Self-reports in linguistic study, which were central to the dialect surveys of the twentieth century, have, by and large, been relegated to the sidelines by more advanced sociolinguistic techniques in recent years. This article probes into the validity of written self-report surveys in relation to the fieldwork method for Vancouver, British Columbia. Confirming Chambers's general findings of equivalence, it produces insights into the preferred length of written questionnaires and offers recommendations as to question type. The present article also compares the written questionnaire results to acoustically analyzed recorded data for yod-dropping and the low-back vowels before /r/, identifying linguistic items that correlate well with results from self-reports and those that fail to produce reliable results because of ongoing linguistic change or reindexicalization in the case of yod-dropping. Overall, written self-report surveys are found to be highly reliable data gathering tools if certain factors are kept in mind.
Pluricentric approaches to international varieties have been a mainstay in English dialectology since the 1980s, often implied rather than expressed. What is standard lore in many philologies is today questioned in one philology, however. This paper assesses the pros and cons of the so-called “pluri-areal” perspective, which has in the past few years become prominent in German dialectology. Intended to replace the pluricentric model, “pluri-arealist” perspectives affect the modelling of German standard varieties in Austria and Switzerland, among others. Attempting to falsify claims on both sides, this paper argues from an English-German comparative perspective that the idiosyncratic treatment of national varieties in one context is a problem that threatens the unity of the field regarding how the standard is seen in relation to other varieties. It is shown that the base of the “pluri-areal” paradigm is an a-theoretical perspective of geographical variation that adheres implicitly to a One Standard German Axiom. This meta-theoretical paper suggests three principles to prevent such terminologically-fuelled confusion henceforth.
The present paper uses data from written self-reports from two points of time, 2004 and 2008-10, to gauge the strength of the Canada-US linguistic border in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. With parallel data sets from Metro Vancouver, Canada, and adjacent Washington State, Vancouver English is characterized as a vernacular that -for the 30 variables studied -is not undergoing Americanization. The data for young local residents who were at least raised, if not born, in the target regions provide solid evidence that present-day Vancouver English is best identified as a linguistically more conservative variety than the vernacular of Washington State. Speakers of second-language varieties of English in Vancouver are shown to amplify differences already present in the local population. While the linguistic boundary in Canada's westernmost province is rarely an isogloss in the qualitative sense of the term (applying only to two cases), it appears to be a stable linguistic boundary in quantitative and statistically significant terms for the variables investigated.
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