This paper examines the history of the language distance studies: from the genesis of the language distance measuring concept to rapid adoption as one of the standard methods for different types of language classification during the 1990s-2020s. The general overview is split in two parts, one dedicated to the computational dialectology and the second to the computational phylogenetic linguistics, both of which currently use measuring language distance as a crucial part of their methodology. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the listed approaches, such as the Levenshtein distance and Bayesian phylogenetics, arguing that some of these methods are unfairly criticised in comparison to the human-made classifications. It proposes the strategies of enhancing the existing approaches and explores the latest emerging ones. The paper underlines the relatively poor performance of the current methods on small raw historical corpora material as the potential course for future research.
Kashmiri phonology has received considerable attention from many scholars but the occurrence of the nasal vowels as a separate category has not been discussed till date. This paper presents a comprehensive account of the nasal vowels in Kashmiri language. Nasal vowels in this study have been established through the standard phonemic procedures and their evolution and occurrence has been represented and explained within the autosegmental framework. The data includes examples from the core vocabulary, phenomena of nasal deletion, nasal vowel packing and unpacking in different contact languages and dialects of Kashmiri language. The data for the study have been collected over a time span of several years from three different dialects of Kashmiri from north, south and central Kashmir to get a comprehensive account of the nasal vowels in Kashmiri. The primary data consists of the fifty hours of the recorded speech. The study establishes the presence of fourteen nasal vowels in Kashmiri along with their distribution and frequency of occurrence.
In the Syunik-Artsakh dialect area of Armenian, 141 words of Indo-European origin have been preserved in the lexical group related to body parts. Some of them, according to etymological results, are evidenced only (or mainly) in Syunik and Artsakh dialect units, such as: հարու տալ (haru tal), սէռ (ser), հօռ (hor), գէղտ (geght), անգ (ang), լա̈բ (läb), սէպռիկ (seprik), լէմ (lem), տըմտէմուկ (tĕmtĕmuk) etc. The studies of these and related issues, in fact, once again confirm that the inter-dialect group of Karabakh-Shamakhi directly carries not only the material values of the Indo-European culture, but also the linguistic traditions. In terms of territory, the largest dialect group of Armenian has not reached the level of a literary language, but for about 5000 years it has preserved not only the phonetic and grammatical features of the proto-Armenian language, but also the vocabulary layers, the main part of which is of Indo-European origin.
This paper reinterprets Imai (2004), a study of Tokyo vowel devoicing in linguistic and social contexts; the focus here is on the latter. In that study, the data were analyzed in GoldVarb, widely used by variationists at the time (Tagliamonte 2006). Although it was a form of binomial logistic regression, it had limitations and was reworked in more widely used formats (Johnson 2009) and supplemented with nonparametric approaches (Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012), models now more often used by variationists and applied here to re-examine the 2004 findings. The major findings of this reanalysis point to the overwhelming influence of style over other factors and a distinction between young men and women that seems to contradict usual sociolinguistic interpretations of gender, style, and age. A reanalysis of the standardness of Tokyo Japanese based on Tamminga et al. (2016) addresses this apparent contradiction.
The language situation in Morocco is an ongoing process jointly influenced by historical, sociocultural, and educational dynamics. The local ethnocultural fabric, the colonial legacy, and language policy are all interrelated elements that have shaped the multilingual landscape and continue to inform the linguistic performance of Moroccan Arabic. The aim of the current study is to offer a theoretical review with linguistic examples to contextualize these forces in line with the development of Moroccan Arabic (i.e., Darija) and its frequent alternation to French. As such, the study revisits language contact between Arabic and French in this Arabic colloquial variety, examining sites of equivalence and constraints at the overt and covert levels, and unpacking the underlying language ideologies at work. Adopting this approach is critical not only for understanding the linguistic applications of language shift, but also for discerning linguistic choices considering societal attitudes in post-independence Morocco and the sociopolitical implications they bear on language policy.
