̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - dialect

Cambridge app maps decline in regional diversity of English dialects

sjr81 — Thu, 26 May 2016 09:26:27 +0000

̽��ֱ��English Dialects App (free for Android and iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. A new, updated version of the app – which attempts to guess where you’re from at the end of the quiz – is available for download from this week.

Based on the huge new dataset of results, researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s.

One of the major findings is that some features of regional accents, such as pronouncing the 'r' in words like 'arm' – a very noticeable pronunciation feature which was once normal throughout the West Country and along much of the south coast – are disappearing in favour of the pronunciations found in London and the South-East (see map slideshow).

Lead researcher Dr Adrian Leemann, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east; more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Professor David Britain from the ̽��ֱ�� of Bern added: “People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did fifty years ago. Regional differences are disappearing, some quite quickly. However, while many pockets of resistance to this levelling are shrinking, there is still a stark north-south divide in the pronunciation of certain key words.”

Dialect words are even more likely to have disappeared than regional accents, according to this research. Once, the word ‘backend’ instead of ‘autumn’ was common in much of England, but today very few people report using this word (see map slideshow).

However, the research has shown some areas of resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from those areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For example, many people in the North-East still use a traditional dialect word for 'a small piece of wood stuck under the skin', 'spelk' instead of Standard English 'splinter'.

Other dialect words, like ‘shiver’ for ‘splinter’, are still reported in exactly the same area they were found historically—although they are far less common than they once were (see map slideshow).

̽��ֱ��data collected to date shows that one northern pronunciation has proved especially robust: saying words like 'last' with a short vowel instead of a long one. In this case, the northern form actually appears to have spread southwards in the Midlands and the West Country compared with the historical survey.

In other cases, new pronunciations were found to be spreading. Pronouncing words like 'three' with an 'f' was only found in a tiny region in the south east in the 1950s, but the data from today show this pronunciation is much more widespread – 15% of respondents reported saying 'free' for 'three', up from just 2% in the old Atlas.

Cambridge PhD student Tam Blaxter, who worked alongside Dr Leemann to map the 30,000 responses supplied by the public, suggests that greater geographical mobility is behind the changes when compared to the first systematic nationwide investigation of regional speech, the Survey of English Dialects from the 1950s.

“There has been much greater geographical mobility in the last half century,” said Blaxter. “Many people move around much more for education, work and lifestyle and there has been a significant shift of population out of the cities and into the countryside.

“Many of the results have confirmed what language experts might predict – but until now we just didn’t have the geographical breadth of data to back up our predictions. If we were to do the survey in another 60-70 years we might well see this dialect levelling expanding further, although some places like the north-east seem to have been especially good at preserving certain colloquialisms and pronunciations.”

When the app was originally launched in January, users were quizzed about the way they spoke 26 different words or phrases. ̽��ֱ��academics behind the app wanted to see how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out since the Survey of English Dialects. ̽��ֱ��1950s project took eleven years to complete and captured the accents and dialects of mainly farm labourers.

Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the data provided so far is how the use of ‘scone’ (to rhyme with ‘gone’ rather than ‘cone’) is much more common in the north of England that many might imagine (see map slideshow).

Adrian Leemann said: “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where. Our data shows that for the North and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.”

̽��ֱ��launch of the English Dialects App in January has also allowed language use in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be compared with language use in England (the original 1950s survey was limited to England and similar surveys of the other parts of the UK were not undertaken at the same time or using the same methods).

̽��ֱ��huge levels of feedback have also meant the team have improved the prediction of where users might be from. ̽��ֱ��app now correctly places 25 per cent of respondents within 20 miles, compared with 37 miles for the old method.

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the south-east, according to the first results from a free app developed by Cambridge researchers.

More and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Adrian Leemann

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Yes

Speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with speakers of two languages

sjr81 — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 15:01:24 +0000

̽��ֱ��new findings on bi-dialectalism are published in the journal Cognition, following a study undertaken by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cyprus, and the Cyprus ̽��ֱ�� of Technology.

Although a topic of continuing academic and public scrutiny, a lot of research to date reports a positive cognitive net effect for multilingual children compared to children who speak only one language.

̽��ֱ��effect is usually manifest in attention, cognitive flexibility and the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, with some researchers arguing that the advantages of bilingualism are evident throughout the human lifespan. Until now, however, there has been very little research on children speaking two dialects which may only be separated by subtle linguistic differences.

Bi-dialectalism, the systematic use of two different dialects of the same language, is widespread in many parts of the world. In the USA millions of children grow up speaking African American English at home as well as Mainstream American English at school.

Similar situations arise in many parts of Europe, such as the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where school-children may only feel comfortable to talk about school subjects in High German, but switch to Swiss-German for everyday conversation.

British English, Gaelic and Welsh have well-established dialects as well as newly emerging ones such as Multicultural London English, which has a rising number of speakers, especially among young, urban people.

To date, bi-dialectalism can be found in Lowland Scotland (in speakers of Scots and Standard Scottish English), in parts of Northern Ireland and elsewhere. However, the criteria for classifying two varieties as dialects rather than independent languages are not strictly objective and it could be debated whether these are cases of bilingualism instead.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou and Dr Napoleon Katsos from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge studied the cognitive performance of children who grew up speaking both Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek – two varieties of Greek which are closely related but differ from each other on all levels of language analysis (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar).

̽��ֱ��study showed that multilingual and bi-dialectal children exhibited an advantage over monolingual children that was evident in composite cognitive processes including memory, attention and cognitive flexibility; suggesting that advantages previously reported for multilingual children could be shared by children speaking any two or more dialects.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “What is exciting and encouraging about our findings is that we were able to replicate the advantages of bilingualism in children who speak two varieties of the same language. They need not be as diverse as English and Mandarin Chinese.

“ ̽��ֱ��distance between languages and dialects does not make much of a difference according to our tests and findings. Systematically switching between any two forms of language, even quite similar ones, seems to provide the mind with the extra stimulation that leads to higher cognitive performance.

“Our findings could be significant for parents and children in the UK and countries across Europe and beyond where children speak a variety of different dialects. Germany, Italy and Spain all have significant numbers of dialectal speakers, as do parts of the US and China. With the rise and increased recognition of dialects in the UK, bi-dialectalism might become even more relevant in the UK in the near future.

“What our research suggests, contrary to some widely held beliefs, is that we don’t have to treat multilingual or bi-dialectal children as problematic. When it comes to language, plurality is an advantage.”

̽��ֱ��study consisted of 64 bi-dialectal children, 47 multilingual children and 25 monolingual children. Comparisons between the three groups were performed in two stages and the socio-economic status, language proficiency, and general intelligence of all children taking part was factored into the research methodology.

Dr Napoleon Katsos, one of the study authors, said: “Previous research has documented positive associations between childhood bilingualism and cognitive abilities.

“ ̽��ֱ��novel and most important contribution of this study is that it showed similar positive effects extend to children speaking two closely related dialects of the same language. In qualitative terms, the effects of bi-dialectalism and multilingualism were, in general, quite similar. However, more research is needed on this topic.

“Dialects are very much under-recognised and undervalued. This kind of research can make people appreciate there is an advantage to bi-dialectalism and this may be important when we think about our identity, about how we educate children and the importance of language learning.”

Dr Antoniou and Dr Katsos are now retesting and extending their hypotheses on a larger scale in Belgium, in collaboration with researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Brussels. Belgium offers an ideal testing ground, with dialects of Dutch such as West-Flemish, being spoken alongside more standard versions of Dutch and French. ̽��ֱ��new study includes larger samples and new measures, to better understand the effects of bi-dialectalism on cognitive and linguistic development and their relation to bilingualism.

Reference:

K.Antoniou et. al. ‘ ̽��ֱ��effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control’ Cognition 149 (2016)

DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.002

̽��ֱ��ability of children to speak any two dialects – two closely related varieties of the same language – may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who speak two or more substantially different languages (such as English and French).

Dialects are very much under-recognised and undervalued.

Napoleon Katsos

https://www.flickr.com/photos/smcclan/16024515689/in/photolist-qq2Qeg-8Nkm1m-nRE…

Conversations by Steve McClanahan via Flickr

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Do you say splinter, spool, spile or spell? English Dialects app tries to guess your regional accent

sjr81 — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:06:31 +0000

Along with colleagues from the universities of Zurich and Bern, Cambridge’s Adrian Leemann has developed the free app English Dialects (available on iOS and Android), which asks you to choose your pronunciation of 26 different words before guessing where in England you’re from.

̽��ֱ��app also encourages you to make your own recordings in order to help researchers determine how dialects have changed over the past 60 years. ̽��ֱ��English language app follows the team’s hugely successful apps for German-speaking Europe, which accumulated more than one million hits in 4 days on Germany’s Der Spiegel website, and more than 80,000 downloads of the app by German speakers in Switzerland.

“We want to document how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out,” said Dr Leemann, a researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. “ ̽��ֱ��first large-scale documentation of English dialects dates back 60-70 years, when researchers were sent out into the field – sometimes literally – to record the public. It was called the ‘Survey of English Dialects’. In 313 localities across England, they documented accents and dialects over a decade, mainly of farm labourers.”

̽��ֱ��researchers used this historical material for the dialect guessing app, which allows them to track how dialects have evolved into the 21st century.

“We hope that people in their tens of thousands will download the app and let us know their results – which means our future attempts at mapping dialect and language change should be much more precise,” added Leemann. “Users can also interact with us by recording their own dialect terms and this will let us see how the English language is evolving and moving from place to place.”

̽��ֱ��app asks users how they pronounce certain words or which dialect term they most associate with commonly-used expressions; then produces a heat map for the likely location of your dialect based on your answers.

For example, the app asks how you might say the word ‘last’ or ‘shelf’, giving you various pronunciations to listen to before choosing which one most closely matches your own. Likewise, it asks questions such as: ‘A small piece of wood stuck under the skin is a…’ then gives answers including: spool, spile, speel, spell, spelk, shiver, spill, sliver, splinter or splint. ̽��ֱ��app then allows you to view which areas of the country use which variations at the end of the quiz.

It also asks the endlessly contentious English question of whether ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’ or ‘cone’.

“Everyone has strong views about the pronunciation of this word, but, perhaps surprisingly, we know rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where,” said Professor David Britain, a dialectologist and member of the app team based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bern in Switzerland.

“Much of our understanding of the regional distribution of different accent and dialect features is still based on the wonderful but now outdated Survey of English Dialects – we haven’t had a truly country-wide survey since. We hope the app will harness people’s fascination with dialect to enable us to paint a more up-to-date picture of how dialect features are spread across the country.”

At the end of the 26 questions, the app gives its best 3 guesses as to the geography of your accent based on your dialect choices. However, while the Swiss version of the app proved to be highly accurate, Leemann and his colleagues have sounded a more cautious note on the accuracy of the English dialect app.

Dr Leemann said: “English accents and dialects are likely to have changed over the past decades. This may be due to geographical and social mobility, the spread of the mass media and other factors. If the app guesses where you are from correctly, then the accent or dialect of your region has not changed much in the last century. If the app does not guess correctly, it is probably because the dialect spoken in your region has changed quite a lot over time.”

At the end of the quiz, users are invited to share with researchers their location, age, gender, education, ethnicity and how many times they have moved in the last decade. This anonymous data will help academics understand the spread, evolution or decline of certain dialects and dialect terms, and provide answers as to how language changes over time.

“ ̽��ֱ��more people participate and share this information with us, the more accurately we can track how English dialects have changed over the past 60 years,” added Dr Leemann.

After taking part in the quiz, users can also listen to both historic and contemporary pronunciations, taking the public on an auditory journey through England and allowing them to hear how dialects have altered in the 21st century. ̽��ֱ��old recordings are now held by the British Library and were made available for use in the app. One of these recordings features a speaker from Devon who discusses haymaking and reflects on working conditions in his younger days.

Dr Leemann added: “Our research on dialect data collected through smartphone apps has opened up a new paradigm for analyses of language change. For the Swiss version nearly 80,000 speakers participated. Results revealed that phonetic variables (eg if you say ‘sheuf’ or ‘shelf’) tended to remain relatively stable over time, while lexical variables (eg if you say ‘splinter’, ‘spelk’, ‘spill’ etc.) changed more over time. ̽��ֱ��recordings from the Swiss users also showed clear geographical patterns; for example people spoke consistently faster in some regions than others. We hope to do such further analyses with the English data in the near future.”

̽��ֱ��findings of the German-speaking experiments were published last week in PLOS ONE.

An app that tries to guess your regional accent based on your pronunciation of 26 words and colloquialisms will help Cambridge academics track the movement and changes to English dialects in the modern era.

We hope that people in their tens of thousands will download the app and let us know their results.

Adrian Leemann

Screen grab of one of the app's questions

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Welsh Twitter: capturing language change in real time

lw355 — Wed, 29 May 2013 07:50:07 +0000

Twitter keeps millions of people in touch, whether it’s sharing their politics with followers or updating their mates with the trivia of everyday life. These tweets are in Welsh: ‘loaaaads o gwaith i neud a di’r laptop ’cau gwithio!’, ‘dio cau dod on!! Mar bwtwm di tori.’ Roughly translated, they read: ‘loads of work to do and the laptop won’t work’ and ‘it won’t come on!! ̽��ֱ��button’s broke.’

How do you capture changes as they take place in the language we use in everyday life – from buzz words such as ‘sweet’ to tags such as ‘innit’? One answer is to look at tweets. Because they don’t follow the conventions of written language, tweets provide an authentic snapshot of the spoken language. By analysing the content of the 140-character messages, linguists can get to grips with the dynamics of the language played out in real time.

Welsh is spoken by 562,000 people in Wales; 8% of the country’s children learn it at home as their first language and 22% are educated in Welsh.

Like all living languages, Welsh is constantly changing and new varieties are emerging. When Dr David Willis from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics set out to research the shifts taking place in Welsh, he used a database of Welsh tweets as a means of identifying aspects of the language that were changing, and then used that information to devise the questionnaires used for oral interviews.

He explained: “When your intention is to capture everyday usage, one of the greatest challenges is to develop questions that don’t lead the respondent towards a particular answer but give you answers that provide the material you need.”

“If I want to find out whether a particular construction is emerging, and where the people who use it come from, I would normally have to conduct a time-consuming pilot study, but with Twitter I can get a rough and ready answer in 30 minutes as people tweet much as they speak,” he said. “My focus is on the syntax of language – the structure or grammar of sentences – and my long-term aim is to produce a syntactic atlas of Welsh dialects that will add to our understanding of current usage of the language and the multi-stranded influences on it. To do this relies on gathering spoken material from different sectors of the Welsh-speaking population to make comparisons across time and space.”

In the late 17th century, the antiquarian Edward Lhuyd conducted an investigation into the dialects of Wales. By the 19th century, Welsh was attracting the attention of European historical linguists such as Johann Kaspar Zeuss. Later, scholars all over Europe, realising that local dialects were receding in the face of industrialisation, sought to record variations in language. Large dialect atlases were undertaken in Germany and France, and speech archives were begun, such as the one that laid the foundations for the National History Museum at St Fagan’s near Cardiff.

In the 1960s the attention moved away from rural areas to the cities where most people by then lived – and researchers started to look at sentence structure, an area of language that presents particular challenges for investigators. Willis’s interest in syntax stemmed from his study of a wide range of minority languages, including Breton, which is, like Welsh, a Celtic language. To create the biggest possible picture of syntactic changes in Welsh as it’s spoken today, he decided to take an inclusive approach and set out to investigate day-to-day speech patterns of a broad range of speakers, aged 18–80.

British Academy funding for a year-long study has enabled Willis and assistant researchers to interview around 160 people across Wales, beginning his analysis with North Wales where the language is thriving and a significant number of children use Welsh as their home language. ̽��ֱ��study included both those who had acquired Welsh at home and at school.

̽��ֱ��spoken questionnaire asked interviewees to repeat in their own words sentences that were presented to them in deliberately ‘odd’ Welsh that mixed different dialects, inviting the interviewee to rephrase the awkwardly phrased sentence to sound more ‘natural’. An example in English might be ‘we’ve not to be there yet, don’t we?’ which a British speaker might be expected to rephrase as ‘we haven’t got to be there yet, have we?’

̽��ֱ��data from these interviews are a treasure trove of information in terms of the light their content can shine on how and why the structure of language shifts over time – and give the researcher a valuable database not just for the present study but also for future research.

Changes identified so far include use of pronouns and multiple negatives. An analysis of usage of the Welsh words for ‘anyone’, ‘someone’ and ‘no-one’ reveals that there are differences between those who learnt Welsh in the home (who are more likely to say the equivalent of ‘did someone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see no-one’) and those who learnt it at school (who are more likely to say ‘did anyone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see anyone’).

One example of multiple negatives reveals a shift in meaning of the Welsh word for refuse, ‘cau’. “We knew that people in the north used the word ‘cau’ to mean ‘won’t’, saying the equivalent of ‘the door refuses to open’ for ‘the door won’t open’. Negative concord – such as saying ‘I haven’t not seen no-one’ for ‘I haven’t seen anyone’ – is a strong feature of Welsh. We’ve now identified two groups in the north: one that still says ‘the door refuses to open’ and the other that have begun to say ‘the door doesn’t refuse to open’. ̽��ֱ��next step is to work out when and how this change occurred.”

In tracking shifts in the language, GIS mapping is used to plot where interviewees were brought up and enables researchers to look at the geographical spread of particular aspects of syntax, making comparisons between age groups, gender and mode of acquisition.

̽��ֱ��research has revealed that, while Welsh does not vary much by social class, there are interesting differences between the variety of Welsh spoken by those who learn it as their first language in the home and that spoken by those who are first exposed to it in nursery or primary school.

“Those who acquire Welsh once they reach school are more likely to use English sentence constructions, which are perfectly good Welsh but differ significantly from the constructions used by those who acquired Welsh at home. For example, they tend to prefer standard focus particles – words that correspond to a strong stress in English sentences like ‘I know YOU’ll be on time’ – over the ones from their local dialect,” said Willis.

With around 22% of the Welsh population educated in Welsh at school, and all children learning it as a second language, data on this aspect of language acquisition may prove valuable in developing Welsh teaching policy – for example, in determining which forms to teach second-language learners or in promoting both dialect and standard written Welsh in schools.

Inset image credit: Howard Beaumont

A database of Welsh tweets is being used to identify the characteristics of an evolving language.

If I want to find out whether a particular construction is emerging, I would normally have to conduct a time-consuming pilot study, but with Twitter I can get a rough and ready answer in 30 minutes

David Willis

̽��ֱ��District

Welsh Twitter

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Against all odds: archaic Greek in a modern world

bjb42 — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Until Medieval times, the area of Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, lay at the heart of the Greek-speaking world. ̽��ֱ��land of the legendary Amazon kingdom was colonised by the Greeks in the 8th and 7th centuries BC and was immortalised in Greek mythology as the area from which Jason and his crew of 50 Argonauts began their journey across the Black Sea on his quest for the Golden Fleece.

Remarkably, despite millennia of change in the cultural and socio-political history of the surrounding area, in this mountainous and isolated north-east corner of Asia Minor its people still speak Greek. ̽��ֱ��uniqueness of the dialect – known as Romeyka – is providing a fascinating window on language past and present, as Dr Ioanna Sitaridou, ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in Romance Philology at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Queens’ College, is discovering.

On the verge of extinction

Romeyka is proving a linguistic goldmine for research because of the startling number of archaic features it shares with the Koiné (common) Greek of Hellenistic and Roman times, spoken at the height of Greek influence across Asia Minor from the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD.

‘Although Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern Greek dialect,’ explains Dr Sitaridou, ‘it preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an Ancient Greek flavour to the dialect’s structure – traits that have been completely lost from other Modern Greek varieties.’

As devout Muslims, Romeyka speakers in the Trabzon area were exempt from the large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Using religion as the defining criterion to re-settle Christians in Greece and Muslims in Turkey, the Treaty resulted in the exchange of some two million people between the two countries. For Pontus, the result was an exodus of Greek-speaking Christians, leaving small enclaves of Greek-speaking Muslims in Turkey.

Repeated waves of emigration from Trabzon, coupled with the influence of the dominant Turkish-speaking majority, have left the dialect vulnerable to extinction (UNESCO have designated Pontic Greek as ‘definitely endangered’). ‘With as few as 5,000 speakers left in the area, before long Romeyka could be more of a heritage language than a living vernacular,’ says Dr Sitaridou. ‘With its demise would go an unparalleled opportunity to unlock how the Greek language has evolved. ’

Language cartography

Dr Sitaridou’s research project is uncovering the secrets of this little-studied dialect. Her expertise is both in syntax, which is the study of a language’s grammatical rules and sentence structure, and in how and why language changes. ‘With Romeyka, I have the most wonderful opportunity to study these two things in tandem. Not only does the dialect demonstrate elements that are proving problematic for the current linguistic theory but it also presents us with a living example of an evolving language.’

In collaboration with Professor Peter Mackridge ( ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford), who has carried out pioneering research on Pontic dialects since the 1980s, Dr Sitaridou is also working with Dr Hakan Özkan ( ̽��ֱ�� of Münster), Professor Stavroula Tsiplakou (Open ̽��ֱ�� of Cyprus), the European Dialect Syntax network (Meertens Institute) and three postgraduate students: Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Petros Karatsareas and Dimitrios Michelioudakis.

At the core of her work are fieldtrips to villages in Pontus to map the cartography of the language – how it works, how much micro-variation there exists (known as synchrony) and how the morpho-syntactic structure has changed through time (diachrony). Information is gathered through video and audio recordings of the villagers telling stories, as well as through specially structured questionnaires that Dr Sitaridou has designed to collect the complex data needed for unpicking the structure of a language.

Window on the past

Studying language change is, in general, notoriously difficult because of the lack of living speakers who can positively tell us what they think is ungrammatical or not (in contrast to texts, from which we can only recover what is grammatical). Investigating the history of Greek is no different despite the plethora of old texts.

‘Imagine if we could speak to individuals whose grammar is closer to the language of the past; not only could we map out a new grammar of a contemporary dialect but we could also understand some forms of the language of the past. This is the opportunity that Romeyka presents us with,’ says Dr Sitaridou, who is also a member of the Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures (CELC).

Last of the infinitives

̽��ֱ��first results of the study are already providing remarkable insights, as Dr Sitaridou announced during the first ever linguistics conference on Romeyka last March at Queens’ College, Cambridge: ‘Unlike ancient forms of Greek, use of the infinitive has been lost in all other Greek dialects known today – so speakers of Modern Greek would sayI want that I goinstead ofI want to go. But, in Romeyka, not only is the infinitive preserved, making this essentially the last Greek infinitive of the Greek-speaking world, but we also find quirky infinitival constructions that have never been observed before – only perhaps in the Romance languages are there parallel constructions.’

All the more astonishing, the results so far seem to be indicating that Romeyka is closer to Hellenistic Koiné than all other Modern Greek dialects, which are generally considered to have emerged from the later Medieval Greek spoken in the 7th to the 13th century AD.

Change ‘in real time’

Dr Sitaridou’s research is ultimately trying to pinpoint how Pontic Greek evolved. ‘We know that Greek has been continuously spoken in Pontus since ancient times and can surmise that its geographic isolation from the rest of the Greek-speaking world is an important factor in why the language is as it is today,’ says Dr Sitaridou. ‘What we don’t yet know is whether Romeyka emerged in exactly the same way as other Greek dialects but later developed its own unique characteristics which just happen to resemble archaic Greek. Or whether it developed from an earlier version of Greek in contrast to the rest of the Greek dialects and as a result of this more direct lineage, as well as its isolation from other dialects for centuries, it maintains archaic features.’

Nevertheless, Romeyka also demonstrates considerable innovation especially as a result of contact with Turkish. In this respect, Dr Sitaridou is interested in modelling what influence the contact with Turkish and Caucasian languages has had on the evolution of the dialect. Given the linguistic and socio-historic context of Romeyka, she notes that ‘in Pontus, we have near-perfect experimental conditions to assess what may be gained and what may be lost as a result of language contact.’ It is precisely these questions she will pursue further as the recipient of the prestigious Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton ̽��ֱ�� in Spring term 2011.

̽��ֱ��implications of such research are, however, far more pervasive, since understanding how language functions could provide some insight into cultural identity and people’s sense of themselves, as well as what happens when cultures connect.

Dr Sitaridou, whose own great-grandparents were from the region, believes that the linguistic evidence will help to unravel the thread of language evolution; we have yet to see whether the thread takes us all the way back to the time of Jason and the Argonauts and whether more surprises await us.

For more information, please contact Dr Ioanna Sitaridou (is269@cam.ac.uk; http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/is269).

An endangered Greek dialect spoken in Turkey has been identified by Dr Ioanna Sitaridou as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its closeness to a language spoken 2,000 years ago.

Although Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern Greek dialect, it preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an Ancient Greek flavour to the dialect’s structure – traits that have been completely lost from other Modern Greek varieties. 

Dr Ioanna Sitaridou

Archaic Greek in a modern world

Dr Ioanna Sitaridou

Trabzon area of Turkey

Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures

Linguists and anthropologists from across Cambridge have created Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures (CELC) as a forum for researchers with common interests not just in seeking to document languages that are under threat, but also the literatures and ideas about cultural identity that they help to maintain. For more information, please visit http://groups.pwf.cam.ac.uk/celc/

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Endangered dialects of Aramaic

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Over 6000 languages are currently spoken worldwide but many are in danger of dying out. Some dialects are lost through political upheavals, scattering populations whose children grow up speaking the language of their new home; for others, social tensions persuade communities to lose one dialect in favour of another. Unlike the loss of biodiversity, this type of endangerment goes largely unnoticed and yet the loss of linguistic diversity, and the history and knowledge that languages embody, is equally as lamentable.

There is now a great urgency in the task of systematically documenting one group of dialects, whose roots lie in the ancient Semitic language of Aramaic, before their imminent demise. Since October 2004, Geoffrey Khan, Professor of Semitic Philology in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, has been directing a research team in an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project that is preserving this knowledge in an entirely new way.

Ancient roots

Aramaic has survived into modern times as the spoken vernacular language in various areas of the Middle East. Neo-Aramaic, as it is known, consists of a very diverse range of dialects that today differ considerably from earlier literary forms of Aramaic. In many cases, the dialects exhibit types of linguistic forms that are unique within Semitic.

̽��ֱ��group of dialects spoken in south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and the adjacent region of the former Soviet Union, known as North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), exhibits particular diversity, comprising over 100 dialects spoken by Christians and Jews. Remarkably, those spoken by Christians are in all cases different from those spoken by Jews, even when the two communities have lived side by side for centuries.

Vulnerable voices

̽��ֱ��NENA group of dialects are particularly vulnerable because of the great upheavals that have been suffered in the 20th century by the Jewish and Christian Aramaic-speaking communities in the region.

Jewish communities left the region in a mass exodus in the 1950s and now live, for the most part, in Israel. As for the Christian communities, a large proportion have been displaced in the past century: in south-eastern Turkey, for instance, virtually all the village communities were destroyed in the First World War and the survivors forced to flee their villages; and in northern Iraq, many of the Christian villages have been lost more recently through political disturbances in the region.

These catastrophes, together with a policy of Arabicisation by an Iraqi government intolerant of linguistic minorities, have driven a large number of Aramaic-speaking Christians out of the Middle East to make a new life in other countries. ̽��ֱ��diaspora have settled throughout the world, particularly in North America, Australia and western Europe. Such upheavals have brought the majority of the NENA dialects to the verge of extinction.

Tracing the last surviving speakers

To arrive at a systematic description of the surviving NENA dialects, much of the data have to be gathered in field-trips and it has become a major task to locate informants for many of the dialects. This applies all the more so to the most endangered dialects of the group, some of which have only a few surviving speakers, all of whom are advanced in age. For example, after a long hunt, Professor Khan finally managed to locate the final speaker of one dialect in Auckland, New Zealand. He was a man in his 90s who had originally come from a small village in northern Iraq. Similarly, the remaining half-dozen speakers of another dialect have been found, this time in a village in Armenia to which their ancestors had migrated from eastern Turkey at the beginning of the 19th century.

In the case of some of the NENA dialects, the surviving speakers remember the dialect of their parents imperfectly. Vocabulary relating to material culture is particularly prone to disappear quickly after the displacement of the communities from their rural villages in the Middle East. ̽��ֱ��physical deterioration of the speakers can also be a problem; elderly speakers often lack enough teeth to pronounce some words properly, especially those with dental consonants.

Having found surviving speakers, the process of describing an undocumented spoken language consists of more than simply recording an individual’s speech. There is an analytical dimension in which a linguist must use various means of questioning to tease out the complete structure of the language. Some cases turn out to be more arduous than others: one informant had great difficulty with the plural imperative of the verb ‘to open’ (i.e. the order ‘open!’ addressed to a group of people), insisting that this was not possible, since more than one person is not needed to open a window or door.

̽��ֱ��most successful means of working with informants has proved to be through informal, friendly relationships, without any payment of fees. On one occasion, however, an informant was clearly conscious of the financial value of his knowledge and insisted on charging $2 for every grammatical form. Owing to the complex nature of his dialect’s verbal system, it became clear that the description of this particular dialect would be beyond the means of the available research funding!

Linguistic fingerprinting

In most cases, the speakers have no knowledge of the migration history of their ancestors. ̽��ֱ��grammatical structure of the dialects, however, is a ‘linguistic genome’ and one fascinating aspect of this project has been the finding that dialects sometimes contain evidence of population movements. In Azerbaijan, for instance, the Turkish language had an impact on the verbal system of the Aramaic dialects of the region. This influence can still be seen today in Aramaic dialects that are spoken a long way from Azerbaijan, as far as the Mosul plain in Iraq.

Preserving for future generations

A key and innovative element to this project has been the NENA database (NENAD), a tool developed by an IT team to accommodate and process the diversity of the dialects in the NENA group. ̽��ֱ��web-based resource allows efficient retrieval of linguistic data and audio recordings for individual dialects, of which over 70 have now been documented. Comparative displays of data from all the dialects in the database can be created, and a ‘smart’ version of the traditional dialect atlas displays the distribution of grammatical features across the dialect area.

Of course, linguists in most cases cannot keep endangered languages alive, given that the risk to the language is often rooted in social and political issues, but they can create records that are detailed and sophisticated enough to allow analytical study by future researchers over decades to come. By preserving the world’s rich history of linguistic diversity, we can enhance our collective understanding of human language and the peoples that have spoken them.

For more information, please contact the author Professor Geoffrey Khan (gk101@cam.ac.uk)

at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies or visit the NENAD website (https://nena.ames.cam.ac.uk/index-new.php).

Current estimates suggest that a language dies every two weeks. Here, Geoffrey Khan describes the documentation of a group of dialects before they are lost forever.

There is now a great urgency in the task of systematically documenting one group of dialects, whose roots lie in the ancient Semitic language of Aramaic, before their imminent demise.

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