Kammu, a Mon-Khmer language spoken in Northern Laos, is a language that has developed lexical tones rather recently, from the point of view of language history. One of the main dialects of this language is a tone language with high or low tone on each syllable, while the other main dialect lacks lexical tones. The dialects differ only marginally in other respects. This type of language material...

The current study investigated the perception of the three-way distinction among Korean voiceless stops in non-tonal Seoul and tonal Kyungsang Korean. The question addressed is whether listeners from these two dialects differ in the way they perceive the three stops. Forty-two Korean listeners (21 each from Seoul and South Kyungsang) were tested in a perception experiment with stimuli in which ...

The aim of this paper is to show that Northwestern Latvian dialects (also called Tamian) are insufficiently characterized by placing them on a simple linear hierarchy of feminine gender loss, which is how they are traditionally approached in Latvian dialectology. While Lithuanian and Central and High Latvian dialects all have very similar and fairly canonical gender systems, various Northwester...

The present paper reports on an investigation to find an answer to the question to what extent subjects base their judgments of linguistic distances on actual dialect data presented in a listening experiment and to what extent they involve previous knowledge of the dialects when making their judgments. The point of departure for our investigation were distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as ...

Abstract The Malagasy language is not strictly confined to Madagascar but it also spoken in Mayotte, one of the four islands which constitute Comoros archipelago. inhabitants Mayotte are, fact, divided between two very distinct mother languages, Shimaore, a Bantu dialect similar dialects other three islands, Malagasy, an Austronesian language. In turn, represented by varieties, Kibosy Kimaore, ...

Majorcan (and Balearic) Catalan dialects lack an overt inflectional morpheme for first person singular present indicative verb forms. Many of these Majorcan Catalan (MC) verbs end with the consonants of the verb root with no further inflectional vowel (represented by the morphs /u/, /o/, /e/ or /i/ in other dialects of Catalan). This divergent morphological structure is illustrated in (1) from ...

This paper sketches some parallels in analyzing linguistic and biological data, emphasizing how methods taken from biology have been applied in dialectometry. We also present a technique developed specifically for detecting distinctive properties in (putative) groups of linguistic varieties (species) as this illustrates how the linguistic enterprise perhaps differs from the biological one.