This study investigates the effect of differing representations of state boundaries on the draw-a-map task in perceptual dialectology in a region of the United States. The typical draw-a-map survey instrument represents state borders with solid lines. Would respondents react differently to maps with dashed-line state borders? More specifically, would respondents draw more dialect areas that cross state lines on maps with dashed-line state borders versus solid-line state borders? These questions are explored through two datasets, and similarities and differences emerge. For example, respondents of both map types draw more single-state dialect areas than multistate dialect areas, and respondents with dashed-line maps draw more dialect areas on average than respondents with solid state maps. While dataset 1 showed a significant association between map type and multistate dialect area with respondents using dashed-line border maps drawing more multistate dialect areas than respondents with solid-line maps, H(1) = 5.13, P = .017, this association was not significant in dataset 2, H(1) = .06, P = .798.

Describing specific dialect areas in terms of their lexis is an attractive idea now that the latest version of the English Dialect Dictionary Online (EDD Online 3.0, 2019) allows for quick and easy lexical retrievals of English dialect words of the Late Modern English period. This paper uses the Isle of Wight (I.W.) as a test case for putting such an idea into practice. The 137 words uniquely attributed in the EDD to I.W. are analyzed and interpreted in relation to the 1500-odd words used on I.W. alongside other areas of the UK. The paper informs the reader of the available query modes and discusses their pros and cons, quantifying and mapping the different numbers of isolated words in use on I.W. versus those unique to other English counties. The larger number of words that the island shared with the counties of the “mainland” will likewise be considered, thus allowing for first steps towards a “dialectometrical” analysis. The findings are related to the historical background of I.W., particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This paper aims to understand the contribution of geographical information in the perception of linguistic variation. A total of 813 mental maps collected among young speakers from different cities in Tuscany have been analyzed via an open-access web dialectometric tool (Gabmap). In particular, the study seeks to verify the role of geographic distance and the place of residence of the respondents in modeling perceived variation. The relationship between dialect grouping as made by linguists and perceived taxonomies of sublinguistic areas is also investigated. Results show that geographical proximity between mapped areas significantly predicts the perception of dialect similarity. Our participants made their decisions looking at (1) a keen sense of spatial contiguity, and (2) the synchronic presence of linguistic differences between the Tuscan subregions. Moreover, classification uncertainty grows when the mapped areas are very close to, or very distant from, the participants’ places of residence. Methodological and linguistic perspectives of mental maps in folk linguistics are finally discussed.

This article presents the results of an interdisciplinary project that explores street name changes in Leipzig, a city in eastern Germany, over the past one-hundred years. Our analysis focuses on the ways in which semantic choices in the streetscape are recruited to canonize traces of the national past that are “supportive of the hegemonic socio-political order” (Azaryahu, 1997:480). We triangulate results from variationist sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies and geographical analysis to visualize waves of street (re)naming during a century of political turmoil. Drawing on historical archival data allows us to interpret spatial and temporal patterns of odonymic choices as the public embodiment of subsequent political state ideologies. The analysis provides quantitative and longitudinal support to Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) claim that the indexing of officially sanctioned identity and ideology as well as the appropriation of human space are performed by and in turn index state-hegemonic politics of memory.

The use of future subjunctive (FS) has suffered a steady decline in written Spanish from the fourteenth century. It is not clear whether it disappeared similarly in each clause, and whether its use was determined by regional distinctions to be considered as a dialectal feature. Granda (1986) suggested that the Hispanic Caribbean countries in the Americas were more conservative in the use of FS in contrast to other regions in a southerly direction. Ramírez-Luengo (2008), however, argued that FS decline occurred uniformly in the Americas, with the eighteenth century being the critical time for the substitution. In a sample of 45 legal documents (60,852 words) from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, issued in northwest and southwest Colombia, the proportions of FS and other alternating forms were equally likely in both regions. FS tabulations were less likely to occur in the nineteenth century within relative clauses, while they were equally likely to occur in conditional protases. This suggests that FS in written Spanish does not show dialectal differences and that its decline might have occurred earlier in relative clauses than conditional protases, probably due to a stylistic motivation.