linguisticious-blog

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On the Abruzzese dialect, Roberta d’Alessandro (in Italian)

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lucky kid..

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Serious academics are only those who are willing to write also for the people, in a language that is not a jargon, but something that everybody included my grandma can understand, otherwise they have failed at their job. Keeping the knowledge only for those up in the Ivory Tower does not bring any progress to humanity

“If serious academics do not attempt to reach a wider audience, someone else will, and there is no guarantee that they are going to uphold the intellectual standards that we desire. Without a change in the existing academic culture, we will continue to see public debate on important issues derailed by factual errors and invalid reasoning. If we really are committed to the old-fashioned ideals of education and the pursuit of knowledge — and in today’s corporate environment, that is no longer a given — it seems that we should be rewarding the attempt to reach a broader audience.”

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Sounds more or less like Russel’s paradox.

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abstract

In bilingual communities, individuals often communicate in one of their languages only,and they adjust to the linguistic background of different interlocutors with ease. What facilitates such efficiency? [...] Overall, results suggest that proficient and/or early bilinguals benefit from an association  between  language  and  interlocutor  during  (or  even  before)  language comprehension, because they are able to predict the context-appropriate language based on non-linguistic cues, such as interlocutor context.

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Geographical distribution of Southern Italian Dialects and a couple of historical facts.

Today’s topic: Southern Italian Dialects. Ehh yes, I know, again. But just like you can take the girl out of Texas, but you cannot take Texas out of the girl, the same applies to me. So, Southern Italian Dialects are distributed as follows:

(Source: Enciclopedia Treccani)

The area covered by Southern Italian Dialects (area meridionale - the yellow one in the map) goes from south Umbria and Marche, to Abruzzi, parts of Latium (Rome’s region), and then Molise, Apulia, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily.

This area roughly corresponds to what once was the Kingdom of Naples, or, more precisely, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies:

(German map of the 19th Century, public dominion. I know, I know, it is an old map, but I like it. You can find a more modern and tidy one here)

The regions under the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were Campania, Abruzzi, Molise, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily. Its capital city was Naples. So, you will think: a kingdom with a unique language? Far from that. The crown of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was born from the unification of the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples. So, in Sicily the predominant language was Sicilian, in Campania Neapolitan, and as for other regions like Calabria and Apulia, they spoke (and still do, like the other regions) their own language derived from Vulgar Latin, but a different, regional one. From that we now have Calabrese and Apulian. Other languages were Italian (for the cultivated ones), Greek, Albanian and Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian, and Occitan. Greek was  (and it still is, in Calabria and Apulia, in a modern form called Griko) spoken because of the Byzantine presence in Italy from 330 to 1453 AC. Albanian was (and still is, in its modern form called Arbëresh) present because of the presence, since the 15th century, of Albanian refugees fleeing  the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans.The same Ottoman invasion brought to Italy refugees from Dalmatia who were Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian speakers, who then settled in Molise. Their language evolved into what we now know as the Slavomolisano Dialect. Arbëreshë speakers settled in Southern Italy in the Abruzzi, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Apulia and Sicily. On the presence of Occitan speakers, De Salvio (1908) notes that “... from the remains of the Angevine Registers in the Grand Archives of Naples, it is known that from 1269 to 1277 Charles of Anjou conferred lands and estates in Apulia on Provençal nobles and other vassals”. Nowadays, Occitan (along with its Provençal variety) is still spoken in Apulia, in some Piedmontese valleys, and Calabria.

As for the other dialects, they came directly from the variety of Vulgar Latin that was spoken in that area. Very often, these dialects, also show the presence of the various non-Italic population that invaded (or tried to), occupied, migrated to Italy. The Lombards, the Arabs, the Spanish, the French, the Greeks, the Byzantines... all converge in this marvelous cornucopia of tongues and colors, pride and abandon that we call Southern Italy. So, now, tongues in music: Garganic (Apulia)

Neapolitan

Salentino (Apulia) - this is not a popular song (you can find plenty, though, but instead a song written in salentino by Ludovico Einaudi in 2015 )

Sicilian

Daunic (Apulia)

Barese (Apulia), begins with a monologue in Barese, then the song starts at 1.29

Calabrese

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So, since language is nothing without gestures... Italian Gestures Compendium for you guys! Also, here, a psychologist explains the history of gestures in Italian and where they might have originated from

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Did you know a multilingual brain actually has more grey matter than a monolingual brain?

From the TED-Ed Lesson The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli

Animation by TED-Ed

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We know from decades of linguistic research that all people express themselves in ways that can convey an affiliation with a particular group or identity. We know that gender identity, sexual orientation, regional background, socioeconomic status, racial/ethnic affiliation, level of education, age, political beliefs, and many other social categories can be indexed through manipulations of voice quality, pitch, rhythm, vowel quality, consonant articulation, etc. Crucially, it’s not just the minorities of these categories who use such features; majority groups make use of these indexical features as well. For example, straight male speakers of American English are known to have deeper voices than straight male speakers of many other languages; even prepubescent boys in the US have been documented to have significantly lower pitch than girls of the same age, even though the two groups are physiologically indistinguishable in their throats. This trend has been getting more extreme since the 1960s, with American boys getting deeper and deeper voices with each generation. This means that inviting a gay man to talk about how his voice conveys gay-maleness is (scientifically speaking) just as valid as asking a straight man to talk about how his voice conveys straight-maleness, how a white person’s voice conveys whiteness, how a middle class person’s voice conveys middle class-ness, how a college-educated person’s voice conveys education, etc. But I can say I’ve never heard of such an interview from your program or any program; this is only something that gets asked of women, gay men, African Americans, immigrants, and other people who are in a socially un(der)privileged position. The questions that get asked are “why do gay people/women have to talk like that?” or “why can’t blacks speak (what we consider) proper English?” instead of “why do straight people/men have to talk like that?” or “why don’t whites know how to speak (any variety of) African American English?”, etc. There is no logical reason why we should ask the questions like the former two and not questions like the latter two. Not only is it inaccurate to label minorities as the only ones who convey their identities through their speech, it also perpetuates a misguided belief that there is a “natural” way to speak, or a way to speak that has no “styles”. This concept of “naturalness” or “authenticity”, which came up many times in your interview, assumes that only some people (i.e. minorities) are adopting “styles”, deviating from “natural” speech in order to convey their identity. This myth comes up all the time with another linguistic feature brought up in the interview, “vocal fry”. This type of voice quality, which linguists call “creaky voice”, “glottalization”, “laryngealization”, or a host of other terms depending on the specific acoustic characteristics, appears to index a number of social categories in American English: younger age, urban background, and (lately in the popular media) a sort of femininity. Ms. Sankin’s technical description of the voice quality was not incorrect (it does involve a slow vocal fold vibration with often incomplete closure), except for the part where she said it is harmful or unnatural. Endless popular articles and podcasts (and your interview) describe “vocal fry” as a deviation from a natural voice quality, that it can be physiologically harmful to the vocal folds, that it grates on the ears, that it’s a “style” coming from singers of pop music, and that it should be avoided in order to be successful in life. None of these claims has any basis in reality. In truth, these voice qualities are used extensively in languages like Danish, Vietnamese, Burmese, Hmong, and many indigenous languages of Mexico and Central America (such as Zapotec, Mazatec, and Yukatek Maya), far more than they are in English – and as you might imagine, speakers of those languages do not suffer from medical problems in the throat any more than speakers of other languages.

Excerpt from Open Letter to Terry Gross, by Sameer ud Dowla Khan on Language Log

This whole post (and its comment section) is worth reading – it’s written in response to an interview on NPR Fresh Air about a documentary on “sounding gay” but also stands well on its own.  

(via allthingslinguistic)

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hey :) i hope i'm not bothering you but for an assignment at school we have to conduct our own science experiment and i was hoping you might have some ideas on some fun linguistics investigations a high school student could carry out (maybe to do with internet speech or something idk) thankyou :))

I think I have missed a couple of messages (I did not have the time to be on Tumblr lately), so forgive me for not answering.Still need help?

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Exactly as bad as it sounds... Studies show that handwriting has cognitive benefits that cannot be ignored. Also, almost every important historical document is handwritten, so, here you go. Keep using a pen.

Signing off: Finnish schools phase out handwriting classes

From 2016, pupils will be taught only print handwriting and will spend more time learning keyboard skills – “something we recognise is very important for the job market,” said Harmanen.

Finland is one of the first countries to stop making cursive handwriting classes compulsory, but the change is part of a global move away from handwritten documents towards digital communication. 

(via Signing off: Finnish schools phase out handwriting classes | World news | The Guardian)

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Just watch this MOOC on Human Language made by the amazing linguists from Leiden University! :)

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Program of the Italian Dialect Meeting, 22-24 June 2015, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

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Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch. 

Martin Heidegger, Brief Über den Humanismus

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Buongiorno!Am I just mad, or does Italian have an 'r coloured vowel' similar to General American English. No matter how many times I hear it, the 'e' or the 'r' sounds in 'per' sound completely different from say the 'e' and 'r' in 'restare'. I hear no roll and I hear the 'e' and 'r' as one sound. Yet no Italian has seemed to agree with me... Grazie!

Yes you're correct :) the difference between the two is that "restare" ends with a vowel. So that gives the 'r' more space to roll freely. :)

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During the years, a copious number of grammar nazis and English majors around the world spread the idea that "gotten" is some kind of deviation of the English language created by Americans. Most British English speakers will tell you that it's not a real verb, and Australian English speakers say that - oh my God, bear us - it has infiltrated Australian English and that we're probably all gonna die for this. Like my brother says, "Google is your friend ", and if such people would take the time to Google its etymology they would discover that not only both "got" and "gotten" are correct, but also that (drum roll) they both date to the XIVth century, which, as you know, means 1300 A. D., which in turn means that: - such verb is not an American 'deviation' - it actually predates colonization in the New World - it was used in the United Kingdom - it dates back to Middle English, so, yes, that makes it pretty English English - these people are incredibly clueless about the history of their native language - there's actually a semantic difference between "got" and "gotten". The first describes the satus of owning something, the second describes the process that lead to this ownership (or lack of it): "I haven't got any money " vs. "I haven't gotten a word from her". Pragmatics, friends, Pragmatics.