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Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition (BDLT) has been one of the longest-running Slavic digital humanities projects in the United States. Initially conceived in 2008 as a series of printed volumes, the digital project was built upon the foundation of a long-term international collaboration dating to the 1970s. As BDLT nears completion in 2019, this paper reflects on the trajectory of its development and its sustainability as an unfunded digital humanities project, and the ways it can serve as both a model and cautionary tale for others who seek to undertake similar work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comprehensive investigation of the historical rise and contemporary usage patterns of Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian adjectival long-form allomorphy (ALFA). ALFAs include the sets of the genitive and dative/locative case allomorphs,-og/-ogaand-om/-ome/-omu, respectively. First, from my diachronic research, I find the sudden inclusion of ALFAs in Croatian grammars shortly following the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850. This evidence, coupled with the early attestation of ALFAs in Old Serbian (Belić 1969), as I claim in Pennington 2010, suggests that ALFAs may have been brought to Croatian dialects via Serbian refugees who fled westward to escape Ottoman (and Muslim) rule. From my synchronic research, I find a clear correlation between a preceding preposition and the addition of long-forms to pronominal adjectives. I link this phenomenon to the similar requirement for full form pronouns following prepositions, given the high level of semantic and syntactic features shared by pronouns and pronominal adjectives (see Sugamoto 1989). Finally, taking into account the general Indo-European trend to place pronouns and other “stressless” elements in the second position in a sentence found in Indo-European languages (à la Wackernagel 1892), and moreover, applying Mark Baker's Mirror Principle (1985), which is a statement on the regularity in the similarity of independent syntactic and morphological derivation processes to one another, I claim that ALFAs arose historically and continue to persist (even in Serbian) as extra syllables that may nor may not still have an anaphoric component (in the absence of a following noun) but most certainly serve to create a bi-syllabic form for pronominal adjectives when following stressless prepositions, an analogical extension of the sentential Wackernagel's Law to pronominal adjectival prepositional phrases. While in Serbian this rule is limited to pronominal adjectives, in Croatian it has been analogically extended to the adjectival class as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dialect classification is a classical problem in traditional dialectology. In the course of the last few decades, several quantitative approaches have been suggested as solutions for this problem, one of which uses 'Levenshtein distance' for measuring linguistic distances between dialects. In the present paper we shall introduce the Levenshtein algorithm as well as two methods with which the results of the measuring can be analyzed, viz. multidimensional scaling and clustering. Then we shall apply these methods to the Bulgarian language area and present a quantitative classification of Bulgarian dialects. Finally, we shall compare the classification obtained to the most widely accepted traditional Bulgarian dialect map, analyze the similarities and differences and evaluate our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue here that sociolinguistic studies of elite accents have largely been trapped in a methodological and theoretical cul-de-sac, isolated from other work in dialectology, blinkered by outdated concepts of elite status, and entangled with ideologies about standard accents. I begin by presenting the hurdles that face scholars of elite accents in English. There have, firstly, been few robust empirical investigations of English elite accents and our understanding of them has not been integrated into theorisations of language variation and change. Secondly, there has been a consistent but problematic “gentry aesthetic” in work on such accents – a concentration on the aristocratic, landed, private school-educated elite. Thirdly, a cycle of ideological linkages between phonetic descriptions of English, elites and accent standards has led to an overpowering dominance of “Received Pronunciation” (RP) in debate about upper-class accents, preventing us from examining the everyday accents of elites independent both of century-old descriptions of RP and of the assumption that elite accents are standard accents. I conclude by outlining what a dialectology of elites might look like, freed from overpowering orientations to RP and the standard, and enabling elite accents to be integrated into sociolinguistic models of language variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of standard language varieties on rural dialects is an important factor involved in dialect loss, which is widespread in Europe. In this study, we look at how the three-gender system in the Jämtlandic dialect of Sweden is changing under pressure from the two-gender system of Standard Swedish. The Jämtlandic dialect is an understudied Swedish dialect and an interesting object of study, in part because of the social and economic changes that have occurred over the past century. We performed a survey using profiled stimuli to elicit indefinite articles, definite articles and anaphoric pronouns for 36 target nouns. An analysis was conducted on the traditionalness of gender agreement in the material. We consider linguistic features (traditional gender and type of agreement), as well as sociological features (age, gender, education, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and language attitudes). The results show that most participants maintain the traditional three-gender system to a large degree. Age is the most significant predictor of traditionalness. While the youngest participants show the highest variability in gender assignment, they still retain the three-gender system to some degree. In addition, participants to whom the dialect is very important tend to use more traditional agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article demonstrates how the methods of modern dialectology can be used together with established dialectological and toponymic findings to inform our understanding of present-day variation. The linguistic data used are from theAtlas Linguistique et Ethnographique Normand, whose data were collected in the 1970s, and in which many of the words given to researchers are probably Norman as opposed to French. The comparison of these data with the known settlement patterns of Vikings in Normandy in the ninth to eleventh centuries shows clearly that the Vikings' mediaeval settlement patterns are reflected in isoglosses which can be drawn based on the Atlas' twentieth-century data, and the statistics of the modern methods show how strong the correlation is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]