enhanced by a faulty kind of “linguistic engineering”: the
Flemish language ideologists have been propagating the northern/Netherlandic SL as
the only correct norm too rigorously and over too long a time period (see for example
Jaspers 2001).
3. The need for a (more) natural Flemish variety which is fit for daily contact in all
parts of Flanders and which is not felt to be dialect. This new and stabilizing interlect
results from a spontaneous process without any linguistic engineering: this is the
reason why so many Flemings feel “at home” when using it.
3. Conclusions
This quest for various kinds of linguistic stability provides some general conclusions:
1. Generally speaking, linguistic stability is becoming more and more a marked phenom-
enon. More and more we find a panta rhei situation.
2. Nevertheless, in all varieties on the vertical standard ⫺ dialect axis we have been able
to discover several cases of relative linguistic stability, even in language communities
which are fundamentally characterized by a situation of diaglossia. Under certain
circumstances (see for example Flanders in section 2.3), stabilization processes may
be at work within the linguistic continuum resulting in rather stable intermediate vari-
eties.
3. The factors which may have a stabilizing effect appear to be of very different kinds.
Some of these factors are more relevant for one type of language variety than for
others.
4. I give a brief survey:
a. Intralingual (structural) factors: in this context we elaborated on the factor of
“structural distance” between two varieties: if this distance is bigger, the chance
that this factor will have a positive effect on linguistic stability will be higher.
Moreover, the degree to which a linguistic element is embedded in the system will
contribute to greater stability.
b. Extralingual factors: in the course of our explanation several kinds of extralinguis-
tic factors turned out to be capable of exerting a positive effect on linguistic sta-
bility (under certain circumstances).
i. Social: if the social, economical or cultural basis of “lower” varieties is
stronger, they appear to resist leveling processes from outside better (both ver-
tical and horizontal).
ii. Functional: if the functional strength of [⫺SL] and more particularly [⫹DIA]
varieties is greater, the chance that they will display some kind of linguistic
stability will be higher.
iii. Ideological: if normative control (in this case of the [⫹SL] variety) is stronger,
the chance of relative stability will be higher (see for example the Belgian vari-
ety of the Dutch SL in Flanders).
iv. Socio-psychological: in this respect we pointed out that some varieties or fea-
tures may attain a high symbolic value for a particular (socially or geographi-
cally defined) group of language users. In this case this will contribute consider-
ably to their linguistic identity and create positive attitudes. If this symbolic
value is higher, some kind of stability of the varieties or features in question
will be more likely.
v. Mental: the factor mentioned above interferes with the degree of awareness
(and salience) of a particular feature. Especially with respect to the “lower”
varieties this factor appeared to act on the degree of stability in two ways: (1)
in case of “upward” leveling processes, the degree of awareness turned out be
inversely proportional to the degree of stability and (2) if a high degree of
awareness coincides with positive attitudes, a strong stabilizing effect is to be
expected and polarization is far from excluded.
Our findings with respect to linguistic stability must certainly be confronted with more
material from more language areas and from more language varieties. This will consti-
tute a fascinating challenge for today’s and tomorrow’s variationist linguistics.
4. Reerences
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21. Old minorities within a language space 375
21. Old minorities within a language space

1. Preliminary remarks
2. How to define (ethno)linguistic minorities?
3. Typology and areal patterns of established (ethno)linguistic minorities
4. Minority language rights, legislation and language space: The territorial principle
5. Minorities and language spaces: A glance at three case studies
6. References
Ce n’est pas l’espace qui définit la langue,

mais la langue qui définit son espace.
(Pailhé 2007: 70)
1. Preliminary remarks
Within the humanities, the notion of space is a central concept and a recurrent object
of analysis mainly in the area of geography (cf. Johnstone in this volume), a science for
which spatial reference ⫺ be it to areas, to structural or to distributional patterns ⫺ is
fundamental and constitutes the key element of the way that this discipline defines itself.
Space, in its traditional geographic definition, is understood as a three-dimensional en-
tity, the extension of which may vary according to the structures and patterns to be
taken into account. This primarily territorial view of space is due to the fact that the first
and foremost objects of study in geography are “natural” spaces, which are delimited by
boundaries considered as given by nature or, at least, reconstructible as traced primarily
along physical, topographical units and not “manufactured” by humans (Harnisch in
this volume). In linguistics, this geographically-based notion of territorial space has been
taken up in (traditional) dialectology, which has been describing language variation
within spatial entities similar to those that constitute the object of study of geography,
i. e., primarily territorial ones. At the same time, however, dialectology has shown the
insufficiency of territoriality to circumscribe language space(s): with the rare exception
of zones of spatial contact between typologically distant languages, language borders
have turned out to be extremely difficult to trace, as isoglosses are rarely bundled up
in a clear-cut way and large zones of dialect transition are far more widespread than
straightforward lines of separation. This echoes the insight gained in geography that
many physical dividing lines considered to constitute “natural” boundaries at first sight
have in reality not led to separation between cultures or populations at all, or, if they
did, did so to a far lesser degree than one might have expected.
As a reaction to the difficulty of defining spatial entities through “naturally given”,
physically circumscribed territories, both geography and areally-oriented linguistics (in-
cluding linguistic geography and geolinguistics; see Pailhé 2007: 67⫺70 on this distinc-
tion) adopted a concept of reference space based on man-made, “manufactured” bound-
aries, namely legal and administrative ones. This perspective had the advantage of being
in accordance with the nation-state, the dominant model of socio-political organization
in Europe and the parts of the world under European influence. In dialectology, this
opened the era of “national” language surveys and atlases, and language space, though
still defined in a predominantly territorial way, became increasingly aligned to political
space (cf. Gal in this volume). In geography, this perspective led to a wealth of studies
focusing on individual regions, states, countries or conglomerates of countries. In a more
recent step, geographers ⫺ mainly from the area of human and social geography ⫺
turned away from these rather static physical and territorial definitions and emphasized
the dynamic character of geographic space, which in current reference work is defined
as a functional space of action and interaction emerging through the pursuance of basic
necessities of day-to-day life. In the realm of language studies, this re-perspectivization
of language space was favored by the pragmatic turn in linguistics, which put strong
emphasis on the situational and social circumstances that guided and, to a certain extent,
determined language use. As in geography, the notion of space in areally-oriented lin-
guistics became more dynamic and floating, thus allowing for the accommodation of
increasing spatial and social mobility that is typical for contemporary society in industri-
alized countries. With language space(s) being increasingly determined by functional
needs and interactional practices instead of fixed territorial entities, the attitudinal and
representational dimension has gained importance, and the question that is now mostly
addressed ⫺ namely in sociolinguistics ⫺ is how language space is constructed or imag-
ined. And while some radical approaches in geography suggest to abandon the territorial
dimension of the definition of geographic space altogether (Werlen 1993) in favor of a
vision of space in permanent, interactionally-based emergence, in linguistics the under-
standing of communicative space has almost entirely shifted away from traditional dia-
lects and is now based on a complex network of variational dimensions and language-
determining variables subsumed under concepts such as the architecture of language
(Berruto in this volume and Viaut 2007).
It is important to bear in mind these different definitions and evolving conceptualiza-
tions of space when the issue of (ethno-)linguistic minorities and their relation to lan-
guage spaces is addressed, and even more so when “old”, i. e., territorialized (established/
indigenous/autochthonous) minorities and their language(s) are concerned. It may legiti-
mately be questioned whether it is adequate to speak of linguistic minorities within a
language space, as the language through which such a minority is defined constitutes its
own language space, both in a territorial and in a functional sense. On the other, it is
obvious that the increase in bilingualization ⫺ a frequent phenomenon in minority
contexts that has gained strength namely within the last century ⫺ is perhaps the most
striking result of an overarching standard or national language intruding into the linguis-
tic minorities’ “own” linguistic space and their language territory (cf. Viaut 2007 for the
discussion of this distinction). This affects significantly the status of the minority, which,
as will be shown in the following section, may be defined in very divergent terms anyway.
2. How to deine (ethno)linguistic minorities?

At first sight, the most obvious approach to define linguistic minorities seems to be a
quantitative one: a linguistic minority within a given space would be a part of the pop-
ulation making use of a distinct language or language variety, which has a lower number
of members and/or occupies a smaller part of this territory than another or the other
linguistically defined group of the population, which in turn would be designated as the
majority. The socio-territorial criteria (how much territory of a given space is occupied
by which part of the population) is rarely applied, contrary to the socio-demographic
criteria. However, the socio-demographic attributes of minority/majority may shift ac-
cording to the reference space that is taken into account: for instance, speakers of French
are a minority within North America (as a geographic space) and within Canada (a
political space; 22.3 percent of the population in 2006), with speakers of English as the
majority. This still holds true, and even more saliently, in the Province of Ontario, where
French speakers make up some 4.4 percent of the population. However, when the East-
ern Ontarian County of Russell is considered as reference space, French speakers, with
62.5 percent of the county’s population, are no longer minoritarian; and in the ⫺ again
administrative ⫺ space of the Village of Casselman, located within Russell County,
French speakers ⫺ 86.5 percent of the townspeople ⫺ are the uncontested majority
(figures from LeTouzé 2004). Only the apriorism of considering the provincial or na-
tional level as the relevant reference space for a quantitative analysis allows describing
the French speakers of Casselman as belonging to a linguistic minority. However, a
purely quantitative approach to linguistic minority status is unable to show why the
nation-state of Canada or the province of Ontario should be a more important com-
municative space for Casselman French speakers than the county or the village. It be-
comes obvious that the identification of the relevant and adequate reference space is
frequently delicate and arbitrary when the case of French speakers in Canada is com-
pared to that of speakers of French in Switzerland: whereas the former are generally
awarded linguistic minority status in the relevant literature and such a classification does
not normally raise much controversy, most scholars would feel uneasy to attribute the
same status to the latter, although from a quantitative point of view, Swiss Francophones
(with twenty percent of this country’s total population) are even more “minority-prone”
than Canadian speakers of French. This is so because the Canadian French speakers
tend to feel to belong to a linguistic minority (even if a speaker from above-mentioned
Ontario probably has stronger feelings of this kind than his French-speaking neighbor
in the province of Québec), whereas the Swiss French speakers generally do not feel as
belonging to a linguistic minority or do so only in particular situations or in specific
small-scale geographic border areas. This is something that numbers will not tell.
Since a purely quantitative definition of minority status quickly turns out to be insuf-
ficient to capture reality, various more elaborate definitions have been proposed. These
definitions take into account qualitative aspects of minority status, namely those alluded
to somehow loosely in the previous paragraph as “feelings”, i. e., attitudinal, percep-
tional and other psychological factors, but also quantifiable criteria that go beyond
socio-demographic data and concern the socio-economic or socio-political stand of com-
munities within a given space. According to these definitions, minority groups are char-
acterized by their limited access to key positions in the economic, political and cultural
sphere in the administrative space in question ⫺ typically the nation-state they live in ⫺
and by their relatively lower position on the average income scale or in relation to the
level of education that the typical member of the minority group receives. Economic and
political marginalization of this kind was an important aspect of the so-called “Quiet
Revolution” that took place in French-speaking Canada, mainly in the province of Qué-
bec, in the 1960s, where French Canadians ⫺ who in Québec, at that time, were, and
still are, the socio-demographic majority ⫺ realized that not only was their mother
tongue rarely heard in political institutions but that the average income of a francophone
person was also significantly below that of an English-speaking citizen. Furthermore,
speakers of French were blatantly under-represented in top positions in private enter-

prises as well as in public administration. Educational marginalization does not normally
mean, at least in developed countries, that no access to schooling is provided but that
schooling is available only in the majority or dominant language, so that members of
linguistic minorities receive education in a language other than their primary language,
which may lead to less satisfactory results and increased educational failure. However,
the most crucial aspect of qualitative definitions of minority status seems to be the socio-
psychological one that concerns attitudes (cf. Gallois, Watson and Brabant 2007): an
(ethno-)linguistic community may only be regarded as a “minority” if it is considered as
such by the community itself and by the other group(s) in the reference space. That is,
despite the fact that many attributes and features associated with minorities are without
doubt externally motivated and therefore “given”, they may only affect the community
in question if members of the minority (and members of the majority) are aware of these
features and conscious of their relevance. Thus, minorities are always created to a certain
extent, either by “the others”, i. e., the members of the majority, through an act of
heterocategorization (Krefeld in this volume) or by themselves through autocategoriza-
tion as a different, culturally, linguistically or otherwise deviant, less powerful or less
“important” part of the whole population of a nation-state or another reference space.
Theoretically, both auto- and heterocategorization as a minority group may have
positive or negative outcomes. In reality, though, the case of a (socio-demographic) ma-
jority which holds in high esteem and perhaps even admires an ethno-linguistic minority
is much rarer then the contrary constellation where (socio-demographic) minorities are
considered as inferior, as “underdogs” or political trouble-makers by the majority group.
An example for the seldom-found former situation might be the attitude that the Ger-
man-speaking majority in Switzerland has towards the Rhaeto-Romance-speaking mi-
nority in their country, an attitude that, as sociolinguistic surveys have repeatedly indi-
cated, is generally favorable and even very positive. Self-awareness of minority status,
on the other hand, may lead to ambiguous and contradictory statements on this issue,
too. It is well-known that members of ethno-linguistic minorities may show very negative
attitudes towards their own community, language and culture when they become aware
of its minority status and of the fact that the majority considers them as minoritarian,
a phenomenon labeled as self-hatred. This may lead to extreme cases of self-induced
alienation and loss of one’s own identity. For instance, among heritage speakers of so-
called Isleño or Brulé Spanish in the New Orleans region of Lousiana, in the southern
United States, it is reported that members of the community not only change their
linguistic behavior, but also eliminate all ethno-linguistic attributes as they were aware
that, as such, they were considered as uneducated, uncultivated, poor and “dirty” by
members of the English-speaking majority group (Holloway 1997).
3. Typology and areal patterns o established (ethno)linguistic

minorities
Among the different typologies and ensuing terminological proposals for minorities and
situations of minorization, Edwards’ (1995; 2004: 463⫺467; cf. also Turell 2001) model
is particularly suited to shed light on the recurrent patterns of spatial localization and
organization of minorities. Edwards’ grid involves three fundamental distinctions:
The first is among minority languages that are unique to one state, those that are non-unique
but that are still minorities in all contexts in which they occur, and those that are minorities
in one setting but majority varieties elsewhere. This initial distinction gives rise to the terms
unique, non-unique, and local-only minority. The second categorization deals with the type
of connection between speakers of the same minority language in different states; are they
adjoining or non-adjoining? Finally, what degree of spatial cohesion exists among speakers
within a given state? Here, the terms cohesive and non-cohesive can be used.
(Edwards 2004: 465)
As can be deduced from the quote, Edwards follows the general practice and considers
the legal entity of the (nation-)state as the relevant reference space for situating linguistic
minorities. However, the model clearly favors a trans-national perspective in that the
minorities’ areal patterns are analyzed, not only within the political space and the con-
comitant language space of the national or “official” language(s), but also within neigh-
boring political or national entities, by the primarily geographic criteria of spatial ad-
junction and cohesion.
As a matter of fact, when nation-states and their territorialized established minorities
are graphically represented ⫺ a language map of Europe being the prime example (cf.,
e.g., Plasseraud 2005: 12⫺13) ⫺ it is a remarkably recurrent fact that the areas where
minority languages are spoken are located at the fringes of the states. Synchronically,
therefore, many ethnolinguistic minorities are border minorities, whereas inland minori-
ties are less common. This distributional pattern is obviously the result of case-specific
historical events but may also be linked to more general regularities of horizontal diffu-
sion of innovations that concern, among others, social structures and language use: such
innovations and changes usually irradiate from a powerful center point or area, fre-
quently ⫺ although not necessarily ⫺ the national capital or capital region. This leads
to processes of increased language contact, bilingualism and diglossic functional hier-
archization, and perhaps, ultimately, to language shift in areas close to the national
diffusion center but not necessarily reaching, or having the same impact on, more periph-
eral zones. Such an historical development is exemplified by the language distribution
on the Iberian Peninsula between the beginning of Christian re-conquest of Arab-domi-
nated areas from the eighth century onwards and the present, where, among other
reasons, the establishment of a powerful administrative and cultural center in the form
of a capital region in the Toledo-Madrid area favored a phase of lateral expansion of
the Castilian language. It is tempting to link the socio-economic, political and cultural
marginalization that characterizes linguistic minorities in the quantitative approaches
mentioned above to their spatial marginalization, with the latter conditioning the former.
The example of the linguistic landscape on the Iberian Peninsula, however, clearly shows
that geographic marginalization within a nation-state is quite often a secondary process
and a consequence of incipient or even entrenched political domination and socio-eco-
nomic marginalization, and that the relationship between peripheral geographic location
and socio-political subordination is a complex one, especially when the diachronic axis
is duly taken into account.
Another recurrent phenomenon in Europe’s nation-states which explains many cases
of border minorities is that political frontiers frequently cut through traditional language
zones. Some political borders of modern nation-states go back to older legal separation
lines that had been drawn in a period where the ideal of linguistic homogeneity ⫺ along
the “one nation ⫺ one language” line of thinking typical for many modern states (Do-
rian 2004: 441⫺443) ⫺ did not have much importance. In other cases, borderlines are
the results of battles, conquests and diplomacy. But on many occasions in the process
of nation-building, the myth of “natural frontiers” has been put forward, with political
powers seeking to establish ⫺ through war and violence if necessary ⫺ borders along
geographical guiding lines such as mountain ranges or rivers. The border between France
and Germany in the Upper Rhine region is a point in case, where the French considered
the river as a “natural frontier”, whereas the Germans ⫺ with some additional linguistic
arguments at hand ⫺ found the ridges of the Vosges Mountains to constitute a “natural”
borderline. On closer examination, it turns out that both sides were wrong as neither
the mountains nor the river really had lead to a hermetic separation of ethnic groups,
languages and cultures. An blatant example of a mismatch between nation-state borders
traced along “natural” guidelines and ethnolinguistic zones is provided by the Franco-
provençal language group, which stretches over a geographical area that embraces the
highest peaks of Europe but which is now split up through national borders among
France, Italy and Switzerland. Cases like this correspond to Edwards’ unique adjoining
minorities; whereas the French-German borderline that follows the Upper Rhine has led
the Alsatian dialect of German to become a local-only adjoining minority language.
It is hardly surprising that the latter type of minority, with a large and adjacent
hinterland sharing the same language and culture, is, generally speaking, in a much more
favorable socio-linguistic situation than the former type, with German in eastern Bel-
gium or northern Italy (South Tyrol) ⫺ but less so in Alsace ⫺ being prime examples.
Although the importance of geographic adjacency of border minorities belonging to the
same ethno-linguistic group is beyond doubt, immediate geographic contact is not neces-
sary for contiguity effects to arise; in Pailhé’s (2007: 66) wording, connectivity is more
decisive than proximity. For instance, neither the Danish speakers in northern Germany
(Schleswig-Holstein) nor the speakers of Swedish on Finland’s south and west coast are
in direct and uninterrupted spatial contact with their language neighbors “on the other
side” but still profit from their linguistic hinterland in about the same way as German
speakers in South Tyrol or Flemish speakers in northern France do. If the linguistic and
cultural hinterland is itself in a minority situation and lacks political or socio-economic
vigor, no strengthening contiguity effects show up, as, e.g., in the case of Occitan speak-
ers in northern Spain (Val d’Aran) and northwestern Italy (Piemontese Valadas Occita-
nas) who do not get any an advantage from the (geographically) large Occitan-speaking
territory in southern France (cf. section 5.1).
Edwards’ third distinction between cohesive and non-cohesive minorities also is a
primarily geographic one, but again geography and spatial distribution patterns will not
tell the whole truth. The fact that ethnolinguistic communities do not occupy a con-
tinuous area but are scattered may be due to the fact that the minority is non-sedentary,
but then it would not count as a territorialized minority anyway; or it may have purely
geographical reasons, as for example in the case of Rhaeto-Romance speakers in the
Swiss canton of Grisons (Graubünden) and around the Sella Massif in northern Italy,
where the sub-groups (and their different language varieties) are separated by high
mountain areas that do not permit permanent settlement. The geographic separation of
the Swiss and the northern Italian Rhaeto-Romance communities, or the scattering of
Acadian French speakers in eastern Canada (cf. section 5.3), are due to the immigration
of people speaking other languages into a once more cohesive (minority) language space,
with the consequence of an areal retreat of the latter, as in the case of the Rhaeto-
Romance communities, or geographical displacement, as in the Acadian example. Migra-

tion of this kind may also lead to very isolated, small ethnolinguistic groups known as
Sprachinseln in the German terminology (Riehl in this volume).
Whether different non-contiguous sub-groups of linguistic minorities have strong in-
ternal ties or not is also conditioned by psychological, attitudinal and political factors.
Where such ties exist, for instance, in the Acadian French communities (including Louisi-
ana’s Cajun-French minority), common roots and a common heritage have been a
central element of the cultural memory of the community. On the other hand, attitudinal
factors and political action may also undermine common heritage and psycho-linguistic
ties and thus lead to a loss of internal cohesion, even in cases where there is no spatial
separation at all. For instance, the decrease of internal cohesion between the Catalonian
and the Valencian sub-group of the Spanish mainland Catalan minority is largely, if not
exclusively, ideology-driven and the result of political instrumentalization (cf. section
5.1), despite the fact that both communities are territorially contiguous and not sepa-
rated by any geographic dividing line whatsoever.
4. Minority language rights, legislation and language space:

The territorial principle
A key topic in the literature on ethnolinguistic minorities and the future of their lan-
guages is the juridical situation of these communities and, more specifically, the legisla-
tion concerning the use of the minorized language(s). The status of language rights,
namely in relation to more general human rights, is the subject of a vast body of litera-
ture (cf. de Varennes 1996; May 2001: 128⫺197). Among the debated points is the ques-
tion whether language rights are individual or collective rights, but also whether the
non-discrimination or protection of ethnolinguistic minorities can and should be formu-
lated in the form of legal rights or if they are better looked upon as moral rights (Ed-
wards 2007: 453⫺455). As a derivation or “particularized application” (Edwards 2007:
453) of basic human rights, the right to use a specific language for a specific purpose in
a specific social setting is a priori an individual right, but since language as a communica-
tion system necessarily involves at least two interlocutors and, in order to really function
as such, a speech community, language rights are de facto individual and collective/social
rights at the same time. If language rights are considered legal rights in some way, and
some political action in the form of language planning and language policy is taken to
enforce them (cf. Skutnabb-Kangas 2007), they are unavoidably territorialized, since
planning actions and policies can only be implemented in an area over which the social
actors in question have power and jurisdiction (Viaut 2007: 48).
This antagonism may be captured, following Grin (1994), in the contrast between
two principles, the personality principle and the territorial principle; both play an impor-
tant role when established minorities are considered, but the latter is intrinsically linked
to the question of minority languages and space. The territorial principle “traditionally
means that each language should correspond to a specific area, in order to ensure the
latter’s linguistic homogeneity; the language rights enjoyed by individuals are then condi-
tional on their geographic position” (Grin 1994: 35). Although said to be successfully
applied in various nation-states, most prominently perhaps in Switzerland, the territorial
principle raises the crucial question of how the language area(s) are determined. This can
be done on synchronic, and predominantly socio-demographic, or historical grounds, or
a fusion of both. Since legal action in order to ensure the territorial integrity of a lan-
guage is frequently taken only when this integrity (and the minority language itself) is
endangered, a demographic definition can be problematic since at this stage the internal
cohesion of the linguistic minority will already be low, bi- or multilingualism prevalent
and allophone immigration into the area widespread. Therefore, a critical threshold
value is frequently applied: on this basis, a zone is considered to belong to the area
covered by the territorial principle if the linguistic minority has a certain demographic
weight there, even if it is below fifty percent. This may still be insufficient to prevent
“holes” in and around urban centers (if there are any within the minority’s area).
As a purely synchronic definition of language territories would not lead to results that
are in accordance with the very aims of the territorial principle ⫺ namely continuous and
stable areas ⫺ some kind of diachronic argument is also usually invoked. For instance,
the territory of a language may be defined as an area where a language was traditionally
spoken and historically dominant. But which period or point in history should be taken
as a reference point in order to decide where a language was “traditionally spoken”?
The Italian Fascist activist Ettore Tolomei justified the forced assimilation or expulsion
of the German-speaking minority in South Tyrol by arguing that their area of settlement
belonged to the “traditional” zone of Italian or, put in more cautious a way, of the Italo-
Romance varieties, because the Romans had colonized this area some two millennia
earlier and the spread of Germanic was but the result of illegitimate posterior “intru-
sion”. A similar argument has been made by certain representatives of the Flemish com-
munity at the peak of the Belgian language battle when they claimed ⫺ in the name of
the territorial principle! ⫺ that Brussels, which had been a Flemish-speaking town for
many centuries but had undergone a process of language shift in the late eighteenth
century, should be included into the monolingual territory of Flanders, although cur-
rently speakers of French clearly dominate with around 85 percent of the city’s popula-
tion (Nelde 1982). Theoretically, toponymy might help to determine the area where a
language had been “traditionally spoken”, but toponyms are sometimes difficult to inter-
pret and to assign to precise historical layers (and languages). They would in most cases
lead to overlapping language territories, i. e., to the contrary of what the territorial prin-
ciple aims at.
As a consequence of these problems, in most cases areas to which the territorial
principle has been applied are the result of a compromise between historical, socio-
demographic, more strictly linguistic and political factors. Boundaries between territories
have been determined during the twentieth century mostly with regard to the contempo-
rary situation, but in borderline cases evidence from administrative documents and lin-
guistic sources (namely dialectological surveys that started to be available from the late
nineteenth century on) have been taken into account as well. Therefore, minority (and,
conversely, majority) language territories mostly reflect the extension of the language at
the moment when language-political action was taken, or just before. Where neither
reliable historical nor contemporary linguistic evidence was available and the question
of the boundary remained unsettled, political considerations prevailed and the alignment
of language territories with already established administrative entities was given prefer-
ence. In some cases, small zones along the territories’ border have been “swapped”. An
emblematic case is the Belgian municipality of Fourons/Veuren, a traditionally multilin-
gual zone with a French-speaking majority which used to be part to the Francophone
province of Liège but joined the Dutch-speaking Flemish province of Limburg during
the 1960s as a compensation, as Flanders had lost some municipalities to the Walloon
region. It is mainly in such areas along the border that conflicts arise later on and that
the territorial principle is challenged, usually without success.
A particularly delicate issue, which frequently occurs but is not restricted to states
and regions where the territorial principle applies, are so-called included minorities.
Sometimes, such minority groups within the territory of a politically or demographically
superordinate ethnolinguistic minority receive special attention and political support; the
Occitan-speaking (sub-)minority of the Val d’Aran in Catalonia is a point in case, as
well as the Rhaeto-Romance-speaking Ladin population living within the territory of
the German-speaking minority in South Tyrol/Northern Italy. The contrary may be true
when these sub-minorities are made up of speakers of the dominant (national) language
on the state level; as examples, Anglophone inhabitants of Montréal and other areas in
Québec/Canada or Castilian speakers in Barcelona and other parts of Catalonia come
to mind. According to Grin (1994: 38) such an unequal treatment of languages in an
overall clearly asymmetric sociolinguistic situation is in accordance with the territorial
principle when applied to minority languages that are threatened languages at the mo-
ment when legal action is taken. However, this author is aware of the inherent dangers
for social stability if language rights are systematically withheld from included minori-
ties, and particularly local-only minorities, on all levels. In order to achieve a balance of
rights, he therefore develops the concept of “territorial multilingualism” (see Grin 1994:
41⫺45 for details).
5. Minorities and language spaces: A glance at three case studies
5.1. Catalan and Occitan speakers in Spain and France
The Catalan- and the Occitan-speaking communities (cf. the maps in Plasseraud 2005:
24⫺27) are typical “old” minorities that have not moved from their territories since their
languages came into being, as a result of the Roman colonization of Western and South-
ern Europe between the third and the first century b.c. Up to the early twentieth century,
Catalan and Occitan were treated as one language (or diasystem) by many scholars in
Romance philology due to internal criteria, although this ⫺ nowadays contested ⫺ view
might have been biased by the fact that written Occitan has remained the dominant
literary language in the Catalan-speaking area for a longer period than anywhere else.
Typologically, they share basic Gallo-Romance features and features that link them to
the realm of Ibero-Romance, although these features are much more visible in Catalan
than in Occitan (and restricted, in the latter case, to the Southwestern dialects of Gas-
cony). Historically, both languages also have much in common. After a period of literary
splendor, associated with high political and economic influence, a period of decay fol-
lowed in the Middle Ages (for Occitan) and the Early Modern Times (for Catalan), which
came to an end with the rise of European Romanticism in the nineteenth century only.
The current situation of both languages, however, is totally different, and conscious-
ness of common origin or specific links between the two communities is absent, with the
exception of a small (mostly academic) elite. On European language maps, both lan-
guages seem to occupy rather large and coherent territories. Occitan covers the southern
third part of France and Catalan two-thirds of the eastern coastal fringe of the Spanish
state (plus isolated island areas). But these maps are misleading (Pailhé 2007: 76; cf. for
instance Plasseraud 2005: 25 for a more differentiated cartography of Occitan). Catalan
is much more vivid than Occitan and has a significantly better sociolinguistic standing.
The Catalan-speaking community may be estimated at 7 to 8 million, whereas the Occi-
tan-speaking community is impossible to quantify, due to the absence of corresponding
census data, but estimates range between 100.000 and several million speakers.
According to Edwards’ topological typology, both speakers of Occitan and Catalan
would most readily be qualified as non-unique adjoining cohesive minorities. For the
Catalan community, however, such a classification is not entirely correct, not only be-
cause of the presence of the language on the Balearic Islands and a small area in North-
western Sardinia, but also because Catalan is not considered as a minority idiom in the
Principality of Andorra, where it is the only official language. However, apart from some
symbolic acts (e.g., Catalan songs due to Andorran participation in the recent editions
of the European Song Contest) little effect is derived from this status. Today Catalan is
a de facto minority language even in Andorra as autochthonous Andorrans are now
outnumbered by immigrants (cf. Sinner 2004). In the far more populous Spanish part
of the Catalan territory, the language enjoys a relatively good sociolinguistic and legal
status and is co-official with the dominant national language Castilian, a status that it
shares with the languages of the other “historical” autonomous communities within the
Spanish state such as Basque in the Basque Country and Galician in Galicia. Further-
more, Catalan has a strong position as the language of administration and schooling,
especially in the autonomous regions of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands (less so in
the Valencian Community region), and a remarkable presence in the media, in science
and in commerce. These and other features make the Catalan-speaking community a
rather untypical example of an ethno-linguistic minority and totally distinct from the
Occitan-speaking community. Occitan has official status in a small area only, i. e., in the
previously mentioned Val d’Aran, which administratively belongs to Catalonia and, thus,
to Spain.
In the case of Occitan, the lack of a generally accepted standardized language (Krem-
nitz 1974; Sumien 2006: 15⫺110) has led to weak psychological cohesion. Dialectal di-
vergence is significant, enforced by some ⫺ albeit minoritarian ⫺ community activists
and even linguists who challenge the linguistic unity of Occitan (cf. Blanchet and Schiff-
man 2004 for samples of this position). Many speakers believe that they do not speak a
language of their own at all, but a patois, i. e., some kind of “bad French”. The case of
the Catalan community is different in this respect: internal psychological cohesion is
much stronger, and the consciousness to speak the same language is high. However,
challenges to the ⫺ linguistically entirely uncontroversial ⫺ unity of the Catalan lan-
guage space have arisen in recent decades through an increasing political antagonism
between the two large mainland regions where Catalan is spoken, i. e., Catalonia and the
Valencian Community (Doppelbauer 2006; Triano López 2007). This so-called “language
conflict” in the Valencian community with respect to Catalonia is in fact more readily
explained in terms of a political and economic competition between the regions and a
result of battles between political parties and social groups with divergent ideological
orientations. Still, this conflict undermines significantly the position of Catalan and the
entire Catalan-speaking community within the Spanish state and its national, Castilian-
dominated language space.
In legal terms, in post-Franquist Spain the latent conflict between individual and
social language rights is tamed by the co-officiality of the national language ⫺ Castil-
ian ⫺ and the regional languages ⫺ such as Catalan ⫺ within the “traditional” territories
of the latter. This legitimates and, eventually, promotes bi- or multilingualism within the
minority languages’ territories and therefore departs significantly from some basic ideas
behind the territorial principle. In Finland a completely different approach to the recon-
ciliation of individual and collective language rights and linguistic territoriality has
been chosen.
5.2. Swedish speakers in Finland
Finland (Suomi) is an officially bilingual state (Latomaa and Nuolijärvi 2005 [2002])
that came into being in 1917, after more than a century as an autonomous Grand Duchy
of Russia and ⫺ more important for the language issue ⫺ after having been under
Swedish rule between the early fourteenth century and the early nineteenth century. 500
years of Swedish presence left their traces on the linguistic landscape (Tandefeldt and
Finnäs 2007): until independence was gained, Swedish was not only the dominant lan-
guage of politics, administration and commerce but was also considered the language of
the elite, so that a typical situation of diglossia was in place, when in the nineteenth
century Finnish nationalism developed and the use of Finnish began to be promoted
also in formal registers. Geographically, speakers of Swedish concentrated in the cities
and along the southern and western coasts of the country, areas that had experienced
important waves of colonization and settlement during previous centuries; the Swedish-
speaking community of Finland therefore is a significantly “younger” minority than the
Occitan- and Catalan-speaking communities presented above. Today, this geographical
pattern is still valid (cf. the cartographic presentation in Plasseraud 2005: 35), with Swed-
ish-speaking Finns living on small coastal stretches and on nearby islands in the south
and in the west and on the Åland Islands, which are closer to the Swedish than to the
Finnish mainland.
In 2001, 92.3 percent of the Finnish population had Finnish as their first language,
while 5.7 percent spoke Swedish as a first language; in the 1920s at the moment of
political independence, their share had been at 11 percent (figures from Latomaa and
Nuolijärvi 2005: 128 and 135). According to the (recently reformed and updated) Na-
tional Language Act from 1922, no territoriality principle applies in communicative ex-
changes with the national government, where a reply in either language may be expected.
A strict territorial principle, comparable to Switzerland or Belgium, is only observed on
the Åland archipelago, where Finnish is almost non-existent in daily life, with 93.5 per-
cent of the population indicating Swedish as their mother tongue (Svenska Finlands
folkting 2004: 19). On the mainland, however, the language status is determined on the
administrative level on the basis of rather “generous”, i. e., minority-friendly numerical
criteria: a municipality is considered bilingual when the minority group ⫺ be it Finnish-
or Swedish-speaking ⫺ makes up at least eight percent of the population or totals up to
a minimum of 3,000 speakers. In bilingual municipalities, both languages may be used
with local authorities and schooling is provided for both groups. Currently (2002), there
are 385 monolingual Finnish-speaking municipalities in Finland, as compared to 21

monolingual Swedish-speaking municipalities. Out of 42 officially bilingual municipali-
ties, 22 are predominantly Swedish- and 20 are predominantly Finnish-speaking; among
the latter are large cities in the South, where the percentages of Swedish-speaking Finns
are low but absolute numbers exceed 3,000, such as the national capital Helsinki (Hel-
singfors in Swedish; 6.4 percent/35,800 Swedish-speakers) and the cultural centre of the
Swedish Finns, Turku (Åbo; 5.2 percent/9,000). The highest ratios of Swedish-speakers
on the mainland are found on the western coast, in the Ostrobothnia region, where
several municipalities boast Swedish majorities between 90 and 97 percent.
The Finnish system does not normally lead to coherent language territories as favored
by the territorial principle. Still Finnish-Swedish bilingualism is generally characterized
as “harmonic” and mostly free of conflicts (Saari 2000: 5⫺6), which may be attributed
to two facts: first, Swedish is not an endangered language and the Swedish-speaking
community of Finland is, according to Edwards’ typology, a local-only minority which
receives significant institutional and medial backing from Sweden. And, second, the
members of the community generally do not feel as Swedes living in another nation-
state but as Finns speaking another language, and this language is considered as an
element of the national heritage not only by Swedish-, but also by (many) Finnish-
speakers. Therefore, it would seem inadequate to designate the Swedish-speaking com-
munity in Finland as an ethno-linguistic minority; despite much cultural specificity, it is
best described as a linguistic-only minority.
The linguistic harmony, however, seems to be less assured in recent years than before:
although the demographic weight of the Swedish-speaking group has remained stable in
absolute figures between the late nineteenth and the twenty-first century, the Finnish-
speaking population has grown more rapidly and the relative weight of Swedish-first-
language speakers has gone down by two thirds between 1880 and the present (Latomaa
and Nuolijärvi 2005: 135). Opposition to compulsory teaching of the second national
language surfaces regularly and most vigorously from the Finnish-speakers, many of
whom no longer see much utility in learning Swedish and advocate an earlier and longer
inclusion of international languages ⫺ namely English ⫺ in the schools’ language cur-
riculum (comparable to current moves within certain German-speaking cantons of Swit-
zerland). In the end, such a readjustment would lead to a lack of persons among the
Finnish-speaking majority group with a sufficient proficiency in the minority language
to comply with the requisites of the official bilingualism. Such an evolution would, in
the long run, destabilize the language situation in Finland and weaken the position of
the Swedish-speaking community within the national Finnish language space.
5.3. Acadian French speakers in Canada
The recognition and protection of a clearly circumscribed and stable language territory
is aimed at by most “old”, established ethno-linguistic minorities and considered a
requirement for their survival. In view of this fact, it is rather surprising to find an
“old” minority for which the non-existence of a language territory of its own fulfils this
identificational and emblematic function; speakers of Acadian French in the eastern
provinces of Canada are such a minority group. In the discourse of Acadian-French
speakers, the reference to a common territory called “Acadia” (Acadie) is omnipresent,
although this territory is virtual, not visible on maps and atlases and not delimitable as
a geographic reality.
Obviously, speaking of “established minorities” in the Canadian context is ambiguous
and controversial; strictly speaking, only the Indian and Inuit first nations would legiti-
mately qualify as “old”, autochthonous minorities. However, among the European mi-
grant groups that settled on Canadian territory, the Acadian-French or, more briefly:
the Acadians were indeed among the first to arrive: After the foundation of Port-Royal
(today’s Annapolis-Royal) in 1604 by the discoverer and colonizer Samuel de Cham-
plain, French migrants mainly from western and central parts of France settled on the
A(r)c(c)adie island known today as Nova Scotia (Nouvelle-Ecosse) (cf. Griffiths 2005;
Kolboom 2005 for historical details). Since they wanted to maintain a neutral position
vis-à-vis both competing colonial powers in the region, France and England, in the mid-
eighteenth century they refused to swear an oath of allegiance on the British Crown,
which led to their expulsion from Nova Scotia and their deportation by the British to
New England and other British colonies on the American East coast, to England and
back to France. A number of Acadians arrived, sometimes on very roundabout ways,
on the marshes of the lower Mississippi River, in the future U.S. state of Louisiana (then
under Spanish rule), where they formed the francophone community known today as
“Cadiens” or Cajuns. Other Acadians managed to escape from deportation and took
refuge, with the help of the befriended Micmac Indians, in inaccessible areas of the
nearby mainland province of New Brunswick. During the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century, many Acadians who had been brought to European destinations returned
to Canada, but, since their former territory in Nova Scotia was no longer available to
them, settled elsewhere in the Atlantic provinces, the French islands of Saint-Pierre and
Miquelon and in Newfoundland.
Due to this varied history, the Acadian minority, which in eastern Canada outside
Québec amounts today to some 255,000 persons, is scattered over the entire Atlantic
region (cf. Rossillon 1995: 73 for maps), but the highest concentration of Acadian-
French speakers is found in northern, eastern and southeastern New-Brunswick (Nou-
veau-Brunswick), where stretches, e.g., along the Upper Saint-John River around Ed-
mundston, opposite the US state of Maine, and on the so-called Acadian Peninsula east
of Bathurst are almost exclusively French-speaking. It is also in New-Brunswick that the
Acadian-French minority has the most favorable sociolinguistic status, since the province
adopted in 1968 an Official Language Act (updated in 2002), through which official
bilingualism was installed (cf. Kolboom 2005: 230⫺246); New-Brunswick is ⫺ up to the
present ⫺ the only officially bilingual province of Canada. Official and administrative
bilingualism, though far from being considered as “harmonic” and even less so as sym-
metric, is now actively promoted by the government as a distinctive feature and “brand”
for the province. That such a development was possible in New-Brunswick but not else-
where in the eastern Canadian provinces with an Acadian-French population is partly
due to the low (or lower) degree of linguistic assimilation of New-Brunswick Acadians
and partly to their demographic weight: whereas francophones account for a third of
the population (33 percent in 2006) in that province, they constitute only around four
percent of the populations of neighboring Nova Scotia and Prince-Edward-Island (Ile-
du-Prince-Edouard) and are even more marginalized, quantitatively speaking, in New-
foundland (Terre-Neuve; 0.4 percent) (cf. the contributions in Valdman, Auger and Pis-
ton-Hatlen 2005). Language policy in favor of the francophones is almost absent in these
provinces and limited to minimum services in the realm of schooling, as required by

federal Canadian law.
However, despite these low figures and equally low spatial and administrative cohe-
sion, Acadians are very “present” and visible even outside of New-Brunswick due to
a strong socio-cultural and ideological cohesion. Literature, music, theater and other
performing arts are the vectors of this manifest presence of the Acadian group, which
creates or strengthens internal ties and radiates outside the community. Regular manifes-
tations of common origins, heritage and values, such as the annual celebration of the
national Acadian holiday on 14 August, the annual Acadian Festival in Caraquet, an
entirely francophone municipality on the Acadian Peninsula in New-Brunswick, regular
family meetings and the episodic organization of an Acadian World Congress (the third
edition of which will take place in 2009 in the Caraquet region, too) contribute to de-
velop and maintain a communicative space with a dense interactional network, so that
territorial space is considered as less prominent. Although geographic concentrations of
Acadian-French speakers are obvious and acknowledged as such in the community, no
real move to a territorialization of “New Acadia” has been made so far, and speakers
do not hesitate to argue that Acadia is where someone who feels as an Acadian has
taken residence for at least 24 hours. Such an attitude, which is in strong contrast to the
one prevailing among European minority groups, is certainly linked to the migrant-
colonial history of the American continent and to a different conceptualization of
“homeland” and geographical origin there; but it can also be linked, at least partially,
to the fact that the Acadian-French minority members have successfully constructed an
“Acadia that has no frontiers”, as expressed in a song by the Québec-Acadian singer
Carolyne Jomphe (L’Acadie n’a pas de frontières; cf. Kolboom 2005: 12). Among the
speakers of Acadian French, even more than among Swedish speakers in Finland, lan-
guage space is replacing language territory, in the sense of Viaut (2007).
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IV. Structure and dynamics across language
spaces
22. Contact-induced grammatical change:

A cautionary tale
1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Establishing change
4. Applying the comparative variationist framework to the investigation of change
5. Putting contact-induced change to the test
6. Discussion
7. Acknowledgement
8. References
1. Introduction
When the space between two languages ⫺ or their speakers ⫺ is reduced enough to
result in contact, a variety of outcomes may ensue. Most prominent by far is change. So
ubiquitous has the association between contact and change become that it is invoked to
account for a wide array of developments that differ from some (typically ill-defined)
norm. This is the case even where the candidate development already exists in the recipi-
ent language, where no other-language form is visible, and where the transition period
is as short as a single generation. And despite the general consensus that grammatical
structure is particularly resistant to transfer, reports of dramatic structural changes in
languages known to have been in contact are legion.
In this article we suggest that much of the evidence brought to bear on contact-
induced change ⫺ diachronic as well as synchronic ⫺ either fails to demonstrate that
change has occurred, and/or if it has, that it is the product of contact and not internal
evolution. These issues, together with the possibility that the inherent variability charac-
teristic of all spoken language may have been mistaken for change, need to be resolved
before a contact explanation can be justified.
In the ensuing sections we first provide a brief overview of some of the more salient
types of change reported to result from contact. We then review the kinds of confound-
ing evidence that plagues the study of change, contact-induced or otherwise, and propose
criteria for establishing its existence empirically. In section 3 we detail a method, combin-
ing the machinery of variationist sociolinguistics with the comparative method of histori-
cal linguistics, capable of identifying change and ascertaining its source. We then present
a series of case studies illustrating the utility of this approach and conclude with some
observations about the implications of our findings for understanding the existence, na-
ture and extent of contact-induced change. Our focus is on the grammar, but the consid-
erations we present also apply to other types of change, with the exception of lexical bor-
rowing.
392 IV. Structure and dynamics across language spaces
2. Background
Contact-induced structural change has long been a subject of debate among linguists,
due in no small part to the primacy traditionally accorded the internal evolution of
language (e.g., Lass 1980; Martinet 1960). This was traditionally assumed to be regular
and rule-governed, while externally-motivated changes could be arbitrary, unpredictable
and idiosyncratic. External explanations were thus often invoked as a last resort, when
a more satisfactory account was not available (Romaine 1988: 349).
Early opinions ranged from outright denial of the possibility of a mixed language
(e.g., Müller 1871: 86; Whitney 1881) to the claim that there are no completely unmixed
languages (Schuchardt 1884: 5). But most of those who admitted the possibility of con-
tact-induced change did so cautiously and under specific conditions. Haugen’s comment
that “[on] those relatively rare occasions when bound morphemes are actually transfer-
red from one language to another, they are such as fit readily into a preexistent category
in the recipient language” (1954: 386), is but one example. Similarly, Jakobson (1962:
241) argued that “a language accepts foreign structural elements only when they corre-
spond to its own developmental tendencies”. Notwithstanding such caveats, major struc-
tural changes said to result from language contact continue to be reported.
Among the more spectacular changes of the past figure the borrowing of Turkish
inflectional suffixes into dialects of Asia Minor Greek (Dawkins 1916), the incorporation
of the entire Spanish preposition system into Malinche Mexicano (Field 2005: 352), the
borrowing of Russian finite verb morphology into Mednyj Aleut (Thomason 2001), the
development of Michif from French noun phrases and Cree verb phrases (e.g., Bakker
1997; Bakker and Papen 1997) and the (in)famous convergence of Kupwar Urdu, Mara-
thi and Kannada into “a single surface syntactic structure” (Gumperz and Wilson
1971: 155).
After reviewing many such changes, as well as a variety of theories of what constrains
them, Thomason was led to reject the idea that categorical constraints against contact-
induced change could be enunciated. Instead she proposed that under the right social
and linguistic conditions,
[…] anything goes, including structural borrowing that results in major typological changes
in the borrowing language. In phonology, loss or attrition of entire phonetic and/or phono-
logical categories in native words and of all kinds of morphophonemic rules. In syntax,
sweeping changes in such features as word order, relative clauses, negation, coordination,
subordination, comparison, and quantification. In morphology, typologically disruptive
changes such as the replacement of flexional by agglutinative morphology or vice-versa, the
addition or loss of morphological categories that do not match in source and borrowing
languages, and the wholesale loss or addition of agreement patterns. (Thomason 2001: 71)
At the time of this writing, Thomason’s (and Schuchardt’s) views enjoy wide support.
The implicit assumption is that change is an almost inevitable result of language contact
(e.g., Appel and Muysken 1987: 154; Bynon 1977: 240; Harris and Campbell 1995: 149,
among many others; although see Thomason 2007 for discussion of deliberate resistance
to contact-induced change). To be sure, some scholars continue to caution against pro-
miscuous inferences, particularly in the absence of robust sociohistorical and linguistic
evidence (e.g., Dorian 1993; Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner 2005). And Heine and Ku-
teva (2005: 8) observe that contact is often invoked without satisfactorily ruling out
22. Contact-induced grammatical change 393
other causal mechanisms. Nonetheless, the onus seems to be on the analyst to justify
why change did not occur in an apparently favorable situation:
But since [the above] predictions are robust ⫺ that is, they are valid in the great majority of
cases that have been described in the literature ⫺ any violation should provide interesting
insights into social, and, to a lesser extent, linguistic determinants of contact-induced
change. (Thomason 2001: 71, emphasis ours)
And in fact, the kinds of changes enumerated above are reported in contemporary con-
tact situations as well. In the least conspicuous cases, an existing minor-use pattern is
claimed to be developing into a major-use pattern via overextension of recipient-lan-
guage options into new contexts (e.g., Heine and Kuteva 2005: 44⫺62; Klein 1980; Silva-
Corvalán 1994a: 167; Toribio 2004: 167). Thus Toribio (2004: 170) states that when the
“bilingual mode” of two Spanish-English bilinguals was experimentally induced, their
use of overt subject pronouns, while not ungrammatical in Spanish, reflected the influ-
ence of English, a non-pro-drop language. Savić (1995: 487, cited in Heine and Kuteva
2005: 69) reaches similar conclusions in relation to slightly elevated uses of optional
overt subject and object NPs in the discourse of Serbian-English bilinguals. Heine and
Kuteva also discuss an increase of overt pronouns among Russian and Hungarian bilin-
guals, again on the model of English (2005: 68), as do Otheguy, Zentella and Livert
(2007) for New York City Spanish and Backus (2005: 333) for Turkish. The same process
has been said to initiate word order changes, as in the shift from the Spanish majority
pattern of postposed adjectival placement (la persona más importante) to the pre-nominal
adjectival placement (la más importante persona) characteristic of English (Toribio
2004: 167).
In another type of change, recipient-language morphemes may encode a completely
new grammatical category, as in Tariana-Portuguese bilinguals’ use of interrogative pro-
nouns (e.g., kwana ‘who’) to mark relative and complement clauses on the model of
Portuguese, or of Portuguese lexemes to express the Tariana evidentiality marking sys-
tem (Aikhenvald 2002: 182⫺183, 315⫺316).
Other contemporary cases of convergence involve outright violation of recipient-lan-
guage grammar. Clyne (2003: 132) discusses overgeneralization by Dutch-English and,
to a lesser extent, German-English bilinguals of SVO word order in contexts where SOV
and VSO are prescribed in the non-contact varieties.
Apart from extension of an existing option, addition of a totally new category and
violation of recipient-language rules, contact is widely believed to accelerate attrition
and loss of grammatical features in one language with no equivalent in the other (e.g.,
Seliger and Vago 1991). The subjunctive mood in New World Romance varieties is fre-
quently cited as an example of contact-induced erosion (see e.g., Garcı́a 1985; Gutiérrez
1994; Lantolf 1978; Ocampo 1990; Silva-Corvalán 1994b for Spanish and Laurier 1989
for Canadian French). We explore this phenomenon in more detail below. Other mor-
phosyntactic elements said to be receding as a result of contact include the BE auxiliary
(sein, zijn, essere) in Australian German, Dutch and Italian respectively, in favor of
haben, hebben, avere ‘have’, on the model of English, which admits only have in such
contexts (Clyne 2003: 118⫺119). Clyne does acknowledge regional variation in auxiliary
usage, even in some non-contact varieties of these languages, but follows Thomason and
Kaufman (1988: 58⫺59), in arguing that contact reinforces language-internal tendencies.
And these examples could be multiplied ad libitum.
Much of the evidence for contact-induced change may lend itself equally well to
alternate explanations. Sometimes inherent variability is equated with change (as in the
aforementioned Australian example). Elsewhere, perceived differences from a standard
are designated changes (as in the increase of overt subject pronouns). And it is often
unclear whether the change in question is idiosyncratic or community-wide. The next
section summarizes these and other pitfalls and details some of the considerations that
must be taken into account in the empirical establishment of change.
3. Establishing change
3.1. Variability is not change
The hallmark of speech is inherent variability, alternate ways of saying the same thing
(Labov 1969). Variability is a necessary condition for change, but is not, in and of itself,
coterminous with it. In many areas of the grammar, alternations among variant forms
may persist for centuries, but linguists who believe that language is invariant often inter-
pret them as signs of change. This inference is particularly prevalent when the forms in
question are detected among speakers or groups considered vulnerable to external influ-
ence (e.g., bilinguals, residents of minority-language communities in intense contact with
a majority language, etc.). Change is also routinely invoked when one of the variants is
salient or stigmatized, especially when a null form is involved. Thus, the widespread
variability between subjunctive and indicative morphology in (prescribed) subjunctive-
selecting contexts cited above is usually characterized in contact situations as loss of the
subjunctive, despite the fact that this alternation has been attested for centuries (Poplack
2003; St-Amand 2002). So a first requirement is to determine whether variability is in-
volved in change. Variant choice is never random, but is instead highly constrained by
features of the (linguistic and extra-linguistic) environment. Measuring the trajectory of
variant use over time, coupled with analysis of the fine conditioning of variant choice,
provide a sensitive and refined diagnostic of change, in ways we illustrate in section
5 below.
3.2. Locating an earlier stage
At the most trivial level, change shows up as a difference (qualitative or quantitative)

between an outcome and an earlier stage, but in much of the current literature, the
structure of the earlier stage is either not appealed to, or at best, only inferred (e.g.,
Winford 2003: 64). Absent systematic comparison with a relevant precursor, any claims
about what has changed must remain speculative. (Indeed, lack of an appropriate dia-
chronic baseline is at least partially responsible for the widespread assumption that many
salient features of contemporary vernaculars, both contact and non-contact, are recent
innovations; see also Zwicky 2005).
The first step in establishing the existence of change is comparison over time. This
may not be simple or straightforward, given the often fragmentary nature of surviving
diachronic evidence. This abiding (and at times insoluble) problem in historical linguis-
tics has given rise to an entire methodology devoted to reconstruction (e.g., Campbell
1999, 2003; Hoenigswald 1960; Lehman 1992; Ringe 2003, to name but a few). Syn-
chronically, however, with a modicum of ingenuity, earlier stages or surrogates for them
can often be found.
3.3. The nature o the reerence point

Not every earlier stage is equally useful in assessing change, however. In most reported
cases, the comparison point (diachronic or synchronic) is some poorly defined “stan-
dard”. Constituted only of forms that have been prescriptively ratified, the standard
rarely acknowledges variants that cannot be associated (rightly or wrongly) with variant
functions or readings (Poplack et al. 2002). As a result, the language ratified as standard
may diverge considerably from the language actually spoken, which often develops inde-
pendently of normative injunction (Poplack and Dion to appear; Leroux 2003; Poplack
and Malvar 2007; Willis 2000). The variability most characteristic of vernacular speech
involves competition among standard and nonstandard features. When compared with
an idealized invariant standard, the latter may appear to be changes.
A nice illustration of the importance of an appropriate reference, or baseline, variety
comes from a recent study of Spanish in contact with English in New York City
(Otheguy, Zentella and Livert 2007). As noted above in connection with the extension of
minor-use patterns, rates of overt pronouns are thought to be increasing among second-
generation Spanish speakers, on the model of English, in which the subject is assumed
to be categorically expressed (but see Leroux and Jarmasz [2006] for conditions govern-
ing variable subject pro-drop in English). Of course, some overt pronoun expression is
tolerated in Spanish, but the standard baseline does not specify how much. What then
constitutes an “increase”? Vis-à-vis what? Otheguy, Zentella and Livert’s comparison
with one surrogate pre-contact stage of Spanish (spoken by newcomers to New York)
revealed, contrary to the widely espoused convergence hypothesis enunciated above, an
even higher rate of overt pronouns than that displayed by their New York born-and-
raised counterparts (2007: 786). Only once the appropriate comparison variety was iden-
tified (i. e. by distinguishing two newcomer dialects, each with a different initial rate of
overt pronouns), were they able to demonstrate that pronoun expression had in fact
increased in the second generation.
Invidious comparisons can only be avoided if the reference variety is commensurate
with the variety hosting the candidate for change. If it is a spoken vernacular, the base-
line should also be a spoken vernacular (or an appropriate surrogate thereof); if it is a
contact variety, the baseline should be a pre-contact variety, and so on. As we will show
below, when the inference of change is pursued scientifically via systematic comparisons
(vertical and horizontal) of appropriate reference varieties, potential candidates often
turn out either not to be changes, or not to be contact-induced, but rather cases of
garden-variety inherent variability firmly rooted in the internal structure of language
(Leroux and Jarmasz 2006; Poplack et al. 2006). Efforts invested in locating and mining
appropriate earlier stages have paid off handsomely (Ayres-Bennett 2000; Gordon et al.
2004; Martineau and Mougeon 2003; Poplack and St-Amand 2007). The procedure is a
good deal more laborious than simply inferring what the precursor was like, but in view
of the potential for misidentification, we see this as a requirement for any claim of
change based on synchronic data.
3.4. The social embedding o change
Another major impediment to detecting change resides in the nature, quantity and qual-
ity of the evidence. Manifestations of change are relatively rare in running discourse.
This may be why much of the published evidence comes from data collected in experi-
mental or quasi-experimental conditions (e.g., informant elicitation, subjective reaction
tests, even “forced” interviews with semi-speakers [see, e.g., Altenberg 1991; Huffines
1991; Kaufman and Aronoff 1991; Montrul 2002; Schmidt 1991]). Atypical situations
may entail atypical behavior, with little or no bearing on what transpires in real-life
bilingual settings (Poplack 1983: 116). Without knowing how well, if at all, these experi-
ments reflect language use in the community, their results cannot be interpreted.
This brings us to the distinction between innovation and change. Every change in-
volves an innovation in the speech of one or more individuals and its subsequent diffu-
sion across the rest of the community (Croft 2000; Joseph and Janda 2003: 13; Milroy
1993: 223; Shapiro 1995: 105, fn. 1; Thomason 2007). For some linguists, the innovation
is the change, and it is assumed to occur during first language acquisition. Theoretically,
we would argue (along with Labov 1994: 310⫺311 and most other sociolinguists), that
“an innovation in a speaker’s output is not a linguistic change until it has been agreed
on and adopted by some community of speakers” (Milroy 1992: 221), a fortiori because
the vast majority of changes do not “catch on” (e.g., Thomason 2001: 130). From an
empirical perspective, however, this is a moot point: in all but the rarest of cases, the
moment of innovation is simply unobservable.
We can rephrase the issue in terms of the relationship between the individual and the
community. Claims of change are often based on exiguous speaker samples (e.g., Tori-
bio’s 2004 study of two individuals), if any. The linguistic behavior of the individual may
be ephemeral, situation-bound and/or simply deviant from the norms of the remainder
of the community (Labov 1972a; Poplack 1983: 119), especially when this behavior is
elicited under laboratory conditions. Alternatively, it may be a predictable outcome of
one or more explanatory factors, linguistic and/or extra-linguistic. Only once the speak-
er’s linguistic behavior is situated with respect to that of the appropriate reference variety
(other speakers of the same age, bilingual ability, educational level, etc.) is it possible to
decide. If change has occurred, it should be observable (at least to some degree) in the
speech of the relevant members of the community (e.g., the younger cohort, if spear-
headed by youth; the highly bilingual, if induced by contact, etc.). In other words, in
the absence of diffusion, change cannot be confirmed.
3.5. Type o bilingual population
The locus of the candidate for contact-induced change is also important. As Bullock and
Toribio (2004: 91) observe, researchers have drawn on an array of bilingual populations,
including heritage language speakers, incomplete acquirers and those undergoing lan-
guage loss. Shifting populations have garnered most attention (see, e.g., Dorian 1981,
1989; Gal 1979; Mougeon and Beniak 1991; Otheguy, Zentella and Livert 2007; Silva-
Corvalán 1991), but the linguistic behavior they display is not necessarily applicable to
stable bilingual communities (Poplack 1993; Winford 2003: 64). In the widely studied
contexts of language restriction and obsolescence, structural differences (from the main-
stream or non-contact variety) may in fact be inevitable, given that many of the infor-
mants may not (or no longer) use it with any regularity. In effect, then, although ethni-
cally minority-group members, they may be L2 speakers of the minority language
(Poplack 1997: 305). L2 speakers can expected to make all manner of acquisition errors,
depending on their level of proficiency at the time of data collection. Though these may
be transitory, in contact situations, they too are often construed as changes.
3.6. The linguistic embedding o change
In addition to a certain level of diffusion across the community, the innovation should
also occur (to some degree) in relevant linguistic contexts. Relevant contexts are deter-
mined by situating the innovation in the larger host linguistic system⫺synchronic and
diachronic. Among the questions to be answered are: To what extent has the innovation
gained a foothold? What is its current role? Has it replaced a native form in one or more
functions? Did it introduce a new function into recipient-language grammar? Isolated,
anecdotal or exceptional examples, so often cited in the literature, reveal nothing about
the regularity of the innovation, its productivity, or the extent to which it is entrenched
in the language (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 185). This can only come from
studying the sustained discourse of speakers in context. Because changes examined syn-
chronically are likely to still be in progress, and thus continue to feature variability, these
questions can only be addressed by establishing the structure of the variability, as it
emerges from the constraints conditioning variant choice.
3.7. Recognizing change
Most reported changes are tangible: a novel lexical element (e.g., a borrowing), unwar-
ranted presence of an existing form (e.g., increased pronoun expression in pro-drop
languages), absence of a prescribed form (e.g., the French subjunctive), or choice of the
(prescriptively) “wrong” form (e.g., auxiliary haben for sein in Australian German or
avoir for être in Canadian French). But observed changes tend to be far more subtle,
especially during the sometimes very lengthy transition period from one language state
to another. Linguists who focus on inherent variability recognize, in ascending order of
importance, change in frequency of one or more competing forms, change in statistical
significance of one or more factors contributing to variant choice and change in linguistic
structure. With rare exceptions, these elude casual observation, but can be detected with
the aid of the methods described in section 4.
3.8. Distinguishing contact-induced change rom internal evolution
Once it has been established that a change has indeed taken place, it remains to demon-
strate that it is contact-induced and not the product of drift. This step is usually skipped
in the literature, much of which is predicated on the aforementioned (widespread but
unfounded) assumption that linguistic differences occurring in bilingual contexts are nec-
essarily 1) changes and 2) contact-induced. Thomason (2007: 42) defines contact-induced
change as follows: “a particular linguistic change is caused at least in part by language
(or dialect) contact if it would have been less likely to occur outside a particular contact
situation”. Given how little we know about the likelihood of particular changes ⫺ within
or outside contact situations ⫺ we offer alternative criteria:
A candidate for contact-induced change in a contact variety is present in the presumed

source variety and either 1) absent in the pre-contact or non-contact variety, or 2) if present
(e.g., through interlingual coincidence), is not conditioned in the same way as in the source,
and 3) can also be shown to parallel in some non-trivial way the behavior of a counterpart
feature in the source.
Compliance with these conditions can only be ascertained through systematic quantita-
tive comparisons, of a diagnostic linguistic feature, with an earlier or pre-contact stage
(or a surrogate thereof), with a non-contact variety, and most important, with the pre-
sumed source. As we shall see in what follows, these criteria have not been met by most
extant studies, with the result that the existence, frequency and extent of contact-induced
change remain unclear.
Summarizing, sufficient understanding of the outcomes of contact appears beyond
the reach of anything but systematic corpus-based research carried out within the bilin-
gual community. Application of an empirically accountable quantitative methodology to
large and representative bodies of bilingual speech can contribute significantly to resolv-
ing the difficulties associated with ascertaining whether contact-induced change has au-
thentically occurred. It is to such a methodological framework that we now turn.
4. Applying the comparative variationist ramework

to the investigation o change
4.1. The variationist paradigm
The approach that we exemplify in the remainder of this article draws on the combined
resources of variationist sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov 1972a, Labov 1972b; Labov et al.
1968; Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968) and the Comparative Method of historical
linguistics (e.g., Baldi 1990; Campbell 1998; Hoenigswald 1960; Meillet 1967). A central
tenet of the variationist paradigm is that the recurrent choices made by speakers in
discourse, though not completely predictable, are not random, but are subject to con-
straints imposed by “the phonological environment, the syntactic context, the discursive
function of the utterance, topic, style, situation and personal and/or sociodemographic
characteristics of the speaker or other participants” (Sankoff 1988a: 151). The key theo-
retical construct of this framework is the linguistic variable (Labov 1966/1982), which
comprises a set of variants among which speakers alternate in expressing a given meaning
or function. This results in a heterogeneous but structured linguistic system. A founda-
tional working principle is that the structure ⫺ grammatical and social ⫺ underlying the
heterogeneity can be inferred from the distribution and conditioning of competing vari-
ants in discourse.
4.2. Communities and speakers
We noted above that change proceeds from diffusion, and extent of diffusion can only
be assessed in reference to a community of speakers. A crucial step, though often ne-
glected, is to locate an appropriate (here, bilingual) community in which to carry out the
study. The nature and makeup of the community allow us to test hypotheses about the
extra-linguistic factors often claimed to be relevant to contact-induced change. These
include intensity of contact (the more intense, the greater the likelihood of structural
interference), length of contact (the greater the time-depth, the greater the likelihood of
change), status of the languages in the community (minority or majority) and size of
speaker population (the fewer and more marginal the speakers, the more likely that they
will borrow from the language of the dominant group) (e.g., Romaine 1995; Thomason
2001; Winford 2003). Study sites can be selected to represent these parameters and to
test whether these factors are or are not operating.
Speakers constituting these communities can be sampled to represent individual di-
mensions of the contact axis. Sampling protocols are also guided by hypotheses about
how contact-induced change works. According to one, individual level of bilingualism
is inversely correlated with mastery of the minority-language grammar, such that the
greater the proficiency in the other language, the more likely the possibility of simplifica-
tion or loss of minority-language linguistic structure. Another proposes that the incorpo-
ration on the local level of majority-language material (via code-switching or borrowing)
into otherwise minority-language discourse may bring with it associated grammatical
properties, and these in turn may lead to structural convergence (e.g., Backus 2005; King
2005; Muysken 2000; Thomason 2001; Winford 2003). According to this hypothesis, a
speaker’s individual propensity to code-switch would be a predictor of contact-induced
change. Individual attitudes toward, and relative prestige of, each of the languages could
also affect the extent and direction of change (e.g., Appel and Muysken 1987: 158; Joseph
2007; Romaine 1995: 66; Thomason 2001).
The case studies in section 5 demonstrate how these and other hypotheses can be
tested on linguistic production data provided by speakers representing different combi-
nations of these conditions, thus enabling us to ascertain which are most explanatory of
contact-induced change and which community members are most likely to lead it.
4.3. Sampling bilingual speech
Once the appropriate speakers have been identified, we can record samples of their
spontaneous speech (bilingual and monolingual) in quantities sufficient to permit ac-
countable analysis. The speech of choice for such an endeavor is the vernacular. Not only
does the vernacular offer “the most systematic data for linguistic analysis” (Labov 1984:
29), it is also the register in which linguistic manifestations of language contact are most
likely to occur. Variationists mine vernacular corpora to uncover the regular patterns
that characterize natural exchanges in the speech community and to distinguish them
from isolated or idiosyncratic occurrences. A pattern may be defined as “a series of
parallel occurrences (established according to structural and/or functional criteria) occur-
ring at a non-negligible rate of use” (Poplack and Meechan 1998: 129). Patterns can
only be discerned by systematic quantitative analysis of the data in accordance with the
principle of accountability (Labov 1972b: 72) . This requires not only that all the relevant
occurrences of a feature be incorporated into the analysis, but additionally all the
contexts in which it could have occurred but did not. Adherence to the principle of
accountability allows the analyst to identify anomalous occurrences which are neither
representative nor recurrent (and thus unlikely to trigger change), while identifying regu-
lar tendencies, which may (or may not) herald change.
4.4. Variable rule analysis
Certain linguistic and extra-linguistic conditions can be expected to promote change,

though none is fully determinant. Claims that even favorable linguistic factors can be
overridden by the right constellation of social factors (e.g., Thomason 2001: 77; Winford
2003: 25) raise the issue of the relative weights each contributes to a particular outcome
and the relationship of such weights to different types of contact situations. This is a
problem that lends itself well to multivariate analysis, the major analytical tool in the
variationist framework. Variable rule analysis (Rand and Sankoff 1990; Sankoff, Taglia-
monte and Smith 2005) facilitates extraction of regularities from the welter of data mak-
ing up running discourse. The multiple regression procedure incorporated within it helps
determine which aspects of the linguistic (e.g., phonological, morphological, syntactic,
etc.) and extra-linguistic (e.g., minority status, bilingual ability, age, etc.) contexts con-
tribute statistically significant effects to variant choice when all are considered simulta-
neously (e.g., Sankoff 1988b). These aspects are hypotheses about the structure of variant
choice. Variable rule analysis enables us to operationalize them (as factors) and deter-
mine which give the best account of the data. The goals are to ascertain whether change
has taken place and if so, whether it is the product of contact or internal development.
Much empirical work on contact-induced change in progress revolves around fre-
quencies. As detailed by Poplack and Tagliamonte (2001: 92), however, differences in
rates of variant selection must be used with caution to infer change, contact-induced or
otherwise. The key diagnostic in assessing the relationship and provenance of forms is
the constraint hierarchy, the configuration of environmental factors affecting the prob-
ability that a given variant form will be selected, along with the direction of their effects.
We construe these as a portion of the grammar underlying the variability. To the extent
that constraint hierarchies are language-specific, they are powerful indicators of change
(see section 5).
Similarities in surface form in contact and source varieties can be misleading. They
may result from borrowing or transfer, justifying the inference of change, but may also
be due to interlingual coincidence or to linguistic universals. To rule out alternative
explanations, we rely on conflict sites (Poplack and Meechan 1998: 132): functional,
structural and/or quantitative differences, typically manifested as a conflict in constraint
hierarchies. The conflict site, together with detailed cross-variety comparison, plays a
crucial role in detecting change and identifying its ultimate provenance. If the hierarchy
of constraints conditioning the variable occurrence of a candidate for change (e.g., Ø
subjunctive, overt subject pronoun, preposition stranding, null relative marker, peri-
phrastic future) in a contact variety is the same as that of its pre-contact precursor, while
differing from that of its presumed source, no structural change has taken place. If it
features a constraint hierarchy different from those of both its pre-contact precursor and
the presumed source, we can infer that change has occurred, but not one that is contact-
induced. Only when a candidate for change in a contact variety features a constraint
hierarchy different from that of its pre-contact precursor, but parallel to that of its pre-
sumed source, can we conclude in favor of contact-induced change.
4.5. Cross-variety comparison
Comparisons are at the heart of inferring change, and as such, figure, at least implicitly,
in all studies of contact-induced change. But many have been carried out without refer-
ence to the principle of accountability, or involve an idealized comparison variety. Still
others are simply anecdotal. Innovative in the research program we describe here is the
extent of the scientific apparatus brought to bear on the comparison. The comparative
variationist enterprise (Poplack and Meechan 1998; Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001; Tag-
liamonte 2002) contributes not only a methodological aspect ⫺ the construction, statisti-
cal analysis and linguistic interpretation of suitable comparison varieties (pre-contact,
non-contact and post-contact), but also the critical capacity to decide among competing
hypotheses. The focus is on identifying empirical criteria capable of both detecting
change and ascertaining its source, and testing hypotheses empirically to determine the
goodness of fit with the data. This involves principled data collection, enunciation and
operationalization of hypotheses and their statistical evaluation in large-scale corpora.
In section 5, we illustrate this approach by considering a number of case studies which
attest to the versatility of quantitative variationist methodology for identifying contact-
induced change.
5. Putting contact-induced change to the test
The studies we present below were carried out in a context of long-term intense contact
between French and English in Canada, a situation that meets all the criteria considered
favorable to structural convergence (e.g., Thomason and Kaufmann 1988; Winford 2003:
90). Depending on locality, each of the languages has a different official status: English
is the majority language in Ontario, while in Quebec, French assumes this role. This
configuration allows for comparison of each of the languages in minority and majority
guise. The 284 speakers involved in these studies are distributed among these four condi-
tions. Other characteristics relevant to the contact situation include density of contact
on the local level (as expressed by the ratio of anglophones to francophones in the
community), individual bilingual ability (as measured by a bilingual proficiency index
[Poplack 1989, Poplack, Walker and Malcolmson 2006]) and relative propensity to bor-
row or code-switch (as inferred by comparing individual rates of each across sample
members). Standard extra-linguistic factors like social class, education, etc. were also
taken into account. The inference of change over time was investigated by comparing
the speech of younger and older generations.
The linguistic data come from two massive corpora of spontaneous speech collected
from these speakers: the Ottawa-Hull French Corpus (Poplack 1989) and the Quebec
English Corpus (Poplack, Walker and Malcolmson 2006). The typological similarity of
French and English should render them particularly hospitable to contact-induced
change. In addition, superficially similar structures were deliberately targeted, as these
are considered to be prime candidates for grammatical convergence. Indeed, at least two
of the cases described below had been reported to result from this process.
5.1. Attrition o the subjunctive in Ottawa-Hull French
In the most straightforward case, we locate, in community speech, a linguistic feature

that is used differently from the way it is prescribed and determine which individuals
are deviating the most. If the difference is the result of change, and if that change is
contact-induced, its leaders should figure among the younger, the more bilingual and
those in most intense contact with the majority language. The French subjunctive is an
excellent candidate. It is (prescriptively) obligatory after the class of “subjunctive-select-
ing” main verbs, like falloir in example (1), but in Canadian French it has been found
to be variable ((1); Poplack 1990). (This and all ensuing examples are reproduced verba-
tim from audio recordings from one of the corpora described above. The codes in paren-
theses refer to corpus [QEC: Corpus of Quebec English; OH: Corpus of Ottawa-Hull
French], speaker and line number. The examples cited throughout this paper are instanti-
ations of patterns that emerged from the large-scale quantitative analyses presented in
sections 5.1⫺5.3)
(1) Fallait qu’ elle répond (ind) “oui, tu peux faire trois pas de
Necessary (past) that she answer (ind) yes you can make three steps of
géant”.
giants
Fallait qu’ elle réponde (subj) la phrase complète.
Necessary (past) that she answer (subj) the sentence complete.
‘She had to say “yes, you may take three giant steps”. She had to say the whole
sentence.’ (OH.025.2186)
Because the subjunctive is no longer used productively in English, the (variable) occur-
rence of the indicative in contexts like (1) is inferred to be a stage in the loss of this
form, a development which Laurier (1989) characterized as the result of contact.
Table 22.1 displays the results of a multivariate analysis of the extralinguistic factors
contributing to choice of subjunctive. In this and the ensuing tables, the higher the figure,
the greater the probability the “application” variant will be selected in the environment
listed on the left. Table 22.1 reveals a small, but statistically significant, tendency for the
most bilingual speakers to use least subjunctive. This result supports the hypothesis that
high levels of bilingualism lead to linguistic simplification and loss. Most studies would
stop at this demonstration (if they provided any quantitative information at all). But if
this is a contact-induced change, effects of the other factors should point in the same
direction. This not the case. Instead, the two French-majority-language communities in
Québec, Vieux Hull and Mont Bleu, which should favor the subjunctive most under this
Tab. 22.1: Variable rule analysis of the contribution of extralinguistic factors to the choice of sub-
junctive under verbal matrices
Corrected mean 0.715
Total N 2694
SEX
Female .52
Male .46
AGE
45⫺54 .55
55⫺64 .53
15⫺24 .52
25⫺34 .50
65⫹ .48
35⫺44 .44
NEIGHBOURHOOD OF RESIDENCE
Vieux Hull, Quebec (FR majority working class) .57
West End, Ontario (FR minority working class) .51
Vanier, Ontario (FR minority upper-working class) .50
Basse-Ville, Ontario (FR minority working class) .50
Mont Bleu, Quebec (FR majority upper-middle class) .43
ENGLISH PROFICIENCY
mid-low .54
low .53
mid-high .48
high .42
hypothesis, instead use most and least, depending on social class. (Working-class speak-
ers, even more counter-intuitively, apparently use it the most.) Also militating against
the inference of change is the fact that the age distribution is not monotonic: the youn-
gest speakers are as likely to select the subjunctive as their oldest counterparts. Further
analysis revealed that these apparent extra-linguistic effects are in fact epiphenomena of
a strong lexical effect (Poplack 1990, 1992: 2001). Subjunctive morphology is highly
associated with only a few main verbs, and because those verbs happened to be unevenly
distributed across the subgroups represented in Table 22.1, this showed up as a discrep-
Tab. 22.2: Variable rule analysis of the contribution of English proficiency to the choice of subjunc-
tive in verbs embedded under four classes of verbal matrix
English Proficiency
low mid-low mid-high high
VERBS EMBEDDED UNDER
high frequency/high subjunctive matrix verb:
falloir .55 .58 .40 .42
high frequency/high subjunctive matrix verbs:
vouloir / aimer .46 .58 .42 .60
low frequency/low subjunctive matrix verbs .68 .47 .49 .31
low frequency/variable subjunctive matrix verbs .34 .60 .61 .39
Tab. 22.3: Variable rule analysis of the contribution of socioeconomic class to the choice of subjunc-
tive in verbs embedded under four classes of verbal matrix
Socioeconomic class
unskilled skilled sales / profes-
service sional
VERBS EMBEDDED UNDER
high frequency/high subjunctive matrix verb:
falloir .45 .53 .47 .69
high frequency/high subjunctive matrix verbs:
vouloir / aimer .36 .62 .64 .52
low frequency/low subjunctive matrix verbs .56 .47 .42 .58
low frequency/variable subjunctive matrix
verbs .50 .42 .42 .68
ancy in subjunctive usage. When the lexical identity of the main verb is factored out, as
in Table 22.2, bilingual proficiency no longer shows a systematic effect.
The real explanation for differential use of the subjunctive is class-based, and is not
relevant to the contact situation at all, as illustrated in Table 22.3 (see Poplack 1997 for
detail). This result could not have been intuited from casual comparisons with either the
idealized standard benchmark (which prescribes the subjunctive categorically), or
amongst proficiency groups. This is but one illustration of our earlier contention that
differences in overall rates of variant occurrence need not be indicative of change, con-
tact-induced or otherwise. Indeed, real-time analysis over a time span of 120 years (St-
Amand and Poplack 2002) showed that the current situation of the subjunctive is actu-
ally a retention.
5.2. Preposition stranding in Ottawa-Hull French
It has been argued that a local factor, the extent to which individual speakers draw on
the two languages in discourse, is a better predictor of contact-induced change than
macro-level factors like minority status or density of contact. Under this hypothesis,
speakers who code-switch the most would lead contact-induced change (Backus 2005;
Bullock and Toribio 2004; King 2005; Thomason 2001; Winford 2003). Zentz (2006) was
the first to test this hypothesis empirically, using as a diagnostic the syntactic phenome-
non of preposition stranding in Canadian French, as in (2).
(2) Comme le gars que je sors avec, lui il parle- bien il est français
Like the guy that I go out with him he speaks- well he is French
‘Like the guy I’m going out with, he speaks- well he is French.’ (OH.013.2122)
Because preposition stranding is normatively proscribed, examples like (2) have been
ascribed to contact, if not convergence, with English (e.g., King 2000; Roberge and
Rosen 1999), in which stranding is presumed to occur freely.
But the phenomenon of stranding cannot be fully understood in isolation from the
behavior of the remainder of the preposition system. In particular, French does admit
phrase-final prepositions in another, superficially similar, construction, known as or-
phaning (Zribi-Hertz 1984). This is illustrated in (3). In contrast to stranding, orphaning
is not admissible in English, as can be seen from the gloss of (3).
(3) Si tu veux l’ avoir avant, il faut tu payes pour.

If you want it to.have before it have you pay for
*‘If you want it before, you have to pay for.’ (OH.013.258)
This raises the question of whether preposition stranding in French is an extension (to
relative clauses) of the native orphaning, or a change induced by contact with English.
Reasoning that if the latter were the case, and the above claims were correct, speakers
who code-switched frequently to that language should engage in more stranding, Zentz
(2006) contrasted the stranding behavior of “high” and “low” code-switchers.
Using constraint hierarchies to first determine and then compare the structure of the
choice mechanism, Zentz showed (Table 22.4) that the strongest predictor of preposition
orphaning in French is lexical.
“Strong” prepositions (a category made up, for the most part, of four: avec ‘with’,
pour ‘for’, dedans ‘in’, dessus ‘on’) favor orphaning, while “weak” prepositions (here, à
‘to’ and de ‘from’) disfavor it almost categorically. This, pattern, which is perfectly con-
sistent with normative injunctions (Grevisse 1980: 1509), is shared by all speakers, re-
gardless of propensity to code-switch, as can be seen by the parallel constraint hierar-
chies. In comparison, stranding, the candidate for change, not only occurs at the same
low rate as orphaning (approximately ten percent of all eligible contexts), but is con-
strained in the same way.
Here too, the most important conditioning factor is the lexical identity of the preposi-
tion. As with orphaning, stranding is also eschewed with weak prepositions and highly
promoted by strong prepositions. And the strong prepositions in question are precisely
those that favor orphaning. This effect is again as true of high as of low code-switchers.
Once stranding ⫺ the superficially English structure ⫺ is examined in the context of
the recipient-language system, three independent results counter the notion that it was
borrowed from English. Stranding occurs at the same (low) rate and more important,
obeys the same variable constraints as native orphaning. Like orphaning, stranding is
restricted to like orphaning, standing is basically restuded to the same four strong prepo-
sitions. In English, on the other hand, stranding would seem to be equally productive
with a wide variety of lexical prepositions, strong and weak. Finally, there is no distinc-
tion between high and low code-switchers, refuting claims that the former are agents of
contact-induced change (see also Torres-Cacoullos and Travis to appear).
The great merit of the Zentz study is that it marshals accountable scientific methodol-
ogy to demonstrate that, contrary to appearances, a syntactic structure apparently iden-
tical to a counterpart in the majority language, and which is moreover (prescriptively)
proscribed in the minority language, is nonetheless unlikely to be a contact-induced
change. This is because the conditions giving rise to stranding in French parallel those
constraining native orphaning, while differing from those assumed to be operating in
English. The drawback of this study (and most others) is that it compares the situation
Tab. 22.4: Independent variable rule analyses of the contribution of linguistic factors to preposition
orphaning and stranding for low and high code-switchers (brackets indicate that the
factor was not statistically significant)
Orphaning Stranding
“Low” “High” “Low” “High”
Code-switchers Code-switchers Code-switchers Code-switchers
Corrected mean .09 .02 .01 .03
Total N 982 662 224 116
SYNTACTIC FACTORS
Place of topic
Discourse referent [ ] [ ] N/A N/A
Intra-sentential
referent [ ] [ ] N/A N/A
Type of construction
Cleft N/A N/A .35 [ ]
Object precedes
relative N/A N/A .40 [ ]
Pseudo-cleft N/A N/A .99 [ ]
Presence of another
complement
None [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
Additional Post-V
complement [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
Clitic [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
SEMANTIC FACTORS
Semantic content of
preposition
“Weak” 0 .19 .19 .19
“Strong” .96 .99 .95
Obligatoriness of prepo-
sition
Obligatory .42 [ ] [ ] [ ]
Non-obligatory .61 [ ] [ ] [ ]
Humanness of noun
complement
Non-human .57 [ ] .46 [ ]
Human .36 [ ] .82 [ ]
in the contact language with what is presumed to be the case in the source. Absent any
accountable study of preposition stranding in the contact variety of English, we cannot
be fully confident about exactly what was transferred. In additional, there is no evidence
(in this or other studies), that the current state of affairs represents a change. Demonstra-
tion of contact-induced change would minimally include a vertical comparison (prefera-
bly with a pre-contact stage, but at the very least with an earlier stage), a horizontal
comparison with a non-contact variety and comparison with the structure of the source.
5.3. Relative marker expression in Quebec English
A study by Poplack et al. (2006) illustrates the unexpected results to emerge from such
an approach. It involves the variable use of overt and null relative markers in accusative
relative clauses in Quebec English, a minority language in intense contact with French.
This is illustrated in example (4). Quebec French shows the same (surface) alternation
in the same context (5).
(4) a. I said “Oh yeah, I remember I was wearing this disgustingly ugly green suit that
you made me wear”, or something. (QEC.031.1135)
b. I was always known as Carrot Head and Freckle Face and a few other very vulgar
names Ø they called me. (QEC.006.602)
(5) a. Bien je comprenais le français, mais c’ est les mots que je comprenais
Well I understood the French but it is the words that I understood
pas.
not
‘Well, I understood the French, but it’s the words that I didn’t understand.’
(OH.059.812)
b. Les maisons Ø ils faisaient dans ce temps là le bois était très-
The houses Ø they made in that time there the wood was very-
il était pas cher pantoute.
it was not expensive at all
‘The houses they made in those days, the wood was very- it wasn’t expensive at
all.’ (OH.050.698)
In particular, both languages permit a null variant (4b, 5b), although this is prescriptively
unacceptable in French. How is it generated? Table 22.5 displays the factors constraining
choice of null variant across mainstream varieties and cohorts of contact-variety
speakers.
A first important observation is that the structure of variable relative marker expres-
sion differs in the two non-contact varieties. In English (column 2), the strongest predic-
tor of a null relative marker is the presence of intervening material between the subject
of the relative clause and its antecedent; in French (column 1), the major effect is phono-
logical. Because these effects are language-specific, we can use them as diagnostics of
contact-induced change. We may now compare the contact variety to its non-contact
counterpart (columns 2 and 3).
For all factor groups, the constraint hierarchies are parallel. This means that, in the
aggregate, the contact variety of English is no different from its mainstream counterpart.
But according to the hypotheses enunciated earlier, certain subgroups of the population
could be expected to spearhead changes. So we will want to establish whether all of the
minority-language speakers behave in the same fashion, by comparing the conditioning
of variant choice according to speaker age and bilingual ability. Predictably, the behavior
of the older (column 5) and least bilingual (column 7) speakers is very similar to that of
speakers of noncontact English (column 2) in terms of constraint hierarchies. But the
younger (column 4) and more bilingual speakers (column 6) share less with the main-
Tab. 22.5: Independent variable rule analyses of the contribution of linguistic factors to the selec-
tion of the null relative marker: across mainstream varieties
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Mainstream Mainstream Contact Younger Older Most Least

French English English speakers speakers bilingual bilingual
speakers speakers
Corrected mean: .019 .367 .532 .400 .502 .503 .568
Total N 50/460 109/288 150/281 131/316 128/253 75/146 75/135
Intervening material
None [ ] .52 .54 .55 [ ] .57 [ ]
Present [ ] .17 .24 .19 [ ] .14 [ ]
Antecedent type
Pronoun .71 .73 [ ] [ ] .76 [ ] .89
Noun .44 .46 [ ] [ ] .45 [ ] .42
Type of subject of the
relative clause
Pronoun .52 .51 [ ] .53 [ ] .53
Noun 0 .28 .32 [ ] .15 [ ] .18
Following phonologi-
cal environment
Sonorants .13 [ ] [ ] .54 [ ] [ ] [ ]
Obstruents .94 [ ] [ ] .36 [ ] [ ] [ ]
Definiteness of ante-
cedent
Definite [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] .59 [ ] .60
Indefinite [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] .36 [ ] .31
Sentence type
Cleft .61 [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
Other .44 [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
stream in terms of the fine conditioning of variant choice. This kind of result is consistent
with their predicted role as leaders of change. Are these in fact changes? Comparison
with older speakers suggests that they are. But are they contact-induced? As we noted
earlier, to sustain any claim in this respect, the involvement of the source language (here,
French) must be established. The three major “departures” of the younger and more
bilingual cohorts with respect to their older and less bilingual counterparts involve the
effects of antecedent type, type of subject of the relative and following phonological
environment. The first two effects have been neutralized in the younger generation, while
in French, as shown in column 1, they are strong and significant. The effect most relevant
to the contact situation is phonological. Recall that this is the major predictor of variant
choice in French, and the younger and most bilingual anglophones are the only ones
who display it. This result is consistent with the inference of contact-induced change.
But comparison of constraint hierarchies shows that the French effect goes in the oppo-
site direction. (The apparent English phonological effect is an epiphenomenon of a devel-
oping tendency for certain pronominal subjects which are coincidentally obstruent-initial
(he, she, they) to disfavor deletion.) Here again, differences among minority-language
cohorts, suggestive as they appear on the surface, cannot be attributed to convergence
Tab. 22.6: Independent variable rule analyses of the contribution of linguistic factors to the selec-
tion of the null relative marker: younger contact vs. benchmark speakers
Younger contact Younger mainstream
speakers speakers
Corrected mean: .482 .299
Total N 83/168 48/148
Intervening material
None .56 .55
Present .18 .10
Antecedent type
Pronoun [ ] .76
Noun [ ] .45
Type of subject of the relative clause
Pronoun [ ] [ ]
Noun [ ] [ ]
Following phonological environment
Sonorants [.53] [.54]
Obstruents [.38] [.34]
Definiteness of antecedent
Definite .59 [ ]
Indefinite .40 [ ]
with French. To what then are they due? Comparison with the non-contact benchmark
provides the answer (Table 22.6). When speakers of mainstream English are analyzed
according to age, we find the same apparent changes in progress.
In this case our method has enabled us to detect change ⫺ the young minority-
language anglophones are diverging from their elders (column 5 of Table 22.5) ⫺ and to
attribute it to the correct source: participation in a change in progress in mainstream
English.
These examples, along with many others (e.g., Dion 2003; Jarmasz 2005; Leroux and
Jarmasz 2006; Petrik 2005; Poplack and St-Amand 2007; St-Amand 2002) demonstrate
that when the inference of contact-induced change is pursued systematically, it becomes
increasingly difficult to justify. Particularly instructive is the fact that even in quantitative
studies, differences between cohorts or overall rates may be masking effects that are
independent of the contact situation.
6. Discussion
Change is widely considered a predictable, if not inevitable, outcome of language con-
tact. The literature is rife with accounts of radical alterations of the grammars of contact
languages, whether by virtue of incorporating forms or functions with no antecedent in
the recipient language, or losing one or more of its core grammatical elements. Many of
these changes would appear to be very rapid, occurring even in the space of a single
generation. This is consistent with another widespread, if unproven, idea: that contact
accelerates change. On both of these counts, contact-induced change appears suspi-
ciously different from internal evolution, which we know to be gradual, moderate and
vastly more conservative.
Observing that scientific demonstration of change, contact-induced or other, was often
missing from this research, we reviewed some of the phenomena that could lead the
analyst down the garden path of inferring change, even where such an inference is not
warranted. Chief among them are the inherent variability characteristic of spontaneous
speech and the dearth of accountable corpus-based studies of the languages in contact.
When confronted with an idealized standard variety, but lacking systematic comparison
with the more relevant pre- and non-contact varieties, or with the supposed source vari-
ety of the claimed change, we detailed how the (variable) occurrence of non-standard
variants could easily be confused with change.
We also outlined a number of conditions necessary to establish the existence of con-
tact-induced change. Many had already been enunciated elsewhere (Poplack 1993;
Poplack and Meechan 1998); some were recently reiterated (e.g., Backus 2005: 310). The
following are paraphrased from Thomason (2001: 93⫺94):
1. Situate the proposed change with respect to its host linguistic system
2. Identify a presumed source of the change
3. Locate structural features shared by the source and recipient languages
4. Prove that the proposed interference features were not present in the pre-contact
variety
5. Prove that the proposed interference features were present in the source variety prior
to contact
6. Rule out (or situate) internal motivations
Thomason herself concedes that “in many, possibly even most contact situations around
the world we cannot at present satisfy requirements 4 and 5”, going so far as to caution
that “if we can’t satisfy all the requirements, then we can’t make a solid case for contact-
induced change” (Thomason 2001: 94). This raises the issue, which has preoccupied us
throughout this article, of just how many of the contact-induced changes currently
treated as facts satisfy any of these conditions, let alone all. This is a very important
question, since these “facts” are the basis for our theories about the nature, extent and
mechanisms of contact-induced change.
We observed earlier that for many diachronic changes, the crucial evidence would
now be impossible to reconstruct. But as we have been at pains to illustrate, this is
certainly not the case for synchronic situations. It is thus all the more puzzling that the
requisite information is missing from all but a handful of contemporary studies. Why
should this be? The growing, but patently false, perception among linguists working in
other paradigms that it is too difficult, if not impossible, to access the relevant evidence
may play a role. The treatment of frequency is a case in point. Frequency is at the root
of most inferences of change, whether manifested as raw rates of occurrence of a form,
or its diffusion across a community or linguistic system. Among the few who have ad-
dressed this issue at all, a certain skepticism about the feasibility of ascertaining fre-
quency empirically is detectible. Thus with reference to the appearance of foreign el-
ements in bilingual speakers’ discourse, Thomason observes, “determining the frequency
of appearance is a hopeless task” (2001: 134), and goes on to query: “how can one
determine whether a speaker used [an element] once, occasionally or frequently?” Like-
wise, while Backus (2005) admits that most changes are likely of the “frequency-chang-
ing kind”, he contends that these are precisely the changes that “are virtually impossible
to demonstrate empirically” (2005: 334). Such assertions betray a surprising lack of fa-
miliarity with corpus-based studies, and fly in the face of the important results of large-
scale quantitative analyses that have been performed on languages in contact.
Despite recent concerns about the absence of an empirically well-founded framework
for investigating bilingual speech (Van Coetsem 2000: 39⫺40; Winford 2007: 22) and the
alleged limitations of variation-based techniques for illuminating contact phenomena
(Muysken 2000: 250), we submit that the rigorous comparative methodology presented
here is capable of detecting change and distinguishing external from internal motivations.
It thus discriminates among competing hypotheses about the nature of these processes.
Agreeing with Thomason (2001: 88) that the crucial similarity between the processes
of contact-induced and internal change has to do with competition (i. e. variability) be-
tween an innovative feature and an older feature, we have outlined a procedure for
assessing contact-induced change within a framework that takes account of its symbiotic
relationship with linguistic variation. We hope to have shown that reliance on the struc-
ture of variant choice affords a depth of analysis that transcends impressionistic observa-
tions based on perceived similarities between surface forms and rates of occurrence.
Indeed, the very strength of the variation-based approach resides in its capacity to
discern even minor perturbations in constraint hierarchies, which may be harbingers of
change, contact-induced or otherwise. Otheguy, Livert and Zentella (2007) provide the
most recent confirmation that it can detect even the smallest adjustments in constraint
ranking across generations of bilingual speakers.
Illustrating with studies of three well-documented candidates, we found no evidence
of change in the first two, and the change documented in the third was not contact-
induced. Moreover, in line with Thomason’s (2001: 91⫺92) caveat that a “case for con-
tact origin can’t be made on the basis of single feature”, additional research situating a
wide variety of Canadian French and English vernacular variants in historical, social
and linguistic context corroborates the findings presented here: none of the contempo-
rary non-standard variants typically ascribed to either linguistic change or language con-
tact are in fact innovations (Poplack and Dion to appear; Elsig and Poplack 2006; Jar-
masz 2005; Leroux 2007; Poplack 1993). Rather, virtually all were not only present in the
pre-contact variety, but, more important, they were largely constrained in the same way.
These results are especially striking when we consider that all the popularly invoked
prerequisites for contact-induced change ⫺ social (protracted contact, extensive bilin-
gualism; high levels of proficiency in the respective source languages, etc.) and linguistic
(i. e. typological congruence [Thomason 2001: 71], interlingual equivalence [Backus 2005:
326]; grammatical “weak points” [Bullock and Toribio 2004: 91], attractiveness [Johan-
son 2002: 2]) ⫺ are met.
Why then did contact-induced change fail to occur? Given the present state of our
knowledge, we can only speculate. The length of contact may have been too brief to
result in change, although a time span of two centuries is a good deal longer than those
on which many recent claims have been based. Perhaps the morpho-syntactic features
we examined are particularly resistant to change, although they were specifically selected
on the basis of typological similarities thought to facilitate it. We cannot rule out the
possibility that our analytical tools may have misidentified or excluded changes; we
reserve judgment until a demonstration to that effect is offered. Certainly the circum-
stances ⫺ linguistic, social and attitudinal ⫺ could not have been more propitious. But
while favorable circumstances may encourage change, we know that they do not deter-
mine it. A remaining possibility is that contact-induced change is a good deal less com-
mon than the literature suggests. This is our best guess at the moment.
Of course, the analyses we have presented, despite being based on corpora of bilin-
gual speech with sizes ranging into the millions of words and large representative samples
of individuals in contact situations, cannot begin to do justice to the full trajectory of
change over time and across all speakers of a language. But opting for the alternative ⫺
anecdotal observation ⫺ simply because “it is much easier to show a qualitative change”
(Backus 2005: 334) ⫺ ignores the important scientific advances in empirical linguistics
made over the last half century. Contact-induced change is not an inevitable, nor possibly
even a common, outcome of language contact. Only more accountable analyses of more
contact situations will tell. In the interim, the burden of proof is on those who claim
that it has occurred.
7. Acknowledgement
The research reported here was generously funded by grants to Poplack from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Killam Foundation.
Poplack holds the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa.
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23. Areal language typology

1. Introduction: Setting the stage
2. Language typology
3. Language change: The social and linguistic dynamics of contact-induced convergence
and areality
4. Consequences for Linguistic Typology and its generalizations
5. Conclusion and outlook
6. References
1. Introduction: Setting the stage

Linguistic typology deals with linguistic variation and the discovery of cross-linguistic
universal patterns reflected in that variation. The aim of the present article is to show
that the robustness and the reliability of typological generalizations crucially depends on
the appropriate assessment of areality, i. e., the influence of geographic closeness and
language contact on structural properties of languages. Thus, the analysis of structures
and their overall statistical distribution in the population of the world’s languages does
not guarantee any direct access to valid generalizations about language universals and
about properties of the human cognition.
This can be illustrated by an example from basic word order. In his 1986 volume,
Tomlin looked at the overall percentage of the six logically possible combinations of S
(Subject), O (Object) and V (Verb) in a statistically balanced sample of 402 languages.
As it turned out, the majority of these languages were either SOV (180 languages, 44.78
percent) or SVO (168 languages, 41.79 percent). Only 37 languages (9.20 percent) were
VSO. The sequences in which O preceded S were only represented by a small minority
of twelve languages (2.99 percent) with VOS, five languages in the Amazonian region of
Brazil (1.24 percent) with OVS and no language with OSV. Tomlin’s (1986) data are
statistically representative but they do not allow conclusions of what may be typical or
normal properties of languages. This can be shown by a rather extreme thought experi-
ment discussed by Newmeyer (1998):
[S]uppose that a nuclear war wiped out most of humankind and its written history, but
spared the Amazonia region of Brazil. Some centuries later, a carefully constructed sample
of the world’s languages would in all probability show those with OVS order to be relatively
common. (Newmeyer 1998: 307)
The general problem that underlies Newmeyer’s thought experiment is the contact-in-
duced diffusion of linguistic structures across geographic areas to the detriment of other
cognitively possible structures. In this context, Dryer (1989) points out that some 71
percent of all the VSO languages belong to the Austronesian family. Without the expan-
sion of the speakers of these languages, VSO would be attested in some three percent of
the world’s languages only. Similarly, the percentage of SVO languages would be con-
siderably lower without the Niger-Congo family, which makes up about 40 percent of
the languages belonging to this word-order type (Dryer 1989).
The above example gives an idea of the dependence of typological findings on lan-
guage contact and its areal consequences. A more detailed account will be given in the
following sections. Section 2 will deal with language typology, its methods and some of
its generalizations and functional motivations. The same section will also show how
Integrative Functionalism (Croft 1995: 2000) provides a basis for linking typological
research with social factors and their impact on the contact-induced diffusion of linguis-
tic structures. Section 3 will discuss the social dynamics of contact and language change,
its areal consequences, the possible correlation between contact and complexity and the
new resources for finding areal correlations provided by the World Atlas of Language
Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005). Section 4 considers some suggestions of how to
implement social aspects into typological methods and the problems they raise. Finally,
section 5 will present an outlook on the role of areality for assessing the overall robust-
ness of typological findings and for the arbitrariness of linguistic structures.
2. Language typology
2.1. Methods, universals and motivations
Language typologists try to discover universal patterns inductively in a representative

sample of the world’s languages. They start from a certain semantically or pragmatically
defined concept and look at how this concept is expressed morphologically and syntacti-
cally in that sample. Croft (2003: 14) characterizes the typological method in terms of
the following three standard research strategies:
i. Determine the particular semantic(-pragmatic) structure or situation type that one
is interested in studying.
ii. Examine the morphosyntactic construction(s) or strategies used to encode that situ-
ation type.
iii. Search for dependencies between the construction(s) used for that situation and
other linguistic factors: other structural features, other external functions expressed
by the construction in question, or both.
The application of these strategies will be illustrated by a brief look at the genitive
construction and the relative clause construction. Cross-linguistic comparison crucially
depends on a common basis (tertium comparationis) that is universally applicable. The
definition of a semantic or pragmatic structure as outlined in strategy (i) serves exactly
that purpose. In our example, the genitive construction can be roughly defined in terms
of two entities, a possessor and a thing possessed, and the possessional relation between
them. Relative clause constructions are characterized by an entity that is semantically
modified by a state of affairs (for a more detailed definition, cf. Lehmann 1984).
On the basis of these definitions, it is now possible to apply strategy (ii) and to
examine how these situation types are formally expressed. For the sake of brevity, I will
only look at word order, i. e., at the position of the possessor (Gen ⫽ genitive) relative
to the thing possessed (N) and at the position of the state of affairs (Rel ⫽ relative
clause) relative to the entity it modifies (N). A look at English shows that both word
orders are possible in the case of possession (GenN: my friend’s house; NGen: the house
of my friend; on genitive variation in English, cf. Rosenbach 2002), while states of affairs
have to follow the entity they modify (NRel: the house [I want to buy]). Each of these
expression formats (GenN, NGen, NRel) represent individual types.
The search for cross-linguistic dependencies between the genitive construction and
the relative-clause construction in terms of strategy (iii) reveals an interesting pattern
concerning the combination of types. There are two parameters in our example. Each
of them consists of two types. The parameter concerning the position of the genitive
relative to the head noun consists of GenN and NGen. In the case of the relative-clause
parameter, we have the types of RelN and NRel. From a logical perspective, each of the
four mathematical combinations should be equally possible. As is illustrated in Table
23.1, the combination [NGen & RelN] is not attested ([⫹] means “attested” in the world’s
languages, [⫺] means “unattested”):
Tab. 23.1: Positions of Gen and Rel relative to N

NGen GenN
NRel ⫹ ⫹
RelN ⫺ ⫹
Since the above pattern is parallel to implications in propositional logic and since it
holds universally in the world’s languages, it is called an implicational universal.
Greenberg (1966) was the first who discovered implicational universals. The implica-
tional correlation between the parameters NGen/GenN and NRel/RelN is defined as
follows by Hawkins (1983; also cf. 1994: 2004):
(1) Hawkins (1983): Universal (IX’): NG 傻 NRel

If in a language the genitive follows the noun, then the relative clause follows like-
wise.
Implicational universals can be combined into chains or hierarchies. The two parameters
based on the positions of the genitive (Gen) and the relative clause (Rel) within the
noun phrase are part of a wider framework which additionally includes the positions of
demonstratives (Dem), numerals (Num) and adjectives (Adj) and the likelihood with
which these modifiers deviate from word-order patterns with prenominal modifiers in
prepositional languages. As can be seen from (2), the adjective can only precede the noun
if the demonstratives and the numerals do likewise, etc. This hierarchical correlation was
discovered by Hawkins (1983; also cf. Hawkins 1994, 2004) who called it the Preposi-
tional Noun Modifier Hierarchy:
(2) Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy (PrNMH):

If a language is prepositional, then if RelN then GenN, if GenN then AdjN, and if
AdjN then DemN/NumN.
Prep 傻 ((NDem/NNum 傻 NAdj) & (NAdj 傻 NG) & (NG 傻 NRel))
There is a number of well-known hierarchies in linguistic typology. I only mention the

animacy hierarchy (Silverstein 1976, Dixon 1979) as another example. This hierarchy
includes animacy and person and covers a wide area of grammatical processes involving
word order, choice of grammatical relation and case marking (e.g., split ergativity, direct/
inverse marking, etc.). It shows up in various versions (cf. Croft 2003: 165⫺175, 178⫺
182). The version in (3) is from Dixon (1979):
(3) Animacy hierarchy (Dixon 1979: 85):

1st Person > 2nd Person > 3rd Person > Proper Noun > Human Common Noun >
Animate Common Noun > Inanimate Common Noun
For linguistic typologists, universal patterns of the above type are not arbitrary. They
are motivated by properties of human cognition and by the fact that language is used
for communication. This leads to the following two types of motivations:
⫺ Cognitive motivations: parsing, iconicity, economy
⫺ Motivations from the speech situation: discourse, pragmatics
The cognitive motivation of parsing is based on the properties of the human parser and
the assumption that there are grammatical structures that can be more easily processed
than others. Hawkins (1983, 1994, 2004) gives the most impressive processing-based
account of implicational universals. One of his efficiency principles, the Minimize Do-
mains Principle, states that the parser prefers shorter processing domains to longer ones
in combinatorial and/or dependency relations (Hawkins 2004: 31). The Prenominal
Noun Modifier Hierarchy can be explained in terms of this principle. The most extensive
discussion of iconicity and economy in linguistic typology is found in Haiman (1978,
1980, 1983, 1985). While iconicity implies a certain isomorphism between a concept and
the way in which it is expressed, economy reflects the desire of speakers and hearers to
strive for “the least effort” or “to do things in the simplest way”. The two principles of
iconicity and economy lead to opposite structural consequences. Iconicity supports overt
marking of semantic distinctions, while economy tends to reduce them. From such a
perspective, typological universals are seen as the result of a competition between these
two motivations.
Motivations from discourse have been discussed from various perspectives. A promi-
nent approach understands discourse as the starting point of a grammaticalization cline
from which more rigid syntactic and morphological structures are developed (Givón
1979: 209). Thus, typological variation in basic word-order patterns (subject/object/verb)
are derived from topic structures. Similarly, nominative/accusative patterns versus erga-
tive/absolutive patterns are motivated by the properties of topic and focus structures,
respectively (DuBois 1987). For usage-based approaches, grammar is crucially related to
frequency and relevance in discourse (cf. the contributions in Bybee and Hopper 2001).
Finally, pragmatic inference is seen as an important factor in various approaches to
grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994; Hopper and Traugott 2003).
2.2. What about social actors? Integrative Functionalism
The above description of linguistic typology does not say anything about social factors.
And indeed, there does not seem to be any space for social factors at first glance if
typology is about semantic structures and patterns of their morphosyntactic expression.
But this is not the whole story. Social factors play a considerable role if one looks at the
geographical diffusion of linguistic structures. How social factors matter for typology is
shown by Integrative Functionalism as defined by Croft (1995, 2000).
Integrative Functionalism is one of the three types of linguistic theories discussed by
Croft (1995, 2000). The other two are Formal Linguistics and External Functionalism.
The two criteria for distinguishing these approaches are (i) the assumption of an innate
syntax-oriented Universal Grammar and (ii) the assumption that grammar is self-con-
tained. The following list provides a survey of the three types of theories and the assump-
tions that define them:
⫺ Formal Linguistics: Existence of an innate syntax-oriented language capacity

(Universal Grammar, UG)
⫺ External Functionalism: Nonexistence of an innate UG, but syntax and other as-
pects of grammar are self-contained
⫺ Integrative Functionalism: Syntax and other aspects of grammar are not self-con-
tained, they are open to language-external factors.
Formal Linguistics claims the existence of an innate Universal Grammar that is self-
contained. External Functionalism denies innateness and has a broader concept of gram-
mar which goes beyond syntax. What it shares with Formal Linguistics is the assumption
that grammar is in some way self-contained. A typical representative of External Func-
tionalism is Haiman (1983) for whom grammar can be seen as the outcome of a self-
contained system of iconicity and economy (cf. section 2.1). The theoretical approach
that is crucial for dealing with areality, i. e., Integrative Functionalism, assumes neither
the existence of Universal Grammar nor the self-containedness of grammar ⫺ grammar
is open to social factors. Integrative Functionalism is an evolutionary account that mod-
els the successful diffusion (“propagation” in terms of Croft 2000) of structural innova-
tions in a language. The environment that is responsible for the selection and propaga-
tion of linguistic structures is formed by the individual members of a language com-
munity who bring along their cognitive equipment and their social status in a given
speech situation. If this is true, grammatical structures as we find them in a language

are not only the result of the cognitive properties of the human brain (cf. parsing, iconic-
ity, economy in section 2.1), they are also due to social factors. Croft (2000) even claims
that social factors alone are responsible for the propagation of innovations. In my view,
this claim disregards the fact that the environment responsible for selection is not pri-
mary, but secondary. At a primary level, evolution produced humans and their brains in
interaction with the species-external environment. At a secondary level, the very same
human brains with their cognitive structure become a secondary environment which
selects linguistic structures. Thus, the cognitive properties of this brain matter in addition
to the social environment (Bisang 2001, 2004, 2006a). However, social factors may ulti-
mately be stronger than cognitive factors. Thus, even a cognitively odd structure can
win if there are social factors that support it. The social factors and their manifestation
in the areal distribution of linguistic types will be described in the following section.
3. Language change: The social and linguistic dynamics o

contact-induced convergence and areality
3.1. Social models o language change
This section starts with a general account of the interdependence of social factors and
contact-induced structural change as presented by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) and
Thomason (2001). The second part of this section will briefly deal with approaches that
take the perspective of individual actors, their role within their social environment and
the structural consequences of their behavior. The approaches to be discussed are the
social-network model with its distinction between weak and strong ties (Milroy and
Milroy 1985), the relevance of leaders of language change (Labov 2001) and the invisible-
hand model (Keller 1990, 1994).
Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 50) distinguish between two fundamental processes
of language change, i. e., maintenance (borrowing) and shift, which are triggered by
general social factors such as duration of contact, number of bilingual speakers, popula-
tion size and socioeconomic dominance. In the case of maintenance, native speakers of
a language A keep their language but they integrate elements from another language,
the target language B, into it. Under low intensity of contact and if the number of
bilingual speakers in a given population is small, borrowing will be limited to non-basic
vocabulary. With increasing contact and with an increasing number of bilinguals, there
will be more lexical borrowing and even moderate or heavy structural borrowing.
In the case of language shift, speakers of A abandon their language in favor of the
target language B. The social factors determining its structural outcome are socioeco-
nomic and political relations of domination, population size and the degree to which the
target language B is accessible for speakers of language A. The effect of the first factor
on language shift is straightforward ⫺ the dominating culture of B speakers promotes
the disappearance of language A in favor of B. Typical processes in modern history that
bring about shift in this context are urbanization and industrialization (Thomason 2001:
22). If the number of A speakers is significantly smaller than the number of B speakers,
the target language B will be adopted perfectly without leaving any traces of A. The
percentage of bilinguals in a population of shifters is relevant because it determines the

degree of imperfect learning, i. e., the extent to which structural properties of A can be
found in B. If the number of shifters from A to B is large and the number of bilingual
speakers of A and B is relatively small the new B variety emerging from that situation
will preserve certain properties of A.
In the case of maintenance with very intensive contact and in the case of shift with a
large shifting group and imperfect learning, the structural consequences seem to be basi-
cally the same. Otherwise, maintenance and borrowing produce different structural ef-
fects. Maintenance is primarily associated with lexical change, while shift primarily trig-
gers changes in phonology and syntax. No matter what the structural changes are,
Thomason (2001: 21) clearly points out “that social factors are the only ones that need
to be considered in assessing stability: linguistic factors (such as overall structural simi-
larity of the languages in contact) seem to be totally irrelevant”.
In the social-network model, actors are graphically represented as points, while the
relations between them are marked by lines. Of particular importance for the diffusion
of changes is the quality of the relations between the actors in terms of weak and strong
ties (Granovetter 1973). Strong ties are defined by frequent and reciprocal contacts for
a number of different reasons (e.g., sports, friendship, shopping, child care, etc.). Weak
ties are based on only one reason, they are not necessarily reciprocal and they are more
frequent because they can be established more easily. Linguistic innovations first spread
between actors who are involved in a number of weak networks and serve as liaisons.
As soon as they are disseminated in a large enough number of weak networks, they will
be integrated into strong networks by local influentials, i. e., individuals who have a
special status in their community and want to keep it by taking up innovations.
Labov (2001) points out that the network model is not sufficient for a full understand-
ing of how innovations spread within a community. In his view, it is necessary to look
at the leaders of language change. As he showed in his extensive sociolinguistic study of
the city of Philadelphia, leaders of language change have the following properties:
(4) Properties of the leaders of language change (Labov 2001: 360):

a. The leaders are women; men play no significant role.
b. The highest concentration of leaders is in the groups centrally located in the
socioeconomic hierarchy; that is, leadership forms a curvilinear pattern.
c. The leaders are people with intimate contacts throughout their local groups,
who influence first people most like themselves.
d. The leaders are people who are not limited to their local networks, but have
intimate friends in the wider neighborhood.
e. These wider contacts include people of different social statuses, so that influence
spreads downward and upward from the central group.
It is certainly true that the discovery and the description of individuals who are more
important than others in the diffusion of linguistic innovations is vital for understanding
the social mechanisms of language change. The question that remains is whether the
properties presented by Labov (2001) are universal or whether they are subject to cul-
tural variation. For instance, one may wonder whether women always play a more
central role than men.
The invisible-hand model deals with processes of purposeful individual actions at the
microlevel and the emergence of new structures at a macrolevel. Keller (1990, 1994) has
applied this model to language change. On a microlevel, individual speakers act accord-
ing to certain maxims in order to reach certain purposes. If a large number of individuals
follow at least partially similar purposes, the causal consequence of these individual
purposeful actions on a macrolevel is a new phenomenon which cannot be predicted
from the purposes and the maxim(s) involved. Linguistic structures and their change are
such invisible-hand phenomena. There are different possible structures for communicat-
ing a certain concept in a given speech situation and the speaker selects the most suitable
structure according to certain maxims such as the following:
(5) LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985):

Talk in such a way that you are recognized as a member of the group you wish to
identify with.
Maxims of the above type are of considerable importance for contact-induced change
(cf. section 4). Depending on the group a speaker wants to be associated with, s/he will
select structures from one or the other of the languages involved. If enough speakers of
a community share the same behavior this will have its impact on whether language
change rather tends towards maintenance or towards shift.
3.2. Mechanisms o contact-induced change
The integration of linguistic structures of one language into another is the result of
various mechanisms which may operate individually or in combination. Thomason
(2001: 129⫺156) discusses code-switching, code alternation, passive familiarity, negotia-
tion, second-language acquisition strategies, bilingual first-language acquisition and de-
liberate decision. The present subsection will be limited to code-switching and language
acquisition strategies. Since many mechanisms have hardly been taken into consideration
in linguistics, the following quotation from Thomason (2001) describes the current situa-
tion very adequately:
A full account of the specific processes through which foreign material gets into a language
would require attention to innumerable social and psychological details, and linguists are
nowhere near any comprehensive understanding of all the relevant processes.
(Thomason 2001: 129)
Code-switching is discussed in numerous publications under various definitions (for a

survey, cf. Muysken 1995). The following definition given by Thomason (2001: 132) is
relatively general: “Code switching is the use of material from two (or more) languages
by a single speaker in the same conversation”. In terms of Muysken (2000: 1), code-
switching is “the rapid succession of several languages in a speech event”. A more spe-
cific definition in terms of the Matrix Language-Frame Model describes code-switching
as “the selection by bilinguals or multilinguals of forms from an embedded variety (or
varieties) in utterances of a matrix variety during the same conversation” (Myers-Scotton
1993: 3; for a later model cf. Myers-Scotton and Jake 2000).
Whatever its exact definition may be, code-switching does not seem to be a necessary
element of contact-induced change although it is an important one. There are at least
two reasons for this (Thomason 2001: 132⫺134): The first reason is that code-switching
is not observed in every bilingual speech community, although contact-induced change
takes place. The second reason is that the assumption that there is always a development
from code-switching to maintenance/borrowing is problematic. The difference between
the cognitive processes involved in the use of a code-switched word and a stable loan
word is hardly understood. Given the fuzzy borderline between these two types of words
it is often hard to decide whether a word of language A in language B is due to interfer-
ence or code-switching.
Language acquisition plays a considerable role in contact-induced change. The role
of bilingual speakers has been discussed in subsection 3.1. Silva-Corvalán (1994), who
analyzed the speech of English/Spanish bilinguals in Los Angeles, discusses the following
structural consequences:
(6) Structural consequences of bilingual first-language acquisition (Silva-Corvalán

1994: 6):
a. Simplification of grammatical categories and lexical oppositions
b. Overgeneralization of forms, frequently following a regularizing pattern
c. Development of periphrastic constructions either to achieve paradigmatic regu-
larity or to replace less semantically transparent bound morphemes
d. Direct and indirect transfer of forms from the superordinate language
e. Code-switching
Each of these structural consequences is a result of Silva-Corvalán’s overall hypothesis

“that, in language contact situations, bilinguals develop strategies aimed at lightening
the cognitive load of having to remember and use two different linguistic systems” (Silva-
Corvalán 1994: 6).
In addition to first-language acquisition, adult second-language learners use a
number of specific strategies that can have an impact on language structure under certain
social conditions such as the ones underlying language shift (see subsection 3.2). The
following strategies are listed by Thomason (2001: 146⫺148): Second-language learners
insert material from their mother tongue into the target language. They transfer struc-
tures from their first language into the second language as in the case of speakers of
English who use SVO word order in German subordinate clauses. And finally, they do
not acquire distinctions which do not exist in their mother tongue.
3.3. The problems o deining a linguistic area and the relevance

o zones o convergence
The concept of a linguistic area (Sprachbund) was coined by Trubetzkoy in 1928 (pub-
lished in Trubetzkoy 1930) and has experienced a lot of different and often divergent
definitions since that time. Generally speaking, linguistic areas are characterized by
structural similarities across a set of geographically adjacent languages which are not
due to genetic relatedness. The following definition by Thomason (2001) is relatively
neutral and covers various other definitions (for a survey and discussion of definitions,
cf. Stolz 2002):
A linguistic area is a geographical region containing a group of three or more languages that
share some structural features as a result of contact rather than as a result of accident or
inheritance from a common ancestor. (Thomason 2001: 99)
Since the presentation of the Balkan Sprachbund by Sandfeld (1930), several other lin-
guistic areas have been discussed, among them the Circum-Baltic area (Dahl and Kop-
tjevskaja-Tamm 2001), the Ethiopian area (Tosco 1994, 2000; Bisang 2006b), South Asia
(Masica 1976) and East and mainland Southeast Asia (cf. Bisang 1996).
In Bisang (2006b), I have tried to show the systematic impossibility of providing an
exact definition of a linguistic area because such a definition would have to be based
either on arbitrary criteria or on criteria that are difficult to apply. The most straightfor-
ward instances of arbitrariness have to do with quantification (for other criteria, cf.
Bisang 2006b: 87⫺88). Thus, some definitions restrict the number of languages or lan-
guage families involved in a linguistic area, others opt for a minimal number of features.
Such criteria are meaningless as long as one cannot prove that there is a significant
correlation between the exact quantification of languages, families or features and either
a certain linguistic structure or a certain social pattern present in several linguistic areas.
An example of a criterion that is difficult to apply is exact cross-linguistic structural
identity, another one is social symmetry. The criterion of exact identity does not only
raise practical problems, it also gets right to the heart of formal as well as functional
theories. In my view, none of these theoretical frameworks provides a safe ground for
the exact evaluation of the comparability of languages. A brief look at the diametrically
divergent approaches of Chomskyan Formal Linguistics and Croft’s (2001) Radical Con-
struction Grammar may give an idea of why there is no basis for determining exact
identity (also see Bisang 2006b). Formal approaches deductively stipulate universal cat-
egories and relations which are reflected in the patterns of syntactic distribution across
the world’s languages. As a consequence, structures that look identical at first glance
may be generated by different properties of Universal Grammar. In most cases, the data
on situations of language contact are not detailed enough to show whether structures
from two languages are exactly identical. In addition, Croft (2001: 34) argues that “[p]os-
iting universal categories would imply identical behaviour across languages, which is
empirically false”. In his view, categories and relations are language particular. If that is
true, cross-linguistic comparability is only possible across constructions and the marked-
ness patterns that can be derived from cross-linguistic analysis. Thus, a linguist who tries
to prove the exact identity of two structures from two different languages will find her/
himself in the unbridgeable gulf between stipulated universal categories (claimed to be
false by Croft 2001) and the comparison of markedness patterns within constructions
(which are only surface phenomena that may have a divergent universal explanation).
The criterion of social symmetry was brought about by Aikhenvald and Dixon (2001),
who claim that linguistic areas emerge exclusively out of contact with multilateral diffu-
sion without any relationship of dominance. As was pointed out by Dahl (2001), there
is almost no case of language contact without at least some social asymmetries. Thus,
Aikhenvald and Dixon’s (2001) claim is difficult to apply to real situations of contact.
The above problems with the exact definition of a linguistic area do not exclude the
relevance of contact-induced change within a certain geographic area. The question is
whether it makes sense to strive for a rigid definition of these phenomena in terms of a
linguistic area. In fact, there may be two prospects for why finding such a definition
could be theoretically relevant (Bisang 2006b):
i. The prospect of drawing further typological conclusions from the existence of a

linguistic area. “If x is a linguistic area it must have certain structural properties”.
ii. The prospect of finding some concrete conclusions concerning social and/or histori-
cal properties of a speech community. “If x is a linguistic area, this is due to the
social or historical facts x, y and z”.
Since the features that are discussed for each individual linguistic area are extremely
divergent, it seems rather unlikely to find further typological conclusions in the sense of
prospect (i). There are only some rather general observations such as the preference of
periphrastic structures over morphological structures. However, such generalizations are
too general to be associated with the degree of homogeneity associated with linguistic
areas. Prospect (ii) applies at a more general level such as maintenance vs. shift (see
subsection 3.1). But since the correlation between phenomena of structural convergence
and their concrete historical or social background is normally rather general and ab-
stract, too clear-cut a definition does not look promising for finding potentially exist-
ing correlations.
Since a rigid definition of a linguistic area is unlikely to lead to concrete typological
generalizations and only allows rather general conclusions about the interaction of so-
cial/historical facts with properties of linguistic structures, I argue in Bisang (2006b) that
a less rigid concept in terms of zones of convergence is needed in linguistic typology.
This concept explicitly tries to avoid unnecessary reification. Thus, zones of convergence
are basically geographical areas in which individual languages develop certain structural
similarities through contact among their speakers.
While a rigid definition of a linguistic area is problematic, a looser concept in terms
of zones of convergence is necessary for at least the following two reasons: Zones of
convergence can be seen as generators of typologically new or rare structures (cf. the
case of Ethiopia presented in subsection 3.4) and they avoid language samples that are
statistically biased because of contact-induced convergence among the languages selected
(section 4).
3.4. Language contact and the emergence o new or rarely attested

types
In some cases, typologically rare structures can be accounted for in terms of language
contact. This is illustrated by the positions of the genitive and the adjective relative to
the head noun in Bayso, a Cushitic OV-language (South Lowland East Cushitic: Omo-
Tana) spoken in the Ethiopian zone of convergence (Banti 1988). According to Green-
berg (1966), word order for Gen and Adj in OV languages is subject to the following uni-
versal:
(7) Greenberg’s Universal 5 (1966: 110, also cf. Hawkins 1994: 320):
If a language has dominant SOV order and the genitive follows the governing noun,
then the adjective likewise follows the noun.
Bayso however has NGen & AdjN, a word order that is excluded for OV languages by
(7). Tosco (1994: 416⫺417) convincingly argues that Bayso is situated in a contact zone
between two groups of languages which he calls Highland East Cushitic (HEC) and
Lowland East Cushitic (LEC). Both groups are OV but they differ with regard to the
positions of Adj and Gen: In HEC, Adj and Gen consistently precede the noun, while
they consistently follow the noun in LEC. Bayso takes up NGen from LEC and AdjN
from HEC.
While contact seems to be a good explanation for NGen & AdjN in Bayso, this does
not apply to the same word order in Tigre (Ethiosemitic). As Tosco (1998) shows, the
situation in Tigre can be accounted for in terms of Hawkins (1994) and his performance
theory. Tigre has a preposed clitic article which produces optimal constituent-recognition
domains with NGen & AdjN. The lesson to be learnt from Bayso and Tigre is that there
are different motivations for rare structural patterns. They can be due to language-
external processes (Bayso) and to language-internal processes (Tigre) (and probably to
both processes in mutual interaction). The reason why they are not attested more fre-
quently may thus be a coincidence. Given the right socio-historical constellation, they
might have the potential for cross-linguistic diffusion and for becoming statistically un-
marked.
3.5. Language contact and grammatical properties speciic to

certain areas an example rom the Sinitic languages
Sinitic languages such as Mandarin Chinese are well-known for the asymmetry between
their basic VO word order and the head-final structure of their noun phrases. In Dryer’s
(1992: 86) extensive data sample of languages, Mandarin is the only instance with VO
and RelN, while VO & NRel is attested in 60 genera. In spite of the typological rarity
of this word order pattern, it is diachronically very stable. In the literature, the extraordi-
nary situation in Chinese has been explained in two ways, either by claiming that Chinese
is SOV and thus naturally takes the relative clause before its head noun or that the RelN
sequence is due to contact with Altaic SOV languages. As will be briefly shown, none of
these arguments is convincing.
Li and Thompson (1975) argue that Chinese is SOV. Their claim is based on the ba-
construction in which the object is moved in front of the noun. However, a look at the
frequency of this construction reveals that it is not at all frequent enough (Sun and
Givón 1985) to support the hypothesis of a change from SVO to SOV.
The explanation of SVO & RelN in terms of contact with Altaic goes back to Hashi-
moto (1976). More recently, Dryer (2003, 2008) has taken up the same argument. In his
view, Mandarin Chinese has preserved the OV word-order properties of proto-Sino-
Tibetan through the influence of the Altaic languages spoken in the North. The problem
with this explanation is that the oldest accessible stage of Chinese represented in the
oracle bone inscriptions (fourteenth to eleventh centuries b.c.) is clearly SVO (Djamouri
2001). Thus, it is very unlikely that Chinese word order types such as GenN and RelN
are the remnants of an erstwhile consistently head final stage in proto-Sinitic. Whatever
the reasons for the emergence of that situation in Chinese may be, its typological asym-
metry is characterized by long-time stability ⫺ a time stability which may well be due to
social factors. This can be inferred from the fact that not all Sinitic languages were
equally resistant to contact-induced change. An important factor that supported the
resistance against word-order change may have been the influence of classical Chinese
as a prestigious written standard that prevented change towards a typologically un-
marked word order pattern.
3.6. Spread zones and residual zones
Nichols (1992: 13⫺24, 192⫺195) makes a distinction between spread zones and residual
zones, each of them referring to areas of subcontinental size which are characterized by
relative diversity, center, periphery and internal stability. The two types of zones are not
understood as an exhaustive classification of areality defined by the above criteria, but
they are “two important and common types of areas” (Nichols 1992: 13) and they form
opposition pairs with regard to a number of features (see Table 23.2).
Tab. 23.2: The seven properties of spread zones vs. residual zones
Spread zones (Nichols 1992: 16) Residual zones (Nichols 1992: 21)
(1) Little genetic diversity High genetic diversity
(2) Low structural diversity High structural diversity
(3) The language families present in the spread The language families, or at least a good
zones are shallow number of them, are deep
(4) Rapid spread of languages or language No appreciable spread of languages or
families and consequent language succession families. No language succession
(5) Classic dialect-geographical area with No clear center of innovation.
innovating center and conservative periphery
(6) No net long-term increase in diversity. A Accretion of languages and long-term net
spread zone is a long-lasting phenomenon, increase in diversity. Language isolates and
but it preserves little linguistic evidence of its isolate families are likely to be found in
history residual zones
(7) The spreading language serves as a lingua No lingua franca
franca for the entire area or a large part of it
Typical spread zones are western Europe, central Australia, interior North America,
Mesoamerica, the Ancient Near East and central insular Oceania. The residual zones
analyzed by Nichols (1992) are Ethiopia and Kenya (as a part of eastern Africa), the
Caucasus, the Pacific Coast of Northern Asia, northern Australia and California (repre-
senting the Pacific Coast of North America). Even though she found no simple correla-
tion between residual areas and high complexity, or spread zones and low complexity,
there was a correlation between high-complexity languages and their occurrence in areas
characterized by contact and by high linguistic diversity. Since residual zones are charac-
terized by diversity, “we can expect the languages in residual zones to exceed the averages
of their continents in complexity” (Nichols 1992: 193). However, if there are enough
contact situations in a spread area that spread area can also score high in complexity.
The situations in which this is possible in a spread zone have the following properties:
[W]hen the center shifts from group to group so that the spread is not confined to a single
language, or when a political or cultural spread is of recent formation so that diverse indige-
nous languages still survive, we have a spread situation within which there can nonetheless
still be contact among diverse languages. (Nichols 1992: 193)
Structural complexity is not only related to differences in contact density within residual
zones and spread zones, it also shows up in extreme situations of contact that lead to
the development of Creole languages. As is shown in the next subsection, contact triggers
a reduction of complexity in contact situations of that type.
3.7. Structural complexity and language contact the case o Creoles
Creole languages are not primarily associated with areality but they are the product of
language contact and they are the source for various claims concerning the universal
properties of human language. The present subsection will concentrate on basic struc-
tural properties of Creoles which can be accounted for in terms of contact and it will
conclude with an example of areality.
Creole languages differ from “ordinary” languages by the fact that “they came into
existence at some point in time” (Muysken and Smith 1997: 4). They roughly are the
result of an extreme contact situation in which speakers of different mutually unfamiliar
languages are forced to communicate with each other. In such a situation, speakers tend
to avoid categories and structures that go beyond what is needed for maintaining a basic
conversation. This is the point of departure for McWhorter’s (2001, 2005) claim of the
relative lack of complexity in Creole languages:
Creoles, in being recently borne of communication vehicles deliberately designed to eschew

all but the functionally central (pidgins), are unique examples of natural languages with
much less contingent accumulation of “ornamental” elaboration than older grammars drag
along with them. (McWhorter 2005: 43)
Many grammatical categories and grammatical distinctions attested in the world’s lan-
guages are the result of a long period of development within a more or less stable speech
community. Typical phenomena of a later development are inflectional affixation, tone
and derivational noncompositionality (McWhorter 2001; 2005: 10). This situation leads
McWhorter (2001, 2005) to the conclusion that Creole languages are generally less com-
plex than ordinary languages on the basis of the following definition:
(8) Complexity (McWhorter 2005: 45):

[A]n area of grammar is more complex than the same area in another grammar to
the extent that it encompasses more overt distinctions and/or rules than another
grammar.
McWhorter (2005: 45⫺46) further specifies complexity in terms of the following four
diagnostics:
(9) Four diagnostics of complexity (McWhorter 2005: 45⫺46):

a. A phonemic inventory is more complex to the extent that it has more marked
members. […] [M]arked phonemes are those encountered less frequently in the
world’s languages than others conventionally deemed unmarked […].
b. A syntax is more complex than another to the extent that it requires the process-
ing of more rules, such as asymmetries between matrix and subordinate clauses.
c. A grammar is more complex than another to the extent that it gives overt and
grammaticalized expression to more fine-grained semantic and/or pragmatic dis-
tinctions than another.
d. Inflectional morphology renders a grammar more complex than another one in
most cases.
As a consequence of these diagnostics, many grammatical categories that are found in

Non-Creole languages are not attested in Creoles. Thus, none of the 19 Creole languages
analyzed by McWhorter (2001) had any of the following categories: ergativity, grammati-
calized evidential marking, inalienable possessive marking, switch-reference marking, in-
verse marking, obviative marking, “dummy” verbs, syntactic asymmetries between mat-
rix and subordinate clauses, grammaticalized subjunctive marking, verb-second, clitic
movement, any pragmatically neutral word order but SVO, noun class or grammatical
gender marking (analytic or affixal) or lexically contrastive morphosyntactic tone be-
yond a few isolated cases (McWhorter 2001: 163).
If the presence of these categories in a language is the result of a historical process
their explanation in terms of a combination of cognitive and social factors seems to be
more straightforward than an account in terms of Universal Grammar. A particularly
interesting case are serial verb constructions, which are claimed to belong to the inven-
tory of the Language Bioprogram by Bickerton (1981). As McWhorter (1997: 39) con-
vincingly shows, extensive use of serial verb constructions “have appeared around the
world in precisely the creoles which had serializing substrata”. Serial verb constructions
are also an areal property of Kwa/Nigerian languages. Thus, a successful areal structure
made its way into another group of languages that contributed to its further diffusion.
3.8. The World Atlas o Language Structures (WALS)
On the basis of a sample of 150 to 400 languages (with a core sample of 200 languages),
Haspelmath et al. (2005) have mapped the geographic distribution of 140 structural
variables in the languages of the world. With this pioneering work it has become possible
to analyze and to visualize completely new sets of areal clusters of grammatical struc-
tures.
In spite of its enormous advantages, one should keep in mind that WALS does not
fully reflect areality. It only represents a selection of languages. Thus, areas which look
homogeneous with regard to the distribution of a certain feature may turn out to be
much more complex when more languages from that area are taken into account. Never-
theless, collecting data in this way is the only way to find out more about the geographic
diffusion of patterns, about large linguistic areas and about structural properties which
are extremely time-stable (also cf. Bisang 2004: 30).
4. Consequences or Linguistic Typology and its generalizations

The robustness of typological generalizations crucially depends on the appropriate as-
sessment of areality (Bisang 2004, 2006a). The reason for this is pointed out very clearly
in a programmatic paper by Bickel (2007: 241): “[T]he observable distributions are sub-
stantially influenced by population history, and this makes it fundamentally problematic

to try and predict them by principles of grammar alone” (Bickel 2007: 241). This raises
the question of how linguistic typology integrates social factors into its sampling meth-
ods and how reliable these methods are.
Since Greenberg’s (1966) seminal paper, establishing a language sample involves the
two classical factors of genetic relatedness and geographical closeness of the languages
selected. The relevance of genetic relatedness is based on the assumption that there is a
certain structural homogeneity in languages that share a common ancestor. Geographic
closeness matters because it sets the preconditions for contact-induced convergence.
Rijkhoff et al. (1993) and Rijkhoff and Bakker (1998) discuss two types of samples
depending on the questions a typological research project wants to address:
⫺ Variety samples aim at discovering the full range of possible variation in the world’s
languages.
⫺ Probability samples aim at discovering correlation pairs (e.g., Dryer’s [1992] research
on typological features that covary with the position of V and O relative to each
other; cf. below).
Rijkhoff et al. (1993) and Rijkhoff and Bakker (1998) are only interested in the criteria
for setting up a variety sample. Although these authors do not deny the relevance of
geographic factors they only integrate genetic factors into their model. They argue that
migration and variable geographic distances between languages are difficult to quantify
adequately, while there is a certain correlation between the genetic tree structure of a
language family and the extent of diversity across its member languages. Based on the
number of intermediary layers between the head node of a family and the final node
that represents the level of the individual languages, they calculate a diversity value for
each of the 17 families of the world distinguished by Ruhlen (1987). The diversity values
are then integrated into a matrix which shows how many grammars need to be selected
from the 17 families as well as from Pidgin and Creole languages, language isolates and
unclassified languages for constructing a sample of x languages, whereby x has to be
minimally 30.
Dryer (1989, 1992) presents the most elaborate method of constructing a probability
sample. The aim of his study is to find word-order patterns that covary with the position
of V and O. An instance of such a covariation pair is the position of the relative clause
relative to its head noun: The position of N covaries with V and the position of Rel
covaries with O. Dryer’s (1989, 1992) basic units are not individual languages but genera,
i. e., groups of languages which can be roughly compared to subfamilies of Indo-Euro-
pean (e.g., Germanic, Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian, Romance, etc.). Dryer (1992) lists 252
genera. As soon as a particular word-order type is attested in at least one language of a
genus, that genus will get the value 1 for that type. To avoid the impact of areality, Dryer
(1992) divides the 252 genera into the following six large linguistic areas of continental
size: (i) Africa, (ii) Eurasia, (iii) Southeast Asia and Oceania, (iv) Australia and New
Guinea, (v) North America and (vi) South America. With this division it is possible to
see whether a certain type is a world-wide phenomenon or whether it is local. A pair of
parameters is said to be a correlation pair of VO/OV and thus of typological relevance
only if the two values covary equally through all six large areas.
Considerations of genetic relatedness and geographic closeness are necessary prereq-
uisites for discovering significant typological generalizations but they are not sufficient.
As pointed out by Maslova (2000: 307), these methods do not allow to “distinguish
between general distributional universals and accidental statistical properties of the cur-
rent language population”. The two methods discussed are reliable only if the linguistic
types have reached stationary distribution, i. e., a random distribution which is not bi-
ased by former typological properties of a given language or family. The factors that
determine the geographic distribution of linguistic types are language death and lan-
guage birth. Since there is an enormous lack of information concerning these two factors
and the types involved in them, it is simply impossible to say whether the global distribu-
tion of types has reached a statistically neutral stage. To overcome this problem, Maslova
(2000: 328⫺329) suggests a method which integrates estimates of transition probability,
i. e., the probability that a language shifts from one type (Ti) to another type (Tj) within
a given period of time:
It is clear […] that if we want to estimate the probability of a shift Ti J Tj we must compare
two quantities: the number of languages which have undergone this shift and the number of
languages which have retained type Ti or shifted to another type within the same time in-
terval. Accordingly, in order to estimate a transition probability p (Ti J Tj) for some time
interval t, one would need a sample of languages which can be assumed to have been in a
state Ti t years ago. The current frequency of type Tj in this sample would give an estimate
of the transition probability p (Ti J Tj). (Maslova 2000: 329)
This method is based on the hypothesis that type shift exclusively depends on language
internal factors ⫺ a hypothesis that seems to be implicitly or explicitly supported by a
large number of typologists. The following quotation from Nichols (1992) is an explicit
commitment to that hypothesis:
The rate of spread is determined by nonlinguistic factors such as migrations, political or

economic power, etc. These things cannot figure in a linguistic model, except as unknowns.
But the rate at which structural features change is a purely linguistic matter and does figure
in a linguistic model. (Nichols 1992: 209)
From the perspective of Integrative Functionalism, there is no reason why the above
hypothesis should hold. In situations of contact, the question of whether a speech com-
munity adopts a new type may be due to social factors such as the maxim of language
use presented in (5). If type shifts depend on social factors, the time interval within
which they take place is arbitrary in the sense that there is no cognitive or discourse
motivation which may allow generalizations about what tends to be a short-term shift
and what tends to be a long-term shift (cf. Bisang 2004: 34⫺35). If this is true the
possibility of calculating fixed transition probabilities from a type A to a type B becomes
highly questionable. Within this framework, the most reliable conclusion may be drawn
from looking at those structures that turn out to be diachronically the least stable ones
within a sample of languages. But even in these cases, typologists will have to cope with
the problem that the number of written sources that document language change only
reflects a very small fraction of all the changes that must have taken place in the past.
In such a situation, there seem to be natural limits for typologists to assess the impact
of social factors on the global distribution of linguistic types.

Since a fully reliable method that dissociates cognitive from social factors seems to be
impossible, there will always be some degree of uncertainty about the validity of typo-
logical generalizations. In spite of this, I share Newmeyer’s (1998: 364) optimism that it
is the best strategy “to assume, for want of evidence to the contrary, that the more
robust-seeming of them [i. e., linguistic generalizations; W. B.] are valid”.
Contact-induced change and areality do not only make the assessment of typological
generalizations more complex, they also have important consequences concerning the
Saussurean view that grammar is arbitrary. As was pointed out by Newmeyer (2005:
182⫺191), language change in general and contact-induced change in particular support
holistic functionalism against atomistic formalism. Atomistic functionalism is based on
the assumption that “[t]here is direct linkage between properties of particular grammars
and functional motivations for those properties” (Newmeyer 2005: 174), while holistic
functionalism does not assume any direct linkage. Since there is considerable evidence
from studies on language change that “the forces […] that bring a construction into a
language are not necessarily the same ones that keep it there” (Newmeyer 2005: 185),
structures that might have been motivated at an initial stage can become unmotivated
at a later one. In that sense, findings from language change and areality clearly support
holistic functionalism, which makes the discussion of arbitrariness take on a new dimen-
sion. If arbitrariness is generally attributed to properties of Universal Grammar in for-
mal linguistics, the assumption of innateness loses at least some of its relevance if arbi-
trariness can be due to social factors operating in situations of language change. From
that perspective, areal typology does not only matter to functional typology, it also has
its consequences for formal linguistics.
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24. The consequences o migration and colonialism I:

Pidgins and creoles
1. Introduction: Issues of space in the study of “marginal languages”
2. Are creoles a distinct dialectological type?
3. “Creole spaces” in previous research
4. From language through code to symbol: On the recent deterritorialization of some creoles
5. Outlook: Creolophone spaces in the twenty-first century
6. References
1. Introduction: Issues o space in the study o

marginal languages
The difficulty of placing pidgin and creole languages in geographical space is one of the
hidden leitmotifs of pidgin and creole linguistics. An early classic in the field (Reinecke
1937) bears the tellingly ambiguous title Marginal Languages: A Sociological Survey of
the Creole Languages and Trade Jargons. If we understand the adjective marginal literally,
24. Pidgins and creoles 441
the places where pidgins and creoles arise are the margins of Empire, the contact zones
beyond the confines of regular settler colonialism. But of course it is almost impossible
not to think of the many metaphorical meanings of the adjective marginal here: lan-
guages at the margins of society, languages of precarious status, which are misrepre-
sented or not recognized in the communities in which they are used, and ⫺ not least ⫺
languages whose status and classification has long been a controversial topic in academic
linguistics (cf., e.g., McWhorter 2005; Thomason 1997; Thomason and Kaufman 1988).
Before addressing the problem of space in the study of pidgins and creoles in detail,
a brief working definition is in order of how these two terms are understood in the
present contribution. Pidgins and creoles tend to be lumped together because on one
conventional understanding creoles are pidgins which have become natively spoken com-
munity languages. Quite apart from the fact that we now tend to assume “degrees of
restructuring” (cf., e.g., Neumann-Holzschuh and Schneider 2000) where earlier scholars
saw the dramatic working out of the linguistic bio-program in creolization (Bickerton
1981), pidgins and creoles are very different with regard to their spatial distribution.
Pidginization of languages is a common, indeed almost ubiquitous phenomenon in spon-
taneous language-contact situations, whereas creolization is rare and, moreover, as we
shall see, largely confined to certain tropical regions with a specific colonial history.
There is thus little in common between, say, a presumably transient pidgin such as the
type of Gastarbeiterdeutsch ‘guest worker German’ which arose in Germany in the wake
of labor migration from the 1950s onwards and a creole language such as Sranan, which
arose from a largely English pidgin lexical base, is now the lingua franca of the former
Dutch colony Suriname and has a complex history of more than 300 years, including a
history of writing that stretches back to the eighteenth century (on which see Arends
and Perl 1995).
When the term pidgin is used in the present study, reference is thus to the very small
proportion of pidgins worldwide which have evolved into creole languages or at least
into stabilized and expanded pidgins, such as Tok Pisin (of Papua New Guinea) or
Nigerian Pidgin, which ⫺ though not spoken natively by the majority of their habitual
users ⫺ have undergone a process of institutionalization and concomitant structural and
lexical expansion.
How then do this subset of pidgins and the full range of the world’s creole languages
pattern with regard to the dimensions of space outlined in the first part of the present
Handbook? Maps locating creoles in geographical space (cf. Johnstone in this volume)
which are available (e.g., Holm 1988⫺1989, vol. 1: xvi⫺xvii) make clear that with very
few exceptions creoles cluster in a circumglobal tropical belt. As for their lexical bases,
English, French and Portuguese figure prominently, with other European colonial lan-
guages such as Dutch and Spanish following. There are non-European lexifiers (in
Holm’s list, for example, for the Nubi Creole Arabic of Uganda or for Hiri Motu, an
expanded pidgin of Papua New Guinea), but such cases are generally rare. Another
comprehensive and easily accessible source of reference on the global distribution of
creoles is compiled in the “Creole” branch in the language-family-trees section of the
Summer Institute of Linguistics’ Ethnologue database (http://www.ethnologue.com),
which lists 86 creole languages. This is comparable to Holm’s 88 as far as totals are
concerned, although there are minor differences of coverage which make a direct com-
parison difficult. Both lists obviously include central representatives of the Creole type
such as Haitian Creole or Jamaican Creole, but differ with regard to how they handle
borderline cases. Holm’s list, for example, includes Afrikaans as a semi-creole, whereas
the Ethnologue database excludes Afrikaans, but lists two Afrikaans-based creoles, Tso-
tsitaal and Oorlams. Holm does not list Tsotsitaal in his general survey, but refers to it
as “Fly Taal” (1988⫺1989, vol. 2: 350⫺352) in a section devoted to partial creolization
of Dutch. As for Hindi, Ethnologue refers to Andaman Creole Hindi, which is not treated
by Holm, whereas Holm treats the Pidgin Hindustani of the South Seas (which is absent
from the Ethnologue listing).
The geographical distribution which becomes apparent in such surveys points to a
set of sociohistorical circumstances most conducive to the creolization of languages,
namely the massive and frequently forced dislocation of large populations in the wake
of the colonial expansion of mainly European powers. This forced migration notoriously
took the form of chattel slavery in the plantation colonies of the English, Dutch and
French Caribbean, and arrangements which were only marginally more humane than
slavery in the Pacific region. It is probably fair to say that the following generalization
expressed by Loreto Todd is not just confined to creoles with English as their lexifier:
“the more we study English-related pidgins and Creoles, the more they speak to us of
the suffering inflicted on one branch of humanity by another” (1984: 251).
With regard to movement in space, creoles are languages which owe their existence to
the movement of populations, and very frequently they themselves have become lan-
guages on the move. This becomes most obvious when looking at the island Caribbean,
one of the world’s focal areas of creole genesis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. Here, few members of the original Arawak and Carib populations had survived
contact with Europeans by 1650, when the trade in African slaves started booming.
Europeans were almost everywhere outnumbered by Africans on the large semi-indus-
trial plantation estates at rates of at least ten to one, which provided the demographic
basis for the creolization of English, Dutch and French. The development of the planta-
tion system in relatively small island territories almost inevitably led to ecological disas-
ters of one kind or another and to a degree of overpopulation which has become a
shaping influence on the history of these islands to the present day. Notwithstanding
later immigration to the island Caribbean from India (designed to compensate for the
loss of the labor force after the emancipation of the slaves), China and the Middle East
(trade and services), most islands became exporters of people after the plantation phase.
Workers from the British West Indies helped build the Panama Canal and were active
in various other parts of Central America. When given the opportunity, they provided
labor for US agribusiness, and after World War II out-migration from the British West
Indies/Commonwealth Caribbean became a global phenomenon, leading to the estab-
lishment of thriving diaspora communities in Britain, Canada and the United States
(particularly Florida and the New York region).
Economic pressure, intensified by political turmoil, led to the relocation of a sizable
proportion of Suriname’s Sranan-speaking community to the Netherlands. Haitians, as
it happens the numerically largest creolophone community in the world, have fled their
country and established themselves in neighboring Caribbean islands (e.g., Jamaica) and
in major cities along the US Atlantic seaboard. Elevation of Guadeloupe and Martinique
to overseas-department status in France after 1945 has made free movement between
France and these two islands possible.
Given such a shared history of oppression and degradation, it is clear that the first
approach to creoles should thus be made through cultural/social spaces, i. e., the second
spatial dimension emphasized in this Handbook (cf. ch. 2). It is probably in reaction to
a history of denigration that many creole languages have become focuses of intense and
frequently contradictory positive and negative evaluation in the course of their history.
Most creole languages lack any overt sociolinguistic prestige and owe their survival to
their extremely strong covert prestige. Language attitudes tend to be very negative on
the part of outsiders and non-speakers, and “paradoxical” among speakers themselves,
as they see their languages both as a “symbol of powerlessness and degeneracy” and a
“symbol of solidarity and truth” (Rickford and Traugott 1985: 252). Such attitudes are
very often strong enough to thwart technocratically rational language planning measures
of undoubted practical usefulness, which are usually designed to capitalize on the status
of expanded pidgins and creoles as ethnopolitically neutral lingue franche in their respec-
tive territories. Thus, West African Pidgin English, an expanded pidgin routinely used
by tens of millions of Nigerians and other West Africans and a natively spoken creole
for several millions more, is refused any kind of official recognition and support in
multilingual and multiethnic states which could do very well with precisely this kind of
neutral link language (Deuber 2005; Schröder 2003). Bislama, a creole language spoken
in Vanuatu (Crowley 1990), is probably the only official language anywhere in the world
whose use is discouraged in the country’s educational system.
As to the dimension of transnational spaces (cf. Jacquemet in this handbook), it
should be noted that none of the creole languages involved in these currents of migration
are under threat in their home bases, and many of them show more than usual persis-
tence in the diaspora. Creoles can thus with some justification be claimed to have become
transnational languages.
The combined effect of a century of social and political upheaval (which has seen the
rapid decomposition of European colonial empires and unprecedented migration on a
global scale) and half a century of booming linguistic research in the field of “creolistics”
has been that Reinecke’s “marginal languages” have now moved to the center ⫺ both
in terms of global demography and in linguistic theory. Creole languages are now part
of the sociolinguistic fabric of the world’s global cities ⫺ from New York, London and
Toronto to Lagos, Johannesburg and the urban northeast of Brazil. At the same time
the study of pidgins and creoles has come to occupy a central place in contemporary
linguistics, both in the empirical description of languages, dialects and varieties and in
linguistic theory building. There are now numerous introductory surveys (e.g., Arends,
Muysken and Smith 1995; Mühlhäusler [1986] 1997; Sebba 1997; Holm 2000) and ⫺
more importantly ⫺ ambitious theoretical accounts (Escure and Schwegler 2004;
McWhorter 2005) and major collaborative projects (e.g., Michaelis et al., to appear: The
Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures).
2. Are creoles a distinct dialectological type?
Owing to their history of discontinuous transmission and because they tend to share a
number of important structural features in their core grammars (e.g., extreme analyticity;
SVO order; preverbal markers for tense, mood, aspect; all-purpose locative preposition
covering a wide range of spatial relations), creole languages have been claimed to repre-
sent a distinct linguistic type. The most vocal proponent of this position has, of course,
been Derek Bickerton (e.g., 1981) who ⫺ inspired by Chomsky’s notion of a genetically
wired Universal Grammar ⫺ has argued that the core grammar of creole languages
provides the most direct and immediate reflection of this linguistic “bio-program”. Not
surprisingly, therefore, “creole exceptionalism” (De Graff 2003) has been a controversial
topic in theoretical-linguistic debates on creole genesis and the typological classification
of creole languages. However, notwithstanding such disputes about the genesis and
status of creole languages, all but a tiny minority of professional linguists are agreed
that creoles, in spite of occasionally very strong social stigmatization, are in no way
inferior to any other type of natural human language in terms of overall structural
complexity and expressive potential. One of the rare dissenting voices is Whinnom (1971:
110), who argues that
[…] modern linguists may have been dangerously sentimental about creole languages which,
with only a few notable exceptions, constitute in most communities a distinct handicap to
the social mobility of the individual, and may also constitute a handicap to the creole speak-
er’s personal intellectual development. […] linguists do not have the evidence to assert with
confidence that speakers of these languages are not handicapped by their language, and
should not, while any doubt remains, make […] assertions to the contrary.
When it comes to dialectological and sociolinguistic investigations of the use of creole

languages, on the other hand (that is, the subject proper of the present Handbook), there
is little reason to assume special status for them. The general dynamic of the assignation
of prestige and stigma may play itself out in extreme ways in the case of creole languages
in continued coexistence with their prestigious lexifiers, but there are no fundamental
differences between creoles and other highly stigmatized vernaculars. Similarly, in bilin-
gual and multilingual settings creoles may be found in diglossic constellations or as end-
points of continua linking them to local standard varieties, but there do not seem to be
constellations which are unique to creoles.
If it exists at all, then, the separate sociolinguistic identity of creoles is to be found
in the fact that they tend to locate at the boundaries of traditional dialectological/socio-
linguistic categories. For example, especially in cases in which they are used alongside
their original lexifiers, the status of creoles tends to be controversial: are they to be seen
as varieties or dialects of their lexifiers, or as distinct and independent languages? Gene-
ral attitudes among speakers ⫺ as reflected in names such as patois/dialect (for Jamaican
Creole), Pidgin English or broken English (for the stabilized and expanded English-
lexicon pidgin of Nigeria) or Negerhollands (for a Dutch-lexicon Caribbean Creole of
the Virgin Islands) ⫺ strongly favor the former point of view. Thus, a speaker of Jamai-
can Creole might plausibly express his deeply felt conviction that “is English we a taak”
(focus.marker English we progressive.marker talk), meaning ‘It is English we are
speaking’)⫺in a grammatical structure which is remote from both standard English and
nonstandard varieties of English without a history of creolization. Aligning the creole
with its more prestigious lexifier, however, is no guarantee against the type of linguistic
self-hatred evinced in the following authentic statement by an informant (“Dinah”) in
Patrick’s (1999: 275) sociolinguistic study of the urban mesolect of Kingston, Jamaica:
(1) mi no riili waan spiik ina patwa langwij

I NEG really want speak in patois
‘I don’t really want to speak in Jamaican Creole.’
Linguists, on the other hand, have emphasized precisely these basic structural contrasts
to the lexifier to claim the status of independent languages for creoles, partly in an
attempt to raise speakers’ consciousness and claim recognition for creoles after centuries
of neglect and denigration. Another scholarly tradition (e.g., Alleyne 1980: 1996) has
similarly argued against the popular perception of creoles as varieties of the superstrate/
lexifier, but asserted that they are not so much languages in their own right as varieties
of the West African substrate languages.
In the absence of any precisely definable linguistic criteria to settle the question of
whether a variety is a language or a dialect, a technical linguistic debate on the issue is
pointless and should not be continued. Popular perceptions, however, can have notice-
able effects on linguistic behavior, for example the development of implicational scaling
which links creole basilects to perceived standards or acrolects. Similarly, the idea that
a creole is a dialect of a prestigious standard limits the options for language planning in
education. It reduces the motivation to write in the creole while at the same time over-
estimating active and receptive competence in the acrolect.
Focusing on matters of space, creoles stand out as vernacular languages on the
move ⫺ both in their genesis and history and through their involvement in contemporary
global migrations, and in fact it is most interesting to study how the spread of English,
French or Portuguese-based creoles interconnects with the usually more orderly process
of the spread of the standard varieties of the respective lexifiers. Again, however, such
constellations are not unique. Compare, for example, the case of Hindi, which has un-
dergone a complex history of pluricentric standardization on the Indian subcontinent
and has since developed a worldwide diaspora, and the ⫺ historically prior ⫺ globaliza-
tion of the closely related Bhojpuri, which from its Northern Indian base was spread to
Nepal, Mauritius, Suriname (cf. Damsteegt 2002 on the present-day fate of the Sarnami
community), South Africa (Mesthrie 1991) and the British West Indies, in particular
Trinidad.
All things considered, then, the terminological and conceptual framework developed
in contemporary sociolinguistics to handle highly stigmatized language varieties with
exclusively covert prestige would seem to suffice for the study of stabilized/expanded
pidgins and creoles.
3. Creole spaces in previous research
In creolophone communities which are spread out over larger territories speakers usually
assert that there are regionally distinctive forms (for Jamaica, cf., e.g., Beckford Wassink
1999: 63). For at least one major creole, Haitian, we have now a monumental six-volume
dialect atlas (Fattier 1998). Nevertheless, it remains true to say that the systematic search
for regionally distinctive usages has never been a priority in research on creole languages.
In fact, expert analysts commonly tend to second-guess native speakers’ intuitions about
regional variation and assume that it is epiphenomenal and an accidental by-product of
more systematic ethnic, social or rural⫺urban variability (Beckford Wassink 1999: 83).
Creoles being “young” languages, it is, of course, plausible to argue that there has
not been enough time for stable regional usages to emerge ⫺ just as in the case of
colonial settler koinés of European languages such as Canadian English or Australian
English there is less regional variability than in the traditional dialects of Britain. This,
however, is only a partial explanation. Most creolophone communities are characterized
by very sharp ethnic and social divisions, and these easily overshadow regional back-
ground as a major determinant of linguistic variation.
“Creole space” is, therefore, first and foremost sociolinguistic space. Creoles tend to
be mass vernaculars which are used in classic diglossic situations (Haiti, cf. Ferguson
1959) or which are linked to standard-like versions of the original lexifier through grad-
ual and ordered continua of usage (cf. DeCamp 1971 for Jamaica or Rickford 1987 for
Guyana). Even when the ties to the lexifier have been cut, as is the case with Sranan in
Suriname, they commonly figure as vernacular lingue franche in complex multilingual
constellations. Quite justifiably, this has led researchers to emphasize the study of creoles
in social (i. e., sociolinguistic and social-psychological attitudinal) space rather than in
geographical space narrowly understood.
For creoles which are still in contact with their lexifiers, the parsimonious model of
creole variational space remains the continuum, which “⫺ when reduced to its essen-
tials ⫺ [is] descriptively accurate and theoretically convenient” (Rickford 1987: 15). The
caveat in the quote refers to contested issues such as whether synchronic variation along
the creole⫺standard continuum reflects or implies a diachronic process of decreolization.
A model providing for implicationally scaled and essentially unidimensional moves be-
tween the opposite poles of “creoleness” and “standardness” accounts for intra-speaker
stylistic variability and inter-speaker variability associated with social status and educa-
tion. Critics of this model do not invoke plain regional variation as the extra complica-
tion or second dimension which might invalidate the continuum. Rather, they argue that
it is not fit to account for the full complexity of the observed social and ethnic variation,
which ⫺ they argue ⫺ cannot be mapped along one dimension only. The resulting multi-
dimensional creole space, however, is a metaphorical one and not directly anchored
in territorial geography, as the following definition proposed by Carrington (1992: 98)
makes clear:
1. Creole space is multidimensional.

2. The individuals who inhabit creole space have multi-systemic repertoires.
3. The density of networks of communication will determine the stability, and conse-
quently the identifiability, of systems within this space.
4. The space coheres because networks of communication overlap. Cross-network com-
munication is possible because of the shared parts of repertoires, but the nature of
the overlap may well be neither constant nor systematic.
The most original theoretical impulse that general sociolinguistic theory has received
from sociolinguistically orientated pidgin and creole studies in this tradition is probably
the acts-of-identity model proposed by LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985).
In spite of (or rather because of?) its largely metaphorical use, the collocation “creole
space” (and its analogues in other ex-colonial languages, such as éspace creole, espacio
criollo, espaço crioulo) have become widely used motifs in cultural studies approaches to
creole speakers’ experience ⫺ embodied in titles of academic publications such as “Race,
space and the poetics of moving” (Philip 1998).
4. From language through code to symbol: On the recent

deterritorialization o some creoles
The majority of the world’s expanded pidgins and creoles are small languages, and many
of them are therefore endangered. In addition to the usual factors making language
maintenance difficult for speakers of small languages, creoles suffer from another com-
plication. Not only are they frequently considered corrupt, and therefore expendable,
versions of their lexifiers, but they also lack the prestige of traditional indigenous lan-
guages as the symbolic correlates of a supposedly authentic indigenous culture. Thus, if
in contemporary Nigeria standard English has the overt prestige of modernity and pro-
gress, and languages such as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo connote pride in the respective
ethnic traditions, Nigerian Pidgin, as a lingua franca based among the masses of the
urban poor living at the margins of progress, loses out against both.
However, there are repeated instances in which creoles of the urban poor have come
to be identified of with specific subcultural lifestyles which in turn have been globalized
by the entertainment industry in more or less diluted fashion. The first, most effective
and best-known case of such deterritorialization of a creole language is still the spread
of Jamaican Creole, in its specific manifestation of Rastafarian slang, on the back of the
success of reggae music and its contemporary successors (dancehall, ragga). A language
historically rooted in a strictly localizable speech community has thus become a code,
optionally and consciously employed in a far more ill-defined “communities of practice”
(Meyerhoff 2003; Eckert 2005). Selected features of Jamaican Creole/Rasta talk have
thus become available for appropriation by others beyond the extent made possible by
diffusion through more traditional language contact.
Patterns of conventional face-to-face contact may explain why, in diaspora communi-
ties such as London, first-generation and second-generation Caribbean immigrants from
small-island communities such as St. Lucia or Antigua should assimilate to Jamaican
norms to some extent. Jamaica is the demographic and cultural centre of the An-
glophone Caribbean, an important source of linguistic innovation, and this role persists
in the diaspora. Why, on the other hand, Asian and even white-British adolescents
should find it attractive to “cross” (Rampton 1995) into Jamaican Creole is a more
complicated question to answer. In spite of its strong stigmatization, this expatriate ver-
sion of Jamaican Creole seems to have come to function as the code of a multiethnic
urban street culture in contemporary Britain. As such, it is as likely to be used symboli-
cally, as part of a rhetorical strategy, as it is to be used spontaneously.
In addition to popular culture, a further factor promoting the deterritorialization
of creoles has been the internet and computer-mediated communication, whose sociolin-
guistic impact was almost immediate, as is made clear by the following remark Velma
Pollard (2000: xiii⫺xv) felt it necessary to add to the second edition of her study of the
language of Rastafari:
This book focuses on the importance of language to Rastafarians, and any study of this
“unofficial” Jamaican religion would be incomplete without a thorough reading of it. This
collection of papers, originally published in 1994 […], now includes a new chapter and a
bibliography. The new chapter takes into account some recent developments in what can
only be termed the “globalization” of Rasta culture, much of it represented on the Internet.
[…]
Chapter 6 is a discussion of the sociological and linguistic implications of Rasta dictionaries

available on the Internet, as well as other publications. Here the wordmaking process is
revisited and transculturación, a term which reflects another aspect of the globalization of
Rasta culture, is introduced. The conclusion is that variations in Dread Talk are inherent in
this type of cultural “exchange” and are bound to move the language into new, unantici-
pated spheres.
On the part of the speakers themselves, the computer seems to have lowered traditional
inhibitions with regard to the use of creole in writing. Among the pidgins and creoles
without an extensive writing tradition which have recently established a serious presence
in the chat rooms of the World-Wide Web are Jamaican Creole, Nigerian Pidgin and
Haitian Creole. It is clear that such chat rooms are frequented by members of the public,
often based in or close to the diaspora, who are frequently educated and middle class
and therefore fully competent in English and French. For them, the creoles are an op-
tional stylistic repertoire, a code available for switching into for purposes of more effec-
tive identity and discourse work. As such, this code becomes available to outsiders for
“crossing into”, much in the same way that occasional members cross into the various
music-centered communities of practice mentioned above.
5. Outlook: Creolophone spaces in the twenty-irst century

The future outlook for the world’s known 100 or so expanded pidgins and creoles is
mixed. Many of them are still marginal languages, spoken in small communities of disad-
vantaged speakers in remote and isolated areas. Like almost all micro-languages, they
face the threat of attrition and eventual extinction. Several creolophone communities,
however, are thriving, often both in their historical home bases and in the diaspora.
Haitian, Jamaican and Guinea Bissauan Crioulo are cases in point. These creoles, and
others, show no sign of disappearing. All of them, however, are changing very rapidly
under the influence of prestigious standard languages they coexist with in diglossic situa-
tions or continua. Sociolinguistics and contact linguistics have developed the instruments
to describe these changes. (There is, of course, a less conspicuous counter-trend to this
“de-creolization”: the modification of the standard varieties of the lexifier languages
under the impact of the creole substrate and thus the emergence of new local standards.)
In diaspora situations, creoles may transform into new ethnic vernaculars. Patrick,
for example, has noted “emerging ethnically distinctive varieties of BrE spoken primarily
by Caribbean-origin Britons incorporating various elements of Jamaican Creole-like
speech” (2004: 234).
What poses a challenge to established linguistic methods is the globalization of some
creole usages through their currency in global popular culture. The roots of this process
are clear: the strong covert prestige of creoles and the resulting appeal at the level of
urban street culture. Contemporary sociolinguistics, however, is still developing the
means to cope with usage which is far removed from the unconscious vernacular studied
in its speech community. What we are looking at is, rather, often conscious rhetorically
styled usage in shifting communities of practice, or even largely decontextualized use of
creole linguistic signs which would have to be treated as an instance of a very high order
of indexicality in the framework of Silverstein (2003) or as straightforward commodifica-
tion of language in the terms of Heller (2003).
6. Reerences
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1995 Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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1995 Early Suriname Creole Texts: A Collection of 18th-Century Sranan and Saramaccan Docu-
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1981 Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
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1992 Images of creole space. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 7: 93⫺99.
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2005 Defining Creole. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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25. Overseas varieties 451
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25. The consequences o migration and colonialism II:

Overseas varieties
1. Introduction: An “explosion of space”
2. A rough typology of overseas varieties
3. Shaping overseas varieties
4. Two illustrative scenarios
5. Conclusion
6. References
1. Introduction: An explosion o space

Societies and communities, in Europe and elsewhere, are in a constant process of shift
and flux, for a variety of social, political and economic reasons: crusades and war cam-
paigns; climatic changes and natural disasters; famines; the transformation from largely
rural and self-sufficient to urbanized and monetary-based economies; etc. The last two
hundred years, however, have seen population movements on an unprecedented scale,
an abrupt catalyzation of sociodemographic fluctuation, both within Europe and from
Europe to other continents. Many of these migratory movements take their roots in the
Middle Ages and the Early Modern period: political expansionism following the discov-
eries of seafarers and adventurers (many of them in the service of governments, such as
Sir Francis Drake, Fernão de Magalhães or Amerigo Vespucci); technological innova-
tions that made it possible to transport ever-increasing masses of personnel and cargo
to new and constantly expanding numbers of destinations; the establishment of official
bodies to develop international trading schemes (such as the British East India Company
or the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie; Lawson 1993); the rivalry of the newly
created nation-states for possession of overseas territories, etc.
This “explosion of space” was to have a massive impact on all the domains of lan-
guage and space as discussed in the first division of articles of this handbook. First of
all, it stretched and extended the space of European languages, so that French, Spanish,
German, Portuguese and English (and other European languages) were exported to nu-
merous locations around the globe, where they came into contact with ⫺ and coexisted
alongside ⫺ indigenous languages. Second, the usage of the (non-local) colonizing lan-
guages would eventually cut inroads into the local sociolinguistic landscapes and mas-
sively affect the local varieties, in many cases leading to unprecedented language endan-
germent and death. A common scenario is for the number of speakers of English, French
and Spanish to increase significantly, not because of population growth in Europe, but
due to the subsequent adoption of these languages in the new territories, where they
functioned as lingue franche and granted access to power and wealth. The so-called
“Scramble for Africa” at the end of the nineteenth century provides a particularly perti-
nent case in point here (Duignan, Gann and Turner 1975). As late as in the 1880s, most
of Africa was a genuine terra incognita. The Portuguese (and also, though not on the
same scale, the British) had taken possession of much of the African West Coast (the
Slave Coast, in the Bight of Benin; the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana; and the Ivory
Coast), present-day Algeria and the Suez Canal in Egypt were under French control and
Great Britain held the comparatively small Cape Colony in South Africa. It is estimated
that less than ten percent of Africa was colonized when the continent became a primary
target of New Imperialism (Curtin 1995). With the onset of World War I in 1914, how-
ever, the only countries outside formal European control were Ethiopia and the republic
of Liberia (Bennet 1984). As a result, between 1885 and 1914, in less than thirty years,
Great Britain took nearly thirty percent of Africa’s population under her control, France
fifteen percent, Germany nine percent, Belgium seven percent and Italy one percent.
Nigeria alone was to contribute a populace of 15 million to the British Empire, which
was more than the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire
combined.
The “Scramble for Africa” represents a showcase scenario of the effects of political
expansionism and colonialism on language and space. In terms of geographical space,
an unprecedented extension into unknown territory (cf. Johnstone in this volume); in
terms of cultural/social space, a reshuffling and reorganization of the local socio-ethnic
landscape as well as the collapse, merging and consecutive redevelopment of social
boundaries and networks in the colonial communities (cf. Mæhlum in this volume); in
terms of political space, the creation of new nation states (often based on purely geo-
graphic and ethnically ignorant conceptualizations of space, along topographic rather
than socio-ethnic boundaries), and a transformation of local economic systems (cf. Gal
in this volume); and in terms of migration and colonization, large population movements,
accompanied by the establishment of permanent settlements and enduring contacts with
the colonial powers (cf. Jacquemet in this volume). Linguistically and sociolinguistically,
the global diffusion and spatial expansion of language(s) ultimately led to the endanger-
ment of local minority languages, often going hand in hand with the development of
contact-based varieties such as pidgins and creoles (cf. Mair, this volume). On the other
hand, language contact between colonizing languages (and the emergence of indigenous
offspring varieties, such as Dutch-based Afrikaans in South Africa; Roberge 2002) and
koinéization due to extensive dialect interaction (see below) were common as well. The
“explosion of space” thus triggered a range of social, political, ethnic, economic and
linguistic developments, deeply affecting all domains of language and space, and had a
profound impact on Europe and the New World territories alike.
This article looks into selected aspects of language spread and diffusion and is struc-
tured as follows. It begins by providing a rough typological overview of overseas vari-
eties, addressing the historical and societal dimension of migration and colonialism as
well as the roots of the varieties under discussion more concisely. Using this as a baseline,
it discusses and exemplifies some of the major linguistic and sociolinguistic outcome(s)
of language transplantation, namely how extended contact triggers language change and
how such contact in turn sees the “birth” of new post-colonial overseas varieties. In
particular these are issues related to who is most influential in the formation of these
varieties (the widely discussed concept of the “founder principle” [Mufwene 1996], as
opposed to (later) dialect swamping [Lass 1990], issues related to social restructuring,
settlement patterns, reforming of social networks and communities of practice, identity,
etc.), whether linguistic criteria are more important than social ones or not (e.g. total
percentage of input varieties), and how interaction between varieties as well as extended
contact with the colonial variety affects the overall trajectory of change. A final section
discusses two case studies ⫺ from Tristan da Cunha and New Zealand ⫺ and exemplifies
some of the processes discussed.
2. A rough typology o overseas varieties
Perhaps the most important question in this context is exactly what to include under the
label “overseas varieties”. One should at all cost avoid the implication that these varieties
are characterized by relative homogeneity (Lass 1987). In fact, the term is so general
and all-inclusive that it covers just about every variety that was brought out of Europe
and continued to be used elsewhere. To take the spatial extension of German, for in-
stance, overseas varieties have developed in the Americas, Africa and in the Pacific
(Timm 2001), notwithstanding the fact that Germany had a limited sphere of colonial
involvement and never belonged to the colonial superpowers (Gründer 2004). To name
but some offspring varieties of German around the world: Pennsylvania Dutch (a misno-
mer, Deutsch being misinterpreted as Dutch), certainly the most widely known form,
which saw substantial input of dialects from the Palatinate; Amana German in the Amana
Colonies in Iowa, founded by Inspirationalists of German origin; and several varieties
in South America: Venezuelan Alemán Coloniero (with prominent input from Low Ale-
mannic varieties), Lagunen-deutsch, which developed around Lake Llanquihue in Chile
(and may have undergone extensive mixing with Spanish), and Riograndenser Hunsrü-
ckisch, formed by German Brazilians in Rio Grande do Sul, especially in the areas of
Santa Catarina, Paraná and Espı́rito Santo (see Riehl in this handbook as well as the
description of these varieties on Ethnologue <http://www.ethnologue.com>). In Africa,

there are some 30,000 speakers of German in Namibia (former Deutsch-Südwestafrika),
whereas German has not survived in Ruanda, Burundi, Tanzania or Mozambique (for-
mer Deutsch-Ostafrika, ceded to the British after World War I). A very special place in
the overseas legacy of German is held by Unserdeutsch, also known as Rabaul Creole
German, a German-based creole language spoken primarily in Papua New Guinea and
the northeast of Australia (Holm 1989), which now is near extinction, with few bilingual
speakers left. Consequently, even though the linguistic legacy of “overseas German” is
limited, the varieties named display contact-linguistic complexity and have arisen due to
dialect contact, language mixing and creolization.
What, then, are the major types of overseas varieties and which of them should be
discussed here? Probably still one of the most important classificatory tools is the model
put forward by Kachru (1985), who argued that varieties (of English, though one could
easily generalize to other world languages) could be grouped in three concentric circles,
depending on criteria such as historical continuity, function and use. The so-called “inner
circle” represents the traditional bases of English: the United Kingdom, the United
States of America, (English-speaking) Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The total
number of English speakers in the inner circle amounts to approximately 380 million,
the majority of whom reside in the United States. The “outer circle” (countries that were
part of the British Empire) contains countries where English is not an official language
but where it assumes an important institutional role and is important for historical
reasons (India, Nigeria, South Africa, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia,
Tanzania, Kenya, etc.). The total number of English speakers in the outer circle is esti-
mated to range from 150 million to 300 million. The “expanding circle” finally, is made
up of countries where English plays no historical or governmental role, but where it is
nevertheless widely used as a foreign language or lingua franca (China, Russia, Japan,
Korea, Egypt, Indonesia, etc.). The total number of speakers of English in this circle is
most difficult to estimate, particularly since the usage of English is functionally restricted
(e.g., for academic purposes or the tourism industry). Global estimates range from 300
million to more than one billion (Crystal 1997). In Kachru’s view, the inner circle is
“norm-providing” so that language norms are developed in these countries, mostly be-
cause English is the first (or native) language. The outer circle, by contrast, is “norm-
receiving” (since many speakers of English are bilingual or multilingual), whereas the
expanding circle is seen as “norm-developing”, due to the creative potential of foreign
language speakers and language learners and the limited exposure to native-speaker
norms. Kachru’s model has not remained uncontroversial (Quirk 1990), but factors such
as historical continuity and ancestry, mono-, bi- and multilingualism, the function and
usage of a given language are certainly of utmost importance for any classification of
overseas varieties.
Adopting an approach based on time depth, ancestry and affiliations with the “home-
land”, the presence, strength and impact of input varieties other than the colonizing
language, the function and communicative role of the languages present, the sociodemo-
graphic set-up of the community, etc., then we can distinguish between directly trans-
planted overseas varieties, where a native-speaker tradition was maintained at all times
(e.g., Falklands Islands English, Québec French, or Riograndenser Hunsrückisch), sec-
ond- or foreign language varieties (English in India, Spanish in Paraguay), pidgins and
creoles (e.g., English-derived Pijin on the Solomon Islands, French-derived Mauritian
Creole, or Morisyen, on Mauritius, or Italian/Spanish-based Cocoliche in Argentina;

Holm 1989), creoloids (varieties with prototypical creole features that have not devel-
oped from a pidgin, e.g., Singlish, the basilectal English used in Singapore; Platt 1975)
and language varieties shaped via extensive dialect contact and koinéization (such as
Australian English). It must be emphasized, however, that many, if not most, processes
of new-variety formation are “messy” and that the development of overseas varieties is
never clear-cut. More often than not, it is virtually impossible to delineate and isolate
single processes; many of them co-occur and overlap, for instance when language and
dialect contact coexist and have a joint impact on the sociolinguistic evolution of a newly
forming variety.
Consequently, this article focuses on two possible outcomes, dialect contact and creo-
loidization, to document the complex processes of contact linguistics that underlie the
formation of overseas varieties. It excludes offspring varieties of language contact, i. e.,
pidgins and creoles, since these are discussed by Mair (in this volume).
3. Shaping overseas varieties
We can single out several stages in the formation of overseas varieties. First of all, what
basically happens during the formation phase of an overseas variety is that the total
number of variants present in the contact scenario represents a pool out of which the
first native speakers select features (Mufwene 2001). None of the input varieties “wins
out” at this stage; were this the case, then all but one variety present in the contact
scenario would disappear without a trace and the newly developing variety would repre-
sent the equivalent of one of its inputs. Riograndenser Hunsrückisch would merely be a
transplanted (and basically unaltered) form of a Rhineland-Palatinate German dialect,
Australian English exported Cockney, Québec French the equivalent of a regional variety
found in France, etc. This is hardly ever the case, for reasons that are obvious. Dialects
mix and interact as speakers accommodate to each other, and new dialect formation is
particularly strong when children grow up in a multi-dialectal environment. The usual
outcome is for the inputs to undergo a stage of mixing, so that the inception phase of a
new dialect displays mechanisms of feature selection and retention. Consequently, con-
tact between linguistic systems triggers selection processes of features from several coex-
isting varieties (Kerswill 1996), and this may be influenced by factors such as total
number of features present, salience, stigma and prestige of individual variables, sociode-
mographic characteristics and social mobility, etc. Fully developed dialects, the end-
product of focusing (LePage and Tabouret-Keller 1985; see below), have thus adopted
features from at least two (very often, more) donors. Put differently, a crystallizing con-
tact-based overseas variety combines a mixture of features (phonetic, grammatical, mor-
phological and/or lexical) that derive from some or all the dialects present in the original
contact situation.
A second process is leveling: the majority of variants found in a diffuse mixture situa-
tion gradually disappear as one feature is permanently selected (Trudgill 1986; Siegel
1987; Britain 1997). Tendencies towards regularity and transparency are common in
contact situations. Though the precise nature of what determines leveling is still un-
known, there is consensus that status (stigma or prestige) and frequency are important
criteria. Variants that are regionally or socially marked are usually not maintained
(Mesthrie 1993) and those with the widest social and geographical distribution have the
highest chances of surviving the selection process (Trudgill 1986). First, the surviving
form is usually the one found in the majority of inputs (Mesthrie 1993; Siegel 1987), and
this has led Trudgill (2004) to adopt an extreme (and controversial) hypothesis, namely
that it should be the frequency of features alone that accounts for adoption. Social
factors (prestige, status, social network structures, etc.), as a consequence, should simply
be irrelevant. Such an explanatory attempt cannot account for independent develop-
ments (see below) or cases of reallocation (Trudgill 1986), when more than one original
variant survives the leveling process. Reasons for reallocation are reanalysis and func-
tional redistribution, either as social or stylistic variants, or as phonological variants in
complementary environments (Britain 1997). This has been documented by Domingue
(1981) in Mauritius Bhojpuri, where the total number of coexisting variants was not
reduced due to the fact that former regional variants of Hindi were reinterpreted as
indicators of (in)formality and style.
New Zealand English (NZE) provides a pertinent case of leveling. Schreier et al.
(2003) analyzed the maintenance of voiceless labiovelar /hw-/ fricatives (minimal pairs
Wales ~ whales, witch ~ which) in three regions of New Zealand (Otago/Southland, Can-
terbury and the North Island) and found considerable regional variation in early twenti-
eth-century New Zealand English. Whereas speakers from the North Island and Canter-
bury were predominantly using /w/ (so that the /hw/ ~ /w/ merger was practically com-
pleted by 1950), speakers from the Southland and Otago regions had high levels of /hw-/
well into the second half of the twentieth century. The regional distribution of the vari-
able was linked to population demographics and ancestral effects, reflecting the total
input strength of /hw-/ retaining donor dialects. A high overall presence of /hw-/ variants
in the inputs thus had an enhancing effect on the adoption and maintenance of the
phoneme. The strong presence of /hw-/ in the Otago/Southland dialect region was ex-
plained by high input frequency and the disproportionately high input of Scottish set-
tlers, who made a distinction between /hw-/ and /w-/. In the other regions, however,
/hw-/ was not adopted, simply because the social configuration and the local contact
and mixture situations were different. The inputs were mainly from the South of Eng-
land, where /hw-/ was a minority feature, and this enhanced leveling-out in the local
forms of New Zealand English.
A third process involved is what some label simplification (e.g., Trudgill 1986), which
however may be preferably considered as a manifestation of regularization or simply
analogical language change. I personally favor the latter since the outcome of new-dialect
formation is not necessarily “simpler” than any of the corresponding input forms.
Rather, a given property of a variant X, no matter if phonetic/phonological, lexical or
grammatical, is subject to less variation than it was in the input varieties originally. This
process manifests itself in the reduction of the quantitative range of forms. Siegel (1987:
14) points out that simplification is not well understood and argues that it should be
investigated quantitatively rather than qualitatively (i. e., to adopt a variationist perspec-
tive to trace a putative decrease in variability) and to investigate it diachronically, with
reference to earlier evolutionary phases of a variety (or of the input varieties). This
problem is also recognized by Britain (1997: 141) who states that simplification repre-
sents “an increase in grammatical regularity and decrease in formal complexity”, and
Mühlhäusler (1997: 236; emphasis added), who claims that
Simplification only refers to the form of the rules in which a language is encoded, indicating
optimalization of existing rules and the development of regularities for formerly irregular
aspects, for example, grammaticalization of the lexicon. Simplification is a dynamic concept.
It expresses the fact that as one moves along a developmental continuum, more and more
regularities appear.
A good example of phonological regularization in overseas varieties is provided by the

devoicing of intervocalic alveolar plosives in Afrikaans (Booij 2002). In Dutch, voiceless
alveolar plosives (/t/) are voiced in intervocalic environments:
/t/ > [d] / V_V
Dutch plural formation commonly involves the affixation of an -en marker and changes
the phonological environment from /-VC#/ to /-VCV#/. If a singular form ends in /d/,
then the corresponding plural form maintains it. A voiceless /t/, however, assimilates to
/d/, as in: hoed [hut] ‘hat’, hoeden [1hude]. Afrikaans, in contrast, has regularized this
assimilation rule so that the phonological environment has no effect on the alveolar
plosive: hoed [hut] ‘hat’, hoeden [1hute], stad [stat] ‘city’, statten [1state]. Afrikaans is thus
more regular than its ancestral variety Dutch, in that it has reduced the number of
phonological rules and does not make phonological contrasts in this particular environ-
ment (Booij 2002). Similarly, a striking case of morphosyntactic regularization is found
in Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE), which regularized the past tense paradigm of be
(with pivot form was) to the extent that were was categorically absent from the speech
of Tristanians born before World War II (Schreier 2002). One notes the interplay of
simplification and regularization. A past be paradigm that has undergone regularization
(we was, the fishermen was, etc.) is also in a way ‘simpler’. Put differently, there is no
process of simplification that does not also entail regularization, which questions
whether it is necessary to keep the two terms distinct.
Finally, processes of feature selection and retention are not the only ones operating
in long-term contact situations. A new dialect affiliates with its inputs by drawing its
features from them, but it is erroneous to assume that it is linguistically predetermined
by the distinctive properties of the varieties in contact. Contact-derived dialects may
develop their own dynamics, namely when “contact between two dialects leads to the
development of forms that actually originally occurred in neither dialect” (Trudgill 1986:
62). Some variants are “not actually present in any of the dialects that contribute to the
mixture but … arise out of interaction between them” (Trudgill et al. 2000), and this has
been amply documented by Britain (1997) in English Fens English. According to Trudgill
(1986), “interdialectalisms” represent intermediate variants of original forms (and thus
originate in incomplete or faulty accommodation) or overgeneralization and hyper-adap-
tation (perhaps the most well-known case here is hypercorrection, which occurs when
speakers misinterpret and incorrectly generalize rules by applying them to inappropriate
contexts; Trudgill 1986: 66). Therefore, mixing and leveling alone cannot be offered as
an explanation for all the features of a newly developing variety. Any theory that
attempts to arrive at a general outline of contact-induced language change needs to leave
room for independent innovation patterns.
All these processes contribute to new-dialect formation and are thus part of what
LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985) call focusing. Speakers of a fully focused variety are
in agreement about normative structures and have a strong awareness that their dialect
differs from others on linguistic grounds. Focused varieties often have a “proper” name
and are accompanied by processes of standardization and codification; these reinforce
attitudes towards outsiders and foster a strong sense of a local identity in the speech
community’s members. In so-called diffuse communities, by contrast, speakers display
considerable heterogeneity (resembling the phenomenon of super-diversity), having no
(or little) consensus on linguistic norms and the status of the variety. Le Page and Tabou-
ret-Keller (1985) illustrate this with the case of multilingual Belize, where English, Creole
and Spanish coexist. There is a continuum between acro- and basilectal varieties, no
consensus on the usage of high-standard norms, no clear demarcation between the
coexisting varieties and no agreement as to which of the varieties is used in a given
context or interaction. The maintenance of multiple varieties in a contact setting is there-
fore a crucial factor to determine whether a variety focuses or whether it remains diffuse,
and this has implications for the development of overseas varieties in general. According
to Kerswill and Williams (1992: 13), the initial stages of any dialect mixture situation
are characterized by extreme diffuseness. There is no agreement on shared norms in a
newly founded community and language usage is characterized by the coexistence of a
number of distinct variants. Variability may then be reduced when accommodation pat-
terns between speakers in face-to-face interaction increase and social networks are imple-
mented.
4. Two illustrative scenarios

The consequences of spatial extension of language are clear. First, there exist a large
number of typologically and structurally distinct overseas varieties, so that the sociopo-
litical and linguistic landscape of any expanding language becomes richer and more
diverse (often at the expense of pre-existing varieties, however). Second, the formation
and evolution of overseas varieties depends on the complex interplay of language-in-
ternal and extralinguistic criteria; these influence the outcome of new varieties and must
be taken into account for any attempt at reconstruction or explanatory modeling.
The remainder of the article now illustrates two of these outcomes and looks into the
historical and sociolinguistic developments of two varieties in more detail: New Zealand
English (NZE, which provides a scenario of dialect contact and koinéization) and Tristan
da Cunha English (TdCE, which arose due to creoloidization by adopting creole features
without prior pidginization or creolization).
4.1. Dialect contact and new dialect ormation: New Zealand English
New Zealand English is the youngest of the “inner-circle” varieties of English around
the world (see above), in the sense that it underwent structural nativization (Schneider
2007) most recently. European expansion into the Pacific began in the late eighteenth
century, but by the 1830s, European residents in New Zealand numbered no more than
around 2,000. It was only in 1840, after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and British
sovereignty was proclaimed over the country, that the European population of New
Zealand began to grow. This occurred at a remarkable rate, however; by 1872, the Euro-
pean population had reached 256,000 and by 1881 almost half a million (Belich 1996:
278). In the early years of colonization, Auckland became the seat of government and it
was to remain the most populous settlement. However, the period between 1840 and
1852 was also characterized by colonizing efforts of bodies in Britain that organized
emigration to central and southern New Zealand. Most of the immigrants who arrived
in these years came to planned settlements. Although their numbers were not great when
compared with later immigration, they nevertheless laid out early patterns in the areas
where they settled, particularly in Otago and Canterbury. In a sense, they represent the
founders of these settlements and were to have a long-lasting impact on the colonies.
The 1871 census indicates that the vast majority of migrants in New Zealand came
from the British Isles and that the English formed the largest ethnic group thereof (51
percent). The Scots, who made up ten percent of the population of the British Isles,
constituted 27.3 percent of the migrants in New Zealand. They were mainly concentrated
in Otago and Southland, but also settled elsewhere throughout the country. The Irish,
who in 1871 made up 18.8 percent of the UK population, constituted about 22 percent
of the New Zealand migrant population. The Welsh were often conflated with the Eng-
lish in official records but, even allowing for this, the percentage of Welsh migrants was
insignificant. By 1871, the North Island provinces generally had more New Zealand born
people than the South Island, and Otago and Southland had significantly more immi-
grants from Scotland than the other provinces. Canterbury led in the numbers from
England, though the distinction between this and other provinces in the North Island
was not as marked as the predominance of Scots in Otago and Southland. Here, the
Scots made up between 60 to 80 percent of the total population, mostly living off agricul-
ture (Olssen 1984: 71). The other large group consisted of miners, mostly from England
and Ireland, who made up about 24 percent of the male workforce (Olssen 1984: 71).
This is reflected by the settlement patterns of individual Otago towns. The population
of Arrowtown, for example, a typical gold-mining town, had roughly similar proportions
of settlers from England, Scotland, Ireland and Australia. Milton, on the other hand, a
rural agricultural town, had a high percentage of settlers born in Scotland.
Canterbury, in contrast, was planned to be “English, Anglo-Catholic, and Conserva-
tive” (Sinclair 1991: 92). A study of the population of nineteenth-century Canterbury
(Pickens 1977) shows that the “English” stereotype of the Canterbury population goes
back to early settlement patterns, where fifty-five percent were of English origin, sixteen
percent from Ireland, fourteen percent from Scotland and one percent from Wales. Of
the English settlers, the majority came from the South of England, in particular the
Southeast.
New Zealand’s North Island, on the other hand, witnessed a notably different social
history and higher sociodemographic fluctuation. Wellington was the earliest New
Zealand Company settlement and one of the first places of European involvement.
Places like Dannevirke, in contrast, were planned settlements, set up for government
assisted immigrants from Scandinavia in the 1870s, and places such as Rotorua were
established as late as in the 1880s. Political insecurities and struggles with the local Maori
population hindered colonization of much of the North Island, but the stationing of
British soldiers attracted the European population in the 1860s. Numbers rose dramati-
cally in the 1860s, after war broke out between Maori and the British troops. The colo-
nial government launched an ambitious scheme to recruit soldier settlers and to repatri-
ate them on land confiscated from the Maori. By the mid 1860s, there were some 12,000
Imperial troops, together with 4,000 local soldiers. According to McGibbon (2000: 325),
“most of those who enlisted were young single men born in Great Britain and from the
lower stratum of Victorian society, laborers and semi-skilled workers attracted by the
promise of a free farm”. On their discharge soldiers were allotted land (the amount
determined by rank) though many did not stay long enough to obtain legal ownership.
For example, of the 2,056 soldier-settlers who were granted farms in the Waikato prov-
ince in the 1860s, only 214 still owned farm sections in 1880 (McGibbon 2000: 327),
which attests to the high degree of mobility in the North Island at the time.
Economically, the provinces of the North Island for a long time lagged behind Otago
and Canterbury, where the wool and meat industry yielded high profit margins. The
discovery of gold in the South Island in 1861 increased economic growth and extended
the population. In the 1870s, a government immigration scheme was set up to boost the
population in the wealthier provinces of the south, and there was a massive influx of
new immigrants to Otago and Canterbury. The situation was to change from the 1880s
on, when the success of refrigerated shipping made the export of dairy produce possible.
After 1901, more dense settlement and industrial development gave the Northern prov-
inces an economic advantage, which led to demographic restructuring and a pre-eminent
socio-political role of the North Island, which remains to the present day.
Sociolinguistically, New Zealand English is a showcase scenario to illustrate the
mechanisms of new dialect formation. Though some (e.g., Hammarström 1980) have
argued for monogenetic origins, taking the view that Australian English (and, by impli-
cation, New Zealand English) basically represent varieties of transplanted Cockney, most
agree that New Zealand English originated in a context of dialect transplantation, con-
tact and mixture, classifying it as a contact dialect (or koiné): “While NZE is undoubt-
edly southern English in origin, it shows features which are found throughout the south
of England […] NZE really is a mixed dialect, taking input from throughout Britain”
(Bauer 1999: 304; emphasis added). In the words of Trudgill et al. (2000: 302), it “is the
result […] of a complex series of processes involving dialect contact between different
British Isles varieties of English, followed by dialect mixture, new-dialect formation, and
then by subsequent linguistic changes.” The scenario that gave rise to this variety of
southern hemisphere English consequently involved several transplanted inputs; their
phonological and morphosyntactic properties served as a feature pool from which New
Zealand English drew its features. The most eminent of these varieties was southeastern
English English, or London, to be more precise. Bauer (1994: 388) states that “phono-
logically speaking, New Zealand English is a variant of the southeast England system”,
a claim supported by the qualitative and quantitative analysis reported in the ONZE
(“Origins of New Zealand English”) project (Gordon et al. 2004). Apparent-time data
of nineteenth-century New Zealand English (the database used by the ONZE team) is
indicative of early rudimentary leveling (of socially and regionally marked variants, such
as the /v ~ w/ merger) and extreme variability in the speech of the first locally born
generation, whose speech is characterized by unique and often idiosyncratic combina-
tions of features from distinct dialect regions of the British Isles. The impact of language
contact was slight, manifesting itself mostly on a lexical level (Bauer 1994; Deverson
1998). Following the course of focusing and new-norm adoption, New Zealand English
(like other post-colonial varieties, such as Australian English) underwent regional uni-
formity and leveling on a nationwide scale, as a result of which regionality does not (yet)
correlate with language variation in present-day New Zealand English: “New Zealand,
like Australia, is more remarkable for the absence of regional differences” (Gordon and
Deverson 1998: 126). This has also been openly remarked on in earlier American English
(“The characters chiefly noted in American speech by all who have discussed it, are,
first, its general uniformity throughout the country, so that dialects, properly speaking,
are confined to recent immigrants, to the native whites of a few isolated areas and to
the negroes of the South”; Mencken 1921) as well as in Australian English (“Australians
are for practical reasons almost completely unmarked by region within their speech
community”; Bernard 1989). Indeed, this seems to be a highly diagnostic feature of the
early evolutionary phase of “inner-circle” overseas varieties (see Schneider 2007 for an
in-depth comparison and theoretical analysis of these varieties) and one that sets them
apart from others developing in multilingual contexts.
4.2. Dialect and creole contact: Tristan da Cunha English
The formation of Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE) in the nineteenth century resembles
that of New Zealand English to some extent, namely in that it witnessed dialect contact
between varieties of British and American English. On the other hand, it shows how
complex and intricately interwoven contact-induced change mechanisms are and how
little it takes to alter the trajectory path of overseas varieties, particularly those develop-
ing in small, stable and locally confined founding populations.
The island of Tristan da Cunha lies in the South Atlantic Ocean, some 2,300 kilome-
ters south of St. Helena, 2,800 kilometers west of Cape Town and about 3,400 kilometers
east of Uruguay, with a current population of 285. It was discovered by the Portuguese
admiral Tristão da Cunha in 1506. The English and Dutch too became aware of the
islands, the Dutch being the first to effect a landing (in 1643; Beintema 2000). However,
none of the colonial powers developed an interest in establishing a permanent colony on
the island. Things changed when, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Ameri-
can fishing and whaling industry expanded to the South Atlantic Ocean and Tristan da
Cunha served as an occasional resort to the sealers and whalers (Brander 1940). The
growing economic interest and strategic position along a major sea-route soon attracted
discoverers, pirates and adventurers. The island was officially settled in 1816, when the
British admiralty formally annexed Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, apparently
with the intention of blocking a possible escape route for Napoleon Bonaparte, who at
the time was exiled on the island of St. Helena (Schreier and Lavarello-Schreier 2003).
A military garrison was dispatched to the island, withdrawing after one year only. Some
army personnel stayed behind with the intention of settling permanently: two stonema-
sons from Plymouth (Samuel Burnell and John Nankivel) a non-commissioned officer
from Kelso, Scotland, named William Glass, his wife, “the daughter of a Boer Dutch-
man” (Evans 1994: 245), and their two children.
The population increased when shipwrecked sailors and castaways arrived; some of
them stayed behind and added to the permanent population. In 1824, apart from the
Glass family, the settlers included Richard “Old Dick” Riley (from Wapping, East Lon-
don), Thomas Swain (born in Hastings, Sussex) and Alexander Cotton (from Hull/York-
shire), who had arrived in the early 1820s (Earle [1832] 1966). The late 1820s and 1830s
saw the arrival of a group of women from St. Helena and three settlers from Denmark
and the Netherlands. The population grew rapidly and by 1832 there was a total of 34
people on the island, 22 of whom were young children. The 1830s and 1840s saw a
renaissance of the whaling industry and numerous ships called at Tristan da Cunha to
barter for fresh water and supplies; this led to the arrival of American whalers, some of
whom settled permanently.
The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of growing isolation, for a
number of political and economic reasons. The whale trade declined quickly, the increas-
ing use of steam ships made bartering unnecessary, and the opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869 drastically reduced the number of ships in the South Atlantic Ocean. This af-
fected the influx of settlers and a weaver from Yorkshire (Crawford 1945) and two Italian
sailors were the only new arrivals in the second half of the century (Crabb 1980). The
state of self-sufficiency and isolation lasted well into the twentieth century. When visiting
the island in 1937, the Norwegian sociologist Peter Munch found that the Tristanians
had not partaken in the massive changes that had occurred in the western world (Munch
1945) and noted that they basically lived in non-industrialized conditions. This situation
came to an abrupt end in April 1942, when the British admiralty ordered the installation
of a naval station on Tristan da Cunha. The arrival of the navy corps entailed far-
reaching economic changes and a South African company obtained exclusive rights to
establish a permanent fishing industry on the island, employing practically the entire
local workforce. The traditional subsistence economy was replaced by a paid labor force
economy, and the traditional way of life was modified as a result of the creation of
permanent jobs with regular working hours. Tristan da Cunha was an economic boom-
town in the 1950s: the living conditions and housing standards improved and the changes
brought about by the development scheme led to a complete transformation of the tradi-
tional Tristanian way of life within one generation. These social changes had linguistic
consequences as local dialect features eroded via accommodation to and adoption of
outside norms (Schreier 2002, 2003).
In October 1961, unforeseen volcanic activities forced a wholesale evacuation of the
entire population. The Tristanians had to leave the island and were transported to Eng-
land; virtually all of them returned from their exile to the South Atlantic in 1963. The
dramatic evacuation and the two “volcano years” in England affected the islanders more
than any other single event in the history of the community. The community underwent
quick modernization and adaptation to western culture. A new fishing company pro-
vided all the households with electricity; this improved the living conditions considerably
and the 1970s and 1980s were a period of economic prosperity again, which led to an
increase in mobility (mostly for secondary education and further job training) and a
quick opening-up of the community.
How did the settlement history and population dynamics shape the development of
a local indigenous variety, and exactly what is the sociolinguistic status of Tristan da
Cunha English as an overseas variety of English? As Zettersten (1969) points out, it is
crucial that there was no indigenous population when the island was colonized. Conse-
quently, the community’s founders found themselves in tabula rasa conditions and did
not come into contact with pre-existing language varieties (a major difference to practi-
cally all locales in the Caribbean and Africa). The English input varieties to Tristan da
Cunha English were dialects from the British Isles (the founders came from the Scottish
Lowlands, East Yorkshire, East London and Hastings), the United States (from the New
England area; Captain Andrew Hagan, the most influential American resident, was a
native of New London, Massachusetts) and from St. Helena. The first languages of the
non-British settlers were Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch and Italian. Several kinds of linguis-
tic contact thus operated during the genesis and formation periods of Tristan da Cunha
English, as the following varieties of English were transplanted to the island: British and
American English (which led to koinéization), second language (L2) forms of English
(as spoken by the settlers from Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy) and St. Helenian
English (StHE), which emerged in context of intense language contact involving English,
various African and Asian languages and Malagasy (Schreier 2008). Some (e.g., Hancock
1991) have suggested that StHE may have undergone creolization, so that it is structur-
ally similar to English-based creoles in the North Atlantic. This seems to be a strong
claim, but the parallels (particularly in morphosyntax) are obvious; they are of high
diagnostic value since there were practically no sociodemographic connections between
St. Helena and the Caribbean (see Schreier 2008), excluding the possibility of direct
transmission. As for, this variety primarily derives from varieties of British/late eigh-
teenth-century American English and StHE, which served as the most important donors
to this variety, and it can be excluded that Tristan da Cunha English emerged in a
context of direct language contact. There is first-hand evidence that all the Tristan set-
tlers had at least some knowledge of English (for instance, a visiting captain described
the English of the Dutch settler as “excellent”, quoted in Brander [1940: 157]; cf. also
Earle 1832; Taylor 1856), which excludes pidginization and creolization effects on Tristan
da Cunha. On the other hand, these L2 forms had an impact on Tristan da Cunha
English and several non-native features were adopted when the local variety nativized
(th-sibilization, i. e., dental fricatives realized as /s/, as in think, throw, etc.).
The existence of Creole-type features in Tristan da Cunha English (such as extremely
high rates of consonant cluster reduction and absence of -ed past tense marking [Schreier
2005: 152]; /v/ realized as [b]; lack of word-order inversion in questions; copula absence;
etc.) can only mean that a creolized form of English was transplanted via (at least some
of) the women who cross-migrated in the 1820s from St. Helena. These women had
some proficiency in English (Taylor [1856] reports that no other languages were spoken
on Tristan in 1851) and they most likely spoke a (perhaps mesolectal) English-based
Creole, so that these features were adopted by the first generations of native Tristanians.
Zettersten (1969: 134⫺5) reaches a similar conclusion when stating that “the speech-
habits of the settlers from St. Helena may have contributed towards simplifying the
inflectional structures of the Tristan dialect.” Similarly, Cassidy (1974: 176), in his review
of Zettersten (1969), states that Tristan da Cunha English “did not develop its pidgin-
creole as Pitcairn did, but appears to have imported many common creole features”.
Processes of admixture and creole contact have been documented in other varieties of
English around the world, and simplification as a result of extensive contact with a
regularized or simplified variety is found in Afrikaans (Roberge 2002) or Singapore Eng-
lish (Platt 1975). Accordingly, Tristan da Cunha English is a prominent example of what
is most aptly called creoloidization. In Trudgill’s (2000: 182) words, a creoloid
demonstrates a certain amount of simplification and admixture, relative to some source

language, […] which has never been a pidgin or a creole in the sense that it has always had
speakers who spoke a variety which was not subject to reduction.
Thus, Tristan da Cunha English emerged in a context of dialect contact, yet witnessed
admixture with an English-derived creole variety and had at the same time some input of
ESL and learner varieties of English, which may well represent one of the most complex
development histories of all the overseas varieties we know of.
5. Conclusion
What general conclusions can we draw from the massive expansion of language(s) on a
global scale and how does the emergence and disappearance of overseas varieties chal-
lenge us to rethink the relationship between language and space? First of all, the unprece-
dented amount of language diffusion and spread out of Europe and into the “New
World” led to the emergence of countless “new” varieties, shaped in diverse contact
settings around the globe. These developments affected all the dimensions of space (geo-
graphic, cultural/social, political) and enriched the geo- and sociolinguistic landscape of
European languages, as these came into contact with each other (most notably when
two colonizing powers vied for the same territory, as in Vanuatu or South Africa) and
of course with countless pre-existing local varieties. Regular interaction and subsequent
accommodation fostered a variety of sociolinguistic outcomes (trade jargons, pidgins
and creoles with European lexifiers, contact dialects, etc.). At the same time, the shaping
of overseas varieties had a massive impact on the usage of local languages and is/was
instrumental for the alarming rate of language endangerment and death (see the highly
emotional debate about European “killer languages”; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). By the
same token, the last decades in turn have witnessed a decrease of many overseas vari-
eties, some of which have already disappeared, for reasons such as renewed social mobil-
ity, in- and out-migration, or increasing stigmatization and nationalism (to mention
many of the overseas varieties of German in the USA; Bonin/Ogasawara English in
Japan, Long 2007; Riograndenser Hunsrückisch in Brazil; Unserdeutsch in Papua New
Guinea; Cocoliche in Argentina; and many more).
From a theoretical perspective, the search for a general framework to account for
these varieties is now at the forefront of linguistics, yet the immensely complex processes
that underlie colonization and its sociolinguistic conglomerates mar such efforts con-
siderably. The problem is that so many contact settings are far from straightforward,
that practically all colonies witness a steady coming and going, a frequent reshuffling of
their sociodemographic set-ups, and that there is an ever-changing coexistence of lan-
guage varieties (local and indigenous languages, social and regional varieties of the same
language, etc.). As a result, all contact scenarios are “messy” and simply do not lend
themselves to the neat separation and classification researchers hope to come up with.
The scope and importance of overseas varieties for research on language and society is
immense, however, affecting disciplines as diverse as contact linguistics, historical lin-
guistics, language variation and change, language endangerment and death, typology
and universals and many more. This is the legacy of the spatial expansion of language,
and the emergence, evolution and disappearance of overseas varieties now has a central
role in linguistic theory.
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26. The consequences o migration and colonialism III:

New minorities
1. “Old” and “new” minorities
2. The static concept of space in traditional dialectology
3. Towards a multidimensional and dynamic model of migrants’ communicative space
4. Conclusion
5. References
1. Old and new minorities
The concept of “minority” seems to be based on the sheer quantitative relation of “being
less” than the representatives of a corresponding “majority” even though this basic defi-
nition is completely inadequate when discussing issues within the context of humanities.
While statisticians continuously classify the populations into groups of greater or smal-
ler size, only very few of the smaller groups are actually considered “minorities”. The
underlying reason is that this concept implies a specific sociopolitical status which is the
product of public communication. Numerous factors contribute to the construction of
a minority in a given society. The two extreme opposites are: imposition from above, by
means of administrative implementation, without consent or even against the will of the
concerned group; or minority status claimed by the group itself without being granted
by the state authorities. The middle way is to create a legal framework which allows a
certain number of communities to define themselves as a minority or as belonging to
the majority. This compromise was chosen by Italy in 1999 when it adopted Legge 482
regarding “norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche” (‘norms in
the matter of protection of the historical linguistic minorities’; <http://www.parlamento.
it/leggi/99482l.htm>; cf. Orioles 2003).
It should be noted, however, that only “old” minorities are recognized by modern
states (Orioles 2003: 50⫺57 and 2006). Often their origins predate the rise of the nation-
state (e.g., the Basques, the Welsh); more specifically these minorities have existed long
before a majority was established. “New” minorities, on the contrary, may be defined as
groups that emerged after the formation of the nation-state, normally as the result of
demographic mobility, either voluntary migration or forced displacement (as in the case
of the German speaking population of the Volga region or of the Crimean Tartars who
resettled in Kazakhstan and in Uzbekistan in 1941 and 1944). Occasionally, the forma-
tion of a new state can create “new” minorities without migration, simply by redefining
the majority (as experienced by the numerous Russian speaking people residing in the
Baltic States after 1990, especially in the large cities like Tallinn).
The political privilege of “old” minorities is not surprising; it would be impossible,
for pragmatic reasons, to grant the status of a national minority immediately to the
numerous groups of immigrants, increasingly attracted to countries of relative economic
and/or political stability. The direction of this migration is partly conditioned by colonial
history (as exhibited by immigration to France, Belgium, Great Britain or the Nether-
lands). There are, however, a number of other scenarios as well; some migratory move-
26. New minorities 469
ments have a long tradition, such as the migration from northeastern Italy (Friuli) to
southern Germany which started in the middle of the nineteenth century (see Melchior
2006), while others have only developed recently. Some of these cases were not even
imaginable twenty years ago. In Europe at least, many nations which for generations
represented classical push areas of migration, such as Portugal, Spain or Italy since the
nineteenth century, have recently become strong pull regions of mass immigration.
A systematic survey of new European minorities is not yet possible due to a lack of
basic linguistic information. The three nations mentioned above, however, would suffice
in order to exemplify the main linguistic interest in migratory movements, which is to
observe processes of language change and language acquisition as in a laboratory. These
processes occur simultaneously with the reorganization of the communicative space; they
are characteristic of migratory contexts because of their frequency and density in these
contexts; but of course, they may occur in other speech communities as well, particularly
in regions which are undergoing rapid dialect leveling. Among others, the following two
factors must be taken into account: the similarity of the varieties in contact and the
circumstances of language acquisition.
1.1. The similarity o the varieties in contact
The continuum of contact varieties extends from close cognate languages to completely
unrelated ones (such as Turkish and German; see Rehbein 2001). A special kind of
language change is decreolization; this change takes place when creole speakers come in
close contact with the original lexifier language of their creole as a consequence of immi-
gration into the space of this language. An example is the presence of the Capverdians
in Portugal (numbering around 100,000), particularly in certain neighborhoods of Lis-
bon (see Märzhäuser 2006); decreolization can also be observed in the case of the Hai-
tians in the French-speaking Province of Quebec or in the case of the Caribbeans who
speak English-based creoles in London. Obviously, contact phenomena are not restricted
to (varieties of) the imported and the autochthonous languages; these phenomena may
also lead to convergence between diverse varieties of the imported language, such as in
the case of migrants from different parts of southern Italy (Sicily, Campania, Puglia or
Sardinia) who live in Germany, Belgium and Australia or those Italian dialect speakers
who migrated to North (see Haller 1993) or South America (such as Argentina and
Brazil) during the first decades of the last century. In such language contact situations,
koinéization is expected to set in with “new” varieties emerging from diverse diatopic
input as has been the case in the past. This is best exemplified by the settlement of
“Swabian” Germans into the middle Danube regions of southern Hungary and the
northern regions of former Yugoslavia und southwestern Romania.
1.2. The age o L2 acquisition
Restricting our definition of a migrant to the literal sense, we consider only those people
who pass from a source region into a host region (i. e., the “first generation”); very often
these migrants are adults and consequently gain only an elementary L2 competence of
the varieties spoken in their host society. Due to the linguistic situation at his or her
place of employment, an adult migrant without any educational support or control will
acquire a completely different variety of the host language ⫺ a pidgin-like interlanguage
which, under certain historical circumstances, may pass from the status of an idiolect to
that of a variety used by a social group. Exceptions are cases of rapid acquisition (pos-
sibly fossilization) due to the fact that the L2 belongs to the same language family as
the L1. A possible example is that of the Romanian immigrants in northern Spain (see
Sandu 2000; Şerban and Grigoraş 2000; Radu 2001; Lungescu 2006; Escartı́n and Pinos
Quı́lez 2005); this group is particularly interesting as many immigrants have predomi-
nantly taken up residence in little villages in the Pyrenees rather than in the large cities
(as done by the overwhelming majority of migrants in search of employment). In 2007,
4,389 officially registered Romanians (compared to 2,569 in 2005) were residence only
in the province of Huesca. Those Romanian peasants, unlike their compatriots living in
the cities, have won the acceptance of the autochthonous population because they con-
tribute to the maintenance of the local rural traditions.
The children of immigrants, on the contrary, may acquire two L1s, the language of
their parents and that of the host society. Yet even for these bilinguals, bilingual literacy
is crucial for the organization of their repertoire and the development of language aware-
ness. Without this support, these speakers will not be able to distinguish standard from
non-standard forms, and sometimes it may even be unclear to them to which language
a certain word belongs (for examples see Krefeld 2004: 75).
The age of L2 acquisition and the structural distance between the contact languages
seem to determine the linguistics of immigration. Yet, in contemporary societies, the
determination of an individual speaker is never absolute, which means that linguistic
data need to be analyzed in close relation to the communicative space, in which the
respective speaker is moving.
2. The static concept o space in traditional dialectology
At first glance, a spatial approach to new minorities might seem strange, as the concept
of space used in traditional dialectology since the nineteenth century is extremely re-
strictive and naturalistic.
In fact, the disregard for migration and new minorities in the dialectological para-
digm is in part a reflection of nationalist politics since the notion of space is central for
the concept of the European nation-state. The fact that “old” minorities are much more
readily accepted than those resulting from recent migration is furthermore grounded in
the ideological value of an indigenous and resident population inhabiting its own space.
The established political system of a prototypical nineteenth-century nation and its corre-
sponding scientific traditions were founded on exactly the same ideology of space. It is
no surprise, therefore, that dialectology ⫺ i. e., the modern linguistic approach to
space ⫺ established itself as an academic discipline during the same period which saw
the rise of the European nation-state. The conception of linguistic space applied in the
research of the day was that of traditional (pre-industrial and rural) landownership.
Not even the slightest attention was paid to the consequences of industrialization and
urbanization which would not have been possible without mass migration. For instance,
the empirical data of the first linguistic atlas (Wenker’s Sprachatlas von Nord- und Mittel-
deutschland auf Grund von systematisch mit Hülfe der Volksschullehrer gesammeltem Ma-
terial of 1881) was collected right in the area of the Ruhr during its exploding industrial-
ization ⫺ without reflecting upon this demographic revolution (see Krefeld 2002b).
The mainstream of traditional dialectology stuck to this static, one-dimensional and
highly selective conception of linguistic space. The result was a sterile and closed para-
digm of geolinguistic work, which in the long run became isolated in the context of lin-
guistics.
To sum up, this kind of dialectology was not an appropriate paradigm for facilitating
and encouraging research on more dynamic types of linguistic space or on spatial dy-
namics itself. For this reason, new minorities have been excluded from traditional space-
oriented linguistics. Nonetheless, the linguistic relevance of space is evident in their case.
It may even be said that the linguistic investigation of new minorities generally suggests
a new framework of communicative space for the description of linguistic variation as
will now be shown.
3. Towards a multidimensional and dynamic model o migrants

communicative space
The basic challenge is to deal with scenarios of complex linguistic variation in unconven-
tional constellations of varieties. As a typical example consider the German speaking
territory of northern and eastern Switzerland, where dialects of different (partly cognate)
migrant languages come in contact with one another as well as with various Swiss Ger-
man dialects and Swiss standard German. Among speakers of southern Italian dialects,
Portuguese, Galician (a Portuguese dialect spoken in Spain), Serbian varieties, Greek or
Turkish sharing a common workplace with indigenous Swiss citizens evidence shows that
not only German, but also more or less simplified varieties of Italian are used as an
interethnic lingua franca (cf. Berruto, Moretti and Schmid 1990; Schmid 1994: 26⫺36).
Note that all migrant contact varieties depicted thus far are spoken in “roofless” situa-
tions, i. e., in situations where the standard variety they belong to (e.g., standard Italian)
is not implemented and is scarcely present. On the other hand, the relevance of a lacking
standard roof has diminished over the last years: the extensive availability of digital
media (internet) in large parts of the world in connection with informal writing (sms),
and the transnational reach of satellite TV, has increased the spatially unbounded valid-
ity of standard varieties and varieties close to the standard. (And in a certain way it is
true that the whole history of the media since the invention of writing can be seen as a
process of emancipation of communication from the spatial conditions of interaction.)
It is therefore necessary to resort to concepts such as language contact, diatopics, dia-
stratics, pragmatics, orality and media use for the description of these minorities and
their language.
None of these terms, however, can exhaustively cover the situation due to the ex-
tremely heterogeneous (and unpredictable) linguistic behavior in the communities con-
cerned. The term “minority” suggests elementary homogeneity and is thus misleading.
Even speakers sharing an ethnic-linguistic background and living in largely similar social
and regional contexts may behave in completely different ways. In migratory contexts,
the “imported” identity may be weakened or, on the contrary, strengthened in reaction
to the acceptance or rejection of the migrants by the host society (see Melchior 2006,
2009). Any attempt to hypothesize a simple match of minority membership and linguistic
variation patterns would be naı̈ve.
The consequence of this reasoning, however, cannot be to restrict linguistic descrip-
tion to individual migrants’ speech production; the data should rather represent a reli-
able empirical base for reconstructing patterns or at least prototypes of variation while
bearing in mind that the communicative space in which those data were produced must
be systematically taken into consideration. Firstly, one will have to consider the data in
the narrow context of the informant’s egocentric networks (see Tempesta 2000), secondly
in the wider area and territory in which these networks are embedded. In any case, the
description must include:
(1) the repertoire of the central informants (original space of speaker [⫽ S]);
(2) the varieties dominantly used in everyday networks (non-distant speaking space
[⫽ N]);
(3) a. the varieties used by the indigenous population of the place of residence (space
of the autochthonous idiom [⫽ A]);
b. the official (standard) language and varieties near to the standard of the nation
or region the speaker lives in (“territoriality” or space of the standard lan-
guage [⫽ T]).
Fig. 26.1: The three basic dimensions of the individual communicative space
These three “objective” factors are necessary but not sufficient neither for classifying
the communicative spaces, nor for understanding the particular dynamics they generate,
which is the main interest of a linguistic description. It is also important to reconstruct
on a second “subjective” level how the speech is perceived by the speakers themselves.
With regard to the individual space we have to distinguish:
(4) a. the auto-perception of the speaker’s own production and

b. the corresponding hetero-perceptions.
In other words, we must know whether the migrant speaker is categorized as such or as
an autochthonous speaker and whether this categorization is in accordance with his or
her own perception. In addition, the question arises of how non-migrant speakers of the
migrant’s L1 perceive their production: does it sound authentic or “strange”, maybe

having a specific accent? (For instance, Italians living in Germany are sometimes called
germanesi by Italians living in Italy as their Italian pronunciation appears to show a sort
of German “accent”.)
Above all, however, it is essential to know how the migrant perceives the way in
which the autochthonous population speaks as well as the way in which the members of
his or her networks speak. Without taking this factor into account, it is impossible to
understand in which direction the speakers will adapt their repertoire: by acquiring new
varieties or by changing the varieties they already use. This adaptive impact of percep-
tion is nevertheless an indirect one; perceptions are filtered by complex mental represen-
tations which are partly based on objective language phenomena, and partly reproduce
cultural and social stereotypes projected onto linguistic features or varieties (see Pustka
2007: 9⫺11, 2008). Note that a common language does not guarantee social cohesion.
This is illustrated in the numerous groups of Italians who live in Munich (about 22,000
people), yet are socially deeply split according to their origins (whether they come from
northern and southern Italy). Some of them do not even consider themselves migrants
because they think they left their home country on their own accord.
Fig. 26.2: Dynamic frame of communicative space
The empirical application of the model allows us to position each individual migrant’s
speech and to profile his or her communicative space. Dimensions 1⫺3 (S-repertory, N-
varieties, TA-varieties) are closely interrelated while the dimension 4 (perception) is key
to understanding these interrelations.
The communicative spaces of migrants are always more or less dissociated (Krefeld
2002a) as the individual repertoire is normally congruent neither with that of the speak-
er’s communicative networks nor with that of the indigenous speakers. Dimensions 1
and 2 prove to be crucial in sketching the dissociated migrant spaces.
The isolated migrant speaker is below the threshold of a minority: s/he is only loosely,
if at all, integrated in networks, in which varieties are used that correspond to badly
spoken L2, L3 or L4 varieties in his or her own repertory. In addition, the network
varieties do not necessarily belong to the autochthonous language.
Fig. 26.3: Communicative space of an isolated migrant
Even though this specific case of double dissociation is somewhat extreme, it is never-
theless characteristic for contemporary societies, and perhaps not only in the context of
a metropolis. Little is known about how communication works in networks of isolated
speakers of different linguistic backgrounds. These networks offer good conditions for
the formation and stabilization of local pidgin varieties as they are used in certain neigh-
borhoods of the large cities; a common group identity may develop out of these networks
and in that case the conscious effort to overcome isolation may lead to an emergent
“new minority”.
The other extreme of the range is marked by speakers having acquired only a very
basic, perhaps only passive, competence of the L1 of their parents. Their communicative
networks are largely or exclusively dominated by the L1 varieties of the autochthonous
speakers. The awareness of belonging to a minority may outlast the use of the original
language and manifest itself in the emergence and maintenance of ethnolectal varieties
within the autochthonous dialect and/or the standard language of the respective terri-
tory.
The prototypical representatives of “new minorities” operate in communicative
spaces which are at least partially bilingual; such communicative spaces are based on
networks which maintain the allochthonous varieties brought from the countries of or-
igin.
Nevertheless, these groups normally consist of individual speakers whose repertoires
depend on age (first or later generations), on the professional career, quite often on
gender and on biographical and individual contingencies. Even within a single network
heterogeneous speakers are often united:
i. monolinguals with their “imported” L1, mostly of the first generation; these are
usually women who do not work;
Fig. 26.4: Communicative space of a migrant in an “ethnic” community
ii. bilinguals with their “imported” L1 and a more or less advanced oral L2 compe-
tence; the spoken L2 variety can also be the local dialect of the place, acquired at
the work place;
iii. perfect bilinguals with two L1s;
iv. bilinguals with the L1 of the country/region of residence and a more or less ad-
vanced competence of the “imported” L2 (which can also be dialect);
v. quasi-monolinguals with an L1 of the country/region of residence and a certain
passive knowledge of the dominant “imported” variety of their parents or siblings;
note that the first child of migrant families is very often bilingual whereas the fol-
lowing ones may belong to this latter, quasi-monolingual type.
With regard to this complex situation, we can then define minority networks as intersec-
tions of different individual communicative spaces. It is important to observe that the
members of such networks, apart from those of the balanced type (iii), represent opposite
scenarios of language contact. Speakers of the types (i) and (ii) tend to impose phonetic
and morphosyntactic structures of the “imported” language on the L2-varieties of the
host society. The direction of interference is inverted for speakers of the types (iv) and
(v). The preferred borrowing of lexical elements from L2 to L1 will show the same
inversion (for the opposition of “imposition” versus “borrowing” see Thomason and
Kaufmann 1988; Guy 1990; Thomason 1997, 2001).
4. Conclusion
Although the term “new minority” is frequently used, it should have become clear that
this term is misleading as it suggests the existence of a consistent social unity. In reality,
however, we are dealing with a multitude of more or less instable social groups in a
permanent state of restructuring. Most of these groups, and especially the most dynamic
ones, are located in the cities. The approach outlined above allows us to integrate urban
dialectology and urban sociolinguistics into a common model of multidimensional com-
municative spaces, which are far from “metaphorical”, considering how migrants orga-
nize themselves in their own manner by choosing or at least accepting certain spatial
structures. In their area of residence, migrants may constitute the majority within certain
neighborhoods (such that cities resemble ethnic mosaics with a Chinatown, a Little Italy,
a German quarter, etc.). Even when cities or states take measure to hinder the formation
of such ghettos (see Krefeld 2006), local ethnic micro-structures, such as preferred hous-
ing areas, marketplaces or special roads with “ethnic” stores (groceries, hairdressers,
laundries, restaurants, etc.) are still recognizable. An interesting indicator of the “appro-
priation” of public space in this respect is the renaming of important and highly fre-
quented points of interest, such as markets, bus stops, stations or churches (Amoruso
2002, 2008; D’Agostino 2006).
In conclusion, the spatial distribution and organization of individual migrants and of
groups belonging to the “new minorities” are of great diagnostic value. A respective
map reveals how society (or at least parts of it) integrates these extremely divergent
individual communicative spaces. And this exactly should be the future task of “new
minority” linguistics: the representation of complex multilingual areas in an atlas of
communicative ecology. A first, purely sociological and very schematic attempt at such
a map of “human” ecology was made by Ernest Burgess [1925] of the Chicago School
of sociology. Unfortunately, however, this approach did not find any linguistic echo,
although it merits reconsideration and systematic elaboration (Krefeld 2006).
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27. Non-convergence despite language contact

1. Introduction
2. Contact, language and (non-)convergence
3. Some general considerations
4. Some examples for structural factors in (non-)convergence
5. Some examples for sociolinguistic factors in (non-)convergence
6. Conclusion
7. References
1. Introduction
Most research into the linguistic consequences of the contact of two or more languages
has been concerned with contact-induced convergence (or advergence; cf. Mattheier
1996: 34). Much less scientific effort has been dedicated to the equally important and
theoretically perhaps even more interesting question why convergence does not happen
(but cf. Martinet’s [in Weinreich 1953: viii] historically interesting counter-claim that
“linguistic research has so far favored the study of divergence [e.g., the Romance lan-
guages; G. K.] at the expense of convergence”). At least partly, the reason for this neglect
seems to be that convergence implies change, whereas the lack of it often implies stasis,
which may be considered less interesting (cf. Backus 2005: 328). Besides this, it is rather
27. Non-convergence despite language contact 479
easy to explain contact-induced convergence, firstly because the target structure of such
a change is known and can be easily analyzed, and secondly because the sociolinguistic
motivation for contact-induced convergence ⫺ normally a high(er) overt prestige of the
source language (cf. Auer and Hinskens 1996: 11⫺12) ⫺ can be directly connected to
extralinguistic factors such as the number of its speakers and their material, political
and/or cultural power. For non-convergence, on the other hand, there is neither a struc-
tural target available for analysis, nor does there exist a similarly obvious connection to
extralinguistic factors (see section 2.3). In spite of these difficulties, I will attempt to shed
some light on sociolinguistic and structural factors for non-convergence despite language
contact. First, however, it is necessary to discuss the central concepts of this article,
namely contact, language and (non-)convergence.
2. Contact, language and (non-)convergence

2.1. Contact
After fifty years of research in sociolinguistics it is commonplace knowledge that the
term language contact is a somewhat misleading metaphor and should be replaced by
contact of speakers. But even contact of speakers is a rather superficial description for
what is happening when speakers of one language borrow linguistic material, structures
or rules from speakers of another language. Because of this, Martinet’s (in Weinreich
1953: viii) conviction that “contact breeds imitation and imitation breeds linguistic con-
vergence” has to be questioned. German and French-speaking people, for example, have
been in contact for many centuries, but speakers of German have incorporated much
more French vocabulary (not to mention French phonemes, stress patterns and gram-
matical structures) than vice versa. Usually, this imbalance has been explained by the
high overt prestige (speakers of) French enjoyed for several centuries. This line of reason-
ing seems sensible enough, but it overlooks the important detail that French-speaking
people did not even have the chance to borrow more German words or structures simply
because they did not know enough German in order to do so. The contact of German
and French did not happen somewhere along the Rhine River but in the minds of a
substantial number of Germans who felt the need to learn French (cf. Weinreich’s (1953:
6, 67) dictum that “the individual is the ultimate locus of contact”). Obviously, the
reason for learning French was its high prestige, but this prestige was only one condition
for borrowing, the other condition ⫺ and one may say the more important one ⫺ was
bilingualism. On the eastern edge of the German-speaking area, the situation was quite
different. Here it was West Slavic speakers who learned German and borrowed German
words and rules (e.g., initial stress in Czech words), while these languages hardly affected
German. Nowadays, the international prestige of French, German and the West Slavic
languages is low, at least lower than that of English. The number of French speakers in
Germany has been decreasing and there have never been that many speakers of German
in France or of Polish or Czech in Germany. Even the previously large number of speak-
ers of German in Poland and the Czech Republic is diminishing (but cf. the still high
numbers in StADaF 2006: 2, 14, footnote 18). The consequence of the shrinking number
of speakers of the other languages is the almost complete lack of current mutual borrow-
ing along the French-German and German-Polish/Czech borders. But in all these coun-
tries there are many speakers of English and, consequently, there are many English
words and structures being borrowed into French, German, Polish and Czech in spite
of the fact that none of these countries shares a common border with an English-speak-
ing country. From this, we can conclude that geographical contact of speakers of dif-
ferent languages does not automatically imply language contact (Martinet’s “breeds”
should, therefore, be replaced by a more cautious “can breed”) and that the lack of
geographical contact does not automatically impede language contact, especially in an
increasingly globalized and media-struck world.
2.2. Language
I will not dwell long on the rather fruitless attempt to distinguish languages from dialects
on structural grounds (but cf. some measures of distance in Bechert and Wildgen 1991:
105⫺108). Suffice it to say that it is not at all clear whether Spanish and Portuguese,
two different languages, are linguistically more different than Standard German and
Low German, a standard and a dialect of the same language (cf. Weinreich 1953: 105),
or whether Low German might not, in some respect, be considered closer to Dutch or
English than to Standard German. In spite of doubtful or even absurd groupings (Low
German as a German dialect; Catalan as a Castilian dialect under Franco; Nahuatl as a
dialect, albeit not a Spanish one, in Mexico), one can expect linguistic consequences
from such politically motivated categorizations. For example, had the Catalan people
not had such a long and independent political and cultural history and, even more im-
portantly, had they not had such a strong economy, Catalan might not have survived as
an autonomous language but converged towards Castilian (cf. the somewhat different
case of Galicia [Villena Ponsoda 2006: 1807]). Converging languages can become dialects
(e.g., Aragonese and Leonese in the Iberian Peninsular) and diverging dialects can be-
come languages (the current developments separating Serbian and Croatian [Auer, Hins-
kens and Kerswill 2005b: 7]) or develop into varieties of different languages (the dialects
along the Dutch-German border [Auer and Hinskens 1996: 16]). Regardless of these
considerations, it should be clear that for the analysis of convergence and non-con-
vergence in language contact it is more important to gauge the difference in linguistic
subsystems than the one between languages per se. From this point of view, Low German
word order is closer to Dutch and Standard German than to English, whereas its conso-
nantal system and nominal morphology are closer to English and Dutch than to Stan-
dard German.
2.3. (Non-)convergence
With regard to (non-)convergence in language contact, five points have to be made:

Firstly, Salmons (1990: 454) writes that “the now common use of ‘convergence’ goes at
least back to Weinreich […], where it is understood as ‘partial similarities increasing at
the expense of differences’”. Weinreich sees convergence as a process, but convergence
can also describe the result of a (past) language contact. What these two views have in
common is that both describe the linguistic changes due to language contact and not
the mechanism which causes them, i. e., borrowing. Poplack (1993: 256) defines both,
convergence and borrowing, as mechanisms of change: “[c]onvergence also involves the

process of borrowing, although we reserve this term for the transfer of grammatical
structure […]”. The difference she makes between the two concepts lies in their extension:
convergence is equivalent to structural borrowing whereas borrowing proper is reduced
to the lexicon. For the purpose of this article, I will consider convergence as the conse-
quence of (past/ongoing) change which occurs when speakers of one language borrow
linguistic material, structures or rules from another language, regardless of the linguistic
level involved. Non-convergence, consequently, is the result of a lack of such a transfer.
This can, but need not imply linguistic stability.
Secondly, not divergence but non-convergence is the opposition of convergence (cf.
Auer and Hinskens 1996: 3). Divergence is just one element of non-convergence and in
language contact, it is probably a rather rare one (see section 5.2).
Thirdly, from a purely structural point of view, even languages whose speakers never
come into any type of contact can converge or diverge. There are/were, for example,
tendencies in some Germanic varieties to develop an adpositional case. Kaufmann (2008:
94⫺95, footnote 4) describes the use of the definite article dem in Mennonite Low Ger-
man in Texas. Dem (etymologically dative) appears more frequently in nominal phrases
governed by prepositions than in those governed by verbs. Lass (1992: 112) describes a
similar case with regard to the suffix -e on Middle English nouns. Such developments
make these varieties converge structurally with Hindi, which, too, has a specific adposi-
tional (postpositional) case. But obviously, there is no connection whatsoever between
Mennonite Low German, Middle English and Hindi and, therefore, this exclusively
structural convergence (or divergence from other Germanic varieties) may be interesting
for typologists, but not for us. From a structural point of view, four different types
of non-convergence can be distinguished, namely contact-induced divergence, contact-
induced simplification (mostly an indirect consequence of the functional loss of low-
prestige languages, cf. Silva-Corvalán 1991: 165⫺166), linguistic stability (which may be
contact induced; cf. Labov’s [2001: 297] sociolinguistically motivated “retreat of lower
working class males from a female-dominated change” or Thomason and Kaufman’s
[1988: 58] structural conserving influence of contact languages) and non-converging en-
demic change (often linguistic drift or change towards less marked forms).
Fourthly, convergence is not an independent linguistic phenomenon. It is the conse-
quence of and interacts with other contact phenomena, such as code-switching, language
attrition, second language acquisition, bilingual priming and linguistic accommodation
(cf. Muysken 1995: 188; Backus 2005: 315; Poplack 1993: 255). In section 2.1 it was
claimed that bilingualism, the consequence of second language acquisition, is a highly
important condition for convergence, be it lexical, semantic or structural. For structural
convergence, bilingual priming might be a decisive cognitive factor. Learning a second
language creates or activates structures and mental representations hitherto unknown to
the learner or less frequently used. Misfiring in language production, i. e., the priming
of structures in the speaker’s first language by structures of the newly acquired second
language, is bound to happen in such a situation (cf. Loebell and Bock [2003] and
Backus’ [2005: 326] similar concept of entrenchment, but also the doubts mentioned in
Poplack, Walker and Malcolmson [2006: 208]), especially when code-switching and/or
linguistic accommodation to the speakers of the contact language are frequent. Lan-
guage attrition can lead to negative convergence (different from non-convergence; cf.
Auer and Hinsken’s [2005: 354] concept of negative accommodation), because marked
structures, which are often language specific, disappear first in language attrition (cf.
Silva-Corvalán [1991, 165] and, for dialect contact, Schirmunski’s [1930] concept of pri-
mary dialect features). Negative convergence causes differences between the contact lan-
guages to be leveled not due to the addition of a new word or rule in the converging
language but due to the loss of an old word or rule (cf. Salmons 1990 with regard to
discourse markers in Texas German). In the case of non-convergence, one can assume
that most other contact phenomena mentioned do not appear or only appear in a re-
duced form. One would expect such a constellation either when the contact of the groups
is conflictive or when the languages involved are of comparable prestige. The latter case
can be currently found on the French-German border. The former one is interesting
because it shows that although convergence and divergence are contrary linguistic reac-
tions to language contact, they both occur in comparable sociolinguistic settings; both
presuppose the contact with a language of high overt prestige. After all, why should
speakers change their verbal behavior because they come into contact with a language
they consider inferior? Unless, of course, the speakers of this supposedly inferior lan-
guage start converging. Therefore, the different linguistic behavior of converging and
diverging speech communities, i. e., the existence of language loyalty or the lack of it,
must be explained by the characteristics of these communities (cf. section 5.2). From a
sociolinguistic point of view, these questions are quite interesting, but they do not tell
us much about structural restrictions on convergence or about less obvious sociolinguis-
tic factors.
This leads us to the fifth and final point: With regard to linguistic theory, non-con-
vergence in language contact is most interesting when we find non-converging speakers
or non-converging structures in a situation where we would normally expect con-
vergence. In the light of this, only two of the four types of non-convergence mentioned
in point 3 are of interest to us, namely linguistic stability and contact-induced divergence.
Our basic questions are: (1) What are the structural reasons for the fact that some lin-
guistic structures remain (relatively) stable in a situation which is otherwise marked by
converging structures (cf. Louden 1994: 73), and (2) what are the sociolinguistic reasons
for the fact that some speakers do not converge or even diverge from a prestigious source
language in a generally converging group?
3. Some general considerations
In section 1, the comparatively small amount of research into non-convergence was

mentioned. This does not mean, though, that no efforts at all have been undertaken.
Weinreich (1953: 3), for example, meticulously compares the surface forms of languages
in contact in order to find possible points of interference, but his approach is necessarily
pre-generative and pre-Labovian and thus remains somewhat superficial and lacks a
more modern empirical foundation. Most current researchers distinguish between core
grammar features (“deep” syntax, inflectional morphology, phonological rules), which
are relatively stable both with regard to outside influences and with regard to endemic
change, and peripheral grammar features (“superficial” syntax [word order], derivational
morphology, pronunciation, lexicon), which are more open to outside influences and
change more rapidly (but cf. section 5.2 for a different view). Such general comparisons
do not have much explanatory power, though. Other research projects are too specific.
They represent important linguistic levels with rather exotic phenomena (e.g., non-stan-
dard emphatic pronoun tags as major representative for syntax in Cheshire, Kerswill
and Williams 2005: 159⫺163), a fact which is bound to undermine the validity of far-
reaching conclusions (Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams 2005: 166). Abstracting from
these more methodological problems, the following structural factors are often men-
tioned as facilitating or restricting convergence or related phenomena: typological dis-
tance of the languages involved (Altenberg 1991: 191; cf. also the related concept of
isomorphism [Sanchez 2005: 234]), markedness, linguistic saliency or naturalness of the
elements in question (Altenberg 1991: 191; Kristiansen and Jørgensen 2005: 288; Mat-
theier 1996: 41) and questions of cognitive complexity (either with regard to language
processing [Altenberg 1991: 191] or with regard to the multilingual speaker’s cognitive
load [Sanchez 2005: 235]). These concepts will only be helpful, though, if they are clearly
defined and analyzed in a specific contact situation. Even Thomason and Kaufman’s
(1988) ground-breaking work fails with regard to the second point, because they com-
pare very different situations. Within a few pages, for example, they address literary
Indic-Dravidian language contact dating back thousands of years (Thomason and Kauf-
man 1988: 79) and present-day Low German as spoken in Nebraska (Thomason and
Kaufman 1988: 81⫺82), categorizing both cases as slight structural borrowing. Thomason
and Kaufman (1988: 50, table 3, 74⫺76) try to cover all possible contact situations. They
distinguish three basic cases (language maintenance [entailing borrowing in their narrow
sense], language shift and pidginization) and five different degrees of contact (from ca-
sual contact to very strong cultural pressure). However, if one wants to know more about
structural or sociolinguistic restrictions on convergence in a general converging constella-
tion, situations where the speakers of one language maintain their language and borrow
linguistic material, structures or rules from a contact language should be the main focus.
Concentrating on borrowing in Thomason and Kaufman’s narrow sense is justified by
the fact that this is the unmarked case of language contact (cf. Backus 2005: 326). Al-
though language shift is quite a common phenomenon, the linguistic consequences in
the target language mostly disappear within one or two generations. In addition, one
should not forget that the highly complex psychological and linguistic interaction of
language contact, language death and second language acquisition in a shift situation
further complicates the picture. Besides this, it also seems sensible to restrict one’s re-
search to intermediate levels of contact in order to learn more about structural and
sociolinguistic restrictions on convergence. Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) extreme
scenarios are not very helpful in this regard: category 1 only allows for lexical borrowing
(Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 77⫺78), while in category 5, the very strong cultural
pressure will override any existing restrictions on convergence (Thomason and Kaufman
1988: 91⫺95). Therefore, in order to answer questions (1) and (2) in section 2.3 we
need to concentrate firstly on more fine-grained analyses of several phenomena for each
linguistic level, and secondly, we should do this in specific and well-defined contact
situations, where the sociolinguistic setting (albeit not the reactions to it) is identical for
the entire speech community. In such a situation, the overall pressure for convergence
will be identical for all linguistic structures and for all speakers. This means that the
different behavior of converging and non-converging structures can be analyzed as a
function of their structural characteristics. Likewise, the different behavior of converging
and non-converging speakers can be analyzed as a function of their different sociolin-
guistic dispositions. Another problem with Thomason and Kaufman is their strong rela-
tivization of the importance of structural restrictions on convergence ⫺ “it is the socio-
linguistic history of the speakers, and not the structure of their language, that is the
primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact” (1988: 35; cf. also
4, 15, 19). This conviction is certainly true for situations with extreme differences in the
power relations between the groups in contact; for less extreme situations, however, it
might detract from the structurally interesting points with regard to convergence and
non-convergence (cf. also the critique in Sanchez 2005: 239⫺240). Obviously, even if we
follow all these suggestions, success is not guaranteed: in code-switching, the language
contact phenomenon most thoroughly studied, the search for structural restrictions is
still far from offering unambiguous results. Muysken (1995: 178) states that “we should
aim for universal explanations when looking for grammatical constraints” (cf. also My-
ers-Scotton 1995: 252), but so far the pursuit of this goal has not yet produced any clear
results. Muysken (1995: 177) still wonders “to what extent restrictions on the code-
switching process [are] seen as absolute or relative” (cf. section 6).
4. Some examples or structural actors in (non-)convergence

4.1. (Non-)convergence beneath the surace
In sections 1 and 2.3 it was argued that non-convergence can imply linguistic stability.
But often a more detailed analysis shows that even complete stasis on all linguistic levels
may coincide with an intrinsically dynamic situation. Hamel (1997: 113), for example,
writes about the contact of indigenous speakers of Otomı́ with the majority culture in
Mexico: “[t]he second kind of shift starts with a transformation of the ethnic group’s
interpretative basis, that is, with a change of cultural schemes, of patterns of verbal
interaction, and of interpretative procedures, while the indigenous language remains on
the surface”. What this study shows is that in the contact between a minority and a
majority group, it could be highly deceptive to define the status of the minority language
exclusively by analyzing its linguistic system (cf. also Poplack 1993: 257). Hamel (1997:
113) continues: “[o]nce the cultural and pragmatic basis of the indigenous is eroded
[…], the substitution of the language as such can occur much more easily”. Obviously,
restrictions on convergence with regard to cultural schemes, patterns of verbal interac-
tions and interpretative procedures are not grammatical in nature; therefore, they will
be dealt with in section 5.2. Another case of a somewhat hidden type of convergence is
calquing. Sinner (2005a: 564⫺566) mentions the semantic extension of cada in Spanish
as spoken and written in Catalonia by people with or without Catalan as mother tongue.
Cada dı́a (in Standard Spanish ‘each day’ in a distributive sense) infringes more and
more on the semantics of todos los dı́as (‘every day’ in a generalized sense), and it seems
to do so under Catalan influence. With regard to semantic borrowing of prepositions
and idioms, Louden (1994: 84) writes about the contact of Pennsylvania German and
English in the USA: “in spite of such heavy semantic influence from English on Plain
Pennsylvania German, including borrowings, the lexicon itself remains primarily Ger-
man”. Whether the lexicon can still be called “primarily German” in the case of “heavy
semantic influence from English” could be debated; Louden’s conviction is interesting,
though, because in a certain way, it coincides with the fact that speakers in a contact
situation are more aware of (and more sensitive to) borrowing complete words than of
just borrowing the meaning of a word. It seems that a certain amount of metalinguistic
awareness is necessary in order to refrain from borrowing new meanings (cf. section
5.2), especially if the words in question already share part of their meaning (as in the
case of cada and todos los; cf. also Berruto 2005: 82). Another group of words facilitating
semantic borrowing are bilingual (near-)homophones in related languages (cf. Weinreich
1953: 48⫺50). For Portuguese spoken in the Brazilian-Uruguayan border region, Blaser
(1995: 134) mentions estranhar (Standard Portuguese ‘to find [something] weird’) with
the Spanish meaning of extrañar (‘to miss’); Kaufmann (2000: 171⫺172) mentions em-
baraçada (Standard Portuguese ‘embarrassed’) with the Spanish meaning of embarazada
(‘pregnant’). It is difficult to give structural restrictions on convergence with regard to
semantic borrowing; what one can say is that facilitating factors seem to be a phonetic
and/or a semantic overlap. A different consequence of calquing, which might lead to
dramatic changes, is not connected with the meaning of a particular word but with its
subcategorization frame. Kaufmann (2005: 77⫺81) cites an example of Mennonite Low
German as spoken in North and South America. Indirect objects in German varieties
are normally marked by the dative or a general object case. In contrast, all contact
languages of Mennonite Low German, i. e., Spanish, Portuguese and English, at least
partially use prepositions to mark this syntactic function, and this characteristic has
already had an influence on Low German. In the USA, indirect objects are realized with
prepositions in 37.5 percent of the cases (mostly with tu ‘to’ or no [< nach, ‘after’]),
whereas in Brazil für ‘for’ and tu are used in 19.6 percent of the cases (cf. Portuguese
falar para as crianças, ‘talk for the children’, i. e., ‘talk to the children’). Interestingly,
the four colonies in contact with Spanish show less prepositional marking (between 4
and 16.7 percent). The reason for this could be the inconspicuous and frequently con-
tracted preposition a, which Spanish uses in this context. Such light forms seem to func-
tion as a restriction on convergence. King (2005: 237) sees in this kind of calquing the
only way of acquiring foreign grammatical structures (cf. also Backus 2005: 309); she
writes: “I argue that grammatical borrowing has a lexical basis. This approach is com-
patible with calquing as a process of contact-induced change, given that calquing in-
volves change in the properties of lexical items, rather than the direct importation of
grammatical structure […]”. Interestingly, in her example of Prince Edward Island
French in Canada, calquing leads to convergence and divergence at the same time. This
French variety has borrowed many English prepositions which have caused an increase
in the application of a rather rare phenomenon in French, namely preposition stranding
(cf. King 2005: 243⫺248). At first sight, it appears that we are dealing with a clear case
of lexical convergence towards English and an ensuing structural convergence connected
to a specific rule of the borrowed prepositions. At the same time, however, this new rule
is generalized for all prepositions in Prince Edward Island French, i. e., restrictions on
its application in English have not been borrowed, and this leads to subsequent struc-
tural divergence.
4.2. (Non-)convergence on the surace

It is rather difficult to name clear structural restrictions on convergence in the parts of
language which are not phonetically realized. For phonetically realized parts, this will
be somewhat easier. With regard to entire words, the most intensively studied type of
borrowing, there is a well-known ban on closed-class items (articles, pronouns, etc.) in

comparison to open-class items (especially nouns). A high frequency of a word in the
recipient language also seems to make borrowing less probable (cf. Weinreich 1953: 57).
As for pronunciation, Louden and Page (2005: 1389) state: “[i]t appears that convergence
is suppressed where it would involve contrastive sounds […]” (cf. also Weinreich 1953:
23). The fact that Pennsylvania German has adopted the English retroflex r is no
counter-example to this rule, because “the system of phonological contrasts in the lexi-
con is unaffected by this phonetic substitution” (Louden and Page 2005: 1390; cf. also
the same development in Canadian French [Poplack 1993: 261⫺262]). Bullock and Ger-
fen (2004: 99) mention the substitution of the “only marginally contrastive” French vow-
els in deux ‘two’ and neuf ‘nine’ by the English vowel of bird in Frenchville, Pennsylvania.
This is another example for non-system-affecting phonetic convergence enabled by simi-
larity: “[t]he shared structural properties across French-English that are at the locus of
this change are similarities in vowel height, roundness, and position along the front-back
articulatory dimension” (Bullock and Gerfen 2004: 102⫺103). Such a substitution will
consequently not occur if the elements in question do not share at least some structural
properties. The fact that these speakers converge to an English vowel, which is strongly
marked and does, therefore, not seem to be an attractive target for borrowing, can be
explained by the reduction of overall complexity for this bilingual speech community
(one instead of two marked vowels [Bullock and Gerfen 2004: 103]). Another interesting
point is the phonetic shape of borrowed words (nonce or established): Poplack, Sankoff
and Miller (1988: 72) write that “phonological integration proceeds as a function of the
social integration of the loanword”. One could also claim that pronouncing a borrowed
word in the way of the recipient language is an act of non-convergence within con-
vergence. As for morphology, one can say that the more integrated/synthetic a linguistic
form is, the less probable is its transfer (Weinreich 1953: 35, 41; Backus 2005: 323), i. e.,
the direct borrowing of affixes is a rather rare event. If affixes are borrowed, they are
almost always borrowed as part of words. Sometimes they will then be analyzed, and
only in this case can they be used productively with stems from the recipient language
(e.g., German -ieren < French -i(e)r in verbs with a Germanic stem like inhaftieren, ‘in
custody-ieren’, i. e., ‘to imprison’). What is more frequent in morphology is a functional
change or a merger of forms in the recipient language under foreign influence (cf.
Louden 1988: 146⫺152). With regard to (morpho)syntax, Louden’s (1988, 1994) research
comes pretty close to the desiderata formulated in section 3; he compares different (mor-
pho)syntactic phenomena in a precisely defined contact situation. Because of this, he
(1988: 227) can make valid comparative statements:
What data we have of change in PPG [Plain Pennsylvania German] word order is limited to
minor surface phenomena. These minor changes entail the generalization of certain patterns,
such as the placement of infinitival complements in clause-final position. However, despite
the intimate contact of PPG, an SOV language, with AE [American English], an SVO lan-
guage, there is no evidence to indicate a major shift of PPG word order away from an
underlying verb-final structure.
This quotation illustrates the importance of analyzing several phenomena of each lin-
guistic level, because ⫺ as Louden shows ⫺ these phenomena can behave differently.
The only problem with Louden’s work is that he does not analyze his data quantitatively.
In the following, I will try to demonstrate with examples from Mennonite Low German
(cf. Kaufmann 2005; Kaufmann 2007) what such a quantitative analysis might look like.
As Louden writes, German verbs govern their complement to the left, i. e., different
from English, Spanish and Portuguese, German is an OV-language (den Hund schlagen,
‘the dog beat’, i. e., ‘to beat the dog’). In two of the five Mennonite colonies, namely in
Brazil and the United States, the lexical influence of the majority languages on Low
German is so strong that one would also expect some structural borrowing. Nevertheless,
like in Plain Pennsylvania German there are hardly any cases where the informants
produced Low German embedded clauses with the complement occurring to the right
of its governing verb (cf. Kaufmann 2005: 87⫺89; Kaufmann 2007: 196). Only a robust
number of such tokens would prove a structural influence on Low German. The se-
quence of verbs and their complements is apparently so deeply ingrained in the system
of the language that it functions as a powerful barrier against convergence (but cf. the
contact-induced change of Rimella German from an OV to a VO-language (Louden
1994: 88)). In other subsystems of Low German, however, some cases of word order
change can be found. The sequence of nominal attributes and their governing heads, for
example, shows some influence of the majority languages (cf. Kaufmann 2005: 84⫺86):
in the USA, min Bruder sin Lewen (‘to my brother his life’), with 72.7 percent of the
cases the most frequent variant (in Brazil only 23.2 percent), seems to follow the English
sequence ‘my brother’s life’, while in Brazil daut Lewe von min Bruder is used in 41.1
percent of the cases, probably a consequence of Portuguese a vida do meu irmão (‘the
life of my brother’; not a single token in the USA). Two factors might have made this
convergence possible: first, the respective variants had already existed in the recipient
language, i. e., the influence of the contact language did not create a new variant, but
only strengthened an already existing one (cf. Mattheier 1996: 34), and second, the posi-
tion of a nominal attribute seems to be more superficial than the position of a verbal
complement. Looking at the two Paraguayan colonies (Menno and Fernheim), there are
more interesting things to learn: in Paraguay, the influence of the linguistically distant
majority language Spanish is restricted to lexical borrowing, while the strong presence
of less distant Standard German has a significant effect on many structural levels, among
them the ordering of verbal elements in clause-final clusters. The Mennonites in Menno
and Fernheim use the variant also used in Standard German (… dat hei imma sine Mame
helpe mut, ‘… that he always his mother help must,’ i. e., ‘… that he always has to help
his mother’) in 92.4 and 93.7 percent of the cases respectively, while the Mennonites in
the United States, who have hardly any contact to Standard German, use this variant
in just 29.9 percent. Again, two factors can account for the difference between the Para-
guayan Mennonites who converge to the Standard German variant and the US-Ameri-
can and Brazilian Mennonites who do not converge to English and Portuguese struc-
tures: firstly, the linguistic distance between Standard German and Low German with
regard to word order is smaller than the one between English or Portuguese and Low
German; secondly and more importantly, the nonstandard sequence of verbal elements
in verb clusters (… dat hei imma [sine Mame] mut [sine Mame] helpe) is the result of a
rather superficial movement of nonfinite verbal elements to the right (with or without
scrambling of the complement; cf. Kaufmann 2007: 156⫺157), whereas the basic order-
ing of verbs and their complements is a much more fundamental characteristic of Ger-
manic varieties. Granted, right now we are comparing two different contact situations,
not following the desiderata in section 3, but there are interesting comparisons within
the same situation as well: in verb clusters with three verbal elements, convergence to
the Standard German variants in Paraguay is less strong: in Menno, the rate drops from
92.4 to 43.5 percent; in Fernheim from 93.7 to 39.8 percent (USA: from 29.9 to 2.4
percent). The reason for this drop lies in the higher complexity of clusters with three
verbal elements. Even Standard German, a language with left-branching sequences in
most of its verbal syntax, requires in the context in question (modal verbs in the perfect)
more parsing-friendly, partly right-branching structures, i. e., the finite verb appears be-
fore the nonfinite verbs (… daß er immer [seiner Mutter] hat [seiner Mutter] helfen müssen,
‘… that he always [his mother] had [his mother] help must,’ i. e., ‘… that he always had
to help his mother’). The Mennonites in Menno and Fernheim do not always succeed in
converging to these variants. They produce completely right-branching structures (… dat
hei imma [sine Mame] hat [sine Mame] mut [sine Mame] helpe) in 50 and 56 percent of
the cases respectively. We can therefore conclude that the more complex a structure of
the source language is, the less convergence there will be.
5. Some examples o sociolinguistic actors in (non-)convergence
5.1. Age and gender
Auer and Hinskens (1996: 4) write: “[e]mpirically rich, well-documented and quantitative
investigations of processes of convergence and divergence, and not just of their out-
comes, are rare; investigations into the links between social changes and the linguistic
developments they can trigger are even rarer” (cf. also Mattheier 1996: 31; Cheshire,
Kerswill and Williams 2005: 141). The interaction between social factors (if not changes)
and linguistic developments can be illustrated with regard to the Mennonites in Para-
guay: as Standard German is a language with a high overt prestige in these colonies,
convergence of Low German towards Standard German variants must be classified as
change from above. Labov (2001: 274) characterizes this type of change in the following
way: “[i]n linguistic change from above, women [and especially young women, one may
add; G. K.] adopt prestige forms at a higher rate than men” (cf. also Cheshire, Kerswill
and Williams 2005: 143). Young women in Fernheim converge, as expected, most
strongly to the Standard German variant in clusters with two verbal elements (100 per-
cent as opposed to 92.2 percent for the five other subgroups; p ⫽ 0.022). Young women
in Menno rank second (94.6 as opposed to 91.9 percent; non-significant). The situation
with regard to clusters with three verbal elements is somewhat different. In Fernheim,
young women still use the two Standard German variants more often than most of the
other subgroups (45.2 as opposed to 38.5 percent), but they only rank third and the
difference is not significant any more. Young women in Menno still rank second, (52.5
as opposed to 40.8 percent; non-significant). As the wish to use Standard German vari-
ants hardly depends on the number of verbal elements, we must either explain the dif-
ferent behavior of young women in Fernheim, i. e., their relative non-convergence in
clusters with three verbal elements, with difficulties identifying the standard variant(s)
or again with the complexity of this structure. In Menno, there is another interesting
sociolinguistic development. Young men there seem to converge less strongly to the Stan-
dard German variant in cases of clusters with two verbal elements. While young women
did not converge in only 5.4 percent of the tokens (the older women do not converge in
10.8 percent; non-significant), the rate of non-convergence for young men is more than
twice as high (11.6 percent; the older men 3.7 percent; p ⫽ 0.049). Although the differ-
ence between young men and young women is not significant, it is highly suggestive that
the older men use the Standard German variant significantly more often than the young
men, while the older women use it less often than the young women, at least with regard
to absolute frequency. The difference is even more striking with regard to clusters with
three verbal elements. In this context, young women use the two possible standard vari-
ants in 52.5 percent of the tokens (older women 29.5 percent; p ⫽ 0.032), whereas young
men do so in only 33.3 percent (older men 56 percent; p ⫽ 0.038). The difference between
young women and young men shows a statistical tendency (p ⫽ 0.092). For several
reasons connected to the history of Menno (cf. Kaufmann 2007: 180⫺182), one must
classify the behavior of young men as a “retreat […] from a female-dominated change”
(cf. Labov 2001: 297). This divergence from the prestigious Standard German variants
is only present in part of the speech community and is caused by a special sociolinguistic
disposition. This shows clearly that in studies of convergence and non-convergence nei-
ther languages nor speech communities should be analyzed as if they were monolithic
blocks (cf. sections 2.2 and 3).
5.2. Language loyalty, identity and types o bilingualism
In section 2.3, a high degree of language loyalty was mentioned as an important charac-
teristic for a non-converging speech community. Language loyalty is generally not only
linked to a positive attitude towards one’s language but also to a positive attitude
towards one’s culture. Especially this cultural loyalty is a condition for non-convergence
in the less conspicuous areas of language where cultural schemes, patterns of verbal
interaction and interpretative procedures are involved (cf. Hamel 1997 in section 4.1).
In the context of language enclaves, Mattheier (1994: 334⫺335) calls such culture loyalty
a Sprachinselmentalität, a sociopsychological disposition of the members of a minority
group, by which they mark their difference from the majority group. In Canada, both
types of loyalty seem to exist because neither English as a minority language in Quebec
(cf. Poplack, Walker and Malcolmson 2006: 207) nor French as a minority language in
Ontario (cf. Poplack, Sankoff and Miller 1988: 57; Poplack 1993: 261) show much lexical
or structural borrowing or much code-switching. Besides this, even if, for example,
French speakers code-switch or use borrowed words, they make sure that the listener
realizes that this is not their normal behavior: “[…] Ottawa-Hull francophones draw
attention to, or ‘flag’, their switches, by different discourse devices: metalinguistic com-
mentary, English bracketing, repetition or translation” (Poplack 1993: 263; cf. for lexical
borrowing Poplack 1988: 114). Again we are faced with an act of non-convergence within
convergence (cf. section 4.1 and 4.2). The most important restrictive factor on con-
vergence in this situation seems to be social pressure exerted by people with a high
socioeconomic status (cf. Poplack, Sankoff and Miller 1988: 81; Poplack 1988: 111). Such
a status seems to correlate with high metalinguistic awareness which enables speakers to
monitor even more hidden types of convergence like semantic borrowing (cf. section 4.1).
Other restrictive, but apparently less important factors on convergence are the status as
a minority or a majority group (“linguistic security”; cf. Poplack 1988: 95) and the lack
of bilingual proficiency (cf. section 2.1; Poplack, Sankoff and Miller 1988: 97; Poplack
1988: 100, 110⫺111). Theoretically, in more conflictive contact situations ⫺ Poplack,
Walker and Malcolmson (2006: 209) describe the almost non-converging situation in
Canada “as maximally conductive to convergence” ⫺ one could even imagine diverging
tendencies, at least with regard to typologically related languages. One sociolinguistic
condition for such a development could be a behavior which Sinner (2005a: 561) calls
“linguistic paranoia”. He writes about some speakers of Spanish in Catalonia: “[d]icha
paranoia lingüı́stica puede manifestarse, por ejemplo, en la tendencia a ver catalanismos
‘por todos lados […]’”. Once people see borrowed words everywhere, i. e., once they feel
their linguistic identity threatened, they might well want to avoid using any word or
structure which could possibly belong to the threatening contact language. But different
from dialect contact, such cases seem to be rare in language contact. Sinner (2005b: 46⫺
48) mentions some possible examples for lexical divergence in Catalan. There is one
more sociolinguistic factor worth while mentioning: the type of bilingualism dominant
in the speech community. Louden and Page (2005: 1391) write: “[t]he lexicon is the most
cognitively salient component of the grammar. Therefore lexical items are more easily
borrowed than grammatical morphemes, phonemes or syntactic patterns in casual lan-
guage contact” (cf. section 3; Bechert and Wildgen 1991: 69; Villena Ponsoda 2005: 314).
But Louden and Page (2005: 1391⫺1392) continue:
Conversely, in stable bilingual situations, the phonological shapes of lexical items are the
most salient markers of the code being spoken and are therefore resistant to convergence.
Maintenance of the Pennsylvania German lexicon, including Pennsylvania German morpho-
phonemic alternations, serves to mark one’s identity as an Old Order sectarian.
Louden (1994: 74) defines a situation of stable bilingualism as a situation where both
languages “are acquired sufficiently early and completely”, both languages have “sub-
stantial and productive domains of use”, and both languages “enjoy more or less […]
equivalent prestige”. One often finds such a situation (stable bi- or multilingualism, no
or little borrowing of phonological features and words, massive convergence of syntax)
in Sprachbund contexts (Balkans, Kupwar in India) (cf. Bisang in this volume; Louden
1994: 76⫺79).
6. Conclusion
Our partial analysis of Mennonite Low German and some of the case studies mentioned
may have convinced the reader that working in specific and well-defined contact situa-
tions enables us to compare the restrictive power of structural and sociolinguistic factors
on convergence in a meaningful way. The question whether one day we will be able to
universally determine absolute values for these factors cannot be answered yet. It may
well be that this is not a consequence of incomplete or faulty analyses but of the nature
of these factors. They simply might not have any universal value and might be better
represented by an approach within the framework of Optimality Theory. Structural and
sociolinguistic factors could then be ranked according to their restrictive power for spe-
cific contact situations. The ranking of the structural factors would be a function of
their interaction within the recipient language and the typological interaction between
the contact languages. Therefore, the ranking would necessarily be language specific and
language pair specific, i. e., not universal. The sociolinguistic factors could then be
ranked according to their situational strength. Such an approach would not have much
explanatory power with regard to single structural or sociolinguistic factors, but could
tell us a lot about the interaction of these factors.
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V. Data collection and corpus-building
28. Investigating language in space: Methods and

empirical standards
1. Introduction: Defining the question
2. Objectivity
3. Reliability
4. Validity
5. Representativity
6. Quality criteria and areal linguistic methods of data acquisition
7. Existing corpora: Corpus linguistics
8. Quality criteria and attitudinal research
9. References
1. Introduction: Deining the question

Language is constituted through the relatively uniform, cooperative and mostly unre-
flecting actions of many. The relative uniformity is a precondition for language to be
able to serve its basic purpose (communication); the existing variability serves a number
of other functions. Individual linguistic variants correlate with parameters defined within
variation linguistics by stylistics, sociolinguistics or pragmatics, for example, but also
with non-linguistic parameters. These can include, for example, gender, age, education,
class, milieu, religion, occupation, origin, place of socialization, speech context, intent
or perceived role. Some of the terms just listed are drawn from different descriptive
traditions, which attempt to capture and describe the existing correlations between
speech performance and extralinguistic conditions within a terminological system.
Factors like gender and age can easily be operationalized and linked to linguistic data.
A more challenging case is the concept of “milieu”, because this is a factor which can
only be measured in terms of a larger number of parameters that are, in part, quite
complex constructs themselves (e.g., education). We refer to this complex ⫺ whatever
its constituents in particular cases ⫺ using the collective term “sociopragmatic factors”.
In the investigation of recent, regionally influenced spoken language, the utterances
analyzed have usually been produced for a particular survey. Only so was (and is) it
possible to examine linguistic issues economically and within a manageable time frame.
Observations of “natural” speech play a minor role ⫺ except in the development of
hypotheses. At the outset, linguists may notice a regional peculiarity in their own speech
or when observing a conversation. They then begin to explore the sociopragmatic condi-
tions under which such forms occur. If they suspect there might be a connection with
the speaker’s geographic background, they can test this hypothesis empirically. The lin-
guist simply needs to evoke the appropriate situation in different regions and observe
which linguistic form is used. Theoretically, it should not be a problem to build such a
corpus: the experimental design for evoking such utterances only needs to allow the
28. Methods and empirical standards 495
parameter of space to vary while any other factors influencing speech are held constant.
The problem is, however, that it is extremely difficult to hold all these other factors that
affect speech constant and stable over any length of time. Linguistic acts are always
social acts as well, and hence they cannot simply be repeated as often as required under
the standardized laboratory conditions of a science experiment. There are always more
factors affecting speech than one would wish, and most of these cannot be isolated.
Some (e.g., role perception) are barely subject to external influence and are therefore
virtually impossible to eliminate as disturbing factors.
Dialectology has these problems in common with any discipline concerned with hu-
man behavior, e.g., the social sciences or psychology, that makes use of experiments or
surveys to investigate this behavior. (A survey or an interview can also be seen as an
experimental situation.) As a general rule, there are four requirements for any such data
collection procedures; these act as quality control and evaluative criteria for academic
studies (cf., e.g., Lamnek 2005: 148⫺193; Schnell et al. 2005: 149⫺166):
(1) objectivity
(2) reliability
(3) validity
(4) representativity
These quality criteria are closely interconnected. Insofar as they are relevant for geolin-
guists, they will be described in the following.
2. Objectivity
This requirement specifies that statements about facts should be independent of the ob-
server or describer. Since one can assume that every observer will judge in a “subjective”
way, that every observation and every finding is initially tied to the subjectivity of a
human, it would be better to speak of intersubjectivity. We are inclined to describe things
that everyone sees and talks about in a similar way as objective, things that an individual
or a few (in contrast to the others) see in a particular way as subjective. These terms
have been communicatively and quantitatively defined by linguists and it is safe to as-
sume that this definition reflects current academic usage. Research findings should be
described as intersubjective if they fulfill the criteria (2), (3) and (4) mentioned above. If
an academic endeavor complies with these criteria, and if nobody is reasonably able to
deny its findings, then they can be regarded as intersubjectively founded, i. e., as objec-
tive in the sense described above (on this problem cf., e.g., Kromrey 2006: 43⫺58).
3. Reliability
A research finding is reliable, or consistent, if the results are free of random errors and
if replication of the experiment generates commensurate results. The more widely the
values obtained for a variable differ when measured in an identical experiment or obser-
vation context, the less reliable any finding is. The less “internal” variation within a set
496 V. Data collection and corpus-building
of experiments there is, i. e., the better difficult-to-control factors (subject to limited
external influence) can be eliminated, the higher the degree of reliability. Reliability mea-
sures repeatability, the stability of research results across identical experimental condi-
tions. In the field dealt with in this article, there are two kinds of reliability problem:
(1) Errors of measurement by the person measuring. These can include:

⫺ errors in reading text
⫺ phonetic transcription errors
⫺ using dialectology’s indirect method, informants become measurers; alphabetic
transcription, thoroughly inadequate for certain types of inquiry, is the primary
source of error here
⫺ parsing errors in the assignment of linguistic measures/categories to text seg-
ments
The “faulty measurements” described here may arise accidentally or systematically; re-
searchers are generally aware of them as sources of error. Close phonetic transcription
in particular poses a major problem since it is here that the replication of results is
hardest to achieve, depending on the quality demands imposed. Progress has been made on
this front thanks to the electronic presentation of data possible with analysis systems
like Praat (cf. <http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/> and <http://www.uni-leipzig.de/
~siebenh/subfolder/PraatEinfuehrung/index.html>). It can generally be said that the reli-
ability of a transcription always depends on the goals of a research project and that any
deviations from the “objective” transcription can be regarded as harmless as long as
they do not exceed the “natural” variation range of a speaker (König 1988) and are not
themselves the topic of investigation. For instance, even if I have phonetically tran-
scribed a text incorrectly, I can still use it to analyze syntax.
(2) The impact of confounding variables. From a purely theoretical perspective, re-
search into language in space can be described as follows: the parameter of “space”
is varied in an experiment or observation while all of the other factors which have
an impact on speech are held constant. The resulting linguistic differences can be
considered as geographical variants of a language. Their depiction on a map repre-
sents an ideal, abstract model of how language changes across space. But such
contexts, which have to be re-created from scratch several times, can never be held
completely constant. A range of confounding variables of sociopragmatic nature
can have an influence and thus distort the results. (For more information on con-
founding variables, see section 6.)
Confounding variables reduce reliability ⫺ the same external experimental set-
up gives two different results. If an investigator recognizes such a “deviation”, he/
she can repeat the “experiment”, for example by inquiring, “Wasn’t there another
way of saying that?” This may even go as far as a suggestion, like “Didn’t people
also say XY?” Needless to say, such “intrusions” into the experimental context must
be recorded in the protocol. This presupposes that the investigator knows the object
of study very well and is able to intervene when she/he has the justified suspicion
that a variant other than the one obtained is the valid target usage for a particu-
lar location.
Reliability is a necessary precondition for validity. Validity can never exceed reliability.
4. Validity
A research result can be regarded as valid if the methods used measure what they are
supposed to measure. The main question is how resilient, how strong a correlation be-
tween two variables is, and to what extent a causal connection between them is probable.
In the case of language variation in space, the following problems arise in particular:
(1) To what extent do the linguistic parameters identified in our grammatical/pragmatic

terminology correspond to factors that really exist in language? Are the constructs
we use actually relevant to the research goal? Is, for example, syllable cut [Silben-
schnitt] a relevant construct for the phonology of German? One can certainly argue
about that, but a category like “plural” is most unlikely to be regarded as irrelevant
for German.
(2) How suitable are sociopragmatic parameters, as constructs, for representing corre-
lations between linguistic data and themselves? The pragmatic parameters (e.g., in-
tention X correlates with the linguistic form Y) are normally defined by linguists
themselves and are thus subject to the validity problems described above under (1).
Speaker-related parameters are generally adopted from the social sciences, unless
the features are very simple to operationalize, such as age or gender, for example.
In contrast, complex factors like speech context, education, social class, and milieu
are hard to operationalize, since they are characterized by a multitude of features.
Nevertheless, we need to work with such factors as well, in that they should remain
constant across speakers in order to make comparable what we hope to compare
geographically. However, they mainly crop up as “confounding variables”, because
it is virtually impossible to render two speech situations identical, since there are so
few speakers for whom all of these variables have the same values.
This argument implies that it is possible to specify conditions for the use of every linguis-
tic variant that exists, i. e., that the origin of every variant can be described. Conversely,
that in turn requires that there can be no “free” variation. We cannot discuss this ques-
tion any further here. For the time being, it is probably better to assume that there is no
such thing as free variation and thus avoid abandoning the search for determining
parameters too early. Free variants in such a situation would then be those whose deter-
mining factors are (still) unknown.
(3) To what extent is the data appropriate to the research focus? As a general rule,
economic constraints mean that dialectological research is based on corpora specifi-
cally compiled for that purpose (though cf. section 6.3.5), using methods and de-
signs comparable to those of the social sciences and experimental psychology (cf.,
e.g., Kromrey 2006; Schulz, Muthig and Koeppler 1981). This raises the question
of the extent to which the intended purpose is met by the collected data, i.e., the
extent to which the linguistic forms evoked match the research goals. In other
words: can the experimental method be used to measure what we hope to measure?
We also need to ask how the speech data relate to speech production as a whole.
To what extent does it support generalizations? To what extent can it predict the
form utterances will take? Such questions can be seen as a validity problem, but
also as a representativity issue.
5. Representativity
A sample is representative if it reflects the characteristics of the population to be investi-

gated, if it represents a miniature image of the whole that is capable of supporting gene-
ral conclusions about it.
Representativity is always of that population. A representative sample drawn from a
population is always representative of that population. There is a large body of literature
in the social sciences on how to create representative random samples (cf., e.g.,
Friedrichs 1990: 123⫺147; Kromrey 2006: 265⫺316). Primarily, it deals with the selec-
tion of individuals. In areal linguistics, the question of representativity arises in many
regards, namely the selection of
⫺ locations
⫺ individuals, speakers
⫺ speech contexts, text types, speech styles, register
⫺ linguistic problems.
At any rate, the goal is to obtain a corpus that is representative for a particular research
field and adequate for particular investigations. In general, the greater the variation
within such a population ⫺ and in the case of an established national language with a
high number of speakers it is very large ⫺ the larger the number of speakers, the amount
of text investigated, and the sample have to be in order to be regarded as representative.
The less internal variation there is within a language, speech form or register, i. e., the
more homogeneous it is, the smaller the sample needs to be to provide representative re-
sults.
Where little is known about a population, one can only take a random sample. In
the case of a completely unknown language, just one informant is sufficient to be able
to make many general statements about this language at the beginning. Where the object
of study is well known, targeted samples directed at specific, narrowly defined research
questions are both possible and necessary.
It is practically impossible to create a representative sample of a population like “the
German language” ⫺ whatever it is understood to be. However, it is perfectly possible
to do so for particular parts of this whole ⫺ always with regard to specific research
questions. In investigating base dialects we are generally dealing with smaller, less dif-
ferentiated social units, i. e., villages. When investigating language forms that lie closer
to the standard, we are confronted with barely manageable factors, multiple subdivided
units. The requisite sample size and the experimental design also depend on a number
of additional factors, e.g., the research objectives. Since the individual quality criteria
are closely interconnected, they are not considered separately in the following, and are
only discussed where they may pose a problem.
6. Quality criteria and areal linguistic methods o data acquisition
6.1. Locations
Language in space is determined by language at particular locations. Linguistic forms

may vary between two neighboring locations but they may also remain stable across
larger areas. They may conform to strict boundaries but they may also change gradually
via a slow shift in their distribution. A precise documentation of the situation would
have to take every location into account. Given the number of unique locations, e.g., in
Germany, and the resources usually available to a linguist, this is completely impossible.
The number of locations can only be determined with respect to the research goals.
Someone investigating, say, varieties close to the standard can still achieve valid results
with a less dense net of survey locations, since the geographic variation is on a broad
scale. Someone wanting to record old base dialects, however, will require a rather closely
meshed net of survey locations; linguistic forms can differ at locations just a few kilome-
ters apart. The density of the net of survey locations is usually determined by the pos-
sibilities and resources at the researcher’s disposal, and by the research objectives. Math-
ematical procedures for determining the representativity of a net of survey locations are
conceivable; they presuppose a good deal of knowledge about the number and distribu-
tion of the variants to be expected within an area, however. In principle, it would be
necessary to devise a separate net of survey locations for each linguistic phenomenon,
dependent on the number and distribution of the expected variants. The criteria deter-
mining the appropriate density for the net of survey locations for a dialectological survey
can be summarized as in Figure 28.1.
A narrow net of survey locations may help to minimize validity and reliability prob-
lems. In acquiring data, a higher probability of error is often accepted if it means the
data can be collected with relatively little effort. This is true of the so-called indirect
method for instance. Theoretically, someone who has measurement results from many
locations could reduce the density of the net of survey locations by grouping neighboring
locations together. When groups of, say, five locations are formed, an erroneous mea-
surement at one of the locations is of less consequence than it was before the grouping.
Within the model, there is now only one location but it is represented by five samples.
Someone who combines five samples from five different informants from different but
less dense net of survey locations more dense

왗 왘
(1) few (linguistic) variants (for a given content) many
(2) constant relative size of the “language areas” irregular
(3) direct survey method indirect
(4) close to standard form/level of speech further from standard
(5) (rather) high number of questions canvassed within the (rather) low
study
(6) large area surveyed small
Fig. 28.1: Criteria for determining the density of the survey location network
neighboring communities and then calculates a single value from these samples or
weights the varying values according to frequency thus lowers one of the above quality
criteria, namely (the density of the net of) locations, but also raises the value of another
parameter, the (number of) speakers.
6.2. Speakers
In the investigation of language in space, geographic space features as an independent

variable, with language, varying from location to location, as a dependent one. Locations
can only be operationalized via speakers and their social data. In terms of such social
data, an ideal speaker would be someone who grew up in a particular place and still
lives there, who is well integrated into social life there, and whose parents and ancestors
also came from there. Such speakers are quite rare nowadays; they nevertheless remain
the ideal, since all other sociopragmatic parameters need to be kept constant to enable
study of the phenomenon “space” in isolation.
Social science textbooks (cf., e.g., Haseloff and Hoffmann 1970: 146) cite a minimum
sample size of around 30 for statistical significance because a normal distribution (bell
curve) begins to emerge from this number of measurements. Bortz (2005: 103) talks of
“smaller” samples where there are less than 30 tokens and “larger” ones where there are
more than 30. Depending on the range (deviation) of the results, it may be possible to
reduce the number of samples, but sometimes more may be necessary. This can be il-
lustrated by the example of a number of small objects in a bag: if there are only two
distinct, evenly distributed types of objects in the bag, only a few of them need to be
pulled out to be able to make reliable statements about the types of objects and relatively
reliable ones about their distribution. If the objects contained in the bag are of many
types, shapes and colors ⫺ say 100 ⫺ then a sample of 30 is as good as useless. If the
objects are well mixed, the size of the bag and the total number of objects it contains
only play a marginal role here (cf. Szameitat and Koller 1958). Statistics gives us formu-
las with which to calculate for large populations the sample size required to capture
phenomena of a given frequency with a defined level of probability (cf., e.g., Bortz 2005:
126⫺128; Kähler 2008: 319⫺354; König 1982). For example: in a sample of 30, objects
which make up ten percent of a population are ninety-five percent likely to occur once;
in a random sample of 300, even objects which make up just one percent will occur with
the same probability (Sankoff 2005: 1000).
If we relate these considerations back to the issue of informant selection, a small
village would be comparable to the bag containing only a few variants, where there is a
relatively high uniformity. Assuming that we want to explore this uniformity, it may
suffice to work with a single, competent speaker in whose ability to perform as expected
we are ⫺ thanks to outside data (origin, age, other social parameters) ⫺ confident. This
is particularly the case when the community’s least standard speech level is the focus of
attention. Nowadays this speech level normally differs considerably from the language
usually spoken, so that it is no problem for a speaker to mentally isolate the old dialect
and (re)produce it for the researcher. This entails that the number of sociopragmatically
determined variants is relatively small and that the informant can be assumed to have a
good command of the local forms of speech and generally even be able to make state-
ments about their functionality in communicative events.
A larger locality can be equated with the bag holding substantially more distinct
objects: the bigger a place, the more socially differentiated it usually is and hence the
more variable its language is and the more factors there are which may affect results.
Increasing the number of speakers may help to make the results more valid and represen-
tative, since it will reduce the sampling error. It is hard to raise the number of speakers
(who should be as identical as possible with regard to social parameters) to a statistically
significant level since their social data will then inevitably become less uniform. This can
be a source of additional variation that is not geographically determined. Further, practi-
cal constraints (e.g., the sheer amount of analysis needed) often dictate that an increase
in the number of speakers is only feasible when coupled with a reduction in the number
of phenomena examined. Moreover, the less stable the linguistic phenomena under inves-
tigation are and the less conscious speakers are of them, the less controllable they are in
an experimental set-up and the more likely it is that other factors will interfere. Examples
of such interference factors might be contemporary “flexible” speakers’ (Macha 1991)
role perceptions: these are hard to manipulate and subject both to ineradicable micro-
shifts in the communicative context over the course of the test and to individual charac-
teristics of the informants that can have an effect on speech production within an other-
wise uniform experimental set-up.
Here too, greater reliability and validity can be achieved by increasing the number of
samples and hence informants, but extraneous factors limit any such increase.
Figure 28.2 presents the parameters (names the criteria) that affect the number of
speakers. We could think about how to derive concrete representative numbers of speak-
ers from this scheme if we had sufficient knowledge about the dimensions listed in Figure
28.2 to be able to render them as numerical proportions. But research is far from this
point. Practically too, there is little point making the effort to develop the relevant val-
ues, since consistent results can still be achieved without them.
Therefore ⫺ and just as with the selection of an appropriate net of survey places ⫺
the number of informants is generally decided intuitively, dependent on past experience,
the research objectives and the resources available. That it is possible to produce high
quality results on this basis is due to the input of findings from earlier research and the
fact that language is still ⫺ despite all its variability ⫺ a relatively uniform entity subject
to social controls.
more speakers per location less

왗 왘
(1) variable language at the location relatively uniform
(2) large number of variants for a given small
communicative function
(3) high speakers’ awareness of the phenomenon low
(4) large size of the location small
(5) strong strength of the social network weak
(6) indirect survey method direct
(7) small number of phenomena examined large
Fig. 28.2: Criteria for determining the number of informants per location
6.3. Experimental situations: Register
Anyone aiming to describe language in space needs to ensure that the values he/she
wants to compare really are comparable. This requires limiting investigation to speech
contexts, levels, styles, genres and registers that are as identical as possible. If the investi-
gation is confined to narrowly defined manners of speaking that are kept steady, rela-
tively little variation within a location need be anticipated. Where there is little variation,
the example of a bag holding just a few objects is apt: one does not have to reach into
it very often to gain an accurate picture of which objects are inside.
The overwhelming majority of language-geographic surveys are based on purpose-
built corpora created within an experimental frame (see Wagener 1988 for general infor-
mation). In these experimental or interview contexts, a narrowly sociologically defined
type of speaker is stimulated to speak within a relatively fixed predetermined framework.
6.3.1. Direct method: Intended base dialect
In the past, the construct “base dialect” has contributed to the creation, in both major
and minor research projects (linguistic atlases, regional grammars), of language maps
that bear high quality depictions of language variation in space. Although the variability
of local languages has been known at least since Schuchardt (1885), the construct “(in-
tended) base dialect” continues to be a successful heuristic concept in data collection for
the production of language maps. Recent language change and variation processes in
various regions have left this construct devoid of content, or retargeted at new regional
languages in its stead. The concept will, however, retain its significance for research into
the “lower” end of the register scale (also cf. Lenz 2004).
The direct method was developed around 1900 by Romance scholars (Gilliéron and
Edmont 1902⫺1969) for the research of such “base dialects”. A trained fieldworker
makes on-location recordings and works through a comprehensive questionnaire with
the informant (cf., e.g., Hotzenköcherle 1962; Bellmann 1994; König 1997; for basic
information on the method, see Werlen 1984). Normally, rather than speaking in his/her
local variety with the usually previously unknown interviewer, the informant uses a form
somewhat closer to the standard language. However, when an informant is told that the
interview is about the old base dialects, he/she is generally capable of producing it, virtu-
ally as a series of quotations, for the fieldworker. The investigator and the informant
are united in the attempt to unearth the oldest accessible form at a particular location
(König 1997: 24); the informant scours the “antiquarian part” of his linguistic memory
(Macha 1991: 86). This keeps the context constant and ensures that comparable language
material appears on the maps. The informant is cast as an expert about the language
situation at a particular location, demonstrating fluency and selecting and evaluating
variants. This role also sufficiently motivates the informant to endure the usually
lengthy interview.
This experimental set-up is easy to establish and can furnish a language corpus which
permits the production of maps as valid models of language change in geographic space.
The observer’s paradox (Labov 1971: 135⫺136) does not play a role in it. Further, it is
capable of generating a relatively homogeneous corpus in terms of register. It therefore
permits work with a very low number of informants ⫺ in principle, one informant who
meets the conditions described above is sufficient. Nonetheless, the results remain repre-
sentative of what is termed the base dialect of a location. They can be generalized to
situations where two or more speakers from a location talk about local topics.
Normally, several people are interviewed in such surveys, each, for economic reasons,
about different linguistic issues. A trained interviewer will quickly notice how competent
an informant is and how reliably he/she can provide information about the location’s
norms. Where uncertain, the interviewer may repeat a particular question or even go
over whole parts of the questionnaire a second time with a second informant. This
method also increases the number of experiments, which in turn increases the quality of
the material obtained and thus the reliability, validity and representativity of the find-
ings.
In this way modern linguistic atlases provide not only a more-or-less complete pho-
nology and morphology and comprehensive information about the lexicon, but also (in
their latest generation) many syntactic maps (Eroms, Röder and Spannbauer-Pollmann
2006). They also, albeit not systematically, make available a wealth of information on
recent linguistic developments. This happens whenever the fieldworker has also recorded
speech forms that are inconsistent with the primary objective of the recording, the “base
dialect”. Such forms are produced constantly and spontaneously by the fieldworker and
the informant in the course of their common endeavor, since in most cases the whole
interview takes place at a “higher” speech level, with the base dialect merely being
quoted for conservation purposes. If “spontaneous forms” are plotted onto a map, im-
pressive images of linguistic developments can be obtained (cf., e.g., SDS 1965: 16; SDS
1975: 256).
With the direct method, the phonetic accuracy of the corpus is highly reliable, espe-
cially if the data is stored as a sound recording. Validity and representativity are also
enhanced because the linguist is observing the communicative events, e.g., during sponta-
neous speech, he/she can compare the answers offered with expectations based on previ-
ous experience. Should contradictions arise, he/she has the opportunity to repeat the
experiment by asking if there are other ways of referring to the topic at hand. The
investigator may even make suggestions or propose particular forms. If different variants
are produced, the fieldworker may ask questions about differences in usage. The replies
need to be taken seriously since the informants usually have a competence that encom-
passes more than one variant. The modern, “flexible” speaker has a command of several
“styles” and registers and makes use of them more or less intentionally. He/she is aware
of which forms of speech conform to the old “local norm” and can provide information
about the significance of “more recent” variants and the conditions under which they
are appropriate. Needless to say, all this must be noted in the protocol and it must
always be asked to what extent the information offered corresponds to actual usage, for
this is not always the case (cf., e.g., König 2004; 1975: 352⫺353). There ought to be no
objections to this procedure being employed as a dialect-geographical method. In most
of the social sciences, interviews in which informants discuss social behavior are used,
and this is much less subject to control than the information on linguistic behavior
obtained in dialectological survey interviews, since language is in permanent use in these
contexts and every spontaneous occurrence of an element as well as every comment on
its use increases the number of samples and thus the validity and representativity of the
material collected. Furthermore, the procedure is highly economical: all that is asked is
where variants occur or where, on the grounds of previous knowledge or experience,
they are suspected to occur (e.g., in a neighboring location). Moreover, informants’ judg-
ments may replace direct observations that can be very difficult to make.
The situation described here also in general applies to telephone-based methods of
language data collection like the one used for the Atlas of North American English (La-
bov, Ash and Boberg 2006).
6.3.2. Direct method: Intended standard
In addition to the investigation of base dialects described above, there is a second context
in which homogeneous material can be obtained. In it, the informant is asked to read
out a written text. For example, he/she may be instructed to read the text as if in front
of a school class. It is not hard for the informant to mentally evoke and maintain this
imagined situation over a sustained period. What results is a form of speech that also
occurs in “natural” contexts; the results can thus be generalized, in that they are repre-
sentative of this level of speech. They are also reliable and valid for it, but they are
confined to a very narrow linguistic aspect, namely, pronunciation. The fact that the text
to be read is in written form makes it impossible to vary other descriptive fields. The
results have no representativity in terms of the entire spoken standard (e.g., with regard
to morphology or syntax; cf. König 1989; 1997: 27).
6.3.3. Direct method: Regional languages
It is harder to set up experimental contexts and keep them stable over a longer period
for speech forms that lie between the poles described above. This pertains to the surely
most-spoken speech form today ⫺ everyday speech: vernaculars, regional languages,
regional accents. This spectrum of variation between the poles of base dialect and stan-
dard is very unstable. The speech forms change according to the context and intended
goal, depending on how the speaker understands the role he/she is playing and also on
his/her attitude towards dialect or regional identity (Werlen 1984). The level of speech
may also shift in line with the context or the topic. Speakers tend to be far less aware
of their speech or of the norms governing it than with standard language or base dialect.
The investigation of these speech forms is complicated by the fact that people are increas-
ingly active in social groups that are not tied to a particular location, that seek (linguis-
tic) role models in other areas and do not orient themselves to a local norm, however it
may be defined. Thus, despite identical selection criteria (“ostensible” association with
a particular location for at least two generations, a certain level of education), individual
speakers’ modes of speech may characteristically deviate from those of the regionally
orientated speakers under study.
Nevertheless, there are successful projects which have managed to capture spatial
structures in this intermediate stratum, e.g., the Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas (Bellmann
1994; Bellmann, Schmidt and Herrgen 1994⫺2002; cf. Herrgen in this volume). In it, the
base dialect of a younger, mobile group of speakers (commuters) was sought (data series
2) in addition to that of the older speakers (data series 1). In general, this method cap-
tured a speech form that can be referred to as regional dialect and which corresponds
exactly with the intended “intermediate stratum” between base dialect and standard.
Where the preconditions that applied for the Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas are not
met, it will be more difficult to survey regional languages empirically with regard to their
geographic structuring, especially where there is also an interest in syntactic phenomena.
For this, spontaneously spoken texts, preferably recorded under standardized conditions
with informants from comparable social backgrounds, are necessary ⫺ i. e., speech re-
cordings made under identical sociopragmatic conditions. As Labov (1966; cf. Kristi-
ansen in this volume: section 2.2) demonstrated with his New York survey, creativity can
be of assistance. A group conversation or the MapTask method developed in Edinburgh
(Anderson et al. 1991) may also supply language material that is to some extent compar-
able across space. In the MapTask, stylized “maps” are handed to two dialogue partners.
They contain a series of “landmarks”, or drawings representing notions. On one of the
maps a path has been drawn from notion to notion, but not on the other. One of the
informants, the “instruction giver” has to explain the path to the other informant, the
“instruction follower”. Unbeknownst to the informants, the maps usually differ from
one another, so that an animated conversation can develop. The “landmarks” are men-
tioned frequently and many spontaneously uttered tokens are obtained.
The material produced in such quasi-natural situations can provide information on
language use in analogous contexts at a particular location. With a corpus obtained in
such a way, it is also possible to assign variants to particular sociopragmatic conditions.
When describing geographic variation, particular contextual variants from undesired
registers can be excluded, leading to higher quality results. Of course, this requires some
knowledge about what is common at a location. Where this is not available, higher
quality can be achieved by increasing the number of experiments, e.g., by increasing the
number of informants per location, and then using quantitative analysis. For practical
reasons, the number of informants cannot be increased indefinitely. However, the rich-
ness of variants in everyday language and the idiosyncratic inconsistency of today’s
speakers seem to make this necessary. To obtain statistically sound figures, it would be
necessary to know how many speakers with the same geographical background go their
own individual linguistic way. Since there are no figures on this yet, any decision will
need to be based on intuition and experience. This will ultimately be done on the basis
of existing resources; but a compromise must be reached between two conflicting goals.
The smaller the number of linguistic issues/variables to be dealt with, the higher the
number of speakers may become and, vice versa, the higher the number of research
topics, the longer the experiments will take and ⫺ if the expenditure and effort are held
constant ⫺ the smaller the number of informants will need to be (see above).
The number of experiments increases with the number of informants. But it is also
possible to increase the former by conducting several experiments with one speaker,
effectively increasing the amount of speech recorded ⫺ for instance, every realization of
the negation particle not in a text can be regarded as an individual experiment. It is thus
possible to reach conclusions about the use of the forms that occur, but not about varia-
tion between individuals: that can only be determined by increasing the number of infor-
mants.
6.3.4. Indirect method: Base dialects
This method is above all associated with the Marburg School (Knoop, Putschke and
Wiegand 1982; Wrede, Martin and Mitzka 1927⫺1956; Schmidt and Herrgen 2001⫺
2009). Dialect data are collected with questionnaires and with the help of non-linguists.
The school has achieved much and it continues to influence the scene, despite a striking
reliability problem (Kleiner 2003). Orthographical transcription (into the standard al-
phabet) is useless for many problems; it is only adequate for recording phenomena the
speaker is or can be made aware of. A distinction like that between Tiid and Zeit (‘time’)
or between Appel and Apfel (‘apple’) can be captured well using the existing letters of
the alphabet, and speakers are also aware of it. But they are not aware, for example, of
distinctions in the aspiration of plosives, even though it could be rendered in writing,
e.g., Phost could well be distinguished from Post (‘post’). The indirect method has pro-
vided very useful results for easily representable phenomena in phonology and morphol-
ogy. Its particular strength is, however, the field of regional lexical variation. The speak-
ers are aware of such differences (e.g., Fiedel vs. Geige ‘violin’); they are striking, and
can be captured in normal written language. In this manner, Mitzka’s Deutscher Wortat-
las (Mitzka [and Schmitt] 1956⫺1980) provides high quality results in the field of word
geography, including in part phonetic/phonological distinctions. Even in the field of syn-
tax, ingenious survey design can deliver findings of high reliability and validity, primarily
by suggesting alternative forms and monitoring their level of acceptance in a region
(Glaser 2000). In general it can be said that the more we know about the area under
research, the more successful this method will be. It becomes increasingly possible to
formulate questionaires in a language the informant understands and which makes him
aware of alternatives. In case of aspiration, for example, one could ask, “In slow, care-
fully pronounced speech from where you live, does the p in Post sound more like a hard
b or a p followed by h?”. Formulating the question in such a way ought to be enough
to obtain a (not yet available) geographic distribution for this important phenomenon
of regional German phonology, even via a written survey.
6.3.5. Indirect method: Regional languages
The first atlas of German colloquial language is the Wortatlas der Deutschen Umgangs-
sprachen by Jürgen Eichhoff (1977⫺2000). Two-thirds of his material (a total of 539
recordings) was collected indirectly by means of questionnaires, one-third via direct sur-
veys in the field (Eichhoff 1977⫺2000, vol. 1, 15). Data from 402 survey locations is
presented, the majority of which are towns with a medium to small population. In these
towns, colloquial languages, i. e., regional accents, play the same role as the base dialects
do in rural areas. Thus, geographically immobile informants with a “medium” level of
education (prototypically low or middle-ranking public servants; Eichhoff 1977⫺2000:
vol. 1, 14) are sufficiently aware of the “intermediate” speech form under investigation
to be able to make competent statements about it. The controlled selection of informants
and the restriction of the survey to lexical aspects contributed to the collection of a
relatively uniform speech level and to the creation of maps of high validity and reliability.
Today, the internet offers new opportunities for the indirect collection of materials.
The Atlas der deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA, cf. Möller and Elspaß 2008; Elspaß and
Möller 2006) is one of the first dialect-geographic projects to take avail of this method
of obtaining a corpus. Here, the question of quality criteria takes a different form. The
new method brings little freedom for the researcher; here ⫺ in contrast to the direct
method ⫺ the question is not “What do I want to investigate?” followed by selection of
the appropriate experimental design. Rather, it is “What can be investigated by this

method; for which type of speaker, for which speech forms and linguistic issues does
this method provide high quality results?”
Informants are chosen more or less at random since their selection is not controllable:
they are all computer users and internet surfers ⫺ predominantly 20 to 40 years old. As
with the Deutscher Sprachatlas and the Deutscher Wortatlas, the sheer mass of infor-
mants provides valid results. The number of samples per location can be raised by reas-
signing the data from smaller regions to larger central locations. This often also increases
the number of variants for a location or region and enhances quality (see section 6.1).
Quantitative statements about usage can be made on the basis of the relative fre-
quency of variants, but the conditions determining the use of a particular variant cannot
be elicited. This method is especially suitable for the investigation of lexical variation.
The problems of the indirect method with regard to other linguistic levels have already
been mentioned (section 6.3.4). On the other hand, in taking stock of lexical variation
or other phenomena of which the speaker is aware (or can be made more aware through
sophisticated questioning), the speed and effectiveness of the method are unbeatable.
Moreover, it is exceptionally inexpensive, in part because the materials are already avail-
able in machine-readable form.
It is impossible to obtain as much social data via web-based surveys as in a direct
on-location recording. However, one can learn the age of the informants (e.g., to within
a decade), their gender, something about their education or occupation (classified into
three to four broad groups), and about their level of geographic mobility (also in two
or three categories). If this information is obtained, a high enough number of informants
(five to ten thousand is realistically achievable in the German-speaking area) can ensure
high validity and representativity. For example, 400 locations and 6000 replies yields an
average of 15 results per location. These results are far more comprehensive than those
obtainable with other recording methods. The variants obtained with this method always
represent speakers’ judgments about which variants are common at a location. These
speakers have, however, a much greater than average interest in language. Otherwise,
they would not voluntarily complete the questionnaire. Moreover, they are of the most
varied social status and tend to be better educated than the average. It is true that many
of these speakers would not have been included in a direct method survey. However,
they have lived in one place long enough to feel capable of judgments about the language
common there. Thus, although there are problems with the language material obtained,
it can yield high quality results when interpreted carefully.
The high number of replies makes it possible to use filters to exclude particular groups
or to concentrate exclusively upon them (e.g., mapping the utterances of over 60-year-
olds, or people with a full secondary education, etc.). The replies of people who would
otherwise have been excluded from a study with a purely areal focus provide further
insights into the linguistic reality at a location or in a region. To date, the potential of
this method of data collection is far from exhausted in linguistics. Coupled with sophisti-
cated questioning, it is capable of significant future achievements ⫺ not just in the lexical
field, but also in the areal study of idiom, morphology and syntax.
7. Existing corpora: Corpus linguistics

Corpora of spoken and written language available on the internet are growing in signifi-
cance, not least for linguistic geography. This is primarily due to the fact that they offer
new possibilities of analysis via electronic data processing. But such corpora, like those
provided by the Institut für deutsche Sprache (‘Institute for the German Language’, IDS,
Mannheim), the Bayerisches Archiv für Sprachsignale (‘Bavarian Archive for Speech Sig-
nals’, BAS), or found in the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhun-
derts (‘Digital Dictionary of German 20th-Century Language’, DWDS) of the Berlin-
Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities for example, have not been system-
atically compiled with an eye to their representativity across space. Once major corpora
of written and of transcribed spoken language that take systematic account of regional
aspects (and are classified into text types) are available on the net, it will become possible
to detect regionalisms via automated mass frequency analyses of hitherto unattainable
dimensions ⫺ both qualitative and quantitative. The huge database that will then be at
hand and the calculations of significance it will render possible will permit a comparison
of areally based frequencies and the generation of results of exceptional quality. Unfortu-
nately, the opportunities such corpora offer for areally oriented variation linguistics have
yet to be explored in corpus linguistics. Within corpus linguists’ discussions about the
question of representativity, issues of space and areality have regrettably played virtually
no role to date (cf., e.g., Biber 1993; McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006; McEnery and
Wilson 2007).
8. Quality criteria and attitudinal research
Here, the question is how people think about language and dialects, how they judge
them, how much prestige they accord regionally colored speech forms and speakers, and
how they assess the distribution of dialects (cf., e.g., Preston 2005). Only to a degree are
these linguistic questions; they could just as well be posed by social scientists. The sur-
veys made about the popularity of dialects demonstrate this. For this type of inquiry,
the conditions described in section 6 are no longer valid; the quality criteria for surveys
developed within the social sciences should be applied. Above all, the conditions that
apply to the criterion of representativity are different. In order to make statements about
the attitude of “the Germans” towards an interesting phenomenon, for example, a group
which is “representative” in terms of the criteria of the social sciences needs to be polled.
It needs to be kept in mind for surveys about the popularity of varieties in particular
that sufficiently large groups from all of the regions in the survey area need to be sur-
veyed, given that regional differences are especially significant for this research topic.
Since the size of representative samples normally exceeds the means available to linguists,
statements are generally only made about the group examined. A survey by Hundt
(1992), which furnishes insights into the evaluation of regionally colored standard lan-
guage by 175 informants, can arbitrarily be chosen as an example. Statistical tests which
demonstrate the significance of some specific differences in the evaluation of regionally
colored standard language create an impression of objectivity. In the absence of represen-
tativity, however, the impression is not warranted ⫺ for whom, aside from the 175 infor-
mants scattered all over Germany, can the result be regarded as valid? When social
scientists, like those at the Institut für Demoskopie in Allensbach, conduct comparable
surveys, they have no problems with representativity (1814 informants in the last survey
in 2008, cf. Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach 2008), but very real ones with reliability
and validity (e.g., with regard to how they label dialects). One would like to suggest that
they seek the advice of dialectologists on future surveys.
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Werner König, Augsburg (Germany)

29. Investigating language in space: Questionnaire

and interview
1. Elicitation versus spontaneous discourse data
2. Oral versus written elicitation
3. Survey of oral elicitation techniques
4. Survey of written techniques
5. References
1. Elicitation versus spontaneous discourse data
1.1. Introductory remarks
In spontaneous discourse, utterances are generated by a speaker in order to reach some

communicative goal. What the speaker is saying, and the way s/he is saying it, is rooted
in an interactive context. Elicited linguistic data are of a very different kind. They are
utterances which the speaker is explicitly asked to produce by an investigator who is
interested in the structure of the language itself. Elicited data are responses to linguistic
tasks and thus arise from a situation that is more or less artificial, or experimental.
Dialectological research has developed several data elicitation techniques. The question
of which is the best elicitation method is perhaps misleading. Rather, the different tech-
niques have specific profiles of strengths and weaknesses. The present article is intended
to give the researcher guidelines for her/his choice of method. In practice, a combination
of techniques often turns out to be useful. If several methods are applied in parallel, it
is easier to estimate the extent to which a particular method impacts upon the results.
1.2. Comparability versus reliability o data - a contradiction?
Investigating linguistic variation along the spatial dimension presents us with several
methodological challenges regarding the collection of comparable and at the same time
reliable data. Comparability with respect to the dialect-geographical structure of the
landscape and reliability in relation to the language in actual use seem to contradict one
another. On the one hand, relevant patterns of language variation across space can only
be uncovered if comparable, i. e., more or less standardized, material is won or made
available. On the other hand, all research into spatial linguistic variation deals with
nonstandard varieties, often base dialects, accorded relatively low prestige in many cul-
tures, so that it is a far from trivial question how the linguist can obtain “natural” data
(i. e., data that are relatively free of standardization) in the course of an unnatural testing
situation. There is no doubt that spontaneous discourse is among the most reliable, or
authentic, sources of data available to linguists. However, discourse data are often not
sufficient to achieve a dialect-geographically relevant picture (e.g., the precise geographi-
29. Questionnaire and interview 513
cal distribution of variants). In this article we will discuss ways of resolving the dilemma
of reliable versus geographically relevant data. It is important to note that each method
is always a compromise between partially competing requirements.
1.3. Why elicit data?
It is uncontroversial that records (and transcripts) of spontaneous discourse are the class
of data least influenced by the investigator, especially discourse recorded in the investiga-
tor’s absence. This is especially true of dialects as nonstandard varieties. Large annotated
corpora have become an indispensable tool for testing hypotheses of syntactic theory
(cf., e.g., Bresnan et al. 2007). It is no surprise, therefore, that the methods of corpus
linguistics have been adopted in dialectology, too. First to mention in this context is the
pioneering work on dialects of England initiated by Bernd Kortmann and colleagues at
the University of Freiburg (cf. Kortmann 2003 for a survey). Kortmann and his coau-
thors have compiled a large corpus of texts from all areas of England that were originally
recorded in the context of oral history research (FRED, Freiburg English Dialect Cor-
pus, cf. Kortmann and Wagner 2005). This line of research demonstrates that corpus
analyses may reveal not only a great variety of nonstandard constructions and their
conditions of use, but also, to a certain degree, remarkable dialect-geographical differ-
ences. It must be noted, however, that the corpus-linguistic approach is also subject to
limitations (Glaser 2000; Cornips 2002). These limitations can be evaded only by means
of controlled data elicitation. First, the geographical picture that can be revealed on the
basis of corpora is still very rough. Although the geographical distribution of variables
will show up when corpora from different localities are compared, the findings are still
quite punctiform in comparison to the dense networks of measuring points used by
dialect-geographical atlases. Time and financial constraints make it impossible for large
corpora from as many localities as an atlas uses for investigation to be compiled. It is
therefore very improbable that a corpus-based study would be able to identify the precise
position of an isogloss (but this is exactly what dialectologists want to know). A dense
network of maximally comparable data is mandatory for a linguistic atlas; this can only
be achieved via standardization of the elicitation technique. Second, only for phenomena
which occur very frequently in discourse can corpora guarantee the level of comparabil-
ity between localities that is required in dialect geography. For less frequent phenomena
some standardized elicitation technique is necessary to ensure comparability. Third, cor-
pora do not contain negative evidence, i. e., the corpus does not tell us which variants
do not occur in the area. For a precise geographical picture as well as for questions of
more theoretical interest (e.g., questions on micro-parameters, the covariation of gram-
matical variables that are assumed to be connected at some level of structural organiza-
tion, cf. Kayne 1996), it is sometimes necessary to know whether or not a particular
pronunciation, construction, etc. with a particular intended meaning is possible. More-
over, for dialectological questions, it is sometimes very important to have access to the
most archaic forms, e.g., in order to reconstruct the direction of a sound change not
attested in written records. Sometimes such archaic forms are not used any more in
everyday communication, but speakers still have a passive knowledge of the forms.
Fourth, although the corpus-based approach seems to be especially well suited for syn-
tax, it is less so for phonology, since the transcription of long texts (made in oral history
research, for instance) is usually not very phonetically precise, being too strongly ori-
ented towards standard orthography. Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, large
electronic corpora are simply not available for many areas. Elicitation is a relatively
economical way of gaining a general orientation with respect to the combination of
linguistic variables occurring in a certain area.
In sum, corpus-based research on dialects is unrivaled as far as the reliability, or
authenticity, of the data is concerned. It must be kept in mind that an elicitation pro-
cedure creates artifacts (task effects, repetition effects, order effects) arising from the
unnatural situation the informant is exposed to. As Cornips (2002) points out in her
study on the distribution of om and voor as infinitival complementizers in dialects of
Dutch, the main differences between spontaneous discourse data and elicited data are
found not so much in the purely linguistic distribution of the variants (voor is used more
often in purposive contexts); rather, they are related to the social significance of the
variants (speakers with a high level of education respond in test situations only with om,
the prestige variant, whereas they use both om and voor in spontaneous discourse, Cor-
nips 2002: 91). These results mean that standardized elicitation techniques may reveal
the inventories and linguistic function of expressions at a given locality in a fairly reliable
way, but not their social significance and stratification. These are certainly regrettable
limitations, yet we think that they are tolerable, at least from the point of view of tradi-
tional dialect-geographical epistemological interest, which focuses on that layer of the
language with maximal geographical differentiation. Of course, this sociolinguistically
very limited (and perhaps over-idealized) picture can, and must, be supplemented by
studies integrating the dynamic aspects of language variation on not only the spatial, but
also the social and temporal dimensions, as realized (to a degree) by the two-dimensional
Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas in the German Rhine area (Bellmann, Schmidt and Herr-
gen 1994⫺2002), which worked with two generations of speakers (for further exploration
of the dynamic approach cf. Schmidt in this volume and to appear). It is nevertheless
important to note that for an appropriate interpretation of the findings of multidimen-
sional variationist studies, knowledge of the linguistic layer with maximal geographical
differentiation is mandatory (cf. e.g., Siebenhaar’s [2000] sociolinguistic study on the city
dialect of Aarau, Switzerland, where his results are interpreted in comparison with those
of the classical dialect atlas, Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz [Hotzenköcherle 1962⫺
2003]).
2. Oral versus written elicitation
2.1. Brie historical background
In oral elicitation, the informant and the investigator are present at the same time and
place (sometimes, cf. Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006, oral elicitation is performed via
telephone). The informant uses spoken language, which is recorded by the investigator.
Methods based on oral elicitation are called direct methods. In indirect methods, the
informant and the investigator are separated spatially and temporally. The informant
fills out a written questionnaire, using the normal alphabet. In both methods a set ques-
tionnaire of linguistic tasks is used. In the following, I will make a terminological distinc-
tion between the interview questionnaire used in the direct method, and the written ques-
tionnaire used in the indirect method.
Historically, the contrast between direct and indirect methods coincides with, respec-
tively, the Romance and the German traditions of dialect geography in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. The ideal of the Romance tradition, most promi-
nently represented by Jules Gilliéron and his Atlas linguistique de la France, was to cap-
ture an instantaneous picture of the natural language use of the informant. This
presupposes that only oral methods are to be applied, and that the informant is only
minimally influenced by the elicitation technique. This degree of authenticity is reached
at the expense of the density of survey locations for the linguistic atlas. The German
tradition, represented by Georg Wenker and his Deutscher Sprachatlas (Wenker 1887⫺
1923; Wrede, Martin and Mitzka 1927⫺1956), attempted to cover the area as densely as
possible. It was only possible to achieve a rich network of survey locations by means of
written questionnaires. Since 1876, 52,800 written questionnaires have been collected
(König 2005: 139). The questionnaires contain 40 sentences in Standard German to be
translated into the local dialects. (Insofar as the written questionnaires were sent to
school teachers who were instructed to record how the sentences would be translated
into the dialect of the local population ⫺ not necessarily that spoken by the teacher ⫺
this method perhaps includes a stronger direct component, with the teacher as investiga-
tor, than one would expect at first glance.) The Romance tradition has also had a signifi-
cant influence on the methodology of newer atlases in the German-speaking world, e.g.,
atlases in the tradition of the Swiss Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, which combine
the “Romance” direct method with the “German” network density, whereby covering
only a relatively small area (Hotzenköcherle 1962⫺2003).
2.2. Direct versus indirect methods: Advantages and disadvantages
The main advantages of the indirect method lie in its relatively low costs in terms of
time, finances and personnel (cf. Eichhoff 1982: 550). The indirect method is particularly
well suited to an initial orientation to the distribution of variables found in an area. For
example, the SAND project in the Netherlands and Belgium first undertook a pilot study
with written questionnaires, the results of which served as the basis for later, more de-
tailed oral interviews (Barbiers et al. 2004⫺: vol. 1, 8). The questionnaire material col-
lected for the Deutscher Sprachatlas by Georg Wenker and successors could also be
considered a pilot study insofar as much later work in German dialectology relies on
the general picture provided by the Deutscher Sprachatlas material while at the same
time refining it. The written data from the Syntaktischer Atlas der deutschen Schweiz
(SADS) has served as a starting point for more detailed studies on particular phenomena
(e.g., Seiler 2003; Bucheli Berger 2005). The physical absence of the investigator, al-
though problematic in many respects, can be seen as an advantage of the indirect
method, too. Some informants may feel disturbed by the presence of an unknown aca-
demic in their homes. Sending them written questionnaires is one way of dealing with
the so-called observer’s paradox: “Our goal is to observe the way people use language
when they are not observed” (Labov 1972: 61). Informants are less closely observed in
filling out a questionnaire than they are in an interview situation.
In many respects, though, the direct method is superior. In the first place, the tran-
scription into standard orthography by non-experts makes the precise phonetic inter-
pretation of the results difficult. Written data is less problematic as far as vocabulary or
syntax are concerned, cf. the Deutscher Wortatlas (Mitzka, Schmitt and Hildebrandt
1956⫺1980) as an example of a lexical atlas, the Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialectsyntaxis
(Gerritsen 1991) and the SADS as examples of syntactic atlases, based on written mate-
rial (cf. Kakhro 2005, where it is shown that material based on the 40 “Wenker senten-
ces” originally collected for the Deutscher Sprachatlas yield good results for syntactic
variation in German-speaking Switzerland; cf. also König 2005: 163, a syntactic map
based on the original Deutscher Sprachatlas material). Note that Schmidt (2005) demon-
strates that the original Deutscher Sprachatlas material has turned out to be fairly reli-
able, even for cases of phonological variation, since the results of the Deutscher Sprach-
atlas and the recent Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas can easily be brought into relation with
each other. However, interference from the standard variety is more probable in written
tasks since most informants are not used to writing down their dialect. Furthermore, the
informant is less subject to the investigator’s control when the indirect method is used.
Not only does this mean that it is more difficult for the investigator to estimate how
reliable, hesitant, concentrated, etc. the informant is, it also means that the investigator
is not able to provide help when necessary, e.g., where a question is misunderstood (see
section 4). In general, none of the informant’s reactions aside from the mere answers to
the tasks (amusement, comments etc.), are recorded. It is impossible to compare the
informant’s linguistic behavior in the interview with her/his ordinary speech. Written
questionnaires must be relatively short in order to not exhaust the informant. In sum,
the reliability of written material has perhaps been underestimated in dialectology. It
seems that the indirect method yields reliable results as far as the geographical distribu-
tion of linguistic variables per se is concerned. However, its limitations are to be found
in the exploration of the exact functional properties of the variants, such as context
sensitivity or slight meaning differences.
3. Survey o oral elicitation techniques
3.1. Scene setting
It seems to be very important that interviews are conducted in a place with which the
informant is very familiar. Traditionally, the investigator visits informants in their homes
(Hotzenköcherle 1962: 127). Bellmann (1994: 79) notes that some interviews for the
Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas were conducted in more public places, such as restaurant
booths. A restaurant in the informant’s village turned out to be very suitable for the
direct interviews conducted for the SADS. The place is still familiar to the informant,
but there is no risk that the presence of the investigator could be perceived as invasive.
Linguistic atlases in the tradition of the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz work to-
gether with one informant at a time. The Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas systematically
conducted interviews with small groups of informants. Group interviews make it possible
to abstract away from individual idiosyncrasies of one informant (competence-oriented
approach, Bellmann 1994: 37⫺39). In oral interviews conducted for the SADS, very
positive experiences have been reported with interviewing more than one person at a
time, too. The informants often begin discussions with one another during the interview
in a highly spontaneous manner. The benefits are particularly striking with mixed-sex
couples: the informants are very familiar with each other and therefore relaxed, they are
game enough to correct one another and their voices are easily distinguishable on tape
(voice distinction is often a problem in group interviews). Furthermore, couple interviews
guarantee a balanced ratio of male and female speakers.
As for the investigators’ behavior, it is mandatory that they make clear to the infor-
mant that they are in the role of a learner, attempting to learn from the informant about
the local language. One way of persuading the informant of her/his teacher-like position
is to deliberately mispronounce and/or mistranscribe things, thus giving the informant
an opportunity to correct and instruct the investigator. Another issue is the language to
be used for communication between the investigator and the informant. This depends
very much on the sociolinguistic environment of the region. During the interviews for
the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, both investigator and informant used their native
dialect, in accord with normal linguistic behavior in German-speaking Switzerland. The
investigators for the Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas in western Germany used the regional
variety of the spoken standard language. Perhaps the most elaborate technique has been
developed by the Syntactische atlas van de Nederlandse dialecten (SAND) in the Nether-
lands, where a great amount of interference from the standard language was expected
during conversations with a non-local investigator. At each survey location, two infor-
mants were selected, one of whom became the target informant while the other was
instructed to conduct the interview in the local dialect, with the investigator keeping out
of the conversation as much as possible (Barbiers et al. 2004⫺: vol. 1, 8).
3.2. Loosely structured oral elicitation techniques
Conversation dirigée
Although using an interview questionnaire, the standard methodology of dialect geogra-
phy is oriented towards the ideal of recording dialect data that are only minimally influ-
enced by the investigator. If possible, the word being asked for must not be mentioned
by the investigator. Rather, it should be invoked by pointing at things, gestures, para-
phrasing, etc. (Hotzenköcherle 1962: 127). Grammar in particular should be “hidden”
in a conversation about concrete things or actions (Hotzenköcherle 1986: 24). The ques-
tions are grouped around complexes of objects, events, actions, in such a manner that
the word(s) to be elicited ought to be mentioned spontaneously during the conversation.
Ideally, the interview questionnaire consists predominantly of lists of words embedded
in a functional context that takes account of aspects of external reality, whereby the
sought after set of words includes all of the relevant linguistic variables. The method of
conversation dirigée (Hotzenköcherle 1986: 26) is therefore especially viable for phono-
logical, lexical and, to some degree, morphological variables. However, all atlases use
more structured methods for the investigation of syntactic variables.
Picture story
Picture stories can be used for two purposes. First, they can serve as a starting point for
the compilation of comparable discourse corpora where there is no specialized linguistic
variable to be determined. Zürrer (1999: 467) contains a picture story that has also been
used during interviews for the SADS. It is easier to work with a picture story if more
than one informant is present: one informant is given the task of telling the story to the
other informants who cannot see the pictures. Second, for some very specific linguistic
problems a picture story can serve as a suitable, and surprisingly rigid, means of explora-
tion. Berthele (2006), investigating linguistic expressions for spatial relations, uses a
longer picture story about a boy and his frog (Mayer 1969), originally developed for
typological and psycholinguistic research. The story is made up in a fashion that encour-
ages the informant to use spatial expressions of many different kinds. Another way
of using pictures is illustrated by Fuchs (1993). Fuchs investigates the occurrence of
morphological concord on predicative adjectives and participles in Valais German. With
regard to the participles, concord morphemes appear only if the construction has resul-
tant-state meaning, but not in the so-called analytic “perfect” tense (which, semantically,
is simply periphrastic past). Fuchs presented the informants with drawings depicting
situations that were clearly the results of earlier actions or events, including a pitcher
that was being tipped over. Fuchs told the informants to describe the picture as precisely
as possible in order for her to be able to draw the picture without seeing it. In doing so,
informants said things like
(1) Der Chrüèch isch umgikipptä

the: sg:masc pitcher is tipped.over-sg:masc
‘The pitcher is (in the state of being) tipped over.’ (Fuchs 1993: 72)
Games
Some phenomena can be investigated by means of a game to be played with the infor-
mants. For her study of Swiss German relativization, Rüegger (2003) developed a kind
of memory game. Informants were presented a couple of play figures, each of which was
related to a short story that the informant had to memorize. When asked about the
identity of this or that play figure, the informant naturally answered with a relative
clause: “That’s the guy who we always go swimming with”, etc.
3.3. Highly structured oral elicitation techniques
Highly structured elicitation techniques within the direct method include translation and
acceptability tasks.
Translation tasks
In translation tasks, a form or a sentence is given in the standard language. The infor-
mant is asked to translate the model into her/his local dialect. Translation tasks formed
a marginal part of the interview questionnaires in the tradition of the Sprachatlas der
deutschen Schweiz; they are more prominent in more modern atlases which pay greater
attention to syntactic constructions (SAND, Sprachatlas von Niederbayern [Eroms
2003⫺]). The issues with the translation method are well known (cf., e.g., Cornips and
Poletto 2005). First, it is quite possible that the informant’s response is too pre-structured
by the model, an issue which is particularly relevant in cultures where the social prestige
of the local dialect is relatively low. Second, translating from one variety into another
requires a high level of abstraction; if the informant does not abstract away from the
literal form of the model, she/he will mechanically repeat the model. However, if he/she
takes the explorer’s question, “How would you say …?”, too literally, he/she will perhaps
say something which is too divergent from the model, i. e., where the intended identity
of meaning is lost. Third, for many dialectal words, forms and constructions, no equiva-
lent in the standard language exists. After all, it is a central advantage of the translation
method that prior knowledge of the relevant linguistic variables is not as essential as it
is for acceptability tasks. Translation tasks represent a relatively easy way of detecting
the relevant phenomena at all, or of collecting expressions from previously undescribed
dialects. The results of an investigation based on translation tasks may provide a useful
basis for later, more narrowly focused studies.
Acceptability tasks
Some of the issues raised by the translation method are avoided in another elicitation
technique ⫺ acceptability tasks. The informant is presented with a series of variants
and asked to judge their acceptability. The informants for the Syntactische atlas van de
Nederlandse dialecten were presented with the variants by a local assistant investigator
using the local pronunciation (Barbiers et al. 2004⫺: vol. 1: 7). Note that “acceptability”
may mean at least two different things which do not necessarily coincide: first, whether
or not the informant would use the variant, and second, whether the variant is more
generally common in the dialect, i. e., passively known to the informant. Further, if an
informant is asked, “Would you say this?”, she or he might answer in the negative for
nonlinguistic reasons, i. e., because the intended meaning is uncommon in the infor-
mant’s social context. For example, in the northeast of German-speaking Switzerland, a
special agreement marker for depictive predicatives is used:
(2) si säät, eren Vatte hei de⫽Kafi all schwaz-e trunke

she says her father has the:sg:masc-coffee always black-sg:masc drunk
‘She says that her father always drank his coffee black.’
(Appenzell, Switzerland; Bucheli Berger 2005: 162)
In a social context in which people simply do not drink black coffee (as in Appenzell,
where coffee usually is drunk with milk), the sentence could be rejected by the speakers
on semantic grounds even if the morphosyntactic structure were fine (cf. Cornips and
Poletto 2005 for further discussion of the notion of acceptability). Finally, it is important
to note that the success of any acceptability task relies on previous knowledge of the
relevant variants. Therefore, acceptability tasks are particularly useful in situation where
the inventory of variants is already known but not their exact geographical distribution.
For these purposes, as well as for theoretically oriented research into syntax, it is manda-
tory to know which variants are not acceptable in a particular dialect. Moreover, only a
procedure involving acceptability judgments gives access to the full range of variation
within a speaker’s competence.
Combination o translation and acceptability tasks

The syntactic part of the Sprachatlas von Niederbayern (Eroms 2003⫺) uses a combina-
tion of translation and acceptability tasks. The informants were first confronted with a
model sentence in Standard German, which they were asked to translate into their local
dialect. That variant was recorded as the one that was spontaneously mentioned. Then
alternative variants were suggested, the acceptability of which was also noted. An exam-
ple is (3), where the occurrence of complementizer doubling was being investigated:
(3) a. Model sentence in Standard German:

ich muss warten, bis der Vater heimkommt
I must wait until the father home.comes
‘I have to wait until Father comes home.’ (Eroms 2003⫺: vol. 1, 294)
b. Suggested alternative variants:
i. … bis da Vater …
until the father
ii. … bis dass da Vater …
until that the father
This method combines the advantages of both translation and acceptability tasks. It
provides evidence about the informants’ first, most spontaneous reaction to the Standard
German stimulus as well as the full range of possible and rejected variants. The method
makes possible a more finely graded cartographic depiction of the geographical variant
distribution. The symbols on Sprachatlas von Niederbayern maps (e.g., Eroms 2003⫺:
vol. 1, 295) distinguish between “spontaneous”, “accepted” and “rejected” grades for a
given variant.
In interviews for the SADS, the model sentences for translation and acceptability
tasks were always embedded in a small context story in order to make sure that the
informant captured the desired semantic/pragmatic interpretation of the relevant expres-
sion. One desirable side effect of this procedure is that informants concentrate on some-
thing other than the purely linguistic problem. Often, the answers are therefore given in
a more spontaneous way.
It is important to note that a combination of different interview techniques can or
must be applied, especially when multiple dimensions of variation are the focus of inter-
est. In the Atlas Lingüı́stico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (‘Diatopic and Diastratic
Linguistic Atlas of Uruguay’; Thun and Elizaincı́n 2000⫺), reading tasks, an interview
questionnaire and free conversation are combined and complement each other (Schmidt,
to appear).
4. Survey o written techniques

Length o the questionnaire
As a word of caution, a written questionnaire should not be overloaded with too many
tasks. Filling in a long questionnaire is not only tiring for the informants, it also creates
undesired repetition effects (after a couple of questions on the same phenomenon many
informants give answers in an increasingly mechanical way, without paying enough at-
tention to changes in context). A questionnaire should be able to be completed within
an hour. The questionnaire for the SADS was split into four series which were sent to
the informants over a period of several months (Bucheli and Glaser 2002: 52).
Writing in dialect
Investigations based on written questionnaires presuppose that the informants have
some skills in reading and writing down answers in dialect. In an area such as German-
speaking Switzerland, the prestige of the dialects is relatively high and most people are
not totally unfamiliar with reading words and sentences in dialect (since this also occurs
in advertising for instance), even though the standard variety is normally used for writ-
ing. Informants for the SADS were instructed to read aloud the model sentences in
dialect and to write down their own variants just as they are usually spoken, without
regard for orthography; this instruction proved adequate for virtually all informants
(only a few, who were later removed from the list of informants, gave answers in the
standard language). It is obvious that such vague instructions are not suitable if phonetic
detail is the focus of interest (as is not the case with the SADS, it being a syntactic atlas).
Giving a context
Especially (but not exclusively) for syntactic phenomena, it is advisable to embed the
model sentences in a little contextualizing story, in order to guarantee the right semantic/
pragmatic interpretation of the sentence. For word-order phenomena, information struc-
ture can be crucial. It is often only possible to judge the grammaticality of a given word
order if the intended topic⫺comment or focus⫺background structure is made plausible.
Another example is the “resultant state versus perfect” distinction in some dialects of
Swiss German. In German, the combination of have/be ⫹ past participle has (at least)
two meanings: (i) the description of a state which is the result of an action performed
some time in the past (without determining by whom it has been performed); (ii) so-
called perfect tense (which, semantically, is just periphrastic past for most dialects), i. e.,
the expression of an action performed in the past by the subject of the sentence. In some
archaic Swiss German dialects (e.g., Freiburg, Valais) the participle form agrees in gender
and number with the noun phrase it refers to, but only if the construction has the resul-
tant-state meaning. In the SADS questionnaire, the intended resultant-state meaning has
been achieved by constructing a context that makes this meaning plausible and adding
the adverbial immer no ‘still’:
(4) Context: Your brother has hurt his hand during gardening. Ms Terchert asks you
how he is now. You answer:
a. Er hät d Hand immer no iibunde (yes/no)
he has the:sg:fem hand always still bound
b. Er hät d Hand immer no iibundni (yes/no)
he has the:sg:fem hand always still bound-sg:fem
‘He still has his hand bandaged.’
Moreover, the context stories serve another purpose. They make the questionnaire more
entertaining for informants, and they distract them from the abstract linguistic problem.
But misinterpretations of a question do still occur. Again, an example is found in the
SADS material. In some archaic Swiss German dialects, a pronominal partitive form, re
(ra, ru), a relict genitive case marker (here: feminine singular), is used when referring to
an indeterminate amount of a substance or things, whereas in the majority of Swiss
dialects this relation remains unexpressed. In the context story, one person (female) says
there is no milk left. The other person (male) asks whether he should go and buy some.
Two variants of this response are suggested:
(5) a. Söll i go chaufe? (yes/no)

should I go buy
b. Söll i re go chaufe? (yes/no)
should I partitive go buy
‘Should I go and buy some (i. e., milk)?’
One person from an area where the partitive pronoun is completely unexpected rejected
the first (expected) variant while accepting the second. Moreover, the person noted the
following as his own variant:
(6) söll der go chaufä?

should you:dative go buy
‘Should I go and buy you some (i. e., milk)?’
Obviously, the informant wanted to insert a (benefactive) dative object to denote the
female from the context. The second variant in (5) comes closest to this, since the form
re can also be understood as the dative singular feminine, although in the third person.
This possible source of confusion had not been taken into account when the SADS
questionnaire was constructed. The confusion could have been easily avoided if the ac-
tors’ genders had been reversed in the context story (so that the female asks the male
the question). Confusions of this type are symptomatic of the indirect method. They
could easily be diagnosed and compensated for in an oral interview. See Bucheli and
Glaser (2002: 54) and Cornips (2002: 79⫺82) for further sources of confusion in written
questionnaires.
Translation tasks
The advantages of and issues surrounding translation tasks in written questionnaires
resemble those for direct interviews. To mention one additional aspect, optional dialect
structures (with no equivalent structure in the model sentence) tend to appear less fre-
quently in translation tasks than in acceptability tasks. For example, in many Swiss
German dialects, a dative object can be introduced by a prepositional marker, e.g., in
wem ‘dative marker ⫹ who:dative’ rather than Standard German wem ‘who:dative’
(cf. Seiler 2003). For most speakers, this kind of prepositional marking is optional. In a
translation task in the SADS questionnaire 336 informants spontaneously produced the
prepositional dative maker. But 1150 informants accepted prepositional marking in an
acceptability task, with 280 informants even judging it to be obligatory. That is, while
prepositional marking is optional for 870 (i. e., 1150⫺280) informants according to the
acceptability task results, only a few ⫺ 56 (i. e., 336⫺280) ⫺ of those informants made
use of it in the translation task.
Acceptability tasks
When acceptability judgments are elicited in written questionnaires, the model sentences
must be presented in an orthographical and lexical form that is acceptable to the infor-
mants. Thus, whereas the Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialectsyntaxis used spelling conven-
tions close to those of the Dutch standard language, the SADS suggested variants in a
dialectal form because the influence of the standard language was supposed to be mini-
mized (note that Switzerland is diglossic, with a sharp discontinuity between Standard
German and the dialect. If the spelling of the model sentences resembled Standard Ger-
man, it would have been extremely difficult to judge their acceptability from a dialectal
perspective). But which dialect ought to be used? The SADS worked with three variants:
one for Berne, one for Valais, and one for the rest (in Zurich German phonetics that
avoided too local-sounding forms). Although most speakers are used to listening to
dialects other than their own, for extralinguistic reasons some Bernese informants were
unable to cooperate if the model sentences sounded too Zurich-like. Speakers from Va-
lais use a variety that is very different from their local dialect when communicating with
speakers from other parts of the country. In order to not elicit the outsider variety, the
questionnaire was translated into Valais German. Most questionnaires use a simple yes/
no-distinction to record the acceptability of the suggested variants. The written pilot
study for the Syntactische atlas van de Nederlandse dialecten used a five-grade scale (Cor-
nips and Poletto 2005; see also Simon 2008 on graded acceptability elicitation). The Atlas
van de Nederlandse Dialectsyntaxis and the SADS questionnaires distinguish between
acceptable and preferred variants. In the SADS, informants were first asked to indicate
which of a choice of variants were acceptable (“Which ones can be used in your dia-
lect?”), then to decide which is the preferred (“most natural”) one, and then to write
down an additional variant if the informant would not use any of those suggested. This
design makes it possible to distinguish between unacceptable, acceptable, preferred and
obligatory variants in the cartographic analysis of the results. Interestingly, geographical
transitions from one variant to another are often gradual; for example, a variant is
obligatory in the west, preferred but in competition with others in more central areas,
acceptable but dispreferred farther eastwards, and unacceptable in the easternmost areas
(see Seiler 2004 for the gradual transition from western ascending to eastern descending
orderings in verb clusters and Seiler 2005 for a similar picture concerning purposive
infinitives). It is of crucial importance that the informants also have the opportunity to
write down their own variant in acceptability tasks (“Would you say the same thing in
a different way? How?”). Very often, informants reject all of the suggested variants for
lexical or phonetic reasons, but their own variant is identical to one of the suggested
model sentences as far as the syntactic structure is concerned. Moreover, in many cases,
new (i. e., previously unknown to the investigator) variants or insights into relevant but
as yet unknown semantic properties of the suggested variants appear here.
Completion tasks
Completion tasks consist of a sentence fragment, together with an instruction concerning
the intended meaning of the completed sentence as a whole. Completion tasks have
sporadically been applied in collecting data for the SADS (see Bucheli and Glaser 2002:
61⫺62 for details).
Assessing the results o written questionnaires

As mentioned in section 2.2, the reliability of results gained by means of written ques-
tionnaires is more difficult to control, mainly because the behavior of the informant is
not immediately observable. However, as more recent research suggests, the results of
oral and written elicitation match remarkably well (cf. Bucheli, Berger and Glaser 2004
and Seiler 2003 for comparisons of the orally elicited Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz
data and the SADS questionnaire study; Schmidt 2005 on the comparability of the writ-
ten Deutscher Sprachatlas and oral Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas data). The reliability of
written questionnaire material can be estimated if the following points are kept in mind.
⫺ Mass comparison: To some degree, the lack of direct control can be compensated for
by the great amount of collected data. Problematic answers ⫺ which are certain to
be found in any questionnaire study ⫺ become marginalized. This idea already un-
derlay the data collection for the Deutscher Sprachatlas: “It is precisely the number
of localities represented which protects us from incorrect data from a single one”
(Wrede 1895: 35, quoted in Niebaum and Macha 2006: 16; my translation). For the
same reason, the SADS works together with several informants at each survey loca-
tion (seven on average). Taking as an example the use of an impersonal passive exple-
tive in the middle field position in Swiss German (do wird’s gwärchet, lit. ‘here be-
comes-it worked’, Kulm/Aargau, Frey 1906: 28), the construction has been very spo-
radically judged as acceptable in various areas of German-speaking Switzerland.
However, it is only in a central area (Aargau, Lucerne) that the construction is ac-
cepted significantly more often, i. e., by more than one informant per locality.
⫺ Repetition: The same phenomenon can be elicited several times with superficial
changes, especially when a questionnaire is split into parts.
⫺ Analysis of comments: Some informants make extensive use of opportunities to com-
ment on the suggested variants, the way the questionnaire is structured, etc. A careful
analysis of such comments helps to assess whether the task is understood in the
manner intended, whether the task is confusingly formulated, whether all relevant
variants are suggested in acceptability tasks, etc.
⫺ Oral interviews: In addition to written questionnaires, it is recommended that investi-
gators collect a control sample of data via oral interviews, where possible with dif-
ferent informants, in order to avoid memory effects. It might be the case that the
results of oral versus written elicitations deviate from one another, but the control
sample can tell us in which direction and to what extent.
⫺ Deviations from the standard language: A notorious problem with translation tasks
is the influence of the model sentence written in the standard language. While there
is no way of avoiding that influence, it has a clear advantage, too. When a translation
closely corresponds to the standard language model, the interpretation remains un-
clear: is the variant given by the informant really what she/he uses in dialect, or is it
merely an imitation of the model sentence? However, cases where the informant’s
translation deviates from the standard language model can be taken as clear evidence
that the variant is rooted in the dialect (Glaser 2000: 263).
⫺ Dialect-geographical differences: It is clear that all elicitation procedures, oral or
written, represent actual use only in a distorted way. But whilst it is difficult to mea-
sure the amount of distortion vis-à-vis actual use (see section 1.2), it needs to be kept
in mind that, as a desired result of standardization of elicitation procedures, the
distortion, however great it might be, is identical for all informants. If a standardized
experiment yields systematic geographical differences in the results, it is highly prob-
able that there is also a difference in actual use in the areas. In other words, if no
dialect-geographical differences are revealed on the basis of elicited data, the inter-
pretation remains unclear: either there is simply no dialect difference with respect to
the elicited variable, or the experiment has failed, e.g., because the task has been
formulated in a misleading fashion. By contrast, if an isogloss shows up as a result of
the analysis of elicited data, there must be some concomitant difference in actual use.
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30. Investigating language in space: Experimental

techniques
1. Theoretical and definitional considerations

2. Experimental construction of language-use data
3. Experimental construction of language-attitudes data
4. References
1. Theoretical and deinitional considerations
The appropriateness of the methods we use to collect data is determined by our theories
about the nature of the object under study and the questions we ask about it. The nature
of language (in space, as well as in general) is no uncontroversial issue, as humans are
fundamentally both natural and social beings, with an ability to communicate that also
has both natural and social aspects to it. Both natural and human scientists use experi-
mentation as a method of data collection, but the experimental approach is commonly
held to be less appropriate within the human sciences than within the natural sciences.
So, what are we to understand by experimentation in the context of language in space?
As there does not seem to be any simple and straightforward answer to this question, it
will reappear throughout this article. To begin with, this first section introduces some
conceptual distinctions that may help us explicate the notion of “experimentation with
language in space”. These introductory remarks shall be very brief with regard to the
object (language in space; section 1.1), and a little more elaborated with regard to the
method (experimentation; section 1.2).
1.1. The object: Language in space
1.1.1. Space: Cultural entities
Discourse about how and why language varies and changes across the spatial dimension
often reflects the “natural” and “social” foundations of human beings and their lan-
guages in a direct and “naı̈ve” way. While language differences in the social landscape
are understood in terms of “social barriers” (between classes, genders, ethnic groups,
etc.), language differences in the geographic landscape are understood in terms of “natu-
ral barriers” (such as mountains, woods, bodies of water, etc.). In this article we shall
take it as a given that both geographic and social spaces ⫺ beyond having a material
existence and being “hard facts” ⫺ are also “imagined” (in the sense of Anderson 1983),
and that the issue of how and why language varies and changes is mainly to do with
space as an array of ideologically constructed, cultural spaces.
30. Experimental techniques 529
1.1.2. Language: Use and attitudes, production and perception,

conscious and subconscious
In order to understand language variation and change across cultural spaces, we need
to study not only the linguistic facts as such but also their social meaning. We need to
collect data at the level of language use, and we need to collect data at the level of social
evaluation (or attitudes). This distinction is at the root of the main division of this article
into a section on the construction of language-use data (section 2) and another on the
construction of language-attitudes data (section 3).
Both language use and language attitudes do of course have productive as well as
perceptive (or receptive) aspects to them, but in our context here the distinction between
production and perception will often refer to very much the same distinction as that
between use and attitudes.
Likewise, it goes for both use/production and perception/evaluation that these pro-
cesses may be either conscious or subconscious, and this distinction is by no means the
least pertinent in connection with experimental research.
1.2. The method: Experimentation
As used in practice, there is no clear-cut dividing line between data-collection methods

referred to as “experiments” on the one hand (treated in this article) and “questionnaires
and interviews” on the other (cf. Seiler in this volume). As we shall see, an interview
may not only contain an experiment, it may in itself be an experiment, or, put the
other way round, an experiment may take the form of an interview. It therefore seems
appropriate to begin by determining in what fundamental way experimentation is some-
thing other than questioning and interviewing. In so doing, we shall distinguish between
experimental and observational approaches to research (leaving aside the obvious fact
that “making observations” is a central aspect of research in general) and try to point
out what differentiates the former from the latter.
1.2.1. Deining experiment
The Danish National Encyclopedia (giving the floor, not surprisingly, to a nuclear physi-
cist) defines an experiment as a “set up or arrangement with the purpose of discovering
new connections or verifying a scientific hypothesis or theory” (SDE 1996: 447; my
translation). The definition points to the deliberately staged nature of an experiment: it
is “an arrangement with a purpose”. As to the substance of the purpose or aim of
experimentation, the definition points at what is commonly seen as two levels of ambi-
tion. The less ambitious aim is to describe (“discover new connections”), the more ambi-
tious aim is to explain (“verify a hypothesis or theory”). There is no one-to-one relation-
ship between such ambitions and research approaches: neither the observational nor the
experimental approach necessarily aims beyond the descriptive establishment of connec-
tions (correlations), but both of them may, and often will, aim at answering the why
question of explanation as well as the what/who/when/how questions of description. Nev-

ertheless, the quest for explanation is often seen as particularly characteristic of experi-
mental research.
1.2.2. Techniques or securing control
Explanation in experimental research is based on the comparison of measures obtained

under different conditions. Valid and reliable comparison is only possible with full con-
trol of the different factors or phenomena (entities and processes) that make up the
experimental arrangement. Thus, the basic techniques of experimentation are techniques
for securing control.
Control is searched for through operationalization of the experimental factors into
rules (scales) on which they can be measured. Several rules may be candidates for the
measurement of the phenomenon we want to study, and the chosen rule may be con-
structed in several ways. By choosing a rule that measures what we want to measure,
we solve what is known as the validity problem in data collection. By constructing the
rule so that it measures in the same way each time it is used, we solve what is known as
the reliability problem in data collection. Only by securing the validity and reliability of
our data do we make them replicable, and hence comparable with other data (cf. König
in this volume).
The phenomenon we want to study is operationalized as the dependent variable.
Factors we suspect of having an impact on the phenomenon are operationalized as inde-
pendent variables. Both dependent and independent variables need to be divided into
clear divisions (units, steps, entities). The dependent variable “collects” data that are said
to attain either a nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio level of measurement. On a nominal
scale the relationship between its units is a matter of “either/or” (X or Y), on the other
scales it is matter of “more or less” of the same on a continuum (X1 or X2 or X3 …).
The levels of measurement are of great importance for the statistical analyses of the data.
1.2.3. Obtrusiveness and awareness
In order to secure full control of all variables, the experimental arrangement will often
be set up as a kind of “laboratory”. It follows that the search for control tends to destroy
“naturalness”. Normally, however, experimenters (as well as observers) are interested in
collecting “natural” data ⫺ data as they are, independent of being collected or made
data, so to speak. This is known as the experimenter’s (as well as the observer’s) paradox.
As laboratories are not part of people’s everyday lives, data obtained in laboratories or
laboratory-like settings are by their nature non-natural. Attempts at solving the non-
naturalness problem involve moving the data collection to everyday situations which
can be “used” as experimental arrangements. Such experimental exploitations of real-life
situations are known as field experiments. While laboratory experiments are by nature
obtrusive, field experiments aim to be unobtrusive.
The reason why obtrusive data collection may be problematic has to do with human
consciousness and awareness. When some aspect of human mind or behavior is the
object of study, awareness is often thought to impede naturalness, in the sense that the
informants’ answers or reactions will be influenced by their ideas about what the re-
searcher expects from them, or about social acceptability in general and how they present
themselves. Thus, attempts at solving the paradox of data collection typically seek to
reduce or avoid the participants’ awareness, so that their answers or reactions are sub-
consciously offered. In field experiments, it may be possible to attain this by simply
avoiding informing the participants that data collection is taking place. This will never
be the case in laboratory-like settings, where the awareness problem may instead be
addressed by asking subjects to accept that they will not be informed about the purpose
of the experiment until after its completion, or by using a deception technique (e.g., a
cover story) to give subjects the wrong impression of what the data collection is about.
2. Experimental construction o language-use data

Being based on self-reported data obtained from respondents in interviews or question-
naires, traditional dialectology can be considered observational in its approach to data
collection. Whether they themselves traveled for years as interviewers from village to
village (like Aasen in Norway or Edmont for Gilliéron in France) or covered the geo-
graphical space by means of mail-distributed questionnaires (like Wenker in Germany),
the aim of dialectology’s first great data collectors, and their followers, was to describe
the geographically distributed variation of language. It is not that they were necessarily
uninterested in explanations, rather that their theories constructed the facts of geograph-
ical distribution as the necessary and sufficient empirical evidence for how variation and
change in language should be understood, either in terms of sound laws, or, alternatively,
in terms of “to every word its own history” (cf. Murray, Schmidt in this volume). Experi-
mentation enters the study of language in space with the development of variationist
sociolinguistics and its new focus on explanations in terms of social motivation and social
mechanisms. So let us start by looking at how our theoretical concepts are rendered in
two of sociolinguistics’ classic studies, namely Coupland’s (1984) travel agency study
(section 2.1) and Labov’s (1966) department store study (section 2.2).
2.1. No deliberate stimulus-variable manipulation: The Cardi travel

agency study
The aim of this study was to test the claims of speech accommodation theory (Giles and
Powesland 1975) that interlocutors accommodate linguistically, either by converging or
diverging, and to examine the nature of these processes as either “direct linguistic match-
ing” or “interpretively based persona construction”. The data collection was conducted
in a travel agency in Cardiff and yielded tape-recorded interactions between one assistant
and her clients. The “paradox” of data collection was solved by not making the clients
aware that they were being recorded until they left the agency, at which point they were
debriefed and asked for permission to use the recorded material; the assistant knew
about the recording, but thought that the object of study was the clients’ speech alone.
In fact, the analysis focuses on whether and how the assistant accommodates to her
clients, as representatives of categories in social space. The measurement of accommoda-
tion was done on four phonological variables (dependent variables), all of which were
divided into two variants. Social space was operationalized as an occupational class vari-
able with six units (independent background variable), on which the clients were distrib-
uted on the basis of information they gave about themselves during the debriefing.
This clearly is an example of a deliberate set up which aims to examine a scientific
theory and explain language use in social space, and which comes far in securing the
unobtrusive and yet highly controlled character of the whole arrangement. In other
words, the study is an experiment according to our definition. It is also an experiment
according to A Dictionary of Sociolinguistics, which defines experiment as “the study of
any phenomenon under controlled conditions designed to assess the effect of one vari-
able on another” (Swann et al. 2004: 105). However, Coupland himself explicitly talks
of an “observational approach” in a “non-experimental setting” (1984: 52). Coupland
offers the travel agency study as a contribution to the development of social-psychologi-
cal speech accommodation theory. So his labels should first and foremost be understood
in contrast to the “experimental approach” in “laboratory settings” that is typical of the
relevant social-psychological research. Nevertheless, it seems clear that our definition
renders much research which researchers themselves consider “observational” as “experi-
mental”. In fact, if control alone defines experimentation, variationist studies in general
are experiments. This may be seen as a reason for narrowing down the definition.
We can achieve that by distinguishing between two kinds of independent variables:
stimulus variables and background variables. Background variables are “naturally pres-
ent” in the material and are exploited by the researcher in the set up of the experiment.
“Naturally present” differences may also be exploited to construct the stimulus variable,
but more often the stimulus variable is introduced into the setting by the researcher. In
the travel agency arrangement, what was measured was the assistant’s language use in
response to the clients’ language use. In other words, the clients’ linguistic behavior was
the stimulus variable. The differences in this behavior were not a result of any manipula-
tion by the researcher. Coupland did not introduce the differences into the setting; he
just exploited “naturally present” differences in the construction of the stimulus variable.
2.2. Deliberate stimulus-variable manipulation: The New York

department stores study
Labov’s (1966) famous department store study is well suited for illustrating an experi-
mental design that includes a deliberately manipulated stimulus variable, and also for
illustrating the characteristics of an experiment mentioned in section 1. It should be
mentioned, though, that Labov himself usually refers to this study as a “rapid and
anonymous survey” based on interviews (a problematic label, one might argue, as we are
talking about encounters yielding sequences of four short, more or less identical, utter-
ances, described in section 2.2.1). In the programmatic article on the field methods used
in the Philadelphia project, a list of eight different “field experiments” is discussed in the
“Neighborhood Studies” section (Labov 1984: 42⫺45) while “the method of rapid and
anonymous surveys” (1984: 49) is accorded a section of its own. But, Labov has also
used the term experiment in reference to the department store study. Thus, the relevant
chapter in the seminal book Sociolinguistic Patterns ends with the statement that
We see rapid and anonymous observations as the most important experimental method in a
linguistic program which takes as its primary object the language used by ordinary people
in their everyday affairs (Labov 1972: 69, italics added).
Being set up to do exactly that ⫺ i. e., study “language used by ordinary people in
their everyday affairs” ⫺ the department store study can clearly be classified, just like
Coupland’s travel agency study, as an unobtrusive field experiment and a study of lan-
guage in social space. In the following paragraphs, we shall show in some detail, under
(a), how the linguistic and socio-spatial variation was operationalized into variables.
Under (b), we shall exemplify some of the problems posed by the experimental approach
for the study of language in space, drawing heavily on Labov’s own instructive discus-
sions of operationalization problems with respect to both dependent and independent
variables.
2.2.1. The stimulus variable
(a) The data collection procedure ⫺ which secures the unobtrusiveness of the event and
the informants’ ignorance of their status as informants ⫺ is described as follows:
The interviewer approached the informant in the role of a customer asking directions
to a particular department. The department was one which was located on the fourth
floor. When the interviewer asked, “Excuse me, where are the women’s shoes?” the
answer would normally be, “Fourth floor.” The interviewer then leaned forward and
said, “Excuse me?” He would usually then obtain another utterance, “Fourth floor,”
spoken in careful style under emphatic stress. The interviewer would then move along
the aisle of the store to a point immediately beyond the informant’s view, and make a
written note of the data. (Labov 1972: 49)
In the way he asks for the information twice, Labov deliberately manipulates the
contextual condition under which “fourth floor” is uttered by the informants.
(b) There were problems with this operationalization, however. Because it turned out
that the simple request for repetition had only a limited effect on the dependent
variable, Labov suggests that the stylistic range might be enlarged “by emphasizing
the difficulty in hearing by one technique or another” (Labov 1972: 66).
2.2.2. The dependent variable
(a) The dependent variable is the manifestation of postvocalic /r/ in the words fourth
and floor. The variable is divided into two units (variants) ⫺ “presence” or “ab-
sence” ⫺ and yields data at a nominal level of measurement. In other words, a
naturally continuous variable is operationalized into discrete units:
For each plainly constricted value of the variable, (r-1) was entered; for unconstricted
schwa, lengthened vowel, or no representation, (r-0) was entered. Doubtful cases or
partial constriction were symbolized d and were not used in the final tabulation.
(Labov 1972: 50)
(b) The transformation of something continuous into something discrete will always
raise problems. In this connection, Labov points to the risk of unconscious experi-
menter bias, because “the transcriber, myself, knew what the object of the test was”
(Labov 1972: 66). In general, and independently of when the transcription takes
place (during data collection as in this case, or during data preparation in the case
of tape-recorded speech), any transcriber should treat doubtful cases in accordance
with strict guidelines.
2.2.3. The background variables
(a) Social space is operationalized by means of several background variables. The main
one of these is the department store variable, which is divided into three units: Sacks,
Macy’s, and S. Klein. These units are characterized and ranked as to social status,
on the basis of their advertising and price policies, the physical plant of the stores,
working conditions and general prestige. Other “naturally given” distinctions ex-
ploited by Labov for further operationalization of the social space included the
informants’ sex (men, women), age (estimated in blocks of five years), occupation
(floorwalker, sales, cashier, stockboy), race (black, white), and accent (foreign, re-
gional, “none”). In addition, informants’ working place in terms of floor and depart-
ment was also registered.
(b) How to operationalize naturally continuous variables is a problem with background
variables too. Age was operationalized as the researcher’s estimate, during data col-
lection, of the informants’ age within five-year intervals. But as “these figures can-
not be considered reliable for any but the simplest kind of comparison” (Labov
1972: 57), the informants were regrouped on an age variable with only three units
(15⫺30, 35⫺50, 55⫺70) for the purpose of more reliable analysis. Another sampling
problem was the result of selecting the most available subject in a given area. Labov
certainly subscribes to the view that good sampling in survey studies aim at repre-
sentativity, but points out that an effort to avoid sampling bias should not be al-
lowed to interfere with the unobtrusive character of the speech event (Labov 1972:
66). A general problem with background variables as exploitations of naturally pres-
ent distinctions is that they may show up too rarely in the collected data to be made
the object of analysis. In the New York department stores study, this turned out to
be the case with the department variable: “the numbers for individual departments
are not large enough to allow for comparison” (Labov 1972: 49, footnote 7).
2.2.4. The quest or explanation
The operationalization of the interactional context (the stimulus variable) is grounded

in certain theoretical assumptions about the nature of intra-individual variation, namely
that it is motivated by different degrees of “attention to speech”, and more specifically
in such a way that more attention yields more careful speech. The theoretical framework
furthermore predicts that careful speech will contain more “present” /r/s than casual
speech, because careful style is assumed to favor prestigious speech variants, and pro-
nounced postvocalic /r/ is assumed to be a prestige feature. The notion of prestige, in
turn, is tied up with theoretical conceptualizations of social space. In the final instance,
the data collection in the department stores is based on a complex theory, both psycho-
logical and social in nature, the ultimate aim of which is to explain (not just describe)
the distributional use of language across social space. The whole “arrangement” is set
up to test a hypothesis and validate a theory.
2.2.5. Consequences o narrowing down the deinition o experiment
One might object, rightly I think, that a requirement that stimulus-variable manipulation
be deliberate puts the focus on experimentation’s quest for explanation ⫺ to the detri-
ment of the more modest aim of description, which was included as a possibly solitary
goal in our encyclopedic definition (cf. section 1.2.1). However, if experimentation is
commonly felt to be particularly explanatory in nature (as suggested in section 1.2.1), it
is probably because the common notion of experimentation includes this “deliberate
manipulation of a stimulus variable”. We may note that this narrower definition is also
found in the literature, e.g., in the glossary section of Introduction to Social Psychology,
where experiment is spelled out as “a method in which the researcher deliberately intro-
duces some change into a setting to examine the consequences of that change” (Hew-
stone et al. 1988: 449). This narrower definition omits studies that, notwithstanding the
general use of experimental techniques to secure control (operationalization of vari-
ables), are commonly seen as “observational”, like the Cardiff travel agency study and
many, many others. The narrower definition also shuts out contrastive sociolinguistic
studies that “stage” existing data sets as “laboratories” in which “experiments” may be
carried out (e.g., Sandøy 2004).
In any case, as background-variable manipulation ⫺ i. e., exploitation of naturally
present distinctions in terms of “social group belongingness” ⫺ will never be interest-
ingly (fundamentally) different from what we have already touched upon (section 2.2.3),
we shall focus the following discussion of experimental techniques on stimulus variables
and their manipulation.
2.3. The sociolinguistic interview as experiment
While it is true that interviewing is normally done with aims that do not require the kind
of control striven for in experimental approaches to data collection, it may also be the
case that an interview takes the form, wholly or partly, of an experiment. In fact, the
most common data collection method within variationist sociolinguistics, the sociolin-
guistic interview, often has experimental aspects to it ⫺ not only in the broader sense of
carefully controlled variables, but also in the narrower sense of a deliberately manipu-
lated stimulus variable.
Indeed, it is an important aspect of the sociolinguistic interview as developed and
used by Labov that it is a stimulus variable in the same way that the two-question
“interview” is the stimulus variable in the department stores experiment (section 2.2.1).
In either case, the stimulus variable operationalizes the “context of use” and is deliber-
ately manipulated by the researcher ⫺ in order to measure the effect on “language use”
(operationalized as dependent variables) in “space” (operationalized as background vari-
ables).
Furthermore, the operationalization of the “context of use” builds, of course, on the

same theoretical assumptions about the nature of intra-individual variation (outlined in
section 2.2.4). As a sociolinguistic interview is an obtrusive arrangement (the informants
know that they are taking part in something that is not an everyday affair), the default
interview context is assumed to yield “high awareness” and “careful speech”. Conse-
quently, elicitation of more casual speech is a priority in sociolinguistic interviewing ⫺
operationalized as speech produced with a minimum of monitoring awareness.
In order to manipulate the context of use in the sociolinguistic interview (or to ma-
nipulate the sociolinguistic interview as a context of use), Labov and his many followers
in variationist sociolinguistics have therefore used techniques aimed first and foremost
at reducing interviewees’ attention to their speech, but techniques aimed at increasing
such attention have also been applied (section 2.3.1). Or, to put it another way, tech-
niques have been used to construct “formal” versus “informal” contexts of use (section
2.3.2).
2.3.1. Constructing casual and careul speech data by manipulating attention
In order to reduce attention ⫺ by influencing the psychological “climate” of the en-

counter in such a way that the interviewee, ideally, forgets about being in an interview,
and, in particular, forgets all about its focus on language ⫺ two techniques in particular
have been used: (i) on the assumption that interviewee awareness will decrease as dura-
tion increases, interviewers make the encounter last one or two hours, or even more; (ii)
on the assumption that interviewee awareness will decrease as emotionality increases,
interviewers introduce topics and ask questions that are likely to arouse emotions.
We should not expect any automatic awareness reduction effect, however, neither
from longer duration nor from stronger emotions. Other factors influence the psycho-
logical climate as it develops during an interview, including first and foremost the indi-
vidual personalities of both interviewee and interviewer, and the interpersonal “chemis-
try” these give rise to. Hence, what should be stressed here is, first of all, the need for
ingenuity and flexibility in the design and use of awareness reduction techniques. The
“danger of death” question offers a classic illustration of the need to adapt these tech-
niques to the local context under study. In order to arouse emotion and thus reduce
attention to speech in the narration about the event, Labov successfully asked his New
York informants, Have you ever been in danger of death? Researchers in other and very
different communities (including myself in Denmark) have subsequently asked their in-
formants the same question ⫺ with no success at all. Thus, if most people in your
community have never been in danger of death, the challenge, of course, is to figure out
what other topics might elicit emotional narratives.
We may add that it seems more problematic, and perhaps even contradictory, to
think along these lines within theoretical frameworks that conceive of interactions as
continuous negotiations and renegotiations of relationships and identities.
Now, let us move on to techniques that are intended to influence informants’ aware-
ness in the opposite direction, so to speak, and cause increased attention to language.
We saw in section 2.2.1 how Labov used the hard-of-hearing technique in the department
store study. Such techniques will largely be the ones developed and used to establish
linguistic structure in the first place. In their search for sameness and difference amidst
the chaos of linguistic variability, linguists will often need to adopt a hard-of-hearing
persona in order to make their informants repeat. Thus, the Danish linguist Jørgen
Rischel reported that he was called “The Deaf Ear” by the Mlabri people in Northern
Thailand during his many years of fieldwork among them. Moreover, the obvious way
of putting focus on language is of course to make some aspect of language the topic of
the interview. Finally, as reading can be assumed to require more attention to speech
than talking, informants in sociolinguistic interviews may be asked to read aloud, either
a text or a list of words. Having informants read “minimal pairs” is used as the ultimate
way of directing attention to speech in the Labovian tradition.
2.3.2. Constructing casual and careul speech data by manipulating ormality
In addition to awareness versus non-awareness, casual and careful speech is often theo-
rized in variationist research in terms of formality: casual speech is informal, careful
speech is formal.
We have several options at our disposal if we want to manipulate the formality of
the recording situation.
i. We may change our own appearance and behavior as interviewers. A pair of jeans
and a T-shirt easily construe another situation than a suit and a tie; serving a beer
may change a situation, and so on and so forth.
ii. We may change the location of the interview. A first part may be conducted in a
private context, e.g., the interviewee’s own home, a second part in a public context,
e.g., the interviewee’s working place, etc.
iii. We may change the numbers and kinds of participants in the recording situation.
A husband or wife, or a friend, may be included, either as silent bystanders or as
participants in their own right. With two or more persons present, the interaction
can be changed into a conversation without the interviewer if the latter leaves the
scene for a time; or the encounter can be set up as a group conversation from the
very beginning.
Again, as with awareness, we should not expect any automatic effects from manipulating
these contextual factors. There is no direct relationship between, say, numbers of partici-
pants and degrees of formality. Nor should we expect any simple relationship between
degrees of awareness and degrees of formality. While the presence of a friend during an
interview, or of several friends during a group conversation, may well reduce the formal-
ity of the situation, the awareness issue is, in the first instance, likely to become more
complex the more participants there are in an event. So, the bottom line is that, more
than anything else, we need to bring reflexivity to our attempts to manipulate the in-
terview context.
3. Experimental construction o language-attitudes data

If we assume that people may hold, or express, quite different attitudes towards language
use differences ⫺ dependent upon whether or not they are aware of displaying language
attitudes ⫺ we may, just as for language use, collect data under “awareness” versus
“non-awareness” conditions and register how this manipulation affects the expression
of attitudes.
3.1. Experimental use o interviews and questionnaires
Interviews and questionnaires (cf. Seiler in this volume) belong here to the extent that
these methods take on an experimental character when construed as tests of the effects
of “question manipulations”. Such manipulations have to do with the type and phrasing
of questions (section 3.1.1), the scope and ordering of questions (section 3.1.2) and the
further contextualization of questions (section 3.1.3). One should of course try to avoid
manipulating in such a way that respondents feel manipulated.
3.1.1. Manipulations o question types and phrasings
The type issue is best illustrated with reference to the distinction between open-endedness
and closedness in questioning research. For instance, people’s expressed feelings about
living in their area or town will be of interest in a study of language variation in space,
and the potential difference between answers to open-ended and closed questions may
well in itself shed valuable light on the issue. Thus, in our own studies of language
attitudes in the Danish town of Næstved, close to Copenhagen, we raised the topic of
“local belongingness”, and other topics judged to be of relevance to the community’s
language ideology, in both an open-ended way (What is it like to live in the Næstved
area?) and in a closed format (How do you feel about living in the Næstved area? plus a
choice of predetermined answers), and have sought to integrate data from both types of
questioning into the analyses (Kristiansen 2004). In closed (structured) questioning, rais-
ing the same issue in different phrasings may well result in quite different answering
patterns, and thereby yield possibly valuable data to interpret.
3.1.2. Manipulations o question scope and ordering
In questions that involve some kind of evaluative comparison, the range of “objects”
included may be altered in order to test the effect of any change in comparative scope.
Thus, in the Næstved studies (Kristiansen 1991), one group of adolescents was asked in
a questionnaire study to rank sjællandsk, københavnsk and rigsdansk, i. e., the names of
the three ways of speaking Danish that are important for social identification in the
Næstved area (the “local” variety, the “Copenhagen” variety and the “standard” variety,
respectively), while another group was asked to rank a list which included another four
such names and thus enlarged the perspective to comprise the whole of Denmark. (In
the Næstved case, this widening of the comparative scope did not influence the relative
ranking of the three varieties under study). So-called funneling is a technique used to
progressively narrow down the focus of questioning. It is an indirect way of approaching
the heart of the matter, and may be used as a way of manipulating the respondents’
degree of awareness of the object of inquiry. For instance, if the object of study is the
role of language use and attitudes in feelings of local affiliation and identity, one might
want to start by addressing the issue with more general area-related questions like What
is it like to live in the Næstved area?, Do you often go to Copenhagen?, and end with
more specific language-related questions like Have you ever been teased because of your
language?, For instance in Copenhagen?. The effect of such focus manipulations may be
studied in answers from individual respondents, but can not really be controlled for
unless we administer different sequences of reaction-differentiating questions to two or
more groups of respondents that can thus be compared.
3.1.3. Manipulations o question contextualization
In fact, the question manipulations we have discussed in the two preceding paragraphs
can all be grouped under the heading of changes in the context of questioning. However,
another kind of question contextualization technique should be added, which, unlike
those already mentioned, does not consist in a manipulation of the context in terms of
the questions themselves but in terms of other aspects of the inquiry setting. One way
of doing this is to ask the questions first in a questionnaire and then again in a sub-
sequent interview, or the other way round: first in an interview and then followed up
afterwards in a questionnaire. Perhaps a more common way of manipulating the con-
textual condition is to raise issues with the respondents first in individual interviews and
then in group conversations.
3.2. Experimental approaches to recognition and representation
Social psychologists tell us that evaluation presupposes categorization and recognition,

and that categorization in turn involves comparison and evaluation: we can not evaluate
something without recognizing it, and we can not recognize something without evaluat-
ing it (Hogg and Abrams 1988). In other words, the cognitive and affective aspects of
our relationship with the world are two faces of the same coin. In studies of language
attitudes, we may therefore feel a need to use some kind of recognition test in order to
check on what people (think they) evaluate: what exactly is it that they recognize?
3.2.1. Mental maps
Following up on techniques used within cultural geography, and also previously em-
ployed in Japanese and Dutch dialectology, Dennis Preston has headed the development
of perceptual dialectology (cf. Preston in this volume). Whereas dialectologists are tradi-
tionally engaged in the localization of boundaries and areas as they exist by virtue of
similarities and difference in people’s use of language, perceptual dialectology’s interest
lies in establishing the language-in-space categories people operate with: what do their
mental maps of regional speech look like? Where do people think linguistically distinct
places lie, and what do they think about them?
Answers to these questions are obtained by giving people a blank map, of the United
States for instance, and asking them to first encircle what they believe to be distinct
dialect areas and then attach some characterizing label to these areas. Computer-assisted
analyses of large numbers of such hand-drawn maps allow for generalizations about
subjectively extant language-in-space categories. Thus, a map of the USA divided into
14 such categories emerges as the typical southeastern Michigan mental map, whereas
the typical southern Indiana mental map consists of just 10 speech regions (Preston
1989: 343⫺344). (For illustrations of the mental-map technique and its results, cf. Pres-
ton 1989b, 1999; Niedzielski and Preston 2000; Long and Preston 2002.)
In a study of perceived English dialect areas in Wales, Garrett, Coupland and Wil-
liams (2003: 92) adopted a somewhat different mental-map approach in that they asked
their respondents to outline a maximum of eight English dialect areas, followed by the
usual invitations to label and characterize the areas identified. The choice of eight was
based on piloting work that pointed to this as an optimal number. Respondents generally
identified the maximum number requested (2003: 112).
In the research referred to above, the mental-map technique is not used experimen-
tally, in the sense of a stimulus variable being manipulated. However, it is easy to see
how this could be done, and our examples do indeed suggest that it might be interesting
to present the map task in different ways to comparable groups in order to see whether
and how such manipulations influence the numbers and types of language-in-space cat-
egories that are recognized.
3.2.2. Locating speech samples in space
The basic technique for testing people’s ability to “localize” speech differences consists in
having them listen to and assess the geographical (or social) “belongingness” of recorded
speakers. The concrete design may vary considerably, reflecting the fact that the test will
often respond to the divergent research interests of different research programs.
In nationwide studies of language attitudes among young Danes (the LANCHART
studies; see Kristiansen to appear), the recognition test formed part of a battery of tests
which was administered to subjects in a strict procedural order, and the main purpose
of which was to manipulate “the awareness condition” under which evaluations took
place. The recognition test was presented just after the subjects had finished reacting to
audio recordings of twelve young speakers (two boys and two girls for each of the three
locally relevant accents, i. e., the local, the modern, and the conservative accents of the
standard language) under conditions in which they did not realize they were evaluating
differently accented speech. This was now revealed to them, and they were asked to
judge, while listening to the tape again, whether they thought the speakers were from
Copenhagen or from their own local town. The picture that emerged from this experi-
ment shows high “recognition” rates for young Danes in general: speakers with the
modern accent were mostly (i. e., by two out of three subjects) judged to be Copenhagen-
ers, speakers with the local accent were predominantly (three times out of four) recog-
nized as locals, whereas the distribution for speakers with the conservative accent was a
50/50 split, thus sustaining a generally held view that what characterizes this latter accent
is its non-localizability.
In the recognition task included in the Welsh studies reported in Garrett, Coupland
and Williams (2003), the informants were asked to choose between seven given geo-
graphical names (six Welsh names plus “England”) as they listened to fourteen young
speakers (two boys from each of the seven places). Even though the linguistic differences
were no doubt greater and should thus have made the task easier, the greater complexity
of having to choose between seven places, instead of two as in the Danish test, may well
have been the main reason why Welsh adolescents showed much lower percentages of
correct recognitions, in the order of 15 to 40 percent, with a mean of “just below 45

percent” for recognition of speakers of their own local variety (2003: 200⫺201).
In his studies of folk perceptions of the north⫺south dimension of US English, Pres-
ton (1989a) used speech samples drawn from a geographical continuum of nine sites
representing this dimension from Saginaw, Michigan in the north to Dorthan, Alabama
in the south. Two groups of judges, representing the northern (Michigan) and middle
(Indiana) parts of the continuum, assigned site numbers from 1 (northernmost) to 9
(southernmost) to the voices they heard. The mean scores for both groups indicated that
the north⫺south dimension consisted of only two categories of linguistic distinctiveness,
with the six northernmost sites belonging to one area, and the three southernmost sites
belonging to another area. In a recent web-based experiment, Plichta and Preston (2005)
used an analysis/resynthesis technique to prepare a stimulus variable ⫺ a seven-step
continuum of monophthongization of the phoneme /ay/ in the word guide ⫺ which
respondents reacted to by assigning site numbers from 1 through 9 to the 42 randomized
tokens of guide they listened to (three tokens for each of the seven steps for two voices,
one male and one female). The results here did not group the stimulus speech samples
in terms of a northern and a southern area, but instead showed regularly increasing
mean scores for each step along the monophthongization continuum. The perfect and
robust discrimination of steps appears as a subconsciously produced pattern at the group
level, as respondents generally commented that they did not feel capable of discriminat-
ing the varying degrees of monophthongization presented on the tape. In addition, for
the same synthesized /ay/ qualities, the subjects as a group ranked the male voice as
“more southern” than the female voice, again in a perfect and statistically robust way
across all seven steps, thus producing a nice illustration of the intertwined nature of
cognition and affection. The authors conclude by expressing a strong belief that
“… finely-grained acoustic differences […] may be manipulated in experimental settings
to confirm perceptual salience in such tasks as social category identification” (Plichta
and Preston 2005: 128).
We notice that both qualitative and quantitative aspects of the stimulus voices can
easily be manipulated in many ways, and add that, just as for mental-map drawing
(section 3.2.1), manipulations of the answering format might also prove revealing, as
suggested by Clopper and Pisoni (2007) who report on dialect classification experiments
using the same stimulus voices in both a six-alternative forced-choice categorization task
and a free classification task.
3.3. Experimental approaches to evaluation
Although (re)cognition and affection are two sides of the same coin, it is not only pos-
sible but also analytically necessary to focus on one side at the time. Without forgetting
that categorization is “thinking” (representations, beliefs), we now change focus to con-
sider categorization in terms of “assessing” (values, feelings). The stimulus material may
be presented as either names (labels) for, or examples of, different “ways of speaking”
or “speech styles”. We shall distinguish between the evaluation of language in space
based on conceptual labels (section 3.3.1) and evaluation that involves speech samples
(section 3.3.2).
3.3.1. Evaluation based on conceptual labels
Here, a list of names or labels for different “ways of speaking” is presented to subjects
in questionnaire form together with some format for assessing the conceptualized speech
styles. A small number of labels makes it possible to simply ask subjects to rank them
according to some criterion. This was the approach adopted in the Næstved studies,
where the two label-ranking tasks included either just three or seven labels (mentioned
in section 3.1.2), and it was also the approach chosen in the LANCHART studies (men-
tioned in section 3.2.2), in which no label-ranking task included more than ten labels.
Ranking has also been used by Preston (1989b) in his studies of how the accents of the
50 United States (plus Washington DC and New York City) are evaluated in terms of
“correctness” and “pleasantness”.
With a large number of labels, ranking becomes a rather absurd task, and rating
scales are used instead. Thus, in another study by Preston (1989a), subjects rated the
many state names for “correctness” and “pleasantness” on ten-point scales. In a classic
study within this approach, Giles (1970) operated with sixteen different labels for English
accents (regional, social, and foreign) which were rated on seven-point scales for “status
content”, “aesthetic content”, and “communicative content” (a measure of perceived
ease of interaction with the speaker). In a recent online survey, more than 5000 infor-
mants from across the UK rated 34 such labels on two seven-point scales in terms of
“prestige” and “pleasantness” (Coupland and Bishop 2007). The experimental nature of
these studies made it possible to treat a subset of the 2007 study as a near-replication of
the 1970 study, thus accomplishing a real-time comparison of language attitudes (Bishop,
Coupland and Garrett 2005).
3.3.2. Evaluation involving speech samples
Categorizations of “others” and of “self” are no less intertwined than those of cognition
and/or affection (Turner et al. 1987) ⫺ but, again, we may analytically focus on one at
a time: first, self-evaluations (section 3.3.2.1), and second, evaluations of others (sec-
tion 3.3.3.2).
3.3.2.1. Report or evaluation o ones own speech
The point of self-report tests is that people “place” their own speech in relation to some
other speech. Accomplishing the placement task clearly involves processes of both re-
cognition and emotion. This double-sidedness of the placement task has been exploited
in a series of self-evaluation experiments designed to highlight crucial aspects of the
“language use/attitude constraints” on social identification in Danish communities (Kris-
tiansen 2004 reports on such an experiment in the Næstved area). These constraints are
conceived of as a “normative field” defined by three “norm ideals for speech”. In the
experiment, this three-poled normative field is presented to informants (i) on paper as a
large triangle with a small circle at each of the three angles, and (ii) on audiotape as
three speakers representing each of the small circles at the angles of the triangle. Having
listened to the speakers, the informants’ task is to place their own speech wherever
they think appropriate, either within one of the circles (indicating similarity with the
corresponding voice) or somewhere within the triangle indicating degrees of judged simi-
larity and difference in relation to the three field-defining voices ⫺ or even outside the
triangle if that is judged appropriate. If the resulting data shows significant correlations
between self-evaluations and social groups, such patterns can be taken partly as testi-
mony to (the informants’ recognition of) the existence of norm ideals in the speech
community and partly as testimony to (the informants’ assessments of) the social mean-
ings that are involved. On the assumption that social identifications (categorizations/
evaluations of the self and others) involve accentuation of resemblances and differences
in relation to ingroups and outgroups, respectively, the experimental situation is assumed
to provoke stereotyping thought processes such as: “I’m young, so my language is like
… and not like …”, or “I’m from town, so my language is like … and not like …”, etc.
In other words, the interesting question is not so much whether people assess their own
speech correctly from a purely linguistic point of view, but rather which patterns of
social meaning emerge.
More commonly, self-report tests are used to investigate the relationship between, on
the one hand, what people say that they say, and, on the other hand, what they actually
do say. For instance, subjects may be presented with two different ways of pronouncing
a word and asked to indicate which pronunciation they themselves use. The classic exam-
ples of the use of self-report tests are from Labov (1966), who found a general tendency
for New Yorkers to “over-report” (i. e., people reported themselves to speak more stan-
dardly than they actually did), and from Trudgill (1972), who found an opposite ten-
dency among Norwich men to “under-report” (i. e., they reported themselves to speak
more nonstandardly than they actually did). Again, the research interest lies not so much
in whether the self-report is linguistically correct or not, but rather in the interpretive
implications when it is wrong: what does the phenomenon of over or under-reporting
tell us about the system of social values that imbues and surrounds variation in use? In
linguistic insecurity tests, another of Labov’s “field experiments” (Labov 1984: 45), the
research interest lies in the differences that emerge when people are first asked to indicate
which one of two word pronunciations they think is correct, and then to do the same
with regard to their own pronunciation. The difference is taken as a measure of “linguis-
tic insecurity” (Labov 1966: chapter 12).
3.3.2.2. Evaluation o the speech o others
Data collection methods that somehow ask people directly about the object of study, in
our case language variation, are known as direct methods. This has been a characteristic
of the approaches we have looked at up until now (except that “funneling” was men-
tioned as an indirect way of approaching the object of inquiry, in section 3.1.2). In
contrast, methods used to elicit assessments of the speech of others are typically con-
strued as indirect ⫺ the reason being that respondents are asked questions about the
speakers and not their speech. In itself, this distinction is unproblematic (but readers
should note that these terms are also used to label a separate distinction, cf. Seiler,
König, in this volume).
However, since the reason typically given for indirect questioning is to avoid infor-
mants becoming aware of what the inquiry is really about, the distinction between direct
and indirect approaches to data collection is also associated with the distinction between
conscious and subconscious reactions. This association is far from unproblematic. In
particular, we should take care not to assume that a speaker evaluation experiment
(SEE) secures a subconscious reaction in and of itself. With attitudes towards accent
differences as our object of study, we may well claim to have collected indirect data if
our respondents reacted to speakers, but we can not claim to have collected subconscious
data if the respondents realized that what was at stake were their attitudes towards
accent differences.
In what follows, we shall review and discuss speaker evaluation experiments in terms
of (i) the stimulus speakers, (ii) the measurement instrument, (iii) the procedure for
collecting subconscious evaluations, and finally (iv) the scope of evaluation: variety or
variant?
(i) The stimulus speakers. The central data collection method in speaker evaluation
experiments has been the matched guise technique (MGT), created by the Canadian
social psychologist Wallace Lambert and his colleagues in the late 1950s and 1960s
(Lambert 1967) and subsequently further developed and applied in a plethora of
studies within the social psychology of language field (Ryan and Giles 1982; Giles
and Coupland 1991, chapter 2). The same individual appears twice (or even more
often) on the stimulus tape, each time exhibiting a new speech style, a new guise.
Subjects mostly remain unaware of this because the matched guise voice appears at
some distance on the tape with filler voices in between. The idea behind the matched
guise technique is to manipulate speech style while controlling for all other factors
that might have an impact on the assessment. Extralinguistic features like voice and
delivery quality are controlled for by virtue of the matched guise voice being one
and the same person; “content” is controlled for by having the matched guise voice
(and the filler voices) read one and the same text. The recorded voices are kept
equal in terms of duration; most excerpts used in speaker evaluation experiments
are some 20 to 50 seconds long.
The linguistic contrasts of the matched guise voice may be manipulated in many
ways. Some are of more interest for our language-in-space perspective than others.
We should mention, firstly, manipulations in terms of national languages, and recall
Lambert’s studies in Montreal in which the matched guise voice spoke English Ca-
nadian in one guise and French Canadian in the other. Secondly, and obviously
pertinent to the study of language in space, matched guise voice manipulations in
terms of dialects and accents are rich in possibilities. The Giles (1970) study in-
cluded, in addition to the label-ranking task mentioned in section 3.1.2, a speaker
evaluation experiment with a matched guise voice which performed thirteen re-
gional, social, and foreign accents of English. Thirdly, matched guise voice manipu-
lations in terms of more or less “anglicized” speech may be a promising approach
to language-in-space issues in the era of globalization. Thus, we used “English-
colored” guises versus “pure national” guises in MGT-based speaker evaluation
experiments carried out in order to study and compare attitudes towards the influ-
ence of English in all Nordic countries (Kristiansen 2006).
It is often felt that the matched guise technique, because of its experimental
preoccupation with control, produce data that suffers heavily from low ecological
validity in many respects. The matched guise voice is not the least of the problems.
It may prove simply impossible to find a person who is able to speak “naturally”
in the accents we want for our stimulus tape. The only solution is to use different
speakers ⫺ thus achieving a speaker evaluation experiment design which is no
longer really based on matched guises, but on what have been called “verbal” guises
(initially suggested by Cooper 1975: 5). We may also want to relax our control over
content and use voices that, instead of reading the same text aloud, speak “natu-
rally”, either about one and the same topic, or about any “neutral” topic. Control
can still be achieved by using two or more voices for each of the varieties to be
evaluated. For us to argue that variety differences have a decisive role in such evalu-
ations, the result pattern must indicate that voices representing the same variety
have by and large been treated the same. It goes without saying that such relax-
ations of control yield data that need to be examined and analyzed with a sharpened
sensitivity to how multiple factors interact when speakers and their speech are so-
cially evaluated.
(ii) The measurement instrument. The usual measuring instruments in speaker evaluation
experiments are some kind of scale: either bipolar adjective scales, known as seman-
tic differentials (How do you find this speaker? fascinating L boring) or unidimensio-
nal scales (How fascinating do you find this speaker? not at all L very much). Typi-
cally, the number of steps on these scales is either five or seven, leaving open the
possibility for subjects to choose the “neutral” midpoint. If several scales are used,
the scale ratings may be factor-analyzed in order to discover underlying evaluative
dimensions. It is considered a well-documented finding of language attitudes re-
search that all such scales load into one of only a couple of dimensions: status
and solidarity (Ryan, Giles and Sebastian 1982), or superiority, attractiveness and
dynamism (Zahn and Hopper 1985). In concrete research projects, scales are often
chosen to represent these dimensions because of their established position in previ-
ous research. An alternative to choosing scale items along well-known lines is the
“keywords” approach. It simply refers to an open-ended questioning format which
invites subjects to write down all their immediate impressions, or maybe better their
first three impressions, as they listen to the speakers on the tape. The resulting
material may not only be analyzed in its own right, but also used to find the “right”
labels for evaluative scales (Garrett, Coupland and Williams 2004; Maegaard 2005).
(iii) Collecting subconscious evaluations. In fact, speaker evaluation experiments are rar-
ely designed and carried out in ways that allow for the elicitation of subconscious
language attitudes. The first prerequisite for this to be possible is, of course, not to
inform the subjects about the nature of the experiment until after its completion.
Next, we must take care that the nature of the experiment is not revealed by the
stimulus material itself. If you are asked to evaluate voices speaking in different
languages, or clearly different dialects or accents, it would be strange not to think
that “this is about my language attitudes”. However, as long as the stimulus voices
are kept within the “natural” range of variation for the speech communities under
study, our experience reveals that subjects do not become aware that they are evalu-
ating accent differences. As to the measurement instrument, questions addressing
the speakers’ language in any way, for instance in terms of “correctness” or “dialect
color”, should be avoided. Such questions bring us back into direct questioning, of
course, and take us far from the realm of subconscious language attitudes.
Even if we succeed in maintaining a lack of awareness with regard to the object
of study, our subjects will always know that they are taking part in an experiment.
The data collection is an “obtrusive” event in, say, normal school-day activities. If
we want to pursue unobtrusively collected data, we need to find an everyday setting
where the manipulation of stimulus voices can go unnoticed while reactions can be
reliably registered and background variables controlled at the same time. There are
few examples of such studies, no doubt because they are rather difficult both to
design and to execute. However, the basic idea of the short “planted encounter” has
been exploited in studies using field researchers who, instead of feigning hardness
of hearing like Labov in the New York department stores (cf. section 2.2.1), shift
between two linguistic codes as they address people on the street and ask for some
information (Rosenbaum et al. 1977; Bourhis 1984). If the reactions to the dif-
ferently spoken addresses are measured in terms of, say, “readiness to help”, the
results may lend themselves to interpretation in terms of “language attitudes”. If
we want to use tape-recorded stimulus voices in unobtrusive speaker evaluation
experiments, we will have to operate in social situations where public address sys-
tems are “natural”. The loudspeaker system in a Cardiff film theatre was used by
Bourhis and Giles (1976) to ask audiences to help plan future programs by filling
out a questionnaire form. The announcement was presented in four matched guises,
one per evening: RP, mildly and broadly South Welsh-accented English, and Welsh.
The same method was adopted in a study in Næstved, but with a verbal guise design
in that the announcement was read out by four different speakers: in modern and
conservative standard, and in mildly and broadly locally accented speech (Kristi-
ansen 1997). In both studies, the degree of cooperation was measured as the ratio
of questionnaires completed to tickets sold.
(iv) The scope of evaluation: Variety or variant? Finally, it should be noted that speaker
evaluation experiments may be designed to gather assessments either of “whole”
varieties or of variants of a particular variable. The “holistic” approach effectively
imposes itself as soon as a stimulus voice speaks for more than a few seconds. This
means, however, that we cannot, no matter what detailed linguistic analyses the
stimulus voices are subjected to, infer anything certain about the contribution of
isolated variables to the assessment of a voice. If we want to focus on particular
variables, the stimulus tape has to be created by “cutting and pasting” different
values of the variable under study into short versions of the same sentences. Origi-
nally, this was done by Labov, who used the cut-and-paste method to study the
social evaluation of postvocalic /r/ and other phonological variables in New York
(Labov 1966: chapter 11) and subsequently also in Philadelphia (Labov 2001: 206⫺
222). Campell-Kibler (2007) seeks to combine the holistic and particularistic ap-
proaches in her recent studies of the (ING) variable and its social meanings in
complex interplay with Southern and gay accents in the United States.
4. Reerences
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VI. Data analysis and the presentation
o results
31. Measuring dialect dierences

1. Why measure?
2. Categorical data
3. String distance measure
4. An example
5. Evaluation
6. Emerging issues
7. References
1. Why measure?
Dialectology thankfully inherits large data reserves from earlier practitioners, especially
the compilers of dialect atlases designed to display variation in comparable linguistic
items. These compilers collected linguistic variants such as the lexical realization of the
word for ‘house fly’, the common order of pronominal objects, or the pronunciation of
(the first vowel in) the word marry throughout a large selection of sites in a language
area. We refer to such items of variation as features or variables. Large collections may
include several hundred sites at which hundreds of features are documented. One of the
primary tasks of dialectology is to characterize this variety of speech forms. Naturally
there are many other tasks, e.g., determining the extralinguistic correlates of variation,
modeling the cognitive processes needed to deal with variation in form, and understand-
ing the tension between variation and effective comprehension, but many of these require
good primary characterizations of the linguistic variation.
The data reserves are so large and complex that simple attempts to characterize the
differences always encounter problems of different sorts, many of which are well docu-
mented. Bloomfield (1933: chap. 19) discusses how linguistic variants often fail to map
neatly to geography, noting exceptions of two types ⫺ linguistic exceptions, in which
linguistically similar material does not project to geography in the same way (the same
etymological vowel is realized differently in two different words) and geographic excep-
tions, where linguistic variants project fairly simply but where pockets of exception re-
main. A larger problem is that even very thorough studies (Kurath and McDavid 1961;
König 1994) inevitably examine only a very small fraction of the features documented
in substantial atlases. This leaves dialectology open to the charge statisticians have
dubbed “cherry picking”, i. e., picking variables that confirm the analysis one wishes to
settle on. Given the tens of thousands of features which may differ between languages
(in lexical items alone), we would do well to take measures to avoid the danger of
fortuitous selection.
Finally, we are motivated to develop measurement techniques in order develop
hypotheses about variation that require abstract characterizations. These indeed seem
within reach given the right level of abstraction.
31. Measuring dialect differences 551
We preview briefly how the use of measurement schemes attacks these issues. By
measuring differences we map them to numbers. This numerical characterization enables
us to integrate information from large samples of linguistic variables ⫺ just by adding
the differences. We postulate that the pronunciation difference between night as pro-
nounced diphthongally in standard American, [na=t], and the same word pronounced
monophthongally in the American south, [nat], is a number that may be added to other
measures of difference from a large sample. Given this, we may collect many measure-
ments involving many pairs of pronunciations, enabling an aggregate and therefore more
abstract characterization of the data. Once we have an aggregate, then we need not be
distracted by linguistic exceptions, which simply contribute differently ⫺ perhaps more
and perhaps less ⫺ to the sample. Geographic exceptions may of course remain, but
only if the weight of a great deal of linguistic evidence bears this out. The single excep-
tional feature no longer spoils a characterization, which is based on the tendencies of
many features. We avoid the dangers of relying on fortuitously chosen data by including
a great deal of data, and abstract characterizations inherit the reliability of the mass of
data on which they are based.
2. Categorical data
The strategy of characterizing dialects on the basis of large aggregates of data samples
was pioneered in dialectometry by Jean Séguy and Hans Goebl (Séguy 1973; Goebl
1984), who analyze large samples at a nominal, or categorical level. Categorical data
analysis views data as belonging either to the same or to different categories. One may
then, for instance, measure the similarity between the lexicalizations for the concept
dragonfly, i. e., as zero (0) where the variants, such as darning needle and dragonfly,
are not the same and one (1) if they are. Alternatively, one may measure the dissimilarity
or distance between the two variants, in which case the values switch. Henceforth we
focus on distances rather than similarities, but we maintain that the two perspectives are
interchangeable.
It is also possible to weight some items as more important than others. Goebl (1984),
for example, advocates the use of a similarity measure weighted to favor infrequent
coincidence, which Nerbonne and Kleiweg (2007: 160⫺163) evaluate positively. We shall
ignore such weightings in the remainder of this article, but we note that it is straightfor-
ward to apply weightings such as Goebl’s to the all the aggregating procedures dis-
cussed below.
We also need to deal with competing forms. In the simple case where a single form
at one site is compared with two at another, the mean of the two distances is used.
Nerbonne and Kleiweg (2003) generalize this idea.
Both Séguy and Goebl include pronunciation differences among the variables they
quantify. If the (first vowel of the) word marry is among the pronunciation variables,
then one may review the variants to determine whether the pronunciation is [æ], [e], [e],
or even [æw], [æß ], [eœ] or [ẽ]. We then check straightforwardly whether two pronunciations
are the same or not. A large number of such comparisons provides a reliable basis on
which to measure varietal similarity. Exact identity may be too demanding a criterion,
in which case one needs a procedure testing whether two sounds belong to the same
552 VI. Data analysis and the presentation of results
class or not, effectively dealing with the problem of individual or irrelevant variation. In
the running example, one might distinguish [æ] and its variants (including [æw ] and [æß ])
from raised variants such as [e] and [e] (including [eœ] and [ẽ]). Naturally, it is important
to defend the classification chosen. But if the classification is sound, then it is good
methodology to include this 0/1 measurement as one of a large number on which an
aggregate relation is assayed.
Even though their methodology is sound, we have sought to go beyond the Séguy/
Goebl categorical level of analysis for pronunciation differences, first, because it requires
manual intervention in isolating specific aspects of pronunciation, where an automated
process is also possible. Second, we wished to make fuller use of the rich dialect atlas
transcripts, rather than being limited to selected variables.
3. String distance measure

Fortunately, there are effective algorithms available for comparing strings, i. e., sequences
of symbols. Gusfield (1999: chap. 11) provides an excellent summary of the current state
of the art. Rather than try to summarize all the techniques, we present edit distance here,
also known as Levenshtein distance and string (edit) distance. We can approach edit
distance from two perspectives, and it will be instructive to use both in this overview.
One the one hand, one may ask how many operations of a simple sort are required
to transform one string into another. We illustrate how one dialectal pronunciation of
German Durst ‘thirst’, namely [twes] (Aachen) is transformed into another, [tcst] (Viel-
brunn). By writing each derivation step, we can see the operations at work (Figure 31.1).
t w e s substitute [c] for [w]

t c e s delete [e]
t c s insert [t]
t c s t
Fig. 31.1: A set of transformations to map [twes] to [tcst]. Edit distance associates costs with each
step and is then defined as the total cost of the transformation (the sum of the costs for
each step)
If each operation is associated with a cost, e.g., one, then the Levenshtein distance is
the sum of the least costly set of operations mapping one string to another. Since the
three operations above are indeed minimal, the distance between the two strings is the
sum of the cost of the operations, three. This is naturally rough; we examine more
sensitive costs in section 3.3. Gusfield (1999: 11.1⫺11.3) presents a dynamic program-
ming algorithm for calculating Levenshtein distance efficiently.
The alternative perspective is that of alignment. Proceeding from the least costly
derivation, we align identical segments that remain constant during the derivation and
all pairs of segments where one was substituted for the other. Finally we align symbols
with an empty segment in case they are involved in deletions or insertions. The result in
this case is shown in Figure 31.2.
t w e s
t c s t
Costs 1 1 1
Fig. 31.2: The calculation of the edit distance between two strings implicitly aligns the component
elements. This is the alignment of the transcriptions based on the operations in Figure
31.1. Note that insertions and deletions create correspondences where only one segment
is specified
Given a derivation, the alignment may be recovered. Alignments are an important

check on the quality of measurements (see section 5), and we may search the aligned
segment pairs ([w/c], [e/ ] and [ /t] in Figure 31.2) for regular correspondences (see Kon-
drak 2002; Prokić 2007).
The procedure is normally applied to the entire dialect material available. We measure
the differences not only between all pairs of transcriptions for Durst ‘thirst’, but also
those of dozens to hundreds more. It is sensible to use material which represents true
pronunciation differences as purely as possible, and which therefore contains as few
differences as possible attributable to inflectional morphology, sandhi, and intonation.
After determining all of the pronunciation distances for all of the words, the pronuncia-
tion distance between sites is simply the mean pronunciation distance of all the words
in the atlas’s sample. These site ⫻ site differences may be further analyzed using hierar-
chical clustering or multidimensional scaling (see Nerbonne, Heeringa and Kleiweg 1999;
Heeringa 2004; or below for examples). Peter Kleiweg maintains an interactive demo at
<http://www.let.rug.nl/kleiweg/lev/> which includes various operation weights as well
as the opportunity to use segment distances derived from features.
We turn now to the linguistic interpretation of this sort of measurement. We note
first that the measurement may be automated so as to require no manual intervention
(see RuG/L04, <http://www.let.rug.nl/kleiweg/L04/>), and second, that it is sensitive
to a large number of pronunciation differences, not merely to a limited set chosen by
the investigator.
Third, however tempting it might be to interpret the insertions, deletions and substi-
tutions as historical sound changes, we warn that the operations work strictly on the
surface. Alignments provide documentation of sound correspondences, but the pro-
cedure is not designed to discover or simulate historical changes.
Fourth, even though there is a unique least cost of operations mapping from one
string to another, there may be different sets of operations that correspond to different
alignments. This is one reason we are motivated to explore more sensitive measures of
phonetic overlap (see section 3.3).
Fifth and finally, there are many potential refinements of the procedure which might
be expected to yield more precise measurements. In section 3.2 we discuss how one might
discount the effects of fast speech rules, and in section 3.3 how to build more phonetic
sensitivity into the measure, e.g., by weighting the substitutions phonetically. In section
3.5 we consider enforcing a syllabicity constraint, making the calculation sensitive to
context, and including metathesis as a basic operation.
3.1. Formal properties
We note some formal properties of edit distance, reviewing material in Kruskal (1999)
and Gusfield (1999). First, edit distance is a generalization of Hamming distance, which
makes no provision for insertions and deletions. We illustrate Hamming distance in
Figure 31.3.
t w e s t w e s
t c s t t c s t
Costs 1 1 1 1 1 1
Fig. 31.3: Two alignments for the string pair [twes / tcst]. Even though the alignments do not differ
in costs, each with a total cost of three, the left-hand alignment is linguistically preferable
because it never aligns vowels with consonants
Even though the distance happens to be the same in this case, it is clear that the
Hamming procedure misses the coincidence of [s] in the two strings, so that it is less
suitable for dialectological application. The psycholinguistics of spoken word recognition
is extremely sophisticated in some aspects, but it uses Hamming distance ⫺ on carefully
controlled material in which insertions and deletions do not occur ⫺ as a measure of
word similarity (Luce and Pisoni 1998; see also section 6).
There are even less sophisticated measures, such as Jaccard distance and Dice, which
ignore the order of segments (Manning, Prabhakar and Schütze 2008).
Second, we note that Levenshtein measures are normally distances in the mathemati-
cal sense, i. e., numbers greater than or equal to zero; zero just in the case where two
strings are the same; symmetric, so that the distance from string s1 to s2 is always the
same as the distance from s2 to s1; and in conformance with the so-called triangle in-
equality: the distance from s1 to s2 is less than or equal to the sum of the distances from
s1 to s3 and s3 to s2, for any string s3. The fact that the distances are symmetric makes
them unsuitable for modeling some problems, for example, the confusability matrices
phoneticians compile from how frequently one segment may be mistaken for another
(Johnson 2004: chap. 4). If one modeled confusability with similarity, implemented by
edit distance on samples of the segments’ spectrograms, the attempt would be limited
by the inherent symmetry of edit distances.
3.2. Herrgen and Schmidts dialecticality measures
Independent of the work on Levenshtein distance, Herrgen and Schmidt (1989) sketched
a procedure for comparing pronunciations of entire words which has been applied in
several projects and publications. Our presentation follows Lameli (2004: chap. 5).
The Herrgen and Schmidt procedure shares the goal of being able to evaluate a large
sample of comparable pronunciations, and to include all the material from every word
transcription rather than just selected differences. The procedure assumes feature-based
descriptions of each segment are available; these are interpreted numerically. For exam-
ple if there are four vowel heights, corresponding to [i], [e], [e] and [a], then the height
difference between [i] and [e] is one, and that between [i] and [a] three. It is challenging
to specify a segment distance table exhaustively (see section 3.3), but Lameli completes
the table successfully. The segment distance table, thus derived, is then used as the basis
for calculating word differences, which are simply the sum of differences in aligned seg-
ments.
There are several unique aspects to this research line. First, the work focuses less on
measuring dialect differences, more on measuring differences between a dialect on one
hand and the standard language on the other. This reflects the interests of the research-
ers, but it also allows them to incorporate a second unique feature, a normalization
with respect to fast-speech rules. The Herrgen and Schmidt procedure does not regard
differences as genuine if they might have arisen through the application of a fast-speech
rule. For example German Lippen ‘lips’ may have a canonical standard pronunciation
as [1l=pen], but it is pronounced in fast speech as [1l=pm]. Dialect pronunciations which
1
elide the schwa and assimilate the final [n] should not be measured as differing from
Standard German. In unpublished work at Groningen we have experimented with imple-
menting several fast-speech rules in Standard German, measuring the distance from a
dialectal form to each “allegro” variant, and then using the least value as the distance.
Third, Herrgen and Schmidt’s rules are sensitive to small differences, but they also
set maximal segment difference values so that word measurements are not overwhelmed
by single-segment differences. Fourth, there is still no automatic procedure for applying
Herrgen and Schmidt’s difference metric (but Björn Lüders of Marburg is currently en-
gaged in an implementation). This probably derives from detailed and complex rules for
handling some special cases such as the German /a/ and foreign borrowings. This over-
view is too brief to review all of the details.
3.3. Segment distances
It is linguistically natural to wish to incorporate more phonetic sensitivity into the string
distance measure. After all, an English dialect with path as [paθ] is closer to one with
[pæθ] than to a third with [peθ]. There is also a technical reason for preferring more
sensitive measures of segment difference, namely the wish to avoid multiple alignments.
The more sensitive the phonetic measure, the less likely these are.
Accordingly, not only Herrgen and Schmidt (section 3.2), but also Kessler (1995),
Nerbonne and Heeringa (1997), Kondrak (2002: chap. 4.5), Heeringa (2004: chap. 3⫺
4), McMahon, Heggarty, McMahon and Maguire (2007) and others have proceeded from
segment distance tables, and, for the most part, have used the Levenshtein procedure
sketched above. Heeringa (2004) devotes ninety pages to a comparison of segment dis-
tances derived from the feature system in The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and
Halle 1968), two different systems developed to score transcription quality, and a fourth
system Heeringa develops based on curve distance in canonical spectrograms. All of the
systems allow for the representation of diphthongs, affricates, stress, length, syllabicity,
and a wide range of secondary articulations. In the same spirit as Herrgen and Schmidt’s
maximal values for segment distances, Heeringa uses a logarithmic correction to limit
the impact of differing segments, following Stevens’ (1975) idea that psychophysical reac-
tions scale logarithmically.
Heeringa achieved modestly superior analyses using spectrogram-based segment dis-

tance tables. (See also sections 5 and 6 on comparing putative improvements.)
We note further that, given a table of segment distances, however derived (called
alphabetic weights in Gusfield 1999), the dynamic programming algorithm computing
Levenshtein distance always returns the optimal alignment with respect to that table
(Kruskal 1999: section 5; Gusfield 1999: 11.5), i. e., the alignment that minimizes the
sum of the aligned segments’ differences. We therefore say that the Levenshtein pro-
cedure “lifts” the segment distance table to a sequence distance measure. McMahon and
coauthors (2007) aim to align words with respect to etymological frames, which would
seem to require moving from two-string alignments to the simultaneous alignment of
three strings, but their procedure is not explained in detail (see Gusfield 1999: chap. 14
on the difficult problem of multiple string alignment).
3.4 Other related work
Vierrege, Rietveld and Jansen (1984) developed a system for evaluating student tran-
scribers that assigned varying penalties to mistranscriptions. Kessler (1995) first applied
edit distance to dialect material. Like Herrgen and Schmidt, he proceeded from a seg-
ment distance table, which he also compared to a binary scheme in which segments were
either alike or different, concluding that the latter was superior. Kessler applied cluster-
ing to check whether the edit distances could delineate dialect areas. Nerbonne, Heeringa
and Kleiweg (1999) followed with an analysis of Dutch and introduce multidimensional
scaling (MDS) as a means of further analyzing the average pronunciation differences.
Both clustering and MDS are illustrated in section 4. Heeringa (2004) analyzed Norwe-
gian and Dutch, comparing many options for phonetic representation (see section 3.3),
clustering and MDS. This is the most thorough treatment of the subject to date. There
are also analyses of German, Bulgarian, American English, Italian, Sardinian, Bantu,
and some Indo-Iranian and Turkic varieties.
Kondrak (2002) modified edit distance to discount mismatches near the beginnings
and ends of words and applied his algorithm to diachronic phonology, experimenting
on Indo-European and Algonquian languages. By keeping track of frequent operations,
he could detect regular sound correspondences and cognates. McMahon, Heggarty,
McMahon and Maguire (2007) apply an alignment algorithm to English dialects and
analyze results using phylogenetic algorithms designed to infer genealogical trees (and/
or networks).
3.5. Other reinements
The success of the techniques raises questions about its linguistic underpinnings, some
of which we explore here. Early on, inspection of the alignments induced by the dynamic
programming algorithm revealed alignments such as the following two:
t w e s t w e s
t c s t t c s t
Each of these requires three operations, yielding distances of three, but intuitively the
first violates a syllabicity constraint by allowing the consonant [s] to replace the vowel
[e]. It is a straightforward matter to enforce this constraint, and Heeringa, Kleiweg,
Gooskens and Nerbonne (2006) claim that this yields superior analyses.
While almost all applications have ignored the context of sound correspondences,
Heeringa and coauthors (2006) operationalize the effects of context by applying the
algorithm not to single segments, but rather to bigrams, a standard technique for incor-
porating context in computational systems. Results were slightly, but consistently better.
There are also extensions of the Levenshtein procedure allowing metatheses (also
known as “swaps” or “transpositions”); see Kruskal (1999: 9⫺10). Metathesis is rare in
languages analyzed to date, with Bulgarian a notable exception. Adding swaps to the
dynamic programming algorithm can be quite difficult when segment distance tables are
used (Wagner 1999).
Stress can be straightforwardly interpreted as a vowel feature. Under this scheme the
verb contract [ken.1trækt] and the noun [1kcn.trækt] differ at two positions, the vowels.
Without special treatment, the words would have differed in the first vowel, but not in
the second. Because tone is sometimes not realized on single segments, but rather in
complicated ways dependent on the sequence of syllables, incorporating it into the dis-
tance measure in a general way is less straightforward. Gooskens and Heeringa (2006)
contrast the three tone patterns of Norwegian and compare the degree to which percep-
tual distances can be predicted by prosodic differences with the degree to which they
can be predicted by segmental phonological differences measured using edit distance.
Finally, we would like to add that, although it is good scientific practice to prepare
one’s data carefully to eliminate potential confounding factors and “noise”, it is not
always practical. Fortunately, the procedures we sketch are robust enough to function
well even on noisy data. The Dutch dialect source used by Heeringa (2004) was analyzed
in two ways: once restricted to cognate words (allowing morphological differences, cf.
dog and doggy), and once comparing all semantically similar words, including unrelated
words (cf. friend and buddy). Given a 125-word sample, results correlate nearly perfectly
(r ⫽ 0.98). The replication on a Norwegian sample was slightly lower (r ⫽ 0.95, n ⫽ 58).
We consider other potential refinements in section 6: “Emerging issues”.
4. An example
The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS) comprises mate-
rial collected on the eastern seaboard of the US between 1933 and 1974. The area extends
from northern Florida through to New York State and includes all the intermediate
states on the Atlantic coast, plus West Virginia. Our focus here is on the data collected
by Guy Lowman in 1933⫺1936, which makes up roughly seventy percent of the total
(see Map 31.1). We focus on just Lowman’s work to avoid the confounding influence of
differing fieldwork techniques and/or transcriptions (Nerbonne and Kleiweg 2003).
The data were obtained using a questionnaire in which respondents were asked how
they expressed everyday things and events, e.g., “If the sun comes out after a rain, you
say the weather is doing what?” (used to elicit clearing up, fairing off and forty other
dialectal variants. The LAMSAS material is publicly accessible for reanalysis (see
<http://us.english.uga.edu/lamsas/>; Kretzschmar 1994) and contains the responses of

1162 informants interviewed in 483 communities. The responses to 151 items are in-
cluded in the web distribution, the basis for the work here. We analyze Lowman’s data
in what follows. In Lowman’s section of the database there are 92,537 transcriptions
involving 1.3 million phonetic tokens collected from 363 locations, and 797 informants.
There are, on average, 14.0 characters per string, which are parsed into 7.9 sound tokens
(IPA segments, often with diacritic) per string. There are 1,677 unique sounds (combina-
tions of base segments and various diacritics) and 1,132 unique vowel sounds alone.
LAMSAS usefully contains both phonetic and orthographic transcriptions, allowing us
to focus measurements on comparable material, ignoring lexical and morphological dif-
ferences.
We implemented the LAMSAS feature system as a segmental basis. We present the
features for vowel system in Table 31.1, and suppress discussion of the consonantal
features in the interest of saving space. If one chooses to adopt an existing feature sys-
tem, as we did, the question of how to numerically interpret the feature values arises.
Thus Kurath and Lowman distinguished nine different vowel advancement positions,
and fifteen vowel heights (Kretzschmar et al. 1994: 114⫺120), but we need to assign
numbers to the positions if we are to use them to measure segment differences. Table
31.1 shows how we did this, allowing six as a maximum advancement difference and
only three-and-a-half as a maximum height difference. Wherever the values of one fea-
ture may differ more than those of another, the scheme in Table 31.1 effectively weights
the first feature more heavily. As just noted, advancement may differ by as much as six,
while rounding can not differ by more than one, so differences in advancement can
count much more. Diacritics representing stress, rhotism, pharyngealization and devoic-
ing were each capable of adding maximally one unit of difference, and intermediate
differences, including those indicated by diacritics, were interpolated. The differential
weightings of the features are given implicitly by the difference in a feature’s extreme
values. The decision to make advancement count more heavily than height is based on
the idea that a change in vowel advancement marks a dialect speaker more saliently
than a difference in vowel height, but we concede that this decision is moot.
One vowel feature, “direction”, was not instantiated anywhere in the LAMSAS data-
base, so it is omitted from Table 31.1, and Lowman and Kurath allow for six degrees of
rounding (Kretzschmar et al. 1994: 119), which we simplified to five when we found only
five levels distinguished in the data.
The feature names reflect their normal phonetic (articulatory) interpretation. The
stress which is marked on a syllable is interpreted as a property of the vowel, which is
why it appears in Table 31.1. Vowels receive either stress, secondary stress, or no stress.
Vowels were interpreted as voiced except when explicitly marked as voiceless, in which
case they bore the feature [⫺ voice]. On rare occasions, Lowman added a diacritic indi-
cating the pharyngealization of a vowel; where it occurs this is interpreted with the
[v-pharyng.] feature. Vowels transcribed as superscripts (e.g., the latter halves of laxing
diphthongs) are interpreted not by a [( super] feature, but rather through a weighting ⫺
the cost of comparisons involving superscripted vowels is only fifty percent of what it
would have been had the segments not been superscripted. The idea, of course, is that
such minor articulations contribute less to pronunciation difference.
We calculate the distance between two vowels first by simply summing the differences
of all the feature values, Σ f | fv ⫺ fv1 |. In order to emphasize the importance of slight
Tab. 31.1: Vowel features used in LAMSAS together with the numerical interpretation needed to
interpret feature differences
Vowel feature Possible values
v-advanced ⫺3, ⫺2, ⫺1, 0, 0.4, 1, 1.4, 2, 2.4, 3
v-high ⫺1.75, ⫺1.5, ⫺1.25, ⫺1, ⫺0.75, ⫺0.5, ⫺0.25, 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75
v-rounded ⫺1, ⫺0.5, 0, 0.5, 1
v-long ⫺0.5, 0, 0.5, 1
v-stress 0, 0.35, 0.7
v-nasal 0, 1
v-rhotic 0, 1
v-pharyng. 0, 1
v-voice 0, 1
differences as opposed to larger ones, we work with the logarithm of that sum, as intro-
duced above. Finally, we wish to work with a scale with a genuine zero:
d (v,v1) ⫽ log (1 ⫹ Σ f | fv ⫺ fv1 |)
We applied the unigram Levenshtein model using the segment distances just sketched,
without any word-length normalization. We compared the pronunciations of each pair
of sites in Lowman’s data, using all of the words common to each pair. The result is a
large pronunciation distance table, or matrix, providing a mean pronunciation distance
for each pair of sites. As distances are symmetric, we ignore half of the cells in the table.
We turn now to the results, beginning with the dialect areas which emerge from the
pronunciation comparison. They are detected via hierarchical clustering (Nerbonne et
al. 2008), a technique for recognizing groups in data, and are shown in Map 31.1.
Map 31.1 shows the entire LAMSAS area, with the regions covered by fieldworkers
other than Lowman shaded gray. Note that even though the clustering procedure is
based solely on a matrix of pronunciation distances, it nonetheless detects geographically
coherent areas, a first indication that the analysis is working. The dendrogram on the
right shows that the major division in the data separates the two most southern sub-
areas from the four northern ones, with the split running to the south of Virginia’s
northern border; in the northern cluster, there is also a split running east⫺west through
north Pennsylvania. This is a defensible subdivision of the LAMSAS speech area, even
if it differs from Kurath’s (1949) assessment in failing to confirm his “midland” area,
extending from western Pennsylvania southward along the Appalachian Mountains.
Because the pronunciation distance is numerical, we can also apply multidimensional
scaling to our results and attempt to view it in a more simplified form. The result is
shown in Map 31.2. Heeringa (2004: chap. 6.2) explains MDS in more detail. We note
only that MDS tries to place each site in a coordinate space of few dimensions. We use
a three-dimensional solution which accounts for over ninety percent of the variation in
the original distance table. If we map each of the dimensions in the three-dimensional
solution to intensities of red, green, and blue, we obtain Map 31.2.
Map 31.1: Left, the dialect areas emerging from the aggregated pronunciation difference measure-
ments and right, the dendrogram, providing a key (see text for discussion)
The MDS analysis is striking for the prominence it grants to southeast Pennsylvania.
The explanation for the area’s unusual status is suggested by pronunciations such as
[1tscr.tse] ‘Georgia’, where the devoiced syllable onsets (expected [D]) betray the influence
of German on the speakers interviewed (speaker PA7C in Lancaster in fact spoke Ger-
man as his first language).
Nerbonne (2006) traces which linguistic features contribute the most to the aggregate
dialectal differences shown in Map 31.2, but concentrates on the four southernmost
areas shown in Map 31.1. We focus on the most important distinctions here. Using
factor analysis it could be shown that the different reductions of unstressed vowels ([e]
vs. [ = ], the latter including [I]) in the unstressed closed syllables of words such as closet,
kitchen, and Baltimore (second syllable) were most strongly coherent across the collection
sites. Closely aligned with this shift, we noted that the varieties that used the higher
version of the reduced vowel ([ = ]) also fronted the [u] to [⁄] in words such as St. Louis
and Tuesday, likewise fronting the onset of the diphthong in the second syllable in Mis-
souri. Finally, the [c/a] distinction in hog(pen) and Florida aligned well with [e/= ] distinc-
tion. Note that only the [c/a] distinction is phonemic in some varieties of American
English, while the other two are subphonemic. Nerbonne (2006) also examines several
less prominent alternations, including (i) rhotic vs. non-rhotic pronunciations, where the
latter varieties likewise demonstrate a lowering of [c] in words such as forty or storm;
(ii) a contrast between raised and unraised [I] as the last syllable in Tuesday, foggy or
thirty; (iii) another [e/= ] distinction, but this time in open syllables such as the final
Map 31.2: The three-dimensional MDS analysis of the pronunciation distances, better suited to
portraying dialect continua (see text for discussion)
syllable of sofa, Georgia or Russia; (iv) the raising of [e], most extremely to [ = ], e.g., in
the first syllable of Tennessee (in general before [n]); and (v) fronted vs. non-fronted
versions of the lax [w] in words such as wood and good. It is striking that the [a=/a]
shibboleth was not among the most prominent distinctions.
Kurath and McDavid (1961) also discuss each of the features. The aggregate, dialecto-
metric perspective adds the opportunity to quantify the importance of features which
Kurath and McDavid approached cartographically.
5. Evaluation
In the foregoing, we have criticized the traditional method for having little to say about
which features and which distributions are important. This deficit arises in traditional
methodology because there are simply too many features and hence too many distribu-
tions and isoglosses to choose between, leaving the method quite underdetermined. This
problem also arises in the evaluation of older methodology.
But it would be naı̈ve to think that we render ourselves immune to methodological
woes simply by aggregating. We do indeed avoid the problem of which material to
choose by obtaining a large, representative sample, preferably via (standard) random
selection (Bolognesi and Heeringa 2005). But many options for measuring pronunciation
differences remain (see sections 3.3 and 3.5). Defining segment distances alone involves
distinguishing about twenty features and five or so values per feature. In addition we
may process unigrams or bigrams, treat diphthongs and/or affricates as one segment or
two, normalize based on word length or on segment or word frequency, aggregate fea-
ture differences via addition or via Euclidean distance, etc. The list is substantial, leading
to the question: If we experiment extensively, and finally hit upon a pleasing analysis,
have we attained substantial insights or have we struck lucky thanks to the plethora of
analytical options? This is our evaluation problem.
As we suggest by introducing the issue this way, we believe that the evaluation prob-
lem has always been present in dialectology, but it is more obviously present in complex
systems involving measurements where many options are available to analysts. In the
present discussion we only consider the problem of evaluating pronunciation measure-
ments, and ignore issues concerning further analysis, in particular those involving clus-
tering.
Psychometrics divides these problems into two sub-issues, consistency and validity.
Consistent measurements tend to provide the same information. We are encouraged
when measurements continue to function well when used on new data, a simple sort of
consistency check. Cronbach’s alpha is a more formal check on consistency (Nunnally
1978). We first measure the inter-item correlation, e.g., between the word dog and the
word cat, by first obtaining two site ⫻ site tables of pronunciation distances, one for
dog and another for cat. We then calculate the correlation between the two tables, meas-
uring roughly the degree to which the two words provide the same indication of linguistic
distance. We repeat this process for every pair of words in the sample (a time-consuming
task), thereby obtaining the mean inter-item correlation. Figure 31.4 graphs Cronbach’s
alpha as a function of r, the mean inter-item correlation coefficient, and n, the number of
items. Given a mean inter-item correlation, Cronbach’s alpha indicates whether enough
material is present in the sample. Nunnally (1978) suggests that 0.7 or 0.8 is a satisfactory
level, and Cronbach’s alpha ⫽ 0.97 for the LAMSAS sample, indicating that the signal
is very consistent, given the amount of material.
We emphasize that Cronbach’s alpha depends on the data set being analyzed. In our
experience thirty-word sets normally show levels of above 0.8, but new data, especially
with low inter-item correlation, could differ.
We say that a measure is valid if it measures what it purports to, and this leads
immediately to more reflective questions about the goals of dialectology. We can claim
to measure similarity in pronunciation, but similarity with respect to what? Our thinking
on this point has evolved. Taking expert opinion to be well founded, we once calculated
the degree to which our analyses coincided (Heeringa, Nerbonne and Kleiweg 2002).
Although this is worthwhile, we would still, if we are ambitious, like to improve upon
earlier expert opinion where possible. We now prefer to begin from the premise that one
of the goals of dialectology is to characterize the signals of provenance normally present
in speech. Naturally this process begins with the detection of those signals and proceeds
Fig. 31.4: Cronbach’s alpha is a function of the inter-item correlation r (left axis), which measures
whether different items are giving the same indication, and n (right axis), the sample
size. It shows whether samples are large enough to provide consistent signals
to an investigation of their structure. We speak of signals in order to emphasize that

people should be able to receive them, and this leads immediately to the idea that we
ought to validate our measurements by comparing them to dialect speakers’ judgments.
Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) have developed this idea and rendered it operational.
They analyzed Norwegian pronunciations along the lines sketched in section 3: and
played recordings of the pronunciations to dialect speakers, who judged how similar the
pronunciations were to their own. Gooskens and Heeringa then measured the correlation
between the perceptual judgments and pronunciation distances (r ⫽ 0.7). We have also
applied this method when comparing different versions of the pronunciation difference
measure (Heeringa et al. 2006), and it seems the best way of independently validating
the work. We should add that most analyses indicate that the various versions of the
pronunciation measure do not differ significantly from one another when evaluated
strictly. It is surprisingly difficult to demonstrate the superiority of the more discriminat-
ing systems.
6. Emerging issues
Once we are satisfied that pronunciation distance measures are a valuable contribution
to the dialectologist’s toolbox, several opportunities arise and several additional under-
takings suggest themselves. Perhaps the most exciting opportunity is the chance to at-
tempt a characterization of the general relation between geographic and linguistic dis-
tance. Séguy (1971) has shown that dialectometric distances derived from French data
grow sublinearly as a function of geography, a result which most studies to date have
confirmed. Nerbonne and Heeringa (2007) replicate Séguy’s finding using Dutch data
and argue that this contradicts Trudgill’s (1974) well-known “gravity model”. The pres-
ent overview is too brief to go into further detail, but our argument makes essential use
of the measurement techniques presented here.
The success of the technique suggests that it should be possible to detect recent bor-
rowings, since such words show an unexpectedly low distance given overall varietal dis-
tances (van der Ark et al. 2007), and it is exciting to consider what other cultural markers
might be studied quantitatively to explore the degree to which linguistic variation be-
haves like other cultural traits (Manni et al. 2008). Finally, we wish to discover how the
different linguistic levels ⫺ lexical, phonological and syntactic ⫺ correlate as signals
of provenance.
There are also several points at which we feel the techniques presented here could be
improved. It should be clear that we are not satisfied with the minor benefits that have
been adduced for systems which take account of segment distances. Linguistically, we
are quite certain that finer distinctions may be reliably drawn, and it is a puzzle as to
why their benefit should be so hard to demonstrate. Our current hypothesis is that the
high level of aggregation may be hiding the benefits. It would also be prudent to explore
the relation between dialect perception and other aspects of phonetics, asking whether
they share traits and, if so, which (Wieling and Nerbonne 2007). Finally, we look forward
to the development of better techniques for identifying the major linguistic factors in
aggregate comparison.
Reerences
Bloomfield, Leonard
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32. Linguistic atlases - traditional and modern

1. Introduction
2. Preliminary events
3. Methodological grounding
4. Further development
5. References
1. Introduction
Without doubt, our understanding of human language and communication benefits from
the geographical approach, especially the knowledge organized via maps and atlases.
Given that institutes dedicated to the production of cartographic compendia have in the
past been seen as linguistic laboratories (Stanforth 1971: 12), it should be clear that, in
addition to recent developments, the traditions in linguistic cartography are well worth
investigating. A resurgence in international atlas projects over recent decades has led to
a strong (and continuing) interest in cartographic methodology. Above all, the computa-
tional handling of maps and atlases needs to be seen as a current focus of attention.
But, due to the reassessments of historical data necessary for the analysis of language
change, there is also a strong interest in the history of language cartography. While the
first focal point is widely described in both papers and manuals, to date there has been
no comprehensive cross-philological overview of the traditions in language mapping,
especially one dedicated to the development of linguistic atlases (approaches are pre-
sented in, e.g., Thun 2000; Kirk 2001; Veith 2006; comprehensive but out of date is Pop
1950). This is unfortunate, considering that every cartographic work has a unique sub-
jective dimension that is bound up with, first, the decisions of the individual authors
and, second, the particular context of origin. Understanding how maps and atlases are
organized is thus a precondition for their correct interpretation.
The production of linguistic maps became a relevant linguistic field in the nineteenth
century, at which time we find an abrupt rise in the amount of cartographic work, mak-
ing it possible to speak of the origin of the cartographic paradigm in linguistics. Right
from the outset, atlases, not just maps, were seen as a productive tool in the pursuit of
geolinguistic interests. The extent to which this was a part of a more general zeitgeist
becomes clear when one reflects that geographers were also publishing the first thematic
atlases at this time. Nevertheless ⫺ as will be shown ⫺ an atlas is not necessarily the
result of cartographic impulses. In these early times we find so-called “atlases” that were
based on spatial but not cartographic information; at first approximation an atlas should
thus be understood as a phenomena-based compendium of spatial data of (at best) empiri-
cal provenience. This is unusual, inasmuch as an atlas is currently defined as a systematic
collection of maps (cf., e.g., Bollmann and Koch 2001: 39). But we also find similar
approaches today, as with the modern linguistic atlases that are occasionally organized
without any maps. This is related to the existence of different types of atlas organization
and different historical stages of atlas production. But it also shows that there is to date
still a problem in defining a linguistic atlas.
This article meets the challenge by arguing for a more comprehensive understanding
of the initial phase of atlas cartography than has previously been adopted. Taking meth-
odological progress into account, it becomes obvious ⫺ at least in the cases discussed ⫺
that there are stronger similarities of intent between the different approaches followed
within map and atlas-based projects than has previously been conceded. Accordingly,
section 2 highlights both the growing interest in atlases and the very earliest approaches
which led to the creation of phenomenal maps. In addition, section 3 describes the devel-
opment of the first linguistic atlases in Germany, Switzerland and France in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking these together with the work of their
immediate successors, it becomes apparent that the most relevant issues in atlas cartogra-
phy had already been worked through by the first half of the twentieth century, be they
thematic structuring, onomasiological issues, the principles of map and data interpreta-
tion, the integration of extralinguistic factors, etc. Alongside this, section 4 shows that
current atlases have set a new focus, directed not only at individual varieties but also at
the communicative practices of their speakers. In this regard, the pluridimensional at-
lases are a promising tool for a more comprehensive interpretation of language in space.
An expanded data basis is also emphasized in the design of current information systems,
which extend well beyond traditional atlas design. The computational aspects involved
in such systems are also discussed in section 4.
All together, it will be shown that there are chains of strong (mostly) personal connec-
tions which constitute lineages of tradition of which linguists are not always fully aware.
But, more importantly, the main objective of this contribution is to demonstrate the
progress, both ideological and methodological, which connects individual projects more
closely than has previously been realized. Of course, it is not possible to offer a satisfying
systematization of both chronology and methodology within the confines of a short
essay, especially given that the current state of discussion is relatively meager. This con-
tribution therefore highlights important aspects insofar as they are necessary to under-
stand the central theme. For a more detailed treatment of the whole topic, readers are
referred to the Language Mapping handbook in this series (Lameli, Kehrein and Raba-
nus, to appear). All of the maps and atlases mentioned in the explanations which follow
have been included there (in the second volume) as examples.
2. Preliminary events
2.1. Linguistic maps
Cartography as a method for the description and explanation of spatial relations has a
tradition that can be traced back to ancient times. Its subject is the illustration of a ⫺
however it may be defined ⫺ geographic reality on a two-dimensional plane. Important

epochs can be defined in terms of both the different stages in human conceptualization
of the planet and the development of geometric techniques. Rather late in its history, a
correlative approach that visually combines the terrestrial dimension with specific natu-
ral or social phenomena becomes apparent. Aside from ancient cartographic descriptions
of space as affected by man (e.g., the Tabula Peutingeriana [c. 350 b.c.], or the so-called
mappae mundi that represent the Christian view of the world during the Middle Ages,
e.g., Erhard Etzlaub’s Romweg Map of 1500), an explicitly thematic cartography does
not clearly evolve until the eighteenth century. Then, however, we find a diversity of
analytical approaches, in many cases based on quantitative measurements, as repre-
sented by Edmont Halley’s isogonic Map (1701), which is commonly seen as one of the
first truly thematic maps, if not the first. It is no coincidence that this map was intended
for practical, i. e., naval purposes, namely calculation of the variation in the magnetic
field around the Americas: maps confer practical benefits and are therefore used as
instruments. But human spatial phenomena soon became more relevant for cartogra-
phers, such as, for instance, demographic questions arising from emergent statistics, and
maps thus began to help interpret the conditions of human life. This also includes the
spatial organization of language. However, it was not linguists but geographers who
were the first scholars to demonstrate the regional distribution of languages or language
phenomena (e.g., ten Kate 1723). It was Gottfried Hensel (1741) who produced early
maps of linguistic variation that show, for instance, the different realizations of the
Lord’s Prayer in Europe or other details of the world’s languages.
Although the focus so far has been on thematic cartography, it should not be forgot-
ten that evidence of linguistic particularities is already found in the earliest geographical
compendia. Thus, for example, in the commentary accompanying the map collection
which forms part of his Cosmographiae Universalis, the German geographer Sebastian
Münster mentions differences within the region of Silesia that make his essentially topo-
graphic map linguistically productive. He identifies the Oder River as a language border:
Utitur pro maiori parte lingua germanica. Ultra Oderam vero loquuntur Sclavonice, quae
lingua communis est Bohemis, Polonis, Sclavis, id est, Illyrijs, Moscovitis, Lithvanis et multis
alijs populis.
‘In most parts the German language is used. On the other side of the Oder, however, Slavonic
is spoken, which is the common language of Bohemians, Poles, Slavs, that is, Illyrians,
Muscovites, Lithuanians and many other peoples.’
(Münster 1572 [1544]: Liber I, map 14 “slesiae descriptio”; my translation)
Nevertheless, an enduring desire for knowledge, including the investigation of language,

first evolved during the Enlightenment in Europe. The Enlightenment focus on the hu-
man individual made both the subjectivity of the individual and the subjectivity of per-
ception topics of scholarly discourse. This interest in the res humana led to a particular
tenor of observation that also implicated language. Important consequences were the
first empirical scientific attempts at collecting linguistic data within geography, thus help-
ing to negotiate the theoretical-cum-reflective attitude that can be traced back to the
early modern period. An empirical interest in the spatial dimension of language first
appeared in nations with a marked linguistic heterogeneity, such as Germany, Italy,
Russia or Switzerland, even if the actual aim of the early geographically based studies
was not the production of maps, but rather the publication of the established linguistic
instrument of a lexicon (cf. Freudenberg 1965). Undoubtedly, the indirect global explora-
tion of mass linguistic data commissioned by Catharine II of Russia is one of the most
impressive examples. It led to the Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia comparativa, real-
ized by Simon Pallas (1977⫺1978 [1786⫺1789]).
It did not take long for the first linguistic atlases to emerge from such undertakings,
especially taking into account that the tradition of thematic atlases began in the same
period, with Carl Ritter’s Sechs Karten von Europa (1806). According to Pop (1950: 18),
a French sound atlas was being planned within the Societé Royale des Antiquaires as
early as 1823, although it was never completed. But in the same year, 1823, the first
explicitly labeled (in the subtitle) Sprachatlas was published by Julius Klaproth. Its ac-
tual name is Asia Polyglotta, in reference to the multilingual relations in Asia which
attracted scientific interest. From a current perspective, this work is anything but typical.
In particular, it features lists of words ordered into tables according to certain language
types, which, where necessary, are subdivided into individual roots (Stämme). At the end
of the volume the reader finds a map where the linguistic information is put into geo-
graphical relation. However, on his map, Klaproth explicitly refers not to the listed
languages but to their speakers (“Georgier, Kaukasier, Samojeden, Jeniseier, Ost-Fin-
nen”, etc.). In so doing, Klaproth employs a relevant ethnological argument, which may
well have been of only minor importance to him. The argument reifies apparent parallels
between languages and ethnic groups, e.g., the depicted linguistic proximity of peoples
in “Hindustan” and “Persien”. In this regard, the map contains additional information
and also acknowledges the fact that language is dependent upon human carriers and
does not exist autonomously. Further, it includes topographical details. Hence, the
reader sees that the border between the “Indo-Germanen” and the “Tübeter” coincides
with the “Himalaja”, for instance. Thanks to the visual impressions it generates, which
simultaneously abbreviate and broaden the linguistic information on offer, the map also
serves as a potential starting point for linguistic deliberations. In fact, this proves helpful,
since some groups of speakers, such as the Koreans or the Japanese, are not described
in the preceding tables. But such rare cases aside, the map is also to be understood as a
“register” which refers to the contents of the table and helps to interpret the regional
picture in more depth.
This methodology is already identifiable in the early work of ten Kate (1723), which
features a classification of European languages, together with textual explanations that
also refer to the variation of specific phenomena. But above all, Klaproth’s methodology
is somewhat reminiscent of that of Johann Andreas Schmeller (1821), even if Schmeller’s
single map is not as elaborately illustrated, nor his work explicitly designated an atlas.
Nonetheless, the organizational parallels to Klaproth alone mandate mentioning it in
this context. Schmeller’s objective was an exhaustive description of the dialects of the
Kingdom of Bavaria via a comprehensive set of directly collected data. In order to
achieve a geographical overview, he designed a coded map that enables the identification
of individual language phenomena listed in a particular chapter of his monograph (1821:
427⫺432). Each code represents a dialect grouping, and the map is divided by lines into
six individual groups at the first hierarchical level. The starting points for the areal
structuration are primarily rivers, after which the dialect groups are named. Once again,
based on the chapter about these dialect groupings, further information can be found in
other parts of the book via an identifying number (1821: 31⫺426), where the reader
finds a phonetic description of individual dialect phenomena. In such a way, Schmeller
develops a distinct dialect typology. Here too, the map functions like a register that gives
access to linguistic information while at the same time also providing a spatial impres-
sion of the variability of language.
Against this background, the beginnings of language cartography can be seen to be
characterized by rather similar approaches, with no single clear criterion for the use of
the atlas label ⫺ which should not really be surprising, given that a tradition in thematic
cartography had not yet been established. In contrast, it becomes quite clear that the
terminology of the time is imprecise when we consider Adrien (or Adriano) Balbi’s Atlas
ethnographique du globe (1826), which, despite being called “atlas”, contains no carto-
graphic material. What makes Balbi (who was a cartographer with an interest in ethnol-
ogy, not a linguist like Klaproth) important from a linguistic point of view is the fact
that he aimed to define human space, i. e., relations between peoples, in terms of the
differences between the languages spoken by them (cf. the subtitle of his atlas: ou Classi-
fication des peuples anciens et modernes, d’après leurs langues, précédé d’un discours sur
l’utilité et l’importance de l’étude des langues appliquées à plusieurs branches des connais-
sances humaines). As a consequence, his work is in effect a classification of languages,
or rather a classification of groups of speakers.
In terms of the notion of maps and atlases within the linguistic context, it is important
to note that Balbi included in his work a so-called “mappemonde” that is nothing more
than a “tableau ethnographique” and thus not a cartographic work. At the end of his
volume, the reader finds translations of individual words into the languages of the world
as classified therein. It should be pointed out that the entire work is explicitly located
within the context of Catherine II’s project mentioned above; such early authors were
obviously quite close to the lexicon projects of the time. For authors like Klaproth and
Balbi, the most important defining criterion for an atlas was a reference to variability in
space, not the presence of cartographic material. Consequently, their work occupies the
middle ground between lexica and more modern atlases. One important difference be-
tween phenomena-based projects (like Klaproth’s atlas) and cross-linguistic comparative
lexica (like Catherine’s project) lies in their macro and micro-structural organization.
But possibly the most important difference is that maps and atlases aim to achieve a
particular spatial structuring of language, while this is usually a precondition for lexica,
not their objective.
2.2. Collections o maps
If, however, one defines an atlas from a contemporary perspective as a “systematic col-
lection of maps in book format or as loose sheets for a specific goal and purpose”
(Bollmann and Koch 2001: 39; my translation), then the initial phase of actual linguistic
atlas cartography must be dated a little more recently. The most important starting point
from this perspective is Bernardino Biondelli’s Atlante Linguistico d’Europa of 1841. Here
too, the focus is on the geographical relations between languages, or rather language
families. Specific linguistic phenomena are also excluded from this work. The visual
means of argumentation are color and lines, techniques it shares with virtually every
thematic map from earlier periods. Above all, the use of (colored) lines proved to be a
useful structuring method for evoking a spatial impression. When one considers, for
instance, Bartolomeo Scultetus’ Lusatia Superior map (1593) which displays the regional
difference between “deutsch” and “wendisch” (‘German’ vs. ‘Sorbian’) using colored
lines, it can be claimed that this method has also been used for linguistic purposes from
the very outset of modern cartography (cf. Thun 2000: 70⫺71).
In Biondelli’s case, the integration of further information via specific explanation is
also important. In contrast to Klaproth, Biondelli’s individual maps are supplemented
by additional information in the form of texts, not tables, albeit not as voluminous as
Schmeller’s comments and lacking Klaproth’s detail about concrete realizations. It is
nevertheless noteworthy that they convey, for instance, regional subgroupings or histori-
cal information not deducible from the map. It thus becomes obvious that, from the
authors’ perspective, the map as such is not self-explanatory. In contrast, these authors
feel an unquestionable need for commentary. This too is an element familiar from the
first non-linguistic map collections, such as Sebastian Münster and his explanation of
the Silesian map quoted above. Thus, bearing in mind that the initial nineteenth-century
approaches shared an emphasis on the textual dimension and that the cartographic as-
pects gradually became more important, we can identify a line of development in the
constitution of linguistic atlases, which ⫺ from a latter-day perspective ⫺ can be cap-
tured by at least two definitions distinguished from one another by a methodological
advance. The first definition, which characterizes the first period up to and including the
work of Balbi, conceives a linguistic atlas to be
(1) a (non-lexicographic) collection of language data based on regional variation.
However, considering that Schmeller, whose work fits within this first definition, did not
make use of the term atlas, it becomes obvious that the actual nature of language atlases
was in practice rather unclear and dependent on individual aspects.
The second definition ⫺ which characterizes the later period starting more or less
with Biondelli (Freudenberg [1965: 172] discusses an earlier unpublished project) ⫺ con-
ceives of a linguistic atlas as
(2) a collection of thematic maps showing the regional distribution of language.
What holds for both definitions/periods is, firstly, that the mapping techniques are linked
to traditions in cartographic visualization well known to the cartographically adept au-
thors. Secondly, with the inclusion of textual elements we find the use of techniques that
transcend the illustration as such. At the same time, it is also obvious that linguistic
atlases are from the outset explicitly bound to the concrete phenomena of spoken lan-
guage (i. e., words), be it via maps or texts. If the comments are seen as an extension of
the actual map information ⫺ and contrary to usual practice they should be ⫺ then
there can be no doubt that the mapped registers included in the work of Klaproth or
Schmeller ⫺ alongside earlier maps like Hensel’s, that remained unknown to nineteenth-
century linguists ⫺ are the direct forerunners of later phenomena-based maps. That is,
the distinction between maps of a language (Sprachenkarten), which detail the distribu-
tion of a language, and maps of linguistic phenomena (Sprachkarten), which describe
concrete features (cf. Thun 2000: 71⫺73), is a theoretical simplification, although it is
of practical benefit. For most of the authors mentioned, even if they produced maps of
languages, the inherent information was phenomenal in nature. Of Schmeller at least,
we know that he revised his early map to create a cartographic overview of linguistic
variants in the course of a later, commissioned work (Schmeller 1956 [1846]: 419). This
interest in phenomena will be explored further in the following section, where the notion
of “atlas” is that of the second definition.
2.3. The problem o phenomena
As shown, at the beginnings of linguistic cartography the kind of information that

should properly form part of an atlas or a map seems to have been rather unclear. The
simplest approach to the mapping of language is ⫺ at first glance ⫺ to show the regional
distribution of a language as such. But given that ethnological constraints do not apply,
this is only possible if comparable data that help to define a particular geographical
distribution are available. This makes the linguistic-mapping approach exceptionally
complicated. Even if scholars set out to create a phenomenal overview, the data ⫺ if
available ⫺ is so voluminous that (the problem of transcription aside) it is not possible
to present it all on one page. Scholars therefore attempt to classify their data. The regis-
ter maps demonstrate that cartography was at first blush seen as a means of presenting
such a linguistic classification. This makes it clear that, even if the dependent variable
of the geographical approach was “linguistic item (sound, word, etc.)”, the dependent
variable of the cartographic approach was, for methodological reasons, “language”. Nev-
ertheless, the linguistic items were connected to the maps, via the textual explanations.
The general problem can best be understood by looking at other topics of thematic
cartography. The aim of linguistic cartography is not substantially different from the
objective of mapping “weather”, for instance. However, even the early cartographers
(cf., e.g., Halley’s weather map from 1686) define weather via particular attributes such
as barometric measures, barometric changes, wind, temperature, and so on. These attri-
butes can then be individually presented on a single map. In linguistics, however, the
definiens is often much more extensive and, moreover, there are fewer or no analytical
instruments available that provide an intersubjective definition and classification of lan-
guage “attributes”. It took some time before scholars like Schmeller managed to aban-
don their comprehensive approach and identified the possibility of using maps for the
documentation of individual phenomena. When they did, the dependent variable was
finally defined as “linguistic item” in linguistic cartography as well, and it made sense
to assemble such individual maps into an atlas. As this orientation took hold in linguis-
tics, the full potential of linguistic cartography was finally tapped.
2.4. A look at the zeitgeist
Finally, the scholarly resonance of this early stage needs to be addressed. Some of the
projects mentioned are not well known to contemporary scholars; similarly, the pre-
scientific maps of Hensel, ten Kate or Scultetus were also probably not known to the
geolinguistic pioneers of the nineteenth century. But from 1800 on, most contemporary
works in emergent linguistics rapidly became widely known after publication, at least
within their individual philological traditions (although some occasionally sank rapidly
into philological oblivion). The following anecdote gives a good impression of the situa-
tion at the time. In the Bavarian Academy of Science’s journal, the Gelehrte Anzeigen,
an anonymous review of Biondelli’s atlas was published in 1842. With a vague reference
to Balbi and following a detailed description of Biondelli’s work, the enthusiastic writer
makes it clear that linguistic cartography is only in the preliminary stages of development
and that he therefore hopes Biondelli’s atlas will act as an “effective admonition” (“wirk-
same Mahnung”; Anonymous 1842: 80) to go further. His enthusiasm is inspired not
least by Biondelli’s announcement of future volumes dedicated to the European lan-
guages and dialects. Biondelli’s atlas is thus seen as an “excellent first attempt” (“erster
großartiger Versuch”; Anonymous 1842: 80) on the way to an exhaustive description of
geographical variation in language. Two years later, in 1844, the same anonymous re-
viewer compliments Šafařik and Bernhardi on their individual non-phenomenal lan-
guage maps of Slavia (1842) and Germany (1843), respectively. But at the same time the
reviewer points out that, in future, the main effort of linguistics should be pitched at the
level of phenomena, not that of individual languages, which are heterogeneous sets of
varieties and variants (Anonymous 1844: 573). In the reviewer’s opinion, these three
authors ⫺ Biondelli, Šafařik and Bernhardi ⫺ are nevertheless the founders of an explic-
itly linguistic cartography. This is remarkable in light of the identity of the reviewer in
question: it is none other than the pioneer of empirically based (Bavarian) dialectology
named above, Johann Andreas Schmeller, as becomes apparent from his voluminous
diaries (Schmeller 1956 [1842]: 328). There is no mention of Klaproth in these, so it is
possible (albeit unlikely) that Schmeller had failed to notice the Asian work. But most
striking of all is the fact that Schmeller ⫺ in contrast to virtually every linguist since ⫺
obviously does not regard his own map from 1821 as one of the first dialect maps, a
fact which serves to underline its abovementioned “register” function.
3. Methodological grounding
Linguistic atlases that are strictly confined to the documentation of linguistic phenomena
have so far been portrayed as the result of developments in the history of language
geography, and it is the German Georg Wenker and the Swiss Jules Gilliéron who inde-
pendently realized such works in their earliest attempts in 1878 and 1880. Their projects
are commonly seen as linguistic milestones and hence a large volume of literature on the
basic principles guiding their work has been generated, so that little needs to be said
here (for further information cf. Pop 1950; Werlen 1996: 436⫺444; Chambers and Trud-
gill 1998: 13⫺31). What makes their atlases interesting in the given context is the fact
that they ⫺ not just metaphorically ⫺ enter uncharted territory and thereby set a new
focus in geolinguistics. But conceptually the authors are not that far apart either; recall
that both started out with the documentation of relatively small areas and ended up
working with nations. Naturally, there were other highly creative scholars who addressed
the phenomenal dimension of linguistic atlases, e.g., Fischer (1895). But together with
their immediate successors, Wenker and Gilliéron developed the basic principles of lan-
guage cartography that remain indispensable to this day. This is due not least to the sheer
volume of their work and the central role it has played within the linguistic discourse of
their time and since. This section therefore sets out to explore the underlying lines of
their work which place them directly within the above-mentioned tradition.
3.1. Georg Wenker
Georg Wenker is renowned for his exploration of German dialects using a questionnaire
of 40 standardized sentences that he distributed to German schools by mail. There, the
questionnaire was translated into the individual dialects by pupils or teachers. Proceed-
ing thus, Wenker collected information from over 45,000 locations. In a second step,
this data was plotted by hand onto over 1,500 maps. His mapping procedure was refined
in several stages within the project, in line with overall progress in linguistic cartography
(cf. Knoop, Putschke and Wiegand 1982; Herrgen 2001).
In light of the above considerations (section 2.3), it is not surprising that Wenker’s
first cartographic work was a classification of the dialects around his homeland (Wenker
1877). In separating regions via borders ⫺ e.g., the “Grenze von Benrath” ‘border of
Benrath’ ⫺ which he refers to in the text as lines ⫺ e.g., the “Benrath line” (Benrather
Linie) ⫺ he employs explicitly cartographic arguments, thereby exhibiting a stronger
emphasis on cartography in linguistics than did his forerunners. This also becomes ap-
parent when we consider that Wenker used a geographically detailed and coherent base
map. It is noteworthy that with this map Wenker also aimed to develop a classification
dependent on various dialect group hierarchies. As with Schmeller (whose work was
known to him), we thus find a cartographic structuring of language in space. But, in
contrast to Schmeller, Wenker’s map does not directly refer to textual elements, so that
to a certain degree the map stands alone and can only be interpreted by reading the text
before looking at the map. It should be kept in mind that Wenker’s small volume is
explicitly written for non-linguists (i. e., his informants) and thus addresses a different
audience to Schmeller’s monograph.
Things changed with Wenker’s next undertaking. His Sprachatlas der Rheinprovinz
nördlich der Mosel und des Kreises Siegen (1878) contains 25 printed base maps with
colors that show the distribution of dialect sounds and forms added by hand. Developed
as a demonstration of the validity of the methodology, it never reached the international
book stores (only two copies existed). Nevertheless it has official status, since, as be-
comes clear from Wenker’s letters, it was prepared for and considered by the German
Akademie der Wissenschaften in the context of a proposal for further project funding.
Indeed, this is the first real language atlas in the sense of a collection of phenomena-
based maps. His methodological approach was to combine on one map several items
that ⫺ from Wenker’s point of view ⫺ stood in a certain linguistic relation to one
another or showed similar regional distributions. Larger texts were obsolete and further
information could be integrated into a corner of the map as a comment. An onomastic
map and a topographic map complete the volume and offer further information to assist
interpretation. But, more importantly, areas in which a specific word-bound element
(sound, syllable, etc.) is realized in similar ways are indicated using contour lines. It is
possible to speak here of isoglosses (Bielenstein 1892). The design of the maps is highly
suggestive in the sense that Wenker shows correlations between different linguistic phe-
nomena. Moreover, he demonstrates both the enormous heterogeneity of language and
its underlying structure. This is an important characteristic of his early work since, in
contrast to his later approaches, Wenker here presents a spatial analysis. By presenting
his linguistic results, Wenker underlines the linguistic potential of his method.
His subsequent expansion of the project to northern Germany, published in part as
the Sprach-Atlas von Nord- und Mitteldeutschland (1881), has a similar linguistic objec-
tive, even if the cartography has changed. It is less a presentation of data than a collec-
tion of interpretations (“Wiedergabe der Ergebnisse”, Wenker 1881: XI). Wenker’s work
now became known to the academic world, where it was immediately welcomed with
“unclouded pleasure, even with enthusiasm” (“mit ungetrübter Freude, ja mit Begeister-
ung”; Behaghel 1881: 434). Internationally, the phonetician Ellis considered the project
“the greatest, the best-designed, and the best-executed attempt hitherto made to deter-
mine the peculiarities of local speech” (Ellis 1882: 30). Finally, a scientific gap seemed
to have been partly filled, at least in Germany.
In the final step, which led to the Sprachatlas des deutschen Reichs (1889⫺1923; cf.
<http://www.diwa.info>), Wenker’s principle objective and methodology shifted funda-
mentally once again. In his earlier approach, every map displayed a relatively homoge-
nous distribution of language. Many exceptions to the main spatial distribution were
eliminated, which is why every map needs to be understood as a finished interpretation
about linguistic space. The Sprachatlas des deutschen Reichs (along with its small, rela-
tively unknown offshoot, the Pronomina in Nordwestdeutschland, Wenker 1886) is new
in the sense that the maps explicitly show every detail of the data captured ⫺ and that
for over 45,000 locations. This innovation entailed a stark change in the status of the
maps. If they had previously been considered as analytical output, they were now seen
as the instruments of future research. The increased diligence may also be due to the
fact that the data transcribed were from laymen and thus required careful interpretation.
Nevertheless, the linguistic potential of this approach is enormous, and it led to the
recognition that, given the existence of sound laws, linguistic features ⫺ following
Wenker ⫺ have their own unique spatial distribution, which can vary word for word.
This atlas is undoubtedly remarkable, from both a cartographic and a linguistic point
of view. Each map that had been finished was officially sent to the Berlin State Library,
where it was intended to be publicly available. Further, the maps were accompanied by
commentary in the form of individual booklets (Wenker, to appear), which set out to
document everything that might be of interest for further analysis. All the first drafts
remained in Marburg, where Wenker worked. In the period which followed, this Mar-
burg copy was virtually the only one in use (the commentaries remained unknown).
What never became widely known is that the Berlin copy was created as a new type of
atlas (cf. Lameli 2008a). The visitor to the library finds a paper map depicting monosyl-
labic words or root syllables. The word endings (e.g., sounds, suffixes) are mapped out
on transparent paper. It thus becomes possible to overlay stem and suffix and to analyze
the morphological distribution of related word components, for instance. Where linguis-
tic atlases normally document paradigmatic issues, in this special case ⫺ by looking at
different elements of form at the same time ⫺ the user can examine syntagmatic aspects.
This technique further underlines the strongly word-based orientation. Wenker had al-
ready experimented with transparencies in the Sprach-Atlas von Nord- und Mitteldeutsch-
land (Wenker 1881: XII), making a fundamental characteristic of atlas cartography obvi-
ous in the process: comparability.
3.2. Jules Gilliéron

The importance of comparability can also be found in the work of the Swiss linguist
Gilliéron. His first atlas from 1880 is known as the Petit Atlas phonétique du Valais roman
(sud du Rhône). Gilliéron gathered the necessary data directly during a hike through the
southern Rhone valley, a region in the contact zone between Switzerland, Italy and
Savoy where Romance varieties are spoken. The transcriptions are phonetically detailed
and systemized on maps. This fundamental methodological distinction between Gilliéron
(direct data collection) and Wenker (indirect data collection) is a stereotype in the history
of linguistics. But in light of the historical period, it is also true that the two scholars
were quite close in terms of their linguistic orientation. Gilliéron emphasizes that his
work stands in the tradition of his teacher, Paul Meyer. Quoting Meyer, Gilliéron un-
derlines to the goal of the atlas right at the opening of his introduction: “Faire en quel-
que sorte la géographie des caractères dialecteaux bien plus que celle des dialectes” (Gil-
liéron [1880]: 7). This makes clear what Schmeller had already pointed out (cf. section
2.4). Because of a focus on the regularities of language, in this epoch only microlinguistic
features like sounds seemed usable to obtain deeper insights.
But this atlas is also interesting from a cartographic point of view. The main method
is based on color symbols. Different linguistic types are signified by different colors on
a rather schematic map that features the national borders, the Rhone River and some
villages. A particular location where a specific type was found is underlined in the appro-
priate color. Where necessary, the lines are broken or dotted, so that it becomes possible
to multiply the number of symbols in use. This method was complicated by the fact that
for financial reasons it was not possible to print the colors. Hence, like Wenker, who
drafted onto preprinted base maps, Gilliéron was forced to draw the lines into every
printed booklet by hand (Gilliéron [1880]: 7). Whether this work was really the first
printed atlas is thus open to interpretation (cf., e.g., Thun 2000: 76). The principle of
documentation (not analysis) aside, what is most striking ⫺ and this again brings Gil-
liéron ideologically close to Wenker ⫺ is the need for extralinguistic information. Gil-
liéron includes a wealth of information concerning topography, population, language
history, unmapped linguistic items and ⫺ not least ⫺ linguistic similarities between the
surveyed locations. In so doing, Gilliéron refers to the high degree of similarity between
the dialects. Even if it was not explicitly so intended, this practice is typologically useful.
This is remarkable since it is not a common topic in modern atlas cartography but is
nevertheless related to later dialectometry to some extent (cf. Goebl 1984). In this regard,
Gilliéron’s work illustrates the desire for a comprehensive and integrative description as
well as the creativity of this early period.
Even if the influence of this early work has been rather selective, the next stage in
Romance dialect geography, Gilliéron’s and Edmont’s Atlas linguistique de la France
(ALF, 1902⫺1914), needs to be seen as the foundation of a linguistic tradition that made
another important contribution to linguistic atlas cartography. The main objective of
the ALF was to record the diatopic heterogeneity of the dialects in France (cf. Thun
2000: 76⫺80). According to Werlen (1996: 442), it should also be understood as a re-
sponse to Wenker’s rather workaday methodology. In contrast to Wenker (whose work
was known to Gilliéron), the method of data collection was a direct one: an investigator
(Edmond Edmont) traveled all over France making narrow phonetic transcriptions in
639 locations. The instrumental character of the whole work is underlined by the carto-
graphic organization. Each map shows the original transcripts for a specific linguistic
variable. The map user’s first impression is that of a “spatial tableau”, i. e., topologically
ordered words on a page. A more detailed spatial structuring, like that which Wenker
intended, was not sought, which is why the ALF was able to rigorously pursue the
documentation principle. In addition, a separate volume includes demographic data on
the informants and further comments on the transcriptions. It is highly interesting that
the authors went as far as possible to provide all information about their material. This
is true not only of the very detailed (in comparison to Wenker) description of the infor-
mants (e.g., profession, age, sex). The user also finds information on local variation in
the ALF maps, in some cases information on the social differentiation of the variants
used in a particular location, specified via comments like “chez les jeunes”, “chez certains
individus”, “par les vieillards” (Gilliéron and Edmont 1902: 21). At this early stage, we
thus already find a clear consideration of pluridimensional (i. e., social) aspects, which,
as an aside, is also evident in the work of Wenker when he compares the language use
of older and younger people using a language map in 1889 (cf. Lameli 2008b).
With regard to cartography, it also needs to be mentioned that by this stage a more
precise base map was in use, showing the departments of France as well as the individual
locations. The authors abandon the use of both colors and isoglosses. The latter might
be attributable to the selection of only a small subset of potential locations, something
the editors themselves saw as a “faible partie” (‘weak point’, Gilliéron and Edmont
1902: 3). But since, in contrast to Wenker, a phonetic transcription system was used, the
documentation is as objective as was possible at the time. The user thus finds a sound
data basis for linguistic analysis.
From a cartographic perspective, it is also remarkable that the authors combined
various linguistic items onto one map. An example is Map 44 from the first ALF volume,
where two realizations of the phrase cette année in different sentence positions (Cette
année, il y a eu beaucoup de fruit vs. La chaleur a été tardive, cette année) are contrasted.
The criticism might be raised here, as it was of Wenker (1878) for instance, that the
authors have exceeded the principle of documentation by suggesting clear inter-
pretations. But on the other hand, firstly ⫺ and in contrast to many modern maps which
show combined phenomena ⫺ it is still clear which elements are mapped and, second,
the user becomes sensitized to syntactic variation that is less obvious than phonetic
variation. This highlights other distinctive features of the ALF, namely its inclusiveness
with regard to linguistic sublevels (phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax) on the one
hand, and its orientation to the everyday life of its informants, which results in a concen-
tration on specific semantic or lexical fields (e.g., personal names, plants), on the other.
Both became important for subsequent projects.
3.3. Immediate successors
Obviously, Wenker’s investigations in Germany and Gilliéron’s in organizational terms

parallel research in Switzerland and later France fundamentally influenced the scientific
potential of dialect cartography in and of themselves. The most important factor might
be that it was only through them that the empirical basis reached a (provisional) peak
in terms of the quantity of data and its linguistic accuracy. In terms of theory, it could
be concluded that Romance and German linguists stood in relatively close contact. For
instance, the Literaturblatt für germanische und romanische Philologie founded in 1880
by Behaghel and Neumann, has played a significant role. However, in practice, collabo-
rations in the field of language geography remain rare to this day, making it simpler to
describe these lines of tradition separately.
Starting with the German tradition, the following national projects that are associ-
ated with the Marburg research center established in the context of Wenker’s work
should be mentioned. In Marburg, the Sprachatlas des deutschen Reichs was finally par-
tially published as the Deutscher Sprachatlas (DSA, 1927⫺1956) by Ferdinand Wrede
(a former employee of Wenker) and others. The final, methodologically substantiated
description of the project is found in a separate handbook that forms part of the DSA
(Mitzka 1952). Among other aspects, the analysis of the material gave rise to strategies
for the interpretation of linguistic maps. Time and again, the editors found particular
patterns of spatial distribution which they summarized into spatial types that are rel-
evant for the interpretation of language change, for instance. In a sense, a summation
of these is the classification of German dialects by Wiesinger (1970). In using the Wenker
data in combination with more recent studies, Wiesinger demonstrates ⫺ from the per-
spective of a structuralist ⫺ the spatial structuring as a whole, together with the transi-
tion zones between larger dialect areas. All in all, this is not just a continuation of
Wenker’s work. When one remembers that Wenker started out with the classification of
the Rhenish dialects, Wiesinger’s synthesis also closes the circle. Historical developments
meant that only then, 100 years after Wenker, were linguists able to analyze and interpret
the cartographic information in more reliable ways and thus go beyond the documenta-
tion principle and develop analytical maps of high quality (for a general critique cf. Kirk
2001: 359⫺360).
Aside from this, the extralinguistic embedding of Wenker’s data led to the elaboration
of the subdiscipline of social linguistics (Soziallinguistik) under Wrede’s direction, whose
most important output is the Deutsche Dialektgeographie series (DDG; cf. Schrambke in
this volume). Another step in the documentation of language across space can be seen
in the various collections of sound recordings, such as the early recordings of Joseph
Seemüller (Vienna) from 1905 on, or the collection of Wilhelm Doegen (Berlin) from
1909 on. The latter was carried out in collaboration with the second generation of re-
searchers in Marburg, especially Wrede. Finally, a so-called “talking atlas” (sprechender
Atlas) was published by the Phonogrammarchiv in Zurich in the context of the SDS (cf.
below). Interestingly, its appearance plays back to the first (early) atlas definition men-
tioned above: this type of atlas has no maps (on the linguistic relevance of sound atlases,
cf. Rabanus 2005; Schmidt and Herrgen to appear).
Completely different is the Deutscher Wortatlas (DWA, Mitzka, Schmidt and Hilde-
brandt 1951⫺1980). This major project (22 volumes), initiated under Walther Mitzka,
can be seen as the continuation of Wenker’s national atlas and, as such, it was formally
denominated as part of the DSA from volume 11 on. Whereas Wenker focused on sounds
and forms, the DWA is dedicated to words. Its onomasiological goal is the exploration
of the dialectal synonyms of various concepts. Basically, the DWA is oriented toward
agricultural vocabulary. Given its lexical focus, phonological details were redundant and
a phonetic transcription became superfluous. Hence, the indirect method already favored
by Wenker was seen as adequate for the nationwide collection of data. Using a question-
naire of 200 items (mostly words plus a few sentences), Mitzka and his staff polled over
48,000 localities between 1939 and 1942, representing roughly a hundred percent of the
German communes and nearly the same density as that reached by Wenker’s project,
with around one location for every fourteen square kilometers. Even though the data
was not phonetically transcribed, the editors did not attempt a comprehensive classifica-
tion of the individual records. At most, a (rather approximate) classification of lexical
records was made on the basis of a typological system of symbols. Further, the lexical
types the authors considered to be most relevant are displayed using exemplars (Leitfor-
men). Criticism of this atlas has been raised, that the extensive integration of original
forms via geometric symbols in some cases cancels out or obscures the visual impression.
On the other hand, prior to this, the systemic structuring of German dialect space was
predicated virtually exclusively on the phonological and in parts the morphological di-
mension. Against this background, one of the most important merits of the DWA is to
have demonstrated the lexical structuring of space and to have shown that, in Germany,
lexical heterogeneity and lexical particularity is largely independent of phonological and
morphological distribution patterns (cf. Hildebrandt 1987). This finding was only made
possible by the inclusion of the original forms. In proceeding thus, the DWA reveals
itself to be a continuation of the documentation principle. A comprehensive dicussion
of the DWA is given by Wiegand and Harras (1971).
In the Romance tradition, the (yet again) Swiss scholars Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud
are regarded as the immediate successors to the ALF. Both studied under Gilliéron and
their Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz (AIS, Jaberg and Jud 1928⫺
1940) is strongly endebted to their teacher’s methodology. Nearly every innovative aspect
in the work of Gilliéron is rigorously worked out in the AIS, be it the transcription
system, the typing of map entries, or the classification of the questionnaire’s items and
with it the semantic organization of the atlas maps. The principal motivation behind
every organizational decision is strongly dependent upon the special requirements of the
investigation area. This is what has made the atlas the standard reference work for many
atlas projects in different philological traditions. For anyone interested in the develop-
ment of language atlases, their introduction (Jaberg and Jud 1928) remains to this day
one of the most important starting points. Against this background, the powerful influ-
ence of their work on later dialectology is no surprise.
Another immediate successor (that also became an inspiration for many other atlases)
is the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz (SDS, Hotzenköcherle et al. 1962⫺1997), initi-
ated by Rudolf Hotzenköcherle in 1935. It is by no means coincidental that, once again,
the extraordinarily heterogeneous linguistic situation in Switzerland was the focus. Hot-
zenköcherle, a former student of Jud’s, set out to develop an atlas of a geographically
restricted region (“Kleinraumatlas”), and in a sense thus closed the circle, bringing the
Romance tradition back to the starting point of Gilliéron. Hotzenköcherle’s focus on
confined regions is a result of intensive discussion, especially within Romance philology
(cf. the Atlas linguistiques de la France par Régions called for by Albert Dauzat in 1939).
For direct data collection, the primary advantage of exploring small areas is the possibil-
ity of obtaining a dense network of survey locations. Where, for instance, the ALF polled
around two percent and the AIS 5.5 percent of all possible communes, the SDS explored
33 percent. This leads to a density of one location for every 37 square kilometers in the
case of the SDS, whereas one location in the ALF and the AIS represents 830 and 765
square kilometers, respectively. The distance between the individual survey locations
averages five to seven kilometers in the SDS, whereas it is thirty kilometers for both the
ALF and the AIS (Hotzenköcherle 1962: 86⫺87). This type of atlas ⫺ regionally re-
stricted but with directly collected data and comprehensive coverage of linguistic phe-
nomena ⫺ finally matched the masses of data collected in the indirect paradigm and,
thanks to its inter-philological orientation, the SDS also influenced subsequent German
atlas projects.
It is worth mentioning that once again the methodological aspect is highly prominent.
On the general goals of linguistic atlases, Hotzenköcherle (1962: 1⫺2) summarizes his
perspective as follows:
1. A linguistic atlas should present a cross-section of sounds, forms, words, etc. over
space and time
2. Building on the spatial structure that results from (1), the goal should be a “language-
internal” analysis leading to a spatial typology
3. Finally, the goal should be to relate the linguistic findings (whether of individual,
structural or typological nature) to extralinguistic phenomena in space.
While (1) is an expression of the documentation principle, points (2) and (3) refer to
application, and thus to the analytical potential of an atlas. In this, the SDS combines
the evolving emphases in the history of linguistic cartography documented earlier with
the findings of social linguistics. In concentrating on the German language, Hotzenköch-
erle liaises with German philology, as becomes obvious in the design of the atlas. Even
though the data is phonologically valid in detail, the SDS uses symbols, not the original
forms. By using (grosso modo) the German paradigm, the atlas offers its readers a clear
spatial impression when looking at the mapped phenomena.
But Hotzenköcherle’s work should also be seen as a link between the two philologies
in terms of its linguistic modeling. In this regard, his third goal is explicitly tied to the
epochal work of Aubin, Frings and Müller (1926), which attempted to establish a strong
correlation between linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. As a result, the atlas is also
designed to offer answers to folkloristic and social questions insofar as they implicate
spatial relations. In the final instance, this is also a consequence of defining language as
embedded within a comprehensive network of the specific conditions of human life. The
SDS renders the need to integrate additional information and comments acute by linking
language and linguistic geography to other human factors. Hence the SDS is extensively
connected to other projects such as, e.g., the folkloristic Atlas der schweizerischen Volks-
kunde (Geiger et al. 1950⫺1995). From a methodological point of view, these cross-
connections are highly interesting, since they offer possibilities that exceed the traditional
potential of linguistic atlases. For instance, by linking the individual thematic maps to
entries in the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, a semasiological approach that goes beyond the
usual onomasiological orientation of atlases becomes possible. This maximizes the po-
tential of an atlas, and, in terms of intent, is not that distant from the texts that have
augmented atlases since the earliest times. At the same time it becomes obvious that
linguistic atlases ⫺ in contrast to earlier views ⫺ are cohesive entities (cf. Hotzenköcher-
le’s first goal). Only the analysis of every thematic approach an atlas offers enables a
complete understanding of the spatial structuring of language. This view represents a
fundamental geolinguistic insight. It is the precondition for dialectometric approaches
that are based on the analysis of complete atlases, for instance (e.g., Goebl 1984).
Another special feature of the SDS are the sound recordings that were collected into
a sound library or “Phonotek”. From the outset, these recordings were intended to give
a more complete impression of spoken language than a printed atlas can. But, unlike
later projects, they were designed not to validate the phonetic transcriptions of the data,
but as separate undertakings (1954⫺1959) which sought to supplement the documenta-
tion basis of the whole atlas. In this light, the SDS should also be seen as an early
example of a sound atlas (cf. Schmidt and Herrgen to appear). In conclusion, it should
be pointed out that the methodological basis for virtually all activity in the field of
linguistic or rather dialect atlases is elaborated (or at least considered) within the first
approaches in the German and Romance philological traditions together with their im-
mediate successors (up until the first half of the twentieth century):
⫺ the awareness of the potential of linguistic atlases for smaller and larger regions
⫺ both the documentation principle and analytical approaches
⫺ the principles of data collection, data arrangement and display
⫺ the thematic structuring and needs of atlases
⫺ the organization of atlases as cohesive works in terms of thematic structuring, refer-
ence systems, symbolic representation, comment, etc.
⫺ the treatment of both onomasiological and semasiological material in atlas cartog-
raphy
⫺ both paradigmatic and syntagmatic data processing in atlas cartography
⫺ multimedial extensions of printed atlases
⫺ the principles and possibilities of data interpretation
⫺ extralinguistic linkages.
At the same time, the fundamentals of other aspects, like the pluridimensional paradigm,
for instance, are elaborated largely outside of the philologies examined here.
4. Further development
With the atlases mentioned so far, the pioneers of methodological progress in both Ger-
man and Romance philology, at least up until the mid twentieth century, have been
addressed. There are many other projects that have been broadly influenced by the indi-
vidual undertakings, such as the regional atlases of the Marburg research center or the
continuations of the ALF in many Romanic countries. Also worthy of mention are the
recent regional atlases in Germany and Switzerland, which (their computer-based imple-
mentation aside) are of high empirical significance and methodological refinement but
which generally represent relatively little cartographic progress. For more detail here,
the reader is referred to the relevant articles in both this volume and the Language
Mapping handbook (Lameli, Kehrein and Rabanus, to appear). Furthermore, it should
of course be pointed out that there are numerous other approaches that aim to describe
geographical variation in language via atlases besides those of the German and Romance
schools. Above all, traditions in the English-speaking and Slavic countries and the Neth-
erlands should be mentioned here. In this regard, the dialectometric approach which
initially emerges solely from atlas contexts is highly relevant; it is a point of emphasis in
the traditions that is not examined in further detail here. The most recent and probably
most complete overview is that offered in the philological chapters in the Language
Mapping handbook mentioned above. A solid overview can also be found in Chambers
and Trudgill (1998: 13⫺31), Kirk (2001) or Veith (2006). For an exhaustive description
of the pre-1950 scene, the reader is referred to Pop (1950).
In language cartography in recent years, the investigation of other linguistic levels,
especially syntax and morphology, has become more prominent. In contrast, the pro-
sodic dimension has remained a desideratum. The most important developments in more
recent atlas cartography, however, are related to two aspects: first ⫺ related to the in-
ternal design ⫺ there is the combination of linguistic and extralinguistic factors; sec-
ond ⫺ related to the methodological realization ⫺ there is the increasing use of comput-
ers. These aspects are described separately.
4.1. Pluridimensional orientation
It has been argued above that, to the extent that they were able to observe it, the authors
of the ALF already tried to integrate social variation in language use. With Wenker too,
the integration of linguistic variability has been pointed out. However, for these authors
a social embedding of linguistic data was not the actual goal of their investigations.
From a global perspective, to date the typical language atlas still focuses on just one
variety as spoken by just one social type of informants (or social group). Hence, they
follow a monodimensional approach, mostly concentrating on the language production
of so-called NORMs: “non-mobile, older, rural males” (Chambers and Trudgill 1998:
29). But over the course of the twentieth century, the explication of socially conditioned
linguistic variability also became an important and increasingly relevant topic of study.
In geolinguistics, one result of this is the pluridimensional dialectology that has become
more prominent in recent years. The goal of the pluridimensional orientation is to pro-
vide a more comprehensive picture of the social embedding of language. This is also a
recognition of the importance of linguistic representativity (cf. Herrgen in this volume).
In contrast to monodimensional atlases, their pluridimensional counterparts take ac-
count of a set of disparate factors, such as gender and age. Maps and atlases thus become
the medium for different types of information which visually enables an understanding
of language in space (cf. Mang and Wollin, to appear).
Jaberg and Jud’s AIS, which is marginally pluridimensional (Thun 2000: 81, footnote
33), aside, it is above all the work of Hans Kurath, as represented by the Linguistic Atlas
of New England (LANE, Kurath et al. 1939⫺1943) that should be mentioned in this
context. Given that Gilliéron’s pupil, Jud, was directly involved in the theoretical and
methodological preparation of the atlas (cf. Kurath 1939: xii), there is a sense in which
this is yet another continuation of the Romance paradigm in a different typological
frame. Kurath ⫺ who displays a thorough knowledge of the history and methodology
of language cartography (especially the German and Romance traditions) ⫺ aimed to
describe both the regional and the social differentiation of language. Right from the
beginning of the project, he considered different social groups of informants, classified
into three levels of education (little formal education vs. better formal vs. superior educa-
tion) and two generations (aged/old-fashioned vs. middle-aged/more modern; cf. Kurath
1939: 44), although these differences are not fully explored at every location (there are
a total of 400 informants across 200 communities). Because informants’ backgrounds
vary, at least one constant is needed: all informants must have grown up in the particular
location under investigation. In the case in point, the local focus is relatively unique: in
line with New England’s status as a former colony, special attention is paid to the history
of the chosen communities, thus opening up a particular dimension of interpretative
access (cf., e.g., Kurath 1939: Plate I). Hence, even though the actual language use is
admittedly highly variable, there is still a strong awareness at individual locations of the
historical dimension that gives rise to local types of language production. This is impor-
tant in that even where linguists address the heterogeneity of language enough constancy
nonetheless remains (within the individual repertoires of the speakers of local dialects)
to be able to define local types, both through time and geographically. In this regard,
the pluridimensional approach illustrates particularly well the interest of linguistic atlas
makers in documenting both differences and similarities in language use, even if the
demonstration of differences usually has priority, thanks to its potential for structuring
linguistic space (cf. also Gilliéron’s similarity approach, section 3.2). But a structural or
gradual differentiation of language in geographical, social or situational terms only be-
comes possible through an (at least indirect) consideration of the constant elements of
language. From a cartographic point of view, the implementation of pluridimensional
data is rather complicated. The LANE displays the informants’ realizations (narrow
phonetic transcription), sorted according to the classification mentioned above, directly
at the relevant location.
Explicitly a completion but also ⫺ from a pluridimensional point of view ⫺ an expan-
sion of Kurath’s work is the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS, Pederson 1968⫺
1992) under the editorship of Pederson. The selection of informants is closely aligned
with Kurath’s approach (cf. Pedersen 1968: 16⫺23; 33⫺40). In addition, differences
among (1) four generations are explored, further distinguished in terms of (2) regionality
(communities, counties, parishes), (3) gender, (4) ethnicity (black vs. white), (5) infor-
mant types (old-fashioned and insular, modern and wordly [sic!], etc.). The LAGS thus
indicates the enormous potential of the pluridimensional approach. In fact, the atlas
reveals many interdependencies linking the individual variables. Cartographically, the
LAGS tries to handle its wealth of material by presenting tables and maps dedicated to
selected linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena. A similar project in terms of the goal
of documenting the language use of different social groups (differentiated by age) is the
Linguistic Atlas of the Seto Inland Sea (LAS, Fujiwara 1974).
Another approach to handling the variability of linguistic reality within an atlas pro-
ject is evident in the methodology of the Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas (MRhSA) by Bell-
mann, Herrgen and Schmidt (1994⫺2002; cf. Herrgen in this volume). There, the differ-
ences between two social groups (aged and sedentary vs. middle-aged and mobile) are
displayed on colored contrast maps. However, due to the particular situation in Ger-
many, the linguistic goal is different to that of the LANE and the LAGS. In Germany,
education and age are not the most relevant factors determining the use of dialect fea-
tures. More important is the amount of regular communication outside (or with people
from outside) the home town. In line with this context, in which there is no real marked
linguistic difference between sociolects and dialects, the authors of the MRhSA sought
to find indicators of the vertical differentiation of language, i. e., on a spectrum between
standard language and dialect (Bellmann 1994: 1⫺4) along which people can shift and
switch up and down according to situational requirements. The primary goal is thus not
the description of the social differentiation of language but the description of existing
linguistic varieties (local dialects vs. regional dialects) using sociodemographic factors as
extralinguistic correlates. Hence, this bidimensional approach provides fresh insights
into the real state of language and language use. At the same time, it demonstrates
language change in terms of the widespread replacement of local dialects by regional
dialects. In a similar vein, other German pluridimensionally oriented projects are based
on correlations between language features and social or contextual factors around and
within major cities (cf., e.g., Mang 2004).
Certainly the most ambitious pluridimensional work is that conducted by Harald

Thun in South America, focusing on Spanish, Portuguese and Guaranı́ (for an introduc-
tion cf. Thun 2000, to appear). The Atlas lingüı́stico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay
(Thun/Elizaincı́n 2000⫺; ADDU) can provide a suitable impression. Thun, who first
proposed the term pluridimensionality, structures the atlas and the informants into dif-
ferent dimensions at particular sub-levels (cf. Thun 2000: 82):
1. diatopic
a. topostatic (constant domicile)
b. topodynamic (recently changed domicile)
2. diastratic (two social groups)
3. diagenerational (two age groups)
4. diasexual
5. diaphasic (three styles)
6. diareferential (contrast between answers and comments)
7. dialingual (Spanish vs. Portuguese)
A wide range of both linguistic and extralinguistic factors can thus be controlled and
displayed on maps using a special symbolization system (quadrants). Once again, the
linguistic goal is quite distinct. In contrast to the LANE, the LAGS and the MRhSA,
the ADDU documents the communicative breadth of language. Even if it is not possible
to explore all factors in the same depth and if in some locations only certain dimensions
can be explored, this approach is at present the most comprehensive. Even compared to
sociolinguistic studies that are often confined to a single location but explore multiple
extralinguistic factors in depth, such a variety of controlled parameters is exceptional.
According to Thun, the approach opens the way to linguistic atlases that display human
language within communicative networks, and from a philological point of view this
might well be the next stage in linguistic atlas cartography (cf. Thun 2000: 84⫺86). In
this regard, Schmidt (to appear) argues that the possibility of such new methodological
approaches is necessarily tied to progress in the technical means of realization. The
keyword here is “linguistic dynamics”, and its analysis is dependent upon the geographic
orientation, inextricably tied firstly to linguistic atlases and secondly to their digital avail-
ability.
4.2. Computerization
The computerization of linguistic cartography has generated a wide and international

variety of undertakings (cf., e.g., Kirk 2001: 351⫺353). During the 1970s, the first pro-
jects to use computer methods in linguistic cartography ⫺ especially in the planning of
atlases ⫺ emerged, like the Computer Developed Linguistic Atlas of England (CLAE,
Viereck and Ramisch 1991⫺1997), the Atlas Linguarum Europae (ALE, Alinei, Viereck
and Weijnen 1983) and the Kleiner Deutscher Sprachatlas (KDSA, Veith, Putschke and
Hummel 1984⫺1999). More recently, however, virtually every atlas is realized using com-
puters. A differentiation is possible by looking at the specific uses to which computers
are put and their potential value for language documentation and linguistic analysis.
Whereas some projects use specific graphics software for the design of atlas maps (e.g.,
in Germany, most volumes of the Bayerischer Sprachatlas series; BSA), others develop
tailor-made computer systems to answer particular linguistic questions (e.g., the Digital
Wenker Atlas [DiWA], Schmidt and Herrgen 2001⫺2009). While some projects view a
digital version as a worthwhile supplement to an edited book (e.g., the World Atlas of
Language Structures [WALS ], Haspelmath et al. 2008), others take the other tack by
first publishing their databases on the internet as a means of linguistic analysis before
producing printed atlas volumes of representative maps (e.g., the Syntactische Atlas van
de Nederlandse Dialecten [SAND], Barbiers et al. 2005). Another distinction is possible
in terms of how the digital atlases are made available (desktop vs. internet), and so on.
A special case is the Atlas of North American English (ANAE ) by Labov, Ash and
Boberg (2006). While phenomenal atlases ⫺ especially sound-oriented atlases ⫺ are usu-
ally based on phonetic transcriptions made by specially trained investigators, the ANAE
places its emphasis on acoustic analysis and thus sets a new cornerstone in atlas cartogra-
phy. Significantly, in addition to the computer-based telephone interviews, the encoding
of spoken language is in many cases purely computer dependent. In total, 439 of the
805 recorded interviews are analyzed with regard to the details of the formants they
exhibit. The use of an automatic readout of the acoustic speech signal is a special case
of computerization in geolinguistics which indicates some of the potential of the digital
era (for a critique cf. Künzel 2001).
However, currently, the most common procedure is to digitize the collected data and
then analyze it statistically. Even though computer-based methods yield an additional
benefit, the data continues to be explored, encoded and mostly classified using tradi-
tional techniques. Many atlas projects are currently refurbishing their (sometimes histori-
cal) data by providing digital editions with enhanced functions. Occasionally such work
is conducted within larger organizational frames, as with the North American atlases
(e.g., the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States [LAMSAS ], cf.
Kretzschmar and Schneider 1996) or the Bavarian atlases (e.g., the Bavarian Database
of Dialects [BAYDAT ], cf. Zimmermann 2007). The fact that the LAMSAS gave rise to
an Atlas by the Numbers (Kretzschmar and Schneider 1996) shows that in the meantime,
and in no small part due to computer techniques, the documentation principle ⫺ which
pioneers needed time to become aware of ⫺ also enables promising future analytical
approaches. At the same time, the digitization of data makes it possible to cross-connect
projects, although this proves rather difficult and complicated in detail. The idea of
linking data is not new and it is not necessarily bound to the computerization of linguis-
tics. The example of the print-based SDS, with its attempt to link information from
lexica and other sources, already demonstrates the intent to link linguistic material of
differing provenience. But the development of modern information systems compels lin-
guistic data linking. In the long term, this will dissolve the at present rather clear distinc-
tions between dictionaries, atlases, sound archives, bibliographies, etc. (cf. Moulin in this
volume). Whether such information systems can still be considered atlases is a question
of definition that has not been raised. At any rate, they also serve the documentation
principle.
One of the most ambitious undertakings in this regard is the recently launched regio-
nalsprache.de project (REDE; cf. <http://www.regionalsprache.de>) at the Marburg re-
search center. Among other things (e.g., the collection of fresh linguistic data), REDE
aims to digitize a wide range of German language atlases and bring them together via
the internet along with numerous sound files and bibliographic information (cf. in this
regard the design of DiWA as well). Further, in collaboration with other institutes and
individual scholars, a cross-connection with other information sources (e.g., dictionaries,
questionnaires, alignments, etc.) will be implemented. Due to the vast mass of data thus
pooled, quantitative analyses must be implemented, and a strong analytical orientation
to the goals of information systems (cf. in this regard the goals of the SDS) is a result.
From a theoretical point of view the potential of the cross-connection is enormous, and
in this specific case, the analysis of linked language data from different periods in the
history of linguistics has given rise to the theoretical framework of the linguistic dy-
namics approach (cf. Schmidt in this volume).
Finally, it should be pointed out that, thanks to GIS technology, cartographic quality
in linguistics has improved in recent years. Whereas in the 1990s and the beginning of
the twenty-first century, linguists often still designed their atlases on their own (leading
to some problematic results that can be summarized as the “CorelDraw syndrome”), in
future ⫺ via web mapping, etc. (e.g., Nickel 2008) ⫺ both the computational basis and
collaborations within and across philologies seem set to become more relevant than ever.
Assuming that the cross-linking of data and information systems can be achieved, the
result will be an extremely powerful instrument that could well elevate linguistics to
another analytical sphere. Nevertheless such intentions are beset with both fundamental
and more specific problems. One technical and organizational issue is the problem of
how to handle cross-connectivity. A problem of interpretation is the high degree of
suggestiveness maps and cartographic instruments possess: steps need to be taken to
ensure that the user of the linguistic information system is afforded the support of com-
parable data and data types. At the same time, the user must be aware of the interpreta-
tive traps that are an inevitable consequence of the availability of mass data. Hence, as
a future challenge, geolinguists (and others) have the difficult task of ensuring that stu-
dents and scholars are adequately educated. This, however, is essentially no different to
the situations faced and generated by the pioneers described above.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Jürgen Erich Schmidt, Marburg, for helpful comments on this article
and to Mark Pennay, Marburg, for once more correcting my English.
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Wenker, Georg
1886 Pronomina in Nordwestdeutschland. Strasbourg: Trübner.
Wenker, Georg
1889⫺1923 Sprachatlas des deutschen Reichs. Manuscript (hand-drafted onto printed base
maps) held in the archives of the Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas and in the
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
Wenker, Georg
to appear Gesamtausgabe der Schriften zum “Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs”. Mit einer Do-
kumentation der Sprachvarianten. Edited by Alfred Lameli. (Deutsche Dialektgeogra-
phie.) Hildesheim/New York/Zürich: Olms.
Werlen, Iwar
1996 Dialektologie und Sprachgeographie vom 13. bis 20. Jahrhundert. In: Peter Schmitter
(ed.), Sprachtheorien der Neuzeit II. Von der Grammaire de Port-Royal (1660) zur Konsti-
tution moderner linguistischer Disziplinen, vol. 5, 427⫺458. Tübingen: Narr.
Wiegand, Herbert Ernst and Gisela Harras

1971 Zur wissenschaftshistorischen Einordnung und linguistischen Beurteilung des Deutschen
Wortatlas. Germanistische Linguistik 1⫺2.
Wiesinger, Peter
ten. 2 vols. (Studia Linguistica Germanica 2.) Berlin: de Gruyter.
Wrede, Ferdinand, Walther Mitzka and Bernhard Martin
1927⫺1956 Deutscher Sprachatlas. Auf Grund des von Georg Wenker begründeten Sprachatlas
des Deutschen Reichs. Marburg: Elwert.
Zimmermann, Ralf
2007 BAYDAT: Die Bayerische Dialektdatenbank. (Würzburger elektronische sprachwis-
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volltexte/2007/2270/pdf/WespA1.pdf>.
Alfred Lameli, Marburg (Germany)
33. Dialect dictionaries - traditional and modern

1. Introduction
2. Words in space: The origins of dialect-lexicographic endeavor
3. Mapping the German dialect dictionaries: The German language dialect dictionary landscape
4. From index cards to proofs: Data analysis and presentation of results
5. Electronic dialect lexicography and complex lexicographic information systems
6. References
1. Introduction
The following article is intended as an overview of the most significant phases in the
development of dialect lexicography and of its methods of data analysis and presentation
of results. Because space is limited and in light of the current state of research, where
a systematic review or comparison of the dialect-lexicographic traditions in individual
languages is not yet possible, the German language is taken as an example. However, at
times other languages and related philological traditions are referred to and potential
links are mentioned. The need for a typological, cross-linguistic examination of dialect
lexicography in (and beyond) the European context is made even more apparent by the
absence of an appropriate article in the HSK “Dictionaries” handbook. There, the topic
of “dialect dictionaries” is dealt with on the basis of the situation in French (Rézeau
1990).
2. Words in space: The origins o dialect-lexicographic endeavor

In the history of how modern European languages are written, collections of words can
already be found from the Early Middle Ages, in the form of glossaries for Latin texts
or specialized monolingual glossaries for example. These collections can definitely be
33. Dialect dictionaries ⫺ traditional and modern 593
considered as precursors of the “dictionary” genre. However, they are not primarily
based on meta-linguistic concepts like the collection of lexicographic units from a level
in time, content or space. Over the course of the emergence of popular languages and
their gradual displacement of Latin in the written arena, from the late Middle Ages
and especially in early modern times, the individual vernaculars deliberately developed
descriptive instruments in the form of linguistic theories (grammars, orthographic
doctrines) and dictionaries. An interest in the areal dimensions of language, or regional
variants, became apparent early on in grammatical theorizing (in the case of German,
from roughly the sixteenth century). In particular, linguistic debates about the nature of
High German during the baroque era draw attention to the collection and description
of diatopic or dialectal variants. Emerging from this tradition, Leibniz designed a lexico-
graphic program that encompassed, alongside an investigation of etymology and related
languages, a concerted collection of data on dialects:
The fundamental soil of a language is its words, upon which its idioms grow, as it were, as
fruits, and hence, one of the principal requirements of the main German language is a survey
and examination of all German words, which, once complete, will include not only those
used by everyone, but also those that are a feature of particular arts and ways of life. And
not just those we call High German, which so dominate in writing, but also Low German,
Märkisch, Upper Saxon, Franconian, Bavarian, Austrian, Silesian, Swabian and whatever
else is more common among the rural population than in the cities.
(Leibniz 1697: § 32; my translation)
Leibniz’ ideas proved fertile appreciated, especially in the Low German area (e.g., Richey
1755; cf. Niebaum 1979: 345⫺346). The dichotomous approach developed by Leibniz,
with an emergent overarching High language counterposed by the various dialects (in-
cluding the rural⫺urban opposition), is one of the factors that played a role in the
emergence of idioticography in the eighteenth century (cf. Haas 1994: 1996). According
to Kühn and Püschel (1990: 2060), it is primarily found in the Upper German records
of this time. Another factor in the emergence of dialect lexicography at this time is the
concept of “enrichment” (Kühn and Püschel 1990: 2060), which saw the survey of the
complete German language as enhanced by the documentation of individual language
areas. It was in this context that the first attempts at a complete survey of the German
dialects were made, e.g., in Popowitsch’s (1780) Vereinigung der Mundarten von Teutsch-
land ‘Aggregation of the Dialects of Germany’, a goal which has also reemerged recently
in the attempt to create a comprehensive network of dialect dictionaries. The folkloristic
preoccupation with dialects and their vocabulary within a more general cultural-cum-
historical context was joined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by scien-
tifically, and in part philologically, motivated attempts at dialect-lexicographic documen-
tation (cf. Stadler 1806⫺1812; Schmeller 1827⫺1837, 1872⫺1877). The scientifically
based form of dialect lexicography, which led to the broad-ranging territorial or dialect
dictionaries, has its roots in the wider context of the nineteenth-century elaboration of
single-language philologies, comparative linguistics and historical linguistics research.
The establishment of national-language lexicography and the beginnings of modern dia-
lectology also date from this period; as such they are part of a European language
history. In the course of these efforts, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth
century, both an intensive dialect-geographic survey of the German language area (fea-
turing both appropriate dialect monographs and linguistic atlas projects) and numerous
lexicographic projects, also regionally oriented, appeared (cf. Wiegand 1998: 690). These
enterprises differ from the dialect dictionaries and lexicons that preceded them in the
size of the area surveyed ⫺ usually much larger ⫺ and in their theoretical/methodologi-
cal approach, which was deliberately based on dialect-geographic and dialect-lexico-
graphic methods (cf. also Kühn and Püschel 1990: 2061). The number of published lexi-
cons (of all types and sizes) of German dialects is currently estimated at over 400, of
which roughly a third have been published since 1945 (Wiegand 1990: 2198).
3. Mapping the German dialect dictionaries: The German language

dialect dictionary landscape
The major dialect-lexicographic enterprises (also known as Territorialwörterbücher ‘terri-
torial dictionaries’ or diatopische Gebietswörterbücher ‘diatopic area dictionaries’), often
running over several decades or even longer, cover many parts of the German language
area. Map 33.1 illustrates the areal coverage of the major dictionaries; sometimes the
survey areas overlap (shown in brown on the map).
In detail, the German language area is covered by more than thirty broad-area dic-
tionaries (see Table 33.1; cf. Friebertshäuser 1983; Kühn 1978: 125⫺141; Löffler 2003:
106⫺107; Niebaum and Macha 2006: 37⫺38; Niebaum 1979). Even the titles chosen for
Map 33.1: Wide-area dictionaries of the German dialects plus Frisian and Luxembourgian (König
2007: 138)
Tab. 33.1: Wide-area dialect dictionaries of the German language area; an asterisk marks those
dictionaries with an online component or homepage
Badisches WB* Badisches Wörterbuch 1925⫺ (A⫺Schlenz)
Bayerisches WB* Bayerisches Wörterbuch 2002⫺ (A⫺ bitz)
Brandenburg-Berlinisches WB Brandenburg-Berlinisches Wörterbuch 1976⫺2001 (4 vols.)
Elsässisches WB Wörterbuch der elsässischen Mundarten 1899⫺1907 (2 vols.)
Hamburgisches WB* Hamburgisches Wörterbuch 1985⫺2006 (5 vols.)
Helgogländer WB Helgoländer Wörterbuch 1957⫺1968 (A⫺luuwet)
Hessen-Nassauisches WB* Hessen-Nassauisches Volkswörterbuch 1943⫺ (from vol. 2; L⫺Zank-
diviensalat)
Lothringisches WB Wörterbuch der deutsch-lothringischen Mundarten 1909
Luxemburger WB Luxemburger Wörterbuch 1950⫺1977 (5 vols.)
Mecklenburgisches WB Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch 1937⫺1998 (7 vols. plus index with
addendum)
Mittelelbisches WB* Mittelelbisches Wörterbuch 2002 (vol. 2: H⫺O)
Niedersächsisches WB Niedersächsisches Wörterbuch 1965⫺ (A⫺körperlik, Lāb⫺Mān-
wessel)
Nordfriesisches WB Nordfriesisches Wörterbuch (in separate part-publications)
Nordsiebenbürg.-Sächs. WB Nordsiebenbürgisch-Sächsisches Wörterbuch 1986⫺2006 (5 vols.)
Obersächsisches WB Wörterbuch der obersächsischen Mundarten 1994⫺2003 (4 vols.)
Ostfränkisches WB in progress
Ostfriesisches WB Wörterbuch der ostfriesischen Sprache 1879⫺1884 (3 vols.)
Pfälzisches WB* Pfälzisches Wörterbuch 1965⫺1998 (6 vols. and a supplement)
Pommersches WB* Pommersches Wörterbuch 2007⫺ (A⫺K)
Preußisches WB Preußisches Wörterbuch 1981⫺2005 (6 vols.)
Rheinisches WB Rheinisches Wörterbuch 1928⫺1971 (9 vols.)
Saterfriesisches WB Seelter Woudebouk (1 vol.); Näi Seelter Woudebouk 1992⫺ (A⫺E);
Saterfriesisches Wörterbuch 1980.
Schlesisches WB Schlesisches Wörterbuch 1963⫺1965 (3 vols.)
Schleswig-Holsteinisches WB Schleswig-Holsteinisches Wörterbuch 1927⫺1935 (5 vols.)
Schwäbisches WB Schwäbisches Wörterbuch 1904⫺1936 (vols. I⫺VI.2)
Schweizerisches Id* Schweizerisches Idiotikon. Wörterbuch der schweizerdeutschen Sprache
1881⫺ (A⫺W-m, Wān⫺warnen)
Siebenbürgisch-Sächs. WB Siebenbürgisch-Sächsisches Wörterbuch 1924⫺ (A⫺R)
Siegerländer WB Siegerländer Wörterbuch 1938; 2nd ed. 1968
Südhessisches WB* Südhessisches Wörterbuch 1965⫺ (A⫺zäckerig)
Sudetendeutsches WB* Sudetendeutsches Wörterbuch 1988⫺ (A⫺Geilstelle)
Thüringisches WB* Thüringisches Wörterbuch 1966⫺ (L⫺Z, A⫺Kohlrunkel)
Vorarlbergisches WB Vorarlbergisches Wörterbuch 1960⫺1965 (2 vols.)
Bair. Mundarten in Österr.* Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich 1970⫺ (A⫺
(auf)ge-dunsen; 2 supplements)
Westfälisches WB* Westfälisches Wörterbuch 1969⫺ (A⫺Bråmbi ere, dä⫺Furcht; 1 sup-
plement)
the projects indicate differing conceptual parameters; for example, the survey boundaries
can reflect areas defined geographically, culturally and historically, dialectally, or nation-
ally. For the sake of completeness and because of methodological ties to German dialect
lexicography, Table 33.1 also includes dictionaries of Frisian and Luxembourgish, al-
though these are independent languages. The dialect dictionaries of Transylvanian Saxon
are included as well, but these lie outside the central European area shown in Map 33.1.
Many of the undertakings that are still in progress have developed an online presence,
with their own homepage providing information on the history, materials, progress or
publication reports; these are marked with an asterisk in Table 33.1. In addition to these
wide-ranging, usually multiple-volume, dialect dictionaries, there have from the outset
of the dialect-lexicographic tradition also been dictionaries devoted to more confined
regions, cities, or villages (see the selection in Kühn 1978: 125⫺141; Löffler 2003:
106⫺107).
4. From index cards to proos: Data analysis and presentation

o results
The individual dictionary undertakings sometimes differ substantially in data acquisi-
tion, analysis and presentation of results. This is in part due to differences in their cor-
puses, in part to their differing theoretical and methodological approaches (for details,
see Niebaum 1979; Kühn 1982; Friebertshäuser 1983: 1986; Bauer 1996). The data basis
of the major dictionaries may vary substantially over the preparation phase; further-
more, extended periods of data collection imply that some older material is incorporated.
Hence heterogeneous layers (differing in time and space) can be expected within the
dictionary corpus (see Baur 1986 on data collection). In addition to synchronic/diatopic
information, the dictionary can thus provide historic/diachronic details insofar as these
are appropriately flagged within the article itself. The Bayerisches Wörterbuch ‘Bavarian
Dictionary’, for example, draws on an archive of several million records from question-
naires covering more than three generations and the research literature. It offers both a
synchronic component and a diachronic component that extends back to the beginnings
of writing in early medieval Bavarian scriptoriums (cf. Rowley and Schmid 1996).
The major dialect dictionaries of the German language area generally rely upon a
semasiological approach to description, investigating semantics from the starting point
of the concrete citation (in contrast to Dutch, where a number of systematic/onomasio-
logical dialect dictionaries are being written, e.g., the Woordenboek van de Limburgse
Dialecten [1982⫺] or Das Woordenboek van de Overijsselse Dialecten [2000⫺]); the ques-
tionnaires on which they are based are usually of onomasiological design. This approach
(fairly typical for lexicography) also reflects practical considerations that facilitate cor-
pus construction, data processing and data presentation: dictionary articles are usually
organized and analyzed as alphabetically ordered lists of words, and data are also usually
presented in (more-or-less) alphabetical order, too. For practical reasons, many under-
takings publish consignments that can eventually be combined into volumes. The unify-
ing features of a semasiological approach and the use of Standard German for descrip-
tions aside, many differences can be observed. These include ⫺ to name only the most
important ⫺ the intended audience, the vocabulary covered, headword selection and
ordering, cross-referencing, and the nature of the definitions and the grammatical infor-
mation offered.
The heterogeneity of approach can be illustrated taking the West Middle German
dictionaries as an example (cf. Table 33.2 and Fournier 2003: 156⫺159). Criteria for the
five major dialect dictionaries of this language area differ in virtually all of the aspects
mentioned. Thus, the multivolume dictionaries of Palatine German, Rhinelandic and
Luxembourgish encompass the entire everyday vocabulary of the areas in question,
Tab. 33.2: Different layout and data presentation in the dialect dictionaries of West Middle German
(based on Fournier 2003: 158; Elsässisches, Lothringisches, Rheinisches, Luxemburger and
Pfälzisches WB, respectively; cf. Table 33.1)
ElsWb LothrWb RheinWb LuxWb PfWb
Commenced 1887/1890 1897/1900 1904 1952/1935 1912
1st vol. publ. 1899 1909 1928 1950 1965
Completed 1907 ⫺ 1971 1977 1997
No. of vols. 2 1 9 4⫹1 6
Approx. no. of 1730 550 12800 1840 ⫹ 230 4700
lines (2 cols.)
Region south west north west east
Data and questionnaire; questionnaire; questionnaire; (research lit.); questionnaire;
source earlier data “Paris conver- no sources additional earlier data
collections and sations”; offi- given in the written sources collections and
research cial documents entries for C19th research
Audience Teachers
Target non-standard non-standard complete “language” of everyday
vocabulary lexicon of the Luxemburg in language
Rhineland C20th, in part
also C19th
Historical semi-historical planned but esp. for keyword
dimension not executed etymology
Keyword type dialect dialect standard everyday C20th standard
language;
so-called
Luxembourgish
koiné
Keyword order Schmeller alphabetical according to alphabetical strictly
system word family alphabetical
Unique lexical maps figures and maps
features from vol. 3 on
Cross- ElsWb, RheinWb ElsWb, LothrWb,
references early LuxWb RheinWb, LuxWb
Modeled on ElsWb RheinWb
whilst the one or two-volume dictionaries of Lorraine-Franconian and Alsatian focus

on those lexical elements that deviate from the standard language, making them similar
to idioticons. Further, because of their choice of target vocabulary, the Alsatian and
Lorraine-Franconian dictionaries adapt their lemmas to a dialectal norm while the Rhi-
nelandic and Palatine-German dictionaries adjust headwords in line with the standard
language. The Luxembourgish dictionary follows a system that aligns its headwords
with a virtual Luxembourgian metasystem, the so-called “common dialect (koiné) of the
twentieth century” (Wörterbuchkommission 1950⫺1977: vol. 1: XL; my translation).
The ordering of the headwords is different, too: The Lorraine-Franconian, Luxembour-
gish and Palatine-German dictionaries are strictly alphabetical while the Rhinelandic
dictionary sorts entries by word family and then alphabet. The Alsatian dictionary (like
the Swiss Idioticon) follows the somewhat more user-friendly “etymological-cum-alpha-
betical” headword order of Schmeller’s Bavarian dictionary, based on the consonantal
structure of the stem syllables.
In spite of all the differences, there are some universals of data analysis and presenta-
tion which effectively provide a skeletal structure for every article. (These include adher-
ence to the “word-geographic” principle [wortgeographisches Prinzip], the organizational
unit of a headword with grammatical information, definitions, illustrative examples, dis-
tributional information, and cross-referencing systems; see also Friebertshäuser [1986:
12] and the model analysis in Niebaum and Macha [2006: 114⫺125].) The dialect diction-
aries do not usually go into much detail about morphological and syntactic analytics,
but this is largely dependent upon whether any grammars of the area in question exist.
As a rule, however, details about forms are provided (mostly in smaller type); these
include important phonetic and morphological information about a particular lemma.
In what follows, dialect-lexicographic data presentation will be discussed using the
Wörterbuch der obersächsischen Mundarten ‘Dictionary of the Upper Saxon Dialects’
(vols. I⫺IV, 1994⫺2003) as an example. This dictionary project, hosted by the Saxon
Academy of Sciences, and encompassing the dialects of the Free State of Saxony, was
started in 1928. Following the loss of the dictionary material during the war, it was re-
established in 1955. The replacement data (approx. 1.5 million records) were collected
up until 1977, when work began on the articles. The dictionary was finally published in
four volumes that appeared between 1994 and 2003. The material is presented in the
form of an alphabetically ordered semantic dictionary, with headwords adapted to Stan-
dard or High German orthography. The strict alphabetical order is occasionally dis-
rupted by, among other things, “nests” of cognates. The source corpus in the form of
an index-card archive consists of data from direct interviews, indirect questionnaires,
material submitted by suitable informants, sound recordings, academic literature and
dialectal fiction. Practical (time) constraints meant that no historical material was incor-
porated. The dictionary has a diverse circle of recipients: Aside from dialectologists and
language historians, it also comprises teachers and interested non-professionals. The
structure of a lemma article (cf. the example Käulchenlein in Figure 33.1) includes a
headword and its grammatical category, followed by a definition in which, as per usual
in lexicography, semantic variants (marked off with lower case letters), or distinct mean-
ings (Arabic numerals) are listed. As far as possible, meanings are listed in line with
language-historical developments. Where they exist, possible similarities to the standard
language area are also reported.
Fig. 33.1: The article for Käulchenlein, taken from Wörterbuch der obersächsischen Mundarten
(2003: vol. 2, 516)
Fig. 33.2: The article Kerze with onomasiological references, taken from Wörterbuch der obersäch-
sischen Mundarten (2003: vol. 2, 526⫺527)
The textual data presentation also includes information, in abbreviated form, about
distribution that aims to describe “the geographic/territorial distribution of specific dia-
lectal features” (Bergmann 1994: XVII; my translation); the relevant survey locations
are also listed. Wherever necessary, or possible, information about the age, degree of
conventionality, sociolinguistic distribution, diasystematic marking and density of cit-
ations for a lemma is provided. In addition, there are text samples illustrating the seman-
tic information or phraseological or formulaic usages. Visibly separated from the body
of the article, technical details such as etymology, history of the lemma or about a mor-
phological component can be included. In the Käulchenlein example, morphological and
phonetic details (including a transcription) are provided.
Map 33.2: Onomasiological map for Kerze in the Upper Saxon dialects, taken from Wörterbuch
der obersächsischen Mundarten (2003: vol. 2, map appendix)
Fig. 33.3: Illustrated article for Arschbackenpänert, taken from Wörterbuch der obersächsischen
Mundarten (1998: vol. 1, 92)
An elaborate system of cross-references enables the linking of headwords at the levels

of phonetics, morphology and content. Through this, onomasiological structures can be
revealed, as can be seen in the example Kerze (Figure 33.2). This information is also
presented in a word-geographic dot and isarhythmic map (Map 33.2), displaying the
distribution of a lemma as a demarcated area and locating deviating forms or hetero-
nyms as symbols. In total, the Wörterbuch der obersächsichen Mundarten contains
around 200 lemma maps of this sort.
The dictionary maps are an ideal supplement to the individual articles ⫺ sometimes
they gather scattered information into a clear, spatially visualized whole; furthermore,
they can unburden dictionary articles that would otherwise have excessively long or
complex catalogues of variants. Lemma maps in dialect dictionaries are usually drawn
to illustrate onomasiological relationships; additionally, phonetic or form maps can be
added to the text section. The significance of maps for the presentation of dialect-lexico-
graphic findings in so-called “traditional” print dictionaries has often been a topic of
discussion (Berthold 1924/1925; Scheuermann 1978; Friebertshäuser 1983: 1284⫺1286).
Additional and innovative possibilities for linking map and dictionary material are
opened up by the new instruments of computerized philology (see section 5.1).
In addition to map material, many dialect dictionaries contain illustrations of lem-
mata related to unusual, folkoristic or highly regional objects of material culture (e.g.,
Figure 33.3), in which the relationship between lexicon development and material re-
search become obvious (Friebertshäuser 1976: 7; Reichmann 1983).
5. Electronic dialect lexicography and complex lexicographic

inormation systems
The manifold developments in the field of computerized philology have brought about
new opportunities for lexicographic undertakings as well, ranging from the use of com-
puter-based philological procedures in the creation of dictionaries or corpus-based lexi-

cography to the design of new, internet-based lexicographic projects (cf., for instance,
Klein and Geyken 2000; Haß 2005; Klosa 2007). In the meantime, the use of computers
and computative procedures has become a norm in all (still) current dialect-lexicographic
dictionary projects, but the degree to which computer-philological techniques are inte-
grated varies. Some dictionary administrators only take advantage of the technical pos-
sibilities in the primary field of text processing and formatting (because of time and
financial constraints), others also put cartographic programs and complex databases to
use or deliberately develop their own programs for editing articles, administering data-
bases and material and optimizing the information harvest from their articles and dictio-
nary data (including the index-card archives), cf., e.g., the articles in Friebertshäuser
[ed.] 1986: Große 1998 and Städtler 2003. The use of computative procedures has been
continuously documented in particular detail for the dictionary of Palatine German
(Pfälzisches WB), which has deliberately embraced the new technology since the 1980s
and developed its own programs which include features like an electronic lemma list, a
full-text search function and a cross-referencing system management tool, a generating
tool for phonetic or lemma maps, and tools for extracting sources and searching aca-
demic literature and questionnaire data (for details see Post 1986: 1998).
5.1. Integration and dynamic linking o existing

dialect-lexicographic corpora
In addition to using computerized philology to create dictionaries, the idea of also inte-
grating completed and ongoing dialect-lexicographic projects becomes manifest. The
(ultimately infeasible) vision of a “central store of German regional lexical data” (Kese-
ling et al. 1970; my translation) was formulated quite early on. The ever more powerful
data processing capabilities evoked calls for an “interactive computer dialectology”
(Putschke 1994: 246; my translation) or a comprehensive “German dialect dictionary”
(Schröder 1997). The technical and philological challenges facing such a network of
dialect dictionaries have been outlined in detail by Fournier (2003), who prototypically
played out the scenario taking the dictionaries of the (south)western German language
area as an example. Since then, the procedures he described are being realized in the
University of Trier project, Digitaler Verbund von Dialektwörterbüchern (‘Digital network
of dialect dictionaries’, DWV; <http://www.dwv.uni-trier.de>). The dialect landscapes
of the Rhineland, the Palatinate and the SaarLorLux Euroregion are covered by the
following completed broad-scale dialect dictionaries: the ‘Rhinelandic’ (Rheinsches WB),
the ‘Palatine German’ (Pfälzisches WB), the ‘Lorraine’ (Lothringisches WB), the ‘Alsa-
tian’ (Elsässisches WB) and the ‘Luxembourgian’ (Luxemburger WB) dictionaries. Since
the form and order of the headwords differs in the print dictionaries (cf. Table 33.2), the
lexical interweaving of the dialects of these conjoining regions can only be examined in
detail using digital versions of the dictionaries. This makes possible complex enquiries,
such as a full-text search, a narrow search for specific pieces of information in the dictio-
nary; explicit links in the dictionary can be rendered as hyperlinks as can further cross-
references which first become apparent through various statistical and computer-philo-
logical procedures (Burch and Fournier 2004; Burch and Rapp 2007). Additional cross-
Fig. 33.4: Digitaler Verbund von Dialektwörterbüchern (DWV): internet user interface for the
‘Rhinelandic Dictionary’ with cross-referencing (right-hand frame)
references to the digital edition of the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (‘German
Dictionary’, <http://www.dwb.uni-trier.de>) and the network of Middle High German
dictionaries (<http://www.mwv.uni-trier.de>) taken from the dialect dictionaries also
allow dialect vocabulary to be accessed via standard language and permit diachronic re-
search.
The digital network of dialect dictionaries was developed in several stages. A ma-
chine-readable full-text version of each dictionary in the network was created. The maps
and illustrations contained in the dictionaries have also been digitalized and linked to
their respective headwords. In the machine-readable version, the individual elements of
each article have been (semi)automatically and uniquely labeled in SGML/XML using
TUSTEP scripts applied to complex layout information (e.g., headwords, grammatical
information, phonetic transcriptions, semantic information, citations, survey locations,
etc.). This facilitates both the onscreen display of the dictionaries and the targeted access-
ing of the specific information types. The markup conforms to the internationally ac-
cepted guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). All in all, the aim is to ensure
long-term, cross-platform availability of the data. A graphical user interface enables
access to the digitized data and allows searching in both the individual dictionaries and
the network.
As shown in Figure 33.4, dynamically generated and classified network information
can be called up in the right-hand frame: both the lemma on which the cross-reference
is based and the catalogue number of the reference target are displayed. Different types
of cross-reference are distinguished: explicit cross-references which appear in the printed
dictionaries, so-called symmetrical cross-references (A⫺B, B⫺A), transitive cross-refer-
ences (A⫺B⫺C, A⫺C) and automatically generated (untested) cross-references.
Fig. 33.5: Map module in the Digitaler Verbund von Dialektwörterbüchern (DWV). The map dis-
plays the survey locations named in the respective article. Depending on the zoom level,
further information is available (rivers, additional place names, etc.)
An additional step is the implementation of a map module ⫺ initially in the internet

version of the ‘Palatine German Dictionary’ (Pfälzisches WB). This map module enables
the user to visualize the distribution of an article using dynamically generated maps of
the dictionary domain. Searching in the reverse direction is also possible: the user can
call up all the articles for a specific survey location from a map. In a further step,
the linking of selected dictionary entries and existing georeferenced or newly generated
isoglossic maps with the Digital Wenker Atlas (DiWA) is planned; here too, reverse
searches will be possible.
The dictionary network can be gradually expanded to include further dialect diction-
aries or other components, e.g., corpus data or dialect works of fiction.
Interlinking the dictionaries, as in the conversion of existing cross-references between
the works to hyperlinks and the generation of new cross-references at a semantic level,
should prove onomasiologically revealing (cf. Figure 33.6) ⫺ enabling us to take a step
Fig. 33.6: Screenshot of an onomasiological search (Aalraupe) in the Digitale Verbund der Dia-
lektwörterbücher (DWV)
in the direction suggested by Reichmann (1986: 176; my translation), “to render semasio-
logical dictionaries onomasiologically useful”. A content-based cross-linking of lemmata
from dialect dictionaries via the table of contents is also a feature of the printed work,
Wörterbuch Deutscher Dialekte (‘Dictionary of German Dialects’, Knoop 2001), in which
selected terms from a total of ten dialects are presented in a short synoptic overview via
a Standard German lemma. In comparison with printed projects, the advantage of the
internet-based linkage of the dialect network lies in the fact that all existing dialect-
lexicographic materials can be included completely and dynamically and can always be
extended with further components.
The next step is obvious, the integration of the network of dialect dictionaries into
an even larger dictionary network. Taking the headword Butterblume ‘buttercup’ (Figure
33.7) as an example; the Trierer Wörterbuchnetz (‘Trier Dictionary Network’) can be
used to illustrate how such a network of linguistic information can be formed after using
computer-philological procedures to edit dictionary information. Here, Butterblume is
linked to semantically corresponding headwords from different dictionaries, dialectal
and other, such as Ankenbluem or Wibelewick, and to the expressively similar but ortho-
graphically different Butter⫽Blume from the Krünitzsche Enzyklopädie ‘Krüntiz’s Ency-
clopedia’. The clear distinction between the different types of cross-reference and their
qualitative classification needs to be taken into consideration; this is a problematic area
Fig. 33.7: Cross-references for the Butter-blume entry in the ‘Palatine German Dictionary’, sorted
by type
that ought to be tackled with comprehensive, dynamically generated meta-lemma lists

for instance (cf. Figure 33.7).
Such a dictionary network, if it is to be effective and established in a feasible time
frame, can only be set up with the aid of algorithmic methods drawn from the field of
information retrieval (on this, see Burch and Rapp 2007). Ideally, the philological ap-
praisal of automatically generated references could be conducted by active dictionary
projects in collaboration: as a rule, dictionary editors consult other (dialect) dictionaries
during their work. If they were to do this using an electronic version, they could confirm
existing cross-linkages or establish new ones and thus thicken the net.
Another essential instrument for the documentation of dialectal variation and re-
search into variant texts is the concept of a “meta-lemma list”, which enables standard-
ized access to the material. Preparatory work towards a meta-lemma list of German was
conducted in the TextGrid project (<http://www.textgrid.de>); this is being intensively
pursued further by an internationally oriented project consortium. One result of this
preparatory effort is the TextGrid lemma search service implemented in the Trierer
Wörterbuchnetz (<http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de>), which makes it possible to search
globally in the existing digital dictionaries using WebService technology.
5.2 Computer-based inormation systems and dialect lexicography

in the past and present
The electronic interlinking of dictionaries not only provides the opportunity to relate (in
this case dialect-lexicographic) works with a similar content to each other and to thus
achieve an areal, preferably comprehensive collection of dialectal or regional vocabulary;
it also makes possible the collection of recent and historical lexicographic data for a
language or a dialect. The LexicoLux project follows such a twofold path in making the
existing dictionaries of Luxembourgish available electronically and linking and capturing
them dynamically. Luxembourgian lexicography can be traced back to the nineteenth
century. The codificatory/lexicographic literature thus arises at almost the same time as
Luxembourgish emerges as, from a sociolinguistic point of view, an independent lan-
guage (cf. Moulin 2006). The first dictionary, published in 1847, was entitled Lexicon
der Luxemburger Umgangssprache (‘Lexicon of the Luxembourgian Vernacular’, Gangler
1847). This monograph, with its collection of interesting facts, is completely in keeping
with the style of the conversational dictionaries of the time: its primary objective is
not just to capture Luxembourgish; other languages are also included. In 1897, a state
commission was established to create a new Luxembourgian dictionary, which was pub-
lished in 1906 in one volume under the title Wörterbuch der luxemburgischen Mundart
‘Dictionary of the Luxembourgish Dialect’. The dictionary was conceived as a compo-
nent in a more comprehensive project; like its predecessor, it essentially describes the
vocabulary of the capital and the lower Alzet valley. In the context of a new, official
undertaking dating from 1935 the most extensive lexicographic documentation of the
Luxembourgian language to date was created: the Luxemburger Wörterbuch ‘Luxem-
bourgian Dictionary’ (LWB), published between 1950 and 1977 in the tradition of the
broad-scale dialectal dictionaries. The LWB data basis is in line with that of the earlier
dictionaries; the data collection is primarily drawn from nineteenth-century fiction and
other vocabulary as well as surveys of its own. Furthermore, it documents diatopic varia-
tion in detail. Predominantly, endogenous vocabulary (including many proper names)
was included, with additional borrowings from High German and French insofar as they
had been phonetically or morphologically integrated (cf. Rinnen 1976). In creating a
dynamic and multi-directional dictionary network, the LexicoLux project not only docu-
ments the Luxembourgian language from its nineteenth-century beginnings, it also pro-
vides a basis for further linguistic comparison and analysis. Structural analyses can thus
be performed on existing materials, focusing on diatopic variation in the vocabulary,
Romanic elements, phraseological structures or literary elements, for example. The head-
words of different reference works can be consolidated using a standardized “hyper-
lemma list” of Luxembourgish (see above), so as to create an integrated access point
for the differently treated lemmas (cf. Figure 33.8). In the case of the Luxembourgian
dictionaries, not only are the etymology and semantics of the headwords captured, the
contents of the individual articles are also analyzed in order to be able to relate the
differing treatments of lemmas to each other correctly, especially since the dictionaries
also embody three distinct orthographic systems.
In addition, the language-internal components of analysis are augmented by the link-
ing of the Luxembourgish lexicographic data with that on neighboring varieties held in
the network of dialect dictionaries. National borders (which often hinder dialectological
Fig. 33.8: Online version of the Lexikon der Luxemburger Umgangssprache (Gangler 1847), with
lemma list (left), individual entries (middle) and automatically generated cross-references
to related dialect dictionaries and others (right)
projects) can thus be surmounted and common vocabulary structures and cultural-
historical relationships better detected.
The principle of interoperability also extends to external resources. In the case of the
LWB, the survey locations can be used to determine a precise areal distribution, to
generate a cartographic visualization, or to link to the Digitaler Luxemburgischer
Sprachatlas (‘Digital Luxembourgish Linguistic Atlas’, <http.//www.luxsa.info>; cf. Gil-
les and Moulin 2008).
Alongside its connection to existing dictionary and linguistic atlas resources, Lexico-
Lux can also be accessed from external electronic documents. Firstly, a permanent web
address can be obtained via the icons created for each word article, and secondly, the
project is happy to supply the complete lemma lists with the relevant addresses on re-
quest.
Finally, in the context of such a dictionary network, there is the opportunity for
productive links from the dictionary entries to yet other texts, such as electronic text
editions of primary sources. Moreover, all other kinds of primary source (audio, video,
maps, notes, diagrams etc.) can be easily linked with lemmas or stretches of text. The
possibilities outlined taking the Luxembourgish dictionaries as an example can be ap-
plied prototypically to other dictionary networks.
5.3 The dictionary administration as a source and store o knowledge

Traditional dictionary administrations (Wörterbuchkanzleien), with their archives that
have often been accumulating over decades or even longer, are a rich dialectological and
linguistic hoard ⫺ not just from a narrowly lexicographical point of view. The data
collected, including citation cards, questionnaires, (annotated) text corpora, maps and
much more, some of it unpublished, represents an accumulation of knowledge that, with
regard to the documentation of individual dialects, is in part unique. These archives,
which form the heart of every dictionary project, are usually set up for internal use
within the individual projects and are easily accessed by the editors. To an extent, the
core data for the creation of corpora and dictionary articles is electronically stored and
processed. In recent times, some projects have also set out to document, structure and
offer online their material (or part of it) for further scholarly use by third parties. The
online presence of the Bayerische Wörterbuch (‘Bavarian Dictionary’, BWB), for exam-
ple, includes a map archive featuring a digitalized selection of Eberhard Kranzmayer’s
hand-drawn linguistic maps from the 1920s and 1930s (<http://www.bwb.badw.de>).
The BWB in Munich possesses more than 2000 such dialect maps, the digitalization of
which would definitely be of interest, either linked with the BWB or in the framework
of the dialect-cartographic information systems of existing linguistic atlas projects.
The Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich (‘Dictionary of the Bavarian
Dialects in Austria’, WBÖ), historically related to the BWB, has since 1993 been building
an electronically sortable dialect database (DBÖ), which represents a comprehensive dia-
lectal documentation system for the Austrian language (<http://oeaw.ac.at/dinamlex>).
The database (so far only accessible from within the institute, but to be offered across
the internet in the future course of the project) provides
above and beyond the publication, exhaustive information about the phonetic appearance,
individual definitions (both in light of regional, temporal and social factors), onomasiologi-
cal interrelations within the semantic field (information on related meanings) and usage of
the lemma in dialectal syntagmatic contexts […]. Furthermore, it contains citations and fig-
ures of speech and idioms. Factual information, illustrations and detailed descriptions about
instruments or occupational procedures, traditions, popular beliefs, traditional medicine and
the like are retrievable from the database in a structured way.
(Städtler 2003: 335; my translation; see also Geyer 2000; Wandl-Vogt 2006)
Thus prepared, the dictionary databases and materials can, as well as providing an ar-
chive, become the starting point for further research, not just in linguistics or dialect ge-
ography.
Theoretically, the advantages offered by computer-philological procedures and online
publication can also be put to use in dictionary publication itself. For example, it is
possible to make dictionary articles, which are often published in an abbreviated form in
the printed version, available in their full length online (where they can also be updated
regularly). Such a procedure, freed from the constraints of space, is probably most rel-
evant for the newer (and seldom) large-scale lexicographic projects within the classical
tradition (see, for example, Sappler [2000: 387⫺396] on the data-processing design of
the new Middle High German dictionary). Ideally, arising from and building upon a
dictionary project, a dynamic dialect geography and lexicography information system
can be established, opening up myriad interdisciplinary opportunities for linguists, com-
puter philologists, cartographers, ethnologists, etc. The fundamental preconditions for
such complex information systems are the quality and interoperability of the data, en-
sured by the development and implementation of international standards, plus a willing-
ness to cooperate within the academic community.
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34. Community-based investigations 613
34. Community-based investigations: From

traditional dialect grammar to sociolinguistic
studies
1. Introduction: Genealogical and positivistic perspectives on dialect and dialect variation
2. Dialect grammars: The speakerless, homogeneous speech community
3. Sociolinguistic correlation: The heterogeneous stratified speech community and the group
grammar
4. Beyond the group grammar: The speaker’s language
5. References
1. Introduction: Genealogical and positivistic perspectives

on dialect and dialect variation
1.1. Objective
Current sociolinguistic research based on realistic models of a language has led to signifi-
cant progress toward a fuller understanding of how language is used in society and how
it changes. However, despite appearances, this trend has upheld a conservative line of
dialectological thought based on the old idea of a therapeutic defense of the genuine
variety against modernization, on organic solidarity and on the standard variety. In fact,
in the main research trend at least, variation is considered as the natural context of
authenticity alone, i. e., the vernacular variety closely related to each speaker. Contempo-
rary critical (interpretive, microsociolinguistic, etc.) vindication of the concepts of me-
chanical solidarity and speaker emancipation, however, has revived the original noncon-
formist stance of sociolinguistics and uncovered a hidden line of historical development
in dialect research. Alternative perspectives on dialect variation reject positivism and
interpret nonstandard varieties as a source of emancipation rather than one of alienation
and obstacles to progress.
In this article we seek to gain a clearer understanding of the present-day approach
to dialect and dialect variation by considering its origins and development out of com-
parative historical and traditional dialectological research. We retrace a non-chronologi-
cal development of social dialectology (section 1), focusing on the evolution of tradi-
tional dialect grammars through sociological and linguistic monographs to sociolinguis-
tics (section 2). From this standpoint, current variationist correlational research is seen
as an up-to-date quantitative version of earlier models (section 3). Criticism of Labovian
theory and methods suggests the need for a comprehensive reinterpretation of its entire
development and for a proposed critical social dialectology (section 4).
1.2. Genesis o social dialectology
1.2.1. Language variation: The contemporary version o an old idea

The current commonsense view of a language is that of an orderly heterogeneous system
of varieties along four dimensions: diachronic, diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic (Coşe-
riu 1981; Rona 1970: 204⫺206; Klein 1974: 18⫺71; Kubczak 1979: 11⫺53; see Berruto
in this volume). However, acceptance of this view is relatively recent among linguists.
The main endeavor of nineteenth and twentieth-century (pre-)dialectological researchers
into diachronic variation had been to prove the existence of a grammar of exceptionless
sound laws (the so-called Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze) that characterized each
standard language and was capable of explaining the division between languages in terms
of a genealogical tree (Stammbaumtheorie; see Murray in this volume). Comparativist
historical linguists and Neogrammarians carried out solid empirical work based largely
on earlier written data from the major Indo-European languages. However, as soon as
certain scholars born into the same tradition (Sievers, Paris), began to look into living
spoken diatopic varieties, they realized the need for a comparison between geographical
varieties of the same language. The aim was to prove that “sound laws” were regular
and applied without exception and, hence, that clearly delimited linguistic borders could
be drawn even between these varieties. However, early work on speech use revealed (1)
that there is an interplay of language dimensions in each area or local speech community
such that diachronic stratification may be perceptible within the geographical space (Gil-
liéron 1918), (2) that the homogeneity of the local speech community is very likely to be
a myth (Rousselot 1891; Gauchat 1905).
Both findings are decisive for the evolution of linguistics and of social dialectology
in particular, and respectively represent two different but complementary objectives: the
first, the study of language use and its correlation with extralinguistic factors (stratifica-
tion, ways of communication, accommodation, etc.); the second, the definition of vari-
eties on explicitly empirical foundations.
1.2.2. Key stages: Historical linguistics, traditional and social dialectology
The development briefly described above may be tentatively analyzed into three distinct
key stages as shown in Figure 34.1, from pre-dialectological schools (I) through tradi-
tional dialectology (II) to social dialectology (III). Traditional and contemporary social
dialectology are outgrowths of the same historical trend (nineteenth and early twentieth-
century historical comparative linguistics including Schleicher Darwinism and the Neo-
grammarian school), but they differ in their attitude (decay versus progress) toward the
same object of work:
1. Traditional dialectology adopts a pessimistic stance based on the idea that modern
urban life leads to dialect attrition and death (ideology of decay) and projects its work
as a program of defense against convergence toward the standard language (Berthele
2004: 723⫺724);
2. Variationist sociolinguistics exhibits a more optimistic stance, accepting evolution as
progress, not decay (ideology of progress); it views variation as a natural attribute of
languages, capable and deserving of empirically based description.
Differences between the two perspectives are thus primarily ideological, then theoretical,
and finally methodological. On the one hand, traditional dialectological schools (despite
their theoretical and methodological differences) have carried out essential work either
on dialect geography (direct representation of local variation using vocabularies and
maps, from Wenker and Gilliéron through to the contemporary projects) or on dialect
monographs (reconstructing the prototypical local dialect, from Ascoli and Wegener
through to present-day sociolinguistics), which aimed to show that laws of linguistic
change are exceptionless and that le patois authentique (the genuine dialect of a local
speech community) is the purest form of a language, worth preserving from external
contamination and studying as a reservoir of original purity. On the other hand, social
dialectology rejects the idea of an allegedly genuine dialect or sociolect and states that
its real object of research (variety) needs to be built up from a set of linguistic traits that
all correlate with the same extralinguistic factors (speakers’ variables, such as status, sex,
age, background, etc.). This required the introduction of quantitative techniques of
analysis and, hence, triggered what would later be called a “new paradigm” (Weydt and
Schlieben-Lange 1981: 118; Shuy 1990: 198⫺201).
1.2.3. Transitional stages: The role o the predecessors
Nevertheless, attention had long been paid to the effect of the speakers’ variables on
dialect use (Labov 1972d; Koerner 1988: 1991; Dittmar 2004), from the time dialectolo-
gists became aware that there were likely to be isoglosses similar to those encountered
in geographical space in social space (status, age or sex markers), as well as in its reflec-
tion in the linguistic performance (register) of individual speakers. A line of development
connecting dialectological schools and practitioners that became aware of the impor-
tance of social factors may be traced as a non-chronological path leading to the contem-
porary social sciences of language (Bellmann 1986; Berthele 2004). This line includes
every school or trend challenging the apriority of a homogeneous local speech com-
munity as theorized by the Neogrammarians. The essential role played by the nineteenth
and early twentieth-century schools (Marburg, French School), as well as contributions
by individual dialectologists (Schuchardt, Rohlfs, Wagner, Rousselot, Gauchat), need no
emphasis (see Iordan 1967: 76⫺127, 251⫺389, 507⫺672; Pop 1950: I, xxiii⫺lv, 1⫺156,
337⫺434, 467⫺618, II: 737⫺782, 792⫺834 et passim). In fact, the argument of an avant
la lettre sociolinguistic stance underlies every reconstruction of national sociolinguistic
idiosyncrasy where a synthesis between each country’s tradition and quantitative models
imported from the United States is proposed (see Malkiel 1976: 1984; Calvet 2003), at
Fig. 34.1: Genesis of social dialectology

least in Europe (Alvar 1969; Cortelazzo 1968; Marcellesi and Gardin 1974; Schlieben-
Lange 1976; Dittmar 1976; etc.).
However, early socially conditioned studies on dialects, like those designed by
Gauchat or Rousselot, never abandoned the traditional dialectological leitmotif: the con-
servation of the purest form of nonstandard varieties. Only as dialectologists began to
realize that a speech community has to be thoroughly described with attention to every
speaker and every source of variation can a certain theoretical disquiet be perceived. In
addition, the influence of structural dialectology (Martinet, Weinreich) completed the
emergence of a new way of doing dialect research.
2. Dialect grammars: The speakerless and homogeneous speech

community
2.1. Concept: The study o the genuine community dialect
There are two ways of analyzing diatopic variation (and hence two corresponding tasks
for dialectology): firstly, through idealized models of the existing dialect continua, de-
vised for the description of dialect diversification (dialect geography, dynamic models,
models of spatial diffusion, etc.); secondly, by defining dialects as syntopic systems (dia-
lect grammars). Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of geographical
variation in language has focused on the drawing of onomasiologically conceived linguis-
tic maps. Dialect geography continues to function as a model for representing diatopic
variation, and linguistic atlases act as a complementary source of data for the study of
linguistic variation and change (Milroy and Gordon 2003: 15⫺22; Chambers and Trud-
gill 1998: 89⫺123, 166⫺186). However, dialect maps are not the only means of studying
dialect variation. Traditional dialectology also produced complete and precise phonetic
descriptions of dialects as well as models of their phonological organization. In their
dialect grammars [Ortsgrammatiken], dialectologists described the relationship between
phonology and lexicon in full detail, worked on suprasegmental phonology, morphology
and syntax, and obtained the oldest, most reliable, and most comprehensive dialectal
data available to us today (Petyt 1980: 37⫺67; Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 13⫺31).
Dialect monographs emerged as a means of solving some of the problems and insuffi-
ciencies that had been discovered in dialect geography since Wenker’s and Gilliéron’s
seminal ventures. The need for a deeper insight into the speech community’s patois
authentique and the desire to thoroughly analyze each dialect’s grammar gave rise to a
long tradition of specialized monographs in both Germanic (Bach 1969: 214⫺226) and
Romance domains (Pop 1950: 45⫺56, 303⫺306, 409⫺427, 525⫺530 et passim; Iordan
1967: 55⫺60; 408⫺423; Malkiel 1976: 61⫺62). The local base dialect [Ortsmundart] was
to be the smallest and most regular unit with its own independent history. The canonical
form for dialect monographs had been well defined by Wegener and Ascoli, the former
following Sievers and Winteler, and the latter in line with Gaston Paris (Pop 1950: II,
740⫺741; I, 45⫺50, 525⫺526; see Murray in this volume). The catalog of tasks includes
the following:
1. Data gathering: a diachronic phase of the mother tongue is taken as a comparative

reference base, since the aim is to relate the diversity evident in every phonetic diver-
gence back to the relevant phonetic laws (Pop 1950: I, 525⫺530; II, 740⫺741).
2. To make a diachronic study possible, dialect monographs needed to include precise
analyses of phonetics and grammar; this entailed a comprehensive collection of words
covering every consonant and vowel and required either close acquaintance with the
local dialect or the use of well-selected bona fide informants.
3. The idea was to obtain the complete grammar for each dialect (including every com-
ponent) and the historical basis for interdialectal comparison (i. e., the source form
and the corresponding Lautgesetze).
4. On this basis it was very unlikely that serious consideration would be given to un-
derlying questions such as the informants’ representativity (Berthele 2004) or the
method’s atomism (Weydt and Schlieben-Lange 1981).
2.2. Evolution: Sociological and structural monographs
Early sociological criticism of traditional skewed samples of informants and linguistic

criticism of atomism was voiced and developed quickly. Both trends have been labeled
above (section 1.2.3) as transitional and are retrospectively understood as antecedents
of the new sociolinguistic era (Petyt 1980: 101⫺116; Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 32⫺
44). Works by Rousselot (1891) and Gauchat (1905), among others (Wegener, Raumer,
etc.) are considered representative of the former, while Martinet (1939) and Weinreich
[1954] lead the latter (see Figure 34.1). Traditional diachronic dialect grammars then
evolved toward both social-centered or sociological monographs (section 2.2.1) and lan-
guage-centered or structural (linguistic) monographs (section 2.2.2).
2.2.1. Sociological monographs
In fact, as pointed out by Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 30), the real and “greatest
single source of disaffection” with traditional dialectology among contemporary social
dialectologists is “the narrow choice of informants” (Malkiel 1976: 70⫺73). As the aim
of the research was the oldest stage of the genuine dialect, its data source excluded
a large proportion of the community’s population. Consequently, the traditional ideal
informant would be “une personne pour qui le parler des aı̈eux constitue encore le seul
moyen de communiquer non seulement avec sa propre famille, mais aussi avec les gens
du même pays” (Pop 1950: II, 1158). Unrepresentative groups of non-mobile older rural
male speakers (NORMS), in combination with the dialectologist’s own intuition, were
thus the only source of data. Such data collection procedures are conceivable only on
the basis of an understanding of “space” that implies strong idealization, i. e., a belief
that the other linguistic dimensions do not affect the homogeneity of dialects.
Traditional dialect monographs should thus be considered in relation to a particular
historical period, a particular type of community, and even a predominant ideology,
though this does not mean being blind to the effect of society on speech use. As men-
tioned in section 1.2.3, schools opposed to the Neogrammarians (the French School,
Marburg, etc.) did consider the inclusion of social parameters (such as sex, education,
mobility, etc.) as factors likely to constrain dialect use, but only to demonstrate the
threat of dialect alienation. This utopist ideology upholds the implicit assumption that
progress and urbanization cause dialect alienation (Bellmann 1986: 22⫺42; Berthele
2004: 732⫺735; see section 3.1).
However, homogeneous traditional rural local speech communities, based on strong
network links between speakers, mechanical solidarity and behavioral similarity (includ-
ing linguistic behavior), were evolving into contemporary stratified large urban speech
communities where the division of labor and functions is reflected in stratified linguistic
use. This would force community grammar research to accept social science standards
as theoretical and methodological foundations and become, properly speaking, social
dialectology (see section 3). Nevertheless, the acceptance of such standards does not
entail the rejection of the mountains of rich data these monographs contain; on the
contrary, the historical perspective outlined above should be used to assess this tradi-
tional work positively, rather than disqualify it on the basis of contemporary sociolin-
guistic advances.
Growing acceptance of the key sociological procedures among dialect monograph
researchers began to change the whole scenario. The myth of the homogeneous speech
community (as well as the corresponding idea of a consistent idiolect) was exploded and
by the second half of the twentieth century the idea of heterogeneity was fairly well
established. A series of monographs appeared in an attempt to adapt to the new require-
ments; in fact, the transition from dialect monographs to sociolinguistic studies was
relatively smooth until Labov’s groundbreaking research on Martha’s Vineyard [1963]
and New York City [1966] appeared. In sum, this qualitative shift should be taken as
the final product of a long chain of quantitative changes affecting theory and, above all,
method. Two main aspects should be borne in mind:
1. The reliability and validity of the findings. Gradually, contaminated informants tended
to be replaced by representative samples of speakers. Increasing attention paid to
variation led to a detachment from both unrepresentative groups of NORM speakers
and, apparently, from genuine dialects. The introduction of speaker variables made
samples more complicated and forced researchers to be more accurate in their field-
work strategies (Petyt 1980: 110⫺116) and correlational analyses (Chambers and
Trudgill 1998: 45⫺53; Petyt 1980: 132⫺170).
2. The context. Dialect grammarians’ attention began to focus on urban research. At
first, urban monographs were conducted just as in traditional dialectology, selecting
subject and informants, as in Sivertsen’s (1960) study of Cockney phonology, De
Camp’s (1958/1959) research on San Francisco speech or Viereck’s (1966) research on
Gateshead “pure” dialect (see Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 46⫺47; Milroy and Gor-
don 2003: 15⫺22). However, most of the features that characterize contemporary
variation research gradually emerged in these monographs. On the one hand, Euro-
pean urban research by Séguy [1950] or socially-oriented geographical studies by Bach
[1950] and Vàrvaro [1972⫺1973] cannot be separated from Gauchat’s and Rousselot’s
legacy. On the other hand, American contributions by Kurath et al. (1939) and
McDavid (1948) owe a great deal to Jaberg and Jud’s Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens
und Südschweiz (AIS, 1928⫺1960). All these lines of development converge in the
essential work by Weinreich (Weinreich, Labov/Herzog 1968).
This pre-sociological work is being reassessed by contemporary interpretive researchers
(Sankoff, Williams, Auer), in line with more comprehensive criticism of correlational
sociolinguistics’ shortcomings (see section 4).
2.2.2. Linguistic monographs
As Malkiel (1976: 67) has pointed out, the cleft between Geneva structuralism on the
one hand, and Zurich and Bern/Marburg dialect research on the other, “developed into
an ‘isogloss’ of the first magnitude”. As already discussed, Neogrammarian interest in
the linguistic (as opposed to cultural) foundations of historical comparative research
developed into diachronic atomistic description. The idea of describing the underlying
system of units for each dialect without any regard to the strict diachronic relation to
the overarching standard language, let alone the unequal social prestige associated with
both, seems originally to have been applied by Martinet (1939) in his research on the
Franco-Provençal dialect of Hauteville, a commune in Savoy. Work by Lausberg (1939),
Weinreich [1954]: Vàrvaro [1972⫺1973] and, among others, Fourquet, Pulgram, France-
scato, Catalán, and Rona (see Alvar 1969: 35⫺53; Malkiel 1976: 67⫺73; Petyt 1980:
117⫺131; Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 32⫺44) reveals the advantages and disadvan-
tages of this method of work.
Unfortunately, technical difficulties (how to describe closely related systems in the
simplest way?) and ideological obstacles (why consider stigmatized varieties as autono-
mous systems?) made it very hard to combine linguistic and social interest, as the devel-
opment of social dialectology would show (see section 3).
3. Sociolinguistic correlation: The heterogeneous stratiied

speech community and the group grammar
3.1. Social dialectology: Signiicance and objective
3.1.1. A new way o analyzing dialects: Linguistic and social depth
Social dialectology is the result of an adaptation of traditional dialectology to the new

conditions of the twentieth century (particularly to urban stratified communities). The
Durkheimian opposition between mechanical and organic solidarity (Durkheim 1902;
Berthele 2004: 732⫺734) is an excellent starting point for exploring the transition from
traditional to social dialectology. Examples of a mostly rural, closely knit community,
functioning through mechanical solidarity and characterized by the relative uniformity
of the actors’ états de conscience and activities were vanishing and the idea of them was
becoming out-of-date. This increasingly led to the concept of an endangered homog-
eneous genuine dialect closely related to this type of community proving to be inade-
quate. A new form of community appeared to be emerging, as a new division of labor
and an organic solidarity became established; sharply stratified loose-knit urban commu-
nities do not show unified patterns of behavior but instead present an image of hetero-
geneity which only extralinguistic correlates (occupation, education, age, sex, etc.) could
help to organize. The aim therefore became to grasp the regular patterns of linguistic
use in the community with the help of these extralinguistic factors and try to describe
its varieties.
The ideal objective of social dialectology embraces both what we could call social
depth (i. e., representative samples both of speakers and linguistic data) and linguistic
depth (i. e., analysis of the linguistic structure underlying surface data). This means, on
the one hand, the redefinition of social dialectology as a realistic discipline, which implies
its taking on of an empirical (i. e., statistical and sociological, as opposed to a descriptive
[traditional dialectology] or intuitive [formal linguistics]) character. On the other hand,
Weinreich’s heritage brought together social and linguistic depth, but Labov’s early work
did not pay equal attention to both aspects of linguistic variation, since he assumed that
insufficiencies of method (particularly, fieldwork and analysis) came before all else (La-
bov 1972c, 1984). The early development of American social dialectology therefore
showed a strong tendency to correlate large amounts of atomistic (mainly phonetic) data
with well-structured social patterns. This may explain the later evolution of variation re-
search.
3.1.2. Objectives: Academic and social
Social dialectology aims to describe collective patterns of linguistic behavior (in both
large and small speech communities) and how they are reflected in the behavior of indi-
vidual speakers. Two separate arguments support this aim. The first is scientific or aca-
demic: that a better understanding of linguistic performance in its social context requires
an expansion of the object so as to capture previously neglected aspects of language;
this requires interdisciplinary collaboration (self-liquidating prophecy; see Fishman 1972:
8⫺9; Dittmar 1976: 131). The second argument is a social one: that acquaintance with
patterns of linguistic use in a speech community can help to improve the social condi-
tions (wealth, education and development) of speakers. In both arguments, what could
be called a therapeutic stance supported by the ideology of social progress based on
science and technology is apparent (see Kjolseth 1971: 10⫺22; Dittmar 1989: 23⫺55).
Accordingly, virtual equality in society will be achieved if progress and technology man-
age to tame the world and its dangers. On this basis, mainstream research on social
variation in language has been directed toward quantitative sociolinguistic correlation,
largely supported by empirical sociological theories and statistical techniques.
As pointed out (section 3.1.1), the history of social dialectology may be seen as a
statistically and sociologically modified extension of traditional dialectology in which
Labov’s (1966) study of the social stratification of English in New York City is taken to
be the main reference work. Contemporary correlational research emerges from Labov’s
synthesis of, on the one hand, traditional European and American trends of socially-con-
ditioned dialect research brought together by Weinreich and, on the other hand, tech-
niques of fieldwork and analysis from the social sciences and statistics. This is true at
least for the core developmental trend (see Figure 34.2).
However, this is not the only feasible historical interpretation. As Sankoff (1988)
pointed out, an alternative, less overt development is likely to have taken place: instead
of considering Labov’s research on New York as the starting point, his work in Harlem
(1972b) should be taken as the beginning of something quite different. Social dialectol-
ogy would thus be seen to have adopted a critical stance toward positivism and scien-
tism, and even social progress. As Habermas (1981) has pointed out, since it is based on
technology as a means of dominating the world, progress produces alienation and actu-
ally hinders freedom. Real progress for society would be emancipation. Hence, social
science should treat science and technology as a means, not an end, and aim above
all to contribute to the speaker’s emancipation. On this basis, the alternative, mainly
interpretive, trend should be related to an effectively hidden line of dialectological
thought (Schmeller, Schirmunski), sharply opposed to the dominant trend (Berthele
2006: 721⫺722). This tension between social progress and emancipation helps us to
understand the further development of the discipline (see section 4 and Figure 34.2).
What is interesting and even curious is the contradictory relationship between the
positivistic therapeutic position and the concepts of authenticity and progress. As already
mentioned, nonstandard varieties should be investigated as a contribution to a better
understanding not only of language, but of a community’s social stratification and the
consequences of this. Nevertheless, the underlying ideological representation is that non-
standard varieties represent an obstacle to social progress itself, since they affect com-
munication, especially at school (Bernstein, Badura). This would make vernacular vari-
eties the contemporary counterpart of the traditional genuine dialect. In contrast, the
interpretive position accepts nonstandard varieties as a means of social emancipation
and rejects the idea of an illusory equality of varieties (Bourdieu 1984; Williams 1992).
3.2. Correlational sociolinguistics
More than four decades of research into language stratification have proved that there
is no reason to maintain a theoretical and methodological separation between dialectol-
ogy and sociolinguistics. Social dialectology begins when the social nature of space is
assumed and social prestige (whatever it might be) is taken as the key concept in a
speech community’s dynamics. On the one hand, inter- and intralinguistic variation is
then considered to be normal and the object becomes heterogeneous: space is perceived
as a variation space (section 3.2.1). On the other hand, heterogeneity also means stratifi-
cation: varieties elicited from NORM speakers should be replaced with samples from
real speakers who represent the whole community (section 3.2.2).
3.2.1. The concept o variation space
The task of social dialectology involves describing (1) the different varieties in a certain
variation space; (2) relationships between these varieties and (3) relationships between
varieties and extralinguistic factors (Klein 1989: 106). The object of social dialectology
is no longer assumed to be a natural, homogeneous, well-delimited, genuine variety. On
the contrary, varieties must be built up empirically: “we may define a variety of language
as a set of linguistic items with similar social distribution” (Hudson 1996: 22). Linguistic
features frequently associated with extralinguistic factors, such as sex, social class, ethnic-
ity, regional background or age, turn out to be marked by these extralinguistic variables
and so convey or “mean” their respective content (e.g., “female”, “lower working class”,
“African American”, “rural”, “middle aged”, etc.). Thus, varieties are understood to be
composed of linguistic features which frequently co-occur with the same extralinguistic
variants and hence have the same social connotation (Bierwisch 1988).
The speech community’s repertoire is thus made up of coexistent hierarchized vari-
eties that are organized with regard to mainstream social prestige in many different ways
and according to particular sociohistorical conditions. The overarching standard variety
unifies the whole configuration (Auer 2005). The idea is that social stratification is likely
to be used as a basis for explaining, and even predicting, linguistic variation, since it is
assumed that similar social conditions will produce similar linguistic performance.
In summary, this perspective implies that (1) division and heterogeneity in society
must be accepted and integrated into theory and methodology; (2) the idea of a com-
munity’s genuine dialect is a myth and can therefore no longer be the default dialect; (3)
the overarching standard variety is the putative default variety in a stratified community;
(4) the only way to understand linguistic reflections of social diversity is to use speakers’
social stratification as the independent variable; this is why social dialectology becomes
correlative.
3.2.2. A new paradigm: Social stratiication and quantitative analysis
Social dialectology grew out of socially oriented dialect monographs (section 2.2.1), as
researchers acknowledged the fact that dialects are part of a more complex object that
includes social and stylistic variables as well as geographical features. Research into
linguistic varieties can no longer be one dimensional, since each variety (say a dialect)
may be analyzed into several social (sociolects) and stylistic (registers) varieties. Thus,
new models are needed to account for multidimensional data (Bellmann 1986: 1⫺5,
14⫺22 et passim). To this end it has become necessary to construct what Weydt and
Schlieben-Lange (1981: 118) have called a “new paradigm”. According to them, this
emergent paradigm is based on the following four common features:
1. Realism. This implies the rejection of the Homogenitätsannahme (Klein 1974: 18⫺40),
i. e., the assumption of a homogeneous speech community. Rejection of homogeneity
entails, on the one hand, a thorough revision of data collection, including sample
representativity and current fieldwork criteria and strategies and, on the other hand,
the idea of an interpersonal and intrapersonal grammar capable of covering a speech
community’s diversified performance. Accurate protocols of methodological strategies
(Milroy and Gordon 2003: 23⫺87) have been developed, and well-acknowledged lin-
guistic models (e.g., variable rules) have been proposed (Fasold 1990: 244⫺257).
Nevertheless, representative random aggregates of speakers do not actually repre-
sent anything that really exists. They help us to observe mean tendencies, but lack
social depth (section 3.1.1). The same may be said of linguistic models: the need to
obtain a general picture of the speech community’s social and stylistic variation at
the expense of a more detailed insight into the intralinguistic system of each variety
(Weydt and Schlieben-Lange 1981: 125⫺130) obliges the analyst to concentrate on
the variation of single and isolated sounds (substantialism) without relating them to
their counterparts within the system (atomism).
2. Empirical research. Intuition and other “narrow” sources of data are said to be re-
placed by a larger corpus of real linguistic performance by ordinary speakers who
represent the whole speech community. To cope with mountains of data from the real
community, social dialectology needs interdisciplinary collaboration: from statistics
(quantitative analysis) and the social sciences, especially sociology (sampling pro-
cedures, theories of stratification). Though this represents one of the paradigm’s most
widely acknowledged achievements, it is also its main obstacle, given its mechanism,
scienticism and acceptance of the ideology underlying social sciences (Williams 1992).
3. Grammar. Early steps by Labov and others included variation research within the
framework of generative grammar (Dittmar 1976: 132⫺160), although most of this
work until very recently lacked solid theoretical foundations (Hinskens, van Hout
and Wetzels 1997).
4. Quantitative analysis. Statistical and probabilistic models of representation and analy-
sis have characterized this trend up until now. Aggregate scores are assumed to be
the best means of accounting for orderly heterogeneity. By the end of the twentieth
century, nothing seemed to be beyond the reach of this optimistic new way of analyz-
ing linguistic variation. Focusing on the analysis of complex patterns of interaction
between linguistic and extralinguistic (mainly social) variables generated very success-
ful results in a climate of euphoria.
Even today variation continues to represent one of the most innovative trends in linguis-
tics. However, in spite of the optimism generated by more than forty years of incontesta-
ble findings, interpretive criticism has centered on the fact that correlational analysis
based on mean scores obscures small group and individual variation behind social classes
and other stratificational structures (see section 4).
4. Beyond group grammar: The speakers language
4.1. Emancipation and progress: An interpretive turning point or

social dialectology
The main concern in community-centered research is how to study dialects in their social
context. Correlation between linguistic and stratificational variables has proved to be
successful but insufficient in presenting a realistic account of patterns of behavior in the
speech community. Interpretation (Verstehen) of the speaker’s performance in his or her
social-network context is regarded as the key concept for renewal and even as a turning
point in the development of social dialectology (Auer 1989). The reaction against mecha-
nism and social therapeutics by microsociolinguistic practitioners has uncovered the hid-
den trend of emancipatory social dialectology commented on in section 3.1.2.
As shown in Figure 34.2, the hypothesis is that mainstream correlational sociolinguis-
tics (Labov 1966) has carried forward the original trend of traditional community stud-
ies, as adapted by European and American pre-sociolinguists (not to mention the French
School or significant scholars such as Schuchardt). The emergence of social network
methodology (Milroy [1980]) was initially understood as a complementary technique of
correlation (Milroy and Margrain 1980). As this research trend began evolving toward
a critical interpretive stance (Labov and Harris 1986; Milroy and Milroy 1992; Eckert
2000), an alternative emancipatory research trend was revealed and retrospectively
traced back to the work of certain traditional alternative dialectologists (see section 3.1).
This line of emancipatory sociolinguistics can be related to Labov (1972b) and has been
influenced by several movements (interactional and interpretive sociolinguistics, sociolin-
guistic criticism, etc.).
Such an analysis reveals that the present-day conflict between ideologies of therapeu-
tic authenticity and emancipatory realism reaches right back to the origins of dialectol-
ogy. At the same time it sheds fresh light on the history of dialectology itself.
624
Fig. 34.2: Directions of social dialectology: Therapeutics and emancipation. Continuous black arrows indicate a fundamental line of
development. Discontinuous arrows represent trends of influence
VI. Data analysis and the presentation of results
4.2. Social networks
Communities are not made up of ideal randomly selected subjects resulting from and
representing the interaction of several extralinguistic factors, but of real people living in
their social networks of kin, friends, neighbors and workmates (Milroy and Gordon
2003: 116⫺135). Even in urban contexts, actors tend to integrate into these informal
networks of relations, which function as intermediate structures between speakers and
social stratification. Thus, knowledge of a speaker’s status, sex, age, ethnicity or back-
ground is not enough to predict his or her linguistic performance. Social, ethnic and age
groups are all heterogeneous; even within the same social class, clear differences may be
perceived as people tend to integrate into the personal networks where most of their
ordinary life takes place. As these networks keep very similar people together, and an
inner consensus of norms tends to develop (Milroy 1987a; Dittmar and Schlobinski
1985), it is very likely that they speak alike (Villena-Ponsoda 2005). Social networks tend
then to reflect the individual’s degree of integration into or isolation from the local
speech community and hence can predict linguistic variation (Trudgill 1996: 3⫺4).
4.2.1. Correlational social network analysis

Social dialectology seems to have found what it had essentially been searching for: an
objective way of accessing the speaker’s natural (i. e., unobserved) behavior and a means
of correlating their degree of integration into the community with their linguistic behav-
ior. Hence, social networks have been defined both as a well-accepted bona fide instru-
ment for fieldwork and as a successful way of complementing stratification analysis
(Milroy and Margrain 1980; Milroy and Milroy 1992).
As reflected in Figure 34.2, the evolution of the concept of social network shows
one interpretive and at least three correlative steps, which correspond to four different
hypotheses about the significance of the concept for social dialectology.
The first (and weakest) hypothesis suggests that social networks are only a methodo-
logical tool for solving the observer’s paradox (Milroy 1987b: 57⫺67; Labov 2001: 325⫺
365), but are unable to explain or predict linguistic variation. This trend accepts the
influence of ethnography and has helped greatly to improve sociolinguistic methodology.
The second (and strongest) hypothesis considers social networks as independent vari-
ables capable of explaining or predicting linguistic variation through correlation between
linguistic variables and network markers. The idea is that strong-tie (dense) networks
favor local loyalty and hence correlate with the use of strong vernacular varieties,
whereas weak-tie (non-dense) networks tend to facilitate convergence toward main-
stream norms and the use of the standard variety. As network structure properties (den-
sity, multiplexity, centrality, etc.) have proved easy to quantify (Milroy 1987a: 108⫺176;
Bortoni-Ricardo 1985: 69⫺97; Dittmar and Schlobinski 1985: 163⫺185; Chambers 2000:
68⫺81; Labov 2001: 325⫺365), network markers can be used as independent variables
in the correlation analysis. Measures of the speakers’ strength of ties and frequency of
contacts, as well as their personal network size, have been applied. Researchers have
built scales adapted to their objectives (Milroy 1987a: 152⫺176; Lippi-Green 1989: 218⫺
220 and 223⫺231; Bortoni-Ricardo 1985: 162⫺169, etc.), but the results have not always
been successful (Villena-Ponsoda 2005: 317⫺322).
The third (intermediate or interactive) hypothesis emphasizes the explanatory capac-

ity of social networks, i. e., prediction of vernacular maintenance/shift, but considers the
interactive effect of status and other macrosociological variables (Milroy and Margrain
1980). Given that correlation between strong vernacular features and network markers
is often weak or produces unexpected results, interactive categories of stratification and
social networks need to be proposed. Evidence from different speech communities re-
veals significant differences in the effect of network on linguistic use depending on the
speaker’s status, sex or age (see Villena-Ponsoda 2005: 323⫺329). An interactive model
including three types of interaction of network and social class (life-modes) has been
proposed by Milroy and Milroy (1992). Since empirical evidence shows that the network
parameter (dense/non-dense) frequently interacts with the community’s external contact
parameter (high/low level), as stated by Trudgill (1996, 2002), a model of interaction
between social class, network structure and level of external contact could be proposed.
This model would be the best way of capturing the contemporary version of the genuine
dialect, i. e., the vernacular.
4.2.2. Interpretive social network analysis

It is apparent that linguistic behavior is conditioned by interactive categories including
status, network and external contact, but the locus of homogeneity ⫺ if it exists at all ⫺
lies beyond this threshold. After more than twenty years of intensive research into the
correlation between social network markers and vernacular variables, results have not
always turned out to be strong or significant: speakers living within the same social
network are not as similar nor is their corresponding linguistic behavior as alike as might
be expected. This does not mean that social networks are of no use for sociolinguistic
analysis but they do need to be understood in a different way. Quantitative network
analysis allows the analyst to understand norms underlying connected speakers but, as
a consequence of its dependence on standardized correlation, it usually points to broad
trends to the detriment of details.
Thus, a fourth (interpretive) hypothesis must be formulated: social networks should
be understood as a framework that is indispensable in interpreting the speaker’s motiva-
tions, but not as an end in themselves. Results of correlational network analysis are
merely a way of arriving at the subsets of relations between speakers that usually lie
beyond the analyst’s reach. These relations emerge as people engage in shared social
enterprises (Eckert 2000: 171⫺212). The study of the speaker’s social life (Labov and
Harris 1986; Labov 2001; Marshall 2004) allows the analyst to interpret his or her speech
behavior. However, this interpretation is only within a participant observer’s grasp, since
only an insider can access and understand quantitative results of network analysis be-
yond the standardized measures of network links. This is why analysis of both stratifica-
tion and network structure should only be considered as a necessary but preliminary
step toward the study of a speaker’s language use.
This hypothesis should not be seen as a nostalgic backward step in line with some
kind of philological, or indeed dialectological, rejection of the quantitative methods of
sociolinguistics. On the contrary, it aims to offer an imaginative solution to a methodo-
logical impasse in social dialectology and a significant advance toward reclaiming the
originally critical and emancipatory position of social dialectology.
4.3. An integrated theory o social dialect variation
The evolution of social dialect research invites a retrospective reconsideration of tradi-

tional dialectology perspectives from two angles.
1. Firstly, the linguistic question: since linguistic variables are not atoms to be correlated
with well-defined social structures, but belong to systems, inventories, etc., the ex-
haustive qualitative analyses common in dialect grammar research should be reco-
vered through a thorough scrutiny of the systematic relationships of each variable
under study (see section 2.2).
2. Secondly, the speaker question: stratification and social network correlation are not
sufficient to explain an individual’s linguistic behavior. Results from quantitative
stratification and network analyses (including interaction between status and social
networks) should be complemented by an interpretive analysis of the speaker’s social
life. This produces more satisfactory results but requires changes in social dialectology
theory and methods in line with those described in this article.
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VII. Exemplary studies
35. Untying the language-body-place connection:

A study on linguistic variation and social style
in a Copenhagen community o practice
1. Introduction
2. Language and place ⫺ in the wake of globalization
3. Place and body ⫺ the community as a social construct
4. Body and language ⫺ deconstructing the authentic speaker
5. Conclusion
6. References
1. Introduction
It is a deep-rooted conviction that languages, speakers and places constitute a unity.

Languages belong to specific speakers, and speakers belong to specific places. In spite
of the fact that many people in Denmark (especially in the larger cities) experience daily
that one place may contain different speakers and more than one language, the belief
that a language and its speakers belong to a specific place is profound. Danish is thought
to belong to Danes, and Danes are thought to live in Denmark. The tying together of
places, languages and people is not only characteristic of most lay people’s conceptuali-
zations of languages. A tight connection between place, body and language also lies at
the basis of most sociolinguistic and dialect studies, whether linguistic variation is de-
scribed horizontally, as linked to geography, or vertically, as linked to social stratifica-
tion. Languages and dialects have traditionally been treated as belonging to a place; so
have speakers. The ideal informant lives in the place in which he and his parents were
born. Furthermore, the speaker is believed to incarnate one, and only one, authentic
language (the vernacular of the Labovian tradition). Although both dialectology and
sociolinguistics have been harshly criticized for their rigid treatments of speaker catego-
ries (gender, class, age and ethnicity), there has in general been little focus on the insuffi-
ciently thought-out connection between body, language and place. However, in today’s
large cities, where mobility and heterogeneity seem to be the norm rather than the excep-
tion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to uncritically maintain the language-body-place
connection as the starting point for a linguistic description.
In a globalized world where people move and communicate around the globe, it is
easy to problematize a taken-for-granted connection between language, body and place.
For the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1998: 12⫺18), the notion of globalization entails
a contraction of time and space, which follows in the wake of late modern technologies.
Bodies are able to move and communicate over long distances at greater and greater
speeds at less and less cost. Consequently, bodies (the privileged ones) are less tied to
specific geographical places ⫺ and, drawing on Paul Virilio, Bauman even talks about
35. Untying the language⫺body⫺place connection 633
“the end of geography” (1998: 12). Anthony Giddens likewise (1991: 21⫺23) claims that
globalization reorganizes time and space with fundamental human consequences in that
a “globalisation of social activity” collides with established traditional practices. Giddens
and Bauman thus argue that the consequences of globalization influence and restructure
social organization, practices and identities (Bauman 1998: 18⫺26; Giddens 1991: 14⫺
34). Such deep-seated changes also impact the study of language and communication,
perhaps especially the sociolinguistic study of language variation in cities. The popula-
tions of larger cities become ethnically and linguistically more heterogeneous as migra-
tion increases (at least this has been the case in most of Europe; Extra and Gorter
2001). New communication technologies, mobile telephony and the World Wide Web
reorganize communicative spaces and bring, so to speak, globalization into the core of
speakers’ daily communicative practices. A perspective on language that involves treat-
ing one place as having one language or one dialect is a considerable simplification.
The aim of this article is to show how the body-language-place connection shatters
when the study focuses on language variation in ethnically mixed urban communities. I
will in turn critically scrutinize connections between language and place, place and body,
and body and language. This will be done through a presentation of findings from a
study of language variation and social style in a Copenhagen community of practice
(Quist 2005). Notions of style and practice will be developed as the main means needed
to grasp the complexity of “language, body and place” in the study of linguistic varia-
tion.
2. Language and place - in the wake o globalization
The Copenhagen speech community, in variationist studies, has traditionally been de-
scribed as composed of two sociolects: low Copenhagen (used by working-class speakers)
and high Copenhagen (used by middle and upper-class speakers; Brink and Lund 1975;
Jørgensen 1980; Gregersen and Pedersen 1991b). Jørgensen (1980) and Gregersen and
Pedersen (1991b) describe studies designed in line with the Labovian paradigm, defining
a “Copenhagen speaker” as somebody who was born in Copenhagen (and preferably
whose parents were also born in Copenhagen). In the Gregersen and Pedersen study,
however, the criterion of being native to Copenhagen was difficult to maintain, as it
turned out that only ten percent of the inhabitants had lived in the neighborhood under
study for more than ten years (Gregersen 1989: 49; Gregersen and Pedersen 1991a).
These proportions may even be lower today. We still find speakers of the traditional
sociolects, low and high Copenhagen, but they hardly complete the picture of the linguis-
tic variation in the city. If we today made second-generation nativeness to Copenhagen
(excluding all second-generation immigrants from other countries) the criterion for de-
limiting Copenhagen speakers, we would end up with very few and certainly unrepresen-
tative speakers. Thus, if we wish to gain substantial insight into the development, use
and change in Copenhagen speech, we will have to employ methods other than those
traditionally used (Brink and Lund 1975; Jørgensen 1980; Gregersen and Pedersen
1991b).
The geographical place that we call Copenhagen contains a multitude of languages
and language varieties and speakers who live with and use this multitude. The study
634 VII. Exemplary studies
Tab. 35.1: Highest level of education attained by parents. Approximately 53 students attended the
two high school classes during the five months of observation (some dropped out during
the study, others arrived later). We have information on parents’ educational back-
grounds from 47 students
Highest level of education attained Number of students
Extended tertiary study / university 14
Mid-level higher education (skilled workers, teachers, etc.) 22
Basic schooling (unskilled workers) 11
Tab. 35.2: Parents’ migration/linguistic backgrounds

Parents’ backgrounds Number of students
Both parents have a Danish 27
ethnic background
One parent has a non-Danish 7 (whereby all mothers have Danish backgrounds; fathers:
ethnic background 2 of Moroccan descent, 1 Iraqi, 1 British, 1 South African,
1 Greek, 1 French)
Both parents have a non- 19 (5 students of Pakistani descent, 3 Turkish, 2 Moroccan,
Danish ethnic background 2 Lebanese, 1 Iraqi, 1 Syrian, 1 Bosnian, 1 Faroese,
1 Jordanian, 1 Kuwaiti, 1 Sudanese)
described in this article illustrates this. It was conducted in 2002 in central Copenhagen,
in the Nørrebro neighborhood. It was based on five months of ethnographic research
conducted with two high-school classes at Metropolitanskolen, an ethnically mixed
school. Besides participant observation, data consisting of 52 interviews, ten group re-
cordings, self-recordings and questionnaires was collected (Quist 2005: 85⫺118).
Traditionally, Nørrebro has been a working class area and stereotypically considered
a stronghold of the low Copenhagen sociolect. However, during the last twenty to thirty
years, the population has become ethnically and socially more diverse. Immigrants from
Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and Pakistan settled in Nørrebro in the
1970s and 1980s. Later, during the 1990s, (parts of) Nørrebro, like other areas of inner
Copenhagen, experienced a process of gentrification, with an influx of people with mid-
dle-class incomes, especially artists and academics. These demographic developments are
reflected in the composition of the student body at Metropolitanskolen. In Table 35.1,
we can see that 22 of the students in the two classes included in the study have parents
with mid-level higher education (i. e., three to four years of training after nine or ten
years of basic schooling). Fourteen students have parents with university degrees, and
eleven students have parents with only basic school education (by and large, immigrant
and Danish parents are evenly distributed across all three categories). Table 35.2 shows
that about half of the students have Danish ethnic backgrounds, which means that they
grew up in monolingual Danish homes. The other half grew up in families where Danish
is the second or third language. Seven of the students have fathers of foreign descent
and Danish mothers (incidentally, in this study there are no Danish fathers who married
foreigners). Nineteen students have parents who themselves immigrated to Denmark.
Most of them came in the 1970s.
Taken together, Tables 35.1 and 35.2 show that the students in the two classes consti-
tute a variegated group of individuals of different social, ethnic and linguistic back-
grounds. Students with Danish ethnic backgrounds form the largest group. Still, it is no
exaggeration to consider Metropolitanskolen to be demographically heterogeneous. Half
of the students have mother tongues other than Danish. From time to time, some of
them codeswitch between L1 and L2 (viz. those who speak Turkish, Punjabi/Urdu and
Arabic). The linguistic picture is much more complex than that which the earlier studies
of low and high Copenhagen sociolects were able to capture (Quist 2006). Danish is
spoken in a variety of ways, for example, the use of multi-ethnolect is common (Quist
2000, 2008). There is no one-to-one correspondence between the physical place, here the
Metropolitanskolen, and (one variety of) the Danish language (or the low Copenhagen
sociolect).
That different languages and varieties are present is due not only to the different
backgrounds of the students. The communication technologies (Internet and mobile
phones) that students integrate into their daily communicative practices bring in lan-
guages and varieties from other places. In some Danish high schools today, students are
provided with a personal laptop, which they are also allowed to take home. This was
the case in the two classes under study. At Metropolitanskolen, the students were able to
connect their personal laptops wirelessly to the Internet at all times and places in the
school. And so they did! They were online from the beginning of the school day until
leaving school in the afternoon (and most of them were online again when they got
home). During lunch breaks, for instance, the classrooms were filled with sounds from
the computers. The students visited both Danish and foreign (mostly youth-oriented)
websites where they watched short videos and listened to music. They also used the
computers for instant messaging, e-mailing, and website-based chatting. The school
premises, chiefly the classroom, constituted the physical place in which the students
created their communicative spaces. Among other things, these spaces were characterized
by (1) the virtual presence of interlocutors who were physically to be found in other
places, in other cities and countries for example; and (2) the virtual presence, through
websites, of different languages, mainly Danish and English (including different varieties
of these languages), but also Turkish, Arabic, Hindi and other minority languages.
In sum, the consequences of globalization ⫺ people’s mobility and new communica-
tion technologies ⫺ are evident at Metropolitanskolen: (1) the composition of students
reflects the social and ethnic heterogeneity of the neighborhood, thus bringing in dif-
ferent languages and varieties; and (2) the use of laptops and mobile phones means
that virtual interlocutors, languages and varieties are present and integrated into daily
communication practices.
Metropolitaskolen is not exceptional. In Copenhagen we find many communities of
practice (this notion is described below) characterized by a diversity of languages and
forms of communication that exceed the physical place. This reality is a challenge that
a sociolinguistic study needs to face. It is not a new critique that disciplines like geo-
graphical dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics seem to treat places as more ho-
mogenous than is justifiable. Le Page, Gumperz and others (Gumperz 1962: 133; Le
Page 1980: 336) have argued that a definition of a speech community must include all
its speakers and languages (codes), because, in Gumperz’ words, “the criterion for inclu-
sion of a code in a study of a linguistic community is that its exclusion will produce a
gap in the communication matrix” (1962: 134). What is new in this discussion, however,
is the possibility for speakers to create virtual communicative spaces ⫺ not parallel to
face-to-face interactions, but integrated into ongoing face-to-face interactions. (We shall
look at an example of this later in this article.) Interlocutors, languages and varieties are
in contact in and across Metropolitanskolen as a physical place. If we were to leave out
the virtual communication, there would indeed be a “gap in the communication matrix”.
The question is how the virtual communication and linguistic diversity can be included
in a sociolinguistic study. One suggestion is to implement the notion of “community of
practice” and to base the study in ethnography (see the next section for further discus-
sion).
The complex heterogeneity at Metropolitanskolen does not result in linguistic random-
ness or in an absence of patterns in language variation, choice and use. Nor does it
result in different groups of students using different distinct styles without sharing and
borrowing from each other. In the next section, we take a closer look at an example of
how a traditional sociolinguistic variable distributes in unexpected ways and forms part
of stylistic practices.
3. Place and body - the community as a social construct

The diversity of speakers in Copenhagen, and at Metropolitanskolen, is largely an effect
of the mobility of speakers, who move across country borders, city borders and between
different communities within the city. Hence, if we wish to capture the linguistic diversity
of a specific place, we need a concept of community that does not treat the connection
between body and place as static. Community of practice is such a concept. It captures
the dynamism of peoples’ connections to places by considering the community as a
social construct. One advantage of approaching the speech community as consisting
of communities of practice is that it allows for a multiplicity of linguistic codes and
(mobile) speakers.
Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet (1992) suggest that the notion of com-
munity of practice should be useful in the sociolinguistic study of language and gender.
They borrowed the term from Lave and Wenger’s theory of situated learning (1991), the
main idea of which is that learning takes place in active engagement in practices. Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet argue that the social meaning of linguistic variation is actively
produced and reproduced through practices within the communities in which speakers
engage.
According to Wenger (1998: 73), a community of practice is characterized by three
dimensions: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and a shared repertoire. All three dimen-
sions are characteristic of the two high school classes at Metropolitanskolen, and the
classes are thus defined as a community of practice (Quist 2005: 53⫺57). The students
are mutually engaged in the daily activities that take place within the framework of the
school. This means going to school every day from Monday to Friday, attending classes
on specific topics at specific times of the day, all in anticipation of completing the final
studentereksamen (upper secondary examination). So, going to school, taking part in
lessons, being in the right place at the right time is part of what we may call the joint
enterprise. Within this framework, which is largely defined for them by others, the stu-
dents mutually engage in daily activities such as hanging out in classrooms during
breaks, playing basketball in the school yard, smoking under the roofed porch, doing
Fig. 35.1: Smokers and non-smokers
assignments in groups in the lab, helping each other out with the latest math homework,
playing games or sharing music on their computers, etc. Through all such activities the
students develop a shared repertoire of signs and resources that over the course of time
become socially meaningful to them, i. e., become part of stylistic practices (Quist 2005:
76⫺78).
The students were observed over five months, beginning with their first day at school.
Drawings indicating each person’s position in the classrooms, hallways, yard, etc. were
collected in a field diary. After a few weeks, everybody moved around in regular patterns
(as illustrated in Figures 35.1 and 35.2). In other words, the same people spent their
breaks in the school yard; the same people stayed in the classroom; the same people sat
next to each other and worked together in group sessions during lessons.
Through their routine movements, the students connect their daily practices to the
physical place of Metropolitanskolen (or maybe better, in interaction with the physical
place). The movements/positions overlap different kinds of practices. As a brief example,
we can take a look at smoking. In Figure 35.1, the grey rectangles signify those who
smoke, the white rectangles those who do not smoke and the dotted rectangle signifies
a person who only smokes at parties. The sociogram illustrates that there is a group of
smokers in class B who hang out together (Olav, Mads, Philip, Max, Jakob), a group of
smokers in class A (Alexander, Ian, Malou ⫹ Malte and Doran) and a few more smokers
distributed across the space.
The students’ names are also plotted on the chart, which presents us with even more
information, namely the gender identity of the students. In general, boys move around
in proximity to other boys, and girls close to other girls (Malou and Adam are the
only exceptions). Although the sociograms present a static picture of something which
is inherently dynamic, they do give us an idea of patterns and regularities in the practices
of the two high school classes. From Figure 35.1, for instance, it is clear that there are
at least two groups of boys who move in proximity to each other, and who smoke. These
boys have more things in common. In fact, they perform a series of practices that taken
together can be analyzed as a style cluster.
A style cluster is defined in Quist (2005: 199) as a collection of signs that over the
course of time cluster together, i. e., they are performed in regular patterns by the mem-
bers of the community of practice. The notion of sign is defined broadly here, to include
body signs (gendered and racial), signs of school attitude, physical positioning in the
school area, preferences for music, clothing, and so on. It is argued that it is the regular-
ity of the clustering that makes the style clusters socially meaningful as part of a shared
repertoire of the community of practice.
Space does not allow a detailed presentation of the style clusters. Instead, we shall
focus on one linguistic element, a Copenhagen sociolinguistic variable that varies across
the two high-school classes as part of the style clusters: the affrication of t in onset
position. Brink and Lund (1975: 353⫺355) report that an affricated t in onset position
is characteristic of low Copenhagen speech in the entire period of their study (they base
their description of the Copenhagen sociolects on recordings from the Danish National
Radio Archive, which includes speakers who were born in the years 1840⫺1955). The
absence of affrication of t was a characteristic feature of speakers of high Copenhagen
born in the nineteenth century; for example the number to ‘two’ was pronounced [dho1]
(1 marks the Danish stød). This complete absence of affrication disappears from Copen-
hagen speech at the beginning of the twentieth century, but affrication of t remains a
sociolinguistic variable in that long/strong affrication is associated with low Copenhagen
and short/weak affrication with high Copenhagen.
Parallel to the findings of Brink and Lund, Fisher-Jørgensen reports from an acoustic
investigation that young Copenhagen speakers aspirate the unvoiced stop consonants
/p/, /t/ and /k/ for longer than do older speakers, namely between 90 and 100 milli-
seconds, compared to the older speakers’ approximately 70 milliseconds (Fisher-
Jørgensen 1980; Fischer-Jørgensen/Hutters 1981: 79). Since low Copenhagen in general
has been associated with young and modern speech (Brink and Lund 1974), it is of no
surprise that Fisher-Jørgensen reports that younger Copenhageners pronounce a longer
t than do older Copenhageners. (She did not look at differences in socioeconomic back-
ground.)
If we were to follow a traditional sociolinguistic model, in line with Brink and Lund’s
description of the two Copenhagen sociolects, we would predict the affrication of t to
distribute in accordance with the socioeconomic backgrounds of (the parents of) the
students at Metropolitanskolen. Alternatively, if we were to follow the implicit language
change predictions in Fisher-Jørgensen’s study, we would expect no significant variation
in the affrication of t at all, since the students in the two classes belong to the same age
group (they are between 15 and 16 years old). However, an analysis of word initial t
among the students at Metropolitanskolen shows that neither of the two predictions
holds. There is systematic variation in the affrication of t, but the distribution correlates
with neither socioeconomic background nor, obviously, age.
Tab. 35.3: Duration of t-affrication in four groups according to gender and ethnic background
Group Number of tokens Average F p-value
Boys ⫺ Danish 135 0.109 9.910 0.0001
Girls ⫺ other 103 0.099
Girls ⫺ Danish 111 0.098
Boys ⫺ other 53 0.092
The ethnographic study and an explorative study of the recorded data indicated that
the strong/long t was mostly used by some of the “white” boys, those called danskerne
‘the Danes’ in this community of practice. So the duration of the affrication of word
initial t was measured for 52 speakers. All in all, 402 tokens were measured using the
PRAAT software; that is approximately eight tokens per person. An analysis of variance
of the duration of the ts indicated that there was a statistically significant difference,
overall, between the four groups: boys with Danish ethnic backgrounds, girls with
Danish ethnic backgrounds, boys with an ethnic background other than Danish, and
girls with an ethnic background other than Danish. The results are shown in Table
35.3. Boys with Danish ethnic backgrounds sustained their affricated ts the longest (109
milliseconds on average), while boys with a different ethnic background had the shortest
affrications (92 milliseconds on average).
Post hoc tests showed that boys with Danish ethnic backgrounds had longer lasting
affrications than did all other groups (all p ⫽ 0.0001). The difference between the two
groups of girls was not significant, while the boys with a non-Danish ethnic background
had significantly shorter t-affrications than did the girls overall. The ts were measured
in two contexts: interviews and group sessions. The group pattern of variation was the
same in both situations.
The variation in t-affrication does not correspond to the socioeconomic backgrounds
of the parents (categorized according to the amount of education as shown in Table
35.1). The variable correlates in this community of practice first and foremost with gen-
der and ethnicity (Quist 2005: 222⫺225). Interestingly, however, a closer look at the
boys with Danish ethnic backgrounds reveals that the boys who perform style cluster 1
are the ones who use the longest ts.
Style cluster 1 is primarily performed by boys with white skin; i. e., those who are
recognized as “Danes”. They show little interest in official school activities (they rarely
do their homework and are relatively passive during lessons). They use their personal
laptops primarily for games, music and communication (e-mail, chat and messaging).
On the computer screens they typically display images of half-naked women (e.g., pin-
ups). They also use their computers to search for and share music, mostly hip-hop and
rock music. These boys smoke cigarettes, so they go to the outdoor smoking areas during
the breaks, and they leave the school premises during lunchtime. They drink alcohol and
talk about alcohol at school. The clothes they wear are a sort of hip-hop style with baggy
jeans and large T-shirts. As for the linguistic resources analyzed, these boys had the
longest affrication of word initial t, they used more slang and more swear words than
did the others, and they never used multi-ethnolect, except in instances of parody. (For
details about the specific style features, see Quist 2005: chapters 9 to 14.)
A style cluster should not be confused with a group of individuals (“group” in the
sense used in theory of social identity; Hogg and Abrams 1998), but rather understood
Fig. 35.2: Style clusters and the twelve boys with the longest t-affrications
as a collection of signs and practices that some individuals perform more than others.
Members of a group may perform resources from different clusters. In Figure 35.2, the
seven style clusters that were identified at Metropolitanskolen are illustrated with a circle
around their prime performers. Style cluster 1 is illustrated with a solid line, indicating
that Philip, Max, Mads, Jakob, Olav, Alexander and Ian are the core performers of this
cluster. The twelve boys who have the longest t-affrications in this community of practice
are marked in gray.
From Figure 35.2, we see that the style cluster 1 performers are all also users of long
t-affrication. Malou (female) hangs out with Alexander and Ian, and sometimes with
Adam, Vibeke and Otella. She does not perform all practices that characterize style
cluster 1; e.g., she wears different clothes to the boys, she displays other types of images
on her laptop, but she smokes, and she exhibits a reluctant attitude to school, just like
Alexander and Ian. That is why she is portrayed on the line, a little inside and a little
outside of the solid circle. Malou exemplifies the fact that some students do not perform
all practices of a style cluster; that is, it is not possible to situate her as a core performer
of a cluster.
Figure 35.2 also shows that there are boys who do not perform all elements of style
cluster 1: but who still use long affrication of t, namely Malte, Johan, Adam, Nikolaj
and Kristoffer. Some of them perform other clusters (Nikolaj, style cluster 3; Johan and
Malte, style cluster 2), and Adam and Kristoffer perform practices that do not make up
a systematic pattern. These exceptions and the foreshortened exposé of the style clusters
may leave us with the feeling that there is little of coherence going on as far as sociolin-
guistic variation is concerned. The methods of analysis employed in the study do not
provide a clear-cut coherent and complete picture of language use. The study of the
community of practice at Metropolitanskolen gives us something else: it gives us insight

into patterns and regularities of performance by Copenhagen speakers in daily practice.
We find regularities and exceptions to the regularities. The variation of t in connection
with the style clusters shows us that the variation forms part of the social and linguistic
landscape in a much more complex way than a more traditional approach to the Copen-
hagen speech community is able to capture. In the context of this article, it is especially
important to stress that the heterogeneity of speakers in late-modern Copenhagen does
not result in complete muddled variation. We do find regularities in linguistic variation
and the performance of practices. The linguistic variation is connected to stylistic prac-
tices, and practices connect the speakers to the locus of Metropolitanskolen.
4. Body and language - deconstructing the authentic speaker

We now turn to the last of the three pairs of connections treated in this article, namely
the connection that is typically made between a body and a language (or a body and a
dialect/variety). It is an implicit assumption of traditional dialectology and sociolinguis-
tics that “one body holds one authentic language”. This assumption is parallel to the
ideas (or ideologies, see Bucholtz 2003) of the authentic speaker and authentic speech, as
discussed and problematized in sociolinguistics in recent years (by, for instance, Eckert
2003; Bucholtz 2003; and Coupland 2003). The sociolinguistic search for authentic speak-
ers and authentic speech is in general parallel to the connections made between language,
body and place. Authentic speakers are considered by the researcher to be such precisely
because they belong to a specific geographic place. The same holds for authentic speech.
Eckert (2003: 392) puts it this way:
Authenticity is constructed in relation to particular locations such as the traditional peasant

in an isolated community (Holmquist 1985), the street kid in the inner city (Labov 1972[b]),
and the burned-out burnout in a Midwestern high school (Eckert 2000). Locally located and
oriented, the Authentic Speaker produces linguistic output that emerges naturally in and
from that location.
Bucholtz argues that the idea of authentic speech and authentic speakers is reproduced
in an ideology which she describes in terms of the linguist as an obstacle to authenticity:
“even if we find authentic speakers, they may not produce authentic speech in our pres-
ence” (2003: 406). Labov’s notion of the observer’s paradox (Labov 1972a) reflects this
ideology. The paradox is that the researcher should aim at “capturing” speech as it is
used without the presence of the researcher, the assumption being that the speaker pos-
sesses an authentic way of speaking, the collection of which ⫺ by way of mere pres-
ence ⫺ can be hindered by the researcher. To Labov, the most authentic speech is the
vernacular in its most casual form. The vernacular can be “captured” in a “sociolinguistic
interview” or in “the field” at local locations, where people are engaged in leisure time
activities:
As we enter the city we look for preadolescent and adolescent peer groups engaged in sports
or hanging-out; we encounter family groups at tea or after dinner; we join old men at bowls;
in pubs; or sitting at pensioner’s benches (Labov 1972b: 256).
Labov clearly preferred non-institutionalized settings as his research ground, i. e., he

would try to avoid work places and schools for instance. Bucholtz calls such favoring
of quotidian language and settings an ideology of “linguistic mundaneness” (Bucholtz
2003: 405). Although sociolinguistics represents an important repudiation of linguistics’
taking of introspection and context-free sentences as the only evidence of language, there
has been a tendency to restrict the study of language use to “a narrow subset of all
language use” (Bucholtz 2003: 406). In contrast to the speakers in Labov’s study of
language in the inner city (Labov 1972b), young people in Copenhagen do not hang out
together much outside of institutions. A young Copenhagener spends most of his or her
time by far in school, recreational classes or at institutionalized leisure time activities in
venues such as sports clubs and youth clubs. Therefore, it would represent a crude trun-
cation of the reality of these youngsters to restrict a study of their speech to times in
which they are not in an institutionally organized setting. Arguably, a lunch break at
Metropolitanskolen is just as casual and relaxed as the types of settings Labov refers to
in the quotation above.
The vernacular in its most casual and unconscious form is thought to be the most
authentic representation of a person’s language. If we take the observed linguistic prac-
tices at Metropolitanskolen as our case in point, we will see that it is difficult, if not
impossible, to decide where and when in the flow of language use the most authentic
representation is found. The students in the two classes constantly make use of a broad
repertoire of languages and varieties; they cite, imitate, make parodies, perform (in Bau-
man’s [1986] sense of the word), sing, do language crossing (Rampton 1995) ⫺ and they
do all of this much more than they do not.
Let us look at an extract from a conversation between three girls at Metropolitansko-
len. The extract is taken from self-recordings done by Catrine, a girl with a Danish ethnic
background, who is a typical performer of style cluster 6 (Quist 2005: 198⫺200). She
has, as usual, her laptop on. She is playing music so loudly on it that it almost drowns
out the music played on the other computers in the room. To Catrine’s right is Helena,
who also has her computer on. Both of them are searching the Internet as they talk to
each other. Helena is looking for a specific mp3 file of a Turkish song, and she is trying
to get Catrine involved in the search (lines 6, 22, 25 and 27). But Catrine does not want
to help Helena. She is busy looking for sites that will inspire her in her search for a new
instant messaging alias. Catrine is tired of her existing name, which is a compound of
Catrine and the Muslim name Aisha: Caisha. Right behind Catrine and Helena is Amina.
She is looking at Catrine’s computer screen trying to help her find a new alias. [A modi-
fied CA convention is used for this transcription: (.) micro pause; (2) pause two seconds
long; _ syllable emphasis; Capital letters: high volume; ºtxtº low volume; <txt> slow
speech; >txt< fast speech; : the sound is prolonged; [txt…] overlap; ((txt)) comments
inserted by researcher; xxx incomprehensible speech.]
1 Cat: jeg har fået at vide at jeg skal skifte navn (.) fordi det her er for
somebody told me that I should change my name (.) because this one is too
2 Ami: hvad hedder du
what’s your name
3 Cat: Caisha
4 Ami: okay
5 Cat: det er lidt for: (.) hvad skal jeg hed:de (.) help me.
it’s a bit too: (.) what shall I ca:ll myself (.) help me
6 Hel: prøv lige og send den der

please send this one
7 Cat: what’s my name say my name you bitch
what’s my name say my name you bitch
8 (2)
9 Cat: ºCai:shaº (.) ej men hvad skal jeg he:dde.
ºCai:shaº (.) no but what shall I ca:ll myself
10 Ami: du kan også godt hedde (.) Caisha.
you can just as well call yourself (.) Caisha
11 Cat: (>prøv lige og se< ) fandt vi inde i den der
(>take a look<) we found inside here ((on a web page))
12 (2)
13 Ami: ohh jah Caisha
ohh yeah Caisha
14 ((Catrine sings along with the music)) (7)
15 Cat: xxx hej hjælp mig med mit navn (0.3) de cooleste og sejeste er (lige) taget.
xxx hey help me with my name (0.3) the coolest and toughest ones have just been
taken.
16 Ami: nej du kan kun xxx
no you can only xxx
17 Cat: >hvad skal jeg hedde<
>what shall I call myself<
18 ((they search the Internet for names)) (7)
19 Hel: xxx ((sounds like a suggestion for a name))
20 Cat: det er lidt krukket ikke.
it’s a bit affected isn’t it
((about 15 seconds omitted))
21 Cat: give me a name:
give me a name:
22 Hel: gå ind i den der xxx [jeg kan ikke finde den ]
enter that one xxx [I can’t find it ]
23 Cat: [NE:J JEG GIDER IKKE ]
[NO I WON’T]
24 Cat: men ellers så kald (0.5) ved du hvad [det det det her kalder] det kalder Maja mig
but otherwise you could (0.5) you know what [this name] Maja calls me this
25 Hel: [okay men så send den til mig så går jeg xxx]
[okay then send it to me xxx]
26 Ami: ej helt ærlig lad være
oh no honestly don’t
27 Hel: hallo jeg går ind og finder et eller andet o [kay]
hey I enter and find something o [kay]
28 Ami: [eller] gå ind og åbn den der hjemmeside et
sted ligesom xxx og få et nyt navn
[or] enter and open that homepage a place
like xxx get a new name
29 Cat: ne:j det er ikke noget med det hun har kaldt mig det hele tiden (.) det hedder jeg i
hendes telefonbog (.)
no: it’s not about that she has called me that all the time (.) she has that name in
her phone book (.)
30 bellahøjmafia
This extract exemplifies three points that are important in the context of this article.
Firstly, as mentioned in the section on language and place, the laptops play a central
role in this community of practice, just as communication technologies do in late modern

societies in general. The conversation between Catrine, Amina and Helena is an example
of how the laptops are integrated into their communicative practices. The extract repre-
sents a typical way for students to spend their breaks between lessons (Quist 2005: 180⫺
183) ⫺ their activities and their conversational topics are centered on the computers (for
more on this, see Quist 2005, chapter 15, 16). Catrine and Helena are simultaneously
conversing with each other, and with Amina, as they search the Internet for a new alias
and the Turkish music file. Both of them ask for help and thereby they include others
around them in their ongoing activities on the computers. To conduct a complete analy-
sis of the role of the computers in this conversation, we need video recordings or other
types of data that indicate what the participants are doing on the computers as they
speak. We do not have such data in the current study. However, the audio recording
does lend much support to the point that is important to us here, namely that computers
as a means of communication form an integral part of the speakers’ communicative
practices.
The second important point that should be emphasized here was also addressed in
the section on language and place: speaker heterogeneity in terms of linguistic and ethnic
backgrounds. Catrine’s parents are of Danish ethnic descent; Amina has a Danish
mother and a Moroccan father; and Helena has a Greek father and a Danish mother.
Although Catrine is blond, and by appearance would not be associated with immigrants,
she uses an immigrant speech style, or multi-ethnolect, as part of her linguistic repertoire.
For instance, in lines 29⫺30 she changes intonation into an unmistakable multi-ethnolec-
tal pronunciation (Quist 2000, 2008). She does this unremarkably, without breaking the
flow of speech. There is nothing ironic about it, and no signs to signal that she is not
“speaking as herself ”. This type of shift is very common in Catrine’s speech, and cannot
be understood as crossing in the sense that it is used “by people who are not accepted
members of the group associated with the second language they employ” (Rampton
1995: 280). Multi-ethnolect is part of Catrine’s own language. There is thus, in the case
of Catrine (and many others at Metropolitanskolen), no given one-to-one correspondence
between the particular speaker category (Danish, blond) and the language used. This is
linked to the third and last important point, which is the problem of extracting “authen-
tic speech” and the (dis)connection of body and language.
Catrine’s speech, from line 1 to line 30: is constantly changing, using different voice
qualities, different languages and language varieties. Although the situation is casual and
relaxed ⫺ and the event typical ⫺ it is not possible to judge when Catrine is speaking
authentically as “herself”. She sings (line 14), speaks loudly, even shouts (line 23) and
whispers (line 9); in lines 5, 7 and 21 she switches from Danish into English (italicized
in the gloss); and in lines 29⫺30 she uses a multi-ethnolectal pronunciation. In line 5:
she says with an almost importunate voice “what shall I call myself”, as if she was
begging the others for vital help. The begging is underlined by the proceeding switch
into English, “help me”, which she enunciates in such a way as to sound as if she were
crying. Nobody thinks she is crying of course. The utterance is produced with a kind of
ironic distance, as if it was a direct quote from an American soap or mainstream Holly-
wood movie. The other two shifts into English (lines 7 and 21) also appear in the form
of imitation or quotation, but they are enunciated very differently. “What’s my name
say my name you bitch” is said with a rhythm and intonation suggesting Catrine is
copying a line from a rap song. There is something insistent, even chant-like, about this
utterance that makes it very different from “help me” in Catrine’s previous turn, so it
cannot be understood as a continuation of the former (English) voice. Catrine’s hip-hop
voice in line 7 resembles the type of language used in verbal hip-hop battling (Bejder
and Holt 2005: 6⫺7). In hip-hop, it is common for the rapper to call on others to say
his (because it is typically a male) name as a way to show respect. Catrine is a big fan
of the rapper TuPac. She writes his name everywhere and she has pictures of him on her
laptop screen. In a rap song, TuPac sings, for example, “Scream my name / cause baby
it’s delicious / got a weak spot for pretty bitches”; “What’s my motherfucking name
nigga?”. These are examples of requests to say (or “scream”) the name of the rapper
and the use of the invective “bitch”. Catrine’s “what’s my name say my name you bitch”
appears in line 5 after she has asked her friends for help to find a new name. Helena
does not take up this request. Instead, she keeps on doing her own thing, searching for
music on her computer, and asking Catrine in line 6 to “send this one” (“this one” being
a music file). Then, as if Catrine is offended by Helena’s disregard, she answers Helena
in the voice of a rapper, just as a rapper would answer an attack in a verbal battle. In
this way, Catrine simultaneously restates her request for help to find a name and ignores
Helena’s request.
Space does not allow a detailed analysis of every switch in language and enunciation
in this conversation. The point to be stressed here ⫺ which the switches into English in
lines 5 and 7 demonstrate ⫺ is that the uses of different voices and languages are not
“empty” playing or fooling, around with language without a purpose. They are not
superficial performances that cover Catrine’s “own”, “authentic” language. The many
different voices of Catrine are part of her linguistic repertoire, which she uses with prag-
matic and interactional intents related to the activity she is engaged in and the goals she
wishes to pursue. What Catrine does in this extract is not uncommon in the community
of practice at Metropolitanskolen. In the words of Jørgensen (2004), she is doing languag-
ing, i. e., she is a languager: “speakers employ whatever linguistic features are at their
disposal” to achieve their communicative goals as best they can. Robert Le Page made
a parallel argument in a discussion with Labov about the vernacular (Le Page 1980;
Labov 1980) ⫺ his words shall be the last of this section:
[e]ach individual’s competence subsumes partial knowledge of many socially-marked sys-

tems, and each individual’s performance reflects choice among those systems, constrained
by the social and psychological factors operating upon him at any given moment
(Le Page 1980: 336).
5. Conclusion
The goal of this article was to examine and problematize the often taken-for-granted ties
between language and place, place and body, and body and language. The community
of practice at Metropolitanskolen in Copenhagen makes the case in point by demonstrat-
ing the difficulty of maintaining fixed ties between language, body and place. These ties
are more or less dissolved in the late modern city, where mobility, new communication
technologies and heterogeneity in terms of speaker backgrounds reorganize communica-
tive spaces and practices. Treating a place like Copenhagen as having one language or
two sociolects would be a considerable oversimplification. It would treat speakers as
incarnating only one language or dialect, even though what speakers do in real daily life
is to constantly employ a broad repertoire of linguistic codes.
We saw in the section on body and place that the students at Metropolitanskolen
occupy the physical location in regular patterns linked to their practices and social styles.
The boys who stay in the courtyard during breaks, who sit next to each other at the
back of the classroom during lessons, and who leave the school premises at lunchtime
also share a series of other practices that in the course of daily repetition cluster together
in a style cluster. Characteristic of the speech of these boys is, among other things, the
long affrication of t in onset position. The long affrication of t in earlier studies was
found to correlate with working-class Copenhagen speech, i. e., the low Copenhagen
sociolect. This is not the case at Metropolitanskolen (the social class of the parents does
not seem to matter). Instead, we find that the long affricated t is used in stylistic practices
as a linguistic resource that combines with “white” masculinity and an apparent anti-
school attitude.
In the section on language and body, we saw how problematic it is to maintain a
“one body ⫺ one language” ideology in the community of practice at Metropolitansko-
len. Catrine and her friends mix all kinds of linguistic resources in their communicative
activities. Just as with the boys who use longer t-affrications than everybody else, Cat-
rine’s practices, including her use of multi-ethnolect and her fascination with North
American hip-hop, form part of a style cluster. When Catrine, for instance, is able to
successfully employ multi-ethnolect in a conversation, it is because she ⫺ in the course
of stylistic practice ⫺ has created a position where multi-ethnolect becomes accepted as
part of her language. Thus, mixing and switching do not happen at random, but are
parts of social practices in which it is possible to act against expectations (expectations
like “a blond Danish-looking girl does not use multi-ethnolect”; see Quist and Jørgensen
[2007] for a discussion of who is and who is not able to use multi-ethnolect as part of
his or her language.).
The intention of this article was not to show that geographical place, the body and
language (language defined as a linguistic system) do not matter; they do. But nonethe-
less, they exist as social constructs with complex and dynamic connections, not as given
entities with fixed ties and social meanings. If we wish to understand why they matter
and how they work together, we need operationalizable notions that grasp the dynamism
and the processual connections between them. In this article, I have suggested that style,
practice and community of practice constitute such notions.
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Pia Quist, Copenhagen (Denmark)

36. A study on areal diffusion 649
36. A study on areal diusion

1. Dynamic interpretation of static maps
2. The case studies
3. Case 1: Short vowel lowering
4. A diffusion model
5. Case 2: Long vowel raising
6. Language-internal constraints and the diffusion of innovations
7. Variability
8. Isoglosses ⫺ the limits of diffusion
9. Regions ⫺ the outcome of diffusion
10. References
1. Dynamic interpretation o static maps

This study examines the areal diffusion of linguistic features using examples from Swiss
German. The Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz (SDS; Hotzenköcherle et al. 1962⫺
2003) provides the material basis. Traditional linguistic maps are static, usually atomistic
snapshots of the geography of a single “caractère dialectal” (Meyer 1875: 295). In con-
trast, diffusion describes a dynamic process across time and space in which an increasing
number of speakers add a linguistic feature to their repertoire. The distribution of a
feature on a linguistic map is the frozen geographic reflex of a shift in linguistic behav-
ior ⫺ a change in language.
Studying the diffusion of linguistic features on the basis of static maps requires a
theory of language change in order to bridge “the chasm between the study of language
in time and the study of language in space” (Ogura 1990: 4, 15). Speakers with their
attendant psychological, social and linguistic preconditions, linguistic features, time, and
space must all be brought together into a systematic relationship capable of “explaining”
the spatial patterns discovered, that is, able to suggest reasons for the patterns being as
they are.
One such theory was the concept of “radiation” (Strahlung), which long dominated
the dialect-geographical discussion (Bach 1969: §§ 79, 95⫺101). It focused on “active”
innovators, rather than “passive” adopters. The opposition “active” vs. “passive” distin-
guishes between the emergence of an innovation and its diffusion. Following Labov (e.g.,
1972: 277), sociolinguistic theories equate the emergence of a language change with its
diffusion: emergence describes a process in which a deviation from former regular usage
becomes the common property of a group. Only when several speakers exhibit the same
innovation, that is, when it “diffuses” to others, does it become a linguistic fact and
evidence of language change. In this sense, one can agree with Labov. Nevertheless, the
equation is dissatisfying. The initial transfer of a new linguistic fact into the linguistic
repertoire of a group is the most problematic phase of any change, and it requires an
extra intellectual effort to think it through at all (Keller 1994). The concepts of “active
linguistic landscape” and “radiation center” attempt to differentiate this first phase from
a phase of diffusion, during which the speakers of related lects adopt an innovation
already established elsewhere as a linguistic fact. Although this process is not “trivial”,
as Lüdtke (1980: 9) would have it, it appears conceivable in terms of familiar concepts
like imitation and adaptation (Auer and Hinskens 2005; Haas 1998: 844⫺845).
Radiation theory was based on rudimentary social psychological concepts and at-
tempted to derive dialect-geographical maps directly from those preferred (thanks to
their origin) usages which accrue around new linguistic forms. Sociolinguistics captured
this “added value” with the dazzling catch-all category of prestige.
As early as the 1920s, Walther Mitzka counterposed the concept of radiation with
that of alignment (Anschluss). He insisted that the issue was less the diffusion of an
innovation than the speakers’ adoption or rejection of an innovation (1952: 164). This
touched on a central aspect of the problem: in any linguistic process, the only agent is the
speaker, and every action captured on linguistic maps as the diffusion of an innovation is
enacted by speakers who have adopted that innovation, not those who had already
integrated it into their repertoire.
What is meant by the “diffusion of an innovation” and, even more so, what might
be counted as material for a case study of diffusion, cannot be decided independently of
theoretical considerations. In the following, maps of a series of linguistic changes are
interpreted as static reflexes of dynamic diffusion processes based on Haas’s (1978)
theory of language change (see Domaschnev, Stirnickaja and Najditsch 1980; Mattheier
1984; Moulton 1980; Keller 1982; Reed 1982; Reiffenstein 1986; Wiesinger 1984 for criti-
cal responses to Haas).
2. The case studies

Two wide-ranging qualitative reconfigurations of the Middle High German (MHG)
vowel system, seen as the historical precursor to the Swiss German vowel systems, can
serve as examples for the diffusion of linguistic innovations. The presentation is confined
to spontaneous lowering and raising, that is, to changes in vowel height. Rounded front
vowels generally behave in the same as their unrounded analogues and are not mapped
here.
Tab. 36.1: The Middle High German vowel system. Vowel series of equal tongue height are labeled
(a)⫺(e). Examples and map numbers are taken from SDS vol. 1.a
short long
(a) ı̂ iu û
Eis 105 Mäuse 107 Maus 106
(b) i ü u
Schlitten 48 Füchse 52 “Chuchi” 50
(c) e ö o
Bett 15 “Götti” 47 “Gotte” 41
(d) ë ê œ ô
Speck 21 Schnee 95 “Chööl” 101 Brot 99
(e) ä a æ â
Wespe 19 Achse 11 “strääle” 73 Abend 61
a
See Haas (1978: 107⫺113) for a justification of the system. The assumption of long open mid-
vowels is philologically justified and supported by the observation that the way from diphthongs
(e.g., WGerm. *ai, *au) to closed monophthongs (e.g., OHG/MHG ê, ô) is often via long open
vowels (Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972: 225).
The phonemic system taken is that of classical structuralist phonology, as applied to

Swiss German by W. G. Moulton (1960) and others. The vowel system of any Swiss
German dialect can be related to the system shown in Table 36.1. In historical terms, it
can be postulated that the vowel system of the current dialects have evolved from this
system via language change. The vertical relations can essentially be derived from two
sound shift complexes: (1) a “chain” of short vowel lowering; (2) a “chain” of long
vowel raising.
3. Case 1: Short vowel lowering
3.1. Presentation
If the short vowel system of the Swiss German local dialects is set in relation to the
postulated Middle High German system, it becomes clear that, compared to Middle
High German, many dialects exhibit lowered short vowels. The number of lowered short
vowels in each dialect declines from west to east: western dialects have many lowerings,
eastern ones none.
Map 36.1 shows three regions of lowering, each characterized by a specific combina-
tion of spontaneous vowel lowerings. The geographic constellation of the various types
of lowering reveals a typical “wave formation” (Wellenbild ): the region with the most
changes of a particular kind (III) borders on a region with fewer changes (II) which in
turn borders on the region with the fewest (I). The easternmost dialects are not lowered
at all. The structure of the geographic neighborhood thus reflects a wavelike spread
of innovations.
The regions of lowering are geographically coherent. This finding has to be interpreted
as evidence that the individual dialects have not undergone the various innovations inde-
pendently of one another. Structuralist dialectology explains the development of each
local dialect on the basis of the conditions prevailing in each “closed” system; but this
does not help us understand how coherent regions with identical developments can arise.
For this we must make reference to adoption, accommodation, alignment ⫺ in short
with the diffusion of an innovation.
It is of secondary importance for this study which “sociogeographical” path the diffu-
sion takes; whether it progresses from location to neighboring location (contagion diffu-
sion, Britain 2004: 623) or from one larger population center to the next (parachutage
linguistique, Strahlung, Bach 1969: § 98), and there from higher social classes down to
lower ones (hierarchical path, Britain 2004: 622⫺627) or up from below (Baumgartner
1940: 44⫺48). The parachutage ‘air drop’ pattern is presumably the norm in mobile
societies, but it does not preclude simple areal spread (Herrgen 2005: 299). Usually both
modes eventually lead to homogenous regions. They are therefore less easy to identify
in atlases of traditional and stable dialects than Britain (2004: 623) would have us expect.
The true complexity of the processes first becomes apparent in sociolinguistic investiga-
tions; Siebenhaar (2000) is a good example for the region under study.
The size of the region in which a particular lowering has occurred can be interpreted
as a reflection of the age of the change. From this standpoint, lowering stage 1 (cf. Map
36.1) can be seen as the oldest, 3b as the most recent, act in the overarching process.
Map 36.1: Short vowel lowering in Swiss German

The geographical overlap of all of the lowerings in Zone III can be viewed as evidence
that all of the lowerings here are old; the point of origin of the change complex can thus
be located in Zone III ⫺ the shift must have “arisen” here.
Early Generative Grammar saw the adoption of a change by other speakers as the
root of its generalization; the dialect with the strictest implementation was therefore
believed to be the dialect which underwent the shift last and hence in its most thoroughly
generalized form (that would be III here). This interpretation overlooks the fact that
language is also handed on within the original dialect.
The internal (linguistic) structure of the change complex is of special interest. The
lowerings do not simply affect ever more vowels at random; rather they proceed in a
clear order. First, the most open vowel, Gmc /ë/, is lowered, then follow the mid vowels,
finally the close vowels (the uppermost rows in Table 36.1); within each series the front
vowels shift before back vowels. Thus, in consecutive stages, ever more neighboring
vowels in the system seem to be “affected” by the same change: a lowering by one degree
of openness. This internal and implicative coherence of the innovations fills the until now
purely quantitatively defined neighborhood structure with linguistic content. The wave
form proves itself to be a “Baileyan” wave, distinct from older implication models in
that it only admits features that belong together within the system into an implication
scheme (Bailey 1973: 65⫺109).
The lowering of short vowels conforms to one of the often demonstrated “natural”
tendencies of change (Labov 1994: 116). This tendency may explain the successful diffu-
sion of the change, but it also renders the similarity between neighboring lowering dia-
lects as natural.
3.2. Some reinements
Anton Pfalz observed that language shift affects all vowels of the same height (in the
same “row” of the vowel quadrilateral) in the same manner: vowels shift in series (Rei-
henschritten; 1983a [1918]: 50). In a system of phonological parameters this can be ex-
pressed as the change in a single parameter, viz. tongue height. Short vowels from the
same Middle High German series must therefore continue to form a series after a
lowering. According to Weinreich, Labov and Herzog, this is a practically universal
condition of sound change (1968: 175).
Lowering 1 eliminates MHG ë by merging it with MHG ä; the chain-shift principle
plays no role for this isolated phoneme. For the vowels of series (c) (MHG e…) and (b)
(MHG i…) in Table 36.1, this principle applies without restriction in Zone III: after
lowering, both series once again each form a series of vowels of equal height.
But this principle is not a “law”. The dialects of Zone II are defined precisely by the
fact that there has been no chain shift in vowel series (c). In the local dialects of Zone
II, the front vowel MHG e has been lowered to /e/, while the back vowel MHG o has
maintained the closed quality of /o/. If innovations diffuse in waves which progress from
phoneme to “neighboring” phoneme, then it can be expected that the change must begin
with one of the phonemes of a series, but only so as to then immediately affect the next
one. In light of the chain-shift principle, it is unexpected that change can manifestly
freeze in a “pre-progressive” state for an extended period of time.
This finding is evidence for the assumption that lowering first affects the front vowels
and then the back ones, which can in turn be traced back to differing articulatory
contexts (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 175). The temporal precedence of front-
vowel lowering (Table 36.1, 36.2a) over back-vowel lowering (2b) is reflected in its larger
area of diffusion, which of course includes all of Zone III. But that the generalization of
the process to the back vowels is the “aspirational” norm is evident in the fact that Zone
III, with both lowerings (2a and 2b) is far larger than Zone II with just one lowering.
A wave model that takes adequate account of the chain-shift theory also needs to
specify that lowerings in series (b) can only occur when all of the vowels of series (c)
have been lowered. This assumption is to a large extent confirmed by the distribution
map. This is remarkable, since the lowering of (for example) all front vowels yet only
front vowels would not lead to the collapse of any phonemic distinctions.
The vertical dash symbols on Map 36.1 stand for a conditioned lowering of MHG e
before r (⫹C) (based on contrastive data from SDS vol. 1, Map 18 “hert”). They are
found in a contiguous region to the east of Zone II. In terms of the proposed theory of
diffusion, the conditioned lowering could be interpreted as a precursor to the spontane-
ous lowering of (2a), thus explaining its territorial distribution: the conditioned develop-
ment is older than the spontaneous one and has therefore attained a greater degree
of spread.
4. A diusion model
The vowel-lowering map can be interpreted as a reflection of the manner in which inno-
vations diffuse through the linguistic landscape. It lends itself to the following conclu-
sions:
1. Innovations spread through space from speaker to speaker, and hence from dialect
to dialect (extensive diffusion).
2. This process of extensive diffusion requires time, during which the innovation is also
transmitted to new speakers within the group of innovators-in-progress.
3. During extensive diffusion, the innovation process can encroach upon ever more mor-
phemes containing the same original vowel and also become generalized to similar
vowels (intensive diffusion). This is also to be expected in intergenerational transmis-
sion within the group.
4. Intensive diffusion is subject to the structural parameters of a language; the colloquial
paraphrase of “encroaching on neighboring phonemes” refers to this process, which
a dynamic theory of phonological naturalness must be able to explain.
These interconnections can be rendered schematically as in Figures 36.1 and 36.2. The
idealized linguistic map displays the diffusion of an innovation at a particular time (here
t3). The difference in the age of the innovations that belong together (A, B, C….) is
reflected geographically in the varying size of the areas over which they have diffused
by t3.
The idealized map neglects virtually all social and extralinguistic factors. It takes no
account of the fact that different innovations can diffuse at different rates and hence
occupy territories of differing size precisely because of these factors. It also essentially
Fig. 36.1: Diffusion of an innovation (a sound change) across time and space; α⫺η… represent
local dialects
Fig. 36.2: An idealized linguistic map: A, B, C symbolize an increasing number of contexts in which
the change occurs, or an increasing number of words containing the original phoneme
affected by the change; I, II, III represent regions in which the local dialects exhibit the
same stage of change
fails to capture the fact that all real processes of diffusion come to a halt (at least
temporarily). This is particularly problematic for sound change that must be seen as
incomplete from a language-internal/theoretical perspective, such as the chain shift in
Zone II. An idealized map is even less suitable for predicting either the point in the
landscape at which a change will be discontinued or the reason (Siebenhaar 2000: 62⫺
64, 241 is informative about the current situation).
It should thus be self-evident that the idealized map and real diffusion correspond
only in principle. A real linguistic map supports the theoretical assumptions about the
diffusion of innovations when it confirms the predictions of the idealized map. This is
the case when the neighborhood relations between the real regions of innovation reflect
the implicational relations between the postulated stages of innovation:
Geographical reflection: Zone III | Zone II | Zone I

Stages of innovation ABC AB A
In contrast, the geographical reflection of the diffusion process would be disrupted and
in need of explanation if a neighborhood relation III | I | II were found. This appears to
be the situation between UW and LU on Map 36.1. The dialect boundary between these
two is one of the most robust in German-speaking Switzerland; the innovation in UW
must be expected to come from the east.
What we have in the west is not a disruption of the implications but a “compression”
of the regions of lowering. Here, Zone III abuts directly on the French⫺German border
and Zones II, I and Ø are all absent (cf. the schematic depiction in Figure 36.3). This
geographical pattern is compatible with the diffusion model. A language boundary repre-
sents a major hurdle for the diffusion of a sound change. Because the lowering cannot
diffuse across the language boundary, over the course of time several stages of lowering
pile up on top of one another, so to speak, and their isoglosses converge at the language
boundary. It is important to note that the implicational relations between the individual
stages are in principle not disturbed by the pileup of isoglosses.
This explanation can also be applied to other multistage changes, e.g., the second
Germanic sound shift. Here too, the regions characterized by the most thoroughgoing
change lie on the alpine language boundary. It has often been doubted that such a
successful chain shift could have spread from the most remote alpine valleys. But of
course the process need not have arisen at the very edge of the most intensively affected
Fig. 36.3: Pileup of isoglosses from related stages of change at a robust linguistic boundary
zone ⫺ the lowering discussed above did not begin at the language boundary but at the
center of what is now Zone III.
In summary, it can be said that the linguistic map of the actual lowering process is
highly congruent with the predictions of the idealized map. This can be taken as an
indication that the theory of diffusion sketched here may not be all that far from the
truth. But it is of course an informal and incomplete theory. Whilst no attempt is made
in the following to amend its informality, its incompleteness does need to be addressed.
The theory postulates a close relationship between extensive (i. e., relative to the
speaker and space) and intensive (relative to the language system) diffusion. Following
Mitzka’s suggestion, the speakers themselves, as actors in the process who adopt or reject
an innovation, have to be considered here. Sociolinguistic constructs such as acts of
identity or the evaluation of innovations shape the extensive aspect of diffusion.
But the speaker is equally important in the explanation of the intensive aspect of
diffusion. The adoption of an innovation is the learning of a new linguistic fact by a
speaker, diffusion the learning of a new linguistic fact by ever more speakers. The “gener-
alization” of a rule is a cognitive act, which plays an important role in learning. An
innovation does not necessarily have to be generalized in the course of its diffusion, but
generalization without transmission to new speakers is hardly conceivable: extensive and
intensive diffusion are thus inseparably linked.
Finally, positing so-called linguistic preconditions for sound change only makes sense
when speakers are seen as the locus of the process: “phonemic system”, “chain shift”,
“natural tendencies” etc. are viable concepts only when they are located in speakers’
minds (no matter what theoretical model is applied). Only via speakers’ minds can cogni-
tive objects like phonemic systems function as supportive, impeding, or formative factors
in the learning of linguistic innovations. How they so act is little known; but they do it
with such regularity that the consequences simply cannot be overlooked on dialectolo-
gists’ maps.
This diffusion model requires a more elaborate theory of language change than that
of the neogrammarians or the structuralists, according to whom a sound change affects
the entire vocabulary simultaneously and without exception, and variability is effectively
excluded. But even a dialectological countertheory, which incorporates two different
types of change, an exceptionless sound shift and substitution via word-for-word adop-
tion (Pfalz 1983b: 87) is not enough. Labov is a proponent of this division into two; his
neogrammarian change is, however, not exceptionless, but rather one which can affect
every relevant morpheme of the vocabulary simultaneously but at first variably (Labov
1994: 440⫺444). Wang and his school render sound substitution an absolute, the sole
path for a sound change (Ogura 1990). In opposition to this, a point of view proposed
by Bremer (1893: x⫺xvii; cf. Haas 1995: 334⫺335) is mooted here. According to this,
the different types of change can be understood as phases of a single process, which
begins with lexical diffusion. On this basis, an initially variable and restricted sound-
change rule can be abstracted. In the course of extensive diffusion it can generalize its
field of effect to include more and more relevant morphemes and spread to further
phonemes. The loss of variability can also proceed step by step. “Exceptionlessness” can
be posited as the endpoint of the process, with not every change reaching this goal.
5. Case 2: Long vowel raising
5.1. Presentation
If the long-vowel systems of the Swiss German dialects are contrasted with the putative
Middle High German system (cf. Table 36.1), it becomes clear that many dialects feature
long vowels that have been “raised” compared to Middle High German. The number of
raised long vowels in each dialect declines from east to west: the eastern dialects have
many raisings, the western none. The basic features of Map 36.2 match the depiction of
vowel lowering, but the direction of diffusion is reversed.
Once again the region with the most changes of the same kind (III) conjoins an area
with fewer changes (II), itself adjoining an area with the fewest changes (I), and then
finally there is a region without any raising. Once again, neighboring vowels within the
system are affected by the “same” change (raising by one level) in a particular order
(closed vowels before open ones, back vowels before front vowels). The raising of the
long vowels also accords with an often documented “natural” tendency (Labov 1994:
116).
In all three regions of raising, the reflexes of MHG ê and ô each exhibit the same
tongue height. The perfect chain shift is reflected in the practically point perfect corre-
spondence between the regions of diffusion for the raising of each vowel. This can also be
interpreted as an indication for the contemporaneous diffusion of both sound changes.
In contrast, the regions in which â and æ have been raised are of different size; they
must have diffused at different times in two separate waves. The raising of â has diffused
more widely than the raising of æ. Where â is not raised, neither is æ. This implicational
relation is rigorously valid, which is evidence that the two shifts belong together, and
that the two long low vowels function phonologically as a single vowel series, although
phonetic arguments could support a different interpretation. In light of the perfect chain
shift (the raising of MHG ê and ô), it can be argued that the “imperfect” chain shift
linking æ and â is attributable to this phonetic-phonological problem (cf. Wiesinger 1970:
vol. 1, 32).
As with the lowering, the linguistic map of the actual raising complex corresponds
closely to the predicted implications of the theoretical map. Isoglosses pile up in this
change process as well: in the east, the intermediary Type II is often missing between
Types I and III; in the west, the intermediary Area I is absent from between Area II and
the region without raising. Since there is no language boundary which can be deemed
responsible for the pileup in this instance, it is worth searching for other social bound-
aries (see section 8).
In terms of the proposed fundamental mechanisms, raising and lowering can be de-
scribed as parallel processes. This strengthens the suspicion that the model captures
essential facets of the process of diffusion of linguistic innovations.
5.2. Diusion o new change on the basis o previous change
In three regions on Map 36.2, the relations between the vowels can not be explained via
the generalization of a phonological process to ever more neighboring phonemes. These
relations are therefore of particular theoretical interest.
Map 36.2: Long vowel raising in Swiss German

In the mottled Jurassic region MHG æ and â manifest as closed /e:/ and /o:/, which
have merged with the raised reflexes of /ê/ and /ô/. The products of raisings (2a), */c:/,
and (2b), */ε:/, have thus been raised further. This is not the transfer of the same change
to neighboring phonemes, it is a renewed application of the same procedure to phonemes
that have already been changed. In Labovian terminology, one might talk of a “hyper-
correction”; but there are several indicators (not least the phonemic merger) that this is
an independent change coming out of the northwest which has transformed the reflexes
of raisings 2a and 2b.
In the westernmost of the two hatched areas, the level of raising was initially the
same as in the Jura Mountains, but then, under Middle Bernish influence, partially
wound back (see section 7.1). In the hatched region around Zurich, â was initially raised
to /c: ~ o:/, but then lowered back to /A:/, whereby the spread of an urban/written
pronunciation of MHG â might be implicated. There is precious little historical evidence
for this interpretation, but the almost ideal linguistic geographic image of radiation out
from an urban centre is enticing.
In both hatched regions, more recent, independent change can be seen to have acted
upon earlier states; this preserves the historical implicational relations and consequently
the geographical embedding. Also common to both regions is the fact that the newer
change is regressive, in that it leads back to older linguistic states.
6. Language-internal constraints and the diusion o innovations
If we accept that speakers are also influenced by their own linguistic systems in their
choice of which innovations to take up or reject, then every expansion of an innovation
(every change made) alters the systemic conditions and thus the chances that a subse-
quent innovation will be adopted.
An important (albeit not necessary) condition for the adoption of an innovation ap-
pears to be that it does not provoke the collapse of a phonemic contrast. Within Ger-
man-speaking Switzerland, it appears to be a further systemic condition that a change
contribute to symmetry between the two subsystems of short and long vowels. In prin-
ciple, in the modern dialects every stressed phoneme in the inventory of short vowels
corresponds to a qualitatively identical long vowel; in contrast to Standard German
both short and long vowels of the “same” height can have both lax and tense forms.
The symmetry between the subsystems ought to have first emerged in the post⫺Middle
High German period. Although the waves of lowering and raising have led via
counterposed processes to different systemic states in the east and west, they have also
contributed to the realization of this symmetry. The articulatory, perceptive, and cogni-
tive mechanisms that lie behind such trends are little known, but their effects, e.g., the
symmetry of the systems, are beyond doubt (Haas 1998: 840). It is also not known why
the New High German pairing of shortness and laxity on the one hand, length and
tenseness on the other, can be observed in so many of the world’s languages that it can
be regarded as “natural”, nor why languages such as Swiss German nevertheless pursue,
virtually systematically, a “more unnatural” symmetry between the subsystems.
The two great chain shifts in the vocalic system had their origins at opposite ends of
the language area and the diffusion waves have overlapped in the center (Figure 36.4).
Fig. 36.4: Overlapping waves
This means that the systemic preconditions for the adoption of newly arriving subwaves
are also in flux, dependent upon the relative “arrival time” of each wave.
That the short vowel lowering began in the west might well be connected to the
retention there of the older open quality of the long vowels. The lowering of the short
vowels was not only natural, it also contributed to the symmetry between the short and
long vowel subsystems. If the long vowels are supposed to have had an influence on the
lowering of the short vowels then it will have been via the system-defining characteristic
of symmetry.
The lowering of the short vowels in the absence of long vowel raising led in the
western regions without overlapping waves to systemic states like those in Figure 36.5.
In the eastern regions without overlapping waves, the raising of the long vowels in the
absence of short vowel lowering led to states like those in Figure 36.6.
Fig. 36.5: Lowering and raising in the west
Fig. 36.6: Lowering and raising in the east

Fig. 36.7: Lowering and raising in the center
The raising of the long vowels was adopted into the east of the language area. It
followed a natural trend and at the same time contributed to the establishment of sym-
metry with the unlowered short vowel subsystem. This in turn could be one of the factors
that inhibited the natural tendency of the short vowel system to move lower. In the far
east, the long vowel raising could even have encouraged an (unnatural!) raising of the
close vowel series (b), MHG i > [i≈].
With the overlapping waves, the preconditions for diffusion of the second wave can
be altered by the changes to the system generated by the adoption of the first wave. In
the region of overlap, the dialects have, as in the west, lowered the short vowels but also
raised the long vowels, as in the east (see Figure 36.7).
The development in the center (see Figure 36.7) led to phonologically symmetrical
but etymologically “disrupted” relations, since the MHG “partners” i ⫺ ı̂ … now stood
in a different relationship: *i ⫺ *ê. This is a problem for historicizing dialect orthogra-
phy, yet following the monosyllable lengthening which refilled vowel series (d), the sys-
tems are functionally well balanced; only the short vowel series (b) has a low functional
load. Precisely how the encounter between the opposing diffusion waves may have un-
folded can hardly be reconstructed without apparent time data.
7. Variability
One of sociolinguistics’ most indisputable findings is that language change includes a
variable stage. Zones into which innovations are in the process of diffusing when sur-
veyed must be characterized by variation between the old and new variants of the el-
ement that is changing and hence interpretable using the apparent-time approach.
Variability contradicts the assumption of exceptionless sound change ⫺ variable
change is not without exception. Further, according to the neogrammarian dogma, the
isoglosses for an innovation must coincide for all words that feature the affected sound
in the same context.
Early dialectology was at pains to meet the expectations of the leading linguistic
schools. In order to obtain clear maps, it protected itself from undesired empirical vari-
ability by, say, surveying just a few informants about just one example for each sound
law and determining the course of the isogloss on the basis of this sole example (cf.
Table 36.1). Atlases are thus freer of variation than the languages they map.
On the other hand, local dialects are not that bad at meeting the “neogrammarian”
expectations. Once the variable stage has been passed through, the relations between
sounds in the local dialects in many cases resemble the products of an exceptionless law:
an etymologically identical sound displays the same transformation in most of the rel-
evant morphemes and the isoglosses around an innovation do indeed coincide for the
majority of the morphemes.
Of course, there are always “exceptions”, about which there is less worry these days:
it has become clear that language can never be completely free of variation, particularly
not at the boundaries of lingistic features.
This makes those cases in which even the static maps display variation, and hence
dynamics, all the more welcome.
7.1. Variation as a transitional phase
As mentioned in section 5.2, in the shaded part of Raising Zone II (Map 36.2),
MHG â > */c:/ > /o:/ and MHG æ > */ε:/ > /e:/ were initially raised further, erasing the
distinction between them and the descendants of MHG ô and ê (also /o:/ and /e:/). A
new diffusion of the still open Middle Bernish long vowels into this region led to a
“regressive” change, in the course of which the merged phonemes æ and ê were once
again split, etymologically correctly, into /æ:/ and /ε:/. This indicates lexical diffusion
(Lautersatz). In contrast, â and ô continue to be represented by a single phoneme /c:/,
which ranges between [c: ~ o:]. They have made their way into the atlas because the
change was in progress at the time of the recordings; the variation indicates change in
apparent time.
7.2. Long-standing variation

According to Map 36.1, a region between Luzern and Zurich, the so-called “Freiamt”,
can be assigned to Lowering Zone II. But it displays a series of anomalies: second stage
lowering appears to have been confined to stage 2a whilst, in contradiction of the impli-
cational relations, stages 3a and 3b have already been implemented. The region also
breaches the symmetry between the short and long vowel subsystems, since MHG o is
represented by the closed and unlowered short vowel /o/, while the counterpart to
MHG â is the open and raised long vowel /c:/. Checking the atlas data reveals, however,
that there is in fact variation in the reflexes of MHG o, â, and ô. But this variability is
probably not a phase in a diffusion process playing out in apparent time, but rather a
long-standing variation. It may well be typical for a clearly politically/socially defined
region positioned between two strong centers but without a center of its own. Variation
found here is less likely to be evidence of developmental dynamics and much more likely
to be performing a “mediating” function. The problematicity of complicated variability
in dialects between strong centers has been clearly demonstrated by Siebenhaar (2000).
8. Isoglosses - the limits o diusion

At the language boundary, the outer limit of the region of related lects, the diffusion of
innovations generally comes to a standstill (see section 4). But usually the innovation
never reaches the linguistic boundary; it comes to a halt within the region of related
lects. This is where isoglosses arise.
Traditional dialectology looked beyond language for the reasons diffusion might stop:
innovations diffuse across areas in which the inhabitants are linked to one another
through intensive “intercourse” (Verkehr); they come to a standstill at societal bound-

aries which inhibit social intercourse (cf. Mitzka 1952: 144⫺148). Dialectology’s highest
mission was to synchronize linguistic and extralinguistic boundaries (“The root of the
tongue and the velum have ceded the leading role to the historical atlas”, Wrede 1963
[1919]: 337). The correlation of several isoglosses with one extralinguistic boundary was
taken as evidence of the divisive power of the extralinguistic boundary. In contrast, it
was of little import whether or not congruent isoglosses were linguistically (internally)
connected. Objections were also not raised that the linguistic boundaries of a “dialect
area” followed varying extralinguistic boundaries in varying coalitions. Rather than con-
cluding that the boundary determination method could be at fault, it was posited that
there were no dialects.
Jules Gilliéron was one of the first to propound the idea that the diffusion of innova-
tions could also be curtailed by language-internal boundaries. Structuralist dialect geog-
raphy then went on to systematically establish regions based on the isoglosses of systemi-
cally connected linguistic features, e.g., the phonemes of a subsystem. Extralinguistic
boundaries were used not to define boundaries, but at best to explain the specific loca-
tion of a boundary. Structuralist dialectology was in fact able to establish relatively
clearly defined, contiguous dialect regions (Goossens 1969).
The case study here proceeded structuralistically insofar as it too selected the iso-
glosses of phenomena related within the language system. But incorporation into a pro-
cess breaks this relationship down into stages that follow, and follow from, one another:
it is assumed that a shift can begin with one phoneme and then proceed to a neighbor
within the system. A consequence of this is that the relative position of the isoglosses in
the landscape must conform to the implications of the transformational process. Adher-
ence to the same path is of less significance.
Nonetheless, systematic constraints (trend towards chain shifts, symmetry) generally
lead several isoglosses of connected innovations to merge. Hence, in LU (around Luzern)
for instance, at the border between Raising Zone II and the non-raising zone, the iso-
glosses of the reflexes of MHG ê, ô, and â follow the same path.
The partial coincidence of linguistic and political boundaries is not uncommon on
Maps 36.1 and 36.2. It is true that with isarithmic maps (i. e., those with areas circum-
scribed by isoglosses), the cartographic method is often responsible, especially in the
uninhabited High Alps. Nevertheless, it is clear that the political boundaries of the Old
Swiss Confederacy have often staked out the locations at which an innovation came to
a halt.
What is important in this diffusion model is not the boundary as such, but rather the
combination of features it encloses. Thus the combination of features that define
Lowering Zone III also includes the features of Lowering Zones I and II, whose bound-
aries run elsewhere. The linguistic coherence of a region is more important than its
boundary.
9. Regions - the outcome o diusion

The first linguistic geographers hoped to be able to delineate homogeneous dialect re-
gions with their isoglosses. Dialectology had for the first time used empirical methods
to raise scholarly awareness of people’s linguistic reality. In so doing it exposed the
fiction of homogeneous regional varieties ⫺ a service which, against the background of

the dominant ideologies, dialectologists at first regarded as a fault that they attempted
to overcome with great methodological effort (cf. Knoop, Putschke and Wiegand 1982).
Using features characterized by the closest possible match between their isoglosses
and political boundaries to define dialects is linguistically arbitrary; combining them on
a map inevitably leads to a confusion of isoglosses.
Localized dialect is the largest homogeneous variety that lacks explicit standardiza-
tion, and even it is far from logical homogeneity: “L’unité du patois […] est nulle”
(Gauchat 1905: 222). All varieties that are more than the dialect of small networks are
types, which have to be constructed by their speakers and by linguists. Interlinked, lan-
guage-internal, systemic characteristics are more important to the process than isolated
features (of the lexicon for instance). Phonemic systems are part of this core area, and
they can be used to bundle local dialects into regional groups with relatively clear bound-
aries ⫺ such as groups with identical lowering and raising relationships. This is possible
because the diffusion of innovations is not a random process, but is subject to (among
others) language-internal constraints, which appear to be decisive for the consistency of
the regional types; conversely, coherent regions can only be defined using features that
are linguistically connected.
An alternative way of establishing types is offered by dialectometry (Goebl 1982). It
is true that it does not use any linguistically connected features to do so, but nor does
it ignore any of them, because, say, they do not follow the desired borders or do not fit
with the chosen linguistic theory. Naturally, it can hardly elicit precisely which linguistic
and extralinguistic factors have given rise to a particular dialectometric geotype and its
geographic extent. But the law of large numbers could lead to regions that are also real
for their speakers and which codetermine the further development of the language. It is
therefore unlikely to be a coincidence that an explorative dialectometric computation of
the SDS has produced type zones (Typenareale) that correspond quite well with the
Raising Zones of this diffusion study (Kelle 2001: 29A).
10. Reerences
2005 The role of interpersonal accommodation in a theory of language change. In: Peter Auer,
Frans Hinskens and Paul Kerswill (eds.), Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in
European Languages, 335⫺357. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bailey, Charles-James N.
1973 Variation and Linguistic Theory. Arlington: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Baumgartner, Heinrich
1940 Stadtmundart ⫺ Stadt- und Landmundart. Beiträge zur bernischen Mundartgeographie.
Bern: Herbert Lang.
Bremer, Otto
1893 Deutsche Phonetik. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
Britain, David
2004 Space and spatial diffusion. In: J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes
(eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 603⫺637. Oxford: Blackwell.
Domašnev, Anatolij. I., S. V. Stirnickaja and Larissa E. Najdič
1980 [Review of Haas 1978]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 3: 129⫺132.
Gauchat, Louis
1905 L’unité phonétique dans le patois d’une commune. In: Aus romanischen Sprachen und
Literaturen ⫺ Festschrift Heinrich Morf, zur Feier seiner fünfundzwanzigjährigen Lehrtä-
tigkeit von seinen Schülern dargebracht, 175⫺232. Halle/Saale: Niemeyer.
Goebl, Hans
1982 Dialektometrie. Prinzipien und Methoden des Einsatzes der numerischen Taxonomie im
Bereich der Dialektgeographie. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Goossens, Jan
1969 Strukturelle Sprachgeographie. Heidelberg: C. Winter.
Haas, Walter
1978 Sprachwandel und Sprachgeographie. Untersuchungen zur Struktur der Dialektverschieden-
heit am Beispiele der schweizerdeutschen Vokalsysteme. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Haas, Walter
1995 Wenker contra Bremer: Empirie und Theorie des Dialekts. In: José Cajot, Ludger Kremer
and Hermann Niebaum (eds.), Lingua Theodisca: Beiträge zur sprach- und Literaturwis-
senschaft. Jan Goossens zum 65. Geburtstag, 331⫺340. Münster: LIT.
Haas, Walter
1998 Ansätze zu einer Theorie des Sprachwandels auf lautlicher Ebene. In: Werner Besch,
Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann and Stefan Sonderegger (eds.), Sprachgeschichte. Ein
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(Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 2.1.) Berlin: de Gruyter.
Herrgen, Joachim
2005 Sprachgeographie und Optimalitätstheorie. Am Beispiel der t-Tilgung in Auslaut-Clus-
Hotzenköcherle, Rudolf, Heinrich Baumgartner and Rudolf Trüb
1962⫺2003 Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz (SDS). 10 vols. Berne: Francke.
Kelle, Bernhard
2001 Zur Typologie der Dialekte in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz: Ein dialektometrischer
Versuch. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 9: 9⫺34.
Keller, Rudi
1994 Sprachwandel. Von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache. 2nd ed. Tübingen: Francke.
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1982 [Review of Haas 1978]. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 104:
89⫺93.
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Labov, William
Labov, William
1994 Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William, Malcah Yeager and Richard Steiner
1972 A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. Philadelphia: US Regional Survey.
Lüdtke, Helmut
1980 Sprachwandel als universales Phänomen. In: Helmut Lüdtke (ed.): Kommunikations-
theoretische Grundlagen des Sprachwandels, 1⫺19. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Mattheier, Klaus J.
1984 [Review of Haas 1978]. Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 48: 324⫺329.
Meyer, Paul
1875 [Review of I. Ascoli, Schizzi francoprovenzali]. Romania 4: 294⫺296.
Mitzka, Walther
1952 Handbuch zum Deutschen Sprachatlas. Marburg: Elwert.
Moulton, William G
1960 The short vowel systems of northern Switzerland. Word 16: 155⫺162.
Moulton, William G.
1980 [Review of Haas 1978]. Journal of Linguistics 16: 275⫺288.
Ogura, Meiko
1990 Dynamic Dialectology. A Study of Language in Time and Space. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.
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Walter Haas, Fribourg (Switzerland)

37. The Linguistic Atlas o the Middle Rhine (MRhSA):

A study on the emergence and spread
o regional dialects
1. The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rhine ⫺ Research context and goals
2. Bidimensional dialectology and linguistic dynamics
3. The methods of the MRhSA
4. Results
5. References
1. The Linguistic Atlas o the Middle Rhine - Research context and

goals
Although interdisciplinarity has, for good reason, been required of the social sciences
for some time, research praxis continues to be shaped by disciplinary boundaries. This
tendency runs so deep that a complex, multivariant research field can become dissolved
into separate, discipline-specific objects, each investigated using a unique methodological
arsenal. In the end, those involved barely recognize that they are working in an intrinsi-
cally unitary field of study, and instead reify their methodologically constituted and
differentiated objects of study into separate segments of reality. The empirical linguistic
investigation of language across space provides an example of such a situation. On the
one hand, in the process of becoming an independent and established linguistic disci-
pline, traditional dialectology increasingly blocked out social and contextual factors in
linguistic variation in the quest for a scientifically sound methodology that exclusively
targeted the areal dimension of variation. A similar development is also true of sociolin-
guistics and pragmatics, which emerged later. Since the 1960s, the communicative-prag-
matic turn has occasioned an expansion of the traditional dialectological methods
through various new linguistic subdisciplines, each with its own theoretical-methodologi-
cal approach. Although sociolinguistics, pragmalinguistics, discourse linguistics, etc.,
cover other aspects than traditional dialectology, this has not resulted in a more complex
penetration of the research field, but rather in the constitution of new objects of study.
Where dialectology excluded the social-pragmatic dimension, these new disciplines shut
out the areal dimension of variation. To this day it is widely believed, within the relevant
disciplines, that it is impossible to simultaneously investigate areal and social/situational
dimensions of linguistic variation, and geolinguistic research praxis thus continues to be
shaped by reductionist impulses.
Such a methodologically conditioned reduction of the object of geolinguistic research
is particularly awkward when change in regional dialects is investigated. For an adequate
description and explanation of the dynamics of language across time and space is only
possible when areal and social factors are explored simultaneously and their interdepend-
ence is accurately captured (cf. Schmidt in this volume).
In the following, the example of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rhine (Mittelrhei-
nischer Sprachatlas, MRhSA) is used to demonstrate that an integrative data collection,
analysis, and presentation of simultaneously both the areal and the social dimensions of
37. The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rhine 669
language is possible and that important insights into the dynamics of regional dialects
can thus be won. The idea behind and explicit goal of the MRhSA was to suspend the
traditional yet inadequate subdivision of variation linguistics for a particular linguistic
subregion. The MRhSA was the first linguistic atlas in Europe to set itself the dual goal
of recording and analyzing the linguistic structures within its survey area bidimensio-
nally, i. e., in terms of both areal extent and social complexity. To this end, the MRhSA
systematically relates the diatopic/horizontal and the diastratic/vertical dimensions of
linguistic variation to one another:
While linguistic atlases usually only document spoken language relative to space, the
MRhSA’s object of study is the areal (diatopic) and to some extent the social (diastratic)
dimension. Accordingly, it pursues two goals:
(1) The discovery and documentation of the areal structure of the least standard domain of
spoken language, the base dialects.
(2) The discovery and documentation of diastratically determined contrasts in local language
forms and thence the changing areal structure in a further non-standard domain of spo-
ken language, the regional dialects.
(Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1989: 285⫺286; my translation)
Through an integrative, albeit partial, simultaneous investigation of the social and areal
dimensions of linguistic variation, the MRhSA was supposed to contribute to the inte-
gration of sociolinguistics and dialectology. A similar approach had previously been
adopted by Hans Kurath in the Linguistic Atlas of New England (1939⫺1943) and by
Yoichi Fujiwara in the Linguistic Atlas of the Seto Inland Sea (1974). Eberhard Zwirner’s
first series of tape recordings (Lautbibliothek der deutschen Mundarten, later Deutsches
Spracharchiv [DSAv], Mannheim, cf. Zwirner 1956) also belongs to this tradition of mul-
tidimensional variation linguistics. Yet for various reasons, these projects evoked only
limited international resonance, so that the initiator role in bidimensional or pluridimen-
sional dialectology was effectively played by the MRhSA (1994⫺2002) and later the
Atlas Lingüı́stico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (ADDU; Thun and Elizaincı́n),
which began to appear in 2000. The model of multidimensional dialectology thus estab-
lished has since become quite productive (cf., e.g., Mang 2004), even though projects
around the world also continue to follow the earlier tradition of division by discipline
(cf., e.g., Labov 2006).
2. Bidimensional dialectology and linguistic dynamics

The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rhine’s integrative investigation of social and areal
factors in linguistic variation makes it possible to explore linguistic dynamics in space
and time. In particular, stabilizing and innovative processes (the stasis, spread, and
shrinkage of language areas) can thus be systematically analyzed. Here too, a decisive
theoretical/methodological innovation of the MRhSA can be seen. In the past, geolingu-
istics was primarily concerned with the least standard areal varieties, the dialects. The
conspicuous dynamic of the areal varieties was regarded by dialectologists as trouble-
some at best, since they saw in it a tendency for dialects to disappear, taking with them
the widely acknowledged focus of their discipline. The geolinguistic research tradition is
therefore dominated by studies which more or less deliberately ignore the dynamics of
areal varieties. In contrast, the MRhSA views such dynamics not as interference to be
eliminated via suitable collection and analysis methods, but rather as a constitutive fea-
ture of the object of study. Here, areal varieties are regarded as constantly changing
sectors (of restricted register and area) of the entire complex of a single language. This
article will examine the methods used in the MRhSA to explore linguistic dynamics
across space and the research findings these methods have generated.
3. The methods o the MRhSA
3.1. The region studied
The MRhSA investigates areal linguistic structures in West Middle (Central) German,
more precisely, in those parts of the federal States of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland
that lie to the west of the Rhine River, i. e., in an area bounded to the east by the Rhine,
to the west by the border to France, to the south by the Wieslauter River and to the
north by the Ahr (see Map 37.1). In linguistic terms, the domain of the MRhSA is clearly
divided into two: the Rhine-Franconian dialects of the southwest and the Moselle-Fran-
conian dialects as part of the Middle Franconian grouping in the northwest. The two
regions are connected by a broad transition zone running from Saarbrücken in the direc-
tion of Koblenz (cf. Wiesinger 1983: 846⫺859). What makes the domain of the MRhSA
interesting for linguistic studies, aside from the dialectal structure across space, is its
high sociodemographic diversity: in part progressive (modernized), in part conservative;
Map 37.1: Domain of the MRhSA (cf. Schmidt 1986: 229)

very different linguistic dynamic impulses can be expected in the different subregions. A
distinction can be drawn between (1) conservative rural regions like the Eifel and the
Hunsrück, (2) stagnating former industrial regions like Saarland, and (3) modern con-
urbations like the Frankfurt Rhine Main Region and the area around Ludwigshafen
and Mannheim.
3.2. Data collection and analysis

The MRhSA investigates the phonology and morphology of the dialects within the cho-
sen domain. Lexis and syntax are not within its ambit, but the lack of a word-geographic
section is compensated for by the otherwise good lexicographic coverage of the area (cf.
Pfälzisches Wörterbuch [Palatinate Dictionary], Südhessisches Wörterbuch [South Hes-
sian Dictionary], Rheinisches Wörterbuch [Rhenish Dictionary]). An investigation of the
spatial distribution of syntax will remain a desideratum for some time, however.
The phonetic-phonological and morphological data of the MRhSA were collected
directly using a questionnaire procedure that combined traditional and innovative meth-
ods: The basis of the informant survey was a questionnaire developed by Günter Bell-
mann (cf. Bellmann 1994a: 165⫺207), which featured the target lemmas within senten-
ces. The elicitation of the linguistic data proceeded via oral translation of the question-
naire sentences into the appropriate local dialect; this occurred in group interviews of
three to five informants per location. This thoroughly traditional survey technique can-
not aim to elicit current performance data from the informants; rather, it was intended
as a measure of dialectal competence. The informants’ inevitable corrections of one an-
other about typical dialect features which arose in group interviews and discussions were
seen not as interference but rather as welcome data for the assessment of competence.
What distinguishes the MRhSA from traditional regional atlases in this data collec-
tion phase is, firstly, its bidimensionality. In a sense the MRhSA is ⫺ a novelty in the
history of linguistic atlases ⫺ two atlases in one. In the first place, an initial phase
pursued traditional data collection methods. At each survey location, teams of infor-
mants who had lived their lives in the one locality, as had their parents before them,
who were more than 70 years old and had worked in a manual occupation, were selected
and interviewed. The MRhSA’s key innovation lay in a second, additional series of re-
cordings. In these, the same methods were employed with a younger set of informants.
A maximum of two years elapsed between the collection of the two data series. The
informants for the second survey also had blue-collar jobs and their families had lived
in the one locality for at least two generations. But in contrast to the first series they
were between 30 and 40 years old and commuted to work daily. The “typical” informant
for the MRhSA was thus an old farmer for series 1, and a commuting tradesperson or
laborer of the middle generation for series 2 (cf. Table 37.1).
Tab. 37.1: MRhSA: Sociodemographic data about the informants

Data series 1 Data series 2
1. <Abode: two generations>
2. <Occupation: manual>
3. <Age: ( 75> <Age: ( 35>
4. <Mobility: ⫺> <Mobility: ⫹>
On the basis of such an admittedly arduous bidimensional survey, the effects of differ-
ences in the informants’ age and geographical mobility on the areal structures of the
dialects can be precisely determined. It was important that the MRhSA survey aimed to
capture the deepest achievable active dialectal competence of both demographic
groups ⫺ the methodological consistency rendered the two series directly comparable.
Focusing on the deepest active dialectal competence meant that a well-known fallacy
that often crops up in intergenerational linguistic comparisons could be avoided, a fal-
lacy which, on the basis of differences in usage alone, has in the past wrongly been used
to predict dialect change, even dialect death.
Data were elicited between 1978 and 1988. A total of 2,510 informants from 841
localities were interviewed. The results of the survey (sound recordings and IPA tran-
scriptions) have been archived. This archive consists of 841 logbooks, in which the infor-
mants’ responses (only the lemmas) are transcribed using the International Phonetic
Alphabet, and a collection of around 2,500 hours of sound recordings. The MRhSA is
the first linguistic atlas to permanently record the data collected on tape and phonetically
(on-location transcription). The MRhSA sound recordings are currently being digital-
ized, so that they will soon be available to the general public (cf. <http://www.diwa.
info>; <http://www.regionalsprache.de>).
3.3. Mapping and publication
For a linguistic atlas, the primary tool of data analysis and presentation is the map. The
linguistic maps of the MRhSA present the linguistic information in point symbol format
on a geographically precise base map. The linguistic maps of the atlas were created in a
semi-computative process in keeping with the information technology of the time: with-
out automatic map generation from a database, but with computer plotting tools that
allowed the inclusion of hand-drawn maps and elements and diverse options for manipu-
lating symbols. As a result of the bidimensional data collection there are many bidimen-
sional linguistic maps in the MRhSA. In line with its dual research goal (the documenta-
tion of the areal structure of the base dialects and the documentation of diastratically
determined local contrasts), two kinds of maps are employed: (1) the full view (at a scale
of 1 : 600,000) and (2) the contrast view (1 : 1,000,000). The full view serves to display the
base dialectal areal structure as completely as possible in terms of, first, the language
system including the historical distribution of phonemes, and second, the density of
survey locations, reaching 23 percent here. The contrast views are paired maps which
present the dialects of the older informants (always on the left) and the younger (on the
right) across an identical selection of locations. No attempt is made to depict the full
depth of data. Firstly, the network of locations is less dense than in the complete view
(around 12 percent), and secondly, contrast views are only produced when the informa-
tion they present is not redundant.
The assignment of symbols is systematic and uniform across all maps: (1) monoph-
thongs are always displayed as lines, diphthongs as shapes; (2) the thickness of the lines
symbolizes phonetic duration: thin lines correspond to phonetic shortness, thick lines to
length (in the case of diphthongs, overlength); (3) intraseries variants are always mapped
and separated from one another by a comma; (4) the legend is consistent for each pho-
neme or morphological category. Contrasting information is also systematically encoded:
Map 37.2: Contrast map (Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002: vol. 4, Map 332/1⫺2 beißen)
(1) in cases where both data series match (“zero contrast”), the symbol remains black in
the contrast maps, but where the dialect of the younger generation contrasts with that
of the older generation, the symbol is set in red on the right-hand-side contrast view
map (dialect of the younger generation); (2) if a variant or a diacritic is absent, the
contrast map features a red zero. This visualization method is designed to allow the atlas
user to analyze the dialectal contrasts by location and assess their implications for a
constant or changing areal distribution. This visualization method thus provides an ade-
quate depiction of the interdependence of diatopic and diastratic content and permits
the detection of linguistic dynamic tendencies from the maps (see Map 37.2 for a detail
from a contrast map).
Various pieces of supplementary information found on the map sheet also serve to
facilitate interpretation of the atlas maps. (1) The base maps include a selection of origi-
nal records (IPA transcriptions), which provide a context for the segments displayed on
the map. (2) A relevant vowel or consonantal context is sketched on the point symbol
maps using isoglosses to delineate certain systematic distributions. (3) The contrast maps
include bar graphs to support a quantitative analysis of the linguistic features mapped.
Publication of the MRhSA in its full linguistic scope (phonetics/phonology and mor-
phology) as originally planned is complete; five volumes of 1073 maps and an introduc-
tion are available. From the outset, the MRhSA was also a linguistic experiment: its
novel theoretical/methodological approach instigated a series of pilot studies, accompa-
nying analyses and then data evaluations that tested its analytic potential. The following
studies must be mentioned: Bellmann 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986a, 1986b, 1987, 1989, 1990,
1994a, 1994b, 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 1998; Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1989;
Drenda 2000; Girnth 2000; Herrgen 1986, 1994, 2000, 2001, 2006a, 2006b; Herrgen and
Schmidt 1985, 1986, 1989; Kehrein, Lameli and Nickel 2005; Lameli 2004; Lenz 2003,
2004, 2007; Orlovic-Schwarzwald and Schmidt 1986; Rabanus 2004, 2005, 2008; Schmidt
1986, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1998, 2005; Schmidt and Herrgen (to appear); Schmitt 1986,
1992; Smazal 1986; Steiner 1994; Thinnes 1981. More complete bibliographic details can
be found in the reference sections of the atlas volumes and at <http://www.uni-marburg.
de/fb09/dsa/publikationen/sprachatlanten>.
4. Results
4.1. Structural boundaries in West Middle German
Its specific methodological innovations aside, the MRhSA has generated a whole series
of research findings. For a start, the MRhSA represents a full regional atlas of the
phonology and morphology of West Middle German. As such, it provides systematic
linguistic information on a German region that was formerly in large part (especially
the Moselle-Franconian region) only very sporadically covered (cf. Bellmann, Herrgen
and Schmidt 1994⫺2002: Maps 13, 479a). Even without the bidimensional methods, the
comprehensive treatment of, first, phonology (including difficult to access phenomena
like the Rhenish accentuation, centralization, quantity-based distinctions in the conso-
nantal system, etc.) and second, the systematic geographic depiction of inflectional and
word-formation morphology represents an impressive scholarly contribution.
These results cannot be discussed here in detail. But the summarizing analysis of the
spatial structure of dialect distribution to be found in volume 4 of the MRhSA is note-
worthy. It classifies the atlas area along structural boundaries distilled from an aggregate
of maps. Adopting Wiesinger’s (1970, 1983) approach, the MRhSA team (Bellmann,
Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002: vol. 5, IX⫺XI and Map 479b) show that the area of
the MRhSA is strikingly characterized by such dialectal isolines, which delineate struc-
tural differences between subregions. These “structural boundaries” are each indicated
by clear bundles of isoglosses and have proved highly significant for, on the one hand,
the division of the atlas area into dialectality regions (section 4.2.2) and for detecting
trends in dialect change (see sections 4.2.3, 4.3) on the other. The MRhSA establishes
the following structural boundaries (cf. Map 37.3) as decisive for the areal structure of
the base dialects. Foremost is the tone accent boundary; this is the most important
structural boundary in the West Middle German area and separates the Moselle-Franco-
nian (with a tone accent distinction) from the Rhine-Franconian (no tone accent distinc-
tion) dialects. The significance of this boundary is a result of the prosodic difference
itself, its effects on vowel quality (phonological split; cf. Wiesinger 1970: I, 65, 127 and
II, 178⫺179) and quantity (cf. Schmidt 1986: 185⫺191). Second in terms of relevance is
the “unrounding” boundary, which forms the southern border of the Ripuarian⫺Mo-
selle-Franconian transition zone. It separates the southern dialects without vowel
rounding from the northern dialects, which feature vowel rounding. Further system
boundaries include that of the diphthongization of MHG ê-(œ)-ô and that of the pho-
neme merger of MHG ei-(öu)-ou. Together, these two separate the southern Palatinate
relict zone off from the rest of the Rhine-Franconian region. Yet other structural bound-
aries demarcate the southern and northern boundaries of the Rhine-Franconian⫺Mo-
selle-Franconian transitional zone ⫺ to the south, the boundary of the maintenance of
the Rhine-Franconian distinction between MHG ë and e/ä; to the north, the <s>-voic-
Map 37.3: Structural boundaries in the MRhSA (Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002:
vol. 5, Map 479b)
ing boundary. A final structural boundary defines the eastern extent of the Eifel relict
zone: this delimits the retention of long obstruents in medial syllable boundaries first
documented in the MRhSA. Taken as a whole, the structural boundaries delineate the
relevant subregions within the atlas area. An indicator of the high diatopic relevance of
the structural boundaries is their covariation with the degree of interdialectal intelligibil-
ity: Schmitt (1992: 118⫺194) was able to show that it is the language regions delimited
by structural boundaries which determine the extent of interdialectal intelligibility. This
finding can now also be explained in terms of a theory: as Schmidt demonstrates in this
volume, structural regions are also synchronization regions and structural boundaries
are synchronization boundaries. It can no longer come as a surprise that structural re-
gions are also regions of mutual intelligibility, nor that processes of regional language
change are contained by structural boundaries.
4.2. The yield o the bidimensional method
4.2.1. The interseries comparison
The decisive innovative aspect of the MRhSA is the bidimensional method which enables
a systematic investigation of the connection between the diatopic and diastratic dimen-
sions and thus an exploration of trends in dialect change. During the final phases of
data collection for the MRhSA, Günter Bellmann analyzed the initial results recorded
in the survey protocols and draft maps (cf. Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1989: 301⫺
305). It became clear that with data series 1 (the older generation), the MRhSA had
accessed a “language state of extremely high dialectality” (Bellmann, Herrgen and
Schmidt 1989: 301; my translation). As far as data series 2 (the younger generation) is
concerned, the MRhSA documents a state of spoken language that is still highly dialectal
yet increasingly locally undifferentiated. Bellmann interprets the contrasts between the
two data series diachronically and diatopically: “The more coarse-grained areality, which
is associated with reduced dialectality, can be understood as diatopic change” (Bellmann,
Herrgen and Schmidt 1989: 303; my translation). All together, Bellmann claims, “the
target variety of this development may be an emergent regional dialect” (Bellmann, Herr-
gen and Schmidt 1989: 305). Thereby, the dialectal competence of the younger infor-
mants is increasingly oriented to the region, not the locality. Where new regional dialects
emerge, an independent development can be observed, in parts characterized by innova-
tions that even lead away from the New High German Standard. The Linguistic Atlas of
the Middle Rhine documents numerous cases showing that the regional dialectal form is
preferred over both the local dialectal form and that of the standard language, which
might have been expected to be especially supported by the media and school. The
prevailing trend documented by the MRhSA can thus be best encapsulated under the
rubric of “dialectal regionalization”. It is also evident in the frequency counts that ac-
company the MRhSA maps: the predominant trend is for rare and highly localized fea-
tures to be replaced by more common and widespread ones.
Yet differentiated analyses reveal that there is no simple and linear reduction in dialec-
tal features. What can instead be observed is a dialectal redistribution (Umdialektalisie-
rung) that takes different forms depending on the base dialectal areal structure, including
both the stability and the replacement of base dialectal features. Bellmann describes
different forms of buildup and decline in linguistic variability. He typologizes the inter-
series contrasts as follows: Type 1: substitution (A > B); Type 2: devariabilization (A,
B > B); Type 3: variabilization (A > A, B); Type 4: zero contrast (A > A; Bellmann
1994a: 302⫺303). Exploring consonantal systems, Herrgen (2000) could show that these
developments unfold in accordance with locally differentiated structural preconditions:

Depending upon the base dialectal structure, a single map can chart the dominance of
standard-conform substitution in one subregion and dialectal regionalization in another.
4.2.2. Dialectality and change
In light of the variation in substitution and (de-)variabilization processes across space,

the MRhSA authors emphasized the need to achieve an overall estimate. This was in-
tended to show, firstly, how dialectal features are grouped at a location and across a
region, so that the total dialectality typical of a location or a region could be ascertained.
Secondly, such an analysis ought to show the extent to which these aggregate values
differ for the two data series, and hence whether there is any “dialect decline” in general.
To this end, separate dialectality measurements for both data series were undertaken (cf.
Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002: vol. 4, VII and Map 314; Herrgen and
Schmidt 1989; Bellmann 1998). The phonetic measurement technique used (cf. Herrgen
and Schmidt 1989) counted the number of phonetic features per survey location that
deviated from moderate standard pronunciation. The dialectality scores in the MRhSA
range from a minimum of 201 (or two nonstandard phonetic features per word) to a
maximum of 349.5 (or an average of three and a half nonstandard phonetic features
per word). The following results are noteworthy: (1) four clear subregions of differing
dialectality became apparent (West Eifel mountains, Moselle⫺eastern Eifel, Saarpfalz,
southern Palatinate); (2) the dialectality in data series 2 is approximately five percent
lower than in data series 1; (3) an internal leveling of dialectality can be seen within all
of the subregions.
The analysis of these measurements permits an initial response to the question of
dialect decline ⫺ for the MRhSA area. Contrary to the expectations of nonexperts and
the dominant view in the research literature, within the population segment that the
Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rhine investigated, namely two generations of locally born
blue-collar workers, there is no evidence of a general or a partial disappearance of the
dialects. The dialect of the younger generation is indeed closer to the spoken standard
than the dialect of the more senior generation, but only by about five percent overall.
To put it another way: ninety-five percent of the dialectality is retained. Standard con-
vergence in the dialect of the younger generation is thus evident from the sum of the
phenomena, yet their dialect can still be classed as strongly dialectal. It must be stressed
that material from a linguistic atlas like the one presented here can only offer a narrow
view of trends in dialectal change, since a linguistic atlas survey is characterized by
regional, survey contextual, and social restrictions. But for use in conjunction with other
dialectological projects, such as dialect census projects and linguistic variation studies
for example, it provides an indispensable empirical basis, from which recent diatopic
trends in dialect change can be tackled.
A comparison of the dialectality measurements (Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt
1994⫺2002: vol. 4, Map 314) with the analysis of structural boundaries already men-
tioned (Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002: vol. 5, Map 479b) is instructive.
This reveals that the quantitative and qualitative (systemic) differences correlate: the
structural regions are also dialectality regions. But this does not mean that the differ-
ences in dialectality are simply a product of the mapped structural distinctions. In con-
trast, seen in isolation, some of the structural boundaries ought even to generate diamet-
rically opposed dialectality contrasts (cf. vowel rounding or the voiced/unvoiced opposi-
tion). If a structural region displays a higher total dialectality than neighboring structural
regions, this is because structural regions act as regions of synchronization. Internally,
they possess a higher degree of consistency than they do across the structural boundary.
Incorporating the findings on interdialectal intelligibility described above, we could say
that structural boundaries are dialectality boundaries, which in turn are intelligibility
boundaries.
4.2.3. The spread o regional dialects
The central questions for geolinguistics ⫺ whether, how and to what extent dialects
spread ⫺ can only be answered if an adequate empirical basis is available. The Linguistic
Atlas of the Middle Rhine provides such a basis. The limited broadscale or local decline
in areal features aside, a relatively comprehensive inventory of areal phenomena has
been discovered in the MRhSA survey data and its analysis. Particularly interesting are
those cases of regional language diffusion in which local or regional language features
spread, i.e., divergence from the standard. In these cases, we can safely assume original
regional linguistic processes are at work. In the following, three examples of nonstandard
areal diffusion that have emerged from analyses done for the MRhSA are discussed. The
first two examples are phonetic/phonological, the third morphological.
The diusion o /s/-voicing

An example of standard-divergent spread of a linguistic phenomenon can be seen on
MRhSA Map 332, beißen ‘to bite’, where in the Rhine-Franconian dialect of the younger
generation a highly frequent replacement of the voiceless dental spirant by a voiced one
can be observed (cf. Map 37.2). The function of the voiced/unvoiced opposition in Rhine
Franconian lies behind this. There is a tendency, especially among the younger genera-
tion, but also already among the older generation, to treat voiced and unvoiced dental
spirants as combinatory variants. In the beißen map, unvoiced [s] dominates in the base
dialect, as in the standard language, but in data series 2 voiced [z] dominates across the
entire Rhine-Franconian area (except for the southern Palatinate relict zone). In the
regional dialect of the broad area between the southern Palatinate relict zone, in which
voiced [z] is generally absent, and the Moselle-Franconian area, in which there is a pho-
nological opposition between /z/ and /s/, voiced [z] thus becomes an allophonic variant
in voiced contexts. In this case we are thus dealing with a sonorization of the [s] in
voiced environments supported by phonetic naturalness. The spread reaches its limits at
the northern and southern structural boundaries (northwest boundary of the Rhine-
Franconian⫺Moselle-Franconian transition zone, boundary of the southern Palatinate
relict zone).
Coronalization o [ç]
Coronalization (cf. Herrgen 1986; Schmidt and Herrgen to appear) is the replacement
of a dorsal [ç] with a coronal [C], which phonetically lies between [ s ] and [ç]. The coronali-
zation, currently very widespread in the Middle German dialects, first emerged polyge-
netically in the major cities of the Middle German region in the mid-nineteenth century.
Map 37.4: Coronalization in the MRhSA (based on Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002:
vol. 4, Map 350/1⫺2)
The MRhSA maps (cf. Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002: vol. 4, Maps 349,
350) show coronalization to have already been areally dominant in data series 1 (cf.
Map 37.4), with no sign of this development halting in the dialect of the younger genera-
tion. Outside of the relatively small southern Palatinate relict zone, the coronal spirant
is now practically universal in the broader area. It should be stressed that we are dealing
with a regional language innovation that continues to diverge away from both the spo-
ken standard and the traditional dialects. A whole series of factors have been invoked
to explain this phenomenon (cf. Herrgen 1986). (1) As a result of a number of historical
linguistic processes, the set of voiceless fricatives is overfull in German, making a distinc-
tion difficult. A neutralization of the /ç/⫺/s/ distinction can thus be classified as an
articulatory simplification. (2) The functional load of the /ç/⫺/s/ opposition is light; there
are only a handful of minimal pairs (Kirche/Kirsche ‘church’/‘cherry’, selig/seelisch
‘blessed’/‘mental/psychic’, Männchen/Menschen ‘male’/‘people’). It therefore does not
prevent the opposition from being neutralized. (3) The “melting-pot” situation in the
rapidly growing cities during the nineteenth-century modernization phases brought with
it a relatively high degree of norm tolerance. This meant that the /ç/⫺/s/ opposition
could be rapidly abandoned in Middle German (in contrast to Low or Upper German,
where other historical linguistic conditions prevailed). (4) In subsequent generations the
coronalization was also adopted in the villages. Here, the above factors continued to
apply, with the addition of the prestige of the cities from which it originated. With the
coronalization process, the MRhSA maps again illustrate an impressive regional linguis-
tic diffusion process that diverges from both the spoken standard and the local dialects.
But the significance of the structural boundaries discussed above is also evident here ⫺
the southern Palatinate relict zone has until now remained unaffected by the coronaliza-
tion (cf. Map 37.4).
A third example of the spread of destandardizing linguistic features is the distribution

of the past participle of bringen ‘to bring’, which Schmidt (in this volume) analyzes from
a linguistic dynamic perspective. As further evidence for the fertility of the bidimensional
material and for the high systematicity of the morphological areal contrasts we could
also cite, e.g., Girnth (2000), who analyzes the MRhSA data from the point of view of an
empirical investigation of grammaticalization and is able to demonstrate a high degree of
areal regularity.
4.3. Future research perspectives: Areal structure

and linguistic dynamics
A polydimensional atlas like the MRhSA gains additional linguistic dynamic explanatory
power when it is systematically related to comparable geolinguistic surveys undertaken
at different points in time. A double advantage can be gained from such a comparison:
on the one hand, a linguistic dynamic investigation like the MRhSA receives additional
temporal depth; on the other hand, the validity of a comparison of linguistic data from
differing times is significantly improved when one of the data sources has been designed
along linguistic dynamic lines, in that it can then be unequivocally determined whether
differences in the areal distribution at various times really do represent linguistic dy-
namic processes or whether they are merely artefacts reflecting differences in the sur-
vey methods.
Thanks to its integration into trendsetting linguistic dynamic research platforms like
the Digital Wenker Atlas (DiWA; <http://www.diwa.info>) or the “regionalsprache.de”
project (REDE; <http://www.regionalsprache.de>), the MRhSA can once again serve
as an example. These research platforms aim to thoroughly investigate the structure and
dynamics of German by integrating diverse data collections into a single online analysis
system. Although they are fundamentally similar in approach, DiWA is confined to
material and results that are directly comparable to Georg Wenker’s Sprachatlas des
deutschen Reichs ‘Linguistic Atlas of the German Empire’, while REDE will encompass
a significantly larger collection of material, including new, precise surveys of the near-
standard regional registers (regional accents).
The MRhSA’s incorporation into DiWA reveals the opportunities thus opened up:
systematic comparison of the Wenker atlas (data collected 1876⫺1887) with the MRhSA
(data collected 1978⫺1988) produces a real-time difference of around 100 years; the
interseries comparison of the MRhSA data adds a further “apparent-time” difference of
30 years. For linguistic dynamic purposes, at least three different points in time can be
contrasted ⫺ the future integration of additional comparable data (sound recordings of
different age, monographs, etc.) will bring a further refinement of the linguistic dynamic
perspective. Already, the combination of as yet relatively few atlases within a single
research platform is rendering highly systematic linguistic dynamic processes visible (cf.
Schmidt 2005; Rabanus 2004, 2005, 2008). The future possibilities already intimated can
once again be demonstrated using an example of the spread of standard-divergent dialec-
tal features, this time over the period of a century.
Deletion o -t in hast
The deletion of -t in the verb form hast (2sg of haben ‘to have’) occurs in different
regions (cf. Goeman 1999; Herrgen 2006a, 2006b; Rabanus 2008). Forms such as has,
Map 37.5: Linguistic dynamics of t-deletion (based on Herrgen 2006a: 135)
hos, hasch, hosch are widely found in Middle and Upper German dialects. Map 37.5
compares the situation recorded in the Wenker Atlas, the MRhSA (older generation)
and the MRhSA (younger generation). A circle is used to mark t-deletion; t-retention is
not indicated. The map shows t-deletion even in the Wenker Atlas (for Moselle Franco-
nian and the southern Palatinate). Comparison with the MRhSA reveals a similar picture
with the extent of deletion slightly altered: t-deletion has visibly expanded in both the
Rhine-Franconian and the Moselle-Franconian regions. It is remarkable, then, that the
trend has continued in the dialect of the younger generation (progressive t-deletion).
Hence, a dynamic areal trend in Middle German over 100 years can be confirmed: the
spread of t-deletion. That speakers abandon local dialectal features in the course of this
development is of little surprise. But what is very surprising is the long-term independent
diffusion of a regional linguistic feature that is diverging away from the norm of the
spoken standard. (Those who would interpret the dynamics of regional speech as a one-
dimensional decline of the dialects and convergence on the standard need to be con-
fronted with this finding.) Here, as in the other cases of areal linguistic dynamics dis-
cussed above, the factors that motivate the development can be identified. Optimization
processes are at work in the morphological system (cf. Goeman 1999: 157), especially
involving the factor of “contrastivity”. For those Middle and Upper German inflectional
paradigms in which t-deletion occurs, t-deletion in the second-person singular enhances
contrastivity, since the morphological contrasts between the inflectional forms are more
marked. The spread of the innovative forms has been in progress for over 100 years via
(meso-)synchronization between interactants in the affected German regions. What
makes it attractive for the speakers to adopt forms that are supported by neither the
base dialectal nor the standard language structures is a type of morphological optimiza-
tion, namely their increased paradigmatic contrastivity.
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38. Challenging the homogeneity assumption

in language variation analysis: Findings
rom a study o multilingual urban spaces
1. Introduction
2. Multilingual urban spaces in Sweden
3. Some results of the SUF project in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö
4. Discussion
5. Conclusions
6. References
1. Introduction
The close tie between language and space ⫺ the idea that “in country/region/neighbor-
hood/community X people speak language/variety X” ⫺ is a powerful conception in
popular as well as professional discourse about language. Its influence is not confined
to that of the ideal of one language⫺one nation, routinely refuted in most textbooks on
sociolinguistics and multilingualism, but can also be detected in contemporary percep-
tions of and approaches to language variation and varieties. Linguistics has been, and
to a large extent still is, permeated by the conception of languages and varieties as
bounded in space and tied to local, homogeneous speech communities. More generally,
like classical sociological research, sociolinguistics within the quantitative paradigm has
38. Challenging the homogeneity assumption 687
had as its point of departure a homogeneity assumption: that groups of speakers who
are sociologically similar tend to be linguistically similar (Romaine 1982: 11; Wolfram
and Thomas 2002: 160). While this would at first glance appear to be a necessary step
in hypothesis formulation, it tends to have the effect that not only (perceived) groups
of speakers, but also (perceived) ways of speaking are commonly “homogenized” and
essentialized ⫺ both by lay persons and linguists (for further discussions see, e.g., Le
Page 1977, 1988; Pratt 1987; Leung, Harris and Rampton 1997; Bucholtz 2003). Many
sociolinguists continue to work as if individual variation or intragroup variation is of
secondary importance (cf. Rampton 1997: 330; Wolfram and Thomas 2002: 160⫺165;
Wolfram 2007).
The language and space tie and the homogeneity assumption are coupled with the
tendency among both laymen and linguists to uncritically apply dichotomous categoriza-
tions of language users such as native/non-native speakers, first/second language users
and speakers/non-speakers (of language X) ⫺ implying that any individual is either a
native first language user or a non-native second language user, and that any individual
either speaks or does not speak language X. The default assumption is that individuals
are monolingual and that, if not, they are either balanced bilinguals (i. e., two monolin-
guals in one) or bilinguals with one language clearly dominant (i. e., monolinguals with
clear first and second languages). This monolingual bias or norm for linguistics has been
pointed out by many others before us (e.g., Cook 1992; Kachru 1994; Backus 1999;
Block 2003).
The tie between language and space disavows the realities of widespread and multifac-
eted multilingualism and the diversity of language practices involving multitudes of lan-
guages and varieties in “the same” or contiguous spaces, global interaction involved in
long distance travel or various forms of mass media and computer-mediated communica-
tion, similarities in patterns of variation over non-contiguous areas, and the transna-
tional nature of migrant languages and non-territorial minority languages, as well as the
sort of individual variation in micro-groups that Dorian (1994) among others has
studied. The dichotomies of nativeness fail to account for the linguistic realities of many
speakers, excluding forms of language competences and practices involving, e.g., partial
knowledge of languages (e.g., Dorian’s [1981] semi-speakers), code-switching, or the
mere use of a limited number of indexical words or phrases from another language for
various purposes usually studied with regard to the concept of identity (e.g., Childs and
Mallinson 2006).
All these, often implicit (and therefore potentially even more damaging), assumptions
have attracted increasing criticism for at least three decades. The criticism has in particu-
lar been rooted in experiences from multilingual practices and contexts, something which
to some extent might explain why it has not reached the linguistic society at large. But
even in countries like Sweden, where a monolingual ideology has been dominant for a
long time, things are changing. Today, the complex and diverse linguistic realities of, in
particular, young people of the modern multilingual city and the variation in the ways
languages are acquired and used forcefully challenge the language⫺space tie, the homo-
geneity assumption and the dichotomous notions connected with nativeness. This com-
plexity has also been the challenge of the Gothenburg-Lund-Stockholm project, Språk
och språkbruk bland ungdomar i flerspråkiga storstadsmiljöer (SUF) ‘Language and lan-
guage use among adolescents in multilingual urban settings’. The aim of the project,
which was funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, is to describe and
analyze language as it is used in such settings.
This article will briefly summarize some results and implications from five of the
sub-studies within the SUF project. It will describe where a journey starting with the
preconceived notion of a new variety of Swedish called Rinkeby Swedish (hereafter RS)
has taken members of this project. In this article, we will argue that while varieties such
as RS (here also used to refer to its equivalents in Gothenburg and Malmö) certainly
have a valid existence as social constructions (among lay people as well as linguists),
they cannot be adequately described as varieties in the traditional sense of a set of
linguistic features connected to a specific speech community (cf. Hudson 1996). Lan-
guage and language use (as well as speakers) in contemporary multilingual settings in
Sweden (and possibly elsewhere) exhibit a variation that we can only hope to be able to
account for by avoiding essentializing categorizations of speakers and their ways of
speaking, and by using an analysis integrating various linguistic, psycholinguistic and
sociolinguistic approaches.
2. Multilingual urban spaces in Sweden
After its long history as a country which sent migrants to other parts of the world,
Sweden has become a country which receives immigrants (cf. Statistics Sweden, <http://
www.scb.se>; Boyd 2001). Since the mid 1960s relatively large numbers of labor market
migrants, refugees and their families and adopted children have come to the country.
Sweden having no history of major colonies, its foreign-born population is unusually
diverse. Furthermore, the country of origin with the highest number of new arrivals
changes every few years in line with changing conditions in different parts of the world
and shifting immigration policies in Sweden. Currently, national groups from outside of
Europe dominate, particularly persons born in Iraq, but during the 1990s for example,
refugees from former Yugoslavia dominated the new arrivals.
Fluctuations of this kind in immigration to Sweden have resulted in a very diverse
population. In addition to historical minorities, ten percent of the total population and
twenty to thirty percent of the population of the three largest cities have a “foreign
background”, i. e., are either born abroad or are children of two parents born abroad.
The proportion of young people of school age with a foreign background (using this
definition) has recently been estimated to be fourteen percent in Sweden as a whole
(SOU 2008: 153).
New arrivals in Sweden tend to live in the three largest cities of Sweden, although
many refugees are at least initially directed to live in other municipalities. In the cities,
they typically settle in publicly owned apartments in neighborhoods on the outskirts
which were built in the 1960s or early 1970s. The populations of these suburbs include
not only new arrivals, but also earlier ones who have stayed in the area, as well as
working or lower class native-born persons and their families. The neighborhoods are
therefore quite diverse, typically lacking a single dominant national or ethnic origin
group; in other words, there are few, if any, “little Helsinkis”, “Bosnian neighborhoods”
or the like in Sweden. The number of heritage languages in neighborhood schools is
often claimed to be over 50 and may sometimes be as many as 100.
The majority of the young people studied in the SUF project grew up at least partly
in such settings. Primary and lower secondary public education is typically organized by
neighborhood, so the schools the young people have attended have also been diverse in
this respect. When our project was carried out, however, the young people studied were
attending upper secondary school, which in some cases implied that they had left their
neighborhoods to attend school with peers from other parts of the city. All schools
included not only a diversity of pupils of foreign background, but also pupils with a
monolingual Swedish background. In all three cities, attending upper secondary school
involved a broadening of the young people’s contacts with pupils from neighborhoods
and backgrounds other than their own. There were certainly strong similarities between
the spaces (neighborhoods and schools) the students had grown up in and the spaces
(i. e., upper secondary schools) they now moved in, even though the range of movement
for almost all students had increased significantly.
3. Some results rom the SUF project in Stockholm, Gothenburg

and Malmö
The overarching aim of the SUF project has been to describe, analyze and compare
language and language use among young people from multilingual urban settings in
Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, with a focus on the majority language, Swedish.
The sub-studies encompass analyses of phonetics and phonology, syntax, lexicogrammar
and pragmatics as well as of perceptions of varieties, identity development and ethno-
graphies of the negotiation of identity and power in the multilingual classroom (see
Källström and Lindberg to appear). The project staff consisted of two post-doctoral and
five senior researchers and several graduate students.
The participants in the project have been 222 young people from eight classes at eight
upper secondary schools. All classes but one followed the social science program, a
broad academic program which provides basic qualification for certain programs or
courses at university; this was chosen because it was offered at all the selected schools
and had a good balance of male and female students. The aim was to include schools
with differing proportions of pupils with foreign background; in the selected classes the
proportion varies between 33 and 100 percent. Almost three-fifths (59 percent) of all
participants were either themselves born abroad or both their parents were born abroad.
About thirty percent have no foreign background, while the remaining eleven percent
have one parent born abroad.
The project team gathered data from the young people in a wide variety of settings,
both in and outside of school. The participants were first interviewed by a researcher
about their backgrounds and language use, then recordings (the bulk of them audio)
were made of semi-directed and non-directed group discussions, individual presentations
to the class, and in a number of informal circumstances. Many informal recordings were
self-recordings, where the participants borrowed equipment and recorded themselves in
various everyday situations. The individual graduate students also made more directed
recordings, such as interviews, focus group discussions, film-retellings and picture series
descriptions, in order to elicit speech of a specific type for their particular research ques-
tions. Samples of the young people’s writing, in the form of the essay component of the
national examination in Swedish, have also been collected and analyzed.
Four of the sub-studies described below focus on different linguistic features that had
been observed to vary in the speech of young people in Sweden today. The features differ
with regard to their association with, on the one hand, alleged new varieties such as RS,
and/or, on the other hand, learner language. As will be shown, they represent all four
possible combinations of these associations. The fifth study investigates young people’s
perceptions of contemporary language variation, reflecting the diversity of social mean-
ings that are attributed to different ways of speaking.
3.1. Phonetic/phonological variation
In addressing the question of potentially conventionalized phonetic features of the lan-

guage of young people in multilingual urban spaces in Sweden, Petra Bodén (formerly
Hansson) carried out a preliminary series of listener tests (Hansson and Svensson 2004;
Bodén and Grosse 2006). The aim was to see if young people had similar ideas about
which of a number of selected speech samples could be labeled as examples of RS. The
speech samples were extracted from the total of about 300 hours of recordings in the
SUF project. Each listener group only listened to samples from their own city.
It turned out that young people in all three cities chose rather consistently between
“RS” and “not RS” for a number of the samples, although there was also some dis-
agreement between listeners. (As we will see in section 3.5, another sub-study indicates
that different listeners appear to apply these labels to rather different entities.) Interest-
ingly, different stimuli from the same speaker could be labeled differently, and the “RS”
label was not applied solely to the speech of young people with a foreign background
or of those who were active multilinguals, nor was the “not RS” label applied only to
monolingual young people with no foreign background. An interesting question is what
phonetic characteristics led most listeners to apply the RS label.
In her main study, Bodén carried out phonetic analyses of the speech samples iden-
tified by a majority of listeners as RS. Bodén found both segmental and prosodic fea-
tures characteristic of the identified samples. A segmental feature found to vary in all
three cities was the use of an affricate or a fricative in loan words such as checka ‘check
out’, chilla ‘chill out’ or names like Charles and Jesus. In standard Swedish phonology,
these affricates are typically replaced by simple fricatives, but in the speech samples
studied the young people sometimes used an affricate. Bodén could find no “foreign
accent” explanation for this replacement, as it occurred even among young people with-
out affricates in their heritage language.
Prosodic features that varied in the material for the listener test included the typical
Swedish stress pattern in phrases. In Swedish, the basic pattern is that the last content
word in a phrase receives the greatest prominence; occasionally, however, Bodén found
examples of phrases among young people from all three cities, where a non-content
word receives such prominence. In Malmö, this more consistent tendency for stress on
the last item in a phrase or sentence was coupled with a flat or slightly rising F0, where
the pattern for standard Swedish is a lowering of F0 through the sentence. This variation
in the basic F0 pattern was, however, not found in the other two cities. Bodén has
furthermore found many examples where young people use rising F0 within the stressed
syllable of a word to signal prominence, a feature which is unmarked in languages of
the world, but which is not used in most dialects of Swedish, restricted as it is by its
distinctive word accents. This final prosodic feature was found in recordings in all three
cities. These prosodic features help to contribute to the impression of a distinctive “stac-
cato” rhythm that the speech of some young people gives to listeners.
Bodén concludes that one segmental and several prosodic features of the language of
young people in these multilingual urban spaces can be found in all three cities; others
are specific to one city only. Thus, the speech recorded in multilingual urban spaces
shows both characteristics shared with other such spaces in the same country and charac-
teristics of the local environment, e.g., diphthongs in Malmö. Many listeners describe
the prosody as “bumpy” or “staccato”. Interestingly, similar terms have been used about
the prosody of Danish and German spoken in multilingual contexts in Copenhagen
(Quist 2000) and Berlin (Kern 2007), respectively, as well as in Nuuk-Danish (Jacobsen
2000, 2001). These similarities should be studied with care, in order to avoid hasty con-
clusions about prosodic features common to a certain type of contact variety and about
their possible sources, but the similarity in characterization is nonetheless interesting and
worth investigating further.
3.2. Instances o grammaticalization: san such, a sant and such

and helt totally
Lena Ekberg has carried out research within the SUF project on particular uses of three
lexical items that appear to be characteristic of the speech of some of the young people
in Malmö. One is the pronoun sån, a spoken form of the written form sådan ‘such (a)’,
which is beginning to acquire the functions of a determiner, specifically an indefinite
article. (Note that the names below and in other sub-studies of the project are pseud-
onyms).
(1) Gorda: nej de e sån journalfilm # sån färgfilm # ja # såna fem kakor
‘No, it’s such news film, such color movie, yes, such five cakes’
(Ekberg 2007: 52)
The second is the tag expression å sånt ‘and such’ (cf. English and stuff), an extremely
frequent discourse particle in the Malmö material, which also seems to be broadening
functionally to be not only a modifier, but also a terminal marker of reported speech or
a general boundary marker.
(2) Aurora: han ba kan du inte komma hit å sånt

‘He just [said] can’t you come here and stuff.’ (Ekberg 2007: 68)
The third is the adverb helt ‘totally’, which is beginning to be used as an emphasizer
also with unbounded adjectives, such as benig ‘boney’ and ful ‘ugly’.
(3) Jing: han var helt svettig

‘He was totally sweaty.’ (Ekberg 2007: 71)
The material Ekberg bases her (primarily cognitive semantic) analysis on consists of
recordings of two groups of girls who were close friends, from the project sample in
Malmö (see Svensson 2009: 90⫺94). The groups attend different schools in the city and
take two different programs of study. The four girls in one group (Cgr1) have a variety
of foreign backgrounds, are actively bilingual and are (based on information from in-
terviews and various other contacts with them) ambitious, good students; the three girls
in the other (Egr2) do not have foreign background, are monolingual and are not as
ambitious or interested in succeeding in school as the first group. The student body of
both classes includes students with foreign background to about the same degree (60 to
65 percent). All four of the students in the first group were included in Bodén’s listener
test (see section 3.3.1); two were judged by listeners to be “speakers of RS”, the third
not, and the fourth ended up in between. Stimuli from two of the girls in the second
group were also included in the listener test: both samples were considered “not RS”.
From a sociolinguistic viewpoint, what is interesting about Ekberg’s results is that
there is no indication of differing usage of the three lexical variables between the girls in
the two groups. The monolingual, less ambitious girls in the second group, who were
judged not to be speakers of RS, use the forms studied to the same degree as the multilin-
gual, ambitious girls (at least two of whom were judged to be speakers of RS) of the
first group. The variation does not therefore seem to be something particular to girls
with a foreign background or to a particular multiethnic style or variety, as some girls
were judged to be speakers of RS and others not.
Since all the speakers in this sub-study were girls attending schools in multilingual
environments in Malmö, and the material the study was based on was very informal
speech, further research is needed in order to find out to what extent this usage is found
among other young speakers in other places, for example, among boys and also in more
monolingual environments in general (as Ekberg believes might be the case), as well as
in more formal speech. Ekberg suggests that at least the second variable, å sånt, is prob-
ably a current, local Malmö phenomenon. Comparisons with data from other studies in
other parts of Sweden suggest that frequent use of this tag could be specific either to
Malmö, to more recent times, or to both (Ekberg 2007). Nevertheless, it is important to
note that we have here three variables whose use is partly local, perhaps more common
in casual speech and among girls, and possibly linked to multilingual environments in
Malmö but not specifically to multilingual speakers.
3.3. Variation in relexive/personal pronoun usage
Sofia Tingsell’s work (2007) with a sub-sample of young people from the full project
sample, as well as with a small sample of adults, has been on the use of reflexive versus
personal pronouns. Tingsell has based her findings primarily on directed speech and
writing tasks, which generate 35 to 40 examples per person. Variation in choice of pro-
nouns has existed in the language for some time and is described to some extent in the
literature of (native) Swedish linguistics (Teleman, Hellberg and Andersson 1999), but
Tingsell sees signs that the variation she has recorded involves relatively new contexts,
at least as compared with those described by Teleman and coauthors. Since it is a pattern
which is difficult for many learners, a connection with learner language must be consid-
ered. In contrast to the XSV word order studied by Ganuza (2008, see section 3.4), we
believe the choice of pronoun to have a relatively low salience, not being heavily stigma-
tized.
In Swedish, the basic pattern is that reflexive pronouns are used when possessive or
object pro-forms are coreferential with the subject within the same domain, usually the
same clause, as in (4):
(4) Anna gick på bio med sin (refl) bror.

‘Anna went to the movies with her (i. e., Anna’s) brother.’
When the pro-form is not coreferential with the subject in the same domain, a personal
pronoun is used, as in (5):
(5) Anna gick på bio med hennes (pers poss) bror.
‘Anna went to the movies with her (i. e., someone else’s) brother.’
In Tingsell’s material, a certain amount of variation or deviation from the norm as

described above occurred. In some of these cases (examples [6] and [7]), personal pro-
nouns were used instead of reflexive pronouns; in other contexts (example [8]), it was
the other way around.
(6) Interviewer: … vem tror du att hon e sur på?

‘… who do you think she’s mad at?’
B: på hennes (pers poss) mor
‘her mother’ (Tingsell 2007: 102)
(7) å så kollade hon i hennes ⫹ i hennes väska då
‘and then she checked in her (pers poss) ⫹ in her (pers poss) bag’
(Tingsell 2007: 100)
(8) Hon ger gubbeni sini plånbok och går hem.
‘She gives the guy his (refl) wallet and goes home.’
(Tingsell 2007: 96; written data)
Since the choice between reflexive and personal pronouns is a problem for learners of
Swedish, Tingsell tested the hypothesis that the variation would be related to the age at
which a young person began to acquire Swedish. It turned out, however, that the pattern
of variation was more complicated than that. The number of deviations from the norm
was relatively low overall, but variation occurred in the speech of a sizeable proportion
of (at least by heritage) monolingual young people as well as over half of the multilingual
young people (Tingsell 2007: 152). (Tingsell’s characterizations of participants as “mono-
lingual” or “multilingual” are based on analyses of several variables in the database.) At
the same time, 49 percent of the monolingual and 40 percent of the multilingual young
people had no such variation at all. Only a small number of young people produced
more than a few examples of deviant pronoun use. Although the proportion of devia-
tions was significantly higher among multilingual young people there was no such clear
effect for the variable “age of onset”, operationalized as the age the young person re-
ported having begun to learn Swedish. In an earlier paper (Fraurud and Boyd 2006), we
discuss some of the problems with operationalizing “age of onset” as well as with the
concept of nativeness as applied to young people such as those in this study.
Despite the connections of this kind of variation with multilingualism and learner
errors, this variable would seem not to be simply a feature of interlanguage. Rather, the
variation proved more significantly linked to the young people’s multilingualism and
social networks at the time of the study. There was for example a difference in the
amount of variation between young people who reported actively using their languages-
other-than-Swedish (at the time of the study) and those that did not; the former deviated
in the use to a slightly higher degree than the latter. An important factor, according to
Tingsell, seems to be the kind of micro-environment the individual young people can be
found in as well as their choice of social network. Her findings indicate that multilingual
young people in more “monolingual” schools (i. e., schools with fewer multilingual stu-
dents) vary less than their counterparts in more “multilingual” schools. There were also
interesting differences in the micro-environments of the monolingual young people. For
them, variation seemed to be unaffected by the proportion of young people in their
school with foreign background. However, the by heritage monolingual young people
who have multilingual friends and who speak languages-other-than-Swedish with their
friends vary more (i. e., follow the norm less closely) than monolingual young people
who do not. This would seem to indicate that going to the same school as other speakers
who vary their speech in this way isn’t sufficient; the young person also needs to socialize
with multilingual young people in order to have this resource at hand. It also suggests
a complex connection between this variable and multilingualism.
3.4. Variation in subject-verb word order
Natalia Ganuza’s work within the project has concerned a highly stigmatized syntactic
variable that is common in at least lower stages of Swedish as a second language, but
which also is commonly associated with the Swedish of multilingual young people more
generally: the XSV word order or “non-inversion” (Ganuza 2008).
Swedish is a typical V2 language, which requires that if a sentence begins with a
constituent other than the subject (e.g., an adverbial or a fronted object), the order of
subject and first auxiliary or main verb is inverted, here exemplified by the participant
Bushra:
(7) SVX order: han började springa du vet.

‘he started running you know.’ (Ganuza, pers. comm.)
(8) XVS order: så började han kuta.
‘then he started running.’ (lit.: ‘then started he running’)
(Ganuza, pers. comm.)
What are found in typical “learner Swedish” and variably in the Swedish of young people
in multilingual environments are constructions of the type XSV, as in this example from
the same participant:
(9) XSV order: å sen dom kutar ut

‘and then they run out’ (Ganuza, pers. comm.)
Ganuza analyzed both spoken and written data from one larger sub-sample comprising
126 participants, whose data include a film re-telling, a written essay and a grammatical-
ity judgment test, and a smaller sub-sample comprising 20 participants, who contributed
several additional data types for analysis, including self-recordings, group discussions
and presentations in class.
Contrary to her expectations, clear cases of XSV constructions such as the one in (9)
occur in only about four percent of possible environments (i. e., clauses with constituents
other than the subject in initial position) in her large sample. In the smaller sample,
which included more recordings from spontaneous speech, the proportion increased, but
only to ten percent.
The SV inversion rule (or V2 rule) constitutes a problem for learners of Swedish as
a second language. It is a very frequent construction, which is acquired early in L1
Swedish (Håkansson 1998). Håkansson (2003), using Pienemann’s processability hierar-
chy, considers mastery of the V2 rule as an important milestone in acquisition of Swedish
as a second language. That this variable originates in learner Swedish seems unquestion-
able, a conclusion supported by the fact that similar variable word orders are characteris-
tic of the V2 languages Norwegian and Danish of young speakers in multilingual settings
in Oslo and Køge (outside Copenhagen) (Aasheim 1997; Quist 2000).
It is interesting to note that XSV word order, which is used extremely frequently in
literary versions or stylizations of these varieties ⫺ cf. Källström’s (2003, 2005) studies
within the SUF project ⫺ and in various attempts to re-create it in other forms of art
and entertainment, occurs to such a limited extent in our corpus. Even the most consis-
tent users of XSV word order in Ganuza’s small sample use it less often than the stan-
dard XVS order. However, when discussing RS, some of the young people in the Malmö
sample exemplified the variety using a sentence with this distinctive word order (as well
as a distinctive prosody). In other words, despite its low frequency in our corpus, the
feature has high salience and is strongly associated with these perceived varieties.
The rate of inversion or non-inversion turns out to covary with a number of con-
straints, both internal and external. The internal constraints include the length and type
of the fronted constituent. For example, the adverbials sen ‘then/after that’ and då ‘then/
at that time’, frequent connectors in narratives, tend to favor non-inversion more than
other adverbials ⫺ at least for some speakers in some situations, but non-inversion also
occurs with (the less frequent) fronted subclauses and prepositional phrases.
In addition to the internal factors, there are a large number of external constraints
that appear to be in operation. Although XSV word order, like pronoun choice, would
seem to have its origin in interlanguage, there turned out to be no clear relationship
between this variable and age at which the young people began to acquire or learn
Swedish (“age of onset”). The more frequent users of XSV did not differ significantly
from those who never used it in terms of the age at which they report having begun to
learn Swedish; further, some young people with a monolingual Swedish background did
use the feature. Looking at the results from a geographical perspective, the proportion
of inversion did not differ significantly between the three cities. If one looks at the results
on an individual level, however, it turns out that a few young people in the Stockholm
sample have relatively many XSV sentences compared to the rest of the project sample
as a whole. Still, the similarities in the pattern of variation among the three cities are
greater than the differences, although there are also indications that link this variation
particularly to Stockholm. It was difficult to isolate a category of young people who
would be likely to be frequent users of XSV.
Even more interesting for our purposes here are a number of important factors that
seem to have to do with the immediate context of the speech situation. Ganuza has
shown that speakers who otherwise tend to follow the V2 rule consistently can use XSV
if they are talking in a group with one or more speakers who more frequently use this
word order or when the conversation is about certain topics, such as in group discussions
about a literary text partly using features associated with RS. The number of non-inver-
sions also tends to increase when the style is very involved or the speaker holds the floor
for a longer period, e.g., with a narrative. Male speakers use non-inversions slightly
more often than female speakers, but the difference is not significant; both sexes use
non-inversion and one of the female speakers, Bushra, is among those with the highest
number of non-inversions. Ganuza finds those speakers with a strong identification with
their neighborhood and the language use of their communities tend to non-invert some-
what more often.
These observations might lead a traditional variationist to consider XSV to be a
feature of the vernacular of these young people, quite simply, when speakers pay minimal
attention to how they speak (Labov 1972). But to Ganuza and to us, the pattern of
variation in word order seems instead to be a resource actively used by young people to
create a certain style of speech, which expresses solidarity, strong identification with
one’s own community and one’s multilingual network. But even here, there is not a
simple relationship between use of the variable and a particular meaning. The meaning
attached to it also seems to vary with the particular situation in which the XSV variable
is used (cf. Auer 2005). Like the non-standard pronouns studied by Tingsell, XSV word
order seems to be used sparingly in very specific contexts by young people in all three
cities (indeed, in similar contexts, even in other Scandinavian countries). Unlike Ting-
sell’s pronouns, this feature is, as noted, strongly stigmatized.
3.5. Perceptions o variation within the linguistic space o young people

rom Stockholm
As may already be evident from the brief reports of some results from four of the SUF
sub-studies, much of the linguistic variation found in contemporary multilingual
contexts cannot be accounted for simply in terms of new varieties or language acquisi-
tion. Still, reified entities such as RS play an important role in people’s thinking and in
debates about language and education. This is the focus of another sub-study within the
SUF project. In an on-going series of listener experiments, Ellen Bijvoet and Kari
Fraurud investigate lay peoples’ perceptions and constructions of young Stockholmers’
ways of speaking (Bijvoet and Fraurud 2008, to appear). Their main research question
is how people of different linguistic and social backgrounds conceptualize the linguistic
space of (young) Stockholm, e.g., how language users with different sociolinguistic expe-
riences divide this linguistic space, as reflected both in their labeling and description of
different ways of speaking and in their attitudes towards speakers. An important point of
departure for this series of studies was the observation ⫺ from interviews and informal
discussions as well as from media discourse ⫺ that labels such as RS have very different
extensions and connotations for different language users (including linguists). This obser-
vation is the reason for the exploratory nature of the experiments and motivated a choice
of open questions about labeling and descriptions of the speech stimuli (rather than
multiple choice or yes/no- questions).
The results reported here come from a pilot study conducted within the SUF project,
and involve some of the participants in the Stockholm part of the project as speakers or
listeners. Seven speech stimuli of about 30 seconds were judged by several listener groups
with different backgrounds, two of which are focused on here: (i) sixteen participants in
the larger project, adolescents attending a suburban senior high school with a large
proportion of bilingual students (BIL); and (ii) 24 monolingual first-year language stu-
dents at Stockholm University of a median age of 28 (MON). Subjects listened to the
speech samples and were asked to judge the speakers using semantic differential scales
and to label and describe the speech samples and make guesses about the speakers’
background (place of residence in Stockholm, length of residence in Sweden and
mother tongue).
The open question about how the listeners label the various ways of speaking pro-
duced a wide diversity of labels and characterizations, the well-known label RS being
only one of numerous suggestions. What interests us here is the way this label is applied
very differently by different listeners, i. e., to how many and which of the speech samples
it was applied. The speech samples that most frequently attracted the RS label come
from two girls in lively discussions with their friends. But, rather than only considering
these conceived “typical cases” of RS, it is instructive to compare listeners’ labeling of
two of the speakers for whom listeners diverge most: Bobby and Ashur, who were very
dissimilar from each other in background and lifestyle or attitude. Bobby came to Swe-
den at the age of 15. He is an ambitious learner of “proper” Swedish with a negative
attitude towards RS, which for him represents “bad” language mainly because it includes
slang words, so he tries to avoid using it. Ashur is born in Sweden and was pointed out
by classmates as a proficient speaker of RS. But in this particular speech sample he gives
a presentation in class demonstrating his high proficiency in Swedish along with certain
non-standard features mainly at the phonetic level.
Despite the differences between these two speech samples, both are labeled RS by
some listeners. One listener considers Bobby’s speech to be RS “proper” (in contrast to
other speakers’ label of RS “light”), while another remarks that his use of RS is “uncon-
scious”. That Ashur’s way of speaking is not always seen as typical RS is acknowledged
by modifications such as in “intellectual” RS, but it is nevertheless still RS for listeners
who use such modifications. Not too surprisingly, the tendency for such broader con-
structions of RS is stronger among the listeners in the MON group, with less experience
of multilingual contexts. Listeners in the BIL group tend to use the label RS more re-
strictively. First, they more often distinguish RS from “broken”, “learner”, “new arrival”
or “immigrant” Swedish, here represented by Bobby ⫺ thus discriminating between (in-
voluntary) learner language and the (voluntary) use of linguistic features associated with
multilingual youth. Secondly, Ashur’s speech is more often characterized as ordinary or
good Swedish, e.g., “Standard Swedish; ‘normal’ pronunciation etc.”, “Stockholmian;
he tries to speak clear Swedish without using slang words” (in sharp contrast to one of
the MON listeners’ characterization of Ashur’s speech as “immigrant Swedish; strong
accent, large vocabulary but [it is] used ‘incorrectly’ according to the Swedish standard
model”).
Similar lines of differences between the two listener groups in dividing up examples
drawn from the linguistic space of (young) Stockholm can be seen in the data from other
parts of the study as well. But there was also divergence within each listener group that
might be attributed to individual preferences and attitudes towards language use, as well
as different degrees of mobility in the city.
The results suggest the existence of many diverse constructions of different ways of
speaking associated with different combinations of geographical, social, age related and
ethnic spaces ⫺ and sometimes with particular speech practices within these spaces. The
label RS is for example alternatively tied to multilingual suburbs, immigrants, learners,
youth, informality, intimacy and humor, or a combination of some of these elements.
When it comes to the guesses about where in Stockholm the speakers live, however,
listeners tended to show a higher degree of agreement, although somewhat modified by
their different local experiences. The results of this pilot study thus offer an empirical
illustration both of the notion that varieties/languages are social constructions that ⫺
albeit to different degrees ⫺ may take different shapes for different language users as
well as linguists, and also illustrate our contention in the introduction to this article that
lay people (and linguists?) are inclined to identify a speech sample with a place, such as
in our case the well-known multilingual suburb of Rinkeby.
4. Discussion
Sociolinguistics and dialectology strive to describe and analyze variation in language

within and across various social settings or spaces. Traditionally, sociolinguistics has
focused on urban settings and vertical variation and change, dialectology on rural set-
tings and horizontal variation and change. Both strands of research tend to concentrate
their studies on monolingual speakers of (varieties of) the majority language of the
country or region under study, commonly excluding speakers considered non-native
from the sample. (In his classic study of language variation in New York City, Labov
[1966: 174⫺175, 187⫺188] excluded nearly half of his original random sample of Lower
East Side residents on the grounds that they were not clearly native speakers of English).
Multilingualism, both as a social and psychological phenomenon, has traditionally been
treated separately ⫺ primarily in studies of language maintenance and shift (e.g., Fish-
man, Cooper and Ma 1971), language contact and change (e.g., Thomason 2001) and
second language acquisition (SLA, e.g., Doughty and Long 2003).
The homogeneity assumption and the related language⫺space tie and dichotomies of
nativeness criticized in the introduction to this article are deeply rooted, even within
fields of linguistics devoted to the study of heterogeneity. Despite the existence of both
early and more recent critical work within these and neighboring fields, we believe that
the influence of classical studies such as those of Labov (1966) and Fishman, Cooper
and Ma (1971) is still strong in much contemporary research ⫺ including at least the
early stages of the SUF project reported here. Speakers in multilingual urban spaces
have often either been excluded from samples of informants as non-native or non-au-
thentic speakers, or studied solely in ascribed roles such as language shifters, language
learners, or speakers of alleged new varieties of majority languages. These roles tend
to be contrasted with native speakers as norms or controls. (Conversely, in studies of
multilingualism, individuals assumed to be monolingual native speakers tend to be either
excluded or used as a control group.)
The importance of handling such essentializing categorizations of speakers with care

was emphasized in an earlier sub-study in the SUF project, based on analyses of the
background interviews (Fraurud and Boyd 2006). This study clearly showed that a large
majority of the 222 participants did not fit neatly into dichotomous categorizations such
as native/non-native speakers or first/second language users. Most of these young people
are in a broad sense multilingual in terms of both their background and their language
proficiency and language use, but few of them would, according to prevailing definitions,
qualify as native speakers of Swedish nor of their heritage language, nor would they be
considered typical non-native speakers or learners. This observation is in itself an impor-
tant challenge to paradigms presupposing comparison between learners, shifters or bilin-
guals and a native control group. In the SUF project, the results of our studies led us
to begin to see the variables associated with nativeness as parameters that did not neces-
sarily have the expected effects on the language variation studied. It turned out that for
several of the studies within the project it did not make sense to conceive of a selected
group of “native” participants as a “control group”. Neither was it possible to isolate a
number of homogeneous groups within a “non-native” segment of our sample.
The different sub-studies of the SUF project each contribute a piece of insight into
the overall picture of language and language use among young people in contemporary
Swedish urban spaces. In addition, an evaluation of both the results of these studies and
the journeys that the individual researchers and students have made during their research
can also be instructive for an assessment of what theoretical and methodological frame-
works suggested by earlier studies of language and language use have had to offer in
relation to these multilingual contexts.
When the SUF project was initiated in 1999⫺2000, previous studies of the language
and language use of young people similar to those in our project had either taken an
psycholinguistic/SLA perspective, focusing on advanced or near-native second language
use of Swedish (e.g., Stroud 1988; Hyltenstam 1992; Ekberg 1997), or a descriptive one,
focusing on alleged new ”foreign sounding” varieties of Swedish not necessarily spoken
only by young people with immigrant background (e.g., Kotsinas 1988, 2000). Both of
these perspectives were also present at the outset of SUF, but most of the project mem-
bers felt a need after a time to integrate several approaches, in some cases also including
folk linguistic or ethnographic ones.
Four of the sub-studies of contemporary language variation briefly described above
focused on particular features at different linguistic levels, examining how these variable
features are located in time and space. Even these brief glimpses may provide at least
an impression of the complexity of the variation found.
As mentioned, the features studied represent four different possible combinations of
associations with alleged new varieties and/or learner language. Both the word-order
(section 3.4) and the phonetic features studied (section 3.1) are ⫺ in contrast to the other
features ⫺ highly stigmatized and indexical of “foreign-sounding Swedish”, often labeled
RS. Variation in word order, as well as in pronoun choice (section 3.3), is also found in
second language acquisition, which is not the case with the other features studied. The
grammaticalized lexical items (section 3.2) cannot be connected with either perceived
new varieties or learner language.
As regards variation in space, some linguistic features turned out to be confined to
“micro” or local spaces, others appear at a national level (although with possible differ-
ences in frequencies in different cities), and some might even be perceived as having
transnational character (although we do not yet know enough to be able to distinguish

structurally motivated similarities from contact phenomena possibly conveyed by
media).
As regards variation related to parameters associated with nativeness, none of the
features could be ascribed solely to language acquisition, and no features were found
exclusively among young people with multilingual backgrounds, or exclusively in multi-
lingual settings ⫺ although all these factors influenced the frequencies of use of some fea-
tures.
It is furthermore important to note that even linguistic features with a similar (if not
identical) distribution in our sample may have widely differing meaning potentials and
are likely to be more or less available as resources for speakers and listeners due to,
among other things, different degrees of salience. For all the linguistic features studied
there was also a considerable intra-individual variation, affected by a number of socio-
pragmatic factors in ways that we have only begun to understand.
Importantly, the linguistic variation found among the young people in the SUF pro-
ject cannot be reduced to manifestations of near-nativeness, nor could it adequately be
accounted for in terms of homogeneous and delimited speech communities or varieties.
The latter conclusion is further emphasized by the fifth sub-study described above, delin-
eating the widely diverging constructions of speech communities and language varieties
among language users. For example, while some listeners distinguish RS from learner
language, others perceive all foreign-sounding Swedish as one and the same thing, RS. In
fact, for a speaker to be judged to speak RS, just one manifestation of a single salient
stigmatized feature (e.g., use of certain slang words, “staccato” prosody, non-inversion),
or some other “foreign-sounding” feature, or even just careless speech may suffice.
To the extent that, in working with our data, we need to speak in terms of language
varieties (or styles or practices), we believe that these notions can best be approached as
social constructions conceptualized as “pools” of linguistic resources (cf. Eckert 2000),
which are employed to different extents by different speakers in different situations for
different purposes and that are accessible at different levels of awareness.
This said about the need to acknowledge heterogeneity among speakers and in their
language, we want to add a word about the need also to recognize a pragmatic and
political aspect of language discourses. While criticizing the essentialization of speech
communities and language varieties, Bucholtz (2003) suggests that a total rejection of
essentialism is not always desirable. Despite her criticism, Bucholtz suggests that strate-
gic essentialism can function as an important intellectual and social tool in certain
contexts and at certain points in time, in particular ”when the group under study is seen
by the dominant groups as illegitimate or trivial, or when a stigmatized group forms an
oppositional identity to counter such negative ideologies” (Bucholtz 2003: 400⫺401).
The Swedish linguist Ulla-Britt Kotsinas’ “defense” ⫺ which she has advanced since the
1980s ⫺ of RS as a youth language rather than as some popular opinion would have it,
just “bad” Swedish, is perhaps an illustration of this dilemma. Given the potential intel-
lectual and social usefulness of strategic essentialism, many researchers studying new
ways of speaking may feel the need to use various descriptive labels such as “multiethno-
lect” (Quist 2000), “multiethnic youth language” (Fraurud and Bijvoet 2004) or “subur-
ban slang” (Bijvoet and Fraurud 2006). But, again, it is important to remember that,
when using the tool of strategic essentialism, “researchers must remain mindful of the
assumptions it brings along with it concerning ‘real’ language and ‘authentic’ speakers”
(Bucholtz 2003: 403, cf. also Auer 2005; Jaspers 2007; Wolfram 2007: 16). We now be-
lieve we have good reason to be very restrictive and aware if and when using strategic
essentialism in talking about the language of young people in these environments. Nei-
ther the groups of speakers nor the variation fulfill the criteria required by the traditional
notions of speech community and language variety. To continue to talk about a category
of young people (however defined) using a particular variety (however described) tends
to reify their ways of speaking, hiding important complexity.
5. Conclusions
We would like to conclude by making three specific practical points about the sampling
and methods used in the SUF project, which have helped us approach the complexity
of our object of study.
First, the sample of participants is all-inclusive; in our case a cluster sample consisting
of all (willing) students in the selected school classes. We did not select or exclude indi-
viduals according to (often dubious and always difficult) distinctions such as monolin-
gual/multilingual and/or first/second language speakers of Swedish; neither did the no-
tion of a control group make sense in our study. It should however be noted that our
participants do not constitute a random sample of young people in the cities as a whole,
nor in the selected schools or their neighborhoods. The choice of schools and of the
program of study were made in order to increase comparability between cities, not to
provide the possibility for broad generalizations about the language of various categories
of young people in Sweden.
Second, our database includes a broad range of settings for recording the young peo-
ple and a number of different genres, both spoken and written. No particular style of
speech is assumed beforehand to be more authentic or genuine than another (cf.
Bucholtz 2003, Eckert 2003). Furthermore, we expected there to be interesting and im-
portant style shifting in the young people’s language in different situations, and we were
also curious as to the relationship between the use of the perceived spoken varieties such
as RS and contemporary literary versions or stylizations of it (see Källström 2003, 2005).
Our assumption that important differences exist between the spoken languages of these
urban settings and the literary versions or stylizations was borne out.
Third, a multi-methodological approach was employed, motivated both by the com-
plexity of our object of study and the exploratory character of much of our research.
Some of us used rather traditional sociolinguistic and sociophonetic methods, others
followed more closely methods used within second language studies, or analyzed tran-
scriptions with the help of functional grammar or cognitive semantic approaches; one
of the graduate students carried out an ethnographic study, etc. Both quantitative and
qualitative methods have been used, sometimes by the same researcher. At least some of
this variety in approach may reflect the fact that we had somewhat different ideas about
what the object of study was when we started out. Importantly, we believe that all the
project members have benefited from working in a context where several different ap-
proaches were represented.
We hope to have shown that the complexity of the linguistic practices among young
people in contemporary multilingual urban spaces invites a number of different research
approaches, all possibly contributing to but not providing the whole picture. We are
reminded of the saying “as the question, so the answer”. If you approach contemporary
urban spaces as a sociolinguist looking for variation along class lines, you will find social
stratification (among the informants not excluded from your sample for being “non-
natives”). If you are interested in on-going language change as reflected in contemporary
language variation (possibly more vivid in multilingual contexts), you are likely to find
some tendencies toward that. If you approach it as a sociologist of language, you see
“second generation immigrants” carrying out language shift. If you approach it as an
SLA researcher, you see second language learners at different levels of proficiency. If
you are looking for young people’s language or slang, you’ll find evidence for that as
well. We believe that all of these aspects, and perhaps more, are notable in the language
of these young people. To put a single label on these linguistic practices, however, essen-
tializes both the language and the speakers, and simplifies their complex linguistic reali-
ties. A multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches will be necessary to do
justice to the linguistic experiences of these young people we would like to argue.
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39. Variety complexes in contact: A study

on Uruguayan and Brazilian Fronterizo
1. Introduction: Language contact in pluridimensional dialectology
2. A short history of studies on Uruguayan and Brazilian Fronterizo
3. A schematic view of the variety complexes entering into contact
4. Some characteristics of our pluridimensional cartography
5. Conservatism in the Fronterizo varieties
6. Innovations
7. Conclusion
8. References
1. Introduction: Language contact in pluridimensional dialectology
Pluridimensional dialectology (explained in more detail in Lameli in this handbook)

means not only the methodological fusion of traditional dialectology and sociolinguistic
principles. It additionally involves aspects and techniques of language contact analysis.
This expansion seems particularly necessary in the New World, where the linguistic land-
scape has, since the arrival of the Europeans, been shaped by manifold contacts between
cultures and languages. Unlike classic studies on linguistic contact (like Weinreich 1970),
which tend to reduce the contact configuration to the mutual influence of two languages
considered as homogeneous systems, we propose analyzing the contact configuration as
an approximation of two or more variety complexes, each of them an architecture of
more than one more-or-less homogenous system (see Coşeriu 1967). The following sur-
vey is intended to demonstrate the utility of this complex approach in the case of Portu-
guese varieties spoken on both sides of the border separating Uruguay and Brazil.
39. Variety complexes in contact 707
2. A short history o studies on Uruguayan and

Brazilian Fronterizo
Northern Uruguay, which makes up nearly a third of the national territory, is a bilingual
zone in which Portuguese varieties are spoken together with Spanish. The bilingualism
is nowadays collective and unidirectional. This means that nearly all speakers whose
mother tongue is Portuguese are also relatively competent in Spanish, but there are
many speakers of Spanish who do not speak Portuguese (although the proximity of the
two languages means a basic, passive comprehension is possible). During the investiga-
tions for our linguistic atlas of Uruguay between 1989 and 1992: we found only one
Portuguese-speaking informant who declared that “unfortunately” he did not speak the
language of his country, i. e., Spanish. In Uruguay, Portuguese is principally an oral
variety, traditionally banned from schools and spoken mostly by the lower classes. On
the other side of the frontier, the situation is different. No compact Spanish-speaking
community exists in southern Rio Grande do Sul and hence a corresponding collective
bilingualism is not found, only speakers of Portuguese varieties ⫺ Portuguese being, of
course, the language taught in Brazilian schools.
Lusophone zones beyond the borders of Brazil exist in many neighboring countries.
The Portuguese-speaking region in northern Uruguay is probably the oldest and the
most stable of these. Furthermore, it seems that Portuguese and then Brazilian settlement
preceded Spanish and Uruguayan population of the zone.
It is northern Uruguay, too, which has been studied more intensely in terms of linguis-
tic aspects than the other frontier zones. The first systematic and the most influential
study is that of the Uruguayan linguist José Pedro Rona, who published a small mono-
graph entitled El dialecto >fronterizo< del Norte del Uruguay in 1965 (based on a paper
presented at a conference in Salvador da Bahı́a in 1959). The results from this study
have entered the manuals of Hispanic and Romance Studies, together with its empirical
limitations and interpretative errors. In Rona’s eyes, this frontier dialect (“dialecto front-
erizo”) is essentially the product of a mixture of the Castilian spoken in Uruguay and
the Portuguese spoken in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The charac-
terization of this mixture as “chaotic” and “instable” does not prevent Rona from subdi-
viding it into two principal dialects, one with a Portuguese base, the other with a Spanish
one. Each of them is made up of four subdialects. The phonological systems that Rona
attributes to each variety are the manifestations of an internal contradiction. Further-
more, they seem to be structuralist constructions rather than the results of solid data.
Rona’s method of investigation was correspondence; his material has been lost. For
almost thirty years his work restricted linguists’ attention to the perspective of mixture.
This orientation did not change even when sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and ap-
plied linguistics (concerned with alphabetization problems in northern Uruguay) entered
the scene. Fritz Hensey (1972), who reexamined Rona’s data from a generativist trans-
formational perspective, focused like his precursor on the aspect of mixture. This is also
true of the numerous studies by Adolfo Elizaincı́n, which show a strong interest in the
consequences of mixture in Uruguayan schools. In his monograph Dialectos en contacto,
Elizaincı́n (1992, see also Elizaincı́n, Behares and Barrios 1987) develops an interesting
method in order to predict the degree of mixture in the localities he studied empirically.
But this method fails to avoid the following interpretative pitfall: experience shows that
the responses of northern Uruguayan informants depend on the stimulus. Because Span-
ish is the language used with strangers, the first reaction is usually an answer in Spanish,
mixed of course with Portuguese elements. To take these mixed Spanish/Portuguese ut-
terances for the Portuguese variety used in internal communication would be an error.
It is necessary to give stimuli in Portuguese with great insistence in order to position the
informant in a context more likely to evoke his or her mother tongue.
The investigations conducted within the Uruguayan-German project, the Atlas lingüı́-
stico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (ADDU and ADDU-Norte), directed by Thun
and Elizaincı́n (2000a, 2000b), offered the possibility of a more comprehensive view of
the linguistic situation. This involved the abandonment of the exclusively mixture-fo-
cused perspective and openness for the independent characteristics of the northern Uru-
guayan varieties.
As for the Brazilian side of the frontier, there is only one monograph dedicated to
the linguistic situation (Blaser 1995). There is no generally accepted name for the Uru-
guayan and Brazilian frontier varieties. In order to avoid terms used only locally (like
Carimbão, of unclear origin) or negative names (like Portuñol, a blend of Português and
Español ), we will use the neutral denomination Uruguayan and Brazilian Fronterizo
(from frontera ‘frontier’), which is not unknown in the zone. The speakers themselves
name their variety Português or Brasileiro, adding specifications like fronteiriço or da
fronteira (‘of the frontier’; see Blaser 2003).
3. A schematic view o the variety complexes entering

into contact
On the Spanish side, we have to distinguish at least three varieties: Uruguayan Spanish
(also known as Castellano), Uruguayan Popular Substandard and Uruguayan Rural
Substandard. Uruguayan Spanish is somewhat vaguely defined because it lacks a com-
monly accepted codification. The Peninsular Spanish Standard is still present in school
teaching, although more in precepts than in real speech. As there is no direct connection
between the north Uruguayan varieties and the Peninsular Standard, we do not include
a separate category for this Standard and instead identify potential correspondences
under the Uruguayan Standard, which is thought to be the transmitter in modern times.
This does not exclude the possibility that users, dependent upon their level of formal
education, occasionally refer to the Peninsular Castilian norm or to the Brazilian or
even Portuguese lı́ngua padrão. The Brazilian Standard enjoys the benefit of being more
Tab. 39.1: A schematic overview of the variety complexes entering into contact
Spanish Fronterizos Portuguese
Uruguayan Spanish Brazilian Standard
(“lı́ngua padrão”)
Uruguayan Fronterizo Brazilian Fronterizo
Uruguayan Popular (1. Proximate zone) Brazilian Popular
Substandard (2. Remote zone) Substandard
Uruguayan Rural Riograndense
Substandard Substandard
rigorously codified than Uruguayan Spanish. It is, of course, present in the frontier zone,
through its domains of the school and the media. As with Spanish, we distinguish three
varieties on the Portuguese side as well. Table 39.1 offers an overview.
4. Some characteristics o our pluridimensional cartography

In addition to the traditional areal distribution of the points of inquiry (“diatopical
dimension”), in our standard pluridimensional maps we add two more dimensions: the
diagenerational and the diastratic. The first contrasts younger informants (18⫺36
years ⫽ GI [“generation I”]) with older ones (60 years old and over ⫽ GII [“generation
II”]), the second contrasts informants with less formal education (from the illiterate to
those who finished nine years of school ⫽ Cb [“clase baja” ‘lower sociocultural class’ )
with better educated informants (from secondary school to university ⫽ Ca [“clase alta”
‘higher sociocultural class’]). The two dimensions are combined and represented in a
cross, with the upper section reserved for the higher sociocultural class, the lower for
the lower sociocultural class and the left section for the elder, the right section for the
younger generation:
CaGII CaGI
CbGII CbGI
So, CaGII means higher sociocultural group, older generation; CbGI is lower sociocultu-
ral group, younger generation. As a rule, we add statistics to our maps. In the examples
provided here, we have refrained from reproducing the informants’ commentaries and
linguists’ observations which usually accompany the maps in our atlas.
5. Preservation in the Fronterizo varieties
5.1. Where Uruguayan Fronterizo is more conservative than

Brazilian Fronterizo
The Portuguese Fronterizo of northern Uruguay is an uninterrupted continuation of the

linguistic and cultural Brazilian “lusitanidade” in Uruguayan political territory. In terms
of classic linguistic geography, we can say that this zone fits into the areal typology
described by Bartoli (1945). In relation to the very distant centers of innovation of the
great Brazilian cities on the Atlantic coast, northern Uruguay can be considered a “lat-
eral area”, as is confirmed by the characteristic preservation of older forms that are
obsolete in the more dynamic central varieties. This may be demonstrated using a pho-
netic example taken from the consonantal domain.
Map 39.1 shows the treatment of final -l (“implosive l” at the close of a syllable or
word) in words like alguém ‘someone’, salvo ‘save, except’, lençol ‘sheet’ or anel ‘ring’.
Twenty-one words with final -l appear in the “Parable of the Lost Son” text that our
informants were asked to read in order to realize the “lecture style” within our diaphasic
Map 39.1: Implosive -l, from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (Norte)
program. The other two styles were free or directed conversation and the responses to
the long list of questions contained in the questionnaire. The map shows a clear contrast
between Brazil and Uruguay. In our Brazilian area, 26 of the 27 groups distributed
among the eleven survey locations realize the final -l at the back of the mouth, only one
group of informants (BC1) at the front. Six groups from the majority vocalize the final
-l, eleven velarize it and nine show a semi-velarization. In Uruguay, on the contrary,
only two of the thirty-nine groups manifest vocalization, two other groups exhibit velar-
ization, fifteen semi-velarization and twenty, i. e., the majority, retain the anterior articu-
lation (palatal or prepalatal). Vocalization is generally progressive in Brazilian Portu-
guese; velarization is still very common in Riograndense Regional Portuguese (Riogran-
dense Substandard). Our map thus reflects a very characteristic pattern of graduation:
Brazilian Fronterizo is more conservative than the rest of the Riograndense Substan-
dard; Uruguayan Fronterizo is even more conservative than its Brazilian counterpart.
5.2. Bipartition o Uruguayan Fronterizo due to conservatism

in the remote zone
Remaining with the areal dimension, there is, furthermore, clear evidence that Uru-
guayan Fronterizo can be divided into two. The “proximate zone” has adopted the back
articulation of -l, while the “remote zone” overwhelmingly retains the frontal pronuncia-
tion. The diatopic dimension of our pluridimensional program already enables us to
classify the posterior articulation as the result of a process of innovation which has
spread from a remote innovative center in Brazil, reached and crossed the political
boundary, but then lost force and failed to make the distant reaches of the Uruguayan
lusitanidade. This conclusion is confirmed by the diagenerational dimension. In both
Brazilian and Uruguayan Fronterizo, posterior articulations are more frequent among
the younger generation than among the older. Thus, “apparent time” (Labov 1994), also
provides evidence of innovation.
As our topic here is conservatism, we should point out that there is a massive block
of retained older forms underlying the innovation zone and emerging into daylight in
the remote zone of Uruguayan Fronterizo. In Peninsular Portuguese, velarization of the
-l is the rule. It is presumed, moreover, that the Portuguese varieties exported to Brazil
from the sixteenth century on were velarizing ones. The results from our “lateral area”
indicate that this opinion must be revised (for a more detailed discussion see Thun 2000).
5.3. Conservatism in both Fronterizos
5.3.1. Phonetics
Conservatism in the vocalic domain may be illustrated by the maintenance of the diph-
thong [ou] and even [oi] in words like tesoura ‘scissors’, documented in Map 39.2, which
is based on the response data. Reduction of this diphthong to the closed and sometimes
Map 39.2: Phonetic map: tesoura ‘scissors’, from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del
Uruguay (Norte)
lengthened vowel [oø ] is common in Portugal and Brazil. As can be seen, the diphthong
is well-preserved all over our territory, although not with identical vigor. The older gener-
ation of the socioculturally upper class retain the diphthong without exception and it is
still the principal form among the corresponding younger generation (CaGI). In the
socioculturally lower class, the monophthong clearly prevails among the older genera-
tion (CbGII), whereas the younger generation (CbGI) exhibit results similar to those
from the equivalent upper-class generation. This seems to indicate, in the intergenera-
tional succession, a restorative impulse favoring the more traditional diphthong pronun-
ciation.
5.3.2. Grammar and pragmatics
Both Brazilian and Uruguayan Fronterizo preserve, albeit with a clear tendency to give
it up, consigo ‘with you’ in non-reflexive, formal, distant and polite use. This form is
usual in Portugal, but rare and even criticized as incorrect in Brazil. Map 39.3, based on
the construction O doutor quer que eu vá consigo ao hospital? (roughly ‘Do you want,
doctor, that I go with yourself to the hospital?’), shows that nine of our forty-nine groups
still continue to use this construction, fifteen groups accept it, whereas a narrow majority
of twenty-five groups reject it (preferring constructions like com o senhor, roughly ‘with
the Sir’). The diatopical dimension does not indicate a clear areal distribution. This
argues against the possible influence of Castilian, where this construction is unknown.
Map 39.3: Use of consigo, from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (Norte)
Formal allocutive consigo is clearly a regressive construction. The histogram gives evi-
dence that not even among the older upper-class group (CaGII) do a clear majority use
it. In the other three groups, consigo is a minority choice, even taking into consideration
significant levels of use or acceptance. The diagenerational dimension nevertheless allows
the conclusion to be drawn that formal allocutive consigo is in the process of falling
into disuse.
5.4. Where Brazilian Fronterizo is more conservative than

Uruguayan Fronterizo
Map 39.4, which is complementary to Map 39.3, does not authorize the conclusion that
consigo, while losing its formal, nonreflexive use, finds refuge in reflexive constructions.
Like Portuguese and Castilian as popularly spoken, but progressively in other varieties
too, and like other Romance languages (the evolution from avec soi to avec lui has been
completed in French), Brazilian and Uruguayan Fronterizo are shifting to a preferential
use of the nonreflexive form in prepositional third-person constructions (com ele, not
consigo in O João levou o livro com ele ‘John took the book with him’, not ‘with himself’).
Nevertheless, and in spite of its massive decline, there are remnants of the use of reflex-
ive, delocutive consigo, with exclusive use in just one group (Cl1), preferred use in an-
other unique group (A1 CaGII), alternation with com ele in three groups (A5, R1J MV,
Map 39.4: Preposition before pronoun (consigo/com ele), from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y
Diastrático del Uruguay (Norte)
Map 39.5: Ermão ‘brother’, from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (Norte)
R1 CaGI) and tolerated (accepted) use in fourteen groups, among them all the Brazilian
groups. This map shows that conservatism in the Fronterizo varieties must be consid-
ered, on the whole, as a graduated phenomenon. In this specific case, the many groups
which reject consigo and exclusively use the com ele construction underline the more
popular character of Uruguayan Fronterizo. The unanimously tolerant attitude of the
Brazilian groups may be a result of the influence of high level varieties transmitted by
the Brazilian school system. Note, nevertheless, that this hypothetical effort was not
strong enough to alter the popular habit of using the com ele construction.
6. Innovations
6.1. Independent innovation in Uruguayan Fronterizo
Exclusive innovation interpreted as an independent creation seems to be rare in the two

Fronterizos. If the form ermão in place of Portuguese irmão (and Galegian irmán) is not
a continuation of a hitherto unidentified dialectalism of the Peninsula, it could well be
an original Uruguayan Fronterizo crossing of Portuguese irmão with Spanish hermano,
both meaning ‘brother’. The phenotypical Map 39.5, which records whether or not even
a single token is recorded at a particular location, shows that this form has only been
Map 39.6: Pluridimensional phenotypical map: *lh+ pronounced [j], from the Atlas lingüistico Dia-
tópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (Norte)
found at Uruguayan locations and at no Brazilian ones. The areal distribution includes
localities in both the remote and the proximate zone. Ermão is only used among the
socioculturally lower class. The ten groups who produced this form are equally divided
among the younger and the older generation of Cb. This fact indicates stability. The
absence of ermão among the socioculturally higher class ⫺ which in Uruguay is to be
found in urban locations near the border ⫺ and in Brazil may be explained by the
greater permeability of this social stratum to the influence of standard language.
6.2. Innovation due to the inluence o the standard varieties
6.2.1. Innovation in Brazilian Fronterizo
There are nonetheless cases where the high-level varieties are successful in bringing Bra-
zilian Fronterizo back to a more conservative form. This is the case with the pronuncia-
tion of <lh> as a lateral palatal [ Y] in Brazilian Fronterizo and as palatal [ j] in Uru-
guayan Fronterizo. At the liminal level of a single recorded occurrence, the phenotypical
Map 39.6 indicates that the lateral palatal pronunciation is much more frequent and
diatopically more densely distributed in Brazil than in Uruguay. There are only five
Uruguayan groups which do not delateralize the palatal; all of them are situated in the
Map 39.7: Use of cujo ‘whose’, from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay
(Norte)
zone closest to the Brazilian frontier and three represent the younger generation. On the
Brazilian side, [Y] is the form for the majority of the groups. Those who use [ j] either
live in rural locations (like B1 and B2) or belong to the older generation of the sociocul-
turally lower class. In Brazilian urban locations (like BC2 Quarai, BC4 Santana do
Livramento, BC8 Bagé or BC10 Chui), the usual form is [Y]. Considering that delaterali-
zation is common in popular Brazilian Portuguese, and looking at the areal, generational
and social distribution of the [Y] form, we conclude that this form is replacing the older
popular variant [ j] under the influence of the Brazilian school system, which is less
effective in rural zones and absent in Uruguay (where Portuguese has been excluded
from formal instruction). We propose an interpretation of the [Y] pronunciation in Brazil
as the result of a recursive process. The older [Y], which is still common in Portugal, has
been replaced by [ j] and this delateralized form is now receding under pressure from the
lı́ngua padrão variant, [Y]. If this interpretation is correct, [Y] is, in its actual use in
Brazilian Fronterizo, not an example of conservatism, but one of innovation.
6.2.2. Innovation in Uruguayan Fronterizo
As Dorotea Frank Kersch points out in her recent study (Frank Kersch 2006), the use
of the relative pronoun cujo ‘whose’ is almost exclusively confined to erudite written
prose in modern Brazilian Portuguese and it has probably never been a popular language
form. Map 39.7 provides evidence of a clear contrast between Brazilian and Uruguayan
Fronterizo here. Cujo is completely absent from the linguistic competence of our Brazil-
ian speakers. In Uruguayan Fronterizo, two of the high-status groups of the older gener-
ation (in A1 and R1) and one of the younger generation (in R1) claim to use the form.
Still more surprising are the following two results: the older lower-class group at the
rural location CL2 attests to using this relative and not less than sixteen lower sociocul-
tural status groups together with two higher level younger generation groups (A1 and
R1 J MV) claim to know the form, even if they do not use it. Frank Kersch has supple-
mented our linguistic map based on the questionnaire responses with an analysis of the
conversational style, including radio transmissions. It turns out that nobody ever uses
cujo in spontaneous style, not even the high-class speakers. Nevertheless, even if there is
no evidence for its real use in spontaneous speech (where the polyfunctional que is pre-
ferred), cujo does exist at the level of passively known forms. We assume that this is
due to the influence of Uruguayan Standard Spanish, where the relative pronoun cuyo
(pronounced [1kuzo] like the Portuguese cujo, if not [1kuso]) is used somewhat more often
in the spoken variety (see the comparison in Frank Kersch 2006: 167⫺169) and relatively
frequently in written text, to which Uruguayan Fronterizo speakers have become
acquainted while at school, where teaching is conducted exclusively in Castilian.
6.3. Innovation rom the substandard varieties
6.3.1. In Brazilian Fronterizo
Brazilian Fronterizo participates actively in the popular Brazilian reduction of the verb
paradigm. Uruguayan Fronterizo is much more resistant to this radical change. As Map
39.8 shows, the present third-person plural subjunctive falem or even the singular fale
(which is the most advanced stage in this change) have completely replaced the tradi-
tional form falemos ‘that we speak (sbjv)’ for the first-person plural in the Brazilian
locations. This tendency is still countervailed in Uruguayan Fronterizo, where good rates
for the use of the conservative falemos are to be found. The third-person forms are
nevertheless progressive in Uruguay too, as is shown by the high values in the histogram
for the third-person solution. This applies to all groups, with a considerable increase
especially among the lower-class and the younger generation. We suppose that the ab-
sence of this form reduction in the Castilian varieties in Uruguay helps to preserve the
traditional form of the first-person plural. From this perspective, Map 39.8 could also be
considered under the heading of “Preservation of older Portuguese forms” (cf. section 5).
Note that in other cases Uruguayan and Brazilian Fronterizo show similar resistance
to the influence of popular substandard Brazilian. The Riograndense construction tu
veio ‘you came’, which combines the second-person singular pronoun with the third-
person singular verb form, in line with the common Brazilian construction você veio but
maintaining the pronoun tu , is still rare on both sides of the border. Both Fronterizos
prefer tu vieste or tu viestes which retain the second-person form of both pronoun and
verb.
Map 39.8: Reduction of a verbal paradigm: falemos ‘that we speak’, from theAtlas lingüistico Diató-
pico y Diastrático del Uruguay (Norte)
6.3.2. In Uruguayan Fronterizo
Map 39.9 illustrates a case of preponderant influence of Uruguayan rural Spanish sub-
standard on Uruguayan Fronterizo with lesser effect on Brazilian Fronterizo. The form
equivalent to the adverb so is assim in Standard Portuguese and ası́ in Standard Spanish.
Our Brazilian informants recognize the form ansim [ã’sı
˜ ], but only use the standard form
assim [a’sı
˜ ]. Not so in Uruguayan Fronterizo: the exclusive use of ansim is particularly
frequent in the western half of the remote zone, with decreasing use in the proximate
zone. We conclude that ansim is strengthened by forms like ansı́n and ansina which are
known from the Spanish of the Uruguayan rural interior.
6.3.3. In both Brazilian and Uruguayan Fronterizo
Since the Brazilian Portuguese substandard and the Uruguayan Spanish substandard
coincide in a considerable number of deviations from their respective standard forms, it
is not very surprising that both Brazilian and Uruguayan Fronterizo also feature these
popular constructions. Map 39.10 offers evidence for the deep roots that the concor-
dance between the adverb and its corresponding adjective possesses across the entire
region and among all of our groups. The construction A minha irmã é meia boba ‘My
sister is rather stupid’ is clearly preferred everywhere. There is only one group (CaGII
Map 39.9: Presence of ansim ‘so’, from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay
(Norte)
in A1) which prefers the standard form meio boba, and even they do not reject the
deviant form meia boba. Similar cases are the popular verbal concordance in impersonal
constructions like fazem anos instead of faz anos or tiveram festas alegres in place of teve
festas alegres. In these cases, Standard Portuguese and Spanish, unlike English or Ger-
man, demand the singular third-person form (lit. ‘there has been merry festivities’).
6.4. Innovation due to either standard or substandard varieties

(Uruguayan Fronterizo)
As Uruguayan Fronterizo is much more exposed than Brazilian Fronterizo to the influ-
ence of a different historical language, i. e., Castilian, there are numerous examples of
Spanish influence at all structural levels of Uruguayan Fronterizo. It is because of these
Castilian elements that Uruguayan Fronterizo is, as we have seen, commonly considered
to be a mixed variety. Integrated into the Uruguayan Fronterizo system, these borrowed
forms must be considered as innovations when compared with the stock of vocabulary
from the Portuguese varieties. We will not, in order to illustrate this important phenome-
non, choose lexical loan words like the names of the days of the week (lunes instead of
segunda feira ‘Monday’), of the month (enero instead of janeiro ‘January’) or numbers
(uno instead of um ‘one’), which are all in general use in the Portuguese of northern
Map 39.10: Adverbial concordance, from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay
(Norte)
Uruguay. Morphological or categorical influence is certainly a more profound and thus

more convincing proof of the Castilian impact on Uruguayan Fronterizo. We propose
the example of gender problems with mass or abstract nouns. One of the most interesting
cases is that of ordem which is always feminine in Portuguese and means, like the English
word order, either ‘command’ or ‘normal state of things’. Castilian, on the contrary,
makes a difference between the two senses by distinguishing between the feminine la
orden ‘command’ and the masculine el orden ‘normal state or methodical disposition’.
We can infer from Map 39.11 that there is harmony between Uruguayan and Brazil-
ian Fronterizo as to the preference for the masculine gender of ordem when it means
‘command’. Nevertheless, we note some indecision about the gender among eight Uru-
guayan groups, distributed across the territory, the generations and the sociocultural
rankings. The next map, Map 39.12, shows that many Uruguayan groups ⫺ but similarly
also the Brazilian CbGII group at the distant B1 location ⫺ have introduced the mor-
phological distinction of using the feminine article for ordem when it means ‘a normal
state of things’. This differentiation is certainly attributable to the Castilian model. The
hesitation commented upon in the preceding map may be an indicator that the morpho-
logical refinement is not fully established.
Our linguistic atlas of northern Uruguay contains nineteen cases of similar nouns
(like sangue ‘blood’, açúcar ‘sugar’ or leite ‘milk’). Summing up the results from these,
we can say that there is less divergence from Portuguese in the gender these words have
in Brazilian Fronterizo than in Uruguayan Fronterizo. In Uruguayan Fronterizo, the
Map 39.11: The gender of ordem ‘order’ (command), from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrá-
tico del Uruguay (Norte)
gender problem usually occurs in contexts in which Portuguese and Castilian feature
different solutions. But Uruguayan Fronterizo does not always follow the Castilian ex-
ample. There are significant degrees of oscillation: in the case of mel ‘honey’ for instance,
more than 26 percent of the groups use the feminine article, following the Castilian
example of la miel. But 25 percent of the groups are fluctuating between the two genders
and almost half of the groups retain the Portuguese masculine. There is no clear prefer-
ence for these words whose gender is not motivated by natural sex to be classified as
either feminine or masculine. All we can say is that the contact between the two source
languages, which is particularly intense in Uruguayan Fronterizo, contributes to an ex-
acerbation of the gender problems inherent in each of the neighboring great languages
within the Fronterizo variety.
7. Conclusion
As we have pointed out, Uruguayan and Brazilian Fronterizo are not simply the pro-
ducts of a mixture. Both are also characterized by the conservation of older forms aban-
doned elsewhere. In this sense, Uruguayan Fronterizo is more conservative than its Bra-
zilian counterpart. There are only weak indices of independent innovation in the Front-
erizos, while influence from neighboring varieties is frequent indeed. It turns out to be
Map 39.12: The gender of ordem ‘order’ (normal state), from the Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Di-
astrático del Uruguay (Norte)
important to differentiate the donor varieties. The influence of the Brazilian Standard on
Brazilian Fronterizo seems to be greater than that of Uruguayan Spanish on Uruguayan
Fronterizo. Many of these Standard Portuguese elements stop at the political boundary
which is also an educational border. It is typical of Uruguayan Fronterizo, but not of
Brazilian Fronterizo, that the internal territory is subdivided into two zones. This bipar-
tition is the result of various influences. The remote zone is sometimes more conservative
than the rest of the Fronterizo domain. On the other hand, it is more susceptible to
Spanish influence. The proximate zone is subject to greater influence from Brazil. An
explanation for this may be found in the particularly intense degree of contact with
Brazil. Many localities within Uruguayan Fronterizo zone are twinned with their Brazil-
ian neighbors (cidades gêmeas ‘twin towns’). In addition, Brazilian radio and television
programs are available in the border region.
8. Reerences
Bartoli, Matteo
1945 Saggi di linguistica spaziale. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier.
Blaser, Jutta
1995 Das Spanische in Südbrasilien: Die Zerstörung einer Legende durch mikrodialektologische
Feldforschung. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Blaser, Jutta
2003 “Carimbão” oder “Corrupio”: Sprachmischung und Bewusstsein im Norden Uruguays.
In: Dieter Messner and Matthias Perl (eds.), Portugiesisch in der Diaspora: Vorträge vom
4. Deutschen Lusitanistentag an der Universität Mainz (2001), 103⫺129. Germersheim:
Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos / Institut für Romanistik, Johannes Gutenberg-
Universität Mainz.
Coşeriu, Eugenio
1967 [1966] Structure lexicale et enseignement du vocabulaire. In: Council of Europe, Les théo-
ries linguistiques et leurs applications, 9⫺51. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. [First pub-
lished in: Actes du premier Colloque International de Linguistique appliquée (Nancy 1964),
Annales de l’Est, Mémoire no 31, 175⫺252.]
Elizaincı́n, Adolfo, Luis Behares and Graciela Barrios
1987 Nos falemo brasilero. Dialectos portugueses en Uruguay. Montevideo: Editorial Amesur.
Elizaincı́n, Adolfo
1992 Dialectos en contacto. Montevideo: Editorial Amesur.
Frank Kersch, Dorotea
2006 A Construção relativa na lı́ngua falada. Enfoque na fronteira bilı́ngüe do Brasil com o
Uruguai, comparado ao espanhol e ao português riopratense e europeu. Kiel: Westensee.
Hensey, Frederik G.
1972 The Sociolinguistics of the Brazilian-Uruguayan border. Paris: Mouton.
Labov, William
1994 Principles of Linguistic Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rona, José Pedro
1965 El Dialecto <fronterizo> del Norte del Uruguay. Montevideo: Universidad de la Repúb-
lica.
Thun, Harald
2000 O português americano fora do Brasil. In: Eberhard Gärtner, Christiane Hundt and
Axel Schönberger (eds.), Estudos de geolingüistica do Português Americano, 185⫺227.
Frankfurt am Main: Teo Ferrer de Mesquita.
2000a Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (ADDU), vol. 1: Consonantismo y
vocalismo del español. Kiel: Westensee.
2000b Atlas lingüistico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay-Norte (ADDU-Norte), vol. 1: Conso-
nantismo y vocalismo del portugués. Kiel: Westensee.
Weinreich, Uriel
1970 Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. 7th ed. The Hague: Mouton.
Harald Thun, Kiel (Germany)

40. Language as a process: A study on transnational

spaces
1. Operationalizing space
2. Linguistic minority nationalism in francophone Canada
3. The commodification and marketing of Canadian francité
4. Francophone Canada goes transnational
5. Webs and links, spaces and trajectories, resources and actors
6. Acknowledgements
7. References
1. Operationalizing space
In the history of linguistics, language has usually been thought of as tied to some form
or other of geographical space. I have argued elsewhere (Heller 2007) that this linkage
is a product of the ways in which linguistics as a discipline emerged in the context of the
development of the nation-state, and in particular in the ideological complex linking
bounded territories to bounded and uniform languages and cultures (Hobsbawm 1990;
Hutton 1999; Bauman and Briggs 2003). In many ways, it is possible to see the work of
linguistics as having been devoted to a combination of creating order, boundedness and
homogeneity out of linguistic diversity and flux and, simultaneously, of exploring exactly
the diversity and flux which emerged as salient out of the nation-building project. Dialec-
tology, for example, sought explicitly to identify and describe the historically and geo-
graphically most stable and most isolated forms; descriptive linguistics sought to identify
and describe regularity and systematicity; and even historical linguistics looked for laws
of linguistic change more attributable to the workings of the linguistic system than to
the practices of speakers.
So we have inherited a set of disciplinary approaches which foreground stability (or
at least predictable, rule-governed change) and which construct movement and variabil-
ity as problems to be explained when they cannot be swept under the rug. Lately, how-
ever, this perspective has begun to shift; movement and diversity have begun to be under-
stood as the norm, as the phenomena to be foregrounded, and things like standardiza-
tion or stability as phenomena requiring explanation. What this means, in practical
terms, is that we have to re-think how we understand the relationship between language
and space, imagine new ways of constructing what counts as data and figure out how
to go about collecting that data.
In this article, I will describe some ways in which the research team I have been
working with has tried to take up that challenge in the context of the particular research
questions we have been asking. This is not meant as a prescriptive or programmatic
presentation, but rather as an illustration of some of the challenges before us and an
exploration of some strategies, in the context of a particular theoretical approach to
conceptualizing the problem. In what follows, I will set out the research question and
its ties to the problem of language, space and nationalism, the conceptual underpinnings
of our approach to it and some of the methods we have used to construct a set of data
40. A study on transnational spaces 725
that would allow us to answer our question. The ways in which transnationalism has
become salient for linguistic theory and methodology is embedded, I argue, in the chal-
lenges it presents for the nation-state and its accompanying ideologies of identity, com-
munity, culture and language. Ethnographic modes of tracking the circulation of actors
and resources through discursive spaces, where resources are produced and distributed
and given meaning, is one way of exploring how the competing values of locality and
authenticity versus universality and transportability play out in late modernity.
2. Linguistic minority nationalism in rancophone Canada
The major research question that I have been following for some years has been how to
describe, understand and explain the changing shape of Canadian francophone national-
ism (Heller 2002). This is, of course, classically a problem in which linguistic forms (in
this case usually understood as varieties or a variety of French) are tied to territories
with some kind of political boundary, whether municipal, regional or state-like. In this
vein, much linguistic work has been devoted to describing the French found in what are
understood in political terms to be francophone spaces (see for example Sankoff 1980;
Péronnet 1989; Thibault and Vincent 1990; Mougeon and Beniak 1991; Ostiguy 1993;
Deshaies and Ouellon 1998), to detailing what has been understood as the effect of
contact with English (e.g., Mougeon 1989; Mougeon and Beniak 1991), and to working
in a language-policy mode towards increasing the homogeneity of language and to maxi-
mizing the language-and-territory fit (e.g., Corbeil 1980; Martel and Cajolet-Laganière
1996; Forest 1998; Georgeault and Pagé 2006).
I understand this body of work to be ideologically informed (whether consciously or
not) within a discourse of nationalism. My task is to understand the relationship between
language ideologies, discourses of language and nation and language practices, whether
my own or anyone else’s (and whether from the perspective of an academic or govern-
ment agency researcher or one occupying any other social position). From such a per-
spective, it has become clear that so much has had to be done in these directions precisely
because the fit is not neat and things are not staying still; that is, in the particular context
of francophone Canada in the last forty years or so, the conditions for establishing a
normalized, hegemonic discourse uniting language, nation, territory and individual iden-
tity have not been as propitious as its proponents might have liked.
In addition, those conditions, in francophone Canada and elsewhere, have only got-
ten worse, not better, as the global and increasingly privatized expansion of capital forces
nation-states to recast the bases of their legitimacy and to revamp their modes of regula-
tion (Harvey 1989; Featherstone 1990; Castells 2000). The result, in the social sciences
generally, has been to try to come to terms with the rapid movement and intensified
linkages across time and space that characterize this period of late modernity (Harvey
1989; Giddens 1990).
In anthropology and sociology especially, recent developments have been aimed both
at conceptualizing challenges to the heretofore dominant sociopolitical order and to
working out ways of understanding what new processes may be at work and how they
function. They also aim at identifying their consequences both for the ways in which we
can, may or must re-imagine the social order and its discursive legitimation, and for
what that means concretely for the life conditions of differently-positioned social groups.
Much of this work can be understood under the rubric of studies of transnationalism,
which can be understood in a number of ways, ranging from a strictly delimited concern
with social processes which cross nation-state boundaries to a looser concern for multidi-
rectional flows across social boundaries, some of which are related to ethnonational or
nation-state-related identity categories, and some of which are not (Basch, Glick Schiller
and Szanton Blanc 1994; Appadurai 1996; Beck and Sznaider 2006).
Appadurai (Appadurai 1986, 1991), among others (cf. Burawoy et al. 2000), has sug-
gested that what this means in practical terms for social scientists is a shift away from a
focus on communities, identities, or linguistic and cultural forms understood as whole,
bounded systems and towards following the flows of people, things and discourses. In
Appadurai’s view, what we need to get a handle on are the trajectories of resources and
of social actors across time and space. This has been operationalized in anthropology
through the concept of multi-sited ethnography, understood in a variety of ways. Some
of these are close to what I understand Appadurai to be getting at, that is, following
things and people; some examples might include Hannerz’ studies of international jour-
nalists (Hannerz 1996, 2003), or Bestor’s study of the flow of tuna from the fishery off
the northeastern coast of the United States to the sushi-bound markets of Tokyo (Bestor
2001). Many studies of migration (including many of those cited above) are of course
central to this approach, and have led to an emerging argument that migration must no
longer be understood as the recruitment of citizens of country A to work and reside in
country B under clear rules established by that nation-state (or by A and B in collabora-
tion with each other), but rather as a multi-faceted and multidirectional set of flows,
communications and relationships in which people and resources (including communica-
tive ones) circulate in many different ways at once. One can also, however, understand
multi-sited ethnography to mean investigating the manifestations of some process in
many sites at once, in order to better grasp the broader process in which local manifesta-
tions are situated; this is the version closest to the position of George Marcus, whose
name is in fact most closely associated with the term (Marcus 1995).
In either case, there is a shared methodological problem, which has to do with identi-
fying the local places and moments where processes occur and their linkages across time
and space with other heres and other nows. In the next section, I will discuss how one
research project has tried to put some of these ideas into operation in an attempt to
understand what flows mean when we are talking about things like language, identity
and nation or nation-state, that is, about things which were supposed to be fixed, but
which are moving around and mutating in interesting ways.
3. The commodiication and marketing o Canadian rancité
As I mentioned earlier, francophone Canadian nationalism has, in the last forty years
or so, been constructed around a modernist ideology linking language, culture, territory,
nation and state. This has taken its most straightforward State-territorial form in Que-
bec, and a kind of quasi-territorial form outside Quebec, manifested in efforts on the
part of leaders of the linguistic minority movement to establish and control homo-
geneous institutional spaces, especially as concerns state-controlled ones (Heller and La-
brie 2003). As is the case with most nationalisms historically, francophone Canadian
national identity has been linked to a Romantic vision of authenticity as rooted in the
country, that is, in nature, and in continuity of occupation of the land and of cultural
and linguistic practice (Williams 1973; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Hobsbawm 1990).
This discursive formation was sustained by a political economy in which, initially, ethno-
linguistic categorization overlapped class stratification (Porter 1965; Clift and Arno-
poulos 1979) and spatial segregation was the norm (Levine 1990; Lasserre 1998; Gilbert
and Langlois n. d.), within an economy based on primary resource extraction and sec-
ondary sector industrial transformation of those resources.
That was difficult enough to sustain as the population became increasingly urbanized,
educated and both socially and geographically mobile through the 1960s and 1970s. The
political economic shifts of the 1980s and 1990s however, have made it close to impos-
sible. Those shifts include: (i) a neoliberalization of the formerly liberal welfare state;
(ii) globalization; and, perhaps most importantly in this instance (iii) the collapse or
restructuring of the primary and secondary sector economies on which the reproduction
of nationalist francophone ethnolinguistic identity depended, in the wake of the emer-
gence of a globalized tertiary sector economy in which cities play a prominent role.
The traditional bastions of francophone Canada, that is, the areas that have long
been understood as the keepers of the francophone flame and the guarantors of its
authenticity, are precisely the areas which have suffered most from this shift. These are
either rural areas with economies based on fishing, lumber, agriculture or mining (or
some combination of these), or urban industrial working-class neighborhoods. To pro-
vide just a few key examples among many:
⫺ in Atlantic Canada, the major fishing industry, that of cod, was closed in 1992 due
to overfishing, and a second iconic domain, the lobster fishery, is currently under
threat, possibly because of climate change;
⫺ in northern Ontario, a majority of mines were closed and the paper industry encoun-
tered major difficulties because of a trade disagreement with the United States, a
major market as well as a competitor;
⫺ the steel industry of southern Ontario suffered downsizing as industrial production
increasingly went overseas, and as the US automobile industry, to which it is closely
tied, suffered from severe competition from Asia;
⫺ in western Canada, the large wheat farms that were the basis of the Prairie economy
have been proving unsustainable.
While francophones are not alone in suffering the consequences of these changes they
do feel them in two specific ways: they are over-represented demographically in these
sectors, and their symbolic appropriation of them has been central to the production of
legitimizing nationalist francophone discourses. (As the post-colonial dominant majority,
English-speaking Canada has been concerned with nationalism in different ways; but
that discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.) Indeed, the current changes have
triggered a panic among institutionalized agents of production of francophone modernist
nationalist discourse, both inside and outside state structures, all of whom agree on the
vital political importance of what I might call “saving the space”.
This is a version of Bourdieu’s notion that the first reaction when conditions change
in ways that threaten the viability of symbolic markets, and therefore the value of the
symbolic and material capital that people have invested there, is not to invest in new
capital more adequate to the new conditions and to new emerging markets, but rather
to do everything possible to save the existing market (Bourdieu 1982). The connotation
that I wish to emphasize here is that, for francophone Canada, saving the market means
saving the idea of a homogeneous community fixed in rural locations you can point to
on a map, locations which in our interviews with active participants in that market
(mainly civil servants involved in official language minority funding programs, agents of
those programs, or members of francophone associations) are usually referred to as nos
communautés ‘our communities’, thereby eliminating the urban francophone population
from consideration. This discursive perspective is largely shared by academic producers
of knowledge about those communities, who have concerns about what is usually called
the “ethnolinguistic vitality” of those communities and hence of francophone Canada,
especially outside of Quebec (Landry and Allard 1996; Johnson and Doucet 2006), al-
though the discursive perspective was first developed and remains shared by Québécois
nationalists.
The major efforts aimed at saving the market target tourism and the knowledge econ-
omy as means of keeping young people in the rural areas that constitute francophone
Canada’s traditional bastions. Secondary efforts aim at recruiting francophone immi-
grants into those areas (Quell 2002; CIC 2003; CIC 2005). In both cases it is assumed
that urbanization is tantamount to “assimilation”, that is, to the loss of adherence to
discourses and practices of collective identity (Heller 2005). But at the same time, the
efforts aimed at preserving rural homogeneity by their very nature undo it: immigration,
the knowledge economy and tourism all introduce ethnocultural, linguistic and racial
diversity into the traditional bastions, by importing new actors and by putting existing
actors into new, diverse and widespread social networks.
One result is that in order to understand what is happening to francophone Canada,
and to the discourses which constitute it as a relevant and meaningful social category, it
is no longer adequate to carry out either community or institutional ethnographies which
take for granted the existence of homogeneous and bounded social spaces. I found this
out in a direct way through a school ethnography I carried out in the early 1990s in the
Toronto area (Heller et al. 1999), in the course of which it became clear that the geo-
graphical mobility of students, parents and teachers was a key element of the construc-
tion of the school as a francophone space, or more properly of the contradictions be-
tween that construction and the complex and moving reality which had to be managed
on a daily basis in the most quotidian of school-based practices.
I have therefore had to find new ways of exploring how francophone Canada is being
constructed, or possibly re-imagined, under the new conditions, both in the traditional
bastions encountering late modernity and in the new spaces which francophones increas-
ingly find themselves traversing. Most importantly, this has required moving away from
understanding sociolinguistic ethnography as focused on sites, and towards understand-
ing it as focused on spaces of discursive construction and on the trajectories of resources
and actors through them. Furthermore, it has meant moving away from the quasi-
nationalist distribution of research areas, in which each province of Canada becomes a
research target in its own right, incommensurable (although comparable) with other re-
gions, and back towards an older view of francophone Canada as stretching across
political boundaries.
Now, of course, it can be easily demonstrated that geographical mobility and transna-
tionalism are scarcely new features of the francophone Canadian landscape; after all,
what is francophone Canada but the product of European imperialist expansion? Ties
to both England and France (and their colonial and neocolonial spheres of influence)
remained active in one form or another from the time of New France on and always
involved the circulation of people, of goods and of ideas. We can add to that the strong
links to the United States. But in the past we had different lenses for understanding
those forms of transnationalism and reasons for pushing them into the background of
scholarly enquiry. Moreover, while a revisionist transnational history is almost certainly
in order, the conditions of the past are not the conditions of today, and those remain at
the forefront of my area of concern. In what follows, I will describe some specific
attempts to carry this out empirically.
4. Francophone Canada goes transnational
In this section I will begin by describing a case which represents one important dimen-
sion of the new ways in which francophone Canada is having to understand space in
the globalized new economy: the circulation of identity goods (including both material
products and performances) around Canada and between Canada and other parts of
the francophone world, notably francophone Europe, and especially France; it involves
goods and performances principally from Quebec and Acadia. I will focus mainly on the
circulation of authentic products (most of them food-related) around commercial fairs
and Christmas markets in France and Belgium, although much of what I have to say
here applies to a variety of cultural and artistic artefacts and performances as well.
What we find here is the by now well-known process whereby the current market for
authentic goods and experiences provides a basis for reproduction of traditional ideolo-
gies of identity, but in ways which turn those identities into commodities (Le Menestrel
1999; Heller 2003; Coupland, Garrett and Bishop 2005; Jaworski and Pritchard 2005).
This is a double-edged sword for the guarantors of authenticity of those commodities,
since, while they have new value, that value is largely determined by a market con-
strained by consumer interest in fixed objects. Being someone else’s object of consump-
tion has its delights, but also its disadvantages. The element I wish to explore here is
how a traditional (nationalist) idea of linguistic minoritization goes hand in hand with
the modes of authentication which link identity to the land and to fixed points in space,
but precisely at the moment where those identities either circulate through distant mar-
kets, or are available to mobile consumers (who attribute greater value to products which
have either traveled far to them or which they have traveled far to obtain). I will also
keep an eye on the part of the story that is about sociolinguistic methodology, that is,
what we have to do to see how things unfold. Indeed, the emphasis on this first case
allows me to explore in greater depth what it means to investigate ethnographically the
circulation of language, identities and resources than would be possible otherwise.
However, in order not to leave the reader with a skewed idea of what transnational-
ism means for ideologies of language and nation such as those we find in francophone
Canada, I will then briefly contrast this case with other ways in which transnationalism
has come to francophone Canada, in particular: (i) the ways in which other ways of
being francophone (and, of course, speaking French, or being bilingual in French and
English) have entered the putatively homogeneous and fixed territories of francophone
Canada through the geographic and social mobility of actors (immigration is a large
part of the story, though there is more to it than that), resulting in claims for a plurilocal-
ization of francophone Canada, and (ii) the ways in which the commodification of lan-
guage itself in such fields as translation sets up a market in which language is com-
pletely delocalized.
4.1. The circulation o authentic identity goods
In 2005, Claudine Moı̈se, a member of our team based in France, noticed that the annual
commercial fair in her hometown, Montpellier, was announcing Canada as the special
guest for that year. It is not entirely clear to me when or how the practice of using states
as a means of marketing such events came about, in France or elsewhere, although it is
somewhat reminiscent of international competitions in sport or the arts. One person we
interviewed said that in France this probably dates from an initiative in the 1990s under-
taken by the then Minister of Culture, in which every year the Ministry would promote
ties to a specific country and allocate funds to be made available to the organizers of
regional or local events who wished to participate in that effort. It is possible that
Canada was popular in 2005 as a result of programs set up in 2004 by both Canada and
France to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first French settlement
in Canada. In any case, this was clearly an opportunity for us to explore what Canada
as a brand might mean in the context of a French commercial fair. We used the opportu-
nity to carry out fieldwork conceptualized as identifying and following threads.
The fieldwork in Montpellier was carried out in October 2005 by team members based
in France, Germany and Canada. This was largely the result of a conscious strategy used
by our team in doing multi-sited ethnography within Canada since the 1990s, using
teams composed of members with varying degrees of familiarity with the spaces, the
networks and the resources involved, so as to maximize analytical perspectives and com-
municative contexts. Subsequent fieldwork at the Christmas fair of Montbéliard was
carried out in December 2005 by a similarly mixed group, including some of the same
researchers, in December 2006 at the Christmas fair in Liège (Belgium) and in August
2006 in the Saguenay region of Quebec on the production and circulation of the Nativity
scenes exhibited in Montbéliard.
One dimension of the fieldwork can be understood as fairly conventional site ethnog-
raphy: multiple visits to the site (like any visitor), checking out the kiosks and the restau-
rant, picking up promotional material, traveling to the site via public transport to see
how it is presented in that space. Here it became clear that the image of Canada that
was presented was a fairly traditional one, with kiosks made of “logs” and employees
wearing iconic elements of what could be called male French Canadian national cos-
tume, which index the figure of the voyageur at the time of the fur trade or the nine-
teenth/twentieth-century bûcheron (lumberjack): ceintures fléchées (woven multi-colored
sashes) and red-and-black checked jackets. The hall was also decorated with both the
Canadian and the Quebec flags, as is to be expected when state sponsors are involved,
and the site also included a Plains Indian tipi that served syncretically as a site for
performances of indigeneity by a member of the Maleseet First Nation from eastern
Canada.
Goods on display included a wide range of traditional items such as maple syrup,
and more modern ones, such as hot tubs and frying pans (whose connection to the
Canada brand was established via tropes such as the outdoors, healthy attention to the
body, or technical competence). The restaurant served a menu designed to index authen-
ticity, including items such as buffalo, beer, cranberries, and, of course, maple syrup (all
also part of the commercial fair display).
Interviews with organizers and employees allowed our team to establish what net-
works accounted for the particular selection of goods, people and images featured in
Montpellier, and in particular to uncover the resource base for the growing industry of
marketing (usually, but not only, francophone) Canadian authenticity in Europe. It was
possible to establish the means with which to follow the actors and the resources.
It quickly became clear that the core of the network involved entrepreneurs based in
Canada (usually in Quebec) connected to entrepreneurs based in France. The Quebec-
based entrepreneurs followed the goods to their markets in Europe, while the France-
based entrepreneurs were significantly less geographically mobile. The Quebec-based en-
trepreneurs were responsible for managing both the network of producers in Canada
(some but not all of whom accompanied their goods to sell them in Europe) and a pool
of temporary workers (vendors for the most part).
While some of the resources (the frying pans, for example) might have been a bit
difficult to authenticate, the vast majority were authenticated through a combination of
tradition and rootedness in a fixed point in space. That is, their value came from being
able to identify their origin in a space that was not only easily locatable, but also tied to
values of the rural (nature, rootedness, the wild) which are core elements of traditional
francophone Canadian-ness. They are also tied to indigenous knowledge.
The following extracts are from an interview conducted on site in Montpellier by
Claudine Moı̈se (C) and Emmanuel Kahn (E) with A, the Canadian partner managing
the importation and sales of this set of goods at a variety of venues in francophone
Europe. A explains the importance of guaranteeing the provenance of the goods on sale,
both in terms of what part of the planet they are from and in terms of the knowledge
which produces them. First A discusses how to make maple syrup, tying that process,
interestingly, to what it means to present an indigenous person as part of the image of
Canada (note that the linking of national or ethnonational identity to nature is also tied
to aboriginal identity in ways which would likely be contested by First Nations within
Canada). He then goes on to discuss salmon, cheese and buffalo meat (I do not provide
the entirety of the discussion here for considerations of space).
Extract 1
A: ben/ il y a plusieurs personnes qui font leur petite cabane et vendent du sirop d’érable/ cabane
qui (x) ici c’est une cabane (x) on a une bouilleuse/ on/ il y a de la (x)/ ça chauffe/ le monde
l’avait vu plusieurs fois/ la cabane (x) le sirop prêt à apporter/ mais le faire/ ils avaient jamais
vu ça/ et c’était une première puis ça nous (x) déjà beaucoup de/ on a au moins/ on a au moins
quatre personnes là qui veulent faire le même truc l’an prochain/ comme il y a (x) il y a
d’autres villes qui veulent avoir la cabane à sucre/ c’est sûr qu’on se promènera comme un
charlatan de pilules avec la cabane/ il faut que ce soit bien structuré/ comme ici c’est très bien
structuré/ c’est de l’ouvrage/ ça prend un sucrier/ ça prend du monde compétent/ comme le
tipi/ combien de fois qu’on voit un tipi et puis on voit quelqu’un du Québec qui représente un
Amérindien et qui en est pas un
(…)
on en a un/ l’Amérindien qui est là c’est un vrai/ c’est un (x) c’est une réserve/ c’est un vrai/
le matin il part il purifie les stalles/ là c’est un vrai/ et puis je pense les Français maintenant
ils ont accroché énormément (x) hey/ là c’est pas/ c’est pas galvaudé là/ c’est du vrai/
A: well/there are lots of people who do their little shack and sell maple syrup/ shack which (x)
here it’s a shack (x) we have a boiler/we/there is (x)/it heats up/ people had often seen that/the
shack (x) the syrup ready to go/ but making it/they had never seen that/it was a first and that
we (x) already lots of/we have at least/we have at least four people who want to do the same
thing next year/like there are (x) there are other cities which want to have the sugar shack/of
course we could wander around like a charlatan pill-pusher with the shack/it has to be well-
structured/like here it’s very well-structured/it’s a lot of work/it takes a sugar-maker/it takes
competent people/like the teepee/how often do you see a teepee and then you see someone
from Quebec who represents an Amerindian and who isn’t one
(…)
we have one/the Amerindian who is there is a real one/he’s a (x) it’s a reserve/he’s a real one/
in the morning he goes out and purifies the stands/he’s a real one/and I think the French now
they really got interested (x) hey/that’s not/that’s not fake/it’s for real
Extract 2
E: le saumon fumé d’où il vient?
A: c’est du saumon de l’Atlantique et du saumon du Pacifique
C: les deux oui
A: c’est les deux ouais et sauvage/ parce que vous savez nous on peut pas (x) et ça c’est mon
prochain défi/ c’est de faire comprendre/ je dis ça puis c’est pas péjoratif/ je veux bien qu’on
se comprenne/ parce que ici en France/ ils passent 40 000 tonnes de saumon fumé par année
C: oui
A: c’est tout du saumon d’élevage
E: where does the smoked salmon come from?
A: it’s Atlantic salmon and Pacific salmon
C: both yes
A: both yeah and wild/because you know we can’t (x) and that’s my next challenge/is to get
people to understand/I say this and it isn’t pejorative/I want to make sure we understand each
other/because here in France/they go through 40,000 tons of smoked salmon a year
C: yes
A: it’s all farmed salmon
But language was also a key component of authentication. While at times members of
the labor pool were recruited locally in France, the key managers all agreed that being
able to provide a (largely linguistic) performance of francophone Canadian-ness was a
major dimension of the symbolic value added of the products.
Extract 3
C: et comment vous choisissez vos vendeurs là sur le/ sur la foire?
A: ben comme/ mes vendeurs/ à l’exception de deux personnes c’est tout des/ des Québécois/ des
Québécoises/ euh/ les deux Français sont excellents/ c’est pour ça que je les ai utilisés/ ils
connaissent le produit très bien et puis euh/ comme le marché de Noël bien/ je travaille avec
le Webpage souvent avec l’Association France-Québec/ les vendeurs (x) les Québécois ou Qué-
bécoises ont besoin d’un emploi/ ils appellent là/ ah/ oui Promotion canadienne a besoin mar-
ché de Noël/ ils envoient leur CV/ les jeunes passent tous par Internet/ ils envoient ça/ deux
pages/ pas plus/ je regarde/ ouais/ ok/ si c’est bon on va l’étape plus loin et puis
E: c’est tout des francophones?
A: pardon?
E: des francophones ou il y a des anglo-québécois ou?
A: non/ c’est Québécois/ Québécoises/ c’est (x) il faut l’admettre/ l’accent comme ils disent
E: ouais
A: souvent on va arriver/ non/ non/ on achète/ parlez-nous/ parlez-nous
C: (rire)
A: on capitalise sur c’t accent-là aussi (x) c’est la business/ hein/ c’est
C: and how do you choose your vendors for the/for the fair?
A: well like/my vendors/except for two people they’re all Québécois (masc.)/Québécoises (fem.)/
uh/the two French people are excellent/ that’s why I used them/ they know the product very
well and uh/ like the Christmas market well/ I work with the webpage often with the Associa-
tion France-Québec/the vendors x the Québécois or Québécoises need a job/they call there/ah/
or Promotion canadienne needs (someone for a) Christmas market/they send their CV/young
people all go through the internet/they send it/ two pages/ no more/ I take a look/yeah/ ok/ if
it’s good we go to the ne(x)t stage and then
E: they’re all francophones?
A: pardon?
E: francophones or are there anglo-Québécois or?
A: no/they’re Québécois/Québécoises/it’s (x) I have to say/the accent as they say
E: yeah
A: often we get there/no/no/we buy/speak to us/speak to us
C: (laughs)
A: we capitalize on that accent also (x) it’s (the) business/eh/ it’s
The result was that in some cases Canadians were recruited to travel to Europe, and in
others, Canadians residing in Europe (for example, students) were hired. For the manag-
ers, this required a cost-benefit analysis balancing the accent’s ability to attract customers
and justify a price against a calculation that includes the value of authenticity, knowledge
of Canada, knowledge of the product, knowledge of the clientele and costs related to
travel and subsistence for workers. Thus who circulates where is directly constrained by
the conditions of a market in which authenticity in general, and linguistic authenticity
in particular, are major features. That authenticity is built on the displacement across
space of people and goods anchored in a traditional idea of francophone Canada as
located in fixed places (and a time, roughly 1850 to 1930) into the here and now of the
French market.
The experience in Montpellier opened up paths to follow, both in terms of identifying
trajectories of goods and people, and in terms of understanding the ideologies of trans-
nationalism which were part of that movement. We followed many of the same actors
and goods two months later to a Christmas market in Montbéliard (France) and over a
year later to one in Liège (Belgium).
We also followed up links to brokers and organizers of various kinds based in France
and to the producers back in Canada, exploring for example the source of artisanal
Nativity scenes exhibited at Montbéliard. We traced them back to their source in a small
town in Quebec, whose economic crisis led to the choice of Nativity scenes as a form of
branding, in the service of developing community solidarity, of attracting tourists and
of linking the remote town to the wider world. Finally, we examined the political and
economic conditions, especially the work of ever-present agents of the state, in providing
the funds and in facilitating the flow of information, that were important contributions
to the commodification of Canadian francophone language and identity on the Euro-
pean francophone market. (We could, of course, have done much more; for example,
we could have examined the recruitment process, or followed actors or goods physically
from Canada to Europe and around European sites.)
On a methodological level, this component of our research can be likened to using
an observed phenomenon (in this case, the Foire de Montpellier) as a window onto a web
of discursive construction. The event itself provides the kind of discursive material which
has long been the object of sociolinguistic analysis. But an understanding of it is enriched
by grounding that material ethnographically, by examining the social processes out of
which it emerges and which it influences in turn, that is, by understanding where they
lie across time and space, and what broader social processes help us understand why
they occur where and when they do and why they take the shape they have. These
processes, it turns out, are deeply and complexly transnational in that their very meaning
and value stems from the transnational circulation of goods and people, but one in
which the national categories at play are extremely traditional.
This is, however, only one way in which francophone Canada is turning transna-
tional. In the next two sections I will briefly contrast this picture with two other sets of
phenomena: the incursion of the transnational into local, putatively fixed and homo-
geneous spaces; and the emerging importance of a language industry in which the local
and authentic slugs it out with the decontextualized and universal for pride of place.
4.2. The world comes to rancophone Canada
The observation which put me on the trail of the transnational in the first place, as I
mentioned earlier, was the appearance, in territorial and institutional spaces set up as
strategically essentialized francophone Canadian, of participants from a wide variety of
backgrounds, bringing all kinds of life trajectories, linguistic repertoires and senses of
belonging to spaces set up to build uniformity.
There are a variety of reasons for this. One is the use of the democratic state by
linguistic minority activists to create spaces of privileged control; doing so also requires
legitimization of those spaces as inclusive. A second is the social mobility of Canadian
francophones and their entry into a political economy in which the immigration of edu-
cated and skilled workers is of vital importance. Finally, in recent years, the world politi-
cal economy has rendered emigration (or flight) necessary or at least attractive to
increasing numbers of educated people from the francophone world.
The result, very simply, has been work, largely on the part of immigrants and refu-
gees, aimed at creating a symbolic place for themselves in francophone Canadian spaces.
This is an ongoing, and increasingly well-documented, struggle (Jedwab 2002; Quell
2002; Laperrière and Beaulé 2004; Gallant and Belkhodja 2005; Magnan and Pilote
2007), in academia and in popular culture (Bourbonnais 2005⫺2006; Sarkar and Winer
2006). Fundamentally, this a version of a broad struggle over the reproduction of ethno-
national identity as we know it, through incorporation of new members into otherwise
unchanging social, political and cultural categories, versus the loosening of boundaries
and the redefinition of criteria of inclusion and exclusion towards more complex, dy-
namic and fluid forms of belonging and appropriation. This discursive struggle pits mo-
nocentric local authenticity against the polycentric; and opposes the local authentic (or
local authenticities) with the fluid and universal.
Methodologically, our work on this aspect of change has taken institutionalized fran-
cophone spaces such as schools and community centers as a point of departure, in order
to examine the discursive struggles within them as a function of the interests of partici-
pants who can muster different kinds of linguistic and cultural capital through a variety
of social networks, more and more of them transnational. Here, the transnational is
embedded in the daily experience of participants in the social and institutional spaces
where their trajectories converge, at least temporarily.
4.3. The language industry
A final element to consider is the emerging so-called “language industry”, a feature of

the globalized new economy aimed at managing the problems of globalized economic
networks requiring some means of handling multilingualism. The language industry is
in fact frequently associated with the growing localization industry, that is, with the
development of techniques and technologies for helping globalized businesses adapt to
local markets and labor pools.
The Canadian State recognized several years ago that it was sitting on expertise in
the management of bilingualism developed out of the necessity of running a country
that was committed to an ideology of official bilingualism, but was also working (for
similar ideological reasons) with aboriginal and immigrant languages (Heller 1999). It
was also sitting on not one, but two, languages connected to global markets, as well as
a variety of immigration-related languages of international economic importance (such
as Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi and Urdu). It has been since working out a policy aimed
at capitalizing on that expertise as an investment in global capitalism (Gouvernement
du Canada 2003). Current policy identifies translation, interpretation, language teaching
(mainly of English and French to citizens of other countries) and speech technology as
the key fields.
The issue here really has to do with who gets to define what counts as English and
as French (and as English-French bilingualism) in these areas. The struggle tends to be
implicit, because the ideological underpinning of the field takes language as an autono-
mous skill that can be detached from any considerations of authenticity. Globalized
capital also tends to still prefer Fordist, that is uniformized, scripts (Gee, Hull and Lank-
shear 1996; Cameron 2001) while simultaneously struggling with the idea of the value
of niche marketing and hence the primacy of local forms of diversity, as well as with the
value of authenticity itself in many domains (as we saw above).
For many francophone Canadians, the language industry presents potential opportu-
nities for capitalizing not only on the resource of their first language, but also on the
bilingualism that for many years was the hallmark of their subordination. The problem
is that, particularly for lower middle class or working class speakers, it is not necessarily
their vernacular French, or their particular (mixed) bilingual practices which are valued
there; they face stiff competition from others (anglophone graduates of French immer-
sion programs, francophone immigrants from Africa or Europe) whose linguistic reper-
toire is largely school-derived (or in any case derived from spaces better dominated by
prestige varieties).
This manifestation of transnationalism risks reproducing class distinctions, albeit on

a somewhat different basis than in the past. Grasping it requires identifying the spaces
where the language industry is at work, the criteria for the selection of legitimate speak-
ers there and the nature of the language produced as a marketable product.
5. Webs and links, spaces and trajectories, resources and actors

I have identified three ways (there are probably more) in which francophone Canada is
encountering transnationalism, and I have tried to lay out the challenges of studying
these processes as well as some of the strategies we have adopted to try to meet them.
As with other linguistic nationalisms, minority or otherwise, the complexity and mobility
indexed by the concept of transnationalism can no longer be swept under the rug. The
question is, rather, how one copes.
We have seen here the contradictory ways in which the globalized new economy
values both traditional authenticity and universalized and decontextualized practices,
resulting both in the development of separate niches (people writing programs for ma-
chine translation do not often work with people selling maple syrup at Christmas mar-
kets) and in some forms of struggle over access and legitimacy in others (education, for
example). We see formerly dominant notions tying authenticity to fixed locality actively
valued, as long as they are commodified as part of the transnational circulation of goods
and consumers.
At the same time, we see those notions actively challenged. The first order of chal-
lenge comes from attempts to replace single-locale authenticity with ideas about poly-
centric sources of authenticity and the accompanying syncretic forms of hybrid linguistic
and cultural practices, such as those we see for example in multilingual rapping or bilin-
gual and standard-vernacular theatre performances. The second order of challenge
comes from ideas about linguistic and cultural forms which are held to be universal and
hence easily transportable, and which remove from consideration all ideas about rooted-
ness as essential to belonging.
These discursive struggles emerge in spaces where the key resources involved are pro-
duced, distributed and given value and meaning. The challenge for linguistics is to find
ways of describing how resources and actors circulate, constrain what is possible and
creatively navigate those constraints. The methods I have described here require loosen-
ing up our ideas of ethnography and recognizing in particular that the idea of the
bounded whole meets its limits in such conditions.
6. Acknowledgements
The data on which this discussion is based are drawn from a research project, La francité
transnationale: Pour une sociolinguistique de la mouvance, funded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2004⫺2007). I would like to thank the
many members of the team, especially those involved in the fieldwork reported on here:
Gabriele Budach, Alexandre Duchêne, Philippe Hambye, Emmanuel Kahn, Mélanie
LeBlanc, Claudine Moı̈se, Mireille McLaughlin and Mary Richards.
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41. The study o language and space in media

discourse
1. Introduction
2. Shifting values of localness in heteroglossic mediascapes
3. Spaces, media, language: Reviewing the main concepts
4. Mediated local speech: The “reflection fallacy”
5. Shifting approaches: From language variation to “techniques of localism”
6. Contrast and voice: Issues of analysis
7. Conclusion
8. References
1. Introduction
This article explores the relationship between language and space in the context of mass
and new media, drawing on a critical review and synthesis of research literature. My
starting point is the observation that media discourse may draw on linguistic variabil-
ity ⫺ e.g., phonological variation, lexical or code choice ⫺ to index how social actors,
institutions or reported events are related to particular spaces or places. We encounter
such constructions of “linguistic locality” (Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006: 79)
on any ordinary day of media consumption. They include advertisements which use a
regional dialect to authenticate a product’s origin; television shows which blend in the
local languages of tourist destinations; pop stars who self-consciously use their urban
41. Language and space in media discourse 741
vernacular; or films using a vernacular to underscore the origin of a character. In these

and other cases, linguistic form ties in with propositional content and other semiotic
means to construct “what it means linguistically to be ‘here’ or ‘from here’ and how
places and ways of speaking are thought to be related” (Johnstone, Andrus and Dan-
ielson 2006: 79).
Such linguistic heterogeneity is sometimes felt to be the rule rather than the exception
in today’s mediascapes (Appadurai 1996), but language in the media looks back to a
rather standardized or centripetal tradition (Fowler 2001; Bakhtin 1981; Androutso-
poulos 2007). As a result of the nexus between mass media and the emerging nation-
states of the nineteenth century, the media used standard language to reach national
audiences, thereby strengthening the bond between language and nation and contribut-
ing to the standardization process (Anderson 2006; Giesecke 1992). This did not exclude
vernaculars from public discourse, but restricted their status, functions and reach. The
use of vernaculars to index origin or social class against the backdrop of standard lan-
guage predominance has a long tradition in theatre and fiction (Blake 1981; Goetsch
1987; Lippi-Green 1997; Culperer 2001; Schröder 2005). In film, the contrastive deploy-
ment of standard and non-standard dialects as indicators of social class was established
by the mid⫺World War II era (Marriott 1997).
However, there is a widespread impression that the visibility of vernacular speech in
the media has increased in the last few decades (Crystal 2002). In Europe, regional
speech is embraced in broadcast and celebrated in advertising (Burger 2005: 364; Coup-
land 2007: 171). Representations of dialect in newspapers have become more common
in the last decade (Betz 2006: 78, 173), and minority languages or mixed codes are
surfacing in local or minority media (Jaffe 2000, 2007; Busch 2004).
These processes have received relatively little attention in sociolinguistics, where, de-
spite important forerunners such as Bell (1984), language in the media has been viewed
as distinct from “authentic” vernacular speech. However, a number of current develop-
ments seem to have built up momentum for a focus on media discourse in sociolinguis-
tics: foundational concepts of authenticity and identity are being critically questioned
(Coupland 2001; Bucholtz 2003; Bucholtz and Hall 2008); the role of media in the
agenda of fields such as language ideology and critical discourse analysis has been ac-
knowledged, and “the reach and impact of media language in contemporary social life”
(Coupland 2007: 28) is becoming increasingly apparent to researchers of language and
society. The turn to “post-variationist”, style-centered approaches offers a pivotal point
from which to engage with media sociolinguistics, and concepts such as stylization and
performance are in part fleshed out with media discourse data (Coupland 2001, 2007;
Schilling-Estes 2002; Auer 2007). This article is both motivated by and aims to contribute
to this turn by developing a post-structuralist view of local speech as a resource that is
deployed in media contexts in ways that go well beyond its classic understanding as
marker of local belonging.
2. Shiting values o localness in heteroglossic mediascapes

The proliferation of vernacular speech in the media reflects wider processes of social and
institutional change, and I draw in this section on Fairclough’s (1995) distinction be-
tween micro, meso and macro dimensions of discourse in order to sketch out these
processes and how they affect the mediatization of local speech. On a macro level, the
deregulation of media systems over the last decades has led to a tremendous diversifica-
tion of target audiences; more recently, the digital revolution has increased grassroots
access to media production technology and blurred the boundary between producers
and audiences, creating new chances for vernacular voices to be heard publicly. Tenden-
cies toward regionalization or localism, which emerge as a response to globalization
pressures, may lead to a rediscovery of local linguistic values. Two other relevant aspects
of the globalization process are commodification, i. e., the use of local linguistic re-
sources for promotional purposes, and disembedding, i. e., the detachment of social rela-
tions from their original spatial context (Coupland 2003; Coupland, Bishop and Gar-
rett 2003).
Such macro-level processes can be seen as affecting meso-level changes in institutional
practices of media planning and production. For instance, media diversification leads to
a proliferation of local media and narrowcasting programs (see section 3.2), in which
the celebration of local identity and culture gains priority. Formats of audience engage-
ment and participation have become widely popular in the last couple of decades, result-
ing in a dramatic increase in the presence of lay speakers in broadcast content (Straßner
1983; Hausendorf 2003; Burger 2005). These institutional changes in turn affect the
micro level of linguistic and textual processes which we focus on here. The key tendency
to conversationalization (Fairclough 1995), i. e., the use of informal speech and conversa-
tional features in public discourse, is no doubt joined by vernacularization, i. e., an
increase in the currency of non-standard speech. Language in the media now regularly
includes “exposed dialects” (Coupland 2007: 171), and linguistic variability that is associ-
ated with specific target audiences is being transformed into linguistic capital (Richard-
son and Meinhof 1998). In media linguistics literature, this is reflected in, e.g., the view
of media language as a “variety mix” (Burger 2005) and the suggestion that nowadays
any linguistic variety has good chances of being mediatized (Schmitz 2004: 33).
However, it seems important not to lose track of the ideologies and power relations
surrounding the mediatization of vernacular speech. Traditional ideologies of non-stan-
dardness are still widely reproduced, and we can clearly see their workings in the example
of local dialects. For instance, when regional television channels reserve use of the re-
gional dialect exclusively for “local culture” shows, they draw on and reinforce the link
of dialect to local rural tradition (Richardson and Meinhof 1998). In other cases, linguis-
tic localness is ideologically transformed into an index of social stratification, with film,
comedy or newspaper reports often drawing on vernacular speech as a signifier of low
status (Marriott 1997; Sand 1999; Lippi-Green 1997).
Such patterns are certainly not without exception. Local speech styles may also be
represented in ways that challenge these stereotypes, and some vernaculars have ambiva-
lent and contested meanings: for instance, London English (“Cockney”), traditionally
cast as a working-class marker, is repositioned as marker of subcultural, street-smart
styles in contemporary pop music culture. Indeed, the current proliferation of local
speech in the media makes it increasingly difficult to allocate local speech a single, fixed
meaning. Rather, it bears a range of potential meanings, whose activation depends on
the specific contextual embedding of local speech (see Eckert 2008). On the other hand,
as media contexts are complex and ambivalent, resorting to stereotypes of localness may
offer producers and audiences a relieving reduction of complexity.
An implication of this discussion is the need to steer away from fixed meanings of
local speech as a marker of local identity. Rather than subscribing to an “anything goes”
view of linguistic variability in the media, I suggest an understanding of media discourse

as a site of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981). Defined as “(a) the simultaneous use of different
kinds of forms or signs, and (b) the tension and conflicts among those signs” (Bailey
2007: 257), the notion of heteroglossia has been adopted by researchers interested in the
intricate relationship between linguistic diversity, social difference and power (Baxter
2003: 67; Cook 2001: 187; Busch 2004, 2006). Viewing media as fundamentally hetero-
glossic means that our close analytical attention to the diversity of media language is
complemented by a focus on the power relationships that shape the meanings of this
diversity in context. The following sections attempt to flesh out such an approach.
3. Spaces, media, language: Reviewing the main concepts

The nexus of language, media and space has received one dominant reading in the litera-
ture, i. e., the use of regional dialects in broadcast. While this remains a centerpiece in
the following discussion, this article aims at bringing further aspects of space, media and
language together in a comprehensive framework.
3.1. Spaces - rom local to virtual

To begin with, it seems useful to think of spaces and places (see Johnstone in this hand-
book) in terms of a cline or scale, reaching from e.g., a country to a single neighborhood,
with a different set of sociolinguistic contrasts becoming relevant on each level (Richard-
son and Meinhof 1998: 88). For example, a regional dialect in a standard-language envi-
ronment has the potential to index some sort of engagement with, or proximity to that
region and with what the region conventionally stands for. On a larger scale, a language
as a whole may be juxtaposed with another language in order to index the national
affiliation of a speaker. On a smaller scale, an urban dialect may index belonging to a
city (as opposed to other cities or the surrounding region), and a slangy speech style or
an ethnic or mixed variety may be mobilized to index proximity to a particular district
or neighborhood. The relations between spaces and associated linguistic resources are
not essentially fixed, but evoked and reproduced in discourse by means of ideological
links between vernacular varieties, social types and places.
But spaces indexed by language may transcend a single geographical location or lie
beyond physical space altogether. In media for migrant and diasporic communities, both
the community’s current location and their place of origin are made relevant in discourse
and indexed by code-switching or other patterns of bilingual speech. And as digital
communications technologies enable people to interact via computer networks, virtual
spaces emerge on platforms such as chat channels, discussion boards or role-playing
environments, which lie in a tradition dating back to the earliest days of computer-
mediated communication and extend to currently popular formats such as Second Life.
3.2. Media - rom mass to narrowcast

As these observations suggest, an open, inclusive understanding of media may increase
awareness of the highly diverse ways in which language may signal local affiliations in
public discourse. Different delimitations of the media field will constrain the phenomena
under consideration in different ways. Linguists interested in media discourse often re-
strict their scope to printed media and broadcast, excluding domains such as film and
the new media, where linguistic constructions of localness are common and potentially
influential.
One point of entry for a consideration of the role of the media is to compare the use
of vernacular speech across different media types. Straßner (1983) suggests that dialect
is most common in Germany’s press, followed by radio and then television, whose na-
tionwide reach impedes the use of dialects. However, the sociolinguistics of television
have dramatically changed in the last two decades, and as the research focus is shifting
to the discursive work done with “dialect” in particular contexts (sections 4 and 5), such
a broad hierarchy seems questionable. Other researchers compare patterns of vernacular
use in different media within a speech community, e.g., Jamaican Creole in newspapers
and radio phone-ins (Sand 1999), Cypriot Greek dialect in newspapers, radio phone-ins
and advertising (Pavlou 2004), and dialects across all media types in German-speaking
Switzerland (Burger 2005; see section 5). Their findings clearly suggest moving beyond
a comparison of media types as a whole.
Another macro-level approach is to consider the potential impact of media institu-
tions. Based on the tripartite system of public service media, private commercial media
and alternative media (Busch 2004; Busch 2006; Androutsopoulos 2007), one might ask
how the communication economy of each media sector shapes their constructions of
locality and uses of local linguistic resources. Private commercial media have been shown
to drive forward the processes of conversationalization, and this seems to hold true for
vernacularization as well; for example, private broadcasters have been crucial in increas-
ing the share of dialect in the Swiss media (Burger 2005). It remains to be examined
whether alternative media such as community radio deal with localness in distinct ways,
perhaps driven by their aim of offering a forum to social groups traditionally excluded
from the public sphere (Busch 2004).
Yet a different angle is to examine how the reach of a media institution or product
to specific target audiences may impact on constructions of localness. This allows a
connection to the study of local media and narrowcasting, i. e., “channels dedicated to
particular types of programming … as well as channels designed to reach a local popula-
tion rather than the country as a whole” (Richardson and Meinhof 1998: 87). Local
media have been around for a long time (e.g., local newspapers), but narrowcasting
refers specifically to private or public broadcasting which emerged after the deregulation
of media systems. The question here is how the targeting of a spatially delimited audience
may draw on language that is indexical of that area, and how this complies with relevant
media aims and policies (Löffler 1998).
A final perspective is to ask which media genres and formats favor the proliferation
of local speech. My literature survey and observations indicate six key areas:
1. Advertising offers textbook examples of how local linguistic forms are turned into
symbolic capital in the authentication of products or geographical regions (see Bell
1992, 1999; Coupland 2007; Johnstone 2004; Piller 2001). Dialect advertising comes
with different degrees of audience engagement, sometimes inviting recipients to be-
come part of an imaginary local community. Within an advertisement, dialect is often
confined to the narratee, i. e., the person using or promoting the product (Piller 2001),
while the voiceover or concluding slogan, which feature voices of institutional author-
ity, are in standard language. Straßner (1986) finds that in southern German newspa-
pers dialect advertising is restricted to particular product categories, especially food
and beverage, and capitalizes on romantic, rural and traditional connotations. Such
conjunctures of dialect, local produce and local identity indeed seem quite widespread
(see e.g., Pavlou 2004 on Cyprus), but dialect is nowadays also used in ways which
challenge traditional dialect values, as in examples discussed by Coupland (2007:
171⫺176) and Bell (1999) or in a series of commercials by the German federal state
of Baden-Württemberg, in which dialect-speaking celebrities and professionals are
framed by the slogan “We can do anything. Except speak High German”. The mean-
ings of localness in advertising, then, are complex and multilayered, and despite en-
during traditional stereotypes, local speech is sometimes coupled with high social
status and recontextualized as a symbol of collective or corporate identity.
2. Linguistic landscape (Gorter 2006) seems an important site for the commodification
and emblematization of vernacular speech. Local codes may be selected for use on
shop signs, in company logos or tourist memorabilia. This may fulfill the informa-
tional function of the linguistic landscape, i. e., to index the territorial presence of a
language and its speakers, or its symbolic function, i. e., to declare ethnolinguistic
identity. These purposes may coexist with the wider commercial function of language
display (Eastman and Stein 1993), i. e., to authenticate services by indexing a relation
of the service to the places where that language is actually spoken. In that sense, any
language may be used to index the place of origin of a product or service, as the
domain of gastronomy makes clear.
3. Film and other types of fiction (comedy, drama, novel, music, television series) are
important sites for the public staging of localness and local speech (see Balhorn 1998;
Blake 1981; Crystal 2002; Goetsch 1987; Marriott 1997; Schröder 2005; Taavitsainen,
Melchers and Pahta 1999). When local varieties are used in fiction, the contrast with
other linguistic varieties is typically tied to contrasts between the characters of the
plot. In film, speech styles become part of wider, multimodal “mechanisms of juxta-
position and contrast” (Marriott 1997: 184), which involve clothing, outfit, scenery,
etc. As Lippi-Green suggests,
In traditions passed down over hundreds of years from the stage and theatre, film uses
language variation and accent to draw character quickly, building on established precon-
ceived notions associated with specific regional loyalties, ethnic, racial or economic alliances.
(1997: 81)
When dialect is used as “shortcut to characterization” (Lippi-Green 1997: 81), it will

often index social stratification by being allocated to working rather than middle-
class characters, people from the “street” rather than representatives of an institution
(see also Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006: 94). Local speech can also be used
to enhance a film’s setting and to provide local flavor, and different functions of local
speech in fiction may be intertwined, acting both as class and mood marker as well
as reminder of the narrative setting.
4. Audience participation formats such as talk, game, quiz or reality shows contribute to
the visibility and diversity of lay people’s voices. Formerly restricted to direct quota-
tions and sound bites in news shows or documentaries, lay speech is now spread
across media programs, and the drive to engage the audience can even lead to lay
speakers assuming small institutional roles in narrowcasting stations, such as weather

presenting (Richardson and Meinhof 1998). Lay speakers are not professionally
trained speakers, and in some cases are presumably selected because they display
“a legitimate connection to a place” (Johnstone, Bhasin and Wittkofski 2002: 160;
Jaworski et al. 2003). Their speech will often be positioned as authenticating the
places, activities and experiences being reported on. In turn, by accepting and embrac-
ing lay vernacular voices into its program, a media institution may authenticate itself
as representative of local concerns.
5. In media for transnational and diasporic audiences (e.g., community newspapers or
ethnic websites), discourse is shaped by the tension between “here” (place or residence
and everyday life) and “there” (homeland, place of ethnic identification), and their
linguistic practices may relate to both relevant spaces. If the community language is
still the audience’s base language, traces of contact to the majority language will index
the community’s current location and cultural setting. If the community has shifted
to the majority language, residual elements of home language, often intricately bound
to heritage culture, remain in place and are transformed into “rich points” of di-
asporic culture (see section 3.4). Code-switching may be used in accentuating con-
trasts between home and diaspora, thereby drawing on associations of ethnic “we-
code” and dominant “they-code” (Gumperz 1982). On web discussion forums popu-
lar with Jamaican expatriates, most Creole occurs in contributions from abroad, and
code-switching tends to accompany deictic shifts between the writer’s place of resi-
dence and the Jamaican homeland (Hinrichs 2006).
6. Virtual spaces: in computer-mediated environments, local deixis (i. e., “being here”)
becomes fundamentally ambiguous as it may index both the virtual discourse ground
and a physical space that is important to the participants, and language may index
orientation to both physical and virtual space. In online communities which are ori-
ented to familiar geographical space, such as city-based chat channels (section 5),
markers of local affiliation are ubiquitous, including dialect features, local references
and allusions, and accompanying visual elements. In multi-user role-playing environ-
ments such as Second Life or Active Worlds (Axelsson, Abelin and Schroeder 2003),
physical space may provide the backdrop for novel virtual territories, in which local
language policies are established and corresponding linguistic performances emerge,
authenticating the virtual space (e.g., use of Spanish expected in “mundo hispanico”,
Dutch being spoken in Second Life’s “Amsterdam”). In online communities which are
not defined in relation to geographical space, references to virtual space may take
various forms, e.g., labels for the space and its regular visitors, a specific jargon for
online activities relevant to the group. Metalinguistic conventions regulating content,
style or language choice emerge, and norm-enforcing practices may occur, in which
what is considered appropriate “here” gives reason to exclude participants from the
virtual ground.
As this overview suggests, the media environments which host local speech are those
which favor heteroglossia generally: talk and interaction, fiction, audience participation,
less informing or educating discourses than entertaining ones. Some of these facets of
media discourse have received relatively little attention in (critical) linguistic literature,
which has often tackled politically “important”, yet stylistically standardized, monoglot
domains of the media (Fowler 2001).
3.3. Local speech - as language, code or symbol
As suggested by the discussion so far, the range of linguistic variability that can be
deployed to index space in the media is, in principle, limitless. Local dialects, varieties
of a pluricentric language, creoles, mixed vernaculars or minority languages ⫺ they all
may evoke, depending on context, an association to particular spaces or places, even
though they are per se primarily associated with other social dimensions such as class
or ethnicity.
In examining how local linguistic resources are positioned in relation to other lan-
guages in a media context, I find it useful to draw on tripartite distinctions familiar from
social dialectology and creole studies. Mattheier (1980) suggests that dialect may func-
tion as the “main variety” of a speech community, a “social symbol” or a “relict lan-
guage”. Mair (2003) classifies contemporary uses of Jamaican Creole as “language”,
“code” or “symbol” (see also Hinrichs 2006). In what follows, this latter distinction shall
be used as a window onto the functions of vernacular varieties in media contexts.
On the first level of this triadic scheme, a local vernacular serves as a base language
for given media across various genres and topics. Radio hosts with a regional accent
would be a case in point, as reported from the UK or (southern) Germany, albeit pre-
sumably restricted to spoken language media of regional reach. Media using a local
dialect as a base language seem rare, Switzerland being a noticeable exception (see sec-
tion 5). We might expect that the willingness to accept a regional variety as an institu-
tional voice presupposes highly positive attitudes towards that variety. There is evidence
that local media may celebrate dialects which are stigmatized in the wider speech com-
munity (see Richardson and Meinhof [1998] on Saxon dialect in regional television), but
the dialect voices in this case are lay speakers, not professional journalists.
The notion of code foregrounds relations of contrast, in which a code of localness is
juxtaposed with other codes with different, non-local associations. Drawing on concepts
from bilingualism research, their distribution may be conceived of as situational or meta-
phorical code-switching (Gumperz 1982). The former implies a conventionalized distribu-
tion of a code to activities or situations. When for instance local media regularly cast a
small part of their content in dialect (a column on local affairs, a political cartoon,
advertisements etc.), the local code is made visible and granted default status within a
niche of the media product, but at the same time kept at bay from fully fledged institu-
tional usage. The situational dimension also captures occasional uses of local codes
which are perceived as obvious and “natural” in terms of topic or life-world. When for
example a television documentary on the life of fishermen features the fishermen speak-
ing exclusively their local dialect, these local voices tie in with local activities in sharp
contrast to the language of the narrator or the surrounding program. On the other hand,
metaphorical code-switching captures linguistic evocations of localness that are typically
short and often unique in the course of a text or program: a show host switching to a
local vernacular in order to caricature a social type or to address a caller; a politician in
a talk show switching into his dialect to claim an understanding of local affairs; a news-
paper report casting direct speech by elderly locals in the dialect (Selting 1983; Schlobin-
ski 1988; Birkner and Gilles 2008). This is a wide, largely uncharted territory, in which
language often indexes spaces and associated social types by means of double-voicing
and stylization (section 5).
Finally, the notion of symbol implies that local speech is quantitatively and function-
ally restricted, but nonetheless made relevant to the participants’ identity claims. Sym-
bols of localness are often single lexical items and proper names, which are positioned
in discourse in such a way as to flag individual or institutional identities. Titles, headings,
mastheads, product and company names, slogans, web forum signatures, website naviga-
tion buttons are typical textual slots in which local codes may take on symbolic functions
(Coupland, Bishop and Garrett 2003; Androutsopoulos 2003, 2007; Johnstone, Bhasin
and Wittkofski 2002). Here dialect is both reduced to an accessory and elevated to an
icon of identity, collaborating to this end with other local indexicals of self-presentation.
We return to such usage of dialect with Coupland’s (1995) notion of “rich points of
culture” in the following.
3.4. Rich points: Where local orms meet local reerences
This tripartite distinction is also related to Johnstone’s (2004) distinction between two
types of regional speech in the media, i. e., a strategically symbolic and a habitual type.
The latter corresponds in my classification to “language”, albeit a language with re-
stricted and controlled distribution in terms of the voices and participation formats it is
allocated to. Johnstone’s strategically symbolic type, corresponding to both “code” and
“symbol”, entails the planned use of markers of localness in the design (Kress and van
Leeuwen 2001) of a media product, thereby relying on vernacular stereotypes and antici-
pating audience reactions.
A striking instance of this symbolically strategic type is the fit between form and
content of local indexicals, by virtue of which markedly local forms come to designate
a local place or category. Consider Johnstone’s example of Dahntahn, an item represent-
ing the feature of monophthongized /aw/ in media reports on “Pittsburghese” dialect.
When this feature is represented in media reports, it tends to be illustrated by precisely
that lexical item. This co-variance of local form and local place name is also encountered
in city names whose pronunciation or spelling emphasizes their vernacular form. When
they occur embedded in a standard-language environment, these variants foreground
specific relations of the speaker, the addressee or a referent to the urban location. For
instance, writing Saaf London ⫺ which marks two key features of London English, i. e.,
th-fronting and a monophthongal variant of the MOUTH vowel (Wells 1986: 309,
328) ⫺ may index either attributes of lower social class stereotypically associated with
that area, or the familiarity of the speaker with local vernacular culture, or possibly
both. Likewise, departing from the base language of discourse to label a social group or
a key cultural concept in its own code serves as a powerful emphasis of group member-
ship, which can be deployed in order to identify with addressees or referents or to render
then as “other” (Jaworski 2007; Hinrichs 2006).
This coupling of linguistic form and local reference is captured in Coupland’s (1995)
notion of “rich points of culture”. For Coupland, what makes dialect a culturally power-
ful marker of local identity is, precisely, “the conjunction of pronunciation and ide-
ational reference”, his example being a Cardiff place name pronounced by broadcasters
in Welsh English (rather than standard English). Coupland views such conjunctions of
dialect phonology and place names (or culturally relevant common nouns) as “producing
expressions that are cultural mini-icons” of regional or ethnolinguistic identity (Coup-

land 1995: 316⫺317).
Importantly, such “cultural mini-icons” are not fixed once and for all. The co-vari-
ance of local indexicals is a resource available for deployment in different socio-cultural
contexts. A telling example is a slogan used by an Austrian far-right politician during
the 2008 election campaign: Daham statt Islam ‘At home instead of Islam’. This uses a
dialect form of the adverb, i. e., daham with long [a:] instead of the diphthong /ai/ of
standard daheim, with all other campaign materials in standard German. More than just
the choice of a dialect variant for rhyme, dialect-as-symbol is mobilized here to bolster
the notion of local identity, which is juxtaposed to an “other” religion and thus contextu-
alized as a national Christian identity. Interestingly, during the same period an Austrian
cultural association released a CD of religious music called Daham ist Islam ‘At home
is Islam’, thus mobilizing the same item of dialect-as-symbol for the opposite social
meaning.
4. Mediated local speech: The relection allacy

Determining the “authenticity” of mediated local speech seems a central concern in parts
of the literature, and my aim in this section is to question this. By “reflection fallacy” I
refer to the often tacit expectation that local speech in the media be an (accurate) reflec-
tion of non-mediated language, and to the resulting tendency to foreground this relation
in the analysis. To be sure, linguistic constructions of localness in the media owe their
indexical power to their tacit interpretation as representations of the informal, everyday
language of a community (see Balhorn 1998; Jaffe 2007). As vernacular varieties are
reproduced outside educational institutions, their mediatization contrasts with the non-
local codes and registers required for professional media discourse practices. However,
this fundamental contrast does not mean that mediated local speech will always corre-
spond to an “authentic” counterpart.
Indeed, the problematic nature of such an expectation becomes obvious in the fre-
quently mentioned gaps and inconsistencies between the two. According to some au-
thors, advertising features “inauthentic, synthetic, simulated” (Straßner 1986: 323) or
“softened up” (Janich 1999: 171) dialects, in which deep local features are ironed out in
order to avoid comprehension problems or evocations of stigma. By other accounts,
based on a range of genres, the media exaggerates a few stereotypical vernacular fea-
tures; combines “authentic” dialect features with less realistic ones; or even presents
authorial creations as “authentically local” linguistic forms (Crystal 2002). More specifi-
cally, Bell (1992: 334) points out how advertising relies on a few “typical features to
mark target dialects”. Marriott (1997: 182⫺183) shows how a British film draws together
both more and less realistic dialect features in the representation of characters in terms
of social class. Birkner and Gilles (2008) find that stylizations of Cologne dialect in
television shows rely on a few dialect features, which are grafted onto colloquial stan-
dard German.
Expecting mediated local speech to live up to an “authentic” model seems fraught
with theoretical and methodological problems. First, it may easily lead to an idealized
view of local speech (Bucholtz 2003) and a “fetishization” of supposedly authentic lin-
guistic form. Second, the expectation of accuracy does not always correspond to the
views and motivations of media practitioners whose language use is shaped by a complex
web of institutional, technological and generic constraints. A “realistic” rendering of
language varieties is often not intended at all (Bell 1992). Third, in some cases an authen-
tic model is not obvious (e.g., in advertisements featuring a mock foreign accent) while
in others the mediation of local speech relies on traditions of public vernacular use
(Marriott 1997; Birkner and Gilles 2008). Thus filmic representations of English dialects
owe their success not to their documentary precision but their popular availability, “per-
mitting [a] ready identification” (Marriott 1997: 183).
Overall, it is perhaps realistic to assume that much media usage of local speech works
no differently to literature, in that authors and speakers are “not aiming at the systematic
and accurate representation of real-life sociolinguistic facts, but at supplying some
markers of particular varieties, leaving readers to fill in the gaps with background knowl-
edge” (Culperer 2001: 209). This does not mean that accurate representations of non-
standard speech do not exist; it means, however, that we should not expect them to be
the default case.
More generally, the search for an authentic model is rooted in the belief that language
“naturally” belongs to geographical spaces. Taking inspiration from human geography
and Foucault-inspired discourse theory, Johnstone (this handbook) proposes rethinking
this relationship: no bond between language and space pre-dates discourse; rather, it is
in discourse that the link between language and spaces is constituted. This fits well with
the (equally Foucauldian) tenet of critical discourse analysis, that media discourse does
not represent a reality beyond itself, but rather creates social reality in its own right
(e.g., Fairclough 1995; Thornborrow 2002). Johnstone shows how, in media reports and
web forum discussions, a new urban dialect, “Pittsburghese”, is literally talked into be-
ing, regardless of whether or not this status is dialectologically accurate (Johnstone 2004,
Johnstone and Baumgardt 2004). We may also think in this context of the Mundartwelle
‘dialect wave’ in Germany in the 1970s, i. e., the increased use of dialect in advertising
and other mass media, which was less a symptom of dialect resurgence in society at large
than a trend within the media, neither reflecting nor initiating an increased use of local
dialects “out there” (Löffler 1997). Indeed, a post-structuralist perspective on language
and space challenges the primacy of “dialect out there”, instead drawing attention to
how discourse shapes the understanding of dialect.
5. Shiting approaches: From language variation to techniques o

localism
The relation between media, language and space has been examined within various re-
search frameworks so far, and I sketch here a transition from descriptive and variationist
to currently influential post-variationist and interactional approaches. Parts of the litera-
ture focus on the frequency and distribution of regional dialects across media types and
genres (Straßner 1983; Schmitz 2004: 31). The strengths of this approach are illustrated
by the work of Burger (2005: 362⫺388) on dialect use in southern German, Austrian and
Swiss German media. The diglossic situation of German-speaking Switzerland entails a
split between written and spoken language media. In the former, written dialect is re-
stricted to “occasional exceptions” (2005: 368) such as adverts for local shops and ser-
vices. In spoken language media too, the choice is organized by local reach, with local
radios using almost exclusively dialects, and local topics and participants favoring the
use of dialect in nationwide programs, where standard German otherwise predominates.
If both varieties are co-present in a program, their distribution is organized along the
boundary of spoken/written or spontaneous/edited discourse (2005: 371⫺373).
In research within the audience design framework (Bell 1984), the relationship be-
tween language style and target audience is examined based on variationist methodology.
Bell’s original study found that colloquial phonological variables in the language of New
Zealand radio stations occurred more frequently on local community stations, followed
by commercial regional channels and the national public program. Even though no dia-
lect variants were involved, localness is played out in Bell’s interpretation, which suggests
that the more a station orients to a local (and younger, lower-status) audience, the more
it will draw on vernacular variants as a resource to shape its relationship to that audi-
ence; by contrast, the more detached a station is from local contexts, the higher its
share of standard features. This correlation of colloquial speech with restricted reach is
confirmed by other studies. Reynolds and Cascio (1999) found that a British local news-
paper uses more contracted forms than do national dailies, and Burger’s work, even
though not variationist in methodology, offers ample evidence for the systematic associa-
tion of regional speech with regional reach. Research on computer-mediated communi-
cation shows that German chat channels named after a city or region display features
of the respective dialect, albeit restricted in terms of frequency and environments (An-
droutsopoulos and Ziegler 2004; Franke 2006). A study on Swiss-German chat com-
munication (Siebenhaar 2006) shows that local chat channels (with a younger audience)
use local dialect features almost categorically, whereas supra-regional channels (with an
older audience) vary between dialect and standard forms.
The attention paid in these studies to the distribution of local features is not always
accompanied by an equal amount of attention to localness in discourse. Some earlier
descriptive work tends to view dialect in the media in a matter-of-fact way, i. e., as a
variety that happens to be used in certain genres or by certain speakers. Dialect is thus
viewed as “behavior” rather than “performance” (Coupland 2001), and its function as
an index of local origin is assumed a priori rather than examined in context. What I
term the “reflection fallacy” (section 4) also forms part of this angle. Characteristically,
Burger’s “fundamental linguistic question” is whether the distribution of varieties in
broadcasting “mirrors the conditions of everyday linguistic reality” or whether the media
develop their own usage, which might in turn impact upon “linguistic reality” (Burger
2005: 369; my translation).
Methodologically, a strictly distributional approach implies that the occurrence of
local features will be interpreted as an index of the strength of local orientation of a
station or show. However, regional features may be non-deliberate, and their interac-
tional treatment may suggest that they are less a resource for claiming localness than
something participants try to avoid (Pavlou 2004). While on a more abstract level even
such unintended uses of dialect are, of course, indexical to particular places, claims about
the identity relevance of local speech in the media may be risky without a close look at
what is actually being done with that speech within the discourse context.
In work located within the perspective of interactional and style-oriented sociolinguis-
tics (Schilling-Estes 2002; Coupland 2007) local speech is viewed as a resource in the
construction of individual or institutional style. The focus shifts from linguistic features
as such to the social types and activities styled or stylized through local speech, and
from authenticity to processes of authentication, by which local speech marks people or

activities as “genuine”, and is itself constituted as genuine (Bucholtz 2003; Eastman and
Stein 1993). A prime example of this line of research is from Coupland (2001), who
illustrates the contrast between variationist and interactional views of dialect ⫺ “behav-
ior” or “performance” ⫺ using the example of a Welsh radio disc jockey. In one of his
examples, the radio host uses Welsh English in utterances that constitute a “local”
worldview, but subsequent utterances representing an authoritative opinion are voiced
in Standard English. Stereotypical conjunctions of language and social identity are still
in place here, but these are more-or-less strategically selected and reflexively performed,
i. e., they are an outcome of stylization. Dialect stylization emphasizes the relationship
between dialect as a resource, the communicative activity at hand and the identity pro-
jected by the speaker. “To style dialect is to construct a social image or persona that
interconnects with other facets of a speaker’s communicative design … in a particular
event or act.” (Coupland 2001: 348)
In this spirit, Birkner and Gilles (2008) examine dialect stylizations in reality shows
and television comedy, pointing out that the default assumption in social dialectology,
i. e., that dialect is a marker of regional belonging, is entirely off target in their data, in
which practices of styling local origin, stylizing local social types or performing dialect
prevail. Androutsopoulos and Ziegler (2004) show that local dialect on a German chat-
channel often serves as a contextualization cue, marking shifts in topic or key, quotes
and asides, or evoking the voice of local proletarian types. Franke (2006) finds similar
patterns in a Berlin chat-channel. Again, far from being a reflection of the channel’s
collective identity, dialect is tailored to specific interactional purposes, including the jocu-
lar staging of local stereotypes.
A logical progression from this point would be to move towards a more holistic view
of media discourse, extending the scope from individual speech styles, texts or shows to
larger units. Local media and narrowcasting invite us to examine how local linguistic
resources are strategically positioned in wider processes of media planning. As narrow-
casting audiences are typically delimited by region, constructing a sense of locality can
be considered a core aspect of local media design. Richardson and Meinhof find that
British and German narrowcast programs deploy a broad range of “techniques of local-
ism” (1998: 99), which involve media content (locally significant stories and topics),
visual content (both contributing to a story and as an independently meaningful code),
intertextuality (allowing participants to draw on and demonstrate local knowledge), and
local jargon (designations of urban locations, often abbreviations, acronyms or meta-
phors). Narrowcasters will constantly seek occasions to produce local talk, even though
these occasions may be asymmetrically distributed across participant formats and voices.
In this process, bonds formed by music, topics and linguistic forms signify the impor-
tance of place, and non-standard varieties may gain niche prestige in the grassroots
mediation of local communities.
6. Contrast and voice: Issues o analysis

The preceding discussion hopefully makes clear the importance of the specific discourse
context in interpreting the meaning of linguistic localness. Speaking simply, it makes a
difference if local speech comes from a newsreader or a fictional character, the show
host or an interviewee, in prime time or late at night. In order to identify and interpret
these differences, I suggest that the analysis of linguistic forms needs to be complemented
by the analysis of contrasts between local speech and other linguistic resources in their
discourse context, the genres in which local speech occurs, the voices local speech is
allocated to or presented as owned by, and the identities, i. e., social categories, which
are represented or evoked through local speech in discourse.
Elaborating on the interplay between contrast and voice, the importance of contrast
follows from the principle that sociolinguistic styles are relational, i. e., gain their social
meaning through situated contrasts to other styles (Coupland 2007). The notion of voice,
on the other hand, foregrounds issues of ownership, participation format and perspec-
tive: to whom does regional speech belong, to whom is it allocated, whose perspective
does it cue? (Bakhtin 1981; Baxter 2003; Blommaert 2005; Coupland 2007: 111). Local
speech may be cast as the voice of institutions or of lay speakers, and it may appear as
a speaker’s own, habitual voice or as an alien voice that is temporarily “put on” (in
Bakhtinian double voicing). It is convenient to initially assume such simple dichotomies,
even though this will not always suffice to capture the multiple layers of voices in broad-
cast.
Local forms are in most cases not the default language in media discourse. Their
choice is a matter of voice (Blommaert 2005), and a local voice in the media is always
implicated in contrasts to other voices present in the media output. The analysis of this
interplay operates on an ideological as well as a linguistic level. It asks how local voices
are framed and contextualized by other voices (e.g., those of show hosts or reporters)
or other semiotic material (music, sound, moving images). This includes an assessment
of the relative frequency of local speech vis-à-vis other resources, bearing in mind that
indexing localness may be “more a matter of individual occurrences of salient variants
than of quantitative sums and relative frequencies” (Bell 1992: 337; see also Bell 1999).
Voice contrasts may be organized sequentially, as in code-switching or double-voicing,
or in a more complex, multimodal way involving juxtapositions of speech, sound and
visual event.
The nexus of genre, topic and code choice may give local speech visibility and legiti-
macy in the media, but it also confines it to niches and excludes it from wider institu-
tional uses. In German local newspapers, such niches are typically found in the local
pages and the arts and culture section (Feuilleton; Straßner 1983), where dialects are
used in articles on local everyday life or local politics, albeit often in a satirical or polemi-
cal manner (e.g., political cartoons with dialect-speaking characters who critique or
mock local affairs). Straßner argues that dialect offers more drastic illustrations than
standard language and enables statements that taboo or lack of evidence would not
permit in standard language. In other words, dialect legitimizes certain statements by
contextualizing them as originating from a non-institutional voice, perhaps a “man in
the street” perspective. These observations fit in well with the written representation of
“Pittsburghese” in connection with “topics that have a strong local link and about which
people are not being completely serious”, such as “cartoons about the city transit sys-
tem” (Johnstone, Bhasin and Wittkofski 2002: 159).
Judging from the research literature, the relation of local speech to voices in media
discourse follows a fairly consistent pattern. If local speech is only allocated to some
participants, these will be lay speakers rather than presenters or hosts (Richardson and
Meinhof 1998: 99). In fiction, it will be given to villains, low-status or minor characters
rather than protagonists or “goodies”. If a show host uses local speech (Coupland 2001),
their delivery will be double-voiced and comic rather than thoroughly serious. If local
speech is represented in newspaper reports, it will be contained within reported voices
(i. e., as direct speech) rather than in the reporter’s own voice; if a broadcast feature has
both on-screen voices and voiceover, vernacular will probably feature as on-screen voice
(e.g., in live reporting), while the voiceover will be cast in standard language (e.g., Burger
2005: 365); and so on. In all such tendencies, the local code constructs an orientation
toward everyday, extramural life, and its exclusion from professional voices eventually
sustains the preclusion of accent/dialect from institutional use. While one effect of the
proliferation of lay speakers is that institutional language loses its monopoly and medi-
ascapes become more heteroglossic, this does not necessarily empower vernaculars and
their speakers, as their mediated exposition is still regimented by relations of asymmetry.
Many lay-speaker appearances are one-off and of short duration, and non-standard
speech is thereby positioned as the speakers’ only voice, i. e., as behavior rather than
performance, as habitual and thus unavoidable rather than strategically selected. Thus
an analysis of voices and contrasts may show how the dominance of standard language
persists even within highly heteroglossic mediascapes, but it can also be used to reveal
where any exceptions and challenges to this pattern lie.
7. Conclusion
Local speech in the media is employed in highly versatile ways which defy easy generali-
zations, and this article is only a first step towards synthesizing research insights into a
coherent picture. I argued for the need to move beyond the “reflection fallacy” and to
rethink the relationship between language and space in the media as inventive and cre-
ative, with the media actively constituting links between speech and spaces rather than
simply reflecting existing links. Representations of localness are often done with limited
linguistic material, and may echo traditions of public discourse. The heteroglossic per-
spective advocated here assumes that discourse does not just reflect but also creates
social reality in its own right. As a consequence, the focus shifts to contrastive relations
between codes and voices within media discourse, and to the workings of mediated local
speech within its generic and institutional contexts.
In terms of methodology, the study of language and space in the media is bound to
take us beyond news discourse. Engaging with fiction and entertainment culture ac-
knowledges that these genres may also be crucial in shaping the values of linguistic
heterogeneity. The perspective developed in this article reinforces the idea, entailed in a
post-variationist type of approach, that constructing localness is not simply a matter of
using a local code, but of doing so in ways that evoke places and foreground “cultural
icons” associated with these places. As a consequence, the attention shifts from varieties
to styles and stylizations, and from linguistic forms as such to their conjunctions with
other dimensions of discourse and multimodality. A question for further research is
therefore how local speech in the media becomes meaningful not just by virtue of belong-
ing to a distinct linguistic subsystem, but through its fit with particular topics, voices,
genres, and visual sceneries ⫺ in short, with wider homologies of localness. We may
think of the ways in which a sense of locality is constructed as working in a puzzle-like
manner, complementing each other across different semiotic levels. Reconstructing this
puzzle requires multi-level analyses, which would benefit from combining the methodo-
logical frameworks reviewed in this article.
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VIII. Structural domains: Methodological
problems
42. Areal variation in segmental phonetics

and phonology
1. Introduction
2. Traditional phonetic approaches and methods
3. Instrumental phonetic approaches and phonological interpretation
4. Taxonomic approaches
5. Phonology in structural dialectology
6. Conclusion
7. References
1. Introduction
As disciplines at the very core of linguistics, both phonetics and phonology provide
general means of describing, analyzing and explaining the sound structure of language,
represented as utterances, sentences, words, syllables, sounds and features. Thus, the
subject of analysis is any language or language variety, regardless of its status as a
standard language, a regional variety or even a specific speaking style of an individual.
In this article, we will only briefly touch on general concepts of phonetic and phonologi-
cal analysis. We will instead concentrate on the phonetic and phonological aspects that
may prove relevant to the study of areal variation, i. e., how the notion of space, and
variation in space, is reflected in research on phonetics and phonology. For general
information about key concepts and methods the reader is referred to up-to-date works
by, e.g., on phonetics, Reetz and Jongman (2008), Ladefoged (2004), Ladefoged and
Maddieson (1996), or Johnson (2003) and, on phonology, Goldsmith (1996), Gussenho-
ven and Jacobs (2005) or de Lacy (2007). Ladefoged (2003) provides a thorough intro-
duction to phonetic fieldwork.
2. Traditional phonetic approaches and methods
Following some preliminary dialectological work in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the debate proper about accurate phonetic reality started with Eduard Sievers’
Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie ‘Fundamentals of the physiology of sounds’, and with its
dialectological implementation in Jost Winteler’s account of the Kerenzer vernacular,
both published in 1876. At the same time, Georg Wenker was collecting data for his
linguistic atlases (between 1876 and 1887). But Wenker gathered his data via the medium
of the Latin alphabet (in kurrent script) transcribed by non-experts. Hence, a phonetic
42. Segmental phonetics and phonology 761
interpretation of these data is only possible via a reconstruction of the grapheme⫺pho-

neme relation and is thus only viable for parts of the sound system. Notwithstanding
these concerns, these data can still be successfully used for phonetic and phonological
analysis (e.g., Kehrein, Lameli and Nickel 2006 on h-dropping).
In contrast to the indirect surveys of Georg Wenker, exact phonetic representation
grew increasingly important in the neogrammarian dialect monographs. The data for
these monographs were collected in a direct survey by either the researcher himself or a
phonetically trained fieldworker and the sounds were recorded phonetically accurately.
On the basis of these exact phonetic descriptions, the history of the sounds, i. e., the
sound laws for the specific location, were presented. Although a strict interpretation of
the hypothesis of the exceptionlessness of such sound laws could not be maintained, the
notion of a regular correspondence between the historical and current sounds is still one
of the pillars of the investigation of sound and space.
All modern Germanic linguistic atlases (except the first volume of the ALA [Beyer
and Matzen 1969], which lies more in the Romance tradition) ground their representa-
tion in the sounds of the historical sound system. Using example words they show how
the sounds in these words are currently realized. To correct and verify the phonetic
development, several words containing the respective sound are usually mapped. Thus,
Hugo Schuchardt’s emphasis on word history is taken at least partially into consider-
ation. In the linguistic geography of the Romance tradition (Gilliéron and Edmont
1902⫺1910, ALF; Jaberg and Jud 1928⫺1940, AIS), which opposes the neogrammarian
adherence to sound laws, transcriptions of complete words are mapped not individual
sounds. Nevertheless, an exact phonetic representation is considered equally important
by the Romance and German linguists.
This recognition of the importance of the sound values of spoken language first gave
rise to the development of phonetic alphabets with which to capture phonetic reality. The
different transcription conventions are not addressed here (cf. Richter 2005); common to
all phonetic transcription systems is the fact that they symbolically represent the articula-
tion of sounds (cf. Almeida and Braun 1986). The investigator tries to capture the audi-
tory impression exactly. This auditory impression, however, cannot be rendered directly,
and the investigator must articulatorily emulate it. Only the articulatory emulation can
be represented symbolically in the transcription. Despite investigators’ intensive phonetic
training, this representation of a speaker’s articulation, with a detour via the transcriber’s
acoustic impression and subsequent rearticulation, can hardly be described as objective
(cf. Almeida and Braun 1982; Vieregge 1985). For this reason, the same interviews are
often transcribed by multiple investigators. These control transcriptions guarantee in-
tersubjectivity, not objectivity, and indicate differences between investigators that can
give rise to false distinctions and isoglosses on the maps of linguistic atlases. For the
ALA (Beyer and Matzen 1965; Bothorel-Witz, Philipp and Spindler 1984) and the SDS
(Hotzenköcherle 1962⫺1997), which recorded their data at the same time, several in-
terviews were transcribed in parallel by the fieldworkers from both projects. These differ-
ences, as well as differences between individual SDS investigators, are described in Hot-
zenköcherle (1962: 60⫺73), and such potential pitfalls are addressed in the introduction
to every linguistic atlas.
Despite their shortcomings, transcriptions remain ⫺ up until the most recent sur-
veys ⫺ the basic data for phonetic and phonological analysis in linguistics and especially
for the representation of variation across space in linguistic atlases. In the Romance
762 VIII. Structural domains: Methodological problems
dialect atlas tradition, these transcripts are written directly onto maps, where they are
immediately accessible as raw data. In the German tradition, the transcripts are pro-
cessed so that the sound maps depict only the relevant sounds as symbols. This abstrac-
tion from various transcription symbols to a single graphic symbol on the map is itself
a reduction and interpretation of data.
The transcripts and their conversion into linguistic maps are the basis for broader
interpretation and analysis. The distribution of the sound representations on the map is
the basis for the traditional historical and extralinguistic interpretation of the distribu-
tion of sound in space (cf. Case Study 1: which follows). Precise phonetic data are a
prerequisite for phonological analyses (cf. the discussion of Case Studies 2 and 3). They
are also the prerequisite for interpretations of phonetic distributions in space by means
of dialect distance measurements (e.g., Herrgen and Schmidt 1985, 1989) and for dialec-
tometric analyses (cf. Nerbonne and Heeringa in this volume).
Case study 1: Traditional dialect geography

The point of origin for all sound maps in traditional dialectology is a sound from a
historical phoneme system. As a tertium comparationis the historical system represents
the putative common ancestor of a diachronic development with all the forms shown on
the map as its end. In German dialectology, the Middle High German or Old High
German vowel system is usually selected as such a common ancestor for vocalic develop-
ments; for consonants it is usually a West Germanic consonant system. In Romance
linguistics it is normally the Vulgar Latin system. During data collection, an informant
is asked to produce a carrier word containing this sound; the exact phonetic realization
is transcribed auditorily ⫺ or measured acoustically, as in the Atlas of North American
English (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005). Despite the fact that the historical reference
point is a sound system, the current forms of the historical sounds are interpreted pho-
netically, not phonologically. Only in exceptional cases are phonological questions
raised, e.g., when multiple sounds are counterposed in a combination map. However, in
this kind of map, only the contrast within part of the system can be shown, not all of
the systemic contrasts (cf. section 5.1 on structuralist approaches).
Map 42.1 is a typical example of a phonetic map from a modern linguistic atlas.
The Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz (SDS; Hotzenköcherle 1962⫺1997) has played a
formative role for all subsequent linguistic atlases of the German area⫺VALTS (Gabriel
1985⫺), SSA (Steger, Gabriel and Schupp 1989⫺), BSA (Hinderling 1996⫺), MRhSA
(Bellmann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002).
Map 42.1 depicts the realization of MHG â in German-speaking Switzerland (Hot-
zenköcherle 1962⫺1997: vol. I, 61). MHG â in Abend ‘evening’ is regarded as a good
representative for the development of the â of the Middle High German sound system.
However, phonological contrasts such as regionally differentiated mergers with a length-
ened MHG a or MHG ô cannot be elicited from this map, nor can the realization of
MHG â in other words (e.g., Haar ‘hair’, Schaf ‘sheep’, gebracht ‘brought’, gaa ‘go’, laa
‘let’, or staa ‘stand’) whose isoglosses follow slightly different paths be seen.
Dialectological maps thus always imply a diachronic view, and the example shows
the present-day endpoint of the development of MHG â. There are three possible ways
to find an explanation for the distribution presented on this map. First, the present-day
realizations can be interpreted phonetically, as in the neogrammarian tradition. Sec-
ondly, extralinguistic models can be utilized (cf. articles 13⫺21 in this volume). Finally,
Map 42.1: Symbol map of MHG â Abend ‘evening’ in German-speaking Switzerland (Hotzen-
köcherle 1962⫺1997: vol. I, 61); see text for an explanation of the symbols
the current forms can be explained phonologically. A “sound physiological” (lautphysio-

logisch) explanation in the neogrammarian tradition, as developed by Bachmann (1908),
would be as follows. Middle High German â is raised to [o/c] in most of the southern
parts of the German area; only the most southern corners of Alemannia do not take
part in this sound change. This raising of MHG â is often seen as one of the core
elements of an areal structuring of Swiss German. The south of German-speaking Swit-
zerland retains MHG â as [a:/a:] (symbols , , ). In the northern parts, represented
by open circles (o), MHG â was raised to [c:]. In the northwest and in a northern strip
on the border to Germany, in the Zürich uplands, in Thurgau, St. Gallen, Appenzell and
Schaffhausen, this rise continued on to [o:], depicted by filled circles (쐌). Finally, the
crossed circles (✦) represent a diphthongization ([o:] > [ow4]). This diachronic and physi-
ological development [a: > a: > c: > o: > ow4] is thus implicatively reflected in space.
However, the region around Zürich builds an exception to this spatiotemporal sequence.
Here we find [A:] (depicted as ). In this physiological/phonetic interpretation, [A:]
would be inserted between [a:] and [c:] in the series above. Hence, [A:] can be regarded
as a relict form of the Zürich region (Bachmann 1908). Hotzenköcherle (1961), however,
has convincingly shown that this interpretation has shortcomings. Bringing other maps
to this interpretation has unearthed an additional motivation for this [A:]. Normally, the
umlaut of a preserved MHG â is [æ:], for a raised [c:] it is [œ:] and for an [o:] it is [ø:].
So we have a systematic relation between a back vowel and a fronted variant. But in
the Zürich region (and only there), the umlaut of [A:] is [œ:], not [˜:]. This opposition
/A: ~ œ:/ can only be explained by hypothesizing an originally raised [c:] that has since
been lowered again to [A:]. Lexical hypercorrections of MHG ô that are lowered to [A:]
provide additional evidence (e.g., Trog > [trA:g̊] ‘trough’ and Tor > [tA:r] ‘door’).
Coupled with these observations, Map 42.1 makes clear what a phonetic interpreta-
tion can achieve, and also that a purely phonetic interpretation has its drawbacks. Based
on this and similar misinterpretations and corrections of the phonetic interpretation
increasing numbers of structural phonological approaches have been pursued since the
1960s.
3. Instrumental phonetic approaches and phonological

interpretation
Compared to the surveys of traditional dialectology, recent developments in instrumental

phonetics offer a range of new possibilities for the analysis and representation of sounds
which have consequences for dialect geography and phonological interpretation. These
instrumental phonetic approaches rely not on articulation, which was the basis for audi-
tory transcription, but on the acoustic features of sounds and therefore on more objec-
tive data. There is no space here to provide an introduction into instrumental phonetics
(available in, e.g., Johnson 2003; Ladefoged 2003; Reetz and Jongman 2008), but because
formant analysis has been used several times in the representation of spatial variation
(Adank, van Hout and van de Velde 2007; Iivonen 1987, 1994; Jacewicz, Fox and Sal-
mons 2007; Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005), the principle behind this measurement shall
be briefly described.
During voiced phonation, each sound is characterized by a fundamental frequency
and its harmonics, which are integer multiples of this fundamental frequency. While
speaking, we rapidly change the size and shape of the vocal tract by altering the shape
of the tongue, the rounding or spreading of the lips and opening or closing of the nasal
tract. These changes in the vocal tract and the chambers of resonance filter out most of
the harmonics and amplify other frequencies, giving each sound its own specific quality.
The remnants of this filtering process are frequency bands of higher intensity ⫺ the so-
called formants ⫺ which show characteristic values for each sound quality. In order to
classify the different vowel qualities, it is sufficient to take just the first two lower for-
mants into account (for an elaborate account of the interpretation of vowel formants, see
Moosmüller 2006). Thus, the first formant (F1) roughly corresponds to the articulatory
dimension of vowel height, while the second formant (F2) corresponds to the back⫺front
dimension of vowel articulation. The first formant of an [i] spoken by male speakers, for
example, is around 300 Hertz, the second formant has a value of around 2300 Hertz.
Figure 42.1 is a spectrogram of three vowels illustrating the different values for the
Fig. 42.1: Spectrogram with highlighted first and second formant for the vowels [i:], [a:] and [u:]
Fig. 42.2: Spectra with highlighted first and second formant of the vowels [i:], [a:] and [u:] from
Figure 42.1
formants; the frequencies of the first two formants are highlighted. Figure 42.2 shows
the corresponding spectra, which allow more exact measurements than the spectrogram.
Differences between languages/dialects arise because of different formant structures
in the vowels. Measuring formants in the sound spectrum therefore allows the sound
quality of different varieties to be surveyed and compared on the basis of the acoustic
features. Early applications of this technique to a comparison of regional variation in
the Germanic dialects area include Göschel (1973), Barry (1986) (a comparison of two
Fig. 42.3: Depiction of formants by Iivonen (1994: 222, 226)
Low German dialects), Herrgen and Schmidt (1986) (vowel centralization in West Mid-
dle German dialects), Lauf (1993) (diphthongization), Schouten and Peters (1996) (diph-
thongization) and Iivonen (1983, 1987, 1994). Present-day research takes different dis-
tance measurements and gender normalizations into account. Fabricius (2007) discusses
sound change in Received Pronunciation, Jacewicz, Fox and Salmons (2007) analyze
regional varieties of American English and Adank, van Hout and van de Velde (2007)
examine regional variation in standard Dutch.
Figure 42.3 shows the comparison of acoustic vowel systems for two speakers of
Standard German. In this figure, F1 is depicted on the y-axis with the higher values at
the bottom and F2 on the x-axis with the higher values to the left. The advantage of this
mirrored coordinate system is that it corresponds roughly to the representation of the
articulatory vowel space. The differences between the two systems are due to regional
variation in the realizations of Standard German vowels in Hamburg and Zürich, respec-
tively. Notice, e.g., the much more obvious tense⫺lax relationship between the vowel
pairs [i:] ~ [=] and [u:] ~ [w] for a speaker from Hamburg as compared to the Zürich
speaker. For the axes, the perceptually based bark scale is used, which allows conclusions
to be drawn about the perceptual distance between vowel realizations (Iivonen 1994).
Iivonen has published several such comparisons of Standard German vowel systems,
allowing him to sketch a rough spatial structure of Standard German pronunciation.
For a comprehensive analysis of a whole linguistic area, however, the costs remain too
high. This analysis only became a reality with The Atlas of North American English (La-
bov, Ash and Boberg 2005), which consistently takes acoustic measurements into ac-
count.
Formant measurements play an important role in analyzing sub-phonemic sound
changes in progress. Labov, Ash and Boberg (2005: 49⫺53), for instance, give a detailed
acoustic account of the merger in progress between the word classes /ohr/ (porch) and
/chr/ (sort, cort) in American English.
Case Study 2: The Atlas o North American English

With its phonetic and phonological interpretation of acoustic data in space, the seminal
Atlas of North American English (ANAE; Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005) is groundbreak-
ing in many ways. By utilizing acoustic measurements on a large scale it becomes pos-
sible to describe patterns of regional variation in phonetics and phonology for the dia-
lects of North America. For 297 cities in the United States and Canada, language data
was recorded in telephone interviews to gather information on all of the phonemes and
allophones of English. The innovative maps of this atlas reveal not only aspects of the
phonological system but also the phonetic dynamics of sound changes in progress. Data
analysis was done both auditorily and acoustically. Using acoustic measurements of
formant structures makes it possible to trace vocalic sound changes in progress, which
are barely, if at all, analyzable using auditory transcriptions alone (but see Künzel 2001
on the disadvantages of analyzing telephone recordings acoustically). This then allows a
reconstruction of the progress of a sound change across geographical space. Labov, Ash
and Boberg apply very exact methods of measurement (well-defined placement of the
measurements points and LPC [“linear predicted coding”] to obtain the formant values)
plus the normalization of the frequency values (using Nearey’s 1978 algorithm) in order
to make speech data from informants of different ages and sexes comparable. The quan-
tification of variability is symbolized using various shades of the same color. The maps
detail the regional distribution of phonetic/phonological processes, which affect the real-
ization of phonemes and their allophones (e.g., /r/-vocalization, fronting of /uw/ [e.g., in
boot], lowering of /o/ [hot, fox], raising of /æ/ [bad ], as well as relationships between
phonemes). The latter include the various kinds of phoneme mergers, distinguishing be-
tween “nearly completed mergers” (e.g., the merger of /ohr/ and /chr/ in words like
hoarse and horse) and “mergers in progress”. The status of a merger is determined both
auditorily and on the basis of acoustic measurements of the corresponding vowels in the
informant’s vowel system. Different symbols on the map describe the status of a merger
and reveal core areas and transition areas.
In most cases, phonetic/phonological processes form part of more far-reaching
changes in the overall system by virtue of being triggers for, or reactions to, other pro-
cesses. Such chain shifts often occur in a vowel system, and were first described in Bavar-
ian dialects by Pfalz (1918) and among German dialects by Wiesinger (1970). With re-
gard to chain shifts, regional variation arises when related dialects exhibit different stages
of the same chain shift. The mapping of the different stages of a chain shift also allows
us to capture the progression of this sound change in time. One of the best investigated
Map 42.2: Phonetic processes involved in chain shifts in the dialects of North America (from Labov,
Ash and Boberg 2005: 123)
chain shifts is the so-called “Northern Cities Shift” taking place in the northern inland
region of the United States around the major cities of Chicago, Detroit, Rochester,
Syracuse and Buffalo (see Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972; Labov 1991). In Labov, Ash
and Boberg (2005), the stages of this chain shift are analyzed acoustically and mapped.
It becomes clear that the temporally consecutive stages of the shift have their own re-
gional spread. In stage (1), the phoneme /æ/ in words like bad, laugh is raised to a more
closed front vowel, which can lead in part to diphthongization (“breaking”). For an
instance of /æ/ to be classified as raised, the normalized value for F1 has to be lower
than 700 Hertz. This initial process in the chain shift is mostly found in the area desig-
nated “Inland North” (red isogloss on Map 42.2). In stage (2) of the shift, the now
empty position of /æ/ attracts the neighboring vowel position /o ~ ah/ and words like
top, bottle are being fronted to occupy the now empty position of the laugh-vowel. In
step (3), the vowel /oh/ in words like caught, dog is lowered and moves into the empty
position of /o ~ ah/. In stage (4), due to the pressure of the raised /æ/, short /e/ in words
like flesh, ten undergoes backing. This, in turn, makes the /v/ phoneme (lunch, tough)
move to the now free position of /oh/ (former slot for dog, caught). The consistent
application of acoustic measurements allows the regional spread of the Northern Cities
Shift to be systematically captured. Labov, Ash and Boberg (2005: 121⫺124) use the
formula ED ⫽ F2 (e) ⫺ F2 (o), which utilizes the second formant to measure the relation
between backing of /e/ and fronting of /o/. Since backing is shown by a decrease and
fronting by an increase in F2, and since these two processes characterize the Northern
Cities Shift decisively, this chain shift is most advanced in areas where the difference
between F2 (e) and F2 (o) is the lowest. If, on the other hand, ED is high, the chain shift
has not advanced very far. Map 42.2 details several aspects of the Northern Cities Shift,
as well as other chain shifts in the dialects of the United States. With regard to the
former, the round dark blue symbols and the dark blue isogloss mark out an area around
the cities in the north where the chain shift has proceed the farthest, based upon the
acoustic formula F2 (e) ⫺ F2 (o) < 375 Hertz; this frequency value has proven useful in
calculating the advancement of the chain shift.
This map shows also the isogloss for the raising of /æ/ (red isogloss), i. e., the initial
stage of the Northern Cities Shift. It is noticeable that this encompasses a larger area
than the blue isogloss. This is a typical instance of the nesting of isoglosses, which can
be utilized to show the temporal dynamics of a chain shift within an area.
All the processes described and shown on the map are clearly sub-phonemic and have
effects on the phonological system. In contrast to purely phonemic analyzes, like Moul-
ton’s (1961) study of the “Ostschweizerische Vokalspaltung”, these maps draw upon a
phonetically and process-based mapping. Instead of comparing (parts of) phoneme sys-
tems, this kind of mapping makes the gradual spread of phonetic processes visible in
geographical space and allows subsequent interpretations about phonological restructur-
ing and the progress of sound change.
While the Atlas of North American English relies mainly on acoustic measurements to
detect regional patterns in the phonetics of dialects, sound perception is also moving
more and more into focus in dialectology. Plichta and Preston (2005) present impressive
results from a perception experiment on the ongoing process of monophthongization
of /ay/ (as in tide) in the dialects of the United States, which is most prominent in the
dialects of the South. They prepared a seven-step continuum of synthetic stimuli (F1 and
F2 synthesis) from clearly diphthongal [a= ] to clearly monophthongal [a:]. Listeners
then had to match the randomly presented stimuli to a location on a map of a North⫺
South continuum. They found that listeners were able to locate the stimuli correctly by
transferring the diphthong⫺monophthong continuum perfectly to the North⫺South
continuum on the map of the United States.
4. Taxonomic approaches
Besides traditional phonetic and phonological analysis, the dialectometric approach

should also be addressed. A dialectometric analysis employs numerical classification
methods to detect basic patterns in large data sets, such as those used in data mining
for market analysis. The data for these linguistic analyses are those drawn from the
linguistic atlases. While phonetic analyses focus on individual or closely related phenom-
ena, phonology analyzes the relations within the system. However, the selection of phe-
nomena is often restricted to a subsystem. A taxonomic approach, on the other hand,
tries to capture differences and similarities between linguistic systems quantitatively, nor-
mally without relating them to a phonological or structural analysis. The point of depar-
ture for the dialectometric approach is the insight that traditional linguistic maps, with
their many different isoglosses, can hardly be overlooked, so that it is difficult to struc-
ture the space (cf. the linguistic, chiefly phonological maps Wiesinger [1983a] drew in
his overview of the German-speaking area). Moreover, structuring the space via a selec-
tion of isoglosses often seems arbitrary, and individual divergent isoglosses can hardly
be integrated into a synopsis. Besides, a structuring on the basis of individual isoglosses
gives the impression that dialect area and dialect continuum are divorced form one
another. One either concentrates on the area, and therefore looks at the isoglosses that
border the area, or one concentrates on the continuum, which means the dialect area
disappears. An alternative is to look at the differences in space that are not prestructured
by linguistic premises underlying the selection of isoglosses, but which are found in a
huge set of data. To attain such an overview, the similarities between all the dialects of
an area are calculated. The measurement of similarity/dissimilarity between all local dia-
lects then results in an area structure that is not biased by singular events. Indeed, it is
the models of numeric classification, the taxonomy and the measure of similarity which
influence the results.
In the following we examine projects that focus on phonetic aspects. However, studies
with a morphological or syntactic (or even lexical) focus have been put forward (cf. e.g.,
Goebl 1982, 1984 and 1993 for atlases of different Roman languages), and it is also
possible to combine different phenomena.
Many algorithms (e.g., Goebl 1982 passim; Herrgen and Schmidt 1985 and 1989;
Kessler 1995) have been proposed to define the phonetic similarity of dialects. Based on
Herrgen and Schmidt’s (1989) algorithm, early maps were drawn to show the degree of
similarity between numerous localities in the West Middle German dialect area on the
one hand and their similarity to the German standard language on the other (see Bell-
mann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002: Map 314/1⫺2).
A comparison of different measurement tools is given in Heeringa (2004; see also
Nerbonne and Heeringa in this volume). He concludes (2004: 184⫺186) that binary
segment differences outperform more refined feature-based measures of segment differ-
ence. As a consequence, he uses the Levenshtein distance algorithm for analyses of dif-
ferent atlases that are presented here in summary. Levenshtein distance was originally
developed to compare mathematical strings and has been transformed to suit acoustic
data by calculating the costs of transforming one sequence of sounds into another. It
comprises the following operations: (a) insertion of a single sound; (b) deletion of a
single sound; and (c) substitution of one sound for another. For every change necessary
to transform a word into another the Levenshtein distance rises.
When the differences between all the dialects in an area are calculated, the distances
are grouped into classes using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, thus gener-
ating classes of greater similarity. Representing these classes in space produces clear
dialect borders (Map 42.3). Similar techniques have been used for different regions,
based on the appropriate linguistic atlases ⫺ cf. Heeringa (2004) for Norway; Nerbonne
and Siedle (2006) for German dialects; Nerbonne (to appear) for the Middle and South
Atlantic States of the USA; Shackleton (2007) for the traditional English Dialects; Wie-
ling, Heeringa and Nerbonne (2007) for Belgium and Holland.
Map 42.3, from Heeringa (2004: 231), suggests that we have clear categorical dialect
borders, similar to those generated within the traditional approaches on the basis of the
interpretation of a handful of isoglosses, but resting on a broader and therefore more
reliable database. These borders are, however, not per se more genuine. They are a pro-
duct of the data selection, the statistical techniques and their interpretation. Another
clustering technique, another selection of the clusters, another measurement of similarity,
another numerical classification or another scaling technique ⫺ all these factor can result
Map 42.3: Dialectometric structuring of Dutch by means of a cluster analysis (Heeringa 2004: 231)
in different regional distributions. So, these structures are based on more data than the
classical approaches and in many cases they support the structures of the classical analy-
ses, however, they can recognize additional or more deeply nested patterns.
5. Phonology in structural dialectology
5.1. Structuralist phonology
Structuralist approaches in dialectology differentiate themselves from purely historical

and phonetic perspectives such as those put forward by the Neogrammarians or the
Marburg School. According to Moulton (1968: 456), the splitting up of a phonetic con-
tinuum into regions with clear-cut borders, as presented on dialect maps for instance,
only becomes possible with the application of a phonological perspective. In developing
his axiomatic structuralist phonology, Trubetzkoy (1931) formulated early thoughts on
the application of phonological principles to both language and dialect geography. By
distancing himself from the neogrammarian diachronic sound-change theory, he trans-
ferred his principles of synchronic phonology to the areal dimension, developing phono-
logical descriptions for individual lects in geographical space, which are subsequently
compared with each other in a separate step. Three areas of difference in the sound
system can be identified. Phonetic differences concern the phonetic realization of a pho-
neme ⫺ either context-free or context-sensitive (“kombinatorisch”). Phonological differ-
ences refer either to the sound inventory or to functional differences in the phonemic
systems. While these general phonological principles can be applied to the comparison
of any languages or dialects, Trubetzkoy’s third type of difference relates explicitly to
the comparison of dialects ⫺ for so-called etymological differences, the “sound history”
of words with a common origin is taken into account.
Uriel Weinreich (1954) introduced an influential formalization to capture differences
between phonological inventories and phonological distributions with his notion of the
“diasystem”. This basic structuralist principle was taken up rather late in German dialec-
tology. The concept of the diasystem has been and still is (implicitly or explicitly) used
in various dialectological investigations. Under the label of strukturelle Sprachgeographie
‘structural language geography’, the comparative/diatopical method of Goossens (1969)
has also been influential. Here, for various (ideally all) localities of a dialect region,
the phonemic systems and their distributional characteristics are determined and, in a
subsequent step, compared with each other. To explain the phonological differences thus
analyzed, diachronic processes relating to older language stages have been deployed (e.g.,
split or merger of a phoneme, etc.). A thorough example of this method is the description
of the vowel system of the Swiss German dialects by Haas (1978; cf. Haas in this vol-
ume). Within this perspective, dialect geography is a branch of diachronic linguistics
which employs synchronic/structuralist methods. This becomes evident in the fact that a
historical system has often been used as a methodological reference point for the descrip-
tion of a present-day dialect, as in neogrammarian phonetic analyses. As already men-
tioned, in German dialectology, “classical” Middle High German and West Germanic
(Keller 1961), and for Romance scholars, late-Latin forms, have been chosen as reference
points; in the dialectology of English, word classes have been set up based on present-
day English (Wells 1982). After preliminary work (e.g., by Pfalz 1918, 1936) on the
systematic nature of vowel systems and their systematic changes in related dialects,
groundbreaking research in this paradigm was done in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Moul-
ton 1961; Goossens 1969; Wiesinger 1970; Werlen 1977; Haas 1978; for a systematic
comparison of the phonological vowel systems of German dialects, see Wiesinger 1983b).
Since that time, basic structuralist concepts like minimal pairs, phonological oppositions,
distributions, neutralizations and allophony have been widely applied to obtain phono-
logical descriptions of vowel and consonant inventories as closed systems. With this
method, areal variation becomes visible when the phonemic systems of several dialects
are presented in the same manner. For the vowel system, then, these phonological differ-
ences may apply to the number of phonemes, the structure of the inventory (e.g., degrees
of openness, presence or absence of rounded front vowels), phonemic vowel length ver-
sus a tense⫺lax system, the implementation of phoneme split or mergers, etc.
A classic example of the application of structuralist principles and methods is a vowel
split in Swiss German dialects (the “nordostweizerische Vokalspaltung”, see Moulton
1961), which demonstrates how the internal dynamics of a phonological vowel system
result in a sound change (“Lautwandel durch innere Kausalität”). The Middle High
German system, the putative historical predecessor, is asymmetrical with regard to the
phonologically relevant degrees of opening of the short vowels: while there are four
degrees of openness for the unrounded front vowels, there are only three degrees for the
rounded front vowels and the back vowels (see Figure 42.4a).
According to Moulton, this asymmetry creates pressure within the system, which
leads to subsequent restructuring in the later stages of phonological development. It is
Original MHG system

i y u
e ø o
ε
æ a
Fig. 42.4a: MHG short vowel system
Solution 1 Solution 2
i y u i y u
e ø o e ø o
ε œ c
æ a æ a
Fig. 42.4b: Short vowel systems in Swiss German dialects
assumed that phonological systems strive for symmetry and, to regain this, two remedies
are conceivable in this case, both of which are attested in neighboring northeastern Swiss
German dialects. In the first solution, the degrees of openness are reduced from four to
three when MHG /e/ merges with /æ/ (cf. Figure 42.4b).
In the remaining dialects, the phoneme split of /ø/ and /o/ leads to the emergence of
the new phonemes /œ/ und /c/ respectively, which then occupy the empty slots of the half-
open rounded vowels (see the right-hand side of Figure 42.4b). In terms of symmetry, the
number of rounded and unrounded vowels is thus in balance. This sound change has
been initiated by the drag of the empty slots in an asymmetrical inventory and preceded
by the emergence of contextual allophones. This example demonstrates how the notions
of phoneme merger and phoneme split are used to capture structural differences in the
phonological inventories of neighboring dialects.
Aside from its temporal dimension, sound change also implies the dimension of grad-
ual progression in space (i. e., speech community), which may lead to a situation where
all instances of a sound in one region are affected by a change, with no exceptions,
whereas in other regions the same sound is only affected in specific contextual or pro-
sodic contexts. This contextually bound progression of a sound change in geographical
space then leads to a so-called “graded landscape” (Staffellandschaft), the systematic
structure of which can also be captured in phonological terms. Map 42.4 shows the
distribution of the phoneme /s / in a dialect cluster in the Limburg area (Netherlands/
Belgium; following Goossens 1969), where the consonant is permitted in differing
contexts (e.g., initially before a vowel, initially before certain consonants, in a word-final
position, etc.). Whereas in the westernmost region, (1), /s / is only permitted in foreign
words, the consonant is allowed in an increasing number of contexts, the further east
one goes. In region (6), then, /s / is possible in nearly all positions within a word. Thus,
the regional distribution of the phoneme /s / can be described in terms of phonological
contexts, and each combination of contexts represents a specific region in this dialect
cluster.
In the dialectological literature one finds several instances of a regional gradation of
sound changes, which are dependent upon the phonological context. For example, there
is the regionally graded application of the Second Germanic consonant shift (Szczepa-
Map 42.4: Distribution of /s/ in a dialect cluster in Limburg (Goossens 1969)
niak 2007) or the palatalization of /s/ before plosives (/st/ >/st/) in Luxembourgish dia-
lects (Gilles 1999). In recent dialect atlases, systematic maps which illustrate the regional
patterns of truly phonological aspects rather than simply the regional variation of a
single specific word can also be found. The Südwestdeutscher Sprachatlas (Steger, Gabriel
and Schupp 1989⫺) for instance, contains several maps to show the structure of the
subsystem of the plosives in southwestern German dialects, in such a way that it becomes
possible to distinguish core areas and transition zones.
5.2. Recent developments in phonology
With the advent of generative phonology and publication of the influential Sound Pat-
terns of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968), the distinction between underlying form,
surface form and phonetic implementation became manifest in phonological thinking.
As described in Barbiers (in this volume), phonological rules were introduced to express
the derivation of the different forms at these phonological levels. With regard to differ-
ences between the phonological systems of related dialects, one way to describe these
differences is “rule ordering”: differences between these dialects may be the result of
different orderings of phonological rules. In the following example, the difference be-
tween the Standard German (and southern) surface form [lan] ‘long’ and the northern
German variant [lank] is explained in terms of different rule orderings (following Ramers
2001: 72⫺73; see Figure 42.5). In Standard German, the rules “final g-deletion” and
Standard German Northern German

/lang/ /lang/
B nasal assimilation B nasal assimilation
/lang/ /lang/
B final g-deletion B final devoicing
/lan/ /lank/
B final devoicing (not applicable) B final g-deletion (not applicable)
[lan] [lank]
Fig. 42.5: Derivation of an underlying form in two varieties of German and application of dif-
ferent rule orderings (following Ramers 2001: 72⫺73)
“final devoicing” stand in “bleeding order”, and hence the latter phonological rule can-
not be applied and this results in the correct form [lan]. In northern German, however,
“final devoicing” is ordered before “final g-deletion” and this leads to the correct north-
ern variant [lank].
Thus, in this model regional differences are expressed in terms of the different order-
ings of rules operating on one common underlying form. A similar analysis has been
proposed by Rein (1974), who describes l-vocalization in Bavarian dialects with the help
of several phonological rules. The characteristics of the different Bavarian regions, then,
are formulated on the bases of various rule orderings (for a general criticism of the
generative concept of rule ordering, see Hooper 1976).
In the last decades, phonological research has increasingly taken dialect data into
account (see, e.g., Repetti 2000 on the dialects of Italy or Hinskens, van Hout and
Wetzels 1997). However, as in structuralist phonology, from this perspective dialects are
seen as clearly delimitable, self-contained varieties; this fails to systematically take into
account the fact that dialects are virtually always characterized by internal variation, the
origins of which lie in language contact with neighboring dialects (horizontal dimension)
and ⫺ these days perhaps more importantly ⫺ with overarching regional varieties and
the standard language (vertical dimension). To circumvent the traditional method of
comparing the phonological systems of idealized self-contained dialects, variation has to
be systematically taken into account by developing more complex, multi-layered models
for the phonological interrelationship between regional varieties (see Auer 1990, 1995;
Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill 2005: 19 for a general critique).
Ongoing developments in phonology ⫺ Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith 1990),
Lexical Phonology (Mohanan 1986), Natural Phonology (Donegan and Stampe 1979;
Dressler 1985), Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004) and Stochastic Optimal-
ity Theory (Boersma 1998) ⫺ tend to strengthen a dynamic perspective in phonology by
bringing internal variation more and more into focus. Certain elements of these phono-
logical theories have been applied in so called “standard/dialect phonology” to model
the dynamic relationship between small-scale varieties like dialects and large-scale vari-
eties like the standard languages. In this perspective the whole linguistic repertoire of
the individual or the speech community is at the center of attention, not discrete, self-
contained varieties. One radical proposal in this context is for a “bi-dialectal phonology”
(Rennison 1981), in which a common underlying form for both dialect and standard
language is posited. On the basis of the standard/dialect repertoire found in the city of
Salzburg (Austria), Rennison shows how filtering rules, standard processes and dialect
processes ensure that either dialect or standard forms are generated out of a single com-
mon deep structure. However, to be able to generate strongly diverging dialect and stan-
dard language surface forms, rather abstract underlying forms are required.
This drawback is avoided if one stipulates a repertoire with two separate phonological
systems, for dialect and standard language respectively, interconnected by a system of
rules and processes (Auer 1990, 1995; Dressler and Wodak 1982; Gilles 1999; Moosmül-
ler 1987, 1988). This, then, allows a more adequate description of language contact
between small-scale and large-scale varieties. One constitutive factor is the modular and
hierarchical composition of phonology, a concept borrowed from Lexical Phonology.
Here, surface forms are derived from an underlying form via various steps. At a prelexi-
cal level, the possible phonemic contrasts and permitted phonotactic structures are speci-
fied. The lexical level is organized by phonological rules, which are sensitive to morpho-
logical operations. They model the phonological consequences of morphological opera-
tions like affixation and stem alternation (e.g., final devoicing, velar softening,
resyllabification, umlaut, etc.). This level in itself is also organized hierarchically by as-
suming different sublevels (“strata”), so as to be able to formulate certain rule orderings.
Fig. 42.6: Two-dimensional model of phonological variation between a dialect and a standard
variety (from Auer 1995: 25)
Finally, on the postlexical level, the phonetic implementation of the surface forms takes
place. For postlexical rules, morphological boundaries are no longer “visible”. Here we
find speech-style related and sandhi rules, which in most cases follow a lenition teleology,
i. e., they are production oriented and strive for articulatory simplification (e.g., certain
kinds of assimilation, monophthongization, “flapping”, segment reduction and deletion;
for an extensive list of prelexical/redundancy, lexical and postlexical rules, see Dressler
1985; Mohanan 1986; Auer 1990).
This hierarchical organization of phonology is utilized by Auer (1990, 1995) to model
the dynamic nature of the relationship between dialect, unmarked intermediate varieties
and a standard variety and to capture variability within a language repertoire (Figure
42.6). Contact between the varieties (i. e., along the horizontal dimension of focusing) is
possible on the prelexical (via redundancy rules) and lexical level (via lexical rules) of
the phonological hierarchy (i. e., along the vertical dimension of lexicalization/grammati-
calization) by virtue of different rule types. Postlexical rules, on the other hand, are not
sensitive to focus on a specific variety; they are language universal in the sense that they
reflect general natural/phonological processes.
Hence, a dialect may differ from other varieties (either the standard language or
neighboring varieties) on the prelexical and/or lexical level. The fact that the varieties
share certain phonological aspects is accounted for in terms of common rules (the “un-
marked” region in the center of the model). Unique traits of dialect or standard language
are expressed in terms of dialect or standard rules, respectively. Rules of correspondence
are a special type of rule used to describe certain “trends” in the relationships between
lexical structures that have to be learned item by item. This complex model of phonologi-
cal contact between adjacent varieties thus describes, in a theoretically grounded way,
how a certain pronunciation is oriented to either the dialect, the unmarked, or the stan-
dard pole of a given repertoire. This model should also be seen as an attempt to combine
or reconcile traditional dialectology with modern phonological theory.
Case Study 3: Optimality Theory in dialectology

In the realm of recent advancements in phonological theory, Optimality Theory (OT;
Prince and Smolensky 2004) offers a fresh view on the representation of the phonological
system and phonological variation. In OT, underlying representations are transferred to
surface forms without any intermediate levels or strata, solely using the evaluation of
various possible candidates through ranked constraints only. The core concepts of OT,
i. e., the violability and re-ranking of constraints, make it possible to capture the differ-
ences between languages and/or dialects and to derivate variability from within the gram-
mar itself (Anttila 1997, 2002, 2007). With regard to dialectology, several studies have
been published in the context of OT: Auer (2005) gives an OT account of vowel epenthe-
sis in German dialects, Alber 2001 tackles glottal stop epenthesis and dissimilation in
two varieties of German, van Oostendorp (2005) the interaction of empty vowels in
Dutch dialects, Noske (2005) variation between Northern and Southern Dutch and
Smith (2003) syllabification differences between two related dialects of Campidanian Sar-
dinian.
To exemplify the application of OT to dialectology, Herrgen’s (2005) analysis on final
st-clusters in German dialects will be presented in more detail. These clusters can be
found in simple words (like Standard German Brust ‘breast’) and inflectional suffixes
(hast ‘you have [2sg]’) and are, depending on the dialect, subject to obstruent dissimila-
Tab. 42.1: OT tableaux to demonstrate the interaction of obstruent dissimilation and deletion in
the Alsatian dialect
Alsatian *ComplexIS DissObstr Ident-IO *ComplexCod
Input: /hast/ hast *! * *
2sg.pres
has *! *
‘you have’
췽 hast *! * *
has **
Input: brust *! *
/brust/
brus *! *
‘Breast’
췽 brust * *
brus **!
tion (st > st: hast > hast) and/or t-deletion (Brust > Brus; hast > has ). The combination
of these two processes lead to four input forms for the evaluation by the OT constraint
mechanism and four constraints are needed to evaluate the candidates: Ident-IO (“Input
and output are identical”; the faithfulness constraint), *ComplexCod (“Syllable codas
are simple”), *Complex IS (“Inflectional suffixes are simple”) and DissObstr (“Obstruent
clusters are dissimilated”). As an example, the constraint ranking for the Alsatian dialect
in Table 42.1 shows that the (correct) candidates has and Brust are evaluated best. In this
dialect, among other aspects, the constraint prohibiting complex suffixes (i. e., *Com-
plexIS) favors the inflected word forms has and has over hast and hast, whereas the
constraint DissObstr favors the dissimilated clusters st in the word form Brust over Brust.
Other dialects exhibit different constraint rankings and thus reveal their different
phonologies (Table 42.2). For instance, while on the one hand the constraint DissObstr is
ranked very highly in the neighboring dialects of Alsatian and Swabian (leading to forms
like hast and Brust), it is, on the other hand, ranked lowly in the remaining three dialects,
which captures the fact that underlying st clusters remain undissimilated (leading to the
forms hast and Brust).
Thus, in OT, phonological differences between dialects are expressed in terms of dif-
ferent constraint rankings. With regard to the structural difference between a standard
language and a dialect, Butskhrikidze and van de Weijer (2001: 49) make an important
and far-reaching claim. While standard languages tend to rank faithfulness constraints
highly, i. e., constraints which require that input forms and output forms be identical
(e.g., Ident-IO), and markedness constraints (constraints modifying the output form)
Tab. 42.2: OT constraint rankings for five Germanic dialects

Alsatian * ComplexIS >> DissObstr >> Ident-IO >> * ComplexCod
Swabian DissObstr >> Ident-IO >> * ComplexIS >> * ComplexCod
East Franconian Ident-IO >> * ComplexIS >> * ComplexCod >> DissObstr
Moselle Franconian * ComplexIS >> Ident-IO >> * ComplexCod >> DissObstr
Ripuarian * ComplexCod >> * ComplexIS >> Ident-IO >> DissObstr
lower, it is the other way round for dialects. In our Case Study, it becomes obvious that
for most dialects the only relevant faithfulness constraint, Ident-IO, is ranked lowly,
while the remaining markedness constraints are ranked highly. Interestingly, in the East-
Franconian dialect the faithfulness constraint Ident-IO achieves a top ranking, and it is
precisely this dialect that shows the least divergence from the standard language, while
the other dialects, with a lower ranked Ident-IO faithfulness constraint, are charac-
terized by greater structural distance from the standard language.
6. Conclusion
This overview has pointed out the core role phonetics and phonology have played in the
presentation and interpretation of linguistic variation in space since the last quarter of
the nineteenth century. For concrete interpretations of variation in space, phonetics and
phonology go hand in hand and stimulate each other. The traditional method of relating
present-day regional variation to a (presumably) common historical reference system,
which has been the guiding principle of many dialect atlases, is increasingly being chal-
lenged by purely synchronically oriented phonetic or phonological approaches. Never-
theless, for nearly all of the studies cited here, it has become clear that sound changes
are still an important means of explaining certain patterns of regional variation. The
increased availability of easy-to-use and reliable instrumental phonetic techniques is not
only helping to overcome or correct for the shortcomings of auditory transcriptions, it
also allows for the analysis of large amounts of acoustic data. Furthermore, it brings
phonetic detail back to the center of analysis, viz., by the use of fine-grained phonetic
measurements to disclose the pattern of regional spread of a sound change in progress.
For dialectology, then, a strict distinction between (substance-based) phonetics and
(form-oriented) phonology is not an issue. Quite the contrary, analysis shows the smooth
transition from phonetic convergence to a switch in the phonological system. The huge
amount of data that has been collected for linguistic atlases is also a prerequisite for
statistical, taxometric approaches, which complement traditional phonetic and phono-
logical explanations.
With regard to phonology, though, it still needs to be pointed out that to date phono-
logical research in the strict sense still shows only limited interest in dialectological issues.
Data from regional varieties are often described only for the sake of applying or im-
proving a specific theory or formal account. To overcome this shortfall, increased con-
sideration of the social and cognitive aspects of phonological description and explana-
tion seems a promising avenue. To our knowledge, so far it is only in so-called standard/
dialect phonology that aspects of the different sociolinguistic status of varieties are sys-
tematically incorporated into the model of phonological variation. A further reconcilia-
tion of dialectology and phonology under the umbrella of sociophonetic/sociophonologi-
cal approaches is therefore desirable.
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43. Areal variation in prosody

1. Introduction
2. Basic concepts of prosody
3. The temporal domain
4. Intensity
5. Voice quality
6. Intonation
7. Prosodic structure of word and syllable
8. Conclusion
9. References
1. Introduction
Research into regional variation in prosody has increased tremendously since the 1990s.
Although regarded as one of the most pertinent features since the beginnings of dialectol-
ogy, prosody was long neglected due to the predominance of purely segmental issues.
Research into prosody has not yet achieved full coverage of a larger geographical area,
e.g., in the form of a language atlas. Rather, several studies of various prosodic features
in single dialects are available, which can be used to gain initial insights into areal varia-
tion in prosody. For descriptions of general aspects of prosody, the reader is referred to
Botinis, Granström and Möbius (2001), Fox (2000), Gussenhoven (2004, 2007), Gussen-
43. Areal variation in prosody 787
hoven and Riad (2007), Ladd (2008), Riad and Gussenhoven (2007) and Sudhoff et al.
(2006), which together provide an up-to-date overview of all of the relevant theoretical,
descriptive and methodological issues.
2. Basic concepts o prosody

Prosodic or suprasegmental features of speech are attributed to aspects covering more
than one segmental sound or to single sound properties that are governed by larger
units. As on the segmental level, the analysis of prosody has a phonetic and a phonologi-
cal dimension. Phonetics is concerned with the physical aspects of prosody, while pho-
nology studies the systematic use of prosody to encode meaning in a specific language.
In phonology, a hierarchy of prosodic domains is widely accepted, ranging from the
syllable through foot, phonological word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational
phrase to the phonological utterance (see Nespor and Vogel 2007). With regard to pho-
netics, prosody manifests itself in the properties of length, pitch, loudness, and their
respective acoustic correlates: duration, fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity. Cur-
rent linguistic research on prosody is focused on intonation, pitch and fundamental
frequency, while temporal/timing aspects have mainly been the province of speech tech-
nology research, predominantly research into speech synthesis. Intensity, however promi-
nent it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the distinction between tone
accent and dynamic accent in historical linguistics, tends to be sidelined in current re-
search. Voice quality is still only peripherally recognized as a prosodic feature. Current
linguistic research into prosody still concentrates on methodological questions, on varia-
tion in standard varieties, or on pragmatic and psycholinguistic questions. Nevertheless,
all aspects can be analyzed in relation to their distribution in space, and the more these
questions are raised, the more obvious their spatial distribution becomes.
Fig. 43.1: Display of prosodic features in the acoustic phonetics software package Praat (Boersma
and Weenink 2008)
Contemporary research on prosody only became possible when affordable and easy
to use computer tools for phonetic analysis became available. Figure 43.1, generated
with the Praat software package (Boersma and Weenink 2008), displays several acoustic
features relevant to prosody, with an oscillogram on top, followed by a spectrogram, a
pitch curve displayed as a blue line and intensity as a yellow line. In the bottom window
there are manually attributed labels for each segment and tone. The highlighted section
is part of a diphthong realized with creaky voice.
3. The temporal domain
Temporal aspects at the level of the phrase are investigated by analyzing the position
and duration of pauses in different speaking styles (e.g., Gustafson-Čapková and Megy-
esi 2001; Peters, Kohler and Wesener 2005; Zellner 1994). However, a comparison of
regional varieties is barely addressed and differences are rarely found. Initial attempts
are presented in Hove (2004). However, individual and stylistic variation are very high
in this regard, so that generalizations about the influence of dialects or regional varieties
cannot yet be made.
The phonologically relevant distribution of segment duration is a prominent aspect
within the temporal domain. If a variety distinguishes phonemes on the basis of quantity,
it is usually between long and short segments. A ternary distinction is rare (Fox 2000:
42⫺46). Globally, quantity distinctions are more common for vowels than for conso-
nants (Laver 1994: 436). Within a language, different dialects can feature different oppo-
sitions. While most German dialects only differ with respect to vowel quantity, Aleman-
nic and Bavarian dialects also show distinctions of consonant quantity, as documented
in the BSA and SDS linguistic atlases (Hinderling 1996⫺; Hotzenköcherle 1962⫺1997).
Moreover, the Standard and northern German opposition between voiced and voiceless
obstruents is expressed as a temporal distinction between long and short consonants in
the southern dialects (Willi 1996). This distinction is even observed in initial position, as
Kraehenmann (2003) documents for the Thurgovian dialect (in Switzerland).
Since the distinction was drawn by Pike (1945), typological differences between sylla-
ble-timed, stress-timed and mora-timed languages have been considered. Reliable pho-
netic correlates to this distinction were only found in the late 1990s, with different algo-
rithms that take into account the relation between the durations of consecutive conso-
nantal and vocalic parts in an utterance. These typological differences are mainly evident
between languages (Ramus, Nespor and Mehler 1999); however, the algorithms also
reveal differences between British English and Singapore English (Low, Grabe and Nolan
2000) or between Arabic dialects (Ghazali, Hamdi and Barkat 2002); the latter conclude
that differences in vowel duration and syllabic complexity seem to be the main factors
responsible for differences in stress patterns and rhythmic structure.
Comparing four Swiss German dialects, Siebenhaar (2004) and Leemann and Sieben-
haar (2007) show that the timing relation between accented and unaccented syllables
distinguishes these dialects; in effect they exhibit a different way of producing accents.
Further, different patterns are found in the marking of phrase boundaries in these four
Alemannic dialects. Final lengthening is documented in all of the dialects; however, the
first and the penultimate syllable of a phrase also appear lengthened, not just the last
Fig. 43.2: Duration of nuclei by position in the phrase (f: first, m: medial, p: penultimate, u: ulti-
mate syllable) in Berne (left) and Wallis (right) dialect; diamonds indicate the mean and
the 95 %-confidence interval; from Leemann and Siebenhaar (2007: 958)
syllable. The temporal differences between the positions of the syllables in a phrase reveal
distinctive patterns in midland and alpine dialects. Figure 43.2 compares the midland
Bernese dialect and the alpine Wallis dialect. In the Bernese dialect, the first syllable is
significantly lengthened compared to the syllables in the middle of a phrase while the
Wallis dialect has no significant phrase-initial lengthening. Moreover, the final lengthen-
ing in the Bernese dialect is much more pronounced than in the Wallis dialect, especially
in the last syllable.
The alpine dialects show much less lengthening around phrase boundaries than do
the midland dialects. Hence, the phrase boundaries are clearly temporally marked in the
midland dialects, with a slowing down and a speeding up, while this temporal marked-
ness is less obvious in the alpine dialects. Moreover, general speech rate can also be used
to distinguish dialects (Ruoff 1973), as is also clearly visible in Figure 43.2. These pho-
netic differences between the dialects of one dialect group are to an extent minimal;
nevertheless they are perceptually relevant (Leemann and Siebenhaar 2008a).
4. Intensity
Due to the technical difficulties in obtaining reliable measurements results, systematic

research into intensity is rare in dialectology (for a review of older research, see Heike
1983). With regard to its influence on syllable structure, Spiekermann (2000) presents
findings on syllable cut prosody in German dialects. In this study, syllable cut is ex-
pressed in terms of the intensity contour of the vowel. Syllables with a smooth syllable
cut show a flat intensity contour at a high level until the end of the vowel, while an
abrupt cut is characterized by a steeply falling intensity contour. In German regional
varieties, we find syllable cut prosodies mainly in northern German dialects. Southern
German dialects, in contrast, do not show these differences in intensity distribution, but
rather a system with short and long vowels. As for the central Franconian tone accents
(see section 7), Heike (1964) and Peters (2006c) show that the so-called accent 1 is char-
acterized by a sharp drop in intensity, while accent 2 does not show any such drop.
5. Voice quality
To date, voice quality has not usually been considered in prosodic studies. However, an
increasing number of studies examine voice quality as an integral dimension of prosody
(Nı́ Chasaide and Gobl 2004). It has been shown that changes in voice quality distinguish
prominent and non-prominent words and phrase-initial and phrase-final words in Eng-
lish (Epstein 2002). Sound quality changes are also used for marking phrase boundaries
(Peters, Kohler and Wesener 2005). Nevertheless, a spatial dimension to voice quality
has not yet been explored and therefore remains an open field for research.
6. Intonation
Regional differences in intonation have been repeatedly reported since the beginnings of
dialectology, with Sievers’ (1912: 62⫺63) idea of a northern and a southern German
intonation system (“zwei konträre Generalsysteme der Melodisierung”) being probably
the most prominent proposal (for a review of older intonation research, see Gilles 2005
and Peters 2006a). However, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that sub-
stantial intonation research in dialectology began to gain ground. It was not only the
improvement in and easy availability of acoustic phonetic techniques mentioned above,
but also the conceptual and theoretical work on the structure of intonation itself, which
contributed to this substantial progress (see Ladd 2008).
Today, intonation is seen as a linguistic feature that is phonetically constituted by the
movements of the fundamental frequency (F0) over a specific stretch of speech. The
function of intonation lies on the one hand in signalizing certain semanto-syntactic as-
pects like broad or narrow focus or sentence type (Féry 1993). On the other hand, into-
nation serves several conversational functions in the context of turn taking or turn pro-
jection (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996). In the influential “British School” of intona-
tion research (Cruttenden 1997; Crystal 1969), basic concepts like “head”, “nucleus” and
“tail” have been introduced to capture the structural constituents of a “tone unit”. In
present-day autosegmental-metrical accounts of intonation (Gussenhoven 2004; Ladd
2008), the intonation contour in an “intonation phrase” is constituted by target tones,
which are anchored to certain landmarks in the intonation phrase ⫺ syllables with focus
accents function as anchor points for pitch accents. Falling pitch accents are said to
consist of a prominent high tone (H*) and a less prominent low tone (L); rising pitch
accents are conceptualized in a similar fashion. The beginning and end of an intonation
phrase can be marked by boundary tones (i. e., %H, %L, H%, L%). The actual phonetic
shape of the intonation contour in a given utterance then results from the interpolation
of the melody between the tones. This structural decomposition into well-defined tonal
elements also provides the descriptive framework for the transcription and phonological
interpretation of intonation contours for dialectology.
According to Ladd (2008: 119), four types of differences between intonation systems,
which can also be adopted to regional variation, can be distinguished: (1) semantic ⫺
differences in the meaning of identical intonational tunes; (2) systemic ⫺ differences in
the inventory of tunes; (3) realizational ⫺ differences in the phonetic make-up of tunes;
(4) phonotactic ⫺ differences in the text⫺tune association and in the permitted tone
structure. Phonotactic differences in the intonational systems of German regional vari-

eties are discussed extensively in Peters (2006a) and Kügler (2007); an overview is given
in Peters (2006b). A collection of comparative studies can be found in Gilles and Peters
(2004). In the following, only realizational and systemic differences will be addressed in
more detail.
6.1. Realizational dierences in intonation

Realizational differences may be evident in the phonetic implementation of a particular
phonological category. Several phonetic aspects can be subject to regional variation,
including but not limited to alignment of F0 movement to an accented syllable, trunca-
tion of F0 movements because of lack of sonorant material, the F0 range used or the
steepness of the F0 slope over an utterance.
Tonal alignment has attracted much research activity in recent years. “Peak delay”,
for example, is described in Scottish English by Aufterbeck (2004), in Irish dialects by
Dalton and Nı́ Chasaide (2005) and in the Swabian dialect by Kügler (2004). For falling
accents of the H*L type, Gilles (2005) describes the regional pattern for alignment of
the F0 maximum in the accented syllable in German regional varieties. In order to con-
trol for interfering factors, only phrase-final structures consisting of exactly two syllables
were analyzed (nucleus and tail). Several acoustic measurements ensure that the charac-
teristics of the F0 movement were captured. The raw data from several instantiations
were then converted into relative measurements to allow pooling of different speakers.
The resulting schematic contours, shown in Figure 43.3, exhibit clear differences. Com-
mon to the regional varieties of Berlin, Dresden and Munich (on the left) is that the F0
maximum is reached in the second half of the nucleus, whereas in Hamburg and Mann-
heim (on the right), it is reached quite early (after just 22 and 13 percent of the duration,
respectively). One can also observe a steep falling movement in the nucleus in the latter
dialects, due to the early F0 maximum, while the former group is characterized by a
falling movement predominantly after the nucleus, i. e., on the unaccented syllable of the
tail. Hamburg and Mannheim, then, are said to feature an early alignment of the F0
Fig. 43.3: Mean intonation contours for bi-syllabic falling contours in five regional varieties of
German (based on Gilles 2005: 342)
Fig. 43.4: Typical rise patterns for statements and questions conflated over two utterances, and
broken down by speaker dialect (Shetland or Orkney) and by sex (from van Leyden
2004: 65)
maximum, while Berlin, Dresden and Munich show a middle alignment. Further studies
on alignment in German regional varieties were conducted by Atterer and Ladd (2004)
and Kleber and Rathcke (2008). They show that alignment is very early for prenuclear
accents in East Middle German, while it is late in southern German. Leemann and
Siebenhaar (2008b) show that this pattern is continued in the Swiss German dialects,
where an accent begins to rise 20 milliseconds before the accented syllable in eastern
dialects and 100 milliseconds after the onset of the accented syllable in the western dia-
lects.
Using a similar technique, van Leyden (2004) presents a thorough discussion of align-
ment for the closely related Shetland and Orkney dialects. Figure 43.4 shows the align-
ment of accent-lending rises in statements and questions. (Test sentences of the type
There are many gardens in Bergen and Are there many houses in Bergen? are used.) While
the onset of the rising movement is located right at the beginning of the accented syllable
in the Shetland dialect, the rise begins considerably later on the Orkneys.
A second aspect of realizational differences in intonation should be mentioned: trun-
cation and compression have been suggested as typological parameters in intonation
(Grønnum 1989; Ladd 2008). For example, analyzing the IViE data, Grabe (2004) com-
pares Leeds and Newcastle dialects. At a phonological level, the two dialects both have
Fig. 43.5: Example of compression in Newcastle English and truncation in Leeds English (from
Grabe 2004: 18)
falling accents (H*L). The dialects show no difference when the accent is realized over
a long word with a large scope for voicing (see the top row in Figure 43.5). But if the
accent is produced at the end of an intonation phrase, on a short word with little scope
for voicing, the two dialects show distinct realizations (bottom row in Figure 43.5):
Newcastle English speakers compress the accent, i. e., the pattern is produced more
quickly, while Leeds English speakers truncate the accent: the pitch movement remains
incomplete, the fall of the H*L-accent is not realized.
It should become clear that all of the regional differences described so far, although
clearly discernible, are purely phonetic processes, in that they do not affect the phono-
logical system. The phonetic processes underlying intonational differences nonetheless
represent a central area of research, because they are to a wide extent responsible for
differences between (closely related) dialects.
6.2. Systemic dierences in intonation
The intonation system of a language/dialect consists of an inventory of intonation con-

tours or tunes. Closely related dialects can have a high degree of system overlap, differing
in only a few inventory related aspects. Thus, numerous studies are found in the research
literature, which concentrate on single specific intonational differences typical of the
intonation system of a given variety. The focus of these studies lies in the detailed (formal
and functional) description of this salient intonation contour, and they fail to take into
account the intonational inventory as a whole. To cite only a few works that apply this
method: Auer (2001a) discusses the so-called “high onset”, which sets Hamburg German
off from other regional varieties (and the standard language); Bergmann (2008) describes
a rising-falling contour typical for Cologne German; Selting (2000) analyzes a typical
high rise contour in Berlin German; and Fletcher and Harrington (2001) explore the
characteristic high-rising terminals in Australian English. Peters (2006a: 384⫺390), elab-
orating on the pioneering work of Guentherodt (1973), analyzes the nuclear contours
Map 43.1: Intonation isogloss in the Palatinate dialect cluster (Peters 2006a: 388)
used in wh-questions in a cluster of Palatinate dialects (“Pfälzisch”, southwestern Ger-

many). Because data was available for several locations in the area, it proved possible
to discover an intonational isogloss that separates an area in the southwest with a rising-
falling nuclear contour from a northern territory characterized by (high-)falling contours
(see Map 43.1).
These kinds of selective studies on isolated intonation contours in regional varieties
should be considered as an important step towards obtaining an increasingly exhaustive
picture of the possible variation of intonation in dialects.
As for the specification of a whole inventory of intonation contours in a given dialect
and the subsequent comparison with inventories from other, related dialects, research
findings are still limited. In order to establish an inventory system, extensive formal and
functional analysis of all intonation patterns in a variety has to be done. By applying,
e.g., the autosegmental-metrical approach, it is necessary to determine all pitch accent
types, the boundary tones and the allowed combinations of these elements. Barker (2005)
uses this procedure for his account of the intonation patterns in Tyrolean German.
Grabe (2004), Grabe and Post (2002) and Grabe et al. (2001) present extensive findings
about inventory differences and overlap for the dialects of the British Isles. Peters (2006a)
develops finite state grammars of the intonation systems for six regional varieties of
German (as an example, see Figure 43.6 for the intonation grammar of Cologne
German).
Fig. 43.6: Autosegmental-metrical finite state grammar for the intonation system of Cologne Ger-
man (based on Peters 2006a: 459)
Fig. 43.7: Schematic nuclear contours and autosegmental-metrical symbolization for northern Stan-
dard German and Freiburg German (based on Peters 2006a: 455)
By identifying these intonation grammars for several regional varieties, differences

and similarities become evident. Figure 43.7 shows a subset of the nuclear contours for
northern Standard German and Freiburg German exhibiting the phonological differ-
ences between the two varieties. One striking differences concerns the type of pitch ac-
cent used in the nucleus: Standard German (like many other German varieties) has a
falling (H*L) accent, while in Freiburg a rising accent (L*H) is observed. As for the end
of the intonation phrase, Standard German has simple boundary tones (Li, Hi, ⵰i),
whereas Freiburg has more complex structures involving phrase accents of the type
Hi⫹L.
7. Prosodic structure o word and syllable
This last section is devoted to aspects that are most adequately described in terms of the
(phonological) word and the syllable. Auer (1998) provides a detailed account of the
variability of the intervocalic position in disyllabic words in several German dialects. His
starting point is a clearly defined prosodic structure of a word that takes syllabic posi-
tions into account and thus makes it possible to describe the regional variation of a
specific prosodic structure rather than just a single sound. It turns out that considerable
weakening processes are at work in the intervocalic (in many cases ambisyllabic) position
in German dialects. Applying a similar methodology, Auer (1997) analyzes the epenthesis
of schwa in Central German varieties by making crucial reference to syllable structure.
With regard to more global prosodic features, Nübling and Schrambke (2004) elabo-
rate on the distinction between “word languages” and “syllable languages”. This distinc-
tion, established by Donegan and Stampe (1983), is related to the distinction between
“stress-timed” and “syllable-timed” languages. These two prosodic language types are
characterized by the features listed in Table 43.1.
Nübling and Schrambke (2004), then, analyze prosodic properties in several Aleman-
nic dialects (southwestern Germany, Switzerland and Alsace). They are able to show
that in the north of this region the (phonological) word is the most important unit for
Tab. 43.1: Characteristics of syllable languages and word languages (cf. Auer 2001b)
Syllable languages Word languages
simple syllable structure, often CV complex syllable structure, differences between accented
and unaccented syllables
clear-cut syllable boundaries partly unclear syllable boundaries, speed related variability
hardly any signals for word phonological signals of word boundaries
boundaries
syllable structured according frequent violations of the sonority hierarchy
to sonority hierarchy
geminates possible no geminates
accentuation has no influence distinction between accented and unaccented syllable
on the syllable structure
tone systems possible hardly any tone system (if so, restricted to accented
syllables)
vowel harmony possible vowel harmony impossible
external sandhi possible only internal sandhi
liaison possible no liaison
phonological processes, while syllable related processes play the more important role in
the southern part. These sandhi processes had already been described by Moulton (1986);
however, the general prosodic difference had not been recognized. Map 43.2 (left) dis-
plays the regional distribution of cross-word assimilation processes. The Standard Ger-
man phrase sollte man ‘should one’ shows up as [zodme(r)] in the north and [zøpme] in
the south. Whereas the first form conforms to a prohibition on phonological processes
crossing the word boundary, the latter form is characterized by regressive assimilation
across this boundary: the initial nasal in the pronoun spreads its labiality to the final
consonant of the verbal form ([zød] > [zøp]). These two prosodically defined areas are
separated by a thin transition zone, where both non-assimilated and assimilated forms
are observed. Similar cases involving place assimilation of a clitic article or negative are
shown on the right-hand map of Map 43.2. Here, assimilation across word boundaries
is blocked in the north ([dfensder] ‘the window’, [(n)idfolge] ‘not following’, [dmil(i)ç]
‘the milk’) and is possible in the south ([pfensder], [(n)ipfolge], [pmil(x)]).
By presenting several other prosodic isoglosses with a similar shape (e.g., no gemi-
nates in the north versus geminates in the south; appearance of the glottal stop in the
north versus its absence in the south because resyllabification processes can cross word
boundaries), Nübling and Schrambke (2004) provide arguments for the first bundle of
prosodic isoglosses detected in German dialects, a bundle which divides varieties with
word-language aspects from those with syllable-language aspects. Research in this field
has only recently begun, and a prosodic reanalysis of regional patterns reported in older
dialectological descriptions and atlases should offer new insights into the phonological
structure of regional varieties.
A long-standing research topic concerns the tone accent system found in a few Ger-
manic languages/dialects. See de Vaan (2006) for an overview; Gussenhoven and Bruce
Map 43.2: Prosody-induced isoglosses in Alemannic dialects (from Nübling and Schrambke 2004:
312)
(1999), Kristoffersen (2000) and Riad (2003) on the tone accents of Swedish and Norwe-
gian; Nilsen (2001) for a discussion of regional patterns in Norwegian dialects; Gilles
(2002), Gussenhoven and Peters (2004, 2008), Künzel and Schmidt (2001), Peters
(2006c), Schmidt (1986) and Schmidt and Künzel (2006) on the “Tonakzente” (“Schär-
fung” versus “Trägheitsakzent”) of Central Franconian; Gussenhoven and Aarts (1999)
and Gussenhoven and van der Vliet (1999) on stoottoon ‘push tone’ and sleeptoon ‘drag-
ging tone’ in Limburgish. The origin of this tonal contrast is explored in de Vaan (1999),
Gussenhoven (2000) and Schmidt (2002), drawing on voicing of the following consonant
and apocope of an unstressed syllable as the key aspects of tonogenesis. The regional
distribution of the tone accents in Limburg and Central Franconian is documented in
Schmidt and Künzel (2006: 139) and on the corresponding maps of the MRhSA (Bell-
mann, Herrgen and Schmidt 1994⫺2002).
In these “tonal” languages/dialects, the prosodic features of the accented, bi-moraic
syllable in two segmentally otherwise identical words establish a phonological opposi-
tion, which manifests itself in two tone accents, often called accent 1 and accent 2.
Phonetically, specific tonal shapes are the most pertinent prosodic features distinguishing
the two accents, but duration and intensity also appear to play a (minor) role; accent 2
is often longer than accent 1 (see Heijmans 2003 for a discussion of Limburg dialects).
While it is generally accepted that the tone accents constitute a phonological opposition,
e.g., in minimal pairs like /ra=1f/ ‘grater’ versus /ra=2f/ ‘frost’ in Central Franconian,
the realization of the two tones varies considerably from dialect to dialect and is also
influenced by the global intonation contour of the phrase or sentence. Figure 43.8
exemplifies the tonal contrast for the minimal pair [mø1l] ‘mill’ versus [mø2l] ‘garbage’
embedded in the middle of the global intonation contour of a statement (top) and a
question (bottom). In the statement, tone accent 1 is characterized by a sharp F0 drop
within the rhyme of the syllable (shaded area), while accent 2 falls only slightly. In
Fig. 43.8: Examples of the two Germanic tone accents in statements and questions for the words
[mø1l] ‘mill’ and [mø2l] ‘garbage’; speaker from the Cologne region (Central Franco-
nian, Germany)
questions, the reverse picture emerges, i. e., accent 1 shows a steep rise, while the tone
contour of accent 2 remains low throughout the accented syllable.
The main question for a phonological account of the tone accents is how to describe
their different phonetic forms in a unified manner. In the autosegmental-metrical ap-
proach put forward by Gussenhoven (e.g., Gussenhoven and van der Vliet 1999), tone
accent 2 is characterized by a so-called “lexical tone” absent from accent 1. The specific
surface-phonetic forms of the two tone accents are due to their implementation and
interaction with the tonal structure of the intonation of the utterance as a whole. Dia-
lects, then, may differ in both the quality of the lexical tone and its interaction with
utterance intonation. For example, in the Limburgish dialects of Roermond, Venlo and
Maastricht, the lexical tone of accent 2 is a high one (Hlex), while the closely related
dialects of Tongeren and Hasselt exhibit a low tone (Llex) here. In both areas, the lexical
tone follows the focal tone of the accented syllable. Peters (2006c) assumes that the
dialect of Cologne also has a lexical tone, but it is not further specified whether it is
high or low (Tlex). Rather, its quality is derived directly from the following utterance
intonation and can thus always be predicted from the tonal context. Furthermore, and
in contrast to the Limburg dialects, this lexical tone precedes the focal tone of the ac-
cented syllable. This Tlex-tone, then, shows up as a high tone (Hlex) when it precedes a
high tone (H*) and is low when it precedes a low tone (L*). As can be seen in Figure
43.8, the level high tone of accent 2 in statements has the phonological form Hlex H*,
while the corresponding accent 2 realization in the question context has the form Llex L*.
8. Conclusion
Since the end of the twentieth century, research in prosody has also been gaining momen-
tum with regard to regional variation through the presentation of numerous findings
about various prosodic features ⫺ from both a phonetic and a phonological perspective.
These advances are due to tremendous improvements in and the easy availability of
acoustic phonetic techniques as well as the theoretical grounding of phonetic and phono-
logical conceptual categories (e.g., [pitch] accent, boundary, intonation phrase, etc.).
For future research it would seem desirable to obtain yet more empirically based
prosodic descriptions of dialects, so as to gather information about not only regional
differences but also the domains of possible prosodic variation. In our view, not all of
the prosodic features responsible for dialect differences are known yet. Experimental
work that also takes speech perception into account could be promising in this respect
(see, e.g., Peters et al. 2002). Furthermore, it is to be hoped that the results of phonetic
science experiments are complemented by research on spontaneous speech.
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44. Areal variation in morphology

1. Introduction
2. Morphological variation and its areal manifestation
3. Morphology and the mental construction of space
4. Effects of geographic space on morphology
5. Methodological issues
6. Explanatory power of the study of areal variation
7. References
1. Introduction
Morphology is the study of word structure. Morphology deals with the linguistic render-
ing of meaning in word formation and inflection. Morphological variation involves mor-
phological variants which encompass formal units (words, affixes, etc.) and paradigmatic
44. Areal variation in morphology 805
distinctions. For example, the 1sg pronouns mi in Czech and mi in Nigerian Pidgin
English (Faraclas 1996: 179) are phonologically identical and of the same Indo-European
origin. Yet, the paradigms to which these words belong are completely different: while
mi in Nigerian Pidgin English performs all the syntactic functions of the 1sg pronoun,
mi in Czech is only one form (dative, alongside mně) in a rich case paradigm that also
contains já (nom), mne and mě (gen/acc), (o) mně (prep) and mnou (instr).
There is a broad transition zone between morphology and neighboring disciplines. In
the Italian 1sg future tense of the verb, all inflectional features are coded as affixes in a
single word, e.g., leggerò ‘I will read’, whereas in the corresponding English form I will
read, a periphrastic construction composed of three words is needed. The English expres-
sion is thus morphosyntactic. In Russian the vowels [e] and [o] in the last syllable of the
stem are sometimes deleted if a suffix is added, e.g., аок ‘castle’ (nom.sg), аки
‘castles’ (nom.pl) (cf. Haspelmath 2002: 27). The alternation of [o] and zero has both
morphological and phonological properties and is, therefore, morphophonological (see
section 5 for more on the delimitation problem).
Areal variation refers to spatial variants of morphological variables within and be-
tween languages. Variation within languages is the topic of dialectology. As dialects of
the same language share most of their morphological features, this article evidences, first
of all, the differences displayed by dialect variants of a variable. For instance, in most
varieties of English the subject pronoun they is opposed to the object pronoun them, but
in Tyneside English them realizes both functions and is of special interest here (see sec-
tion 3). With respect to the variation between languages, in this article, similarities be-
tween the languages compared are pointed out. Such similarities may be a consequence
of language universals, of common historical origins (e.g., as in the above-mentioned
Indo-European 1sg subject pronouns), of chance convergences, or they may be geo-
graphically conditioned: consider the sprachbund characteristics of linguistic areas such
as the Balkans, Meso-America or the Indian subcontinent (cf. Campbell 2006). An addi-
tional aspect in this context is the center⫺periphery pattern (cf. the notions “aree centrali
vs. laterali” of the Italian neolinguistic school, Bartoli 1925), in the sense that structural
similarities may be found at the margins of a linguistic area, regardless of whether or
not the languages in question are closely genetically related (see section 4.2).
Typically, areal variation is a feature of the horizontal dimension, i. e., with one vari-
ant close to another in space. This variation can be dynamic (diffusion of features within
a geographical area) or static (geographic boundaries inhibit the diffusion of features).
However, horizontal contrasts also reappear in the vertical dimension, i. e., two origi-
nally geographically separated variants are now present within the same area, but with
different pragmatic or social values. Nowadays this is often the case for dialect variants
which are in competition with variants from standard languages that originated from
other dialects (e.g., modern Standard French from Paris French, cf. Holtus 1990: 583).
Vertical reinterpretations of horizontal contrasts increase the effect of language contact,
originally restricted to spatially contiguous varieties.
With respect to its speakers’ competence, variation within a language can be seen
either as an inherent property of the language’s grammar or as the result of competition
between different grammars. The first viewpoint is that of variationist sociolinguistics,
the second is preferred by formal linguistics (cf. Meyerhoff 2006: 403; Henry 2002).
Following the second assumption, variation is, essentially, removed from the grammar,
in that variants are regarded as the result of code-switching between different grammars.
In the following sections, areal variation in morphology is discussed from various

perspectives. However, this description cannot be complete. Hence, as mentioned above,
two types of variation are singled out, and related examples will be presented in some
detail: (i) similarities in the morphology of non-cognate languages and (ii) differences in
the morphology of cognate languages/dialects whose relationships to geographic space
is clear enough to be explicated.
2. Morphological variation and its areal maniestation

Areal variation may be found in both aspects of morphological units, meaning and form.
Meaning aspects encompass inflectional, derivational and compound meaning. However,
derivational and compound meaning is much more lexeme or lexeme-group specific than
inflectional meaning and can be much less easily generalized and classified (there are
inflectional categories, but “derivational categories” are not usually assumed, cf. Haspel-
math 2002: 60⫺61). Since the precondition for the analysis of the distribution of mor-
phological variants is the stipulation of the variable, which must be identical for all
languages under investigation, areal variation in morphology is predominantly studied
with respect to inflectional features ⫺ as is attested, for instance, by the choice of fea-
tures mapped in The World Atlas of Language Structure (WALS, Haspelmath et al. 2005).
(Contrary to some other usages, inflectional category in this article refers to the inflec-
tional dimension, e.g., “number”, whereas inflectional feature refers to the specific value,
e.g., “singular”.)
2.1. Variation o morphologically coded meaning
In the inflectional domain, the most general distinction between languages is the presence
or absence of an inflectional category, i. e., whether or not a grammatical category is
expressed solely by morphological means (i. e., within the boundaries of a single word,
see also section 5). Think about distinctions of voice. Such distinctions change the rela-
tion that the surface subject has to the verb, and voice features (e.g., active, passive) are
selected according to the perspective from which the action or event is viewed: in the
active it is usually the doer, in the passive usually the object affected by the action,
that is accentuated by being made the grammatical subject of the sentence. While such
perspectivizations are possible in every language, only some languages allow the voice-
feature expression to be inflectionally bound to the verb. Among the Germanic lan-
guages, Swedish and Norwegian do so: Norwegian uses the suffix -r for the active, e.g.,
han spiser ‘he eats’, and the suffix -s for the passive, e.g., maten spises ‘the food is eaten’.
On the contrary, the cognate languages of German and English use periphrastic expres-
sions composed of an auxiliary and a past participle for the passive voice. Hence, voice
is an inflectional category in Swedish and Norwegian but not in German or English.
Within the same inflectional category, different languages and dialects may display
different sets of feature values. In Standard Italian and most Italian dialects there are
two gender features, namely masculine and feminine. However, in some Umbrian dia-
lects there is a kind of “neuter”, used mainly for mass nouns, that gives rise to a three-
Tab. 44.1: Paradigm distinctions for plural verbs in German dialects

Cell Type 1 Type 2 Type 3 Type 4 Type 5
1pl A A A A A
2pl B B B A A
3pl C B A B A
way gender distinction in the article system: la fija ‘the daughter’ (fem); lu coccu ‘the
egg’ (masc); lo granu ‘the grain’ (ntr) (Haase 1999: 89⫺91). Most Slavic languages have
two number features (sg, pl) but in the Sorbian language island in eastern Germany the
old three-way distinction of singular, dual and plural has been preserved in both the
verbal and the nominal system, e.g., město ‘city’ (nom.sg), měsće (nom.dual), města
(nom.pl) (Stone 1998: 180⫺183). The tense category of Standard German and northern
German dialects features both present and preterite, e.g., ich komme ‘I come’ vs. ich kam
‘I came’. In most German dialects of the south, as well as in many other Germanic
languages, the inflectional preterite forms have ⫺ with the exception of a few very fre-
quent forms like ich war ‘I was’ ⫺ disappeared and have been substituted by a periphras-
tic perfect tense, ich bin gekommen ‘I have come’ (cf. Abraham and Conradie 2001).
Features can be expressed by monoexponential or by cumulative markers. In Indo-
European languages the expression is typically cumulative, e.g., in the Russian word
uроков ‘lessons’ (gen.pl) the suffix -ов expresses both plural and genitive case. The
cumulative expression is attested in many European languages but is very rare outside
Europe: monoexponential formatives dominate everywhere (cf. Bickel and Nichols 2005:
92⫺93). A good example is Turkish. In the word yılların ‘years’ (gen.pl) all exponents
are monofunctional: yıl expresses the semantic content ‘year’, -lar the plural and -ın the
genitive case. However, monoexponential expression is not restricted to agglutinative
languages.
A particularly high degree of areal variation is observed in the field of paradigmatic
distinctions, which lies halfway between the form and meaning aspects of morphological
units. Despite the cases quoted above, the dialects of a language usually share the same
inflectional categories with the same feature sets. But they may have very different para-
digmatic distinctions. Whereas a single inflected word form may correspond to a single
feature, this is not the only possibility. A single word form may also correspond to
multiple feature values, i. e., syncretisms occur. Consider the syncretisms in the present
plural of the verbs in Upper German dialects (cf. Rabanus 2004, 2006, 2008): Table 44.1
shows all possible distinctions between the extremes of “a distinct word form in each
cell” (Type 1) and “just a single word form for all cells”, i. e., complete syncretism of
person (Type 5).
In the Upper German dialects all types except Type 4 are well attested. Type 1 is
typical for a part of the Central Bavarian dialects, especially in the region of Lower
Bavaria (Niederbayern, cf. Rabanus 2008: 233⫺238), and for the Highest Alemannic and
Walser dialects in the Swiss Alps. Type 2 appears across a considerable area in northern
Swabia and is spreading in the northeast Swabian dialects of Bavarian Swabia (Bayerisch
Schwaben), around the city of Donauwörth (cf. Rabanus 2004: 345⫺349, 2008: 170⫺
188). Type 3 characterizes most Bavarian and East Franconian dialects as well as the
western High Alemannic ones (Rabanus 2008: 140⫺144), and it is the paradigm type of
Standard German. Type 5 is the configuration of most Low Alemannic, Swabian and
eastern High Alemannic dialects. Type 4 appears only in rare and doubtful cases of
present-day Upper German dialects (Rabanus 2008: 139). However, cross-linguistically,
Type 4 is the most common plural syncretism on the global scale (cf. Cysouw 2003:
302). To sum up: there is a high degree of variation in paradigmatic distinctions, and
paradigmatic distinctions contribute notably to the constitution of linguistic areas.
2.2. Variation in the orm o morphological units
Meaning features, obviously, have different formal exponents across space. This holds
for both the marker type (additive, modificatory, suppletive markers) and the phonologi-
cal structure of the marker (different words, affixes). Not surprisingly, morphological
features are often formally rendered with different words or affixes even in closely related
dialects (see the example of the 2pl verb affixes in Bavarian and Standard German in
section 3). An example of marker-type variation is found at the dialect border between
Moselle Franconian and Rhine Franconian in western Germany. The noun plural in the
Rhine-Franconian dialects is usually marked by an affix, such as the plural suffix -e:
Stan ‘stone’ (sg) vs. Stane ‘stones’ (pl). In the Moselle Franconian dialects the number
difference is often expressed by an intonational modificatory marker only: singular and
plural forms have the same segmental structure but use different tone accents, e.g., Sta 2n
‘stone’ (sg) vs. Sta 1n ‘stones’ (pl) (Schmidt 1986: 136; the superscript numbers indicate
two different tone accents).
There is also variation in the word-internal order of morphological units. Leaving
aside the problematic status of infixation or circumfixation, affixes generally occur be-
fore or after the lexical stem of the word. On a global scale, suffixes are preferred to
prefixes (Dryer 2005: 112⫺113). The most consistent area with predominantly prefixing
languages is found in a long stretch in the southeast of Africa. The area contains mainly
Bantu languages, but there are also Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. Where
there is more than one affix, their order seems to universally follow the “Inflection-
outside-Derivation Principle” (cf. Stump 2001: 712⫺713), i. e., derivational affixes are
closer to the base than inflectional affixes, as in English sweetens where -en is derivational
and -s inflectional. Thus, despite some arguable counterexamples (Stump 2001: 712
draws attention to the multifunctional Russian suffix -
я which follows the person and
number marking, e.g., uчиш
я ‘you study’ where -иш is the 2sg.pres suffix and -
я is
a verb-class marker), there is no areal variation with respect to the derivational versus
inflectional affix order. In contrast, the order of head and modifier in nominal com-
pounds can vary even in cognate languages or dialects of the same language. The nomi-
nal compounds in the South Bavarian language island of Deutsch-Fersentalerisch in
northern Italy (Rowley 2003) are an example. Older speakers in particular apply the
modifier⫺head order in compounding, which is common to almost all German dialects:
in the noun⫺noun compound hennenstòll ‘hen house’ the modifier hennen precedes the
head stòll. However, younger speakers prefer the head⫺modifier order, i. e., the modifier
(preceded by preposition and article, if necessary) follows the head. Thus, younger
speakers use stòll va den hennen ‘hen house’ instead of hennenstòll (Rowley 2003: 241).
This variation (some might say that stòll va den hennen is not a compound any more but
an NP) is due to the intense present-day language contact between Deutsch-Fersentaler-
isch and Italian which is the majority language of the area. In Standard Italian and in
the Italian dialects of the area the order in compounds is usually head⫺modifier, e.g.,
pesce spada ‘swordfish’, with the head pesce ‘fish’ preceding the modifier spada ‘sword’.
Finally, the same marker may have different degrees of productivity in different dia-
lects or cognate languages. Consider the noun plural suffix -er, which exists in German
as well as in Danish. In German the plural suffix -er occurs only in a small class of
native nouns and is no longer productive in new nouns (loan words, neologisms, deriva-
tions from native words of other word classes). On the contrary, in Danish -er is highly
productive and used with new words, e.g., sushi ‘sushi’ (sg) vs. sushier ‘sushis’ (pl). The
plural suffix -er is so productive that in colloquial Danish speakers even tend to reana-
lyze stem-final -er as in kilometer ‘kilometer’ (sg) as a plural suffix and form the new
singular kilomet (Pia Quist, personal communication).
3. Morphology and the mental construction o space

Perceived geographic space is a mental construct. Physical geography may play a role
(see section 4) but only insofar as it conditions human behavior. Members of social
communities establish the extent and the boundaries of their geographic space principally
according to cultural and political criteria. Linguistic factors also matter. However, if
people are asked to indicate the structural differences between their own language or
dialect and the speech of others, they predominantly refer to phonological and lexical
characteristics: they say that the others have a “different way of saying” the “same
words” or that they use “different words” for the “same things”. Grammatical contrasts
(e.g., different paradigmatic distinctions) are less accessible to the observations of naı̈ve
speakers, and even segmentally different markers are less noted than slight phonological
differences. Nevertheless, sometimes morphological marking is relevant for the mental
construction of cultural geographic space. This is illustrated here with examples from
dialects of German, English and Chinese.
Consider first the Bavarian 2pl verb suffix -ts. Unlike Standard German in which
the 2pl suffix -t is homonymous with the 3sg.pres suffix -t ⫺ resulting in numerous
syncretisms (e.g., er/ihr geht ‘he/you go[es]’) ⫺ in the Bavarian dialects the suffix -ts
exclusively codes the 2pl (er geht vs. ihr gehts). In contrast to other morphological fea-
tures that have been replaced by Standard German forms in the last decades, -ts is a
very resistant marker. It not only remains unchanged in dialect speech but is even at-
tested above the dialect level, in colloquial regional German in Bavaria and Austria
(cf. Scheuringer 1990: 343). Particularly instructive is the situation in Bavarian Swabia.
Bavarian Swabia is a region which, linguistically, lies mostly in the Alemannic rather
than the Bavarian dialect area, but politically belongs to Bavaria. Language-change
studies (Renn 1994: 106⫺107; Kleiner 2003: 142⫺143) report that in recent times -ts has
spread in the Alemannic dialects of Bavarian Swabia, replacing the Alemannic verb plu-
ral suffixes. The reason for this language change is the prestige of Bavarian dialect fea-
tures compared to Alemannic ones. What matters here is that a morphological feature
has become a geographical marker in the speakers’ perception. Speakers who are not
linguistically “Bavarians” use this marker to identify themselves as politically and cultur-
ally belonging to Bavaria and to distinguish their area from the adjacent Alemannic-
speaking regions. In this way, morphology is used to construct and delimit cultural
space.
A similar case of marking geographical space morphologically is found in China. In

Mandarin Chinese there is a class of semantically empty elements that attach to mono-
syllabic, nominal, countable bound roots (cf. Packard 2000). One of these empty el-
ements is (-r). This “vacuous derivation” (cf. Pirani 2007: 41⫺42) is not dialect spe-
cific. However, has a special status in the city dialect of Beijing. In this dialect
attaches not only to the above class of roots but to the vast majority of roots, regardless
of their syllabic, word-class, or semantic features (cf. Pirani 2007: 145⫺147). The so-
called “Běijı̄ng érhuà” (cf. Peng 2006) or “-erization” (cf. Barnes 1977) is an even
stronger example of a morphological geographic marker than the Bavarian -ts because
it bears no other meaning than the geographic one: it symbolizes the speaker’s Beijing
origin. Since Beijing is China’s capital and the Beijing dialect is a very prestigious variety
of Mandarin Chinese, also has a social value, i. e., it is a social and geographic
marker.
The third case is slightly different. The pronoun system of Tyneside English (and
many other English varieties) is characterized by different instances of “pronoun ex-
change”: e.g., in the 3pl the object pronoun is also used in subject position, i. e., instead
of a distinction between the subject pronoun they and the object pronoun them there is
just one generalized form, them (cf. Beal 2004: 118⫺119). In the 1pl the functions of we
and us are reversed in Tynside when compared to Standard English, i. e., us functions as
subject and we as object pronoun, see (1a, b) (Beal 1993: 205):
(1) a. Us’ll do it.

b. Give it we.
The feature is so salient and well known even outside northern England that it has
become a shibboleth for Tyneside English. From a theoretical point of view it is in-
structive to note that here it is not the word form that serves as a geographical marker:
the pronouns are the same words as in Standard English. It is the paradigmatic distinc-
tion that makes the difference, i. e., the syncretism of (subjective/objective) case or the
exchange of subject and object function.
To sum up: morphology is less important for the perception and mental construction
of space than phonology and the lexicon. But there are examples of morphological space
marking, including cases in which abstract paradigm distinctions are recognized as rel-
evant for spatial structures by naı̈ve speakers, as exemplified by Tyneside English.
4. Eects o geographic space on morphology
The point of departure for this section is the observation that linguistic phenomena
usually exhibit well-formed spatial patterns. However, physical geographic space as such
has no effect on morphology or any other linguistic feature. Correlations between the
topographic and the linguistic structure of an area exist insofar as topographic space
inhibits or supports communicative contacts between populations. In ancient times,
mountains, swamps and large forests presented serious traffic barriers; consequently they
became language and dialect boundaries. On the other hand, precisely because of the
absence of good roads, rivers were more important traffic routes than they are today.
Hence, rivers are hardly ever major linguistic boundaries. If they delimit linguistic
spaces, this is due to additional border functions that they have adopted, e.g., political
borders. Nation-state borders constrain communication. In today’s Europe with its
“open frontiers” there are almost no restrictions on cross-border movements anymore,
at least within the Schengen area. However, long-term or regularly repeated cross-border
movements for purposes like education, work, or marriage are restrained by national
economies and national cultures as well as by infrastructure development that is not
usually internationally oriented. Thus, the majority of movements that, unlike holiday
traffic, could seriously contribute to cultural and language contacts remain within the
borders of the nation state. Religious boundaries have similar effects, even in Europe,
as not only the recent history of the Balkan region has taught us. In sum: geographical
space has effects on language only insofar as it conditions whether and what kind of
language or dialect contact occurs. Language contact presupposes some kind of geo-
graphical adjacency. There are three possible types of adjacency which are addressed
in the following subsections: isolation, i. e., no adjacency (section 4.1); physical, i. e.,
topographic adjacency (section 4.2); social adjacency (section 4.3).
4.1. Eects o isolation
If a language is completely isolated, no language contact occurs. This is, historically, the
situation for language islands in topographically remote locations. The effect of the
isolation on (the rare cases of almost) homogeneous languages or dialects is often the
preservation of conservative morphological features that have died out in related lan-
guages or dialects on the “mainland”. Good examples are the Alemannic and Bavarian
language islands in the Italian Alps. Consider the Walser German dialect of Issime, a
small village in the Aosta Valley region in northern Italy, which for centuries remained
isolated both from the German language area and the surrounding Italian and Franco-
Provençal dialects. In the inflection of some nouns distinct genitive case forms still exist
both in the singular and the plural, e.g., wegsch ‘way’ (gen.sg), we egu ‘ways’ (gen.pl)
(Zürrer 1999: 156⫺157), whereas in almost all other German dialects the (Old High
German) genitive case forms have completely disappeared from the noun paradigms (cf.
Koß 1983: 1242) while the surrounding Romance varieties do not have morphological
case on nouns at all. However, there are examples in which isolation has the opposite
effect, i. e., language islands in which case reduction goes beyond the level reached by the
dialects of the core territory. Here the development is also independent of the structure of
the surrounding languages. In Pennsylvania German simplifying effects of language con-
tact (English has fewer cases than German) cannot be excluded (cf. Louden 1994: 90).
However, Rosenberg (2005: 229) reports that “case reduction is stronger in ‘sectarian’
Mennonite and Amish groups who consistently use German in everyday conversation
than in ‘non-sectarian’ groups with intense language contact”. Case reduction is also
attested in German language islands in Russia, despite the rich case morphology of
Russian. What both types (case reduction and case preservation) have in common is that
topographically or culturally induced spatial isolation has effects on morphology: the
morphology of the language-island varieties is different to the morphology of the related
“mainland” varieties.
4.2 Eects o topographic adjacency
Topographic adjacency is the typical situation for language contact in Western Europe
with its dialect and language continuums based on rural, non-mobile societies. Often,
one variety influences the variety next to it in space. In this situation, linguistic innova-
tions might spread out horizontally from the margins of a linguistic area, and represent
a pattern which is sometimes referred to as “contagious diffusion” (Bailey et al. 1994:
366). The magnitude of the influence is a function of geographical distance between two
places: the greater the distance the less similar the varieties. Topographic adjacency is
also the necessary precondition for the occurrence of sprachbund phenomena. Probably
the best-studied sprachbund is the Balkan Sprachbund that features, among others, mor-
phological similarities. Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Slavic languages which
have a (definite) article (cf. Haspelmath 2001: 1494; see also section 5). This is the result
of their geographical position on the Balkan peninsula between Albanian, Greek and
Romanian, i. e., in between languages with article systems. The effect of topographic
adjacency is evidenced as well by the postposition of the definite article common to all
of these topographically contiguous but genetically only distantly related languages (cf.
Feuillet 2001: 1518; Trudgill 1975: 239). The article system is, additionally, a good exam-
ple of the center⫺periphery pattern. Both a definite and an indefinite article exist in the
center of the so-called Standard Average European (SAE) linguistic area whose nucleus
is formed by French and German (cf. Haspelmath 2001: 1505). Icelandic, although a
Germanic language, has only a definite article. Thus, it resembles the nearby Celtic
languages but is also similar to Bulgarian and Macedonian, languages which are located
on the opposite side of the SAE center.
Another well known sprachbund with a common morphological property is that of
East-Central Africa. African languages do not usually display morphological case on
nominals. Exceptions are Nilo-Saharan and Cushitic languages which have up to seven
case forms. These languages cluster in East-Central Africa (mainly Sudan, Ethiopia and
some Central African areas, cf. Iggesen 2005: 204⫺205) and form the so-called “Chad-
Ethiopia” sprachbund (Heine 1975: 41⫺43).
A special type of topographic adjacency involves the contact between two languages
simultaneously present in the same geographical space. Consider the linguistic situation
in Kazakhstan, in which Kazakh, the local Turkic language, has been in intense contact
with Russian for centuries (similar situations exist in other countries which were part of
the former Soviet Union and the Russian Empire). Until the end of the Soviet Union,
there were an almost equal percentage of ethnic Russians and Kazakhs in Kazakhstan,
and Russian today is still an official language that plays an important role, especially in
business, with many bilingual speakers. In a recent study (Muhamedowa 2005), the effect
of this intense language contact on Russian adjective inflection is discussed. Russian
adjectives, like nouns, display a rich inflectional paradigm; in attributive function they
agree in case, number and gender with the head of the NP. In contrast, Kazakh adjectives
do not agree with the head in any of these categories, their syntactic function as attribu-
tive adjectives is marked exclusively by their position in the sentence (cf. Muhamedowa
2005: 269⫺271). The study shows that in code-mixing contexts, when Russian NPs are
embedded in Kazakh sentences, the morphology of many Russian adjectives is simpli-
fied, i. e., they partially lose their formal agreement features. However, even in the purely
Russian utterances of even Russian-dominant bilingual speakers, a small but consider-
able proportion of attributive adjectives (seven percent of the non-masculine NPs, cf.
Muhamedowa 2005: 304) do not formally display gender agreement. The adjective is
“neutralized” to the masculine form, as illustrated in (2) (Muhamedowa 2005: 294;
glossed according to the Leipzig Glossing Rules):
(2) кажд- ациоало

т
every-masc.nom.sg nationality (fem)[nom.sg]
While the noun ациоало

т ‘nationality’ is intrinsically feminine, the adjective
takes the “neutral” default suffix - (masc.nom.sg). The resulting NP is, obviously, not
well-formed in Standard Russian. Hence, the spatially mediated language contact clearly
has effects on morphology.
The reduction of gender and number agreement under language-contact conditions
can also be found in Paraguayan Spanish. In Paraguay, the regional Spanish variety is
in competition with Guaranı́ in a situation of general bilingualism. In contrast to the
situation in the neighboring Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, Guaranı́ is an
official language in Paraguay and still has a relatively strong position: in rural areas
there are even speakers who know very little Spanish (cf. Dietrich 2001). Hence, Guaranı́
is influenced by Spanish, but regional Spanish is influenced by Guaranı́, too. In Guaranı́,
number and gender are not marked as morphological categories. As a consequence, in
the Paraguayan Spanish sentence la banana son buenas ‘the bananas are good’ (Dietrich
2001: 69) neither the article la nor the noun banana bear any plural marker (the sentence
would be considered ungrammatical by Spanish speakers from other regions).
Another very interesting example is the use of perfective aspect markers in Paragu-
ayan Spanish (cf. Dietrich 2001: 68). Guaranı́ has aspect suffixes, Standard Spanish does
not. Regional Spanish adopts perfective aspect markers in two different ways, which are
illustrated in (3):
(3) a. su novia-kue
his girlfriend-perf
‘his ex-girlfriend’
b. voy a comprar para mi vestido
I go to buy perf for me a dress
‘I will buy me a dress’
In (3a) the Guaranı́ perfective suffix -kue is transferred into Spanish preserving both its
phonological form and its grammatical meaning (“state or activity which was ended”).
In (3b) the Spanish preposition para adopts the meaning of the Guaranı́ perfective suffix
-rã (‘state or activity which will be ended’) assigning to (3b) a perfective meaning without
transferring the original Guaranı́ suffix itself ⫺ no speaker of Spanish from Madrid or
Buenos Aires could assign any meaning to para in (3b). Example (3b) is especially in-
structive for language-contact theory as it shows the establishment of an aspect suffix in
a language in which aspect suffixes were formerly unknown by reanalyzing a grammati-
cal word from the target language without transferring the affix from the source lan-
guage itself.
4.3. Eects o social adjacency
The idea of “social adjacency” is that areas sharing social features can be considered
adjacent although they are not spatially contiguous. This holds, for instance, for cities.
Many communicative contacts do not affect the countryside but are transmitted directly
from city to city. The spread of features from larger cities to smaller cities and thence to
rural areas is usually referred to as “hierarchical diffusion” or “cascade diffusion” (Bailey
et al 1994: 361). Outside linguistics, a good example is the spread of the Beatles’ musical
style from Liverpool to London and then to other major cities in the world. Only later
did it move on downwards to smaller cities and towns (cf. Haggett 2004: 319). In linguis-
tics, since Trudgill’s classic studies (1974, 1975), hierarchical diffusion has mainly been
demonstrated in the spread of phonological features. For the opposite pattern, contra-
hierarchical diffusion, a morphological example exists. In the south of the United States
the quasi-modal fixin to (e.g., I feel like I’m fixin to die ‘I feel like I am about to die’)
has been reported to have spread rapidly throughout Oklahoma in the twentieth century
(cf. Bailey et al. 1994: 371⫺378). The spread occured in a contra-hierarchical fashion
from the rural areas to small towns and then to larger cities. Hence, it is not primarily
topographic adjacency that drives the spread of the feature. The reason for the diffusion
is rather the social value of the feature as a marker of local identity, in this case, a rural,
explicitly non-urban identity.
5. Methodological issues
There are two preconditions for the analysis of areal variation in morphology. The first
is the determination of a variable which is valid for the whole area under investigation.
The second is the availability of data on the areal distribution of morphological variants.
These preconditions, in principle, apply to all structural domains, not just morphology.
However, the meanings that frame morphological variables are particularly hetero-
geneous, and their definitions are very theory dependent. Additionally, the available data
sources (linguistic atlases, lists of structural features with explicit areal reference points)
usually do not contain complete descriptions of morphological systems but only a few
selected features (whereas for phonology complete systems may be available). The de-
scriptive situation of morphology has improved notably in recent years: while traditional
dialect atlas projects have focused primarily on phonology and the lexicon and paid
little to no attention to morphology (or syntax), nowadays things are more balanced.
Morphological variation both within and between languages has been surveyed in several
projects that have already produced good descriptive results. The Morfologische Atlas
van de Nederlandse Dialecten ‘Morphological Atlas of the Dutch Dialects’ (MAND, De
Schutter et al. 2005; Van Oostendorp et al. 2008) and The World Atlas of Language
Structure (WALS) are just two examples of geolinguistic projects that concentrate solely
on morphology (MAND) or in which morphological and syntactic maps far outnumber
the phonological and lexical ones (WALS). However, a map that depicts the areal distri-
bution of the variants of a morphological feature will still contain large amounts of
white space.
The data problem is common to all structural domains to varying degrees. Specific
to morphological analysis is the variable-determination problem. It is relatively simple
to define a phonological variable (e.g., “vowel nasalization”) or a lexical variable (e.g.,
expressions for “hand” and “arm”). It is also possible to fix an inflectional variable (e.g.,
“plural”). But meanings regarding derivation and, to an even greater extent, compound-
ing cannot be defined and classified in this way, since the number of relational concepts
that can underlie a compound is potentially infinite (cf. Downing 1977). A successful
survey of, for instance, the areal distribution of the possible interpretations of English
noun⫺noun compounds like plate length seems an almost impossible task. For this
reason, derivational and compound features are usually not studied with respect to ar-
eal variation.
Another specific problem, already addressed in section 1, is the delimitation of the
structural domains: it is not easy to decide where morphology ends and phonology or
syntax begins. Turning first to the morphology⫺phonology transition zone (cf. Wiese
1996), in section 1 the example of vowel deletion in Russian noun inflection was men-
tioned. A similar morphophonological phenomenon is German umlaut. Originally, um-
laut or i-mutation referred to the fronting of back vowels caused by assimilation to an
original [i] in the following syllable, as illustrated in (4a):
(4) a. lamb lemb-ir Old High German

Lamm Lämm-er New High German
lamb[sg] lambs\pl-pl
b. muoter muoter Old High German
Mutter Mütter New High German
mother[sg] mothers\pl
The Old High German umlaut in (4a) could be regarded as an automatic phonetic proc-
ess. But since it was primarily caused by [i] in morphological markers (here the plural
suffix -ir) the umlaut began to participate in the symbolization of the morphological
feature. In the New High German plural word Lämmer one could still argue that the
plural suffix -er is simply an additive exponent and that the umlaut of the stem vowel is
the fossilized result of the Old High German i-mutation, rather than a second exponent
of the plural feature. However, the umlaut was later extended to noun plurals that never
carried -ir or any other plural suffix, as in Mütter in (4b) from Old High German muoter
‘mothers’ (pl). Hence, the fronting of the stem vowel is morphologically conditioned;
the vowel is fronted in order to express the plural feature.
The morphology⫺syntax relationship is no easier. In section 4.2, reference was made
to the definite article in Bulgarian. In fact, the situation is more complicated there, since
what is labeled an “article” is not an autonomous word but an element added to the
first word of the NP, as illustrated in (5):
(5) a. кига кига-та

book book-def (Hill 1991: 314)
b. ова кига ова-та кига
new book new-def book
The element -та in (5) could also be regarded as a suffix expressing definiteness. Perhaps
it is best classified as a clitic since it exhibits a certain degree of freedom of selection
with respect to the host ⫺ the noun in (5a) and the adjective in (5b). Clitics are in many
ways intermediate between affixes, which belong to the domain of morphology, and free
word forms, whose behavior in the sentence is governed by syntactic rules.
In addition to the determination of variables discussed above, compounding is also
problematic with respect to the domain delimitation problem. Spelling differences such
as English flower pot, flower-pot, flowerpot are not simply issues of orthographic codifica-
tion but rather indicators of serious word delimitation problems. These problems are
more obvious in languages like Chinese which in written form never use blank spaces
between characters (cf. Haspelmath 2002: 148).
6. Explanatory power o the study o areal variation
In the foregoing sections, the effects of morphological features on (the construction of

cultural) geographic space (section 3) and the effects of geographic space on morphologi-
cal features (section 4) have been discussed. It has been argued that morphological differ-
ences create spatial delimitations and vice versa. Taking the issue one step further, we
can now ask: what does the geographic reach of a morphological feature tell us about
the properties of that feature?
In the first instance, areal variability reveals that the phenomenon under analysis is
not a linguistic universal. Geographic factors do not affect linguistic universals like the
“Inflection-outside-Derivation Principle” (see section 2.2). If areal variation exists, then
the question of its explanatory power can be framed with regard to its actual extent and
its diachronic development.
The actual extent of the morphological expression of a grammatical category, then,
may tell us something about the relevance of this variable in the speaker’s mind. Bybee’s
(1985) cross-linguistic survey of morphological categories of verbs revealed that in ninety
percent of the languages examined, morphological expression of valence was attested
whereas person and number were morphologically coded in only little more than half of
the sample (cf. Bybee 1985: 29⫺33). Bybee did not depict the spatial extensions of the
coding patterns. But since she included a remarkable tally of fifty languages, each chosen
from a different language group and cultural area so as to create a representative sample,
a map of the world’s languages can be drawn on the basis of her results. The almost
complete coverage of the world with valence-marking languages ⫺ the ten percent which
comprise the exceptions are scattered between Haitian, Serbo-Croatian and Viet-
namese ⫺ proves the high degree of mental relevance of this category. It seems that
speakers consider valence features (transitivity, intransitivity, causation, etc.) so impor-
tant for the semantic content of the verb that they universally tend to express them
morphologically. Compared with that, number and person features are less relevant for
verbs; their morphological marking on verbs can be more readily omitted. Hence, a
picture of areal distribution reveals a property which may otherwise have escaped notice.
The conclusions that can be drawn from the actual spatial extent of the realization
of a morphological variable depend on the representativity of the language sample. Even
well-composed samples are never free of biases: it is almost inevitable that some areas are
overrepresented and others are missing (cf. Bybee 1985: 25). That is why the diachronic
perspective should not be forgotten. The diachronic view is more independent of the
samples’ representativity, since regardless of whether the phenomenon under investiga-
tion is representative or not for a language group or area, its diffusion in time from a
point X to a point Y offers reliable information on the factors governing the organization
and reorganization of morphological systems. Consider the plural-verb paradigm of
Type 3 in the western High Alemannic (mostly Swiss German) dialects, depicted in Table
44.1 in section 2.1. A two-way distinction with homonymy of the 1pl and 3pl but a
distinct form for the 2pl is cross-linguistically a very rare phenomenon (cf. Cysouw
2003: 134, 302). However, in southwest Germany its area is found to be expanding.
During the twentieth century Type 3 spread from a very small area at the Swiss border
towards the northeast in the former Type 5 area (cf. Rabanus 2004: 342⫺345). Since, as
discussed, person marking is not highly relevant for verbs but is nonetheless a feature
of Standard German, the change in the dialect implies convergence towards the standard
language. Hence, the geographic mapping of diachronic changes confirms changes in
the vertical dimension, i. e., an increasing importance of the standard language.
Finally, the study of variation in small areas, i. e., dialect variation, can contribute to
the development of linguistic theory in that it evidences aspects of “microvariation”.
Table 44.2 shows the distribution of the 3sg present suffix -t in four preterite-present
verbs in the Walser German villages in the Italian and Swiss Alps (data presented by
Silvia Dal Negro in her contribution to the Verona workshop on German dialect mor-
phology and syntax, 14 December 2008: cf. Rabanus, Alber and Tomaselli 2008; also cf.
Dal Negro 2004: 205).
Preterite-present verbs in Standard German and most German dialects are a small
group of modal verbs which have acquired a present meaning from a preterite form but
which preserve some formal properties of the preterite, e.g., they do not take the suffix
-t in the 3sg present. In the Walser German dialects -t is added in a process of regulariza-
tion. However, the process is not complete. A look at the areal distribution pattern
reveals an implicational scale: dialect variants of mögen are the first that take the suffix
-t while the occurrence of -t in the 3sg present forms of können implies that the suffix -t
is already also used in wissen, dürfen and mögen (cf. the syntactic implicational scales in
the same dialects in Dal Negro 2000: 47). Once again, areal distribution patterns tell us
something about morphology ⫺ here about the readiness of preterite-present verbs to
give up their formal irregularity.
Tab. 44.2: 3sg present suffix -t in the paradigms of preterite-present verbs

Location mögen ‘be willing’ dürfen ‘be allowed’ wissen ‘know’ können ‘can’
Formazza
Salecchio
Bosco
Gressoney -t
Alagna -t
Macugnaga -t -t
Issime -t -t -t -t
Rima -t -t -t -t
Rimella -t -t -t -t
In section 5, the data situation was listed among the problematic aspects in the study
of areal variation in morphology. In order to conclude with a positive outlook, this lack
of information needs to be seen as an incentive for further research: the “white spaces”
on a map of variants of a morphological variable are exactly the areas whose morphol-
ogy awaits exploration!
7. Reerences
Abraham, Werner and Jac Conradie
2001 Präteritumschwund und Diskursgrammatik. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Barnes, Dayle
1977 To er or not to er. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 5: 211⫺236.
Bartoli, Matteo
1925 Introduzione alla neolinguistica. Principi, scopi, metodi. Geneva: Olshki.
Beal, Joan
1993 The grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English. In: James and Lesley Milroy (eds.),
Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles, 187⫺213. London:
Longman.
Beal, Joan
2004 English dialects in the north of England: Morphology and syntax. In: Bernd Kortmann
and Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English, vol. 2: Morphology
and Syntax, 114⫺141. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bickel, Balthasar and Johanna Nichols
2005 Exponence of selected inflectional formatives. In: Haspelmath et al. (eds.), 90⫺93.
Brown, Keith (ed.)
2006 Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Bybee, Joan L.
1985 Morphology. A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Campbell, Lyle
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45. Lexical variation in space

1. Lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable
2. Methodological requirements for sociolexicology
3. Alternative strategies for dealing with the semantic problem
4. Case studies
5. Overview and prospects
6. References
1. Lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable

Let us suppose that we try to treat lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable, in the
Labovian sense. What methodology would we have to use? In this article, we will explain
why lexical variation presents a specific challenge for the quantitative study of linguistic
variation, we will suggest that the challenge has not been adequately dealt with yet, and
we will present an overview of various partial attempts to live up to the requirements
that follow from the specific nature of lexical variation.
1.1. Spatial variation and lectal variation
The emphasis of this article will be on lexical variation as a generic sociolinguistic phe-
nomenon rather than on spatial lexical variation per se. Specifically, the concrete details
of the traditional methods of dialect lexicology will hardly be touched upon. There are
two reasons for this generic focus.
In the first place, diatopic variation is an integral part of the larger canvas of social
variation in language use, systematically interacting with the other dimensions of socio-
linguistic variation. As is well known, dialect switching is sensitive to situation; see,
for instance, Werlen (2005) for an example involving rural dialects. More generally, the
traditional dialect is only “the local language” because it happens to be the language of
a locally dominant or well-established group. Move the so-called local language to a
different locale and it reveals its essential nature as a marker of group identity, as studies
on immigrant language show. In this sense, spatial dimensions are no different to other
variational dimensions, and need to be treated on a par.
In the second place, diatopic variation itself is a generic phenomenon that extends
beyond traditional dialect variation ⫺ in two directions, in fact: the scale of the geo-
graphic variation may be broader than the dialect, as when we consider regiolects or the
national varieties of standard languages, or it may be more restricted, as when unexpect-
edly local forms of spatial variation are detected. A conspicuous example of the latter
situation is provided by Tway (1975), who shows that topology may influence language
even on such a small scale as a factory. Distinguishing between the front and the back
sections of a pottery factory in Pennsylvania (a functional distinction, since most of the
activities associated with forming and firing take place at the back of the plant, while
decorating and warehousing take place at the front), she illustrates how different objects
receive a different conventional name according to the functional division of the factory.
One ware shape may be called platter in the back section but dish in the front section;
similarly, oatmeal versus nappy, museum versus coupe. The phenomenon is not restricted
to ware shapes, as witnessed by the distribution of ware buggy versus upright, high lift
versus truck, or inspector versus selector.
1.2. The speciicity o lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable
Given, then, the necessity of a generic perspective on lexical variation, why is lexical
variation specific if we want to treat it as a sociolinguistic variable? Let us first recall
what we mean by a sociolinguistic variable. Put simply, a sociolinguistic variable in the
sense of contemporary sociolinguistics (see Labov 1966) is a set of alternative ways of
expressing the same linguistic function or realizing the same linguistic element, where
each of the alternatives has social significance: “Social and stylistic variation presuppose
the option of saying ‘the same thing’ in several different ways: that is, the variants are
identical in reference or truth value, but opposed in their social and/or stylistic signifi-
cance” (Labov 1972: 271). As such, a sociolinguistic variable is a linguistic element that
is sensitive to a number of extralinguistic independent variables like social class, age,
sex, geographical group location, ethnic group, or contextual style and register. Classical
cases of sociolinguistic variables involve pronunciation. Pronouncing the t in butter as a
glottal stop is indicative of a Cockney accent, just like a full pronunciation of the n in
chemin is typical of southern French in contrast to Standard French. Examples like these
have long been studied in traditional dialectology, but modern sociolinguistics enlarged
the scope of investigation beyond the traditional dialects to encompass other “lects” (as
a cover term for dialects, sociolects, regiolects and the like, i. e., socially defined language
varieties, like class-related speech or contextual styles).
Now, to see why lexical variation is specific as a sociolinguistic variable, let us con-
sider how we choose words. Lexical choices in discourse may be determined by different
factors: next to (obviously) the topic of the text, there is variation of a sociolinguistic or
stylistic nature: a speaker of British English will, for instance, make different lexical
choices than a speaker of American English, at least for a number of concepts. Choices
of this kind often involve differences between language varieties. Lexical choices of this
type are not choices of specific concepts (like the topic-related choices would be); they
are choices of one word over another that expresses the same concept: we can recognize
American English when we come across the word subway in contrast to British English
underground, but the type of public transport referred to is the same. We will call this
type of variation (i. e., the subway/underground type) formal onomasiological variation
(FOV), in contrast to conceptual onomasiological variation (COV), which involves the-
matic choices, like talking about public transport rather than beer, biology, or Bach. For
the third type of variation, we will use the term speaker and situation related variation
(SSV). It covers all relevant features of the speech situation: not just the lectal variation
that comes with more or less permanent speaker characteristics (like being American or
British), but also the more transient, interactional characteristics of the communicative
context, like whether the speech event is a dialogue or a monologue.
The interaction between these various dimensions has not yet been systematically
investigated. Such interactions may surely be expected, and they are likely to work in
different directions. The underground/subway case is an example of an SSV-FOV interac-
tion, as would be choosing an informal term rather than a more formal one according
to the formality of the speech situation. But at the same time, the choice of an informal
expression might correlate with thematic factors: there might well be more dirty words
for dirty topics than colloquial words for scientific topics. While such a case would
constitute a COV-FOV interaction, COV-SSV interactions may occur just as well. Con-
ceptual choices, in fact, are not just determined by the topic of a text: rather, for a
number of specific concepts, they derive from the situational, interactional characteristics
of the communicative context. Second-person pronouns constitute an obvious example:
they are typically likely to occur in dialogues rather than monologues. Similarly, persua-
sive texts contain different modal verbs than do informative texts.
Let us consider a further example. In naming a specific garment worn on the lower
part of the body and covering both legs separately, speakers using the general category
name may choose between British English trousers and pants as used in the US, Canada
and South Africa; but at the same time, they may make a conceptual choice for a more
specific name, like jeans, rather than the general category name of trousers or pants. The
lexical variation between trousers, pants and jeans does not just depend on sociostylistic
factors (like whether you are talking to Americans or to Brits) but also on conceptual
factors (like whether you opt for a more general or a more specific conceptual category).
An SSV-FOV interaction, then, involves the classical type of sociolinguistic variable: the
choice of pants or trousers correlates with specific sociostylistic features. An SSV-COV
interaction occurs when the choice of specific concepts correlates with sociostylistic
factors, such as when a professional or academic context invites more specialized lan-
guage than an everyday context does. A COV-FOV interaction may be found when the
choice of a particular expression correlates with conceptual factors, such as when the
taboo-laden nature of a concept influences lexical choices.
Given such interactions, the basic research question for sociolexicology can be de-
fined as follows: What is the overall structure of lexical variation in terms of the relation-
ship between FOV, COV and SSV? The specific situation of sociolexicological research
in the context of sociolinguistics follows straightforwardly from this question: while the
paragon cases of sociolinguistic research involve formal variables and a binary relation-
ship between formal variation and lectal context, sociolexicological research has to come
to terms with a ternary relationship between form, meaning and context. In the next
section, we will spell out in more detail the methodological consequences of this observa-
tion.
2. Methodological requirements or sociolexicology

While sociolinguistic variables have readily been studied in the phonology and the gram-
mar of languages, lexical variation has only rarely been studied as a sociolinguistic vari-
able, even though lexical differences are conspicuous variety markers and, on a very
practical level, often the source of misunderstandings. There are, we think, two methodo-
logical reasons for that neglect. These reasons are easy to identify when we recognize
that treating lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable requires a systematically ono-
masiological point of view. To explain: according to the traditional terminology of struc-
turalist lexicology, a semasiological point of view is one in which the lexical item is taken
as a point of departure, and in which the meaning(s) of that item is/are described. An
onomasiological point of view is one in which a concept to be expressed is taken as the
point of departure, and in which the various ways of naming that concept are described.
(For the distinction between semasiology and onomasiology, see, e.g., Quadri [1952]; for
a contemporary view on onomasiology, see Blank [2003].) If, then, the variation between
subway and underground is a form of sociolinguistic variability, an onomasiological ap-
proach (charting the choices between the two items) clearly provides the most natural
perspective. In general, however, an onomasiological perspective of this kind is much
less common in lexicological research than a semasiological perspective, and this may
have hindered the development of sociolexicology.
Now, given the ideal of an onomasiological perspective in sociolexicology, there are
two methodological hurdles for quantitative sociolexicology to take: the need for a rich
documentation of lexical usage; and the need to control for meaning. Let us look more
closely at each of these problems.
2.1. Usage-based data in sociolexicology
The onomasiological perspective, like the sociolinguistic perspective in general, implies

a usage-based approach to language: we are not dealing with structural variation among
different languages, but we are interested in variation in language use within the confines
of a single language. The examples we have quoted so far may suggest that the differ-
ences in lexical choices between languages varieties, like American English and British
English, are a matter of black and white choices: subway is the American term and
underground is the British term. In actual practice, however, the choices are seldom of a
categorical nature. Rather, the selection from among the various lexical alternatives that
occur within a language is a gradual matter. If we compare, for instance, the different
terms for the concept of ‘jeans’ in Dutch, we notice that between the two national vari-
eties of Dutch (Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch), the choice for either jeans or
jeansbroek or spijkerbroek is a matter of relative preferences, not of absolute choices. In
that sense, the onomasiological enquiry will have to proceed in the quantitative way
that is customary in sociolinguistics in general: what are the relative preferences for the
competing forms?
The kind of lexical documentation found in traditional dialectology, then, will not
suffice. In most cases, traditional dialect dictionaries present us with a single name for
a given concept, coming from just a single informant for a given place: the assumption
would seem to be that (except maybe for diachronic changes in the vocabulary of the
dialect in question) the dialect is internally homogeneous and lexical usage among the
speakers of the dialect is basically uniform. That assumption runs counter to the socio-
linguistic perspective but, at the same time, we need to recognize that the restrictions on
the dialectological data are to a large extent practical ones: if the study of lexical varia-
tion is to be pursued in a quantitative way, the data we need are much more difficult to
obtain than in the case of formal variation. You need only a relatively limited amount
of spontaneous speech to gather a number of attestations of the majority of the pho-
nemes in a language, but you will need a large amount of text before you come across
a sufficient number of instances of, say, either jeans or jeansbroek or spijkerbroek. Cer-
tainly, there are ways of circumventing the problem by special elicitation techniques, but
in general, there is a methodological hurdle for lexical research that is less prominent in
the study of phonetic variation as the core of sociolinguistic research.
It is in fact only in our current era, with the growing availability of large corpora of
spontaneous text, that the first methodological handicap of sociolexicology is gradually
losing some of its importance. The internet, for instance, provides a wealth of materials
that may be subjected to quantitative analysis and that also (with the availability of
blogs, forums and chat channels) provide a stylistically diversified set of materials. At
the same time, classical sociolinguistic speaker-related information (like age, class and
educational level) or even geographic origin is often difficult to identify when using
internet sources. (See Kilgarriff and Grefenstette 2003 for some of the issues involved.)
Even apart from the internet, however, a host of new text materials is gradually becom-
ing available for lexical research. The first methodological hurdle for sociolexicology, in
other words, seems to be becoming less of a problem than it used to be.
2.2. Controlling or meaning

Treating onomasiological variation as a sociolinguistic variable means coming to terms
with the meaning of words: the selection of a word is also the selection of a conceptual
category, so if we are interested in the contextual choice between synonyms as an expres-
sion of sociolinguistic factors, we first need to control for meaning ⫺ and that, needless
to say, is not an obvious matter. The problem is methodological in a high-level sense: in
what ways can we push semantic description beyond intuitive interpretation? But the
problem is also methodological in a very practical sense: in what ways can we achieve a
method of semantic interpretation ⫺ and more specifically, synonym identification ⫺
that works efficiently enough to allow for an easy demarcation of a large set of concepts?
Getting a good grip on the interrelations between FOV, COV and SSV cannot be
achieved unless we can study a sufficiently high number of concepts, but that ideally
requires a method of semantic analysis that is as fast as it is trustworthy.
In the broad context of sociolinguistics, the problem of semantics was recognized

early on, in an important article by Beatriz Lavandera. She argued that
it is inadequate at the current state of sociolinguistic research to extend to other levels of

analysis of variation the notion of sociolinguistic variable originally developed on the basis
of phonological data. The quantitative studies of variation which deal with morphological,
syntactic, and lexical alternation suffer from the lack of an articulated theory of meanings.
(Lavandera 1978: 171)
In the context of this article, we may forgo the question of whether the problem is as
striking in morphology and syntax as it is in lexicology, but the lexical problem is defi-
nitely real: how exactly do we establish whether a number of potential synonyms actually
express “the same thing” or whether they are merely referential near-synonyms? Neither
sociolinguistic nor lexical-semantic theory has a ready-made answer to that, but sociolin-
guistic research features a number of basic strategies for dealing with the problem which
we will review in the next section.
As an intermediate summary, let us recall that the proper treatment of lexical varia-
tion as a sociolinguistic variable has so far been slowed down primarily by two methodo-
logical hurdles: the difficulties involved in constructing a sufficiently large dataset, and
the difficulties involved in identifying concepts in a way that is minimally subjective and
maximally efficient. The first problem is greatly alleviated by the advent of ever larger
corpora, but the second question is still moot.
3. Alternative strategies or dealing with the semantic problem
Given the question of whether a number of potential synonyms actually do express “the
same thing” in referential terms, there are in essence two approaches that sociolexicologi-
cal research may follow: to restrict the domain of investigation to the referential overlap
between the near-synonyms (and specifically, to establish the referential synonymy as
objectively and systematically as possible); or to include the semantic differences between
the near-synonyms in the investigation. Given two words with an overlapping referential
range of application, the first strategy focuses on the area of overlap without including
the non-overlapping areas. As a borderline case, this applies specifically if it can be
established that the non-overlapping areas are semantically insignificant, i. e., if it can
be established that the two items are indeed pure referential synonyms. The second strat-
egy looks at the entire ranges, including subtle semantic differences. The alternative
approaches will be made more tangible and concrete in the following sections, but a
general comparison is due at this point already.
3.1. The restrictive approach
The first approach is obviously the one that corresponds most strictly to the concept of
a sociolinguistic variable: we can only talk about sociolinguistic variables if there are
alternative ways of expressing the same thing. However, we need to be aware that a
b a c
jeans spijkerbroek
Fig. 45.1: A graphical representation of lexical overlap
jeans
a blue denim trousers, with visible stitches
b brown denim trousers, with visible stitches
spijkerbroek
a blue denim trousers, with visible stitches
c blue denim trousers, without visible stitches
situation such as that in Figure 45.1 may represent a number of semantic configurations,
which do not all allow for a simple reduction of the area of investigation to the area of
overlap. For a schematic overview of the various configurations, let us consider the
following fictitious example. If we are looking at the items jeans and spijkerbroek, the
areas in Figure 45.1 might be filled with the types of referents listed. (The “visible
stitches” feature refers to the fact that jeans often have prominent stitching on the
seams.)
The three configurations we need to consider are the following: complete synonymy,
partial synonymy, and mere referential overlap. To begin with, the clearest situation from
a sociolinguistic point of view occurs when the differences in the range of application of
both items (the fact that [b] occurs with jeans but not with spijkerbroek, and that [c]
occurs with spijkerbroek but not with jeans) are superficial. If we can argue that the
meaning of both jeans and spijkerbroek is ‘denim trousers’, the observed differences with
regard to (b) and (c) could in principle be disregarded, because both would in principle
fall within the range of the two words ⫺ which might then obviously be treated as pure
synonyms. Clearly, the superficial nature of (b) and (c) could also follow from a statisti-
cal analysis, if their absence in the observational range of the other term would be due
to chance.
Suppose, however, as a second interpretation, that jeans and spijkerbroek are each
considered to be polysemous, with jeans having the meanings (a) and (b), and spijker-
broek having the meanings (a) and (c). The two words are then partially synonymous.
They could still be treated as manifestations of a sociolinguistic variable, but only if the
investigation is restricted to the meaning they have in common.
A further possibility obtains when jeans and spijkerbroek receive unitary definitions
that imply a certain degree of referential overlap, but no conceptual equivalence, either
complete or partial. This is what happens if jeans is defined as ‘denim trousers with
visible stitches’ and spijkerbroek as ‘blue denim trousers’. (These definitions are neither
realistic nor plausible; they merely the serve purposes of illustration.) In this case, we
can still build up our investigation starting from the area of overlap (a), but we should
be aware that the choice between the two words is a matter of conceptual construal:
selecting jeans or spijkerbroek implies different ways of conceptualizing the referents in
the overlapping area. In other words, whereas the cases in which we are confronted with
full or partial synonymy lead to an investigation of FOV, the situation in which we are
dealing with referential overlap between items that are semantically non-equivalent leads
to an investigation of COV.
It follows from this analysis of the various semantic configurations potentially corre-
sponding with Figure 45.1 that the possibility of treating lexical variation as a sociolin-
guistic variable hinges on the feasibility of identifying synonymy and polysemy. That is
not, in the current state of methodology in semantics, a straightforward matter. For
instance, the distinction between polysemy and vagueness (to mention one of the crucial
steps) is known to be methodologically unstable (Geeraerts 1993; Taylor 2003). The
semantic analysis required for the implementation of the restrictive strategy, in other
words, will tend to be a painstaking and tentative process.
At the same time, such a semantic analysis is absolutely necessary to avoid confusion
of FOV and COV. Simply starting from the items that may be found in the area of
overlap ⫺ i. e., starting from a purely referential rather than a conceptual level ⫺ will
tend to confuse FOV and COV: if there is an unheeded conceptual difference between
jeans ‘denim trousers with visible stitches’ and spijkerbroek ‘blue denim trousers’, simply
asking people what they call a pair of blue denim trousers with visible stitches would
not be sufficient to establish the difference between FOV and COV. This is basically what
the traditional Wörter und Sachen method in dialectology did, which was appropriately
criticized by lexical field theory. (Conversely, traditionally collected dialectological data
may be reanalyzed from the point of view of contemporary semantic models: see Swa-
nenberg 2002; Szelid and Geeraerts 2008.)
3.2. The comprehensive approach
Given the difficulties involved in establishing semantic equivalences, a less restrictive

approach may be envisaged: what if we investigated the entire area covered by the two
items? This is the approach that was advocated by Lavandera in her critical appraisal
of the concept of sociolinguistic variable: she argued that “unless we examine the entire
distribution of the apparent synonyms, the possibility of an explanation of the variation
is ruled out” (1978: 179), and accordingly proposed “to relax the condition that the
referential meaning must be the same for all the alternants and substitute for it a condi-
tion of functional comparability” (1978: 181).
As Labov remarks in his reaction to Lavandera, taking this suggestion at face value
and simply pretending that all the instances of use in the combined range of the near-
synonyms are semantically equivalent would result in the loss of the precision that socio-
linguistic research tries to achieve (Labov 1978: 6). The suggestion may, however, also
be taken more constructively, as an injunction to study the actual equivalence of the
potential synonyms in detail: how do differences of meaning and contextual features
simultaneously determine the choice of one item rather than another, and do these
factors work in the same way for both items?
To see the difference between this and the restrictive approach, it is instructive to
distinguish clearly between the dependent and the independent variables in the investiga-
tion. In the restrictive approach, FOV (lexical selection) is the dependent variable, and
SSV (variation of context) is the independent variable. (But when the near-synonyms are
not partially or fully synonymous, the approach mentioned under 3.1 takes COV as the
dependent variable and SSV as the independent variable.) In the comprehensive ap-
Fig. 45.2: A schematic representation of the different approaches
proach suggested here, semantic factors are included in the set of independent variables,
with FOV as the dependent variable. In the example we have used in 3.1, the comprehen-
sive approach could take the form of a regression analysis in which the selection of
either jeans or spijkerbroek is modeled in terms of lectal features (like the difference
between Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch) and semantic features (like whether
the item to be named is made of denim, what color it has, whether the stitches are
prominent). The different approaches that we have been able to identify, then, may be
summarized in Figure 45.2. (The arrows within the triangles point from independent to
dependent variables.)
The comprehensive approach has the disadvantage of not leading in a straightforward
way to a quantification of the SSV effect, which in this type of research emerges with
other factors in a combined analysis, and is thus less easily assessed on its own. On
the other hand, the comprehensive approach has the advantage of providing a detailed
description of the relationship between the near-synonyms, and may thus help to answer
the questions about semantic equivalence that lie at the basis of the restrictive approach.
If the approach is implemented in the form of a regression analysis, for instance, two
items would be fully synonymous if there is no interaction (in the statistical sense) be-
tween the lectal factors and the semantic factors included in the regression model. In
this respect, it would seem that we could use the comprehensive approach as a heuristic
step towards the restrictive approach.
4. Case studies
Now that we have gained an insight into the two basic strategies that are currently being
followed to tackle the specificity of lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable, two
case studies may help to make the methodological strategies more tangible. We will
present them in a different order than the one in which we introduced the two ap-
proaches: because the comprehensive approach is, as we saw, less narrowly linked to the
idea of a sociolinguistic variable, we will start with a brief example of the comprehen-
sive approach.
4.1. An example o the comprehensive approach
In a comprehensive approach, lectal variation and semantic variation among near-syn-

onyms are studied in combination. Differences exist as to the type of semantic descrip-
tion that is taken as the point of departure. In Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema
(1994), the referential type of description illustrated by Labov (1973) in the field of cups
and mugs is applied to the lexical field of clothing terms: on the basis of pictures and
photographs in magazines, the referents of a number of Dutch clothing terms receive a
componential description which is then used to judge identity of meaning among near-
synonyms (like, indeed, jeans and spijkerbroek). In contrast to the original Labov study,
lectal variation is included in the analysis, in the form of register variation, and in the
form of a spatial factor, viz. the distinction between Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian
Dutch.
In other cases, the semantic description does not take a referential form, but rather
consists of a featural coding of textual corpus data. In Glynn (2007), a corpus-based
analysis of the verbs bother, hassle and annoy is conducted with specific emphasis on the
combination of lectal, semantic and constructional variation. Some 2000 examples taken
from internet sources are coded for a variety of features: first, the distinction between
US attestations and UK attestations; second, a number of formal and constructional
variables (whether the verb is used in a transitive or intransitive construction, whether
or not it is used predicatively, whether or not it is used as a gerund, etc.); and third, a
variety of (manually attributed) semantic features. Among others, these semantic fea-
tures include a distinction between humorous and non-humorous contexts and an indica-
tion of the thematic meaning of the utterances: whether the verb expresses anger, pain
of an emotional or physical nature, concern, a request, an attempt to impose, etc.
These coded data are subjected to a number of statistical analyses that help to reveal
the underlying pattern of polysemy and lectal differentiation. In Figure 45.3, for in-
stance, a multiple correspondence analysis shows how the different verbs cluster with
regard to the semantic characterization. In the top right corner, for instance, we notice
that us_annoy_trans (i. e., the verb annoy in a transitive construction in US sources) and
uk_annoy_trans are situated close to each other, i. e., there is not a lot of difference in
the way they are used. In general, lectal differences between the UK sources and the US
sources are not striking. The UK attestations and the US attestations cluster together,
except for bother in predicative use: us_bother_pred patterns with the expression of anger
(ang in the plot) while uk_bother_pred ties in with themes like “energy”, “request”, “agi-
tation”.
This example demonstrates how the contrastive analysis of polysemy in near-syn-
onyms may profit from the inclusion of lectal features ⫺ which is basically what the
comprehensive approach amounts to. At the same time, it makes clear how an analysis
of this type may help to establish synonym sets. As mentioned, a lectal difference corre-
lates with a semantic difference only in the predicative use of bother; in the other readings
of bother and in the senses expressed by annoy and hassle the lectal difference plays no
role. The semantic grouping of the items in the plot reveals the polysemy of the expres-
sions. In the top right corner of the plot, for instance, we note how transitive annoy,
transitive bother and predicative bother (at least in the US) are all associated with the
“anger” reading. In the left hand side of the plot, we see how an “imposition” and
“teasing” reading is associated with a transitive use of hassle. In the lower right corner,
intransitive uses of bother, nominal uses of hassle, and predicative uses of bother (re-
stricted to the UK) are associated with the expression of agitation.
A correspondence analysis of this kind is an exploratory technique only, and one
would like to take a further step by introducing inferential statistics. In Speelman and
Geeraerts (to appear), for instance, the selection of Dutch doen ‘make’ or laten ‘let’ as a
Fig. 45.3: Correspondence analysis of hassle, bother, annoy
causative auxiliary is subjected to a logistic regression analysis including lectal factors

together with semantic ones. The lectal factors (viz. the distinction between Netherlandic
Dutch and Belgian Dutch and differences of stylistic register) clearly emerge as relevant
for the distribution of the two verbs. While such statistical analyses of near-synonyms
are relatively scarce in lexical studies, they do form an emerging trend in the study of
syntax. In the context of construction-oriented grammar research, a number of younger
scholars are using advanced quantitative techniques to distinguish between near-synony-
mous constructions. Including lectal factors in such analyses is not yet standard pro-
cedure, but a number of publications do incorporate lectal variation as a potentially
distinguishing factor for constructional near-synonyms: see for instance Wulff, Stefano-
witsch and Gries (2007), Grondelaers and Speelman (2007).
4.2. An example o the restrictive approach
As an example of a restrictive approach, we may have a closer look at Geeraerts, Gron-

delaers and Speelman (1999). Following up on the comprehensive approach developed
in Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema (1994), this study investigates the relationship
between the vocabulary of the two national varieties of Dutch, Netherlandic Dutch and
Belgian Dutch.
4.2.1. Materials and method
The empirical basis of the investigation consists of over 40,000 observations of actual
language use, involving two lexical fields (soccer terms and clothing terms). The concepts
in the lexical fields are chosen in such a way that potential polysemy is minimal, and
can be easily controlled for by a manual inspection of the data.
Tab. 45.1: Onomasiological profiles for ‘shirt’ in the Belgian and Netherlandic data (1990)
B90 N90
hemd 31 % 17 %
overhemd 69 % 46 %
shirt 0% 37 %
The database allows, for instance, for a calculation of the relative proportions in
Belgian and Netherlandic sources of the term buitenspel ‘offside’ and the loanword off-
side as names for the “offside” concept. In the case of the concept of “dress”, it can be
determined whether the lexical choices involve a preference for one of the items jurk,
japon or kleed. The core of the observed material consists of magazine and newspaper
material recorded in 1990. This core is extended in two ways. In the first place, similar
material from 1950 and 1970 was collected, which allows for a “real-time” investigation
of lexical convergence or divergence processes. In addition, the stratification of language
use was taken into account. Between standard and dialect, there are a number of “strata”
on which register differences may co-occur with an increasing geographical specializa-
tion. For an investigation of the relationship between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch,
these strata ⫺ viz. the regionally colored informal variants of the standard language ⫺
are extremely relevant: it can be expected that the linguistic differences between Belgium
and The Netherlands will increase on this regiolectal level. This intermediate level be-
tween dialect and written standard language was represented by the clothing terms col-
lected from labels and price tags in shop windows in two Belgian (Leuven and Kortrijk)
and two Netherlandic towns (Leiden and Maastricht). The intended audience of this
form of communication is more restricted than the national or binational audience which
is the target of the magazines from which the core material was selected. Using written
language in a semi-formal situation, on the other hand, implies that the purely dialectal
pole of the stratificational continuum is not represented in the data.
The collected data are analyzed from two perspectives: a diachronic one (involving
the convergence or divergence between Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch in the
period between 1950 and 1990), and a synchronic one (involving the stratification of
stylistic registers in the two national varieties of Dutch). To see how the analysis the
treatment of lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable may happen in practice, we
first need to specify two methodological concepts.
First, the onomasiological profile of a concept in a particular source is the set of
synonymous names for that concept in that particular source, differentiated by relative
frequency. Table 45.1 contains the onomasiological profiles for overhemd ‘shirt’ in the
Belgian and the Netherland 1990 databases.
Second, uniformity is a measure of the correspondence between two onomasiological
profiles. The computation of uniformity has its starting point in the idea that a common
language norm triggers uniform linguistic behavior. In its most extreme form, lexical
uniformity in the naming of a concept obtains when two language varieties have an
identical name for that concept, or several names with identical frequencies in each of
the two varieties. Much more frequent than these examples of “ideal” uniformity, how-
ever, are such partial correspondences as illustrated in Table 45.1. Let us, for the sake
of illustration, assume that the relative frequencies in Table 45.1 represent 100 actual
naming instances in each of both profiles, rather than percentages. The partial overlap
between the profiles in Table 45.1 is quantified by counting the naming instances for
which there is a counterpart in the other profile. In the ideal scenario outlined above,
each of the 100 naming events in each of both profiles has its counterpart in the other
profile, yielding a maximal uniformity of 100 percent. In Table 45.1, however, 14 in-
stances of hemd in B90 have no counterpart in N90, 23 Belgian overhemden have no
Netherlandic counterpart, and there are no Belgian counterparts for the 37 Netherlandic
shirts. Of the grand total of 200 naming events in the two profiles, only 126 (i. e., 200 ⫺
14 ⫺ 23 ⫺ 37) instances have counterparts in the other profile, yielding a uniformity
index of 126/2, or 63 percent. For the sake of quantitative convenience, it should be
noticed that this percentage equates the sum of the smallest relative frequency for each
alternative term, i. e., 17 ⫹ 46 ⫹ 0 ⫽ 63 %.
If more than one concept is investigated, uniformity index U is defined as the average
of the uniformity indexes of the separate concepts, whereas uniformity index U1 is de-
fined as a weighted average, in which the relative frequency of each concept in the investi-
gated samples is taken into account. In this presentation of the results obtained by
Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999), we will focus exclusively on the weighted
uniformity index U1, in which high-frequency concepts have a more outspoken impact
on the overall uniformity.
4.2.2. Hypotheses
Given the database and the methodology, what can we expect to find with regard to the
relationship between the various language varieties included in the investigation? Some
historical background is necessary at this point. In Flanders ⫺ the Dutch-speaking part
of Belgium⫺the standardization process that began (as it did in many European coun-
tries) in the Early Modern Period was slowed down as a result of Flanders’ political
separation from The Netherlands in the Eighty Years’ War (1568⫺1648). Standard
Dutch developed in The Netherlands over the course of the seventeenth century, but as
Flanders was politically separated from The Netherlands, remaining under foreign ⫺
Spanish, Austrian, French ⫺ rule, it did not participate in this process of standardiza-
tion. Rather, French was used more and more as the language of government and high
culture, a practice that received an important impulse after the birth of the Belgian state
in 1830. Dutch then survived basically in the form of a variety of Flemish dialects.
However, as a result of a social and political struggle for the emancipation of Flanders
and the Flemish-speaking part of the Belgian population, Dutch regained ground as the
standard language in Flanders, i. e., as the language of learning, government and high
culture. This process started somewhat hesitantly in the late nineteenth century, gained
momentum during the first half of the twentieth century, and finally made a major leap
after World War II and during the booming 1960s. Still, most linguists agree that the
standardization process has not progressed as far as in The Netherlands. The traditional
local dialects, for instance, have a much stronger position in Flanders than in The Neth-
erlands.
With respect to the status and the development of Belgian Dutch, two hypotheses
may now be formulated. First, there is an expectation of diachronic convergence between
Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch. The standardization process in Flanders is charac-

terized by an explicit normative orientation towards Netherlandic Dutch: the standard-
ization of Belgian Dutch over the course of the twentieth century took the form of an
adoption of the Dutch standard language that already existed in The Netherlands. In
addition, the less advanced character of the standardization of Belgian Dutch is believed
to manifest itself in a larger synchronic distance between local and national language in
Belgium than in The Netherlands; even to the untrained observer, it is obvious that the
differences between regional and supraregional registers are much larger in Dutch-speak-
ing Belgium than in The Netherlands.
4.2.3. Empirical results
The diachronic and synchronic hypotheses may now be made operational in terms of
uniformity values as defined above. Diachronically, convergence and divergence can be
quantified as increasing or decreasing uniformity. Synchronically, the larger distance
between national and local language we expect in Belgian Dutch will manifest itself in
less uniformity between magazine and shop-window material in Belgian Dutch than in
Netherlandic Dutch.
Table 45.2 contains the relevant results. B50 stands for “Belgian data from 1950”,
N50 stands for “data from the Netherlands from 1950”; Bsw90 refers to the shop-window
materials from Belgium, in contrast to B90, which stands for the data taken from maga-
zines and newspapers.
The data in Table 45.2 unambiguously confirm both the diachronic and the syn-
chronic hypotheses. Diachronically, the increase in uniformity between Belgian and
Netherlandic Dutch suggests an evident lexical convergence between both varieties:
U1 (B50, N50) < U1 (B70, N70) < U1 (B90, N90)

69.84 < 74.59 < 81.70
Synchronically, the delayed or unfinished standardization of Belgian Dutch manifests

itself in a distinctly lower uniformity between the Belgian magazine and shop-window
data than between the Netherlands magazine and shop-window material:
U1 (B90, Bsw90) < U1 (N90, Nsw90)

45.90 < 67.75
Tab. 45.2: U1 values comparing Belgium and The Netherlands (1950⫺1970⫺1990) and comparing
written data from magazines and newspapers with local shop window data (1990)
B50 / N50: 69.84
B70 / N70: 74.59
B90 / N90: 81.70
B90 / Bsw90: 45.90
N90 / Nsw90: 67.75
Further extensions of this type of approach include taking into account the effect of
specific factors, like the level of foreign influence or the degree of linguistic purism that
shows up in the data.
5. Overview and prospects
Starting from the assumption that the methodological problems involved in studying the
relationship between lexicon and space boil down to the problems involved in studying
lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable, we have argued that the dearth of quantita-
tive lexical variation studies compared to other types of sociolinguistic studies results
from two features: first, the difficulties involved in constructing a sufficiently large data-
set for studying lexical variation, and second, the specific nature of lexical variation as
a sociolinguistic variable. That specificity resides in the ternary rather than binary nature
of lexical variation: a full picture of lexical variation requires an insight into the multiple
relations between lectal (and more generally, contextual) features, conceptual onomasio-
logical variation and formal onomasiological variation. The first difficulty (that of con-
structing a sufficiently large dataset) is gradually becoming less daunting, thanks to the
growing availability of large corpora. The second difficulty (that of disentangling concep-
tual variation and formal variation) is still a major one.
We have identified two fundamental ways in which quantitative sociolexicology re-
sponds to the challenge of semantic analysis. A restrictive approach stays close to the
original idea of the sociolinguistic variable, and tries to determine the synonym sets that
constitute the input for the lectal analysis as accurately as possible. A more comprehen-
sive approach relaxes the requirement of semantic identity, and conducts an analysis at
short range of the differences between near-synonyms, including both lectal and semantic
factors as independent variables in the analysis. The restrictive approach examines
choices within sets of strict synonyms in the light of external, lectal variables. The com-
prehensive approach examines choices within sets of near-synonyms in the light of such
contextual variables as well as conceptual ones.
The case studies we have described as an illustration of both approaches show the
advances that are currently being made in comparison with the older studies of lexical
variation in space that may be exemplified by traditional dialectological work: in both
case studies, diatopic variation is but one variable among a number of relevant factors;
both approaches use extended datasets of actual usage materials, rather than sample
responses from a limited number of informants, and both subject the data to advanced
forms of quantitative analysis. At the same time, both approaches also have their restric-
tions and disadvantages. While the comprehensive approach, focusing on local differ-
ences between a small set of near-synonyms, lends itself less easily to large-scale investi-
gations, the restrictive approach has yet to come to terms with the influence of external
factors on conceptual rather than just formal onomasiological variation.
Further, both approaches could profit from reliable and efficient methods of semantic
analysis. In this respect, recent developments in Natural Language Processing may pro-
vide a promising avenue to methodological innovation. In the Word Sense Disambigua-
tion paradigm in particular, methods for the automatic recognition of polysemy are
being developed, and one of the major further steps to be taken could be to introduce
these algorithms into sociolexicology, i. e., to introduce statistical, distributional measures

of semantic similarity in order to automate or semi-automate the semantic analysis un-
derlying the identification of onomasiological profiles. Such distributional measures for
semantic similarity (Agirre and Emonds 2006) rely on the assumption that words appear-
ing in similar textual contexts will also have similar meanings. Given the current state
of the art in distributional measures for semantic similarity, it is not yet obvious at this
point which of the various measures is best for synonymy extraction, but we may be
fairly confident that methodological advances may be achieved by pursuing this path.
6. Reerences
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2006 Word Sense Disambiguation. Algorithms and Applications. Berlin: Springer.
Blank, Andreas
2003 Words and concepts in time: Towards diachronic cognitive onomasiology. In: Regine
Eckardt, Klaus von Heusinger and Christoph Schwarze (eds.), Words in Time: Diachronic
Semantics from Different Points of View, 37⫺65. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, Dirk
1993 Vagueness’s puzzles, polysemy’s vagaries. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 223⫺272.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers and Peter Bakema
1994 The Structure of Lexical Variation: Meaning, Naming, and Context. Berlin/New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers and Dirk Speelman
1999 Convergentie en divergentie in de Nederlandse woordenschat. Amsterdam: Meertens Insti-
tuut.
Glynn Dylan
2007 Mapping meaning. Toward a usage-based methodology in cognitive semantics. Unpub-
lished Ph.D. thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Stefan Grondelaers and Dirk Speelman
2007 A variationist account of constituent ordering in presentative sentences in Belgian Dutch.
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3: 161⫺193.
Kilgarriff, Adam and Gregory Grefenstette (eds.)
2003 The Web as Corpus. Computational Linguistics 29 (Special issue).
Labov, William
Linguistics.
Labov, William
Labov, William
1973 The boundaries of words and their meanings. In: Charles-James N. Bailey and Roger W.
Shuy (eds.), New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, 340⫺373. Washington: George-
town University Press.
Labov, William
1978 Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? A response to Beatriz Lavandera. Working
Papers in Sociolinguistics 44. Austin: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.
Lavandera, Beatriz
1978 Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society 7: 171⫺183.
Quadri, Bruno
1952 Aufgaben und Methoden der onomasiologischen Forschung. Berne: Francke.
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Eve Sweetser (eds.), Linguistics of Causality. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Swanenberg, Jos
2002 On ethnobiological nomenclature in Southern Dutch Dialects. In: Jan Berns and Jaap
van Marle (eds.), Present-Day Dialectology: Problems and Findings, 353⫺365. Berlin/New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Szelid, Veronika and Dirk Geeraerts
2008 Usage-based dialectology. Emotion concepts in the Southern Csango dialect. Annual Re-
view of Cognitive Linguistics 6(1): 23⫺49.
Taylor, John R.
2003 Linguistic Categorization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tway, Patricia
1975 Workplace isoglosses: Lexical variation and change in a factory setting. Language in
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Dirk Geeraerts, Leuven (Belgium)
46. Areal variation in syntax

1. Introduction
2. Theories, methods, research traditions
3. The nature of areal variation in dialect syntax: Small and large-scale variation
in European dialect
4. Areal variation and (areal) typology
6. References
1. Introduction
What we spontaneously associate with areal variation are regional dialects, language (or
rather dialect) atlases and isoglosses. The examples of isoglosses and dialect maps which
immediately spring to mind are phonological, lexical and, to a much lesser extent, mor-
phological in nature. Syntax, by contrast, is a relative newcomer in this respect. It has
only been in the late twentieth century that widespread interest, within both dialectology
and general linguistics, has developed in issues of syntactic variation, or dialect syntax
or ⫺ as it is alternatively labeled in studies working within a broadly formalist research
tradition ⫺ microparametric syntax, microcomparative syntax. This late awakening
started very modestly in the 1980s, but has gained enormous momentum since the mid-
1990s. As a matter of fact, when judged on the basis of relevant major research projects
and the range and number of publications, the period beginning in the second half of
the 1990s may justly be called “the decade of dialect syntax”, and this is going to be a
very long decade as it were ⫺ with this very handbook no doubt contributing its fair
share to this development.
This article strives to provide an overview of some of the major developments of this
decade. Moreover, given the fact that the bulk of the relevant studies on dialect syntax
of the last ten to fifteen years have been concerned with Germanic and to a lesser extent
Romance (especially Italian) dialects, and given the research profile of the author, it is
areal variation in Continental Western Europe, in the British Isles and the wider English-
speaking world that will take center stage. The article will show that it is indeed espe-
cially owing to the study of dialect syntax that modern dialectology can no longer be
accused of working “in isolation from the full spectrum of language variation” or
scolded for its “separation from mainstream linguistics”, as Auer and Schmidt correctly
point out concerning classical dialectology in their introduction to this volume. This
significant turn that modern dialectology has taken is also clearly reflected in the follow-
ing opening statement from the introduction to the volume by Filppula et al. (2005: vii):
Until fairly recently, the word “dialect” carried the connotation of being something anti-
quated and having low social status. The situation is now very different: along with the
general rise of language awareness in modern societies, non-standard varieties of languages
have become an object of new interest, which in turn is reflected in their generally improved
position even in educational systems. A similar change has taken place in scholarly research
on dialects. This is partly due to the recent advances in the methods used in dialectological
research. The advent of computer-assisted methods has enabled study of significantly larger
databases than in traditional dialectological research. Also, methods derived from sociolin-
guistic and variation studies have greatly added to the general interest of dialect studies and
distanced them even further from the “butterfly collecting” mentality often associated with
traditional dialectology. New language-theoretical frameworks form yet another source of
inspiration for dialect studies today: typology, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis and
pragmatics have provided fresh perspectives on old problems and opened up completely new
lines of research such as cognitive dialectology, folk linguistics, and perceptual dialectology.
In the following, various dimensions of the “syntactic turn” in dialectology on the one
hand, and the “dialect turn” in modern linguistic theorizing on the other, will be ex-
plored. Current theories, methods and research projects in the field of dialect syntax will
be introduced in section 2. Selected findings from these (exclusively European) projects
and other studies on the areal variation of dialect-syntactic phenomena will be presented
in section 3: including a subsection which addresses the issue of historical stability of
such dialect-syntactic areas/isoglosses and some general problems to be kept in mind by
historical dialectologists when wanting to study dialect syntax. In section 4: the impor-
tant links between the study of areal variation in dialect syntax and language typology,
especially areal typology, will be pointed out. The article will be rounded off by a sketch
of some of the most promising research avenues in exploring syntactic variation in dia-
lects.
Given the nature of a survey article, many issues can be addressed only briefly. To
some extent, the rather long list of (largely recently published) references as well as the
links to the most important research centers and projects on dialect syntax are meant to
help compensate for this, guiding the reader to helpful sources of information. In gene-
ral, however, the kind of kaleidoscopic approach adopted here seems best suited to
providing a state-of-the-art account of this extremely dynamic and fast-developing field.
2. Theories, methods, research traditions

What is typically associated with classical studies on areal variation is strength as regards
methodology, but weakness, or even blissful ignorance, as regards theory, i. e., the com-
plete lack of (interest in) entering into a dialogue with current developments in linguistic
theorizing. That way, dialectology for a long time deprived itself of important sources
of inspiration concerning data to be analyzed and questions to be asked of the material
and, at the same time, failed to feed the dialectological expertise back into the discussions
contributing to the further developments of theories in different fields of mainstream
linguistics, such as formalist and functionalist syntactic theories, sociolinguistics, lan-
guage typology, and historical linguistics (e.g., research on grammaticalization). In this
section, it will be shown how radically this has changed ⫺ most dramatically in the
realm of theory (section 2.1), less so but still noticeably in terms of methodology (section
2.2) ⫺ and which research traditions have played a key role in this recent change.
2.1. Theory
The major driving force behind the “syntactic turn” in the study of dialects has clearly
been the “dialect”, or rather “microparametric”, turn in generative linguistic theorizing.
This turn made itself modestly felt in the 1980s and gained significant momentum in the
course of the 1990s (cf., for example, Abraham and Bayer 1993; Benincà 1989; Black
and Motapanyane 1996; Kayne 1993). Triggered by the Principles and Parameters ap-
proach, there was a growing awareness among syntacticians working within this theory
that alongside cross-linguistic variation (macroparametric syntax), language-internal
variation (microparametric or microcomparative syntax) should also matter in the fur-
ther advancement of generative theory. This microparametric turn, which has alterna-
tively been described in terms of a marriage of “biolinguistics” (i. e., generative syntactic
theory) and sociolinguistics (just take the programmatic title which Cornips and Corri-
gan [2005b] have chosen for their collective volume ⫺ Syntax and Variation: Reconciling
the Biological and the Social), is also clearly reflected in quotations like the following
from the editors’ preface (Trousdale and Adger 2007) and scene-setting introduction
(Adger and Trousdale 2007) to the most recent collection of articles on English dialect
syntax:
The articles in this special issue present new theoretical research into grammatical variation
in English, which yields a number of findings of interest to those involved in work in English
dialectology, typology, and syntactic theory. (Trousdale and Adger 2007: 257)
It is clear from these articles, and from the other ongoing work on microparametric variation
in English, that research based on nonstandard varieties of English can enhance and refine
theoretical models of language structure. (Trousdale and Adger 2007: 259)
Yet the modelling of (syntactic) variation in and across dialects is a critical issue in any
theoretical framework, as variation is ubiquitous in language, and the fact that language can
vary raises important questions regarding what the theory is actually modelling.
(Adger and Trousdale 2007: 261)
In fact, the microparametric turn in generative syntactic theory culminates in the follow-
ing statement by Adger and Trousdale (2007: 274): “The articles in this issue show how
theoretical modelling can be enriched by taking variation as a core explanandum”. This
is as far as one can get from the “ideal speaker’s/listener’s competence” in a (standard
variety of) language which has for decades formed the central object of research in
generativist theory formation.
Today the whole spectrum of broadly formalist syntactic theories is brought to bear
on the study of dialect syntax: still dominant are studies essentially operating within the
Government and Binding (GB, P&P) model of the 1980s or the Minimalism of the 1990s
(apart from the early publications on microparametric syntax mentioned at the begin-
ning of this section, cf., for example, Adger and Trousdale [2007] for a brief survey
discussion and, for a cross-section of microparametric studies on different European
dialects, many of the contributions to Barbiers, Cornips and van der Kleij [2002] and
Barbiers et al. [2008]). But there are also, albeit less frequently, formalist-driven studies
working within other, more recent formalist frameworks like Head-driven Phrase Struc-
ture Grammar (HPSG; e.g., Bender 2007), Optimality Theory (OT; e.g., Seiler 2004) or
Stochastic Optimality Theory (e.g., Bresnan and Deo 2001; Bresnan, Deo and Sharma
2007).
Right from the humble beginnings in the 1980s, formalism has retained a firm grip
on the study of dialect syntax and clearly dominates the field today ⫺ and this is to the
benefit of anyone interested in dialect syntax, regardless of the theoretical framework he
or she is working in. At the same time, it is not only the “microparametric” turn in
generative syntax that has made dialect syntax attractive within linguistic theorizing.
Since the late 1990s, language typologists, too, have increasingly turned their attention
to cross-dialectal variation in light of what is known about cross-linguistic variation, just
as dialectologists have come to realize that typology offers as a very useful source of
inspiration and an additional reference frame for investigating syntactic variation and
for putting their results in perspective (cf., e.g., Kortmann [2004c] for a collection of
papers in this spirit; see also section 4). This is also acknowledged by Trousdale and
Adger in their preface: “Equally, a study of English dialects can make significant contri-
butions to work on language typology, and to our understanding of the place of sociolin-
guistics in linguistic theory” (Trousdale and Adger 2007: 259).
Language typology, in turn, especially given the nature of the explanations for the
observable patterns and limits of variation across the world’s languages offered in func-
tional (i. e., Greenbergian) typology, can be seen as part of the broad research tradi-
tion(s) of functionalism and cognitivism. And just as there are a host of formalist syntac-
tic theories which are currently used in research on dialect syntax, there are also broadly
functional/cognitive theories other than functional typology which are used in modeling
language-internal syntactic variation: usage-based theories (e.g., certain variants of Con-
Modelling syntactic variation
Formalist theories Functional-cognitive theories
GB functional typology
Minimalism usage-based theories (e.g., Construction Grammar)
HPSG Word Grammar
OT
Stochastic OT (sharing properties with both research traditions)
Fig. 46.1: Current syntactic theories aiming at modeling syntactic variation
struction Grammar, such as Haser and Kortmann 2009; Hollmann and Siewierska 2007;
Pietsch 2005a) or Word Grammar (e.g., Hudson 1999: 2007). Figure 46.1 provides an
overview.
One of the many positive points about the current interest in dialect syntax from
different theoretical angles is that there is a healthy competition between these theories
and, even more importantly, that there is a lot of interaction between researchers and
research units working within different theoretical frameworks. Moreover, integration is
the buzzword in the current research scene. Integrated approaches to the study of lan-
guage (internal) variation are called for in many publications (for forceful arguments cf.
Bisang 2004; Cornips and Corrigan 2005a; or Croft 1995; cf. also the volume by Dufter,
Fleischer and Seiler 2009). Three central facets of such an integration of approaches to
the study of dialect syntax are the following:
i. bridging the gap between syntactic theory and dialectology/sociolinguistics (recall
the motto: “reconciling the biological and the social”); above all, this involves the
following two points.
ii. taking variation (across the members of a speech community, but crucially also
within the individual members of a speech community) as the core explanandum, it
has become the major testing ground for all cognitivist theories, be they cognitive
in the Chomskyan sense or cognitive in the Labovian/Langackerian sense of “Cog-
nitive Linguistics” (e.g., usage-based models), which now have to face the challenge
of developing models of the representation and organization of linguistic knowledge
in light of what we know about linguistic reality, namely variation. In other words,
for the purpose of developing theories of the representation of linguistic knowledge
in the mind, language is now investigated in its natural habitat, as it were, and no
longer in the vacuum of the competence of the “ideal” speaker/listener. How, for
example, are competing rules or grammars in the individual speaker to be mod-
eled ⫺ in terms of competing grammars (Kroch 1994: 2001) or a single variable
grammar (e.g., Henry 2002; Seiler 2004), and if the latter, how would such a variable
grammar need to be modeled?
iii. bridging the gap between language typology and dialectology/sociolinguistics/lan-
guage contact studies; the following quotation from Bisang (2004: 13⫺14) makes
this point succinctly.
Dialectology is of particular relevance for functional approaches subsumed under the term of
“integrative functionalism” by Croft (1995). Departing from the existence of language-internal
variants, this approach assumes that individual speakers select the variant they are going to
use in a given situation according to sociolinguistic criteria, i. e., according to grammar- exter-
nal criteria. If this is true at the level of individual speakers, it is also true at the level of
distributional patterns of linguistic types across languages because these patterns are ultimately
the result of the successful diffusion of particular linguistic types and because successful diffu-
sion depends on social criteria. From this perspective, typologists cannot but integrate findings
on the diffusion of particular language structures from dialectological and sociolinguistic
studies.
Finally, it should be noted that two developments within the research community of
dialect syntacticians went hand in hand with the major turns in linguistics described
above. These developments made dialect syntax a new research focus in dialectology,
sociolinguistics, syntactic theory, and language typology. On the one hand, a genera-
tional change has taken place since the 1990s: young researchers with a broad and solid
theoretical grounding, ideally but not necessarily paired with a solid dialectological train-
ing, entered the field of dialect syntax research. On the other hand, as a consequence of
the “dialect turn” in syntactic theorizing, a substantial number of people working on
dialect syntax are not trained dialectologists, but started out as, for example, syntacti-
cians or typologists who often tackled the study of dialect syntax as dialectological nov-
ices but, thanks to their interest in syntactic variation, over time worked their way into
dialectology. This explains why the community of dialect syntacticians in particular di-
verges quite markedly from the community of traditional dialectologists of several de-
cades ago.
2.2. Methodology
In contrast to phonological and lexical variation, syntactic variation can be characterized

as follows: it is much subtler and less salient; it is less categorical, a matter of statistical
frequency rather than presence or absence; it has a wider areal reach and is less restricted
to very confined areas or individual dialects. All this taken together implies that signifi-
cantly more material is necessary for the analysis of dialect syntax than for the study of
accents and dialect vocabularies. The question is what the nature of this material should
be, and how it is to be collected. Another crucial point to be taken into consideration
in this respect follows from the shift in dialect syntax research away from studying
isolated syntactic phenomena in isolated dialects towards large-scale comparative studies
for a broad range of syntactic phenomena, with the ideal of a complete coverage of all
dialects of a language. The greatest advances in the collection of large amounts of dialect
data from as many dialects and dialect areas as possible have been made by research
projects on Dutch and Flemish dialects, German (especially Alemannic and Bavarian)
dialects, Scandinavian dialects, English dialects, and northern Italian dialects. (For a
survey of [and links to] these projects, readers may turn to the website <http://www.
dialectsyntax.org/>, which has been set up as “a digital meeting place for researchers in
the field of micro-comparative syntax”. It aims at stimulating international cooperation
and will for the foreseeable future serve as the single most important window onto Euro-
pean research on dialect syntax.) The methods used in these projects and other studies
on dialect syntax are a combination of new and established methodology, with the indi-
vidual methods best suited to different and often complementary purposes. Speaking of
established versus new methodology in the context of dialect syntactic research is to be
interpreted as follows: established essentially means established in dialectology, but new
in its systematic application to the study of syntactic variation (and, of course, always
exploiting the latest state-of-the-art wisdom as regards, for instance, technology and
questionnaire design); new means new for the field of dialectology and the study of
dialect syntax, but established as a means for exploring syntactic (and other types of)
variation in other fields of linguistics, such as sociolinguistics and language typology.
Briefly, the three most important of these established, (i), and new⫺ (ii), (iii) ⫺ methods
applied in current research on dialect syntax can be characterized as follows, including
a sketch of the specific advantages each of them offers:
i. The traditional dialectological method: standardized data collection via solid ques-
tionnaire-based fieldwork with native-speaker informants from a large number of
measuring points evenly distributed across all dialect areas. Note that what is tradi-
tional about this is solely the approach as such. It is not that variation in dialect
syntax has been investigated this way all along. Quite to the contrary: for example,
in the Survey of English Dialects, compiled in the 1950s and for a long time (and in
certain respects still) serving as the most important data source for dialectologists
and dialect geographers working on English dialects, the relevant questionnaire was
not at all geared to the systematic collection of syntactic data. Out of the more than
1300 questions in the SED questionnaire only a fraction had been designed to col-
lect morphological, let alone syntactic information. This is radically different in
most recent and current dialectological work, where the relevant questionnaires are
exclusively designed for the collection of data on individual (morphological and)
syntactic phenomena. Most advanced in this respect are the Syntactic Atlas of the
Dutch Dialects (SAND; cf. Barbiers et al. 2005) with 266 survey locations in The
Netherlands and Flanders and a minimum of two informants per location, and the
Syntactic Atlas of Swiss German Dialects (SADS) with 385 survey locations and
more than 2700 informants (on the SAND methodology cf. Cornips and Jongen-
burger 2001a, 2001b; for SADS methodology, Bucheli and Glaser 2002; Seiler 2005).
The questionnaires used in both projects (and planned for use in the Newcastle-
based Syntactic Atlas of Northern English ⫺ SANE) consist of a combination of
translation, multiple choice, insertion and elicitation tasks for a selection of syntac-
tic phenomena. Such questionnaires may include, in particular, syntactic phenom-
ena which are only rarely observable in natural dialect discourse. Besides mere data
collection (especially via the translation task), such a combination of task types
allows the dialect syntactician to tackle the same phenomenon (e.g., pronominal
reference, agreement phenomena, negation, quantification, word order) from dif-
ferent angles and in different contexts. Moreover, attitudes and consistency in the
judgments of the individual informant can be tested. Another advantage offered by
such a mix of questionnaire tasks is that it helps to capture several options that co-
exist for the individual informant; among other things, this allows the dialectologist
to identify and characterize transition areas between clear-cut syntactic zones in
which only one option is possible to the exclusion of all others (for examples of
syntax-based areal variation, including transition zones, cf. section 3).
ii. Typology-style analytic questionnaires: filled in by (possibly even native-speaker)
specialists for individual (areas of) dialects, such questionnaires ensure a high degree
of comparability among judgments made on a large number of dialects and vari-

eties. Even in its crudest form such analytic questionnaires help collect information
on whether individual syntactic phenomena are pervasive in individual dialects or
dialect areas, whether they can at least occasionally be observed (by individual
speakers and/or in individual contexts), or whether they are simply not part of the
grammar of the relevant dialect at all. They also help making statements on syntac-
tic features which are otherwise often overlooked in studies on individual dialects,
dialect areas, or world regions (e.g., when looking just at dialects in the British Isles)
because they are not considered distinctive (enough) since they are either not used
pervasively or are also found in other individual dialects or dialect areas, or because
they are considered strongly supraregional, e.g., as part of spontaneous spoken Brit-
ish English in general. Such questionnaires also help pin down the areal spread of
the dialect features analyzed, ranging from very low degrees of spread (in the ex-
treme case: restriction to a single dialect) to a very high degree, with individual
features possibly even qualifying as candidates for “vernacular universals” in the
sense of Chambers (2004).
On a large scale, just such an analytic questionnaire (for 76 morphosyntactic features
from 11 domains of grammar) has been made use of in the investigation of morphologi-
cal and syntactic variation in 46 varieties of English around the world (cf. Kortmann and
Szmrecsanyi 2004). Here is, for example, the relevant set of features from the domain of
relative clauses:
⫺ relative particle what (e.g., This is the man what painted my house);
⫺ relative particle that or what in non-restrictive contexts (e.g., My daughter, that/what
lives in London, …);
⫺ relative particle as (e.g., He was a chap as got a living anyhow);
⫺ relative particle at (e.g., This is the man at painted my house);
⫺ use of analytic that his/that’s, what his/what’s, at’s, as’s instead of whose (e.g., The man
what’s wife has died);
⫺ gapping or zero-relativization in subject position (e.g., The man __ lives there is a
nice chap);
⫺ resumptive/shadow pronouns (e.g., This is the house which I painted it yesterday).
The other grammatical domains on which information on morphosyntactic variation
across varieties of English around the world has been collected in this format are the
following: pronouns, pronoun exchange and pronominal gender; the noun phrase; tense
and aspect; modal verbs; verb morphology; adverbs; negation; agreement; complementa-
tion; discourse organization; and word order. Some major results stemming from this
questionnaire concerning areal variation will be presented in section 3.
iii. Computerized natural-discourse corpora based on interviews and/or free speech
samples of dialect speakers (either monologues or conversations): as pointed out
earlier, syntactic variation often operates on a very subtle level; it is in many cases
not categorical, but instead a matter of statistical frequency, of preferences and
preference patterns rather than mere presence or absence. In order to identify such
subtle aspects of syntactic variation within and across dialects (even within the
speech of the individual dialect speaker) much more material is necessary than for
the study of accents and dialect vocabularies. According to some estimates, about
forty times the amount of text is needed for a syntactic analysis as opposed to a
phonetic one. Large amounts of electronically stored material allow for solid quanti-
tative and qualitative morphosyntactic research, especially on high-frequency phe-
nomena like pronominal usage, negation, tense and aspect, etc. From an areal per-
spective, one crucial lesson to be learnt from dialect corpora is that clear regional
patterns typically emerge solely on the basis of regionally restricted (dis)preference
patterns, i. e., the extent to which a certain morphosyntactic phenomenon is used
in different dialects and dialect areas. (This will be shown for negative concord and
relativization strategies in English dialects in section 3.1) Dialect corpora also allow
an immediate comparison with the results from in-depth morphosyntactic studies
based on (written and especially spoken) corpora of the standard variety/varieties
of a given language (e.g., spoken Standard British English). Against this and other
strengths of computerized dialect corpora, one major weakness of any corpus-based
approach in linguistics is, of course, that rare phenomena may not be represented
at all, and that even for relatively frequent syntactic phenomena not all of the
contexts that the dialect syntactician would like to investigate are represented in the
corpus. (Or take a very simple situation: in oral history interviews, dialect syntacti-
cians interested in future time marking or markers of hypotheticality will most likely
run into problems compiling a critical mass of examples which allows them to iden-
tify patterns of variation and draw general conclusions.) This is why the elicitation
questionnaire method sketched in (i) above and the corpus method complement
each other in important ways. So far, the corpus method in dialect syntactic research
is most advanced in the study of English dialects. Currently, the largest relevant
corpus which has been compiled for the purpose for morphosyntactic variation
across dialects is the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED). The full version of
the corpus consists of approximately 2.5 million words (which equates to about 300
hours of transcribed speech), with representative subsamples for all major English
dialect areas including data from Scotland and Wales. The data in FRED are ortho-
graphically transcribed interviews collected all over the British Isles, for the most
part during the 1970s and 1980s in the course of oral history projects. The majority
of the informants were born between 1890 and 1920: i. e., they are roughly a genera-
tion younger than the generation of informants who were interviewed for the Survey
of English Dialects (SED). For details on FRED compare Kortmann and Wagner
(2005), and Anderwald and Wagner (2007). Many of the results concerning areal
variation in the British Isles sketched in the following will draw on FRED-based
research (for book-length accounts cf. Kortmann et al. 2005; Anderwald 2002 and
2008). Two other (much smaller and regionally restricted) corpora quite heavily
exploited for dialect syntactic research on varieties spoken in the British Isles are
the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech (NITCS), recorded in the mid-
1970s and comprising some 230,000 words, and the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of
Tyneside English (NECTE) which consists of two subcorpora compiled in the 1960s
and 1990s respectively and is designed for (primarily phonological) research on the
dialect(s) spoken in the northeast of England. More information on this corpus can
be found on the NECTE homepage <http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte> and as part of
the overview of the corpus-based approach in current dialect syntactic research ed-
ited by the makers of NECTE, namely Beal, Corrigan and Moisl (2007); for another
overview on the marriage of corpus linguistics and dialectology compare Anderwald
and Szmrecsanyi (2009).
Viewed together, what these three methods allow the dialectologist to do is to collect
information of different degrees of granularity. Coarse-grained (macro-level) informa-
tion, as it were, gleaned from typology-style analytic questionnaires primarily allows us
to see the wood for the trees and develop a first large, necessarily rather crude picture
of syntactic variation. This can be very helpful, however, when increasing the resolution,
i. e., wanting to collect much more detailed information on more fine-grained questions.
The crude picture will guide us to phenomena which are worth investigating in more
detail, thus selecting syntactic features for investigation using either the more traditional
elicitation questionnaires or large naturalistic corpus data. All three methods comple-
ment each other, allowing us to zoom in step by step from the global level (comparing,
for example, syntactic variation in different Anglophone world regions with each other)
via individual world regions (e.g., syntactic variation in the British Isles, North America,
Australia), individual dialect areas (e.g., the dialects of Northern or Southwest England),
and individual dialects (e.g. East Anglia, Somerset, Northumberland and Tyneside) to,
ultimately, the individual dialect speaker, drawing our information on his or her dialect
profile either from elicitation questionnaires or from the digitized transcript of a long
stretch of recorded speech, the latter even allowing us to search for persistence (i. e.,
syntactic priming) effects in individual dialect speakers (cf. Szmrecsanyi 2006).
3. The nature o areal variation in dialect syntax: Small and

large-scale variation in European dialects
To start with, it is clearly possible to identify distinct areas of syntactic variation for
dialects. This statement may sound trivial but is worth making, since traditional dialect
atlases, for example, provide information almost exclusively on phonological and lexical
variation. In terms of areal variation, however, dialect (morpho)syntax is not different,
in principle, from what is known about areal variation in accents and dialect vocabula-
ries. You find everything from extremely local features, documented in just one or very
few dialects, via regional features (individual dialect areas or dialect zones) and suprare-
gional features (cutting across different dialect areas) to (allegedly) universal features
found in vernaculars, e.g., multiple negation, also known as negative concord. (For dia-
lects of English, detailed accounts of the regional spread of a large set of morphosyntac-
tic features are given in Kortmann 2002, 2004a, 2006, and in Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi
2004.) To detect and determine the areal reach of syntactic phenomena, however, you
must look much harder, since (as pointed out earlier) syntactic variation is much subtler
and less salient, less categorical, and in many cases a matter of statistical frequency
rather than the presence or absence of a feature (both across the members of a given
speech community and for the individual community member). There is also widespread
agreement that grammatical variation has a wider areal reach than phonological and
lexical variation. For example, there are far fewer features of dialect grammar which are
restricted to just one or two local dialects (e.g., for English, the after-perfect ⫺ I am
after going ‘I have just gone’, which is found only in Irish English and, exported from
there, in Newfoundland English) when compared with the list of features characteristic
of an entire dialect area or even several areas. In section 3.1, some examples will be
given of areal variation in dialect syntax deriving from some of the research projects on
European dialect syntax discussed in section 2.3. What we can learn about transitional
zones in such syntax-based areal patterns will briefly be addressed in section 3.2, fol-
lowed by a short account of stability and change in syntax-based dialect zones/isoglosses
over time (section 3.3). For reasons of space, a map is only included for a very few of
the relevant patterns
3.1. Areal patterns
Among the Swiss German dialects, it is possible to identify clear north⫺south and east⫺
west contrasts with regard to individual morphosyntactic phenomena. North⫺south
contrasts have emerged, for example, with regard to the passive construction (Bucheli
Berger 2005) and the marking of so-called depictives, more exactly copredicative adjec-
tives and past participles (Bucheli Berger and Glaser 2004; Bucheli Berger 2005). Depic-
tive marking always involves the relevant adjective (e.g., heiss ‘hot’ in [1a]) or past parti-
ciple (e.g., gfror- ‘frozen’ in [1b]) exhibiting agreement in gender and number with its
controller, i. e., either the subject or the direct object. This is illustrated in the following
examples from the Wallis dialect:
(1) a. Dü müoscht d-Milch de heiss-i triich-u.

you must the-milk.f.sg then hot-f.sg drink
‘You must drink the milk (while it is still) hot.’
b. Fisch-stäb-jini müoscht doch gfror-ni abraat-u.
fish-finger-dim.pl must:2sg but pst.ptcp-freeze-pl fry-inf
‘But you have to fry fish fingers (while they are still) frozen.’
In Map 46.1 the north⫺south contrast is apparent in the absence of depictive marking
in the northern dialects as opposed to the fully productive depictive marking in the
Highest Alemannic dialects in the south and southwest of German-speaking Switzerland
(see the triangles). Map 46.1 at the same time exhibits an east⫺west contrast, with the
southern and southwestern area marked with triangles as opposed to the area with the
dots in the northeast of Switzerland. The dialects in the latter area also exhibit depictive
marking, but the relevant marker is invariable; it does not follow the regular agreement
patterns. Regardless of the gender and number of the subject/object which the adjective
or past participle co-predicate something of, an invariable marker -ä/nä (or -a/-na, -e/
-ne) is used, depending on the phonology of the relevant northeastern dialect (thus, for
example, gfror-nä instead of the regular plural marker gfror-ni in the south).
Along the east⫺west axis in Swiss German dialects there is also clear-cut areal varia-
tion in the marking of purpose clauses (cf. Seiler 2005) and verb clusters consisting of a
minimum of two verbs (cf. Seiler 2004). With respect to the marking of purpose clauses,
Seiler (2005) finds that the für … z marker (formally and functionally equivalent to
English for … to) is the western variant, whereas z’/zum ⫹ inf or z’/zum …⫹ inf (for-
mally equivalent to English to/to the ⫹ inf/gerund) are characteristic purpose-marking
patterns among the eastern dialects. Contrast (2a) and (2b), both of which mean ‘We
need that for repairing the car’:
Map 46.1: Swiss German dialects: Depictives (or co-predicatives), as in ‘You must fry fish fingers
frozen’ (Bucheli Berger 2005: 144)
(2) a. Mir bruche das für dr Wage z’repariere. (Berne)

we need that for the car to repair
b. Mer bruuche daas zum de Waage reperiere. (Zürich)

we need that to.the the car repair
From the study of Dutch dialect syntax, one phenomenon which yields nice areal pat-
terns is subject pronoun doubling (cf. De Vogelaer 2008 and, for subject doubling in
Dutch dialects in general, De Vogelaer and Devos 2008). Here are some examples of
subject doubling in sentences with inverted (VS) word order (3a) and normal (SV) word
order (3b and c):
(3) a. Ga-de (gij) naar Brussel?

go.2sg-youclitic youstrong to Brussels
‘Are you going to Brussels?’
b. Ge-gaat (gij) naar Brussel.
youclitic-go.2sg youstrong to Brussels
‘You are going to Brussels.’
c. Gij gaat gij naar Brussel.
youstrong go.2sg youstrong to Brussels
‘You are going to Brussels.’
Map 46.2: Dutch dialects: Subject doubling, inverted word order (De Vogelaer 2008)
Of interest to us is subject doubling such as in (3a), i. e., sentences with inverted word
order, an obligatory subject clitic, -de, and an optional pronoun (gij) doubling the subject
clitic for pragmatic or stylistic reasons. In some Dutch dialects, subject doubling is found
only for a limited set of subject pronouns, e.g., first and second person singular as well
as second person plural in the city dialect of Antwerp. Map 46.2 shows that three broad
areas can be distinguished on the basis of whether or not a given dialect may use all
personal pronouns in contexts such as (3a), and if not, which personal pronouns are
allowed: just second person (singular and plural), or first person singular as well.
Roughly, the three areas follow a west⫺(north)east axis.
Before moving on in greater detail to dialects of England, one major finding about
areal variation in northern Italy may be mentioned here (for general information on the
Syntactic Atlas of Northern Italy (ASIS) cf. Benincà and Poletto 1998⫺2002 and Poletto
2000). For the Lombard dialects, three broad groups of dialects can be distinguished
when exploring subject clitics (cf. Murelli 2006: 47⫺50 based on ASIS data): alpine
dialects, eastern and western dialects. This threefold distinction can be boiled down to
an even more basic one, namely dialects spoken in the mountainous regions (alpine plus
northeastern dialects) and those spoken in the plains region (rural western and south-
eastern dialects). The former are more conservative than the latter, in that they rely more
strongly on subject clitics in order to distinguish between different grammatical persons.
In the dialects of England there are many interesting north⫺south contrasts. First of
all, there are features which are exclusively found in either the northern dialects or in
the southern, more precisely southwestern, dialects ⫺ both dialect areas constituting
highly traditional dialect areas of England reaching back into the Middle English period
(see also section 3.3). Within England, the so-called Northern Subject Rule (NSR), for
example, is found exclusively in the dialects of the North; however, it is also widely
attested in other northern parts of the British Isles, namely in Scotland, Northern Ireland
and the Republic of Ireland. This rule is all about subject⫺verb agreement and can be
formulated roughly as follows: every verb in the present tense can take an -s ending
unless its subject is an immediately adjacent simple pronoun. (Third person singular
verbs always take the -s ending, as in Standard English.) In other words, the NSR
involves a type-of-subject constraint (pronoun versus common/proper noun) and a posi-
tion constraint (⫹/⫺ immediate adjacency of pronominal subject to verb). Thus, in NSR
varieties we get the following examples:
(4) a. I sing (vs. *I sings)

b. Birds sings.
c. I sing and dances
Zooming in on one of the NSR regions in the British Isles, Pietsch (2005a) observed an
interesting areal distribution applying to the NSR in Northern Ireland. On the basis of
the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech, Pietsch identified one central north-
west-to-southeast belt in which the NSR usage is most pronounced. Surprising about
this is that this core NSR area is not identical with the core Ulster Scots areas, contrary
to expectations based on the widely entertained view that the NSR is historically most
closely linked to Scots. Rather, its regional distribution supports independently formu-
lated views that the NSR in Ulster has its historical roots in varieties spoken by both
Scottish and English settlers.
The dialects of the southwest exhibit a number of morphosyntactic features which
are either found exclusively here, or which are highly distinctive of this dialect area and
not found in many others (cf. Kortmann 2002; Wagner 2005). A syntactic feature of the
former type is known as pronominal gender (or alternatively, gendered pronouns, gender
diffusion; cf. Wagner 2004), a feature which relates to a typologically very rare semantic
system of gender marking via pronouns (cf. also Siemund 2008). What we encounter in
Somerset, in particular, is pronominal gender that is primarily sensitive to the mass/
count distinction and only secondarily to the animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman
distinctions. It is only used for mass nouns. Count nouns take either he or she: she is
used if the count noun refers to a female human, and he is used for count nouns either
referring to male humans or to nonhuman entities. Thus we get a contrast as in (5a)
and (5b):
(5) a. Pass the bread⫺it’s over there. [bread ⫽ mass noun]

b. Pass the loaf⫺he’s over there. [loaf ⫽ count noun]
Again zooming in on individual regions of southwest England, we see that the areal
variation we find in the FRED corpus and in the SED fieldworker notebooks differs
from standard dialectological textbook wisdom. The established view is that most south-
western dialect features are found in the Somerset dialect, and that Cornwall, especially
West Cornwall, should generally not be considered part of the southwestern dialect area.
However, as Wagner (2004) found, the story told by both the relevant SED and FRED
material is a quite different one, not only with respect to the phenomenon of pronominal
gender, but for other morphosyntactic phenomena, too. Typical dialectal features of the
southwest are quite (partly even most) pronounced in West Cornwall and, at least in a
Tab. 46.1: Distribution of relative markers along the north⫺south axis in percentages (Herrmann
2005: 27)
zero that what as
North Northern Ireland 46.9 % 50.1 % ⫺ 0.5 %
왖 Scotland 23.6 % 46.2 % 0.4 % ⫺
Ô Central North 34.0 % 43.5 % 2.4 % 1.4 %
Ô Central Midlands 17.7 % 40.3 % 5.8 % 2.4 %
왔 East Anglia 20.4 % 22.0 % 15.9 % ⫺
South Central Southwest 28.9 % 26.5 % 22.3 % ⫺
few cases (notably including pronominal gender), considerably less pronounced in Som-
erset.
On a larger scale, i. e., with regard to syntactic phenomena traditionally assumed not
to exhibit a marked regional distribution, it is also possible to identify clear differences
along the north⫺south axis in England. Most of these differences are not of a categorical
type, as for the NSR or pronominal gender, but of purely quantitative nature, i. e., clear
preference patterns can be identified on the basis of large-scale cross-dialectal (micro-
comparative) analyses of SED and, especially, corpus (FRED, NITCS) data. For relative
markers, for example, Hermann (2005) found the following north⫺south distribution in
her FRED-based comparative study of relative clauses in six major dialect areas (see
Table 46.1). Zero relatives for the subject position, as in There’s a man __ sits in the
garden, are used much more frequently in Northern Ireland than in any of the other five
dialect areas investigated. As for relative particles, the established marker that (The man
that came in is my brother) is used much more frequently in a large area stretching from
the central Midlands to the north than in the south, whereas what (as in The man what
came in is my brother), the newcomer among the relative markers in English dialects,
seems to make its inroads clearly from the south (East Anglia, central Southwest) and
is hardly used of yet in the central Midlands and the north. The receding traditional
relative particle as, on the other hand, has clearly remained a supraregional feature, but
only in the north and the central Midlands, and is very much on the way out even there.
A perhaps even more surprising areal distribution concerning a syntactic dialect (or
general nonstandard) feature has been identified by Anderwald (2002: 109⫺114, 2005).
The phenomenon at issue is negative concord (or “multiple negation”), as in I’ve never
been to market to buy no heifers. If there is one safe candidate for a supraregional feature
of nonstandard syntax that probably even a nonlinguist would spontaneously point to,
it is surely negative concord. The surprising finding for England, Scotland and Wales is
this: in analyzing both the spoken subsample of the British National Corpus and FRED
data, what emerges is a clear south⫺north cline, with rough proportions of multiple
negation usage in the FRED data of 40⫺45 percent in the south of England, 30 percent
in the Midlands, and around ten percent in the north of England, Scotland and Wales.
Finally, as a result of the analytic questionnaire method (see [ii] in section 2.2) for captur-
ing areal variation on a very large scale, the comparative study of the morphology and
syntax of the nonstandard varieties of the British Isles yields a recurrent north⫺south
pattern (cf. Kortmann 2004a). Based on the 76-feature catalogue investigated worldwide
in the Handbook of Varieties of English (Kortmann and Schneider 2004), a marked
north⫺south divide emerges for two subsets of morphosyntactic properties. The core of
the north is constituted by Scottish English, the Orkney and Shetland dialects, and the
dialects of North England, whereas the south is constituted by the southwest, the south-
east, and East Anglia. For most of the relevant features, Irish English (not least due to
the English spoken in Northern Ireland) patterns with the varieties in the north, and
Welsh English with those in the south. The features in (6) are exclusively or almost
exclusively found in the varieties of the north; those in (7) form the corresponding set
for the south:
(6) a. special forms or phrases for the second person plural pronoun (e.g., youse, y’all,
aay’, yufela, you… together, all of you, you ones/’uns, you guys, you people)
b. wider range of uses of the progressive (e.g., I’m liking this, What are you
wanting?)
c. be as perfect auxiliary (e.g., They’re not left school yet)
d. double modals (e.g., I tell you what we might should do)
e. epistemic mustn’t ‘cannot; it is concluded that … not’ (e.g., This mustn’t be true)
f. resumptive/shadow pronouns (e.g., This is the house which I painted it yesterday)
g. lack of inversion / lack of auxiliaries in wh-questions (e.g., What you doing?)
h. lack of inversion in main clause yes/no-questions (e.g., You get the point?)
i. Northern Subject Rule
j. the relative particle at (e.g., This is the man at painted my house)
(7) a. a-prefixing on ing-forms (e.g., They wasn’t a-doin’ nothin’ wrong)
b. ain’t as the negated form of be (e.g., They’re all in there, ain’t they?)
c. ain’t as the negated form of have (e.g., I ain’t had a look at them yet)
d. invariant non-concord tags (e.g., innit/in’t it/isn’t in They had them in their hair,
innit?)
e. relative particle what (e.g., This is the man what painted my house)
From here one could even move on to areal variation on a global scale, namely identi-
fying the areal reach and preference patterns of morphosyntactic features when compar-
ing different anglophone world regions with each other (for L1 varieties, i. e., traditional
and modern dialects, notably the British Isles and North America). It is indeed possible
to identify features which are either restricted to or strongly preferred in one of these
two world regions and not the other. For instance, using was sat or was stood with a
progressive meaning is a British Isles feature not to be observed in US dialects. Vice
versa, ain’t as the negated form of be and have is a pervasive North American feature
found only in some dialects of England. For an in-depth account of areal variation of
such a global scale, which so far has only been studied for nonstandard varieties of
English, the reader is referred to Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004). It should also be
kept in mind that in such a large-scale comparison of the morphosyntax of varieties of
English around the world, variety type ⫺ i. e., whether L1, L2, or contact varieties (nota-
bly pidgins and creoles) are studied ⫺ has been found to be a much better predictor of
their morphosyntactic behavior than geography (cf. Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009a).
In other words, regardless of the region in which a given variety is spoken, each of the
three broad variety types exhibits a distinctive morphosyntactic profile: for example, L2
varieties of English in Africa will be much more similar to L2 varieties of English from
elsewhere in the world than to L1 varieties of English spoken in Africa.
3.2. Transitional zones
In identifying such dialect areas for individual syntactic phenomena as in section 3.1,
what typically also emerges are transitional zones: recall the subject pronoun doubling
in Dutch dialects shown on Map 46.2, or the English Midlands as a transition zone from
infrequent to fairly frequent use of negative concord among the dialects of England. In
other words, the typical situation for syntactic variation, especially on a supraregional
scale, is that there are no sharp isoglosses (which are largely a myth of the pre-quantita-
tive age in the study of areal variation in traditional dialectology anyway), and that the
situation can rather be likened to a cline or slope. The following properties can be ob-
served in such transitional zones (cf. especially Seiler 2005). Each individual transition
zone may exhibit at least one, but typically a combination, and upon close investigation
perhaps even all, of these properties:
i. Frequency: frequency rates for the morphosyntactic phenomenon at hand (be it
text frequency in corpora, frequency in terms of survey locations or of mention by
informants) are somewhere in between the relevant rates for the clearly distinguisha-
ble syntactic areas (just recall section 3.1: compare the percentages for the English
Midlands with the percentages of the dialects of the north and the south for relative
markers [Table 46.1] and negative concord).
ii. Number of variants: where two dialect areas clearly delineated on syntactic grounds
differ in terms of the number of variants they allow (e.g., in Map 46.2 on subject
pronoun doubling, all subject pronouns are doubled in sentences with inverted SV
order in the (south)western core area, in sharp contrast to the peripheral area in
the northeast, where only the second person pronouns are affected), the number of
variants to be observed in the transition zone lies between the maximum and mini-
mum in the two neighboring zones (e.g., in Map 46.2, there where three options are
allowed, namely the two second person pronouns and the first person singular); but
a transition zone may also allow more variants than either of its neighboring zones,
as will next be shown.
iii. Preference and optionality: the variants of a given syntactic phenomenon which are
found exclusively or strongly preferred in clearly identifiable syntactic areas (e.g.,
variant A in zone 1 and variant B in zone 2) are found side by side in the transition
zone (i. e., both A and B) and may even combine (AB). The latter can, for example,
be very nicely observed with regard to variation in negative concord along an east⫺
west axis among the Dutch dialects. As shown by van der Auwera and Neuckermans
(2004), differing types of double negation are used in West Flemish dialects (en
niemand ‘not no-one’) and the dialects of Brabant and Limburg (niemand niet ‘no-
one not’). What separates West Flanders from the provinces of Brabant and Lim-
burg is East Flanders. And it is precisely in the East Flemish dialects that the follow-
ing can be observed: triple negation is used by many speakers (en niemand niet ‘not
no-one not’), but these speakers also opt for one of the double negation variants
found in the dialect areas west and east of East Flanders. What may also be ob-
served is a clear regional skewing in the transition zone as regards additional op-
tions: if, say, variant A is the sole or strongly preferred variant in zone 1 and,
correspondingly, variant B in zone 2: then what can be observed in a transition zone
is, for example, that there is a shift from variant A to variant B as the variant
preferred by informants as we move away from zone 1 towards zone 2.
iv. Division of tasks among competing variants: in a transition zone where both the
variants of the dialect zones it separates can be found, the use of these variants is
typically subject to syntactic constraints, i. e., in the transition zone each of variants
A and B can be used only in a subset of the contexts in which they are used in
zones 1 and 2 respectively.
v. As a consequence of this, it may be observed, as Pietsch (2005a) has done, that it
is in the zone at the southern boundary of the Northern Subject Rule that relevant
constructions cannot be used as freely as in the core areas in the north, and are
instead more or less frozen, approximating fixed expressions.
3.3. Continuity and change
Of course there is also an important historical dimension to the areal distribution of

syntactic phenomena in dialects. As far as we have reliable information on syntax-based
areal patterns in historical dialectology ⫺ and reliable information meeting the standards
of current dialect syntactic research we have on virtually nothing in historical dialect
syntax, not even for the very well-described West Germanic dialects (cf. Kortmann and
Wagner 2007, to appear) ⫺ it is possible to identify quite a number of syntactic features
for which the areal reach seems to have remained relatively, or even absolutely, stable
for a century or longer. An extreme example is the Northern Subject Rule, the areal
distribution of which is largely identical to that which can be observed, for example, in
the Late Middle English period (cf. Pietsch 2005b: 178). The southern boundary of the
NSR zone in the SED data (based on informants born mainly between 1870 and 1890)
is practically identical with the southern boundary in Late Middle English times. A high
degree of regional stability over a period of around a century (mid-nineteenth until mid-
twentieth century) has also been observed for the phenomenon of pronoun exchange
(subject pronoun in object position: They always called I “Willie”, see; object pronoun
in subject position: We used to stook it off didn’t us?) by Kortmann and Wagner (to
appear). In German dialectology, a remarkable stability has been observed for some of
the syntactic isoglosses based on the famous nineteenth-century Wenker sentences (cf.
Schmidt 2005; for a fabulous state-of-the-art cartographic representation of the Wenker
maps the reader is strongly encouraged to consult the Digital Wenker Atlas <http://
www.diwa.info>). For example, the isogloss for the interrogative pronoun ‘what’ (wat
versus was), which is part of the Rhenish fan, has not changed at all between 1880, when
Wenker collected his information, and 1980/1985, when this phenomenon was investi-
gated for different age groups of dialect speakers by members of the team from the
Deutscher Sprachatlas in Marburg, the research center for German dialects, but not (yet)
for dialect syntax.
Besides these continuities, there are clearly also changes in the areal reach of individ-
ual features of dialect syntax which have taken place over time. In section 3.1, we men-
tioned for example the use of as (and likewise at) as a relative particle has strongly
receded, even in its northern core distribution area, whereas the relative particle what
seems to be an innovation currently spreading from the south of England. So-called
pseudo-passives with stood and sat (i. e., passive forms with progressive meaning: I was
stood/sat … ‘I was standing/sitting …’) are also most likely a Late Modern English,
chiefly nineteenth-century, innovation, which is currently diffusing from the northern
and western parts of England to spontaneous spoken British English (nonstandard and
semistandard) in general (cf. Kortmann and Wagner, to appear). Readers should note in
passing that, from a global perspective, this feature is relatively rare in nonstandard
varieties of English around the world and not found at all in L1 varieties of English in
the US. Another interesting story of change can be told about unstressed do as a pure
tense marker in declaratives, as in John did see you yesterday. Among the dialects of
England it is a distinctive feature of the southwest and has been so since Middle English
times. During the Early Modern English period it spread vigorously, though, and could
also frequently be found in the standard (both spoken and written), not just for rhythmic
purposes in poetry and drama. Then, however, it fell into disuse again in the standard,
receding to that small area which had been its heartland since medieval times, the south-
west. From a larger comparative perspective, it is interesting to note that precisely this
use of periphrastic do ⫺ the rarest of the various uses of do as a tense and aspect marker
in the dialects of England and varieties of English worldwide ⫺ is the most widespread
of the uses of periphrastic do (German tun, Dutch doen) in the Continental West Ger-
manic dialects (cf. Kortmann 2004b: 247).
In general, statements on continuities and changes in the domain of dialect syntax
should be made and taken only with a generous portion of caution. This even applies
to statements reaching back to the best-documented historical dialects, namely those of
the nineteenth century, but much more so the further back in time we go. Even where
information on the syntax of nineteenth century dialects is available, the relevant studies
invariably mention dialect features only for their presence or absence. Current accounts
of dialect syntax, as we have tried to show in sections 3.1 and 3.2 in particular, tend to
focus on the distribution of features in terms of frequencies of occurrence, and the range
of contexts in which the relevant (variants of) constructions are used, etc., which makes
it very difficult to compare feature catalogues from the nineteenth century or earlier
with descriptions of late nineteenth or twentieth-century variation that are focused on
quantitative statements.
4. Areal variation and (areal) typology

Areal variation is central not only in dialectology, of course, but also in areal typology
(cf. also Goebl 2001 and Bisang 2004). Above all, the (search for and) study of con-
vergence areas across a set of (especially genetically unrelated) languages spoken in the
same geographical area cannot afford to ignore dialectal (including sociolinguistic) varia-
tion, as is frankly admitted by Dahl (2001: 1460):
Almost by definition, areal linguistics neglects the social dimension of language diversity.
More generally, the whole notion of “areal phenomena” as well as the idea of drawing
language maps, build on the convenient fiction that each language has a specific location in
space, that no more than one language is spoken in each place, and that language contact
takes place between adjacent languages.
Moreover, language contact does not take place between the (written) standard varieties
of languages, but in day-to-day language contact between the spoken (typically nonstan-
dard) varieties of the adjacent languages involved. Thus, on the one hand, the inclusion
of dialects is bound to offer new insights to areal typology on a small scale, i. e., concern-
ing the areal distribution of individual syntactic variables in regionally restricted con-
vergence areas. (This is established practice for studies on the Balkan Sprachbund, but
is necessary also in the exploration of other contact superposition zones like, for exam-
ple, the Circum-Baltic area and the Mediterranean.) On a larger scale, the systematic
study of grammatical variation in dialects could make a significant contribution to ex-
ploring whether Europe, or a large part of continental Europe, forms a linguistic con-
vergence area (Sprachbund Europe). It is striking, and worrying at the same time, that
dialects played a rather marginal role in such a major international project as “Typology
of European Languages” (EUROTYP; 1990⫺1994). The ultimate question which the
inclusion of dialects in European areal typology might answer is what the “real”, i. e.,
spoken nonstandard, landscape of Europe looks like: What is the nature of “real” Stan-
dard Average European, which was hypothesized by Benjamin Lee Whorf about sixty
years ago and largely confirmed by the findings of the EUROTYP project (cf. Haspel-
math 2001)? Compare Kortmann (to appear) on the contribution that the cross-dialectal
study of dialect syntax can make to the study of cross-linguistic variation in language
typology, especially in an exploration of the linguistic landscape of Europe.
Another aspect to be kept in mind in this respect is that in a number of cases the
grammar of the standard variety of a language is strikingly different from the (vast
majority of the) nonstandard varieties. Negative concord is a notorious example: it is
typical only of the standard varieties of the Germanic languages, but not for the non-
standard varieties (cf. also Weiss 2004: 27⫺30). A more subtle example can be given from
English: in typological studies of relative markers in the European languages, English is
characterized as a language using, like almost all (standard varieties of) European lan-
guages, relative pronouns. Take Bernard Comrie, who characterizes the relative pronoun
strategy as “a remarkable areal typological feature of European languages, especially the
standard written languages” (quoted in Haspelmath 2001: 1495). However, in nonstan-
dard varieties of English, as Hermann (2005) has clearly shown, there is not a single
dialect that does not use the relative particle(s) (that, what, as/at) more frequently than
the relative pronoun (i. e., the wh-) strategy. For other morphosyntactic features, too,
Standard British English clearly turns out to be the odd man out among the varieties of
English. As a consequence, findings from studies on dialect syntax may also serve as a
crucial corrective for typological classifications, in general. Vice versa, language typology
may serve as an important (additional) reference frame and source of inspiration for
dialectology when, for example, selecting phenomena to be investigated and appropriate
methodologies (recall, for example, the analytic questionnaire method in section 2.2),
shedding light and interpreting the observable variation in light of what is known about
patterns and limits of large-scale cross-linguistic variation. One example may suffice:
interpreting dialect variation in the domain of relative clauses with the help of a typologi-
cal hierarchy, more exactly the very hierarchy which made the concept of hierarchies
such a successful and firmly established one in functional typology, namely Keenan and
Comrie’s (1977: 1979) NP Accessibility Hierarchy:
(8) Accessibility Hierarchy (AH)

subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique > genitive > object of com-
parison
In various studies on English and German dialects this hierarchy has been drawn upon
(notably in Herrmann 2005 and Fleischer 2004). Let us look at just one particular obser-
vation concerning relative clauses in Standard English vis-à-vis English dialects. Accord-
ing to the Accessibility Hierarchy, if a language can relativize any NP position further
down on the hierarchy, it can also relativize all positions higher up, i. e., to the left of it.
This constraint applies to whatever relativization strategy a language employs. For the
relativization strategy known as zero-relativization (or gapping) there is thus a clear
prediction that the relativized NP is most likely to be gapped if it is the subject of the
relative clause, next most likely if it is the direct object of the relative clause, etc. How-
ever, this is clearly not the case for Standard English: the direct object position can be
gapped (9a), whereas the subject position cannot (9b):
(9) a. The man I called ____ was our neighbor. [direct object]
b. *The man ____ called me was our neighbor. [subject]
English dialects, on the other hand, conform to the Accessibility Hierarchy prediction.
Examples like (9b) are nothing unusual at all (cf. Table 46.1); in fact, gapping of the
subject position is an extremely widespread phenomenon in nonstandard varieties of
English in and outside the British Isles:
(10) a. I have a friend ___ lives over there.

b. It ain’t the best ones ___ finish first.
So here we have a striking instance of the situation where the nonstandard varieties of
English conform to a typological hierarchy whereas the standard variety does not.

The very end of the twentieth century witnessed a most powerful awakening of the long
dormant interest in dialect syntax in general, and in areal patterns of dialect syntax in
particular. Virtually no collection of dialectological articles is published these days which
does not include chapters on dialect syntax. All of a sudden, the morphology and syntax
of regional varieties (but also other nonstandard, e.g., social or contact, varieties) have
attracted attention from fields as diverse as syntactic theory, variationist linguistics and
language typology. In conclusion, some of the most promising research avenues in ex-
ploring (morpho)syntactic variation in dialects for the next two decades will be outlined,
with the mapping of areal variation in a more narrowly dialectological sense as only one
research avenue, albeit a central one.
To start with, given the existing research groups on dialect syntax in Europe, with a
powerhouse such as the Meertens Institute Amsterdam and its European Dialect Syntax
(Edisyn) project helping to establish a Europe-wide network of dialect syntacticians, the
data situation for the study of dialect syntax in a number of regions in Europe is set to
steadily and significantly improve in the near future. Data will be collected in as refined
a way as in the SAND project in The Netherlands and Flanders, the SADS project in
Switzerland, the current NORMS project in Scandinavia (Nordic Centre of Excellence
in Microcomparative Syntax; cf. Bentzen and Vangsnes 2007), or the envisaged Syntactic
Atlas of Northern English (SANE) project in England. For a growing number of dialects,
the whole spectrum of data sources needed for the analysis of syntactic phenomena will
be available, notably including interview-based data, data based on both elicitation and
analytical questionnaires, and electronically stored (orthographic) transcriptions of
longer stretches of natural discourse (monologues or spontaneous conversation) to which
the whole corpus linguistic toolkit can be applied. The crucial point, however, is not
simply quantity, but the quality of the data. What is called for, and what the Edisyn
project in particular tries to orchestrate, is an agreement on standards of data collection,
so that ideally syntactic data are collected on whatever dialect of whatever language
according to a uniform pattern, ensuring immediate cross-dialectal, cross-linguistic and
cross-theoretical comparability. Moreover, one may even define a core of syntactic do-
mains that are known to exhibit interesting regional variation in many languages, so
that, for example, the same set of sample sentences is taken as a basis for translational
questionnaires. Among the current European projects on dialect syntax, the following
domains appear to be most promising candidates for such a core: agreement, comple-
mentation, negation, relativization, pronominal systems, clitics and, cutting across vari-
ous of these domains, syntactic doubling, which has been made the research focus of
Edisyn (cf. the volume on doubling phenomena in the dialects of Europe by Barbiers et
al. [2008]).
These significant advances concerning the data situation will allow the following is-
sues to be addressed in future research:
i. The areal scope of dialect syntactic studies should be increased. On the one hand,
this can be achieved by exploring variation concerning syntactic phenomena in dia-
lects of genetically closely related languages. For example, for any speaker of a West
Germanic language, the parallels in many domains of syntax to be observed for the
regional dialects of Dutch, English and German are quite striking. On the other
hand, following the model set for English by the global approach taken in the
Handbook of Varieties of English (Kortmann and Schneider 2004), similar studies of
syntactic variation around the globe should be carried out especially for European
languages with a colonial history to rival that of English, notably Spanish, French,
Portuguese and Dutch.
ii. Findings from dialect syntax should be systematically integrated into language ty-
pology and areal typology, much along the lines suggested in section 4 (cf. also
Kortmann 2004c, to appear).
iii. Findings from dialect syntax should be systematically integrated into research on
grammaticalization. This is to some extent a natural consequence of the proposition
in (ii), since grammaticalization has for some time now been the central research
topic in diachronic typology. What is more important, however, is that grammati-
calization starts from spontaneous spoken language, and that regional and social
(nonstandard) varieties are thus to be seen as goldmines for identifying further
grammaticalization phenomena and shedding light on known ones. For some initial
studies conducted in this spirit compare Dahl (2004), Kortmann (2004b) and De
Vogelaer (2008). A suitable transition to the next research issue can be made in the
knowledge that, increasingly, attempts are being made to model grammaticalization
phenomena in dialects in terms of constructionist grammars.
iv. Another rich area of future research on dialect syntax will be the theoretical model-
ing of syntactic variation: there will be formalist-driven, functionalist-driven, con-
structionist, integrated, variationist and possibly other approaches, all in lively and
fruitful competition with each other ⫺ the crucial point in all of them being that,
after decades of disregard, it is variation which is at the centre of linguistic reality
and that it is thus variation that is considered to be the core explanandum in syntac-
tic theory.
v. More studies are needed which systematically test hypotheses such as the one put
forward by Trudgill (2009) on the correlation between the degree of contact to
which varieties of a language are or have been exposed and their degree of structural
complexity (in grammar and phonology). Trudgill’s claim is that high-contact vari-
eties (mainstream varieties, including the standard varieties of English, L2 varieties,
contact and shift varieties) undergo simplification, whereas the grammars and pho-
nological systems of low-contact varieties (especially the traditional rural dialects)
are (and can afford to have) more complex grammatical and phonological systems.
For varieties of English, a first set of studies by Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann
(2009a⫺c) seems to confirm this hypothesis. But more studies on English and, in
particular, on the varieties of other languages are needed. Is there, for example,
evidence across languages that the still central object of study for dialectologists,
namely the low-contact L1 variety, is morphologically and syntactically more com-
plex than its high-contact L1 counterpart?
There is a historical dimension to the previous point, of course, in that extensive lan-
guage contact (among adults) plays a crucial role in the shaping of the structure of a
language or variety. This historical dimension is covered by points (vi) and (vii):
vi. Present-day data from low-contact rural communities in Europe in particular may
increasingly play a key role in reconstructing paths of language change, for example
in the reconstruction (of missing links in the history) of younger, transplanted or
contact varieties based on a European superstrate in other parts of the world. For
English, this line of research, using refined quantitative variationist methodology,
has been explored in a large number of studies by Tagliamonte and co-workers (e.g.,
Tagliamonte, Smith and Lawrence 2005).
vii. Finally, there is still a lot of work to be done on syntactic variation in historical
dialectology: every effort possible needs to be made in order to improve the data
situation before, in a second step, research questions can be asked of the historical
material that would allow an immediate comparison of the findings on historical
dialects with findings and interpretations concerning syntactic variation, including
the areal reach of syntactic phenomena, in present-day dialects.
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47. Areal variation and discourse 865
47. Areal variation and discourse

1. Problem space
2. Areas, communication communities and discourse styles
3. Variation of particular discourse segments
4. Variation in discourse: Prospects and perspectives
5. References
1. Problem space
Language and communicative practices often vary between and within regions, mostly
due to local and social diversity (e.g., heterogeneity in big cities). The ecological environ-
ment leaves its marks on communicative formulas and particular patterns of institutional
and everyday use as well as on shifting or switching styles in urban and regional social
spaces where dialect and standard, minority and majority languages coexist. Nowadays,
media have a great deal of influence on the distribution of routines and interactional
styles as is particularly evident in the language of adolescents. American anthropologists
were the first to introduce discourse variation into the international discussion surround-
ing sociolinguistic methodology, surveys and case studies (Gumperz and Hymes 1964;
Hymes 1964). With the emergence of pragmatics in Europe, Schlieben-Lange and Weydt
(1978) suggested the investigation of regional patterns of politeness in dialectology by
looking at the making and reception of compliments in different regional settings of
Germany. They observed that Westfalians reacted to compliments with delight and grati-
tude whereas Swabians were embarrassed by them and played them down. Variation
affects discourse in essentially two dimensions: (1) particular discourse segments in vari-
ous communicative genres (cf. Günthner and Knoblauch 1995) are realized by pragmatic
variants in different areas; (2) in the process of performing social activities, discourse
and interactional conversations are subject to variation (formal and informal register
variants, code shifting and code switching, particular prosodic markers). But first of all,
what do we understand by the notions of variation and discourse?
1.1. Areal variation
The idea of an areal dimension to variation is commensurable with the idea of maps of
landscapes, cities, routes, highways, etc., and their conveyance of a visual impression at
a glance (Chambers and Trudgill 1980; Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005). The old dialectal
perspective of “one variant per location” (see the critical review by Weinreich 1954) has
given way to the principle that the coexistence of multiple variants is the rule, sole variants
the exception. Sounds and words are the easiest to present on maps. Larger units or
stretches of discourse cannot be represented on a map unless they are defined by a
keyword or an abstract symbol in the form of a label that “stands for something”. The
goal of a map is an informative overview of a regional repertoire of variants, whose
distribution is easily perceivable (“at one glance”). In looking at German as a polycentric
language, Ammon and coauthors (2004) identify some phraseologisms, formulaic expres-
sions and routines which differ ⫺ above and beyond all lexical variation ⫺ between
Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Elspass and Möller (2005⫺) present the results of
questionnaires sent to many informants all over Germany in an online atlas. They ob-
tained variants in (among others) (i) phraseological collocations for managing duties
and obligations in everyday communication (das braucht’s nicht ‘this is not necessary’),
(ii) existentials (es gibt versus es hat ‘there is’; cf. the detailed description of these items
by Schiffrin [1994: 239, 305]), (iii) refusals (ach geh! ‘take it easy!’) and (iv) requests for
continuation (ach komm! ‘go ahead!’). Some variation involved interactive items: tag
questions (nicht wahr? ‘isn’t it?’), greetings when entering a store in the afternoon (Grüss
Gott, Hallo, Guten Tag, Grüezi) and answers to the question, “What do you say when
somebody expresses thanks and you have to respond?”
Dealing with discourse in this article, it will become immediately clear that the areal
limits and boundaries of conversational practices and discourse patterns cannot be as
straightforwardly determined as those of lexical items or speech-act variants that can be
elicited by questionnaires. Studies on variation in discourse have to focus on natural,
authentic interactions and communicative genres documented in everyday life. Such
studies have only recently become the subject of sociolinguistic analysis. Exploring the
state of the art, this article will look at urban verbal styles, dialect shifting and code
switching (section 2) as well at the variation of particular discourse segments across
communicative genres (section 3).
1.2. Discourse
Of the competing views on discourse, I prefer a sociolinguistic definition of this notion in

this article. Global pragmatic approaches (cf. Levinson 1983) include deictic expressions,
speech acts, Gricean implicatures, (semantic) presuppositions and conversational struc-
ture. The conversation analysis (CA) approach looks at very fine-grained structures of
everyday language use, treating the patterns it finds as mostly general and universal.
Both approaches do not take into account regional and socially conditioned variation,
which are central to this article. Paying as much attention to interactional sequencing as
possible, discourse can “best be thought of as … utterances as units of language pro-
duction … that are inherently contextualized”. This view can be applied to several rel-
evant goals of discourse analysis. One the one hand, there are
sequential goals: Are there principles underlying the order in which one utterance, or one
type of utterance, follow another? Second is what might be called semantic and pragmatic
goals: how does the organization of discourse, and the meaning and use of particular expres-
sions and constructions within certain contexts, allow people to convey and interpret the
communicative content of what is said? (Schiffrin 1994: 41)
Crucial to the study of variation in discourse is the concern over the use of particular
ways of speaking (cf. Hymes 2003) and the organization of turns and utterance sequences
in interaction in particular social contexts. A full account of the methodology used in
discourse analysis can be found in Schiffrin (1994) and Brinker et al. (2001). The latter
is an 1800-page handbook which includes an overview of the methods of conversation
linguistics (survey methods, transcription and analysis), the organization of conversation

(prerequisites, structures, procedures and modalities) and conversation typology.
We rarely find a theoretical text introducing studies on discourse and variation. Schif-
frin’s chapter on “Variation analysis” in her 1994 book, Approaches to Discourse, is a
discussion of possible concepts. Another text is the introduction to the “variationist
approach” by Dubois and Sankoff (2001), who look at the discourse organization of
lists in conversations. Amenable introductions to the analysis of ways of speaking in the
process of discourse and interaction are Gumperz (1982) and Auer (1998), who identify
variation in discourse with dialect shifting and code switching in conversation.
2. Areas, communication communities and discourse styles
2.1. Conversation styles in big cities
Research on regional variation in dialects has often neglected the major cities because
urban dialects were supposedly characterized by large social variation as a result of
immigration, social mobility, commuting, etc. In fact, urban dialects are mostly a com-
promise between dialectal features of the surrounding areas and some kind of spoken
vernacular substandard. In the case of the urban vernacular of Berlin, Dittmar and
Schlobinski (1988) gained empirical evidence that the Low German substratum influ-
enced the Berlin Urban Vernacular (BUV) in a few outstanding phonetic, lexical and
morphological features, but the original way of speaking that both community insiders
and outsiders associated with the way “Berliners talk” was a particular Berlin style
known in the vernacular as the Berlin wit/gob (Berliner Schnauze). It is the Berliner’s famed
combination of brash, impudent remarks and humor, quickness or repartee, incisiveness of
verbal expression, self-assertive aggressiveness, and loud-mouth bluster! (1988: 45).
This style co-occurs with particular pragmatic and rhetorical features. The vernacular
style is marked by the following key characteristics, which all match the most prominent
underlying social maxim: Be a cool, tough talker and storyteller and make it clear through
your discourse style that you are superior.
1. In conflict narratives (disputes), Berliners like to show that they are winners in the
long run although their opponents may be in a better starting position. That they are
tougher, more powerful and in the end successful is a result of their fine-grained
stylistic and rhetorical techniques which correspond to their superior self-image. Nar-
ratives end up with them as winners and others as losers.
2. Core members of native groups (adolescents in the 1988 study by Dittmar and
Hädrich) use the most prestigious vernacular features when they react to other group
members in performing jokes, challenges and provocations, or when underlining their
success in a quarrel at the culminating point of a narrative by verbally focusing on
the target of their actions towards the “loser” (as opposed to taking the perspective
of the agent). They prefer addressee-oriented patterns of formulation like they’ll get
clobbered so hard they won’t know what hit ’em (Dittmar and Hädrich 1988: 87) which
is coded in what in German is called the Adressatenpassiv (‘addressee-oriented passive
voice’) instead of active voice constructions like I’ll belt you in the kisser (1988: 87).
Thus, highly scored and successful storytellers prefer particular BUV patterns of for-
mulation at the peak of narratives so as to enhance their image in the group. These
speakers are accorded the highest appreciation for sophisticated verbal skills in local
patterns of formulation.
3. When Levinson (1988: 161) states that “there is more language variation than just the
superficial phonological and morphosyntactic variables”, he is referring to reported
quarrels in his corpus of narratives, where he finds a particular characteristic of an
urban way of speaking: “[a] push-down structure, … where the ‘plates’ (turns) con-
tinue to be added to the stack, but are never lifted off again in the reverse order”
(1988: 181). The “combative” way Berliners have of talking leads them to indulge in
less “face-preserving” behavior. We can therefore expect Berliners
(a) to routinely use dispreferred responses to adjacency pair first parts without the normal
dispreferred format (e.g. to refuse request with a simple “No!”); (b) to correct other speakers
instead of prompting them to correct themselves; (c) to not indulge in pre-emptive offers, or
other helpful truncations of conversational sequences. (Levinson 1988: 185)
4. Conversational studies in institutions and in everyday life have shown that BUV
speakers control and dominate the speech of others by leaving out the “hedges” of
politeness, interrupting speakers in the course of their turn and speaking quickly.
Similar stylistic features have been found in other major cities, including Zurich,
London, Montreal and Paris. Metropolitan speakers have the reputation of being
arrogant. “That is to say [in terms of variation in discourse] … that a whole slew of
interactional features should follow as motivated consequences of a certain lack of
interest in face-preservation” (Levinson 1988: 185)
Other studies have identified variation in discourse in prosodic patterns (cf. Gilles and
Siebenhaar in this volume). Schwitalla (1994: 519⫺527) shows that evaluative statements
in narratives and argumentations are prosodically contrasted to the preceding speech
flow. Particular formulaic speech is attested in the studies of the urban vernacular of
Mannheim: parallel to the BUV, there are specific communicative routines and formulas
which represent typical ways of expressing the “Mannheim” social identity (Kallmeyer
and Keim 1994b).
2.2. Dialect shiting and code switching in discourse
Inspired by the pioneer work of Auer (1986) who identified standard⫺dialect continua in
the form of conversational code shifting in the everyday speech of citizens of Constance
(Germany), Schlobinski (1988) looked at code shifting in BUV. He isolated three dimen-
sions which contribute to the initiation of code shifting: the emotional (trouble), the
interactive (i. e., the selection of the speaker) and the discourse dimension (i. e., quotation).
In a detailed analysis of conversational interaction, he established that a prominent Ger-
man politician, Richard von Weizsäcker, shifted between standard and BUV on a fa-
mous talk show in Berlin on the occasion of his retiring as Mayor of Berlin to take up
his new post as the recently elected Federal President of Germany. In a verbal spar with
a famous artist native to Berlin (Wolfgang Neuss), he switched from standard to dialect
when he was attacked and had to defend himself. Another reason for shifting was to
accommodate the BUV in which he was addressed. Schlobinski (1988) identified “quota-
tions” as a third source of shifting. Quotations in BUV served to bring in the original
speaker into the actual (“authentic”) situation or scenario. Thus Weizsäcker was speak-
ing in the standard as an “institutional” representative and in the vernacular as an “indi-
vidual” person reacting “emotionally” to particular interactional or speech events.
According to Kallmeyer and Keim (1994a: 161), phonological variation mainly serves
the functions of organizing the conversation (assignment of turns) and structuring the
utterances (segmentation and control of focalizations). Particular devices which are the
sources of code shifts and variation are quotations and addressee specifications. Accord-
ing to these authors, variation in discourse has social and symbolic meaning. Evaluations
may be affected by them, but code shifts saliently symbolize whether somebody who is
addressed using particular variants is an outsider or an insider, a local and familiar
person or a stranger. Speakers constitute social meaning by shifting their speech behavior
from standard (formal) to dialect/vernacular (informal) and vice versa according to the
well-known parametric oppositions: (a) social proximity versus social distance, (b) we-
code versus they-code, (c) formality versus informality and (d) subjectivity versus objec-
tivity. Prosodic and phonological features reflect these parameters. The variation is de-
fined as the gradual deviation from the informal, basic vernacular speakers use when
they talk to friends, lovers, children and the members of their family. Illustrating the
dynamics of code shifting over large stretches of discourse and the social construction of
particular prosodic patterns at the beginning and end of utterances with many examples,
Kallmeyer and Keim (1994a) find significant social meaning in variation in discourse.
When others are accepted as “superior, noble, better people”, the use of the standard is
positively evaluated. The same holds true for speakers who are recognized by partici-
pants as persons of “authority” for whom they have respect. Divergence is signaled
prosodically and phonologically when somebody sanctions the norms of the group.
Group members may also imitate the standard of somebody in order to make a fool of
them and to negatively mark the distance to them (“they-code”). On the other hand, the
use of dialect also has significant functions: (i) an alien, somebody external to the group,
can be excluded from understanding by using the dialect; (ii) “convergence from above”
(Kallmeyer and Keim 1994a: 233), a kind of solidarity function; (iii) a salient use of
dialect in order to sanction socially unacceptable roles or role performances of group
members (“drunkard”, “slut”). The different ways of marking the quality of vowels,
consonants and syllables or of accentuating, lengthening or shortening words or dis-
course segments carry social-symbolic values which constitute the social meaning of vari-
ation in discourse. The ethnographic study on the language use and communicative
practices in Mannheim is published in four separate volumes (Kallmeyer 1994).
In a similar vein to these four volumes, Denkler describes in a recent study (2007)
the functions of language variation in informal talk (conversations). The methodological
background is conversation analysis as practiced by Auer in his pragmatic approach to
code switching in discourse (Auer 1995), who in turn founds his work on Gumperz’
model of “contextualization cues” (Auer 1992). The informants in Denkler’s study are
native speakers of a variety of Plattdeutsch ‘Low German’ from the German area of
Münsterland surrounding the city of Münster (in northern Germany). Participants at an
evening party switch between the Low German Münsterlandish dialect (which is treated
as a separate minority language, as different from German as Catalan is from Caste-
llano) and the northern German oral substandard. In the discourse stretches under inves-
tigation (personal narratives), participants switch in order to indicate, using specific con-
textualization cues, how particular discourse segments need to be understood in their
sequential context. Participants make conversational inferences from the way the
switches between the two “languages” are performed (phonetic and prosodic quality of
sounds, syllables, words and chunks). There are particular communicative routines which
help to organize conversational sequences. Quotations show significant code switches
which represent contextualization cues for specific pragmatic inferences. Code switching
is used (among other functions) “to gain the floor and to both build a link to and
distinguish an account from previous utterances” (Denkler 2007: 192).
Another situation of covariation is described in Hove (2008). Analyzing 6381 emer-
gency calls where a Swiss policeman and a native or foreign caller interact with each
other in a situation of great pressure, Hove looks at external and discourse specific
motivation for using Swiss German dialect or Standard Swiss German. Most obviously,
discourse determines the variation of both caller and policeman here ⫺ callers initially
react to the local Swiss dialect of the policemen in dialect (natives) or in some kind of
(Swiss) standard (non-natives). Discourse-specific considerations which affect the choice
of Standard Swiss or dialect are (i) whether the relevance of the particular utterance
favors standard (e.g., in order to prevent misunderstanding of an important message
from the policeman), (ii) communicative formulas at the beginning and at the end of the
call are most often in dialect (they do not convey relevant information and, being in
dialect, they provoke the calling person to either answer in dialect or indicate that they
do not have mastery of the dialect), (iii) changes in the modality of interaction (a shift
to dialect during an interaction conducted mostly in standard language can indicate a
higher degree of spontaneity and emotionality), (iv) addressee specifications (addressing
a verbal message to himself or to a third person present during the call can lead to code
switching). Code switching, as mentioned in (iv), is a common event when policemen
talk to foreigners (speakers of other languages). In the course of the interaction they
switch to the standard, often in a way that is known as foreigner talk (a register in
which grammatical structures are simplified to different degrees in order to be better
understood). Beyond these discourse-specific factors there are participant-related factors
which favor a change in variety. When Germans or Austrians answer the dialectal identi-
fication of the policeman in Standard German, policemen switch and also continue in
the standard. Naturally, individual competence in Swiss dialect with respect to pro-
duction and reception is a factor which has an important impact on code switching.
So far I have presented the results of investigations studying variation in the course
of discourse and verbal interaction affecting conversational sequences, turns and turn
taking. I call this variation, which marks the process of discourse, vertical dynamic varia-
tion in discourse. The next section is devoted to another dimension of variation in dis-
course which I call horizontal variation of discourse segments. The idea is to compare well-
defined segments (including formulas, routines, lists, discourse markers and particles) at
different sequential positions in discourse. On the one hand, the verbal realization of
communicative functions is compared across varieties or languages; on the other hand,
pragmatic connectors or particles are compared with respect to their (different) role
in discourse.
3. Variation o particular discourse segments

There are a number of studies which examine the sociolinguistic implications of variation
in particular discourse segments ⫺ such as formulas, lists, discourse markers and par-
ticles ⫺ and the latter at least suggest an areal dimension to such variation (albeit often
in conjunction with other factors). Changes in areal distribution can be seen to go hand-
in-hand with changes in meaning and pragmatic function, as a more detailed examina-
tion of shifts in the use of the modal particles halt and eben in section 3.2 reveals.
3.1. Formulas, lists and discourse markers
Kallmeyer and Keim (1994b) show that everyday conversations are interspersed with
formulaic comments, evaluations and routines which serve the pragmatic orientation of
hearers. They have their own phonetic and prosodic shape and carry the local values
and norms of positive and negative evaluation. Such routines can take the form of
rounds, parallel routinized comments or speech acts which can be differentiated into
those which exhibit thematic progression and those that do not. An example of the
former would be a Berlin football team’s training discussions reported in Dittmar and
Hädrich (1988), in which rounds determine a ritual order of participant turns.
With regard to lists, Schiffrin (1994: 293) states that “one of the most basic differences
between narratives and lists is that narratives tell what happened and lists describe a
category”. She suggests a whole range of different types of lists which reveal a rich
variation. But what is most important in the context of this article is her “assumption
about discourse analysis: syntactic and semantic differences among linguistic items are
sensitive to text structure both within and across text types” (Schiffrin 1994: 315).
Narrowing down Schiffrin’s pragmatic approach to a restrictive analysis of lists in
discourse, Dubois and Sankoff (2001) look at “enumeration as a discourse strategy” in
interviews from the perspective of a variationist approach (Dubois and Sankoff 2001:
285). There is a clear operationalization of those utterances which belong to an “enumer-
ation” in their sense and the authors identified and analyzed a total of 3464 enumera-
tions in their corpus. They found variation according to (a) expressivity (“the more
components there are … the more the expressive potential of enumeration” [2001: 290]),
(b) processing (the more complex the components are, the greater the processing diffi-
culty), and (c) length (“the shorter the enumeration … the more efficient is the use of
enumeration in carrying out its function” [2001: 290]). Dubois and Sankoff find differ-
ences in verbal style between older and younger speakers (reference to experience, infor-
mative function, biographical relevance among other features) and between middle-class
speakers (who tend to use parts of sentences, each well coordinated with the other) and
speakers of working class, who use “full sentences” (2001: 293, 297). The authors con-
clude their pioneering work with the following statement:
We propose our study of enumeration as a prototype of an approach which succeeds in

operationalizing discourse concepts on many levels, so that an exhaustive study of a large
corpus can reveal and characterize with some precision the deep connections among the
various processes implied in the motivation, construction, use, and interpretation of this
figure. (Dubois and Sankoff 2001: 299)
The authors develop an explicit methodology, but unfortunately treat variation in dis-
course only on a “monological” level. Their study nonetheless exemplifies how a poten-
tial areal variation might be approached.
In an article on dialect divergence, Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams (2006) make an
important point about variation in discourse. They argue that patterns of variation are
not the same at different levels of linguistic description: they find sharp stratification
for morphosyntactic variables, whereas phonological variation demonstrates gradient
patterns. This pattern is reversed in France: phonological variants show sharp social
stratification, in contrast to morphosyntactic variables illustrating gradient variation.
They argue that in comparison to the bulk of sophisticated studies on phonological and
morphosyntactic variation, discourse features are barely analyzed. Nevertheless, there
are some studies on the variation of discourse particles (Schiffrin 2001), set marking tags
and particular words. Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams (2006: 142) emphasize that “the
analysis of discourse features […] requires a more complex analysis than a simple count-
ing of the number of tokens”. Interview data alone are not adequate for the pragmatic
analysis of variation in discourse. Discourse markers (and elements such as particles)
often only show up in informal interactions. They require more qualitative analyses, e.g.,
the studies of Erman 1993 and Holmes (1995), who found gender differences in the use
of discourse marker like I mean, you see and you know, women using them to connect
arguments or signal affective meaning, men to signal referential meaning or repair work
or to gain attention. The point is that solid qualitative analysis and description have to
be achieved first because “important differences in the way that different social groups
use discourse features in interaction may be obscured if we simply count numbers of
tokens” (Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams 2006: 143).
One example of a discourse marker which exhibits areal variation is like, which has
been observed to function as a focus marker (and we were like rushing home) and as a
marker of reported speech and thought (and she was like “Where are you off to?”)
throughout the urban centers of the anglophone world (Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams
2006: 154). For three different British cities, Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull, differing
frequencies have been documented for like. In Hull, the middle class used like more
often than the working class did. In the other cities, gender or social class patterns were
not found.
An increase in the frequency of the focus maker like has been generally associated
with youth culture, and Golato (2000) shows quite convincingly that quoting in narra-
tives is a marker of international youth culture. She found that the English quotative be
like is equivalent to German so, “which is mostly realized in the forms of und ich so and
und er so” (Golato 2000: 52). This quotative pattern is also analyzed in Auer (2006) as
one type of syntactic use of the item, but Golato goes beyond the static linguistic descrip-
tion to suggest that “so is used as a demonstrative deictic marker referring to the per-
formative aspect of the quote” (2000: 45). The contemporary use of so in ich so versus
er so or of be like seems to be as an “embodied quote” which “allow the speaker to give
a visual representation of what was going on during the event described” (2000: 45)
Golato’s point is that the “new” construction is used for interactive reasons: the quote
is “transformed into a performance to be watched and listened to by the coparticipant”
(2000: 45). The verbal expression is thus framed by discourse and interactional needs
and the speakers performing the event are quoting by changing their “footing” (Goffman
1981: 128).
In addition to the pragmatic role of quotatives, Macaulay (1991) has analyzed a

whole “set of discourse markers,” in particular oh, well, (you) see, I mean, you know,
(you) ken, (of) course, anyway, in fact, now, here and mind you. He shows all twelve to
have important functions in managing discourse continuity, and further he finds class-
based differences in their use in particular functions and even positions (e.g., of course
in the sense of ‘surely you understand that’ overwhelmingly occurs in initial position in
the lower-class interviews [1991: 167], while for the middle class it is more integrated
into the grammatical middle field; stylistically the lower class thus have a more “prag-
matic”, the middle class a more “syntactic, elaborative” mode in using this discourse
marker). Macaulay’s work on the communicative and social functions of these discourse
markers demonstrates not only that “there are social class differences in the use of dis-
course markers, but also that there are other differences related to genre … [and] to
individual style” (1991: 176).
The point to be remembered is that capturing variation in discourse, whether linked
to geography or not, requires a consideration of the contextually embedded functions
discourse elements perform.
3.2. Particles
Particles are metacommunicative devices which encode relevant pragmatic meaning in

verbal interactions. In line with modern lifestyles and needs in interpersonal communica-
tion, their use can change and their changing regional distribution may also induce
sociolinguistic change. Such a sociolinguistic change has occurred in northern Germany
with respect to the use of the evidentials eben and halt.
Eichhoff’s (1977/2000) areal distribution of the modal particles eben (northern Ger-
many) and halt (southern Germany) into two “dichotomic worlds” is outdated, and has
been corrected by the recent investigations of Elspass and Möller (2005). Their internet
atlas shows that both modal particles (eben and halt) currently coexist all over Germany,
at least in the major cities. From a sociolinguistic point of view, simple coexistence of
these two particles is only a very rough description of the present distribution. Social
forces govern different frequencies of distribution. It would be interesting to know more
about the social conditioning of this variation in discourse and about what is driving
this process, but one important driving factor has been the reunification of Germany,
leading Dittmar (2000) to study the spread of halt to East Berlin. In an exclusively eben
area (northern East Germany, still quite isolated from West Germany at the time), halt
found its way into the eastern part of the city once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. West
Berlin had been a walled island up until 9 November 1989, and many of the Berliners
who left this isolation for West Germany were replaced by southern Germans, in particu-
lar Swabians, in the seventies and eighties. They brought with them the modal particle
halt, which they used as a subjective correlate for evidence marking in coexistence with
eben as a marker for objective evidence (es hat eben drei Grad minus draussen ‘it’s minus
three degrees outside’). In a corpus of 25 recordings of West Berliners and 31 of East
Berliners, West Berliners used halt much more often than the East Berliners did. Dittmar
(2000) distinguishes four types of particle users: (a) those who use only eben (23); (b)
those who use only halt (2); (c) those who use both, in more or less equal numbers (27);
(d) those who use both of them, even in combination (6). Types (a) and (c) predominate.
The particles eben and halt, whether used alone or in combination with each other,
appear in most of the cases in evaluative or argumentative stretches of discourse (i. e.,
talking about and evaluating East⫺West problems). Speakers who use both particles are
motivated to do so because it gives them the stylistic choice between being softer or
harder, more personal or more distant, more friendly and charming or less.
What can we infer from these results? The West Berlin speakers not only use eben
and halt predominately in alternating ways (co-occurrence), they also use halt more often
than eben. I consider the very frequent use of halt (alongside eben) to be an indicator of
the communicative surplus value of this epistemic “softener” in interpersonal discourse.
This argument is supported by the following sociolinguistic reflections.
“Eben-only” users are able to express all of their pragmatic intentions with this par-
ticle. Their only disadvantage is that those who additionally use halt (and expect its use
in communication) often consider the utterances of “eben-only” users to be more formal
and distant and therefore less personal and friendly. The reverse may be true for those
(southern) speakers who use only halt, with one major exception: all German speakers
have to use eben as an adjective or temporal adverb. Furthermore, they also use it also
as a sentence equivalent, in that one can react to a statement in an elliptical way with
ja eben, but not with *(ja) halt. This is not the only argument indicating that halt and
eben are not synonymous: the terms can, moreover, be combined in patterns of eben
halt, which would not be possible if they were synonyms.
It follows from this sociolinguistic argument that those who use both modal particles
do so for reasons of epistemic differentiation (mitigating or reinforcing the evidence of
their speech acts) and stylistic flexibility. In this sense, the use of both particles offers
advantages in register use. Dittmar (2000) predicts that speakers in East Berlin and
Brandenburg, for whom (up until 1989) the norm of eben(t) was the only valid option,
will increasingly use the particle halt in order to differentiate their registers and to make
their personal motives easier to understand, or to react to the pressure of the linguistic
market. The adoption of halt meets personal and stylistic needs related to becoming a
more “unique individual”. There may also be a new job-related need to appear friendlier
and to become more influential by using a particle which carries the prestige of the
Western linguistic market. Those East Berlin speakers who used the modal particle halt
frequently (i) were young (and paid attention to Western prestige patterns) and (ii) had
already worked or lived in the Western part of the city, and had adapted to Western
patterns in the course of intensive daily contacts. The take-up of the modal particle halt
was accompanied by patterns of non-normative use. The particle halt was occasionally
used in ungrammatical syntactic positions (initial and final part of the utterance). The
process of learning to use it correctly has parallels in second-language learning. The
deviant use of the particle indicated a certain period of cognitive insecurity in the new
communication community.
4. Variation in discourse: Prospects and perspectives
Recent investigations on variation in discourse open a window onto the pragmatic mean-
ing of variation in the process of conversational interaction (studies reported on in sec-
tion 2), they open another window onto the comparison of particular discourse segments
across discourse types and genres (lists, formulas, routines) and of regional expressions
for particular communicative functions.
With respect to variation in the course of conversational interaction, the pragmatic
functions of types of code switching or code shifting should be compared ⫺ in more
than some isolated conversations ⫺ with respect to types of (interactional) encounters
(native⫺non-native, expert⫺layman, professional⫺non-professional) and to types of
communicative events/genres (Günthner and Knoblauch 1995). There is a lack of more
explicit criteria for comparing functions in both dimensions. Prosodic features seem to
be prominent devices for these purposes.
Looking at discourse segments on the other hand, regional research centers should
work together in comparing expressions, routines, lists, particles and discourse markers
in their corpora with respect to their positions in turns and their communicative func-
tions in, e.g., direct and indirect speech, evaluations or comments.
Areal variation in discourse is a very young research field still lacking results compar-
able to those obtained in other fields of sociolinguistic description. It could, however, be
shown in this short overview that it is becoming increasingly important in sociolinguis-
tics ⫺ as documented by the increasing number of challenging new descriptions and
attempts to explain them.
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Norbert Dittmar, Berlin (Germany)

Index
A Berlin 250, 280⫺281, 347, 576, 579, 791⫺
793, 867⫺868, 871, 873ⴚ874
absolute vs. relative space 45 bidimensional 671⫺672
Acadian French 380, 381, 386⫺388 ⫺ approach 584
accent 150, 232, 540, 544⫺545, 745, 754, ⫺ dialectology 669⫺670
788⫺790, 792, 842, 844, 846
⫺ Cockney J Cockney accent ⫺ method 674, 676
⫺ English J English accents bilingualism 37, 42, 118, 127, 175, 341, 344,
⫺ foreign J foreign accent 376, 379, 385⫺387, 393⫺394, 396, 398⫺
⫺ regional J regional accent 402, 411⫺412, 424⫺427, 444, 454, 470, 475,
⫺ social J social accent 479, 481, 485⫺486, 490, 687, 692, 699, 707,
⫺ working-class J working-class accent 735, 747, 812⫺813
acceptability task 518⫺520, 522⫺523
Bohnenberger, Karl 96, 100ⴚ101
accommodation 20, 167, 213, 216, 251ⴚ252,
254, 318, 341, 362, 376, 457⫺458, 462, 464, borrowing 39, 63, 83, 242ⴚ244, 250, 253,
481, 531⫺532, 614, 651 286, 318, 358⫺359, 391⫺392, 397, 399⫺
acrolect 232, 342, 445 400, 424⫺425, 427, 475, 479⫺481, 483⫺
adjacency 380, 811ⴚ812, 814, 850, 868 486, 489⫺490, 555, 564, 606, 636
adolescents 150, 155, 170, 192, 271, 365, 538, boundary
540, 687, 697, 865, 867 ⫺ dialect J dialect boundary
alternation (phonological) 365, 368, 560,
⫺ social J social boundary
776, 805
American English 39, 156, 174, 214, 245, ⫺ structural J structural boundary
250, 461, 463, 504, 541, 556, 560, 586, 766, Bourdieu, Pierre 19ⴚ22, 38, 62, 165, 168,
767, 823, 824 621, 728
apparent-time analysis 134⫺144, 202, 205⫺ British English 39, 149, 156, 174, 175, 214,
206, 218, 247, 251, 253, 662, 680 229, 243, 319, 461, 788, 823, 824, 844, 845,
architecture of language 227, 229, 236ⴚ238, 855, 856
376, 706
areal typology 436, 855ⴚ856, 858
assimilation 76, 130, 333, 368, 457, 775, 777,
796, 815 C
atlas
⫺ dialect J dialect atlas
⫺ language J language atlas Canadian French 243, 377, 393, 402, 404,
⫺ linguistic J linguistic atlas 411, 486, 724ⴚ736
⫺ Sprachatlas J Deutscher Sprachatlas Catalan 303, 334, 381, 383ⴚ385, 480, 484,
attitudes J language attitudes 490
Ausgleichssprache 113, 277 cartography 122, 155, 567⫺569, 571⫺578,
Australian English 243, 445, 455, 460, 461,
582, 585⫺586, 709
793
Austria 89, 228, 230, 281⫺283, 288⫺289, central place theory 6, 146
303, 593, 608, 750, 775, 809, 866, 870 city dialect 315, 317, 320, 325⫺327
Austrian German 228, 279, 289, 593, 608 cluster
authenticity 10, 35, 39, 514⫺515, 613, 621, ⫺ style J style cluster
623, 641, 725, 727, 731, 733⫺736, 741, 749, cluster analysis 183⫺184, 190, 303, 770⫺771
752 Cockney accent 822
code shifting 77, 211, 340, 744, 865, 868, 869
B code switching 46, 262, 341, 426ⴚ427, 481,
484, 687, 746, 747, 753, 822, 869, 870
background variable 532, 534, 535, 546 cognitive map J mental map
basilect 232, 260, 267, 358, 445, 455, 458 colonialism 441, 452
belonging 34, 47, 51ⴚ53, 55, 60⫺61, 242, colonization 3, 111, 114, 121, 333, 335, 337⫺
535, 538, 540, 741, 752 338, 385, 452, 459, 464
880 Index
commodification 10, 155, 448, 730, 742, 745 Detroit 155, 172, 325
communicative genre 11, 246, 502, 701, 753, Deutsche Dialektgeographie 92ⴚ93, 96, 579
865, 866, 875 Deutscher Sprachatlas 75, 89, 91, 93, 122,
communicative space 388, 472ⴚ475, 635 205, 515⫺516, 524, 579
community of practice 636 ⫺ institute 211
comparability 428, 512ⴚ513, 576, 701, 828, diachronic, diachrony 79, 205, 211, 227, 247,
858 410, 614, 617, 762, 817
completion task 523 diaglossia 230, 282, 290⫺291, 305, 367
concentration zones J speech levels dialect
concept of variety 211, 214ⴚ215 ⫺ city J city dialect
conservation 30, 481, 503, 616, 721 ⫺ new J new dialect
contact ⫺ primary J primary dialect
⫺ dialect J dialect contact ⫺ secondary J secondary dialect
⫺ language J language contact ⫺ USA J USA dialects
contact-induced change 391ⴚ394, 396, 398ⴚ dialectality 676⫺678
399, 407, 410, 412, 436 dialect atlas 89⫺91, 97, 202, 204⫺206, 774,
contact variety 395, 398, 400, 401, 406, 407, 779
469, 691, 859 dialect boundary 23, 28, 30, 36, 39, 88, 91,
contact zone 282, 284⫺288 94⫺95, 97ⴚ101, 108, 120, 126, 151, 154,
contagion/contagious diffusion 148, 317, 156, 174, 179⫺182, 186, 188, 191, 196,
320⫺323, 651, 812 209⫺210, 217, 236, 246, 275⫺276, 284, 287,
continuity 48, 454, 854ⴚ855 291, 375, 382, 595, 656, 663ⴚ665, 678, 789,
convergence 156, 213, 242ⴚ247, 250⫺253, 810
290, 303⫺304, 358, 429, 478, 480ⴚ482, 484, dialect contact 316, 328, 455
486, 489 dialect description 71, 88
⫺ horizontal J horizontal convergence dialect dictionary 71, 593, 595⫺596, 601⫺
⫺ linguistic J linguistic convergence 602, 825
⫺ vertical J vertical convergence dialect feature 155, 266, 326, 749
⫺ zone J zone convergence ⫺ primary J primary dialect feature
conversational interaction 868, 874⫺875 ⫺ secondary J secondary dialect feature
conversational style 717 ⫺ tertiary J tertiary dialect feature
corpus linguistics 132, 398, 402, 495, 498, dialect geography 24, 87ⴚ101, 107, 109, 114,
502⫺503, 507⫺508, 513⫺514, 596, 603, 126, 203, 205, 315, 328, 335, 513⫺517, 608,
830, 845, 850, 871 614, 616, 664, 762, 764, 771, 772
correlational sociolinguistics 623 dialect grammar 70, 80, 616ⴚ619
creole 232, 432ⴚ433, 440ⴚ448, 454⫺455, dialect leveling 12, 19, 27, 75, 242ⴚ244,
463⫺464, 469, 747, 852 260ⴚ263, 266, 268⫺269, 271⫺272, 276,
creole space 442, 445ⴚ446 301, 324, 328, 336, 342, 357ⴚ362, 469, 677
cultural space (Kulturraum) 109, 110, 121, dialect lexicography 592⫺593
452, 809 ⫺ electronic J electronic dialect lexicography
dialect map 188, 574, 771, 837
dialect mixture 80, 83, 243, 269, 458
D dialectology 78, 87, 108⫺109, 122, 128, 375,
470, 550, 562, 601, 698, 724, 805, 841
Dach(sprache) 231, 277, 285⫺287, 291 ⫺ European J European dialectology
data collection J methods of data collection ⫺ generative J generative dialectology
demotization 267⫺269 ⫺ German J German dialectology
Denmark 263, 265⫺266, 271, 538, 632 ⫺ history of J history of dialectology
dependent variable 530, 532, 533, 534, 536, ⫺ modern J modern dialectology
573, 828, 829 ⫺ perceptualJ perceptual dialectology
destandardization 300⫺301, 304, 356 ⫺ pluridimensional J pluridimensional dialec-
deterritorialization 52, 55, 447 tology
Index 881
⫺ social J social dialectology Dutch 96, 136, 137, 138, 180, 181, 214, 236,
⫺ structural J structural dialectology 243, 276, 283ⴚ285, 291, 300, 320, 356, 359,
⫺ traditional J traditional dialectology 361, 362, 365, 366, 368⫺370, 383, 393, 441,
⫺ urban J urban dialectology 442, 453, 457, 480, 514, 523, 556, 596, 746,
dialectometry 236, 551, 561, 563, 577, 581, 766, 771, 777, 825, 829, 830⫺834, 842, 848,
582, 665, 769, 771 853, 858
dialect syntax J syntax dynamic language atlases (sprachdynamische
dialect user vs. standard user 24, 26 Atlanten) 202, 204ⴚ206, 215, 219
Dialektabbau 276, 288, 304
Dialektumbau 276
diaphasic 227, 228, 229, 231, 234ⴚ235, 236, E
237, 299⫺300, 585, 613, 709
diaphasic variety 228, 234ⴚ235 East German 279, 288, 873
diastratic 227, 228, 229, 232ⴚ234, 236, 237, edit distance 552ⴚ554, 556, 557
275, 283, 289ⴚ290, 296, 299⫺300, 471, 585, electronic dialect lexicography 508, 514,
613, 669, 672, 673, 676, 709 600ⴚ608
diastratic variety 228, 232ⴚ234 elicitation 79, 396, 512, 523⫺524, 536, 545,
diatopic 227, 228, 229, 230ⴚ232, 233, 236, 671, 825, 843, 845, 846, 858
275, 277, 290, 296, 299⫺300, 301, 304, 305, ⫺ oral J oral elicitation
308, 339, 469, 471, 585, 593, 594, 596, 606, ⫺ written J written elicitation
613, 616, 669, 673, 676, 709, 710, 772, 822, empirical quality standards 495, 508
835 ⫺ objectivity J objectivity
diatopic variety 228, 230ⴚ232, 296 ⫺ reliability J reliability
dictionary J dialect dictionary ⫺ representativity J representativity
diffusion 6, 143, 145, 146, 148ⴚ151, 253, ⫺ validity J validity
320, 326, 328, 362, 367, 368, 379, 396, 399, enclaves 118, 334, 335, 337, 338, 340, 489
420, 423, 425, 433, 464, 649ⴚ650, 654⫺657, English 39, 42, 61, 63, 129, 137, 144, 145,
658⫺660, 660⫺662, 663⫺664, 664⫺665, 156, 174, 175, 190, 230, 252, 269, 315, 341,
678, 679, 681, 805, 814, 817 386, 393, 395, 401, 404⫺406, 409, 421, 427,
⫺ hierarchical J hierarchical diffusion 441, 452, 454, 479, 480, 484⫺485, 486⫺487,
⫺ lexical J lexical diffusion 540, 620, 664⫺665, 735, 748, 750, 805, 806,
⫺ wave J contagion/contagious diffusion 809, 839, 844⫺846, 849, 852, 853⫺859
diffusion model 150, 616, 654ⴚ657, 664 ⫺ American J American English
digital space 58⫺62 ⫺ Australian J Australian English
Digital Wenker Atlas (DiWA) 89, 202, 204, ⫺ British J British English
205, 207, 603, 672, 680, 854 ⫺ New Zealand J New Zealand English
digitalization 52 ⫺ Quebec J Quebec English
diglossia 282, 283, 291, 355 ⫺ Tristan da Cunha J Tristan da Cunha Eng-
direct method 79, 80, 87, 92, 94⫺95, 98, 100, lish
502ⴚ504, 515ⴚ516, 543, 580 English accents 189, 269, 542
discontinuous language space 335 environmental determinism 3
discourse 10ⴚ11, 20, 155, 246, 253, 396, 397, essentialism 700⫺701
398, 399, 404, 410, 422⫺423, 435, 489, 668, ethnography 47, 59, 62, 122, 128, 163, 164ⴚ
823, 838, 865, 866ⴚ867, 868, 871, 873, 874, 166, 168, 169, 170, 174, 625, 634, 636, 639,
875 728, 730, 869
⫺ media J media discourse ⫺ multi-sited J multi-sited ethnography
discourse markers 64, 246, 482, 691, 870, European tradition 45, 202, 276
872, 873 evaluation 111, 149, 174, 209, 219, 253, 290,
divergence 4, 75, 156, 213⫺214, 241ⴚ242, 298, 300, 327, 336, 508⫺509, 529, 538ⴚ539,
244, 246, 251, 252, 275, 276, 277⫺291, 325, 541ⴚ546, 657, 777, 778, 871
355, 384, 478, 481⫺482, 485, 488, 489, 490, experiment 495⫺496, 502, 525, 529ⴚ531,
834, 869, 872 532⫺546
882 Index
F geography 1ⴚ12, 35, 51, 143, 144, 145, 147,

317, 375ⴚ376, 574, 633, 750, 772
feminist 7, 9, 10, 11 ⫺ dialect J dialect geography
Finland 276, 385⫺386 ⫺ humanistic J humanistic geography
Fischer, Hermann 87, 94, 96ⴚ98, 99, 101, ⫺ linguistic J linguistic geography
574 ⫺ Marxist-influenced J Marxist-influenced
Flanders 95, 96, 284, 286, 288, 320⫺321, geography
323⫺328, 356⫺371, 382, 383, 833, 834, 843, geolinguistics 145, 147, 155, 205, 375, 574,
853, 857 581, 583, 586, 669, 678
Flemish 283, 286, 303, 320⫺321, 324⫺326, German 75, 81, 90, 205, 207, 216, 228, 277,
328, 356⫺362, 364⫺366, 368, 369, 380⫺ 279, 289, 300, 305, 333, 337, 479, 480, 487⫺
383, 833, 842, 853 488, 497, 555, 579, 592, 767, 775, 795, 807,
focusing 206, 301, 323, 455, 457, 460, 777 809, 812, 857
folk 4, 34, 113, 180, 190, 195, 699 ⫺ Austrian J Austrian German
folk notion 179, 181, 184, 190, 196, 541 ⫺ East J East German
foreign accent 175, 363, 473, 534, 542, 690, ⫺ Swiss J Swiss German
750 ⫺ West J West German
formal, formality 25, 26, 53, 149, 167, 174, German dialectology 94, 120, 237, 854
231, 234, 237, 262, 268, 347, 357, 360, 385, Germany 57, 94, 100, 108, 109, 112, 116,
456, 536, 537, 823, 832, 865, 869, 874 118, 121, 204, 206, 207, 216, 230, 250, 251,
France 24, 110, 118, 204, 285, 286, 319, 338, 252, 276, 277, 279, 284, 285, 286, 380, 452,
358, 380, 383, 384, 387, 443, 452, 455, 468, 499, 569, 580, 582, 584, 747, 750, 865, 873
479, 568, 577, 578, 729, 730, 733, 872 Gilliéron, Jules 92, 109, 204, 315, 502, 515,
francophone Canada J Canadian French 574, 576ⴚ578, 580, 584, 614, 616, 664, 761
French 24, 39, 42, 111, 190, 227, 245, 277, globalization 12, 41⫺42, 51, 54⫺56, 63, 445,
285⫺287, 338, 356, 377, 384, 441, 445, 452, 447⫺448, 544, 632ⴚ635
479, 485, 592, 805, 812, 822, 833, 858 glocalization 28, 55
⫺ Acadian J Acadian French grammar
⫺ Canadian J Canadian French ⫺ dialect J dialect grammar
frequency 77, 94, 98, 134, 151, 213, 214, 232, ⫺ regional J regional grammar
236, 245, 252, 253, 366, 397, 403, 404, 410, grammaticalization 344, 423, 457, 680, 691,
430, 455, 456, 486, 489, 450, 508, 625, 695, 777, 839, 858
750, 753, 832, 833, 842, 844, 845, 853, 872
Fronterizo 706⫺722
full variety 203, 215, 216, 217 H
functional stability 355
Haag, Karl 83, 94, 98ⴚ100
Herder, Johann Gottfried 4, 34⫺35
G heterogeneity 39, 147, 226, 339, 398, 458,
569, 575, 577, 580, 584, 618, 619, 621, 623,
gender 1, 7, 8, 9, 79, 143, 144, 148, 155, 698, 741, 754
164⫺165, 167, 190, 206, 233, 316, 474, 488, heteroglossia 37, 743, 746
494, 497, 507, 583, 584, 632, 636, 638⫺639 hierarchical diffusion 6, 148, 317⫺323, 324,
generative dialectology 129ⴚ138, 229, 623 326, 814
genre high variety (H-variety) 281, 296, 297, 358,
⫺ communicative J communicative genre 363, 365
⫺ media J media genre history of
geographic adjacency 380, 811 ⫺ dialectology 1, 205, 613, 620, 623
geographic(al) space 8, 35, 45, 117, 245, 375, ⫺ linguistics 204, 577, 582, 587, 724
376, 724, 773, 809, 810, 811 ⫺ sociolinguistics 1, 108, 613⫺616, 617,
geographic(al) variation 126, 227, 231, 315, 619⫺623, 624
505, 616, 822 homogeneity 33, 434, 622, 687, 698
Index 883
horizontal convergence 242ⴚ247, 250⫺253, isogloss 89, 91, 94, 126, 128, 151, 154, 203,
278 207, 210, 215, 219, 236, 242, 244, 246⫺247,
horizontal stability 355 253, 275, 513, 525, 575, 578, 615, 656, 658,
humanistic geography 7, 10, 11 662, 663ⴚ664, 665, 673, 674, 761, 762,
hybrid form 149, 265, 269, 270 769⫺770, 794, 796⫺797, 837, 853, 854
hypercorrection 215, 217, 269, 299, 307, 457,
660, 764
hyperdialectalism 299 J
Jaberg, Karl 204, 580, 583, 618, 761
Jud, Jakob 204, 580, 583, 761
I
identity 7, 9, 12, 40, 55, 56, 63, 65, 119, 148,

K
149, 175, 188, 195, 236, 237, 251, 275, 289,
325, 333, 337, 348, 370, 444, 446, 448, 453, koiné, koineization 113, 152, 153, 232, 243,
472, 474, 490, 657, 687, 689, 725⫺733, 741, 253, 277, 287, 301, 324, 328, 336, 339, 340,
745, 751, 752, 753 346, 359, 368, 445, 453, 455, 458, 460, 463,
⫺ local J local identity 469
⫺ regional J regional identity kulturmorphologische Dialektologie 107ⴚ110,
⫺ rural J rural identity 113, 114ⴚ117, 120⫺122
⫺ social J social identity
⫺ urban J urban identity
identity marker 155, 306, 325, 326, 346, 360, L
748, 814, 822
imperialism 3, 116, 452 language
implication 217, 245, 303, 445, 446, 653, 656, ⫺ architecture of J architecture of language
658, 660, 664, 817 ⫺ and place 7, 65, 155, 632⫺633, 645
independent variable 406, 409, 500, 530, ⫺ marginal J marginal language
532ⴚ533, 625, 822, 828, 829, 835 ⫺ regional J regional language
indirect method 79, 87⫺88, 92, 96, 496, 499, ⫺ transnational J transnational languages
505⫺507, 515ⴚ516, 522, 544, 579 language atlas 90, 202, 204⫺206, 215, 219,
inflection 80, 88, 208, 210, 432⫺433, 482, 572, 575, 580, 583, 586
674, 804, 805, 806, 808, 811, 815 language attitudes 188, 337, 348, 442, 529,
informal, informality 25, 53, 149, 167, 175, 537⫺540, 545⫺546, 676, 696⫺698, 843
237, 268, 357, 369, 471, 536, 537, 689, 692, language change 29, 35, 73⫺74, 77, 87⫺88,
696, 698, 742, 749, 832, 865, 869, 872 93, 100⫺101, 108, 147, 155, 203, 206ⴚ207,
innovation 6, 7, 63, 76, 77, 97, 99, 126, 143, 209⫺210, 219⫺220, 242, 247, 251⫺252,
145, 146, 148ⴚ151, 203, 205, 208, 209, 219, 265, 316, 321, 325, 344, 355, 358⫺359,
317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 324, 325, 336, 396ⴚ 366⫺367, 424ⴚ426, 436, 456, 469, 649⫺
397, 431, 447, 457, 576, 649, 650, 651, 654ⴚ 651, 657, 662, 809
660, 662, 663, 679, 711, 714, 715, 716, 717, language contact 118, 206, 244, 251, 284,
719, 721, 854 337, 341, 344⫺345, 379, 392, 399, 409,
intensity 764, 787⫺788, 789, 797 411⫺412, 419⫺420, 427ⴚ432, 447, 453,
interference 23, 231, 283, 285, 303, 368, 399, 455, 460, 463, 467, 469, 471, 475, 478ⴚ484,
410, 427, 475, 516, 517 490, 698, 706, 775⫺767, 805, 808, 811ⴚ813,
internet 51, 54, 59, 60, 61, 447, 471, 506⫺ 855, 859
507, 635, 825 language enclave J Sprachinsel
interview 206, 495, 502, 503, 515, 516ⴚ520, language evaluation 111, 149, 174, 182, 209,
522, 529, 535ⴚ537, 539, 641, 858, 872 216, 218⫺219, 280, 290, 297⫺301, 305⫺
intonation 268, 333, 553, 644, 787, 790ⴚ795, 307, 319, 327, 336, 442, 508⫺509, 538⫺541,
797, 798, 799 541ⴚ546, 869, 871
884 Index
language galaxy 42 linguistic space 121, 188, 227, 237, 251, 275,
language ideology 11, 34, 38⫺40, 43, 55⫺56, 277, 291, 336, 376, 446, 470ⴚ471, 576, 584,
62⫺63, 108, 110, 120, 266, 269, 271, 614, 696
618, 641⫺642, 646, 687, 726, 735, 741 linguistic stability 355, 358, 360, 370, 481
language industry 734⫺736 linguistic variable 128, 129, 164, 226, 229ⴚ
language island J Sprachinsel 230, 238, 243ⴚ247, 398, 514, 516, 517, 551,
language loyalty 118, 150, 328, 344, 482, 577, 625, 627
489, 625 local identity 55, 118, 150, 151, 169ⴚ170,
language maintenance 101, 214, 322⫺323, 172, 325, 360, 458, 538, 742, 745, 749
341, 345ⴚ347, 424⫺426, 458, 474, 483 location-based services 60
language map 33, 36, 88, 379, 384, 502, 505, Locke, John 34⫺35
574, 578, 855 low variety (L-variety) 277, 281, 297, 298,
language pocket J Sprachinsel 357
language space 1, 6, 8, 228, 231, 260, 271, Luxemburg 242, 361, 595, 597, 606⫺607
281, 290, 376
language space ideology 107
language typology 334, 419ⴚ420, 422⫺423, M
434, 453, 571, 840ⴚ843, 856⫺858
language use 21, 27, 129, 164, 167, 169, 228, macrosynchronization 213ⴚ214, 216
234⫺235, 267, 269, 271, 285, 341, 376, 379, map, mapping 33, 35, 40⫺41, 53, 89, 94, 98,
396, 505, 514, 529, 532ⴚ533, 536, 538, 578, 126⫺128, 164⫺165, 179⫺182, 184, 190,
204⫺205, 247, 502⫺503, 505, 567⫺587,
583⫺584, 640, 642, 687⫺689, 699, 750, 822
672, 709⫺722, 769, 865
language variation 126⫺127, 129, 138, 155⫺
⫺ dialect J dialect map
156, 205, 226⫺227, 229⫺230, 234, 266, 296,
⫺ language J language map
316, 375, 461, 497, 513⫺514, 529, 613⫺614,
⫺ mental J mental map
633, 686, 698⫺699, 702, 745, 750, 868⫺869
Marburg School 88, 94, 96, 505, 771
lectal variation 821⫺826, 831
marginal language 205, 377⫺379, 387, 399,
leveling 12, 75, 242ⴚ243, 301, 324, 357, 370,
440ⴚ441, 443, 448
455⫺457, 460
Marxism 6⫺11
⫺ of dialects J dialect leveling
Marxist-influenced geography 7, 8ⴚ9
⫺ rural J rural leveling mass media 9, 214, 741, 750
Levenshtein distance 552, 554⫺557, 559, 770 meaning in variation 163ⴚ169, 869
lexical diffusion 75, 82ⴚ83, 250, 269, 364, measuring, measurement 245, 253, 323, 394,
657, 663 494ⴚ497, 499, 524, 530, 532⫺533, 544ⴚ
lexical variation 127, 136, 506⫺507, 821⫺ 546, 550ⴚ564, 569, 639, 671, 677, 762,
829, 832, 835, 846, 866 764ⴚ770, 789, 791
lingua franca 232, 243, 281, 289, 368, 431, media
441, 447, 454, 471 ⫺ new J new media
linguistic atlas 91⫺92, 204⫺206, 513⫺517, ⫺ mass J mass media
567ⴚ568, 571ⴚ572, 574, 576, 581⫺582, media discourse 740⫺741, 743ⴚ744, 750
616, 669, 677, 761 media genre 744ⴚ746, 749⫺753
linguistic convergence 342 mental map 184ⴚ185, 188⫺189, 191, 195⫺
linguistic dynamics (Sprachdynamik) 201⫺ 196, 539⫺541
203, 211⫺212, 218⫺219, 585, 669⫺670, mesolect 232, 444, 463
680⫺681 mesosynchronization 202, 213, 216, 219
linguistic geography 87, 95, 98, 100, 155, methods of data collection
375, 507, 581, 709, 761 ⫺ data elicitation J elicitation
linguistic market 19, 21⫺22, 26, 30, 265, ⫺ direct J direct method
730, 874 ⫺ indirect J indirect method
linguistics microparametric variation 840
⫺ history of J history of linguistics microsynchronization 212⫺214
Index 885
microvariation 129⫺130, 132⫺133, 135⫺ O

137, 139, 817
migrants, migration 50⫺51, 55, 251, 322⫺ objectivity 495
323, 338⫺340, 380⫺381, 443, 452, 468⫺ obtrusive(ness) 530⫺531
470, 688, 726 Occitan 24, 383ⴚ385
minority 334ⴚ335, 338, 346, 376, 378⫺381, onomasiology 824, 832, 835⫺836
383, 387, 468⫺471, 474⫺476 Optimality Theory 129, 132, 135, 138, 252,
Mischung J dialect mixture 491, 775, 777, 840
Mitzka, Walther 89, 111, 113, 120⫺122, 650 oral elicitation 514⫺515, 516ⴚ520
mobile positioning 60 oral performance 155, 169, 196, 202, 212,
mobility 11, 50⫺51, 152, 251, 315⫺316, 321, 220, 251, 494, 615, 620, 622⫺623, 641, 645,
327, 632⫺633 751⫺752, 869, 872
modern dialectology 838 origo 45
modernity 29ⴚ30, 34⫺35, 39 Ortsgrammatik 79ⴚ82, 616
morphological exponent 807⫺808, 815 Ortsloyalität 251, 328, 360⫺361, 363⫺365,
morphology 79⫺80, 90, 126, 130, 135, 137, 367
204, 210, 243, 252, 285, 290, 301, 345, 365, overseas variety 453⫺455
366, 392, 394, 403, 433, 480, 482, 486, 503,
506⫺507, 578, 582, 600, 616, 671, 674,
804⫺810, 814ⴚ816, 826, 844, 851
morphosyntactic variable 868, 872
P
movement (in space) 52, 251, 338⫺340, 442,
451⫺452, 811 paradigm 622, 805, 807
⫺ population J population movements particle 246, 691, 844, 851, 873ⴚ874
multidimensional scaling 190, 556, 770 Paul, Hermann 70, 71, 72ⴚ78, 111, 202, 212
perceptual dialectology 179⫺182, 192⫺193,
multilingualism 42, 133, 490, 687⫺702
539
multiple grammars model 133
phenomenology 10, 45⫺46, 53⫺55
multi-sited ethnography 726, 730
phonetics 760, 764, 779, 787
phonology 77, 80, 129⫺130, 132, 135, 290,
368, 760, 769, 771, 774⫺777, 779, 787
N pidgin 440ⴚ448, 453⫺454
pidginization 441, 483
narrowcasting 742, 744, 746, 752 place J language and place
national standard variety 22, 23, 24 , 25, 26, pluridimensional 206, 568, 578, 583⫺585,
108 , 111, 112, 113, 114, 214, 216, 217, 262, 669, 704, 709
263, 267, 269, 300, 301, 302, 308, 323, 356 pluridimensional dialectology 583, 706
nationalism 2⫺3, 34, 50, 109, 118, 725⫺729, political space 33
736 political territories 33, 99, 110, 116⫺117,
nation-state 3⫺4, 33, 35⫺40, 375, 379 120⫺121, 276, 289, 382, 725
navigation systems 2, 10, 58ⴚ60 population movements 120⫺121, 338ⴚ340,
neogrammarian 70ⴚ84, 108, 245 442, 451⫺452
Netherlands 95⫺96, 180, 276, 283⫺284, 288, Portuguese 243, 338, 393, 441, 452, 471, 485,
303, 327, 356⫺357, 359, 361, 366, 517, 487, 585, 706ⴚ711, 713⫺714, 716⫺722
832ⴚ834, 843 ⫺ Riograndense J Riograndense Portuguese
network J social network ⫺ Uruguayan J Uruguayan Portuguese
new dialect 300⫺301, 324, 455, 457, 460 postmodernism 10⫺11
new media 740 practice J social practice
new standard variety 305 pragmatics 290⫺291, 494, 497, 668, 866
New Zealand English 456, 458, 460, 461 primary dialect 231, 252, 290, 336
non-convergence 480ⴚ482, 489 primary dialect feature 252, 280, 290, 336,
Norway 26, 94⫺95, 263⫺264, 268⫺272 362
886 Index
pronunciation distance 553, 559⫺563 S

prosody 691, 786ⴚ789
psychometrics 562 salient, saliency, salience 209, 252, 301, 700,
869
sampling 399, 534, 701
Q secondary dialect 231
secondary dialect feature 336, 362⫺363
quality criteria J empirical quality standards sectoral variety 211, 215
Quebec 401⫺403, 407, 469, 726, 728⫺733 semantics 79, 127, 596, 826, 828
Quebec English 401⫺402, 407 semasiology 581, 582, 596, 604, 824
questionnaire 79, 89, 94⫺96, 502⫺503, 506⫺ shifting J code shifting
507, 514ⴚ517, 520⫺524, 538, 671, 843⫺846 similarity 179ⴚ183, 275, 551, 554, 770, 836
simplification 301, 344, 366, 402, 427, 456ⴚ
457, 463
R Sinitic 430
slang 237, 447, 639, 697, 700, 702, 743
reallocation (of variants) 308, 456 social accent 542, 544
real-time analysis 202, 204ⴚ205, 207, 218, social boundary 11, 28, 56
253, 404, 680, 832 social dialectology 615, 619ⴚ621, 625, 752
reevaluation of varieties 297⫺299 social factors 79, 420, 423ⴚ424, 615
regiolect 152⫺153, 203, 216⫺218, 232, 296⫺ social meaning 117, 167, 176, 543, 869
298, 302ⴚ304, 306⫺308, 369 social identity 18, 19, 52, 53, 226, 633, 639,
region 3, 5, 10, 147, 153 752, 868
regional accent (Regionalakzent) 217⫺218, social network 6, 8⫺9, 50⫺51, 63, 65, 151,
232, 307, 363, 368⫺369, 504, 506, 542, 544, 165, 170ⴚ171, 234, 321ⴚ323, 328, 425,
680 474⫺475, 625ⴚ626
regional grammar 88, 93, 202, 502 social practice 7⫺8, 11, 19ⴚ20, 29⫺30, 43⫺
regional identity 267, 270, 271, 328, 334, 46, 143, 151, 154⫺155, 163ⴚ167, 169⫺171,
345, 360, 749 176, 447⫺448, 633, 635ⴚ642, 644⫺646,
regional language 94, 203, 211, 215ⴚ220, 728, 736, 865
305, 334, 385, 504⫺506, 676, 678, 679 social science 5, 144, 508, 615, 622, 725
register 41⫺42, 234ⴚ235, 502⫺503 social space 21, 27, 163, 532
regularization 39, 365⫺366, 456⫺457 social style 646
Reihenschritt(theorie) 252, 653 social variation 169, 232, 316, 583, 620, 822
reliability 495ⴚ496, 512, 516, 524, 530, 618 sociolects 233, 584, 822
relict zone 678, 679 sociolexicology 823ⴚ824, 825, 826, 835
repertoire 231, 260, 290⫺291, 474, 775⫺776 sociolinguistic variable 229, 638, 823, 824,
representativity 495, 498, 501, 508⫺509 826, 835
residual zone 431⫺432 sociolinguistics
restructuring of varieties 276, 297ⴚ308 ⫺ correlational J correlational sociolinguistics
Rhenish fan (Rheinischer Fächer) 243, 248⫺ ⫺ history of J history of sociolinguistics
249 ⫺ variationist J variationist sociolinguistics
Riograndense Portuguese 708, 710, 717 sound change (Lautwandel) 74, 76, 77, 78,
Romance tradition 515, 580, 761 82ⴚ84, 99⫺100, 170, 245, 655, 767, 773,
roof J Dach(sprache) 779
rule-based 134 Southeast Asia 41, 42
⫺ phonology 129⫺131 space
⫺ syntax 129, 135⫺136 ⫺ absolute vs. relative J absolute vs. relative
rural identity 814 space
rural leveling 79, 148⫺149, 316⫺319, 323, ⫺ communicative J communicative space
326ⴚ328 ⫺ creole J creole space
rurbanization 28, 728 ⫺ cultural (Kulturraum) J cultural space
Index 887
⫺ digital J digital space ⫺ conversational J conversational style

⫺ discontinuous language J discontinuous lan- ⫺ social J social style
guage space style cluster 638ⴚ640, 646
⫺ geographic(al) J geographic(al) space substandard 57, 216, 230, 237ⴚ238, 252,
⫺ language J language space 259, 284, 291, 302, 357, 368, 369, 708, 717,
⫺ linguistic J linguistic space 718, 719, 867, 870
⫺ political J political space superimposition (of standard variety) 289,
⫺ social J social space 304, 305, 306, 307
⫺ topographic J topographic space supra-local structure 152
⫺ transnational J transnational spaces Swedish 95, 380, 688, 689, 690, 693, 694,
⫺ variation J variation space 695, 697, 699, 700, 806
⫺ virtual J virtual space ⫺ in Finland 385, 386
spatial analysis 575 Swiss German 74, 216, 243⫺245, 247, 252,
spatialization 38, 39, 40 279, 282, 289, 359, 360, 471, 518, 521⫺522,
spatial variation 143, 764, 821, 822 524, 649, 651⫺652, 658, 659, 660, 763,
speech levels (Sprechlagen) 41ⴚ42, 215, 217, 772⫺773, 788, 792, 817, 847, 848, 870
218, 303, 306 switching J code switching
Sprachatlas J Deutscher Sprachatlas synchronization 211ⴚ213, 215, 216, 220,
Sprachbund 427ⴚ428, 812 676, 678, 681
Sprachinsel 118, 332ⴚ348, 381, 489, 807⫺ ⫺ macro- J macrosynchronization
808, 811 ⫺ meso- J mesosynchronization
Sprachdynamik 211 ⫺ micro- J microsynchronization
Sprechlagen J speech levels syncretism 210, 807
spontaneity, spontaneous 76, 399, 441, 512, synonymy 579, 827
514, 520, 650, 654, 717, 825, 858 syntax 79, 113, 126, 135⫺138, 243, 290, 345,
spread zone 431⫺432 365, 367, 392, 423, 425, 432, 482, 483, 490,
stability 496, 506, 507, 513, 578, 582, 616, 689, 815,
⫺ functional J functional stability 826, 831, 837ⴚ859
⫺ horizontal J horizontal stability
⫺ linguistic J linguistic stability
⫺ structural J structural stability
⫺ vertical J vertical stability T
Stamm, Stämme 108, 118ⴚ121
standard variety 22ⴚ23, 24, 26, 29, 217, 277, temporal 788⫺789
297, 290, 296, 299ⴚ300, 301, 302, 305, 307, territorial principle 381⫺383, 385
308, 345, 346, 356, 410, 856 territory 33, 37, 51, 56, 60, 65, 99, 114, 116,
⫺ national J national standard variety 117, 121, 144, 168, 171, 186, 193, 268, 276,
⫺ new J new standard variety 301, 375, 377, 381ⴚ383, 385, 386, 387, 388,
standardization 24, 38ⴚ39, 262, 301 471, 712, 725, 746, 747, 794, 811
St. Helena 461, 463 ⫺ political J political territories
stimulus variable 531ⴚ534, 535, 540, 541 tertiary dialect feature 368
string distance 552 theory of language change J language change
structural boundary 209, 214, 217, 296, tone accent 674, 787, 796, 798, 808
674⫺676, 678 tone accent boundary 674
structural complexity 432, 444, 859 topographic space 810
structural dialectology 127⫺128 traditional dialectology 126, 128, 201, 275⫺
structuralism 70, 71, 126, 127 276, 315⫺316, 531, 616, 618, 641, 663
structural stability 355, 356, 365ⴚ366 transidiomatic practices 52, 62ⴚ64, 65
study of variation 164, 169, 176, 866 transition(al) zone 99, 246, 269, 361, 579,
style 155, 166ⴚ169, 173⫺176, 234ⴚ235, 271, 673, 774, 796, 805, 815, 843, 846, 853ⴚ854
325, 503, 541⫺542, 544, 638⫺642, 646, 696, translation task 518ⴚ519, 522, 524, 843
701, 717, 742⫺743, 751⫺754, 865⫺867 transmigrants, transmigration 51, 54
888 Index
transnational languages 50⫺52, 55⫺56, 58⫺ ⫺ microparametric J microparametric varia-

65, 443, 687, 729 tion
transnational spaces 50⫺51 ⫺ micro- J microvariation
transnationalism 50, 725, 726, 729, 736 ⫺ spatial J spatial variation
Tristan da Cunha English 457, 458, 461ⴚ463 ⫺ social J social variation
typology 334, 344, 378ⴚ381, 419ⴚ440, 581, ⫺ study of J study of variation
838, 839, 840, 841, 842, 843, 855ⴚ857, 858 variationist sociolinguistics 145, 148, 398,
⫺ areal J areal typology 531, 535, 536, 614, 635, 805
variation space 621
variation theory 163
U variety 22, 112, 128, 168, 174, 202, 203, 205,
211, 214ⴚ215, 218, 226, 227, 228, 229, 235,
urban 6, 11, 25, 28, 40, 79, 111, 115, 121, 236, 237, 242ⴚ244, 251, 252, 253, 259, 261,
143, 145ⴚ146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 154, 155, 266, 271, 275, 277, 289, 290ⴚ291, 295ⴚ296,
156, 157, 171, 172, 232, 246, 259, 270, 280, 297, 299, 302, 307, 334, 339, 341, 343, 347,
281, 290, 302, 315ⴚ332, 333, 337, 340, 345, 357, 367, 369, 370, 393, 395, 434, 445, 453ⴚ
346, 347, 348, 382, 445, 447, 448, 470, 475, 454, 455ⴚ456, 458, 463, 464, 472, 474, 499,
614, 618, 619, 625, 688, 689, 698, 701, 702, 615, 688, 779, 795, 811, 833, 845, 852, 855,
718, 727, 743, 748, 750, 814, 867, 868 856, 859
urban identity 325⫺326 ⫺ concept of J concept of variety
urban space 156, 688, 698, 702 ⫺ contact J contact variety
urban dialectology 145, 316, 475 ⫺ diaphasic J diaphasic variety
urbanization 28, 316, 323, 327, 328, 424, ⫺ diastratic J diastratic variety
618, 728 ⫺ diatopic J diatopic variety
Uruguayan Portuguese 485, 707⫺722 ⫺ full J full variety
USA dialects 230 ⫺ high (H-variety) J high variety (H-variety)
⫺ low (L-variety) J low variety (L-variety)
⫺ national standard J national standard
V variety
⫺ new standard J new standard variety
validity 26, 91, 181, 299, 302, 366, 436, 471, ⫺ overseas J overseas variety
494, 495, 496, 497ⴚ498, 499, 501, 503, 504, ⫺ reevaluation of J reevaluation of varieties
506, 507, 509, 530, 544, 562, 575, 618, 680 ⫺ restructuring of J restructuring of varieties
variability 206, 226, 259, 303, 391, 394⫺395, ⫺ sectoral J sectoral variety
397, 400, 410⫺411, 445⫺446, 456, 458, 460, ⫺ standard J standard variety
494, 502, 571, 537, 583⫺584, 657, 662ⴚ663, ⫺ vernacular J vernacular varieties
676, variety complexes 708
variable variety formation 213, 215, 216, 217, 265,
⫺ background J background variable 301, 453
⫺ dependent J dependent variable Verdichtungsbereiche J speech levels
⫺ independent J independent variable vernacular, vernacularization 23, 26, 27, 166,
⫺ linguistic J linguistic variable 167, 232, 243, 245, 280, 281, 283, 286, 291,
⫺ morphosyntactic J morphosyntactic vari- 296, 297ⴚ298, 317, 318, 323, 325, 337, 339,
able 347, 394, 395, 399, 446, 448, 504, 593, 621,
⫺ sociolinguistic J sociolinguistic variable 626, 632, 641ⴚ642, 645, 696, 741, 742, 744,
⫺ stimulus J stimulus variable 745, 746, 747, 748, 749, 750, 751, 754, 844,
variable rule 132, 143, 400ⴚ409, 622 846, 867, 869
variation vernacular varieties (lantsprachen) 174, 297,
⫺ geographic(al) J geographic(al) variation 299, 302, 621, 625, 747, 749
⫺ lectal J lectal variation vertical convergence 259ⴚ260, 265, 269,
⫺ lexical J lexical variation 271⫺272
⫺ meaning in J meaning in variation vertical stability 355
Index 889
virtual community 61 Wrede, Ferdinand 87, 88, 89, 91ⴚ94, 97,

virtual space 743, 746 100, 101, 108, 120, 121, 505, 579
vocalism 130, 284 written elicitation 514⫺515, 520ⴚ525
voice 191ⴚ195, 248, 250, 252, 256, 319, 366, Württemberg School 88, 96ⴚ101
456, 457, 517, 541, 543, 544, 545, 546, 558,
559, 617, 638, 677, 678, 679, 742, 744, 745,
746, 747, 748, 752ⴚ754, 764, 788 Y
voice placement 193
voice quality 195, 644, 787, 790 youth 24, 47, 61, 213, 246, 396, 697, 872
Volk 34, 107ⴚ122
Volksforschung 108, 110, 111
Z
zone 57, 151, 152, 185, 209, 219, 228, 278,
W 286, 296, 303, 357, 379, 380, 382, 383, 662,
707, 843, 847, 854
wave diffusion J contagion/contagious diffu- ⫺ contact J contact zone
sion ⫺ relict J relict zone
Wenker, Georg 87, 88ⴚ91, 92, 97, 204, 574, ⫺ residual J residual zone
575ⴚ576, 577, 578, 579, 583, 616, 760, 761 ⫺ spread J spread zone
West German 278, 279, 873 ⫺ transition(al) J transition(al) zone
working-class accent 318 zone convergence 427⫺429

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Language and Space:

Theories and Methods

Mitbegründet von Gerold Ungeheuer ()

Herausgegeben von / Edited by / Edités par

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Language and space: theories and methods : an international hand-

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

쑔 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York

these, the theoretical wing, encompasses a transdisciplinary discussion of the notion of

Jürgen Erich Schmidt, Marburg (Germany)

questionnaires (Wenker) were replaced by direct (face-to-face) surveys conducted by

⫺ The development of web-based resources which cross-connect data on the dialect

As a counterfoil, Part II introduces the impressive abundance of genuinely linguistic

While the investigation of phonetic/phonological, lexical and, to a more limited ex-

Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt 1

Introduction to the Language and Space series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

I. Introduction: Language and space

II. Linguistic approaches to space

III. Structure and dynamics o a language space

IV. Structure and dynamics across language spaces

V. Data collection and corpus-building

VI. Data analysis and the presentation o results

VII. Exemplary studies

VIII. Structural domains: Methodological problems

1. Language and geographical space

2. The science o empire: Geography to 1918

The sixteenth-century European transition from feudalism to capitalism both enabled

3. Region and culture

4. Superorganicism and social-scientiic geography

5. The 1960s onwards: Towards new paradigms

5.1. Marxist-inluenced geography

5.2. Humanistic geography

5.3. Discourse and place

activities as attempts to cultivate community pride. Cultural geographers who focus on

In choosing to organize this chapter chronologically, I mean to highlight the variety of

Barbara Johnstone, Pittsburgh (USA)

2. Language and social spaces

a geographical one, but in many contexts it is interpreted primarily as an expression of

2. The conventionalization o linguistic practices:

The role of language as a sociohistorical phenomenon serves as the theoretical basis of

communities with unique discourse traditions. To a community of practice the repetition

As members of a community we share preferred social representations, stereotypes, and

Linguistic utterances or expressions are always produced in particular contexts or markets,

In other words, a condition of hegemony develops in a particular market, regardless of

3. The dialect user versus the standard user  a matter o

Accordingly, the relationship between speakers of a standard variety and speakers of a

A slightly modified version of the ideas presented in Maurand (1981) is presented as

4. Traditionmodernity: A nexus between geographical and

Under such conditions, each individual is exposed to a number of competing norms

Brit Mæhlum, Trondheim (Norway)

3. Language and political spaces

Speaking overcomes distance: We communicate across stretches of space, relying on

2. Language ideologies and spatial representations

2.1. Locational technologies

Herder considered geography to be an influence on national language, but how space

2.2. Language maps and their limits

that assumed language ⫽ national spirit ⫽ political autonomy, multilingual empires

3. Standard languages in national space

(1981) has called “chronotopes”: cultural categories identifying a nexus of space-time

Dialectologists working in countries with standardized regimes (now virtually every-

4. Other models, other maps

4.1. Southeast Asian polities

A striking contrast to contemporary European maps is the Southeast Asian “galactic

3. The dialect user versus the standard user a matter o

4. Traditionmodernity: A nexus between geographical and