Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

This collection of thirteen essays examines sociolinguistic phenomena in a wide variety of marginal environments, providing both an overview of globalizaiton on the margins and a foundation for an expanded understanding of the processes of linguistic and cultural changes at work in these settings. Taking an expansive conceptual view of margins, the volume is organized in three parts, looking at examples of marginal spaces in the nation-state, in online environments, and in the peripheries of urban locations, globally to call attention to new and changing discursive genres, patterns, practices, and identities emerging in these spaces as a result of contemporary mobilities, the evolving global economy, and socio-political changes. With previous research previously confined to the study of globalization in urban areas, this volume opens the door for further research on the complex sociolinguistic processes resulting from globalization on the margins, making this an ideal resource for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, globalization and heritage studies, new media, anthropology, and cultural studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

The book presents a new theory of the relationship between language and culture in a transnational and global perspective. The fundamental view is that languages spread across cultures, and cultures spread across languages, or in other words, that linguistic and cultural practices flow through social networks in the world along partially different paths and across national structures and communities.

History tells us that translation plays a part in the development of all cultures. Historical cases also show us repeatedly that translated works which had real social and cultural impact often bear little resemblance to the idealized concept of a ‘good translation’. Since the perception and reception of translated works — as well as the translation norms which are established through contest and/or consensus — reflect the concerns, preferences and aspirations of their host cultures, they are never static or homogenous even within a given culture. This book is dedicated to exploring some of the factors in the interplay of culture and translation, with an emphasis on translation activities outside the Anglo-European tradition, particularly in China and Japan.

Professor Sapir analyzes, for student and common reader, the elements of language. Among these are the units of language, grammatical concepts and their origins, how languages differ and resemble each other, and the history of the growth of representative languages--Cover.

Written by the world-renowned pioneer in the field of modern sociolinguistics, this volume examines the cognitive and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change, tracing the life history of these developments, from triggering events to driving forces and endpoints. Explores the major insights obtained by combining sociolinguistics with the results of dialect geography on a large scale Examines the cognitive and cultural influences responsible for linguistic change Demonstrates under what conditions dialects diverge from one another Establishes an essential distinction between transmission within the community and diffusion across communities Completes Labov’s seminal Principles of Linguistic Change trilogy

The book is a survey of language and culture from an anthropological perspective. Students explore everything from the actual definition of language to language acquisition, from theoretical perspectives on language development to applied linguistics.

This is a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change. It discusses where our evidence about language change comes from, how and why changes happen, and how languages begin and end. It considers both changes which occurred long ago, and those currently in progress. It does this within the framework of one central question - is language change a symptom of progress or decay? It concludes that language is neither progressing nor decaying, but that an understanding of the factors surrounding change is essential for anyone concerned about language alteration. For this substantially revised third edition, Jean Aitchison has included two new chapters on change of meaning and grammaticalization. Sections on new methods of reconstruction and ongoing chain shifts in Britain and America have also been added as well as over 150 new references. The work remains non-technical in style and accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of linguistics.