This paper examines code choices in the written linguistic landscape of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Due to a history of language imposition, the Marshall Islanders have long been denied the opportunity to express their linguistic identity in the public domain. A recently proposed bilingual language policy, which requires all public signs to be Marshallese-English bilingual, aims to change this status quo. We map language choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI at the cusp of this policy with an eye on the stakeholders, production processes, and audiences involved in the creation and reception of the linguistic landscape. State-of-the-art geographical and regression analyses model the factors that govern code choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI. Our findings allow us to pinpoint niches—both geographical as well as social—where the Marshallese assert their linguistic identity in the public realm.

Contrary to previous “sociolinguistic folklore” that African American (Vernacular) English has a uniform structure across different parts of the US, recent studies have shown that it varies regionally, especially phonologically (Wolfram, 2007; Thomas & Wassink, 2010). However, there is little research on how Americans perceive AAE variation. Based on a map-labeling task, we investigate the folk perception of AAE variation by 55 participants, primarily African Americans in Columbus, Ohio. The analysis focuses on the dialect regions recognized by the participants, the linguistic features associated with different regions, and the attitudes associated with these beliefs. While the perceived regional boundaries mostly align with those identified by speakers in previous perceptual dialectology studies on American English, the participants consistently identified linguistic features that were specific to AAE. The participants recognized substantial phonological and lexical variation and identified “proper” dialects that do not necessarily sound “white”. This study demonstrates the value of considering African Americans’ perspectives in describing African American varieties of English.

Using data from a Swiss German dialect syntax survey, this study aims to explore, in a spatially differentiated manner, the correlation between dialectal variation and geographic distances. A linguistic distance was expressed by a measure aggregated from 60 survey questions. To operationalize the possibility of language contact, Euclidean distance, as well as travel times in 2000, 1950 and 1850 between survey sites were used. Going beyond previous work by others, we also explore the covariation of geographic and linguistic distances at the local level, focusing on spatial subsets and individual survey sites, thus being able to paint a more differentiated picture. With the diverse physical landscape of Switzerland making an impact on potential language contact, we find that travel times are a better predictor than Euclidean distance for the syntactic variation in Swiss German dialects. However, on the local scale the difference is not always significant, depending on prevalent topography.

This paper investigates whether European Francophone subjects are able to distinguish between regional French accents from (northern) France, Belgium, and Switzerland, and at what level of granularity. In total, samples from 120 speakers (from five different areas in each country under study) were presented to hundreds of native French listeners from these three countries. In a first set of experiments, listeners were asked to identify the speakers’ country of origin: they achieved 60% correct identification on average, with significant effects of listeners’ region of origin, speakers’ age, socioeconomic status, and region of origin. In a second set of experiments, listeners from Belgium, France, and Switzerland were asked to identify the speakers’ region of origin within each country (5-alternative forced choice). Results, albeit above chance, proved to be poorer than they were in the first set of experiments (31% correct identification on average). Complementary analyses were conducted to evaluate the role of listeners’ region of origin, speakers’ age, speakers’ region of origin, and their interaction. They showed asymmetrical response patterns across the three countries under investigation: France (or, within France, Paris, which represents the norm) seems to act as a magnet and a catalyst of unification. Younger generations, especially, are more often associated with its way of speaking when their accent is not clearly identifiable. Switzerland, though, resists this homogenizing process better than Belgium does.

This paper presents the results of the first investigation into Kurdish linguistic varieties and their spatial distribution. Kurdish dialects are used across five nation states in the Middle East and only one dialect, Sorani, has official status in one of these nation states. The study employs the “draw-a-map” task established in Perceptual Dialectology; the analysis is supported by Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The results show that, despite the geolinguistic and geopolitical situation, Kurdish respondents have good knowledge of the main varieties of their language (Kurmanji, Sorani, and the related variety Zazaki) and where to localize them. Awareness of the more diverse Southern Kurdish varieties is less definitive. This indicates that the Kurdish language plays a role in identity formation, but also that smaller isolated varieties are not only endangered in terms of speakers, but also in terms of their representations in Kurds’ mental maps of the linguistic landscape they live in.

Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnessed a large growth in interest. Various methods from geospatial data analysis have been applied to morphosyntactic data. To date, the focus has largely been on analyzing the distribution of stable patterns of variation. This article extends this work to examine patterns of ongoing change. It uses a body of data from the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects and the Siarad Corpus of spoken Welsh to examine the innovation and diffusion of a new second-person singular pronoun, chdi, testing the usefulness of Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) as a method for identifying and modeling patterns of ongoing syntactic change. It is shown that GWR provides plausible models of the diachronic development of changes that are still in progress. Furthermore, it allows us to test whether rates of change are constant across geographical space, allowing us to test whether the Constant Rate Hypothesis (that diffusion of change proceeds at the same rate in different environments) holds between dialects.

The current study explored the relationship between participants’ label-based evaluations of six regional varieties in Enshi Prefecture, China, and their speech-based evaluations of talkers from these varieties using a label ranking task and a speaker evaluation task. The results revealed that under correct identification of talker dialect, participants’ evaluations of real talkers based on speech samples were different from their evaluations of ‘imagined’ county-based dialects, suggesting that speech-based talker evaluations are not solely governed by ideological values associated with dialects. Focusing on a small, understudied community in China, this study contributes to our understanding of the local language attitudes, and language use and maintenance in Enshi Prefecture. An integrated approach is needed to build a model of talker evaluation, which must include a complex set of linguistic, social cognitive, and situational objects. The current results suggest that the object(s) that primarily drives talker evaluations is not the talker’s dialect itself.