This Perceptual Dialectology (PD) study asked residents of Cardiff, Wales, about their perceptions of English in the United Kingdom (UK). In addition, because face to face exposure to dialect variation has rarely been included as a variable in PD studies, participants were asked about their travel experience to ascertain whether this might influence their responses to a PD map task. Participants’ responses to the map task were analyzed using ArcGIS to create composite maps. Results show that these Cardiffians perceive “dialect or regional” speech boundaries to be located around major cities in England and Wales but also southwest Wales. Composite maps and polygon counts suggest that the more traveled respondents have a more nuanced perception of dialect regions than those who claim to travel less, suggesting that travel experience may influence PD participants’ responses to map tasks.

This contribution focuses on the use of geben ‘give’ as a put verb in Upper German dialects in Austria from a historical and a recent perspective. On the basis of comprehensive historical and contemporary data from German varieties and Slavic languages our analyses provide evidence for the central hypothesis that this phenomenon traces back to language contact with Czech as already suggested by various scholars in the 19th century. This assumption is also supported by the fact that Czech dát ‘give’ in put function has been accounted for since the Old Czech period as well as by its high frequency in both formal and informal Czech written texts. Moreover, our data analyses show that geben ‘give’ as a put verb has been and is still areally distributed along and spreading from the contact area of Czech and Upper German varieties.

This study explores perceptions held by speakers of Qassimi Arabic (a variety of Najdi Arabic, spoken in central Saudi Arabia) about linguistic variation in their own dialect, and the sociocultural evaluations associated with their perceptions. Drawing on perceptual dialectology research methods, respondents completed the draw-a-map and labeling tasks. The maps were collected and then analyzed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping software to aggregate, query, and create a composite heat map. Findings indicate that Qassimi speakers perceive regional variation to be associated with urban centers, particularly Buraydah and Unayzah, which were identified as the most salient dialect areas. Analysis of the labeled maps generated six categories of evaluative comments: drawl, influences from other regional dialects, heavy accent, old vocabulary, fast, and affrication. These findings point to the need for further exploration of the underlying ideologies and social values that Arabic speakers have about their own dialects and other dialects in Arabic-speaking communities.

This study examines the social perceptions of the traditional Andalusian feature [ʃ] and the Castilian feature [tʃ] in the city of Huelva and the town of Lepe in Western Andalucía, Spain. A matched-guise experiment was created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve Western Andalusian speakers, varying only in word-medial syllable-initial [tʃ] and [ʃ] for <ch> in disyllabic words. Based on 221 listeners from Huelva and Lepe, mixed effects linear regression models indicate that listeners evaluated speakers with [tʃ] guises as being of higher status, more cosmopolitan, and less friendly than speakers with [ʃ] guises. These findings interacted with speaker and listener gender, listener educational level, and listener origin. The implications are twofold: the traditional Andalusian feature is evaluated as less overtly prestigious than the supra-local Castilian feature; and, that two nearby communities of the same dialect variety may share similar language attitudes, but demonstrate nuanced differences in attitudes due to their unique historical and socioeconomic developments.

This article is an analysis of linguistic survey data representing German dialects in Switzerland in 1933/34 based on the so-called Wenker sentences. The data are impressionistic in terms of applied phonetic transcriptions, which were produced by non-specialists using the Latin alphabet. Due to the lack of pre-defined standardization, the phonetic transcriptions are very heterogeneous. From a technical perspective, this leads to very noisy data, which is why the validity of the Wenker data in general and the Swiss Wenker data in particular has been questioned. Using methods from computational linguistics, we compare, for the first time, Wenker data with linguistic data collected at virtually the same time by linguistics professionals. Direct comparison with a sample from the published atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS) reveals that despite the noisiness of the data, they nevertheless provide reliable information, e.g., in terms of the spatial structuring of Swiss dialects. The study is thus a successful pilot for other corpus-based studies dealing with unstructured Wenker data in other regions.

Studies on the correlations between spatial distribution of linguistic varieties and genetic structure of populations began by dealing with geographic spaces and extensive linguistic families. In the last two decades, researchers with this type of interdisciplinary approach have also begun to study more reduced linguistic and population domains. This paper examines geolinguistic and onomastic information in a linguistic and administrative space of a limited extension of the Principality of Asturias. The information on the surnames of this region, taken from the inhabitants’ register, is used to identify surname regions and check correlations with dialect areas described in this space. The results obtained in this research show many similarities in the distribution of surname regions with dialect areas recognized by traditional dialectology studies. The conclusions of the study present the results obtained together with some of the explanatory proposals on the historical constitution of the linguistic diversity of this area.

This study presents the first US-wide survey of the pin-pen merger since Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006). Production and perception data were collected from 277 speakers from across the country, with perception-only data from an additional 94 speakers; these data largely replicated previous findings about the social and geographic distribution of the merger. An examination of production and perception data together showed that near merger—in which speakers cannot hear the difference between pin and pen words, yet pronounce them differently—was relatively common, although this phenomenon has received little attention in the literature on the merger. Additionally, an investigation of how merged speakers phonetically realized their merged pin-pen vowel revealed that, in contrast to previous findings, speakers were equally as likely to merge to [ɛ] (tw[ɛ]n for twin) as they were to [i] (h[i]n for hen). However, there was no apparent social or geographic patterning to this phonetic realization.

In this paper we introduce a computationally enriched experimental tool designed to investigate language ideology (change). In a free response experiment, 211 respondents returned three adjectives in reaction to the labels for five regional varieties, one ethnic variety and two supra-regional varieties of Belgian Dutch, as well as the standard accent of Netherlandic Dutch. Valence information (pertaining to the positive/negative character of the responses) and big data–based distributional analysis (to detect semantic similarity between the responses) were used to cluster the response adjectives into 11 positive and 11 negative evaluative dimensions. Correspondence analysis was subsequently used to compute and visualize the associations between these evaluative dimensions and the investigated language labels, in order to generate “perceptual maps” of the Belgian language repertoire. Contrary to our expectations, these maps unveiled not only the dominant value system which drives standard usage, but also the competing ideology which frames the increasingly occurring non-standard forms. In addition, they revealed a much richer stratification than the “one variety good, all other varieties bad” dichotomy we had anticipated: while VRT-Dutch remains the superior (albeit increasingly virtual) standard for Belgian Dutch, the stigmatized colloquial variety Tussentaal is gradually being accepted as a practical lingua franca, and the Ghent-accent is boosted by modern prestige (dynamism) features. Even more crucially, separate perceptual maps for the older and younger respondents lay bare generational change: there is a growing conceptual proximity between VRT-Dutch and Tussentaal in the younger perceptions.