DIALECT CLUSTER

1. (Sociolinguistics) In other situations, a closely related group of varieties possess considerable (though incomplete) mutual intelligibility, but none dominates the others. To describe this situation, the editors of the Handbook of African Languages (2012) introduced the term dialect cluster as a classificatory unit at the same level as a language. A similar situation, but with a greater degree of mutual unintelligibility, has been termed a language cluster (Hansford, Bendor-Samuel, and Stanford 1976).
    In the Language Survey Reference Guide issued by SIL International, who produce Ethnologue, a dialect cluster is defined as a central variety together with a collection of varieties whose speakers can understand the central variety at a specified threshold level (usually between 70% and 85%) or higher. It is not required that peripheral varieties be understood by speakers of the central variety or of other peripheral varieties. A minimal set of central varieties providing coverage of a dialect continuum may be selected algorithmically from intelligibility data (Grimes 1995). | Wikipedia, 2024
2. (Sociolinguistics) In a discussion on interpreting intelligibility scores, Joseph Grimes (1995) asserts that a threshold of 85% comprehension is needed before any group of speech varieties can be considered varieties of a single language; scores between 70–85% indicate that comprehension is marginal.

   At threshold levels high enough to guarantee good communication from the central dialect to its periphery (usually 85% or above), it is reasonable to speak of the dialect cluster as a single language from the linguistic point of view. Speech varieties that come together at only 70% or below are too distinct to qualify as the same language. In between, 70% to 85%, is an area of marginal intelligibility where some communication is satisfactory and some is not. The threshold depends on the risk associated with not communicating well; the final criteria are not purely linguistic. (Grimes 1995)

    | Michael Ayotte and Melinda Lamberty, 2002

DIALECT COMPETITION
(Examples)
○ A social network strength factor (Hirano 2011) with adjusted technique showed the dynamic result, that certain groups of people with particular qualities resisted conforming to BKK Thai pressure. Thus, the [h] variant may receive a social meaning as a covert prestige form (Labov 2006, Trudgill 1972) rather than a stigmatized form in this dialect competition. | Ko Panyaatisin, 2016
○ The subsequent reduction in the frequency of mais [in 13th-century French] is not accompanied by a reduction in the basic types of verbal construction it can occur in. The possibility remains that dialect competition may have been a factor. As stated above, however, I have found no indication in the literature of different preferences for either plus or mais in different langue d'oïl dialects. | Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, 2013
○ In focussing this was / weren't pattern (of English past tense be), a number of the processes typical of koinéization can be observed:

• Diffusion: The geographical and/or social spread of a linguistic form from another socio-geographic place.
• Levelling: The eradication of marked or minority forms in situations of dialect competition, where the number of variants in the output is dramatically reduced from the number in the input.
• Simplification: A relative diminution of grammatical irregularity and redundance.
• Reallocation: Where two or more ingredient variants of the of the dialect mix are refunctionalized to serve new social, stylistic, or grammatical roles.

• Ah set me dahn e-milking / On Chrestmas-tide at neet, / When t' warld semm'd still an quiet / An gooan war t' waning leet; / All t' beeasts i' booist an' stanning / Contented ate their hay, ... By Douglas Charlesworth.
• Aw like owd stuff; / Mi ancient coit, an' seeasoned pipe; / T'owd walking stick 'at t' wife wunce bowt, / When we wor young an' ripe. ... By A. Farnell.
• Aye! bonny flaar, tha'rt t' first aw've seen, / Who cud a thowt that tha'd a been / Wakken bi naah, an' t' wind ser keen! / Aw felt fair capp'd / As soon as ivver aw had me een / Upon tha clapp'd. ... By the Rev. Harry Shaw.

DIALECT LEVELING

1. (Sociolinguistics) An overall reduction in the variation or diversity of a dialect's features when in contact with one or more other dialects (Hickey 2013). This can come about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often amidst a process of language codification, which can be a precursor to standardization. One possible result is a koine language, in which various specific dialects mix together and simplify, settling into a new and more widely embraced form of the language. Another is a speech community increasingly adopting or exclusively preserving features with widespread social currency at the expense of their more local or traditional dialect features (Britain 2010).
    Dialect leveling has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialization and modernization of the areas in which they are spoken. However, while less common, it could be observed in pre-industrial times too, especially in colonial dialects like American and Australian English or when sustained linguistic contact between different dialects over a large geographical area continues for long enough as in the Hellenistic world that produced Koine Greek as a result of dialect leveling from Ancient Greek dialects. | Wikipedia, 2024
2. (Sociolinguistics) Contact-induced linguistic accommodation commonly involves several well-defined linguistic processes and outcomes. First and foremost is leveling, the reduction in either the number of linguistic variants or the magnitude of variation among variants. The competition between two forms that mean the same thing, such as two lexical items, often results in the loss of one form and the retention of the other. In many but not all cases, the "winning" variant is more frequent in the initial population of speakers; for example, Trudgill et al. (2000) propose that the survival of [h] (rather than its deletion), as in hammer in New Zealand English, is due to the fact that it was more common than [h] deletion overall in the contributing dialects. A related tendency is for the "losing" variant(s) to be marked in some way, that is, associated with a particular geographic area or social group (Moag 1977, Trudgill 1986, Kerswill and Williams 2000). Perceptual salience may also boost a variant's chances of surviving the leveling process in the absence of an initial majority variant (Kerswill and Williams 2002). | Robin Dodsworth, 2017

DIALECTAL COLORING
(Examples)
○ All dialogs are in Standard German, with dialectal coloring for some speakers of Swabian origin. All subjects were females between 20 and 30 years of age, mostly students. They were paid for each dialog they participated in. | Antje Schweitzer, Natalie Lewandowski, Daniel Duran, Grzegorz Dogil, 2015
○ Like those epigrams, the Anacreontic carmina were composed over many centuries by different authors with different goals and, inevitably, conceptions of the form. Moreover, they seem to have reached the manuscripts in which they are ultimately preserved via a series of now-lost syllogae organized according to different editorial practices and goals, and there are objective grounds for suspecting that some aspects of their dialectal coloring has been altered in the course of transmission. | Alexander Sens, 2014
○ A fundamental difference between the two western productions lies in the quality of secondary long vowels, which—in accordance with the Syracusan dialect —are closed (ει, ου) in Archimedes, but open (η, ω) in Philolaus and Archytas (Thumb and Kieckers 1932). As is often the case, we cannot be sure of whether the dialectal coloring of such texts is authentic or due to later editing (not an unlikely event in the case of Pythagorean literature). | Olga Tribulato, 2010
○ I would like to show that the poet of Job incorporates Aramaic linguistic elements not only for dialectal coloring but also for more acute and specific rhetorical effects and that the Aramaizing of the poet can be discerned not only in the lexicon, but in the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language as well. | Edward Greenstein, 2004
○ 70 speakers were selected from the RVGI corpus. The selection procedure was the following: First all speakers were excluded which had judged their own variant as "Standard German". 10 speakers (5 male, 5 female) of each region were selected from the remaining subset which showed strong dialectal coloring of their pronunciation. This judgement was performed by one of the authors by listening to the monologues. | Felix Schaeffler and Robert Summers, 1999
○ Among the factors influential in the formulation of a standard [language] was the printing press. It has been assumed in the past that printers were particularly concerned to avoid dialectal coloring in order to have the widest possible market for their books. This assumption is refuted by Arno Schirokauer in his article, "Der Anteil des Buchdrucks an der Bildung des Gemeindeutschen" (1951), where he points out, first, that printers concentrated largely on the local market and were not interested in taking the risks involved in export; and second, that readers of the day were not disturbed by dialectal peculiarities. | Marion Lois Huffines, 1974

DIALECTAL COMPETENCE
(Examples)
○ The goal of our research was to analyze self-assessment of dialectal competence and external assessment of dialectal competence (both subjective measures), and to identify patterns in the interaction of the two. | Astrid Adler, Karolina Hansen, and Maria Ribeiro Silveira, 2022
○ Then the results of the survey are presented as they relate to the dialectal competence of the respondents and their everyday language use[.] ... The map shows the expected regional differences between North and South (the darker an area is colored, the higher the average dialectal competence indicated). | Albrecht Plewnia, 2022
○ This event-related potential (ERP) study examines the influence of dialectal competence differences (merged vs. unmerged dialect group) on cross-dialectal comprehension between Southern German dialects. ... The results reveal first ERP evidence for cross-dialectal misunderstanding when speakers from the merged area use the /o͡a/-diphthong stemming from MHG ô. No similar effects could be detected for the phonetically related /o͡ʊ/-phoneme. The empirically observable change of /o͡a/ to either /o͡ʊ/ or /oː/ in the Bavarian-Alemannic transition zone can thus be interpreted as a strategy to avoid costly communication difficulties in close dialect contact settings. Insofar, dialectal competence differences resulting in enhanced neural processing costs can indeed trigger dialect change in order to facilitate successful cross-dialectal communication. | Manuela Lanwermeyer, Karen Henrich, Marie J. Rocholl, et al., 2016
○ The highly localized communicative relations that originally dominated have given way to a regionalization of communication, especially in rural areas, a trend which accelerated in the 20th century. From a linguistic point of view, this has led and continues to lead to a constant recalibration of differences in dialectal competence in regionally shaped speech acts (i.e., mesosynchronization). Whilst the use of locally specific forms in communication with speakers of neighboring dialects leads to negative feedback and thus to individual modifications of competence, the regionally dominant forms are understood without difficulty (receive positive feedback) and lead to stabilization of the individual's competence. | Jürgen Erich Schmidt, 2011

DIASTRATIC

1. (Lexicography) Concerned with or relating to the ways in which language varies across social, cultural or educational factors. | Wiktionary, 2024
2. (Sociolinguistics) Refers to variation in language between social classes. | Raymond Hickey, ?
3. (Sociolinguistics; Text) Diastratic variation is variation according to the social class or to the social group to which the authors and recipients of the text feel they belong. | Vanya Micheva, 2018

DIASYSTEM

1. (Dialectology) Or, polylectal grammar. A linguistic analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties in a way that displays their structural differences (Trask 1996, Crystal 2011).
    The term diasystem was coined by linguist and dialectologist Uriel Weinreich in a 1954 paper as part of an initiative in exploring how to extend advances in structuralist linguistic theory to dialectology to explain linguistic variation across dialects. Weinreich's paper inspired research in the late 1950s to test the proposal. However, the investigations soon showed it to be generally untenable, at least under structuralist theory. | Wikipedia, 2023
2. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) Consisting of interconnected language-specific idioconstructions and language-unspecific diaconstructions.
    The term diasystem was introduced by Weinreich (1954) in his strictly structuralist approach to dialectology in order to account for regular correspondences between different structures in closely related dialects, mostly in the domain of phonology. It is, however, easily extensible so as to apply to other systematic crosslinguistic correspondences as well. | Steffen Höder, 2014
3. (Sociolinguistics) Research in sociolinguistics assumes five dimensions of language variation, the so-called diasystem, that are mutually influential: diaphasic (situation), diamesic (medium), diastratic (social group), diachronic (time), and diatopic (space). | Melis Çelikkol, Lydia Körber, and Wei Zhao, 2024
4. (Sociolinguistics) In order to describe this complex structure of our modern languages, linguists have proposed the model of the diasystem. This model goes back to dialectologist Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967) who originally thought of some linguistic construct which would make it possible to describe different dialects in a uniform way (Weinreich 1954). According to the modern form of the model, a language is a complex aggregate of different linguistic systems, "which coexist and mutually influence each other" (Coseriu 1973, my translation from the German).
    An important aspect for determining a linguistic diasystem is the presence of a Dachsprache ('roof language'). This is a linguistics variety that serves as a standard for interdialectal communication (Goossens 1973). The different linguistic varieties (dialects, but also sociolects) that are connected by such a standard constitute the variety space of a language (Oesterreicher 2001).
    There are different "dimensions" according to which the varieties of a language can differ:
   1. Diatopic varieties, which point to the division of a language into different dialects (varying regarding the place where they are spoken).
   2. Diastratic varieties, pointing to different social layers in which the varieties are used. Compare, for example, the language of a football player with that of a politician, which are similar in their tendency to say nothing in many words (especially after hard defeats or before unpopular decisions to be told to the public), but which differ a lot regarding their choice of words.
   3. Diaphasic varieties, which are varieties depending on the situation in which people speak. Compare, for example, the way our politician speaks when giving a speech to the public with the speech when discussing big politics behind closed doors.
   4. We can further identify different speech habits when looking at the medium that is used to produce language; and there are significant differences in many respects when writing or reading something, or when speaking and listening. This dimension is commonly called diamesic (varying in dependency of the "medium").
   5. We should also note that we do not necessarily speak and understand the language from only one time. Think of modern German kids in school who are forced to read Goethe's Faust, bitterly lamenting the old-fashioned style of the language, but think also about different generations of speakers living in the same speech society. This last dimension of language variety is usually called the diachronic dimension.
   
    | Johann-Matiss List, 2015

DIASYSTEMATIC CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR
(Grammar) Abbreviated DCxG. In mainstream 20th-century linguistic and grammar theory, multilingualism is usually seen as an exceptional case as opposed to monolingualism, which is seen as the prototypical case. Consequently, language systems are described as monolingual, largely variation-free, and static. On the other hand, contact linguistic research shows that, on a historic and global scale, multilingualism is clearly the rule rather than an exception. While language contact is the normal state of languages, speaker groups, and individual speakers, monolingualism in a narrow sense (i.e. monolectalism) does not even exist: all speakers are multilingual or at least multilectal to some extent, meaning that they use several different (standard) languages or various varieties / dialects productively or receptively to some degree—in other words, speakers utilize a range of linguistic resources in a way that is communicatively adequate.
 Based on these insights, this project aims at developing a socio-cognitively realistic construction grammar approach to multlilingualism and language contact (Diasystematic Construction Grammar). DCxG is normal usage-based construction grammar as applied to language contact situations and works without any additional assumptions. In particular, DCxG assumes that

1. Linguistic knowledge is cognitively stored and processed as constructions.
2. Constructions are pairings of form and function.
3. Linguistic knowledge is organized through domain-general cognitive processes.

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