Jean Séguy and Hans Goebl were the founders both of Romance dialectometry and of dialectometry in general, which focused largely on Romance languages in its early years. While other attention to dialects had appealed to scholarly intuition to adduce the principles behind the geographic distribution of linguistic variation, dialectometry insisted on employing exact methods and on basing analyses on entire large samples of material. The samples may often be found in dialect atlases, which pre-dialectometry scholars had assiduously compiled.
Dialectometry thus continues the work of dialectology but always proceeding from entire large data collections and using methods that are more exact. It would nonetheless be a mistake to regard dialectometry as purely a methodological contribution, for dialectometry enables new research questions as well as sharper versions of traditional ones, which it has also pursued.
Most centrally, dialectometry asks how geography influences linguistic variation, contrasting, for example, the perspective of discrete dialect areas with that of continua or examining the influence of distance or dialect areas on differences among varieties. It further seeks to characterize the sorts of variation involved (i.e., which sounds, words, or grammatical elements are involved) and aspires to characterize linguistic variation in ways that facilitate comparison to variation in other cultural dimensions such as religion, ethnicity, or mobility.
Further work on Romance dialectometry has built on Séguy’s and Goebl’s innovative foundations (see ORE article on the Salzburg school) and has expanded the empirical scope of the research line to include non-geographic influences as well. Further contributions to this area of study have conducted analyses on different Romance language areas and have incorporated novel data collection protocols, new measures of pronunciation differences as encoded in phonetic transcription (edit distance), and novel statistical analyses, notably the application of multidimensional scaling, mixed-effects regression techniques, and generalized additive models.
Emerging questions in dialectometry include attention to linguistic levels beyond phonetics and lexicology, the stricter validation of its techniques, more effective means of identifying the most important linguistic bases exploited in dialectal differentiation, and naturally the continued research into the enormous range of linguistic variation and its geographic distribution.
Article
Further Contributions to Romance Dialectometry
John Nerbonne
Article
Gender Systems in Germanic
Jenny Audring
Grammatical gender is a pervasive property of the Germanic languages. The typical Germanic gender system distinguishes three values: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The gender value of a noun is not expressed on the noun itself, but shows on agreeing words such as articles, adjectives, and a variety of pronouns. In all Germanic languages except for the two most conservative, Icelandic and Faroese, gender is distinguished only in the singular. Some of the languages have reduced the traditional three gender values to two. In most varieties, this involves the conflation of the historical masculine and feminine. In these languages, nouns denoting male or female persons appear with the same form of the article and other agreeing words. However, the personal pronouns often retain the masculine-feminine split. Some agreement targets have lost their ability to mark gender altogether. In the most extreme cases, gender agreement is limited to the personal and the possessive pronouns, such as in English and in Afrikaans.
What gender a noun belongs to is regulated by assignment principles. Germanic shows semantic, morphological, and phonological assignment principles. In the more traditional languages, especially Icelandic, Faroese, and German, the inflectional class of a noun is an important predictor for its gender. The pronominal gender languages Afrikaans and English have purely semantic systems. This appears to be a typical correlation, observable in other languages.
This article describes the gender systems of Germanic comparatively and points out interesting complexities that inform our understanding of this puzzling grammatical feature.
Article
Germanic Languages in Contact in Central and South America
Karoline Kühl
West and North Germanic language varieties have been part of the Latin American language ecology since the middle of the 19th century, when European mass migration created Germanic-speaking immigrant communities in North, Central, and South America. The subsequent fate of the Germanic immigrant varieties in Latin America varied greatly in terms of how long intergenerational transfer has been maintained, if and to what degree language maintenance has been supported by linguistic codification and language teaching, and the degree of contact with the surrounding majority population. Some languages like the Mennonite Low German varieties have been quite repellent with regard to language change induced by contact with the majority languages Portuguese and/or Spanish, other (Germanic) immigrant varieties, and indigenous languages. However, contact with the majority population and other (immigrant) ethnic groups, bilingualism, and, accordingly, the influence of Spanish and/or Portuguese has been growing for most Germanic immigrant varieties at least since the 1950s.
The long-standing German dialectological research tradition into extra-territorial Germanic language islands has led to detailed accounts of many German varieties in Latin America. Accounts of other Germanic varieties are much more restricted, both in numbers and in extent: Some like Argentine Danish or Patagonian Afrikaans have been described only recently; others, like Swedish in Brazil and Argentine Dutch, hardly at all. In all cases, the accounts differ greatly regarding if, and to what extent, language contact is included as a cause of language change. Based on the scholarly coverage, the extent of contact-induced change in the Germanic varieties in Latin America appears to vary greatly, but whether this impression is due to the varying degrees of attention that the accounts devote to the effects of language contact or to particular sociolinguistic circumstances preventing or promoting language contact cannot be established. Still, contact linguistic profiles of many Germanic immigrant varieties in Latin America present themselves as a promising terra incognita for future research.
From a bird’s-eye perspective, we may in general terms conclude that the Germanic varieties in Latin America are characterized by lexical borrowing, at least for cultural loans and discourse-structuring elements, as well as ad hoc code-switching. Interestingly, a number of varieties show a similar pattern of integrating Spanish or Portuguese verb stems of verbs ending in -ir and -ar into a very similar inflectional Germanic paradigm (Misiones Swedish -era, Argentine Danish -is(ere), Riograndenser Hunsrückisch -ieren, Volga German -i(:)ere). In general, syntactical restructurings seem to be restricted, with the notable exception of standard deviant omission of mainly pronominal subjects and, partly, pronominal objects. Other developments are specific, applying only to individual varieties.
Article
Germanic Languages in Contact in North America
Michael T. Putnam
Over the course of 400 years, numerous speakers of Germanic languages have immigrated to North America. The primary purposes of these immigrations were to avoid political and religious persecution and seek economic stability and growth. These contact varieties of Germanic origin are the intense focus of linguistic research involving multiple sub-disciplines within the field (e.g., sociolinguistic, structural/formal, corpus, and experimental approaches). A deeper investigation into the exact nature of the factors and subsequent results of language shift and structural outcomes found in these varieties challenges a number of long-standing assumptions about language contact, shift, and change in these intense contact settings. First, upon closer inspection, calls for severe language attrition, decay, and loss are largely unattested, which divert the focus from reported language shift to a transition to a post-vernacular state of the contact language in a given area. Second, the specific outcomes of language attrition, innovation, and maintenance in various structural domains of grammar of these individuals and communities (e.g., phonetics/phonology, morphology, mental lexicon, syntax, etc.) provide a basis for comparison both within and beyond this language family. These comparisons enable linguistics to better understand the directions and limits of structural changes in contact Germanic, which can be applied to other populations past and present. Third, these findings collectively contribute broadly to research in contact and heritage linguistics, providing invaluable cross-linguistic data from multiple dyads (including those with non-European ethnic and linguistic backgrounds). Research on these vernaculars advances our collective understanding of contact and diasporic Germanic varieties around the world while additionally making lasting contributions to research on contact and heritage linguistics.
Article
Gothic
D. Gary Miller
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Please check back later for the full article.
Apart from runic inscriptions, Gothic is the earliest attested language of the Germanic family, dating to the 4th century. Along with Crimean Gothic, it belongs to the branch known as East Germanic. The bulk of the extant Gothic corpus is a translation of the Bible, of which only a portion remains. The translation is traditionally ascribed to Wulfila, who is credited with inventing the Gothic alphabet. The many Greek conventions both help and hinder interpretation of the Gothic phonological system. As in Greek, letters of the alphabet functioned as numerals, but the late letter names were from runic.
Gothic inflectional categories include nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Nouns are inflected for three genders, two numbers, and four cases. Various stem types inherited from Indo-European constitute different form classes in Gothic. Adjectives have the same properties and are also inflected according to so-called weak and strong forms, as are Gothic verbs. Verbs are inflected for three persons and numbers, an indicative and a nonindicative mood (here called “optative”), past and nonpast tense, and voice. The mediopassive survives in Gothic morphologically as a synthetic passive and syntactically in innovated periphrastic formations; middle and anticausative functions were taken over by reflexive-type structures. Nonfinite forms are the infinitive, the imperative, and two participles.
In syntax, Gothic had null subjects as an option, mostly in the third person singular. Aspect was effected primarily by prefixes, which have many other functions, and aspect is not consistently indicated. Absolute constructions with a participle occurred in various cases with functional differences. Relativization was effected primarily by relative pronouns built on demonstratives plus a complementizer. Complementizers could be used with subordinate clause verbs in the indicative or optative. The switch to the optative was triggered by irrealis, matrix verbs that do not permit a full range of subordinate tenses, expression of a hope or wish, potentiality, and several other conditions. Many of these are also relevant to matrix clauses (independent optatives).
Essentials of linearization include prepositional phrases, default postposed genitives and possessive adjectives, and preposed demonstratives. Verb-object order predominates, but there is much Greek influence. Verb-auxiliary order is native Gothic.
Article
Gothic and Other East Germanic Varieties
Stefan Schaffner
Biblical Gothic is the earliest Germanic language preserved in a longer text. The main source is represented by the Bible translation of the Visigothic Arian Christian bishop Wulfila ( born ca. 311, deceased ca. 382–383). Another few short Gothic texts are extant. For the translation of the Bible (ca. 350–380), on the basis of a Greek text, Wulfila invented his own alphabet (called Wulfila’s alphabet), using the Greek alphabet as model, with the addition of Latin and runic characters. Several manuscripts (5th/6th century; the most famous is the Uppsala Codex argenteus) contain the greater part of the New Testament. In spite of its fragmentary documentation, Gothic represents without doubt an important basis for the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, because it offers—due to its early attestation—very archaic features in all areas of its grammar in comparison with the other old Germanic languages, the documentation of which began some centuries later. Gothic also shows recent innovations (especially the almost complete elimination of the effects of Verner’s Law within the strong verbs). The position of Gothic within the other Germanic subgroups, North and West Germanic, is still a matter of controversial discussion. Whereas older research stressed the correspondences between Gothic and North Germanic and, therefore, favored a closer relationship between them, postulating a subgroup Goto-Nordic, currently, a subgrouping into Northwest Germanic on the one hand and East Germanic (with Gothic as the most important representative) one the other hand is preferred, although this model also leaves open a couple of questions, giving impetus to further research. Other varieties of East Germanic are runic epigraphic texts (less than 10, most of them probably Gothic) from the 1st half of the 3rd century until the end of the 6th century. One of them (on the Charnay fibula, 2nd half of the 6th century) is probably of Burgundian origin. The documentation of other EGrm (East Germanic). languages is very poor and consists almost only of a few names. Two short syntagmata can probably be attributed to Vandalic. Crimean Gothic, the latest attested EGrm. language, is documented in a list of several dozen words and three lines of a cantilena. Most attested forms seem to represent a late EGrm. dialect.
Article
Greek in Contact with Romance
Angela Ralli
In the course of its long history, Greek has experienced a particularly multifarious and profound contact with Romance, in a wide geographical area that spreads from western to eastern Europe and also covers part of the once Hellenophone Asia Minor. The beginning of this contact is difficult to delimit given that the ancestor languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, were already in interaction even before the Roman period of the Greek-speaking world. Both Greek and Romance (Italo-Romance, Gallo-Romance, Aromanian, and Judeo-Spanish) have acted as donor or recipient, depending on the specific historical and sociolinguistic circumstances. A significant number of lexical items (roots, affixes, and words) were transferred from one language to another, while phonological and structural transfers have also occurred in areas where Greek has been in constant and long contact with Romance, as for instance, in south Italy. Greek has been the basis for the formation of scientific internationalisms in Romance, and reversely it has recently adopted Romance terms and term-forming affixes.
Article
(High) German
Simon Pickl
(High) German is both a group of closely related West Germanic varieties and a standardized language derived from this group that comprises a wide range of dialects and colloquial varieties in addition to its standardized form. The two terms have related, and to an extent overlapping, but distinct meanings: German refers to a Standard Average European language spoken predominantly in Central Europe by some 96 million speakers and by minority speech communities around the globe. High German has a double meaning: On the one hand, it is another term for Standard German. On the other hand, it refers to the High German linguistic group within West Germanic, the linguistic basis for the German language. As such, it is defined by the High German consonant shift, a sound change that affected Germanic obstruents and set it apart from its immediate neighbors within (West) Germanic, that is, Low German and Low Franconian. The High German consonant shift around the 7th century, together with the onset of written transmission in the 8th century, marks the beginning of the history of (High) German. Traditional dialects perpetuate patterns of areal variation that arose in the wake of this sound change. Standard German developed out of High German written varieties, especially based on East Central German, through processes of leveling, koineization, metalinguistic reasoning, and codification. During that process, the emergent supra-regional norm superseded Low German in northern Germany and Upper German regional norms in the south, as well as influencing spoken registers, but (Standard) German remains a pluricentric and pluriareal language. Today, colloquial, regional varieties that combine features of Standard German and traditional dialects dominate oral language use, and in social media the written language, too, is developing new colloquial forms that build on standard orthography as well as on regional, informal forms of spoken language usage.
Article
Historical Developments from Middle to Early New Indo-Aryan
Vit Bubenik
While in phonology Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) dialects preserved the phonological system of Old Indo-Aryan (OIA) virtually intact, their morphosyntax underwent far-reaching changes, which altered fundamentally the synthetic morphology of earlier Prākrits in the direction of the analytic typology of New Indo-Aryan (NIA). Speaking holistically, the “accusative alignment” of OIA (Vedic Sanskrit) was restructured as an “ergative alignment” in Western IA languages, and it is precisely during the Late MIA period (ca. 5th–12th centuries ce) when we can observe these matters in statu nascendi. There is copious literature on the origin of the ergative construction: passive-to-ergative reanalysis; the ergative hypothesis, i.e., that the passive construction of OIA was already ergative; and a compromise stance that neither the former nor the latter approach is fully adequate. In the spirit of the complementary view of these matters, more attention has to be paid to various pathways in which typological changes operated over different kinds of nominal, pronominal and verbal constituents during the crucial MIA period.
(a) We shall start with the restructuring of the nominal case system in terms of the reduction of the number of cases from seven to four. This phonologically motivated process resulted ultimately in the rise of the binary distinction of the “absolutive” versus “oblique” case at the end of the MIA period). (b) The crucial role of animacy in the restructuring of the pronominal system and the rise of the “double-oblique” system in Ardha-Māgadhī and Western Apabhramśa will be explicated. (c) In the verbal system we witness complete remodeling of the aspectual system as a consequence of the loss of earlier synthetic forms expressing the perfective (Aorist) and “retrospective” (Perfect) aspect. Early Prākrits (Pāli) preserved their sigmatic Aorists (and the sigmatic Future) until late MIA centuries, while on the Iranian side the loss of the “sigmatic” aorist was accelerated in Middle Persian by the “weakening” of s > h > Ø. (d) The development and the establishment of “ergative alignment” at the end of the MIA period will be presented as a consequence of the above typological changes: the rise of the “absolutive” vs. “oblique” case system; the loss of the finite morphology of the perfective and retrospective aspect; and the recreation of the aspectual contrast of perfectivity by means of quasinominal (participial) forms. (e) Concurrently with the development toward the analyticity in grammatical aspect, we witness the evolution of lexical aspect (Aktionsart) ushering in the florescence of “serial” verbs in New Indo-Aryan.
On the whole, a contingency view of alignment considers the increase in ergativity as a by-product of the restoration of the OIA aspectual triad: Imperfective–Perfective–Perfect (in morphological terms Present–Aorist–Perfect). The NIA Perfective and Perfect are aligned ergatively, while their finite OIA ancestors (Aorist and Perfect) were aligned accusatively. Detailed linguistic analysis of Middle Indo-Aryan texts offers us a unique opportunity for a deeper comprehension of the formative period of the NIA state of affairs.
Article
A History of Creole Studies
Silvio Moreira de Sousa, Johannes Mücke, and Philipp Krämer
As an institutionalized subfield of academic research, Creole studies (or Creolistics) emerged in the second half of the 20th century on the basis of pioneering works in the last decades of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. Yet its research traditions—just like the Creole languages themselves—are much older and are deeply intertwined with the history of European colonialism, slavery, and Christian missionary activities all around the globe. Throughout the history of research, creolists focused on the emergence of Creole languages and their grammatical structures—often in comparison to European colonial languages. In connection with the observations in grammar and history, creolists discussed theoretical matters such as the role of language acquisition in creolization, the status of Creoles among the other languages in the world, and the social conditions in which they are or were spoken. These discussions molded the way in which the acquired knowledge was transmitted to the following generations of creolists.
Article
History of the English Language
Ans van Kemenade
The status of English in the early 21st century makes it hard to imagine that the language started out as an assortment of North Sea Germanic dialects spoken in parts of England only by immigrants from the continent. Itself soon under threat, first from the language(s) spoken by Viking invaders, then from French as spoken by the Norman conquerors, English continued to thrive as an essentially West-Germanic language that did, however, undergo some profound changes resulting from contact with Scandinavian and French. A further decisive period of change is the late Middle Ages, which started a tremendous societal scale-up that triggered pervasive multilingualism. These repeated layers of contact between different populations, first locally, then nationally, followed by standardization and 18th-century codification, metamorphosed English into a language closely related to, yet quite distinct from, its closest relatives Dutch and German in nearly all language domains, not least in word order, grammar, and pronunciation.
Article
History of the French Lexicon
Olivier Bertrand
The French lexicon of the early 21st century has two main sources: In the early 21st century, approximately 87% of the vocabulary comes from Latin and 13% from many other languages. The French lexicon was created and developed roughly from the 7th–8th century ce up to the early 21st century. There are three ways to create vocabulary: inheritance from popular Latin, borrowing from other languages (as well as from written Latin), and internal creation (through semantic extension, derivation, and compounding).
Article
History of the Italian Lexicon
Paolo D’Achille
The basis of the Italian lexicon is primarily Latin, with substrate features already existing in the languages spoken before the diverse population on the peninsula was Latinized, prior to the gradual conquest by the Romans, and with terms borrowed from Greek. In addition to the lexemes continued directly from Latin, Italian also shows a Germanic superstrate (Gothic, Lombard, Frankish) and an Arabic adstrate; many Germanisms, Arabisms and Hellenisms were borrowed in the Middle Ages. These were almost always in an adapted form, before the vernacular was given any recognition, and today form part of the “core vocabulary.” The Italian lexicon has also been supplemented by new learned Latin borrowings, exogenous lexemes, borrowings from the other languages with which Italian has been in contact, either directly or indirectly, and dialects (linguistic systems which developed independently of Tuscan/Florentine-based Italian). Similarly, there have been endogenous developments, mainly neologisms.
As mentioned, the vocabulary of Latin origin can be divided into two categories. The first one includes the “inherited” vocabulary, that is words that Italian (like all other Romance languages and dialects) inherited from Latin directly through continued verbal use. Although their number is relatively limited, they have been attested for the longest period and make up the majority of the “core vocabulary.” The second category includes Latinisms, which entered the language through learned written use, from the earliest stages of the language right up to the early 21st century. As most of these were also adapted in the process, they cannot always be clearly distinguished formally from lexemes inherited through popular use. The influx of such forms is to some extent still ongoing. In some cases, in particular in the modern and contemporary eras, it has occurred via other languages, primarily French and English.
Among the exogenous elements, that is borrowings, particularly noteworthy are the Gallicisms, Iberianisms, and Anglicisms, which entered Italian in the modern and contemporary era and were gradually integrated into the Italian lexicon (at least in writing) with adaptation by this stage no longer taking place (it was normal in earlier stages of the language). Calques remain frequent. Another remarkable phenomenon is internal loans or dialecticisms, that is lexemes once restricted to certain dialect areas or regions and that now form part of the common lexicon.
Endogenous processes are represented primarily by the creation of neologisms, that is lexemes created within Italian via the normal means of word-formation (principally derivation and compounding). But attention should also be paid to semantic change: many terms already in use have developed new meanings, in some cases additional to the original meanings, and in other cases replacing them.
Article
History of the Portuguese Lexicon
Bernhard Pöll
The basic vocabulary of Portuguese—the second largest Romance language in terms of speakers (about 210 million as of 2017)—comes from (vulgar) Latin, which itself incorporated a certain amount of so-called substratum and superstratum words. Whereas the former were adopted in a situation of language contact between Latin and the languages of the conquered peoples inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula, the latter are Germanic loans brought mainly by the Visigoths. From 711 onward, until the end of the Middle Ages, Arabic played a major role in the Peninsula, contributing about 1,000 words that are common in Modern Portuguese. (Classical) Latin and Greek were other sources for lexical enrichment especially in the 15th and 16th centuries as well as in the 18th and 19th centuries. Contact with other European languages—Romance and Germanic (especially English, and to a lower extent German)—led to borrowings in several thematic fields reflecting the economic, cultural, and scientific radiance that emanated from the respective language communities. In the course of colonial expansion, Portuguese came into contact with several African, Asian, and Amerindian languages from which it borrowed words for concepts and realia unknown to the Western world.
Article
History of the Raeto-Romance Lexicon
Matthias Grünert
The Raeto-Romance varieties, which are spoken in noncontiguous areas reaching from the Grison Alps in Switzerland to the Italian Adriatic coast near the Slovenian border, are characterized by considerable differences from one another at the lexical level. Hence, when describing the Raeto-Romance lexicon, it is important to pay particular attention to which lexical types occur in which main varieties (i.e., in Romansh of Grisons, Dolomitic Ladin and Friulian, secondarily also in subvarieties).
The mentioned spatial perspective intersects the chronological perspective that aims at presenting the components of different origin entering the Raeto-Romance varieties in different periods. The pre-Roman lexicon is of rather small extent and contains especially terms of flora, fauna, terrain, farming, tools, and equipment. Within the Latin stratum, the lexicon inherited from late Latin, Romance formations (on the basis of elements of Latin origin) and borrowings from Latin have to be distinguished. All Raeto-Romance varieties have numerous borrowings from Germanic varieties. Early Germanic elements already entered late Latin and are present in Raeto-Romance as well as in the neighboring Romance varieties. Borrowings taking place in different periods of the Middle Ages and the Modern Era as well as borrowings from different regional varieties of German are often marked phonetically. Romansh of Grisons has borrowings from Alemannic dialects; however, its most eastern varieties are also characterized by borrowings from Tyrolean, which belongs to the Bavarian dialects. Dolomitic Ladin has been exposed to the influence of Tyrolean. In Friuli, there was a period of German influence from the Bavarian area in the Middle Ages, followed by a period of orientation toward Venetan, and later toward Italian as well. In Grisons and in the Dolomites, the influence of Italian dialects and Italian characterizes to a higher degree the southern varieties (i.e., Vallader and Puter, subsumed in Engadinese [Grisons], as well as Fascian, Fodom, and Anpezan [Dolomites]). In contrast, more numerous borrowings from German distinguish the northern varieties (i.e., Surselvan, Sutselvan, and Surmiran [Grisons] as well as Badiot and Gardenese [Dolomites]). A component characterizing exclusively Friulian is a borrowing from neighboring Slovene.
Article
History of the Romanian Lexicon
Maria Iliescu
The history of the Romanian lexicon has been divided into periods in various ways: (a) the Latin of the Danubian provinces (from around the 2nd to around the 7th centuries); (b) common Romanian (româna comună, from 8th to 11th/12th centuries); and (c) preliterary Romanian (the centuries this period covers vary, from the 8th century at the earliest to the 14th century at the latest) and the rise of literary Romanian (start of the 16th century–1780). This latter period includes the most important stages in the process of unification and modernization of Romanian, and thus of its lexicon; (d) Modern Romanian (1780–1945); and (e) the contemporary era, including the socialist period (1945–1989) and current Romanian.
A stand-alone section 7 discusses the numerous external influences of varied and complex origin: geographic contact, bi- and multilingualism, foreign occupation and/or domination, and last but not least, the strengthening of national conscience followed or accompanied by a cultural and political paradigm shift.
Article
History of the Sardinian Lexicon
Ignazio Putzu
Ever since the fundamental studies carried out by the great German Romanist Max Leopold Wagner (b. 1880–d. 1962), the acknowledged founder of scientific research on Sardinian, the lexicon has been, and still is, one of the most investigated and best-known areas of the Sardinian language.
Several substrate components stand out in the Sardinian lexicon around a fundamental layer which has a clear Latin lexical background. The so-called Paleo-Sardinian layer is particularly intriguing. This is a conventional label for the linguistic varieties spoken in the prehistoric and protohistoric ages in Sardinia. Indeed, the relatively large amount of words (toponyms in particular) which can be traced back to this substrate clearly distinguishes the Sardinian lexicon within the panorama of the Romance languages. As for the other Pre-Latin substrata, the Phoenician-Punic presence mainly (although not exclusively) affected southern and western Sardinia, where we find the highest concentration of Phoenician-Punic loanwords.
On the other hand, recent studies have shown that the Latinization of Sardinia was more complex than once thought. In particular, the alleged archaic nature of some features of Sardinian has been questioned.
Moreover, research carried out in recent decades has underlined the importance of the Greek Byzantine superstrate, which has actually left far more evident lexical traces than previously thought. Finally, from the late Middle Ages onward, the contributions from the early Italian, Catalan, and Spanish superstrates, as well as from modern and contemporary Italian, have substantially reshaped the modern-day profile of the Sardinian lexicon. In these cases too, more recent research has shown a deeper impact of these components on the Sardinian lexicon, especially as regards the influence of Italian.
Article
History of the Spanish Lexicon
Steven N. Dworkin
From an historical perspective, the Spanish lexicon consists of three different categories: (1) its historical core of words inherited from the Latin spoken in the Roman province of Hispania; (2) loanwords that entered Spanish over its long history as a result of contact at the levels of both oral and written discourse with other languages; and (3) words created internally through such mechanisms of derivational morphology as suffixation, prefixation, compounding, back-formations, and so on. Over the last 150 years, specialists in the history of the Spanish language have studied in considerable detail all three sources of lexical material. Although most of the lexical items inherited from spoken Latin have cognates in many (in some cases, all) of the Romance languages, Spanish has preserved some words that live on only in Spanish (and neighboring Portuguese) or only in Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, the geographical extremes of the Romance-speaking world, far removed from the centers of linguistic innovation. As a result of language contact, loanwords from the pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula, Visigothic, Arabic, Gallo-Romance (northern and southern French), Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, classical Latin, native languages of the New World, and English have entered and taken root in the Spanish lexicon. Although such lexical borrowings have often been studied within a cultural framework, recent research has focused on their introduction and incorporation as examples of contact-induced language change at the level of the lexicon. Throughout its history, Spanish has increased the size of its vocabulary through the creation of neologisms through processes of suffixation, prefixation, and composition. The study of such items has traditionally been the focus of specialists in diachronic derivational morphology. This subfield constitutes in many respects an important component of diachronic lexicology. Indeed, etymology and diachronic derivational morphology are two sides of the same coin. Lexical history is not limited to the study of additions to the vocabulary. Over time, many words have fallen into disuse or have become obsolete. Some recent work on the history of the Spanish lexicon has examined the various external and internal/structural causes of lexical loss in the history of the Spanish lexicon.
Article
Hokan Languages
Carmen Jany
Hokan is a linguistic stock or phylum based on a series of hypotheses about deeper genetic relationships among languages that extend geographically from Northern California to Nicaragua. Following the general effort to genetically link the vast number of Native American languages and to reduce them to a few superstocks, Dixon and Kroeber first proposed the Hokan stock in 1913, to include several California indigenous languages: Karuk, Chimariko, Shastan, Palaihnihan (Atsugewi and Achumawi), Pomoan, Yana, and later Esselen and Yuman. The name Hokan stems from the Atsugewi word for “two”: hoqi. While the first proposals by Dixon and Kroeber rested on very limited cognate sets comprising only five words, later assessments by Sapir included hundreds of putative cognate sets and analyses of Hokan morphosyntax. By 1925, Sapir further included Washo, Salinan, Seri, Chumashan, Tequistlatecan, and Subtiaba-Tlapanec as the Southern Hokan branch into the stock.
Throughout the 20th century, scholars sought additional evidence for the stock as more and refined data on the languages became available. A number of languages were added, and earlier proposals were abandoned. A new surge in work on individual California indigenous languages in the 1950s and 1960s prompted a string of studies conducting binary comparisons. This renewed interest inspired a series of Hokan conferences held until the 1990s. A more recent comprehensive assessment of the entire stock was undertaken by Kaufman in 1988. Applying rigorous analysis and only implicating those languages for which he encountered substantial evidence, Kaufman proposes sixteen classificatory units for Hokan clustered geographically. Kaufman’s Hokan stock also includes Coahuilteco and Comecrudan in Mexico and Jicaque in Nicaragua.
Although Hokan was widely studied in the 20th century, and many scholars presented what they thought to be supporting evidence, it is far from being an established genetic unit. In fact, many scholars today treat it with a lot of skepticism. One major challenge, as with any phylum-level affiliation, is its time depth. Proto-Hokan is thought to be at least as antique as Proto-Indo-European. Moreover, many of the languages were spoken in geographically contiguous areas, with speakers being multilingual and in close contact for an extended period of time, as is the case in Northern California. This suggests considerable language contact effects and complicates the distinction between true cognates and ancient borrowings. Many of the languages involved further show similarities in grammatical structure as a result of language contact.
Hokan languages stretch across California, Nevada, South Texas, various parts of Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua and display notable structural differences. Phonologically, the languages show great variation including small and large phoneme inventories and different phonological processes. Typologically, they are equally diverse, but many are considered polysynthetic to varying degrees. Morphosyntactic and grammatical similarities are evident especially among languages spoken in Northern California. These resemblances include sets of lexical affixes with similar meanings and affinities in core argument patterns.
Article
Ibero-Romance II: Astur-Leonese, Spanish, Navarro-Aragonese
José Ignacio Hualde
The Romance varieties spoken in the Iberian Peninsula fall into three major groups: Galician-Portuguese, Central Ibero-Romance and Catalan. All these varieties have their origins in the evolution of Latin in the northern fringe of the Iberian Peninsula and spread southward in the Middle Ages. One of the main features that distinguish the Central Ibero-Romance group from its neighbors to the west and east is the diphthongization of /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ from Latin short ĕ and ŏ in stressed syllables (as in tierra ‘land’, puerta ‘door’ vs. Pt. and Cat. terra, porta). Besides Spanish, which historically derives from the evolution of Latin in the original territory of the Kingdom of Castile, the other main Central Ibero-Romance varieties are Astur-Leonese (including Mirandese, in Portugal) and Aragonese. For the medieval period, Old Navarrese Romance is well documented, as is, to a lesser extent, the transitional variety of La Rioja. There are no documents entirely written in Andalusi Romance, the set of Romance varieties spoken in Islamic Spain in medieval times, but we can infer some of its features from short texts and several other sources.
