Regional distribution of contemporary Lithuanian dialects – An approach towards a different method
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Regional Distribution of Contemporary Lithuanian Dialect
At the beginning of the 20th century, like in many other European countries, a plan to document the spoken language systematically was also brought up in Lithuania. Later, in the 1950’s the necessary data for the Lietuvių kalbos atlasas (LKA) 'Lithuanian Language Atlas' was collected. This linguistic atlas was published in the three volumes Lexika 'lexicon' 1977, Fonetika 'phonetics' 1982 and Morfologija 'morphology' 1991, containing dialectal data of 800 localities visualised in 376 dialect maps (cf. Mikulėninė et al. 2014). Since these attempts to create a linguistic atlas of Lithuanian, dialectology has undergone a change of paradigm. As the aforementioned works were published, dialectologists viewed language variation mono-dimensionally. Today, dialectology has become a dynamic, sociolinguistically and perceptually oriented field of research.
Contemporary projects are methodologically based on the new paradigm where crowd-sourcing methods are used to help collect large amounts of data in a short time. These new data corpora are then compared with the data corpora collected during the traditional dialectological period, which makes language variation and change relatively easy to identify and document. Given the existence of the LKA, the Lithuanian situation is also appropriate for comparison.
In this talk, I want to focus on a new study planned in Lithuania in late 2020, for which a set of surveys will be developed in order to document language variation and change. The variables for the surveys will be chosen on the basis of the most salient features found in the LKA to allow for an exact comparison of data. The planned survey will be accessible online and designed in several "rounds", each containing of a thematic coherent set of variables. The results of a first pilot study make clear that the two major dialect regions (Aukštaičių 'Upper Lithuanian' and Žemaičių 'Lower Lithuanian') are still visible; however, their original area of distribution, as shown in the dialect classification which emerged out of the data of the LKA, has changed considerably. Furthermore, the results show that the linguistic homogeneity, as documented for the majority of all variables in the LKA, has been lost in most dialect regions, basically through speaker mobility.
References:
Mikulėnienė, Danguolė et al. (2014). XXI a. pradžios lietuių tarmės: geolingvistinis ir sociolingvistinis tyrimas. Vilnius: Briedis.
At the beginning of the 20th century, like in many other European countries, a plan to document the spoken language systematically was also brought up in Lithuania. Later, in the 1950’s the necessary data for the Lietuvių kalbos atlasas (LKA) 'Lithuanian Language Atlas' was collected. This linguistic atlas was published in the three volumes Lexika 'lexicon' 1977, Fonetika 'phonetics' 1982 and Morfologija 'morphology' 1991, containing dialectal data of 800 localities visualised in 376 dialect maps (cf. Mikulėninė et al. 2014). Since these attempts to create a linguistic atlas of Lithuanian, dialectology has undergone a change of paradigm. As the aforementioned works were published, dialectologists viewed language variation mono-dimensionally. Today, dialectology has become a dynamic, sociolinguistically and perceptually oriented field of research.
Contemporary projects are methodologically based on the new paradigm where crowd-sourcing methods are used to help collect large amounts of data in a short time. These new data corpora are then compared with the data corpora collected during the traditional dialectological period, which makes language variation and change relatively easy to identify and document. Given the existence of the LKA, the Lithuanian situation is also appropriate for comparison.
In this talk, I want to focus on a new study planned in Lithuania in late 2020, for which a set of surveys will be developed in order to document language variation and change. The variables for the surveys will be chosen on the basis of the most salient features found in the LKA to allow for an exact comparison of data. The planned survey will be accessible online and designed in several "rounds", each containing of a thematic coherent set of variables. The results of a first pilot study make clear that the two major dialect regions (Aukštaičių 'Upper Lithuanian' and Žemaičių 'Lower Lithuanian') are still visible; however, their original area of distribution, as shown in the dialect classification which emerged out of the data of the LKA, has changed considerably. Furthermore, the results show that the linguistic homogeneity, as documented for the majority of all variables in the LKA, has been lost in most dialect regions, basically through speaker mobility.
References:
Mikulėnienė, Danguolė et al. (2014). XXI a. pradžios lietuių tarmės: geolingvistinis ir sociolingvistinis tyrimas. Vilnius: Briedis.
Date of Publication
2020-11-13
Publication Type
Conference Item
Language(s)
en
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open.access