Languages in contact commonly leave an imprint on one other. The most straightforward of these imprints to identify is MAT-borrowing, which results in clearly identifiable lexical items of one language (the donor language) being used in utterances of another language (the recipient language). This stands in contrast with PAT-borrowing, which does not involve any such incorporation of “other language” material but rather results in the reshaping of existing structures of the recipient language on the model of the donor language. This type of language change is therefore arguably more “invisible” to speakers since no easily identifiable “other language” material is present.

This study presents a detailed examination of PAT-borrowing in Guernésiais, the Norman variety spoken in Guernsey (British Channel Islands), which is now at an advanced state of language shift. It also highlights a major difference between MAT- and PAT-borrowing, namely that, whereas MAT-borrowing can only be explained with reference to the dominant language, PAT-borrowing can on occasion admit an internal explanation.

This article identifies factors that affect local dialect recognition in the north of the East Midlands, England. Central to the argument is the local belief in a ‘scale of northern-ness’: the general impression that accent moves geographically across the East Midlands, transitioning gradually southwards from northern to southern English. This theory bears similarities with Upton's description of the Midlands region as a ‘transition zone’ (2012, 267). Two dialect recognition tasks were completed by three age groups of respondents based primarily in Chesterfield, North East Derbyshire. The results indicate that Sheffield voices were the most recognisable to the Chesterfield audience, perhaps because they differed from the East Midland voices in the sample. Respondents' ‘dialect image’ (Inoue 1999, 162) of East Midland voices led to some errors being made, with the key belief in the north of this region that ‘north is better’.

Maps are important in many areas of linguistics, especially dialectology, sociolinguistics, typology, and historical linguistics, including for visualizing regional patterns in the distribution of linguistic features and varieties of language. In this hands-on tutorial, we introduce map making for linguistics using R and the popular package ggplot2. We walk the reader through the process of making maps using both typological data, based on the World Atlas of Language Structures, and dialect data, based on large corpora of language data collected from German and American social media platforms. This tutorial is intended to be of use to anyone interested in making maps of linguistic data, and more widely to anyone wanting to learn about mapping in R.

The variation of the two past tense auxiliaries (HAVE and BE) is a well-studied phenomenon in European languages, especially in the West Germanic varieties. So far, however, the situation in Eastern Yiddish has not been examined. This paper focuses on auxiliary selection in these Yiddish dialects based on data from the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry, which were collected in the 1960s. Like most of the current works on this topic, the following analysis uses and discusses Sorace’s (1993, 2000) Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy, which allows to examine the Yiddish structures in light of historical and diatopic evidence from other Germanic varieties, particularly German and Dutch. The main focus is on intransitive verbs that show a high degree of variation—state verbs, controlled and uncontrolled motional process verbs, and change-of-state verbs. However, the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy also has weaknesses, as is demonstrated in the following.*

Who as a restrictive relativizer in English is an old change from above. In urban dialects, it still acts as a prestige form, whereas it is infrequent or negligible in rural British and American varieties. We compare earlier findings from Toronto, the largest city in the province of Ontario (D’Arcy & Tagliamonte, 2010), with a range of communities from the Ontario Dialects Project (Tagliamonte, 2003–present). While none of the rural locations has as much who as Toronto, there is a substantial range. Regions along the major highways to the north and east of the city have more who, while the smaller towns in less accessible locations have less, consistent with a Cascade Model effect (Labov, 2003). Nonetheless, who shows evidence of diffusion, increasing in apparent time in recent decades. We suggest that this reflects overt pressure from above, consistent with the enduring role that prestige plays in English relativizer variation.

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.

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.

Language documentation has been carried out in Iran since the late 1800s but in a sporadic way, and even now, the scholarly picture of the country’s linguistic landscape is fragmentary. The present article responds to this state of affairs in a modest way by working toward a systematic overview of the language situation in one area of the country: Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province of western Iran, where the high Zagros Mountains open onto the Iranian Plateau. In this study, conducted in the context of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) research programme, we chronicle our research process for this region, beginning with an inventory of languages spoken here—varieties of Bakhtiari, Charmahali, and Turkic—and an overview of their geographical distribution. This initial step enabled us to select 30 varieties from 26 locations across the province for in-depth research, including implementation of the ALI language data questionnaire. Data generated by the study have resulted in two language distribution maps as well as a series of linguistic structure maps. Initial analysis of lexical and phonological data provides insight into defining features of each language as well as structures shared between them as a result of language contact in the region.