The Qiāng language occupies a privileged place among Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in China. It is one of the few languages in the area to have been uninterruptedly studied in the complexity of its dialects for almost a century by many non-Chinese and Chinese scholars, including some of the most eminent and prolific Sino-Tibetanists in China, such as Sūn Hóngkāi and Huáng Bùfán. Linguistic fiel...

In some languages, such as Korean and Japanese, some theoretically interesting postlexical tonal phenomena have been observed. The phenomena include, for example, downstep and edge tones in Tokyo Japanese (e.g. Kawakami 1961b, Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988) and downstep and upstep in Northern Gyeongsang Korean (Kenstowicz and Sohn 1997, Jun et al. 2006). Also, some phenomena have shown the int...

In this paper we will expand on the creation and structure of the DynaSAND database as a case study of a corpus tool. Furthermore we will focus on its implementation in other search engines, thereby illustrating how the underlying data is decoupled from its original interface and used in new ways.

One way of evaluating the salience of a linguistic feature is by assessing the extent to which listeners associate the feature with a social category such as a particular socioeconomic class, gender, or nationality. Such 'top-down' associations will inevitably differ somewhat from listener to listener, as a linguistic feature - the pronunciation of a vowel or consonant, for instance - can evoke...

Sarhaddi Balochi dialect, a language variety of Western (Rakhshani) Balochi, employs derivation through affixation as one of its word formation processes. The purpose of this article is to present a synchronic description of the way(s) different derivational affixes function in making complex words in Sarhaddi Balochi as spoken in Granchin[1] district located about 35Kms to the southeast of Kha...

“Borrowing” is a lingual process that is studied in diachronic linguistics. In this process a language borrows elements from another language. This process usually occurs in areas that two languages make contact with each other. In a dialect spoken in South Khorasan the language borrowing happens. Arabs living in this part of Iran probably have immigrated in the early centuries of Islam. In thi...

Traditional dialect maps based on data from carefully selected informants, usually give clear-cut dialect borders, isoglosses, with one dialect characteristic present on one side of the isogloss and absent on the other. We have compared results from traditional dialect research with results from a thorough auditory analysis of /r/ and /l/ pronunciation among the 1015 informants in the Norwegian...

The present study employs phonetic means and LZ-Score values to systematically investigate and tonal patterns and the internal differences of tones in Shandong (Hereinafter, SD) dialect. The dialect regions selected in the study is Jinan, Liaocheng, Tai’an and Zibo, all of which belong to Xiqi district. Results demonstrate that all of the four regions deserve four tones, specifically, tonal val...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the viability of simulating one dialect with the speech segments of another dialect through prosody cloning. The hypothesis is that, among Korean regional dialects, it is not the segmental differences but the prosodic differences that play a major role in authentic dialect perception. This work intends to support the hypothesis by simulating Masan dialect...

Dialect stereotypes are widespread. Birmingham English is perceived as ugly, Parisian French as cultivated. In Switzerland, Bern and Thurgau Swiss German lie on opposite ends of the attractiveness spectrum. In the present study, we examined how Swiss German, French, and English listeners – the latter two being unfamiliar with the dialects – rated the phonetic aesthetics of these two Swiss Germa...