This chapter presents a bird's eye perspective on Dutch, taking a historical perspective. Indeed, many characteristics of Dutch can only be understood by diachronically tracing the origin and development of its phonology, morphology, and syntax. For phonology, the major trends are an increasing phonemic importance and proliferation of vowels, an erosion of the Auslaut, and a closing and diphthongization of long vowels. For grammar the trends can be summarized as a gradual loss of inflectional morphology, a concomitant rise in configurationality, and a gradual crystallization in fixed expressions. Both in its structure and in its development there is considerable overlap with drifts in the neighboring languages, and indeed, Dutch is often found to occupy an intermediate position between its West-Germanic neighbors, not only geographically, but ‘typologically’ as well. Dialect variation is mainly organized along a geographic east–west axis, linking up with Franconian-Ingvaeonic contacts in the Early Middle Ages.
Article
Dutch
Freek Van de Velde
Article
Endangered Chinese Dialects
Qingwen Zhang and Guanen Chen
Starting from an overview of the 10 major Chinese dialect groups, the article aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to endangered Chinese dialects. It delineates the causes and indicators of endangerment, describes the geographical distribution and speaking population of endangered dialects, and elucidates the influence of dominant languages on the linguistic traits of endangered dialects. The paper concludes with an exploration of ongoing preservation efforts dedicated to safeguarding endangered Chinese dialects.
The decrease in language use, influenced by the dominance of Mandarin and other dominant dialects, is identified as the primary cause of endangerment. The implementation of the language policy designating Mandarin as the standard national language to be used in education, administration, and public domains throughout the country has further contributed to this decline. Indicators of endangerment include decreased language use, bilingualism or multilingualism in dominant dialects, and limited domains of usage resulting in language shifting. The disruption of linguistic transmission from older to younger generations is another factor contributing to a diminishing population of speakers. Geographically, the largest cluster of endangered Chinese dialects is distributed at the junction of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hunan provinces. These dialects have a small population of speakers, ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands.
Linguistically, the impact of dominant dialects on endangered dialects pertains to their phonological, lexical, and grammatical properties. While phonological instability displayed due to the influence of dominant dialects, certain stable features are identified, such as the retention or development of Middle Chinese voiced stops and affricates, as well as the preservation of sharp sounds. Lexical properties of endangered dialects are discussed in two aspects: (a) distinctive words in endangered dialects, including dialect-specific words, ancient Chinese words, and those related to folk culture; (b) word order variation between the endangered dialect and its dominant dialect. The erosion of grammatical properties is also noted, with endangered dialects borrowing features from dominant dialects.
The article emphasizes the importance of preserving linguistic diversity and protecting endangered Chinese dialects. The National Language Resources Protection Project in China is introduced as a comprehensive initiative aimed at surveying, collecting, and recording language resources. The project includes the publication of books, symposia, and an online platform showcasing audio and video recordings of endangered dialects. However, a comprehensive approach that includes explicit language policies and the establishment of dialect-promoting institutions are necessary for comprehensive protection.
Article
Segmental Phonology, Phonotactics, and Syllable Structure in the Romance Languages
Stephan Schmid
From the perspective of phonological typology, the Romance languages exhibit considerable diversity, although they all originate from the same ancestor language, that is, “Vulgar Latin.” Most consonant inventories are of average size, with 20–23 phonemes, whereas typologically marked segments (e.g., palatal obstruents or retroflex consonants) only occur in a minority of Romance varieties. Instead, the number of vowel phonemes varies substantially, ranging from 5 in Spanish to 16 in French (which features front rounded vowels and nasal vowels). Substantial differences also exist regarding the treatment of unstressed vowels, which are subject to various degrees of reduction—including their deletion in both diachrony and synchrony. Consequently, such phonological processes yield various degrees of phonotactic complexity: While most Romance varieties are commonly counted among the so-called syllable languages, with a strong preference for open syllables and relatively simple consonant clusters ordered along the sonority scale, some dialects depart from this general tendency, allowing complex consonant clusters that may also run against the sonority sequencing generalization.
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
Intonation in the Romance Languages
Barbara Gili Fivela
The article discusses the main intonation features of Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Raeto-Romance, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish, even though they have been investigated to different extents for their intonation traits. Differing amount of research has been carried out on each individual language, this research has often been performed with different methods and with reference to different frameworks, and, finally, investigations have considered language dialects and varieties in a variety of ways.
Nevertheless, scientific literature on intonation in Romance languages, especially that which refers to the autosegmental–metrical framework, has highlighted similarities and differences regarding prominence, phrasing, and the relationship between intonation patterns and pragmatic meaning. Pitch prominence is attested in all languages and varieties, whether it is related to lexical stressed positions or accentual phrases (APs), and the nuclear prominence does not need to be implemented on the rightmost element; consistently, Romance languages usually show pitch-range compression rather than de-accenting in statements. As for phrasing, most languages and varieties feature at least two levels above the word (the intonational phrase [IP] and the intermediate phrase [ip]), while some languages and varieties also feature a third level in the prosodic hierarchy (the AP), and one variety has one level only (the IP). Regarding pitch patterns, languages and varieties show a highly variable number of nuclear contours and internal variation; these, however, largely depend on the sentence type; this is because variation tends to be greater in questions than in broad-focus statements, where the usual pattern a falling one Romance languages.
The article’s final remarks focus on open issues, such as the debates on pitch-accent density and the prosodic levels, with a specific reference to the ip constituent and to constituents larger than the IP. Additionally, it addresses the need for larger comparable corpora, collected by means of the same methods and transcribed with reference to the same framework, as well as for a wider perspective which also takes into account the integration of context and multimodal information, in order to deepen the current body of knowledge on intonation in the Romance languages.
Article
Suprasegmental Phenomena in Germanic: Tonal Accent
Pavel Iosad
Several Germanic varieties possess a phonological contrast usually referred to as “tonal accent.” They demonstrate phonological contrasts between words that are otherwise identical in their segmental make-up and the location of stress, as in (Urban East) Norwegian bønder ‘farmers’ and bønner ‘beans’, both segmentally [ˈbønːər]. Usually, the contrast is treated as implemented by pitch trajectories; hence, the name 'tonal accent.' Within Germanic, tonal accent contrasts are found in three (historically, perhaps four) areas. First, they occur in most varieties of Norwegian and Swedish, as well as in some Danish dialects; in addition, most varieties of Danish show a peculiar type of accentual distinction based on laryngealization, traditionally known as stød. Second, they are found in a set of West Germanic dialects along the middle Rhine and the Moselle, the so-called Franconian tonal area. Third, they are reported from many varieties of Low German, specifically North Low Saxon. Finally, they may have been present historically in Frisian.
Three aspects of Germanic tonal accent systems are of particular interest to linguistic theory. In terms of synchronic analysis, accents have been considered as sui generis objects, as fundamentally tonal phenomena, and as artifacts of contrasts in metrical (foot) structure and its mapping to intonation. Diachronically, Germanic accents are a poor fit to the cross-linguistic typology of tonogenesis: their development is intimately tied to processes manipulating metrical structures, such as vowel lengthening, syllable deletion and insertion, and clash resolution. Finally, they offer some enlightening case studies with respect to the role of language contact in the development of prosodic systems.
Article
Writing Systems in Modern West Germanic
Martin Evertz-Rittich
The writing systems of the modern West Germanic languages have many features in common: They are all written using the Modern Roman Alphabet and exhibit a certain depth, that is, in addition to the pure grapheme–phoneme correspondences, prosodic, morphological, and syntactic information that is systematically encoded in their writing systems. A notable exception is the writing system of Yiddish, which is not only written with an alphabet evolved from the Hebrew script but is also almost completely transparent.
Except for Yiddish, all writing systems of modern West Germanic languages use graphematic syllable and foot structures to encode suprasegmental properties such as vowel quantity. Paradigmatic relations are represented by morphological spellings (especially stem and affix constancy). Syntagmatic relations are expressed, for example, in compound spelling, which adheres to the same principles in all writing systems under discussion.
The writing systems of modern West Germanic languages have been studied by grapholinguists in varying depth. While German is probably the best researched writing system in the world, some writing systems, such as Luxembourgish, await thorough grapholinguistic investigation.
Article
Central Italo-Romance (Including Standard Italian)
Elisa De Roberto
Central Italo-Romance includes Standard Italian and the Tuscan dialects, the dialects of the mediana and perimediana areas, as well as Corsican. This macro-area reaches as far north as the Carrara–Senigallia line and as far south as the line running from Circeo in Lazio to the mouth of the Aso river in Le Marche, cutting through Ceprano, Sora, Avezzano, L’Aquila and Accumoli. It is made up of two main subareas: the perimediana dialect area, covering Perugia, Ancona, northeastern Umbria, and Lazio north of Rome, where varieties show greater structural proximity to Tuscan, and the mediana area (central Le Marche, Umbria, central-eastern Lazio varieties, the Sabine or Aquilano-Cicolano-Reatino dialect group). Our description focuses on the shared and diverging features of these groups, with particular reference to phonology, morphology, and syntax.
Article
Phonological Variation and Change in Latin American Spanish
Pedro Martín-Butragueño and Érika Mendoza
“Latin American Spanish” (LAS) represents a substantial portion of the Spanish-speaking world. The geographical distances, the contrasts between rural and extremely urbanized areas, the existence of strong social inequalities and migratory streams, and the presence of a high number of indigenous American languages—all create the conditions for a complex linguistic reality, clearly diversified, while also unitary. Many variable linguistic phenomena correlate with the age of LAS expansion and the continuing massive urbanization that began in the 1960s.
American Spanish-speaking communities have different segmental processes, such as consonantal weakening in intervocalic contexts, deletion in syllabic coda, vowel devoicing, among others. On the prosodic level, there is dialectal variation in intonational patterns and differences in rhythmic properties. Both segmental and prosodic variation is conditioned by linguistic, geographical, and social factors.
Article
Segmental Phenomena in Germanic: Consonants
Samantha Litty and Joseph Salmons
Speech sounds are divided into vowels and consonants, the latter being the focus here. Germanic includes ancient and modern “named languages”—traditionally divided into North Germanic (e.g., Swedish, Danish, Faroese), West Germanic (e.g., German, English, Yiddish), and East Germanic languages not spoken for centuries (notably Gothic). The family also includes countless “dialects,” which are often not mutually intelligible and so could be understood as distinct languages. Languages of the world vary in how many consonants distinguish differences in meaning (create phonological contrasts), like
bear versus
pear, from 6 to over 100. Most have about 20 and Germanic languages are near that number. Beyond abstract phonological contrasts, each consonant varies phonetically, in actual pronunciation, from varying degrees of aspiration on p, t, k and voicing on b, d, g to fundamental variation in the realizations of /r/, /l/, and /h/. Key consonantal phenomena are presented in historical context and for contemporary languages, with an emphasis on distinguishing abstract, phonological patterns from concrete, phonetic ones. Despite the long research tradition, many issues proffer opportunities to advance the field and are discussed to encourage readers to engage with them.
