Stanford James N., Preston Dennis R. (ed.) Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (Impact: Studies in Language and Society)

John Benjamins, 2009. — vii, 519 p. — ISBN: 978-90-272-1864-3; ISBN: 978-90-272-8978-0.Indigenous minority languages have played crucial roles in many areas of linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, typology, and the ethnography of communication. Such languages have, however, received comparatively little attention from quantitative or variationist sociolinguistics. Without the diverse perspectives that underrepresented language communities can provide, our understanding of language variation and change will be incomplete. To help fill this gap and develop broader viewpoints, this anthology presents 21 original, fieldwork-based studies of a wide range of indigenous languages in the framework of quantitative sociolinguistics. The studies illustraThe how such understudied communities can provide new insights into language variation and change with respect to socioeconomic status, gender, age, clan, lack of a standard, exogamy, contact with dominant majority languages, internal linguistic factors, and many other topics.The lure of a distant horizon: Variation in indigenous minority languages
Variation in phonetics and phonology
The phonetic and phonological effects of obsolescence in Northern Paiute
Diglossia and monosyllabization in Eastern Cham: A sociolinguistic study
Affricates in Lleidatà: A sociophonetic case study
Sociolinguistic stratification and new dialect formation in a Canadian aboriginal community: Not so different after all?
The changing sound of the Māori language
Toward a study of language variation and change in Jonaz Chichimec
A sociolinguistic sketch of vowel shifts in Kaqchikel: ATR-RTR parameters and redundancy markedness of syllabic nuclei in an Eastern Mayan language
Phonological features of attrition: The shift from Catalan to Spanish in Alicante
Sociophonetic variation in urban Ewe
Phonological variation in a Peruvian Quechua speech community
A tale of two diphthongs in an indigenous minority language: Yami of Taiwan
Phonological markedness, regional identity, and sex in Mayan: The fricativization of intervocalic /l/ in K’iche’
The pronunciation of /r/ in Frisian: A comparative study with Dutch and Town Frisian
Variation in syntax, morphology, and morphophonology
Language shift among the Mansi
Fine-grained morphophonological variation in Scottish Gaelic: Evidence from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland
Animacy in Bislama? Using quantitative methods to evaluate transfer of a substraThe feature
The challenges of less commonly studied languages: Writing a sociogrammar of Faetar
Language variation and change in a North Australian indigenous community
Ethnicity, bilingualism, and variable clitic marking in Bishnupriya Manipuri
Clan as a sociolinguistic variable: Tree approaches to Sui clans
Language loss in spatial semantics: Dene Sųłiné