Language in Isolation, and Its Implications for Variation and Change

Schreier, Daniel

doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2009.00130.x

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…That is, they are stochastic. This is confirmed by studies of founder effects in the formation of new varieties of English over the last few hundred years (Labov 2002, Trudgill et al 2000, Gordon et al 2004, Ross et al1964, Schreier 2009. Thus, in summary, we expect phonetic founder effects to be either neutral or systempreserving at the phonemic level.…”

Section: Founder Effects In Languagesupporting

confidence: 75%

Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects

Bowern

2011

Linguistic Typology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Founder Effects In Languagesupporting

confidence: 75%

Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects

Bowern

2011

Linguistic Typology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Divergence and convergence in language is caused by isolation and contact between the speakers [4], with language change occurring at different time scales [5]. Intuitively, a connection can be assumed between linguistic variation and the potential of contact, which is, in turn, strongly associated with spatial phenomena such as distance, facility of access by transportation, topography, and even one's role in their social network, e.g., [6][7][8]).…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Japanese Lexical Variation Explained by Spatial Contact Patterns

Jeszenszky

Hikosaka

Imamura

et al. 2019

IJGI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we analyse spatial variation in the Japanese dialectal lexicon by assembling a set of methodologies using theories in variationist linguistics and GIScience, and tools used in historical GIS. Based on historical dialect atlas data, we calculate a linguistic distance matrix across survey localities. The linguistic variation expressed through this distance is contrasted with several measurements, based on spatial distance, utilised to estimate language contact potential across Japan, historically and at present. Further, administrative boundaries are tested for their separation effect. Measuring aggregate associations within linguistic variation can contrast previous notions of dialect area formation by detecting continua. Depending on local geographies in spatial subsets, great circle distance, travel distance and travel times explain a similar proportion of the variance in linguistic distance despite the limitations of the latter two. While they explain the majority, two further measurements estimating contact have lower explanatory power: least cost paths, modelling contact before the industrial revolution, based on DEM and sea navigation, and a linguistic influence index based on settlement hierarchy. Historical domain boundaries and present day prefecture boundaries are found to have a statistically significant effect on dialectal variation. However, the interplay of boundaries and distance is yet to be identified. We claim that a similar methodology can address spatial variation in other digital humanities, given a similar spatial and attribute granularity.

show abstract

“…Intuitively, a connection can be assumed between linguistic variation and the potential of contact, which is, in turn, strongly associated with spatial phenomena such as distance, facility of access by transportation, topography, and even one's role in their social network, e.g. [6][7][8]).…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Japanese Lexical Variation Explained by Historical Contact Patterns

Jeszenszky¹,

Hikosaka²,

Imamura³

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We assemble a set of methodologies using theories in variationist linguistic and GIScience, and tools used in historical GIS to analyse spatial variation in Japanese dialectal lexicon. Based on historical dialect atlas data, we calculate a linguistic distance matrix across survey localities. The linguistic variation expressed through this distance is contrasted with several distance based measurements utilised to estimate the potential of language contact across Japan historically and at present. Besides, administrative boundaries are tested for their separation effect. Aggregate association measures within linguistic variation can challenge previous notions of dialect area formation. Depending on local geographies in spatial subsets, great circle distance, travel distance and travel times explain a similar proportion of the variance in dialectal variation despite the limitations of the latter two. While they explain the majority, two further contact estimations have lower explanatory power: least cost paths implemented to model contact before the industrial revolution, based on DEM and seafaring, and a linguistic influence index based on the law of gravity. Historical domain boundaries and present day prefecture boundaries are found to have a substantial effect on dialectal variation. However, the interplay of boundaries and distance is yet to be identified. We claim that a similar methodology can address spatial variation in other digital humanities, given a similar spatial and attribute granularity.

show abstract

Language in Isolation, and Its Implications for Variation and Change

Cited by 21 publications

References 30 publications

Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects

Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects

Japanese Lexical Variation Explained by Spatial Contact Patterns

Japanese Lexical Variation Explained by Historical Contact Patterns

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About