Aug 15, 2025
It's so funny how you can read a Wikipedia article sometimes and know whether it was written by a North American or a Brit (or English speaker from another region) by whether or not "hospital" is preceded by a "the."
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It's so funny how you can read a Wikipedia article sometimes and know whether it was written by a North American or a Brit (or English speaker from another region) by whether or not "hospital" is preceded by a "the."
reasons I love having roommates: I can just kidnap them in the kitchen, give them my 20 pages summary of my Sociolinguistics/Culture Studies course and ask them to quiz me on it
reasons I specifically love my roommate: she's so patient even though she hasn't had a course on variation in language in ages, and asked me all the culture things she's never learned
I'll never know how many times I've taken a British compliment as an insult or a British insult as a compliment. My optimistic solution is to just assume that any negative comments are surely just a translation problem.
Lynne Murphy (2018), The Prodigal Tongue, Penguin USA, p. 194
J’aime sa manière de rester zen.
Bahasa Indonesia was adopted to make communication easier across the vast Indonesian archipelago, but its simplicity has only created new barriers.
Knowing when to scale up speech styles and when to scale them back, and how to successfully balance differing impulses to unity and diversity – that is Bahasa Indonesia’s and this country’s challenge.
There's little research into origins of the geographic patterns of language diversity. A new model exploring processes that shaped Australia's language diversity provides a template for investigators.
All I can think of while reading this article is all the languages all around the world which have gone extinct because of wars, conquests, diseases, the scourge of alcohol, and loss of indigenous territory & population over just the last 500 years. *shudders*
Those people who constantly correct other people's grammar for non-educational purposes and to make themselves feel superior? Introduce them to sociolinguistics and see what happens.
Do you have any favourite books on dialectology? I’ve just finished a degree in English Language and a dissertation on the Essex accent and I want to keep learning about it; they don’t necessarily have to be about English dialects though. Sorry for the long ask and thanks in advance!! 😊
Hi,first of all: i LOVE that nick/url of yours. That’s my kind of revolution!
Now to your question: most dialectology I did was in and about German, I don’t know how much that’s help you. A few books that I would recommend, though:
Chambers, John K., and Peter Trudgill. Dialectology. 2. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998
Niebaum, Hermann, and Jürgen Macha. Einführung in die Dialektologie des Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999
Wiese, Heike. Kiezdeutsch - ein neuer Dialekt entsteht. Originalausgabe, zweite, durchges. Ausg. München: Beck, 2012
Stevenson, Patrick. Language and German disunity - a sociolinguistic history of East and West Germany, 1945 - 2000. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002
Burridge, Kate. Blooming English - observations on the roots, cultivation and hybrids of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004
Duszak, Anna, and Urszula Okulska. Speaking from the margin - global English from a European perspective. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004
“Win a iPad” Wow— a phrase from an ‘an’-less idiolect prominently on display. I’m sort of surprised this got by the designer’s boss...