Dialects

From Kortrijk to the Caribbean: the significance of a final -t

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carriols2

Some linguistic features are striking and unmistakable. Others are so subtle that outsiders barely notice them – while insiders hear them instantly. A t-sound at the end of a word can be one of those features. It may seem insignificant, yet it can signal where you are from, where you belong, even who you are.

In Dutch, final –t is a fragile consonant. In everyday speech, it is often dropped altogether: Dutch speakers say nie instead of niet ‘not’, wa instead of wat ‘what’, and da instead of dat ‘that’. No speaker deletes every final –t, but no one keeps them all either.

This type of deletion is often associated with informality in Standard Dutch. But it … ↪

Global Languages Day, Sept. 17, Dokk1, Aarhus, Denmark

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Global Languages Day82 1
Researchers and teachers connect to Aarhus University (AU) who are interested in languages, are organizing Global Languages Day, an initiative aimed at showcasing the work they do with and about languages at AU to the general public, including gymnasium students. As many languages  as possible will be represented.
The event is planned in three parts:
  1. Short talks
  2. Small booths representing the languages we have at AU (sprogsmagning) – including snacks and possibility for 2-minute language dating
  3. Q&A session (with questions selected in advance for preparation: globallanguagesday@cas.au.dk)
Global Languages Day will take place on September 17 at DOKK 1.
We plan to have the talks (part 1) from 10:00 – 12:10, the sprogsmagning (part 2) from 12:10 – 13:30, and
… ↪

International Romani Day

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Today it is the day of Romani culture. Stéphane Laederich informs us about the intricacies of this transnational language.
A Danish version can be read here and a Russian version can be read here.

On Romanes

Romanes, often also denoted as Romani Čhib or Romani Šib [the Roma language], is originally spoken by all Roma and continues to be so by many Roma in the world. Be it either by migration or by work and social niche specialization, Roma divided themselves into distinct groups. Some groups, such as many of the Hungarian Carpathian Roma or the Spanish Cale, have completely lost the language, partly due to earlier bans on speaking Romanes. Others only speak it in a version that … ↪

A new book about the history of English

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More than 50 years ago, Barbara Strang published her highly innovative book A History of English (1970, Methuen £2.25) which, daringly, began its chronological treatment of the English language in the (then) present-day, with “Changes in living memory” (Strang was born in 1925), and then worked its way backwards. The first chapter in the chronological sequence was devoted to “1970-1770”, and the final chapter covered the period “Before 370”.

The obvious advantage of this strategy is that you can start readers off in a place they are familiar with, and then take them on a journey to increasingly remote and less familiar periods of time. Strang’s way of dealing with this material was an intriguing and attractive one, and in … ↪

Researchers hiding in fear of GDPR

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gdpr

GDPR – business or pleasure?

Do you remember GDPR (or, for mnemonic assistance, Gitte and Per)? This is one of three posts on the EU law that everybody feared last year: What did we think it was, what is it, and what effects has it had?

In the weeks before 25 May 2018, I received up to thirty e-mails a day (yes, I have too many accounts at webshops and social media) with similar text: “We are updating our Privacy Policy”.

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… all on occasion of GDPR, EU’s new data law, which Lingoblog has written about here and here.

The many e-mails made me think if I ought to send a similar one out to all of my … ↪

Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010)

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Lingoblog continues to provide you with suggestions for your summer readings on various linguistic topics. This week we have found a biography of language researcher Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010).

In January 1999, a few years after I had moved to Denmark, I was astounded to come across an interview in the Danish weekly Weekendavisen with the renowned Danish phonetician Eli Fischer- Jørgensen (henceforth EFJ) and marveled: She is still alive! Having made her name in publications as early as the first half of the past century, in the interview EFJ still appeared intellectually unabated, and full of new writing plans yet. She even remarked that she hoped soon to finish a major work on a special liturgic form of Danish!

In … ↪

Why are there so many different types of “R”?

by
rhotic

One of the things that got us excited about linguistics back in the days wasn’t any kind of scientific holy grail, such as why only humans have language or whether we are born with an innate language faculty. It was something very simple, namely: why are there so many different types of “R”?

As a speaker of an Eastern-Dutch dialect, I (Jeroen) noticed I could never roll my R’s with the tip of my tongue like in Spanish or Italian. Rather, I roll my R’s with my uvula (the little “ball” in the back of your throat, see the picture below). Why, I wondered, do I roll my R’s in my throat, whereas most people in Amsterdam roll their R’s … ↪