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We studied the Japanese dialect by calculating aggregated PMI Levenshtein distances among local Japanese dialects using data from 2400 locations and 141 items from the Linguistic Atlas of Japan Database (LAJDB). Through factor analysis, we found the latent linguistic variables underlying the aggregated distances. We found two factors, the first of which reflects a division into five groups, and the second of which reflects the long-standing East/West cultural contrast in mainland Japan, also known as the AB division. In the latter division, the eastern group includes the Okinawa islands. We paid special attention to the Tokyo dialect, which is associated with Standard Japanese. In a second factor analysis, only distances to the Tokyo dialect were considered. Although the patterns represented by the four factors vary, they consistently show that dialects geographically closer to Tokyo are more similar to the Tokyo dialect. Additionally, the first three factors reflected the similarity of the Hokkaido varieties to Tokyo’s local dialect. The results of the factor analyses were linked back to the individual variation patterns of the 141 items. A more precise analysis of Tokyo’s position within the Japanese dialect continuum revealed that it is situated within a region of local dialects characterized by relatively small average linguistic distances to other dialects. This area includes the more central area of mainland Japan and Hokkaido. When the influence of geographical distance is filtered out, only the local dialects of Hokkaido remain as dialects with the smallest average distance to other local dialects. Additionally, we observed that dialects geographically close to Tokyo are most closely related to it. However, when we again use distances that are controlled for geographical distance, the local dialects on Hokkaido stand out as being very related to the Tokyo dialect. This probably indicates that the Tokyo dialect has had a relatively large influence on Hokkaido.

In this article, we tested some specific claims made in the literature on relative distances among European languages and among Chinese dialects, suggesting that some language varieties within the Sinitic family traditionally called dialects are, in fact, more linguistically distant from one another than some European varieties that are traditionally called languages. More generally, we examined whether distances among varieties within and across European language families were larger than those within and across Sinitic language varieties. To this end, we computed lexico-phonetic as well as syntactic distance measures for comparable language materials in six Germanic, five Romance and six Slavic languages, as well as for six Mandarin and nine non-Mandarin (‘southern’) Chinese varieties. Lexico-phonetic distances were expressed as the length-normalized MPI-weighted Levenshtein distances computed on the 100 most frequently used nouns in the 32 language varieties. Syntactic distance was implemented as the (complement of) the Pearson correlation coefficient found for the PoS trigram frequencies established for a parallel corpus of the same four texts translated into each of the 32 languages. The lexico-phonetic distances proved to be relatively large and of approximately equal magnitude in the Germanic, Slavic and non-Mandarin Chinese language varieties. However, the lexico-phonetic distances among the Romance and Mandarin languages were considerably smaller, but of similar magnitude. Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect) was lexico-phonetically as distant from Standard Mandarin (Beijing dialect) as European language pairs such as Portuguese–Italian, Portuguese–Romanian and Dutch–German. Syntactically, however, the differences among the Sinitic varieties were about ten times smaller than the differences among the European languages, both within and across the families—which provides some justification for the Chinese tradition of calling the Sinitic varieties dialects of the same language.

In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Visible Vowels to detect formant and durational differences between L2 and L1 speakers. We used a dataset that contains vowel measures from L1 speakers of French and from L2 learners of French, with Italian, Spanish and English as L1. We found that vowels that are not part of the L1 phonological system are often pronounced differently by L2 speakers. Inspired by the Native Language Magnet Theory which was introduced by Patricia Kuhl in 2000, we introduced magnet plots that relate vowels shared by the French phonological system and the learners’ phonological system—the magnet vowels—to the vowels found only in the French phonological system. At a glance, it can be seen which vowels are attracted to the magnets and which vowels become further away from the magnets. When comparing vowel spaces, we found that the shape of the French vowel space of the English learners differed most from the shape of L1 speakers’ vowel space. Finally, it was found that the vowel durations of the L2 speakers are greater than that of the L1 speakers of French, especially those of the English learners of French.

Bilingual children often experience difficulties with inflectional morphology. The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate how regularity of inflection in combination with verbal short-term and working memory (VSTM, VWM) influences bilingual children’s performance. Data from 231 typically developing five- to eight-year-old children were analyzed: Dutch monolingual children (N = 45), Frisian-Dutch bilingual children (N = 106), Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (N = 31), Tarifit-Dutch bilingual children (N = 38) and Arabic-Dutch bilingual children (N = 11). Inflection was measured with an expressive morphology task. VSTM and VWM were measured with a Forward and Backward Digit Span task, respectively. The results showed that, overall, children performed more accurately at regular than irregular forms, with the smallest gap between regulars and irregulars for monolinguals. Furthermore, this gap was smaller for older children and children who scored better on a non-verbal intelligence measure. In bilingual children, higher accuracy at using (irregular) inflection was predicted by a smaller cross-linguistic distance, a larger amount of Dutch at home, and a higher level of parental education. Finally, children with better VSTM, but not VWM, were more accurate at using regular and irregular inflection.

In this study we develop pronunciation distances based on naive discriminative learning (NDL). Measures of pronunciation distance are used in several subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, dialectology and typology. In contrast to the commonly used Levenshtein algorithm, NDL is grounded in cognitive theory of competitive reinforcement learning and is able to generate asymmetrical pronunciation distances. In a first study, we validated the NDL-based pronunciation distances by comparing them to a large set of native-likeness ratings given by native American English speakers when presented with accented English speech. In a second study, the NDL-based pronunciation distances were validated on the basis of perceptual dialect distances of Norwegian speakers. Results indicated that the NDL-based pronunciation distances matched perceptual distances reasonably well with correlations ranging between 0.7 and 0.8. While the correlations were comparable to those obtained using the Levenshtein distance, the NDL-based approach is more flexible as it is also able to incorporate acoustic information other than sound segments.

The organizing concept behind dialect variation is still seen predominantly as the areas within which similar varieties are spoken. The opposing view—that dialects are organized in a continuum without sharp boundaries—is likewise popular. This article introduces a new element into the discussion, which is the opportunity to view dialectal differences in the aggregate. We employ a dialectometric technique that provides an additive measure of pronunciation difference: the (aggregate) pronunciation distance. This allows us to determine how much of the linguistic variation is accounted for by geography. In our sample of 27 Dutch towns and villages, the variation ranges between 65% and 81%, which lends credence to the continuum view. The borders of well-established dialect areas nonetheless show large deviations from the expected aggregate pronunciation distance. We pay particular attention to a puzzle concerning the subjective perception of continua introduced by Chambers and Trudgill (1998): a traveller walking in a straight line from village to village notices successive small changes, but seldom, if ever, observes large differences. This sounds like a justification of the continuum view, but there is an added twist. Might the traveller be misled by the perspective of most recent memory? We use the Chambers–Trudgill puzzle to organize our argument at several points.

Our focus in this paper is the analysis of surnames, which have been proven to be reliable genetic markers because in patrilineal systems they are transmitted along generations virtually unchanged, similarly to a genetic locus on the Y chromosome. We compare the distribution of surnames to the distribution of dialect pronunciations, which are clearly culturally transmitted. Because surnames, at the time of their introduction, were words subject to the same linguistic processes that otherwise result in dialect differences, one might expect their geographic distribution to be correlated with dialect pronunciation differences. In this paper we concentrate on the Netherlands, an area of only 40,000 km2, where two official languages are spoken, Dutch and Frisian. We analyze 19,910 different surnames, sampled in 226 locations, and 125 different words, whose pronunciation was recorded in 252 sites. We find that, once the collinear effects of geography on both surname and cultural transmission are taken into account, there is no statistically significant association between the two, suggesting that surnames cannot be taken as a proxy for dialect variation, even though they can be safely used as a proxy for Y-chromosome genetic variation. We find the results historically and geographically insightful, hopefully leading to a deeper understanding of the role that local migrations and cultural diffusion play in surname and dialect diversity.

We recorded older male speakers and younger female speakers of 86 local dialects of Dutch. Using these data, we analyze and visualize the influence of standard Dutch on apparent time changes in these dialects. Focusing for the most part on variation in the sound components, we test whether (I) dialect change is mainly the result of convergence to standard Dutch, (II) sound changes in two dialects which make them converge to standard Dutch also make them more similar, and (III) sound changes in two dialects which make them diverge from standard Dutch also make them less similar. We used three-dimensional (first hypothesis) and five-dimensional Levenshtein distance implementations (second and third hypothesis). These implementations are a novel step in dialectometry and in the study of ongoing processes of language change and their consequences for the dialect landscape. The findings corroborate all three hypotheses.