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The influence can go deeper, extending to the exchange of even basic characteristics of a language such as morphology and grammar.. Newar, for example, spoken in Nepal, is a Sino-Tibetan language distantly related to Chinese but has had so many centuries of contact with neighbouring Indo-Iranian languages that it has even developed noun inflection, a trait that is typical of the Indo-European ...
In ethnography, a contact zone is a conceptual space where different cultures interact.. In a 1991 keynote address to the Modern Language Association titled "Arts of the Contact Zone", Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept, saying "I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power ...
In the Language Survey Reference Guide issued by SIL International, who produce Ethnologue, a dialect cluster is defined as a central variety together with a collection of varieties whose speakers can understand the central variety at a specified threshold level (usually between 70% and 85%) or higher. It is not required that peripheral ...
Language convergence is a type of linguistic change in which languages come to resemble one another structurally as a result of prolonged language contact and mutual interference, regardless of whether those languages belong to the same language family, i.e. stem from a common genealogical proto-language. [1]
Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages.Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of, or subsumed by, sociolinguistics. [1]
Since Saami is known to have borrowed many words from a language now lost as Saami culture spread northwards into Scandinavia, Schrijver argues that Saami, West Germanic and North Germanic were all affected in similar ways by contact with a language or group of languages which 'shared a peculiar vowel system, whose features were impressed on ...
It shows how language evolves as a process of 'competition-and-selection', and how certain linguistic features emerge. [2] The Dynamic Model illustrates how the histories and ecologies will determine language structures in the different varieties of English, and how linguistic and social identities are maintained.
Language change has also threatened the survival of stateless languages with existing literary standards, such as Occitan. The Romance languages of Italy are a less arguable example of a dialect continuum. For many decades since Italy's unification, the attitude of the French government towards the ethnolinguistic minorities was copied by the ...