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102-631: From a phonological standpoint, there is a north-south gradient contrasting conservative and innovative pronunciation patterns. The former generally retain features such as / s / – / θ / distinction and realization of intervocalic /d/, whilst the latter may not. Processes of interaction and levelling between standard (a construct popularly perceived as based on northern dialects) and nonstandard varieties however involve ongoing adoption of conservative traits south and innovative ones north. In line with Spanish language's rich consonant fluctuation, other internal variation within varieties of Peninsular Spanish

204-596: A voiceless dental fricative /θ/ , as in English th in thing . Thus, in most varieties of Spanish from Spain, cinco , 'five' is pronounced /ˈθinko/ as opposed to /ˈsinko/ in Latin American Spanish, and similarly for zapato , 'shoe', cerdo , 'pig', zorro , 'fox', Zurbarán . A restricted form of distinción also occurs in the area around Cusco , Peru, where [ θ ] exists in words such as

306-434: A command, as in casarsen 'to get married', siéntensen 'sit down'. In an area of northern Spain, centered on Burgos, La Rioja, Álava and Vizcaya and also including Guipúzcoa, Navarra, Cantabria and Palencia, the imperfect subjunctive forms tend to be replaced by conditional ones. In rural Aragon and Navarre , the cluster /tɾ/ is often realized as a voiceless alveolar non-sibilant affricate [tɹ̝̊] , not unlike

408-530: A dictionary of Sri Lankan Tamil. As a result of the Pure Tamil Movement , Indian Tamil tends to avoid loanwords to a greater extent than Sri Lankan Tamil. Coinages of new technical terms also differ between the two. Tamil policy in Singapore and Malaysia tends to follow that of Tamil Nadu regarding linguistic purism and technical coinages. There are some spelling differences, particularly in

510-492: A focus on linguistic structure independent of phonetic realization or semantics. In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), the basis for generative phonology . In that view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features . The features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant , and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from

612-522: A given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules , sometimes in a given order that can be feeding or bleeding , ) as well as prosody , the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation . The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to

714-506: A language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence in some theories. The distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid-20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception , which result in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology . Definitions of

816-705: A large dialect continuum defined as a unit culturally. Medieval Hindustani (then known as Hindavi ) was based on a register of the Delhi dialect and has two modern literary forms, Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu . Additionally, there are historical literary standards, such as the closely related Braj Bhasha and the more distant Awadhi , as well as recently established standard languages based on what were once considered Hindi dialects: Maithili and Dogri . Other varieties, such as Rajasthani , are often considered distinct languages but have no standard form. Caribbean Hindi and Fijian Hindi also differ significantly from

918-584: A lesser extent the Philippines ). Phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages , their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety . At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have

1020-619: A more abstract level, as a component of morphemes ; these units can be called morphophonemes , and analysis using this approach is called morphophonology . In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, or replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme ( allomorphs ), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress , feature geometry , tone , and intonation . Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in

1122-438: A phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape. At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ("chereme" instead of "phoneme", etc.), but the concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages . The word "phonology" (as in " phonology of English ") can refer either to

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1224-439: A pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . The study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay , who (together with his students Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba in

1326-458: A pluricentric language may be elaborated to appear as separate languages, e.g. Malaysian and Indonesian , Hindi and Urdu , while Serbo-Croatian is in an earlier stage of that process. Pre-Islamic Arabic can be considered a polycentric language. In Arabic-speaking countries different levels of polycentricity can be detected. Modern Arabic is a pluricentric language with varying branches correlating with different regions where Arabic

1428-595: A pluricentric language with four standards: Bulgarian (based on the Rup , Balkan and Moesian (" Eastern Bulgarian ") dialects), Macedonian (based on the Western and Central Macedonian dialects ), Gorani (based on the Torlakian dialects ), and Paulician (including Banat Bulgarian ). Politicians and nationalists from Bulgaria are likely to refer to this entire grouping as 'Bulgarian', and to be particularly hostile to

1530-682: A pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints ordered by importance; a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince and has become a dominant trend in phonology. The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints and representational elements (e.g. features) in various approaches has been criticized by proponents of "substance-free phonology", especially by Mark Hale and Charles Reiss . An integrated approach to phonological theory that combines synchronic and diachronic accounts to sound patterns

1632-574: A southern or Andalusian dialect, and an intermediary zone. This division does not include the Spanish of bilingual regions. While a more narrow division includes the following dialect regions: The related term Castilian Spanish is often applied to formal varieties of Spanish as spoken in Spain. According to folk tradition, the "purest" form of Peninsular Spanish is spoken in Valladolid , although

1734-569: A systematic study of the sounds in a language appears in the 4th century BCE Ashtadhyayi , a Sanskrit grammar composed by Pāṇini . In particular, the Shiva Sutras , an auxiliary text to the Ashtadhyayi , introduces what may be considered a list of the phonemes of Sanskrit, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology , syntax and semantics . Ibn Jinni of Mosul ,

1836-409: A universally fixed set and have the binary values + or −. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so-called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of

1938-721: Is Patricia Donegan, Stampe's wife; there are many natural phonologists in Europe and a few in the US, such as Geoffrey Nathan. The principles of natural phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler , who founded natural morphology. In 1976, John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology . Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations but rather as involving some parallel sequences of features that reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into feature geometry , which became

2040-614: Is a pluricentric language with historically more than one written form. Malayalam script is officially recognized, but there are other standardized varieties such as Arabi Malayalam of Mappila Muslims , Karshoni of Saint Thomas Christians and Judeo-Malayalam of Cochin Jews . The Persian language has three standard varieties with official status in Iran (locally known as Farsi), Afghanistan (officially known as Dari ), and Tajikistan (officially known as Tajik ). The standard forms of

2142-664: Is a popular idea in Bulgarian politics, but an unpopular one in North Macedonia. English is a pluricentric language, with differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, etc., between each of the constituent countries of the United Kingdom, North America, the Caribbean, Ireland, English-speaking African countries, Singapore, India, and Oceania. Educated native English speakers using their version of one of

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2244-486: Is a uniform stage pronunciation based on a manual by Theodor Siebs that is used in theatres, and, nowadays to a lesser extent, in radio and television news all across German-speaking countries, this is not true for the standards applied at public occasions in Austria, South Tyrol and Switzerland, which differ in pronunciation , vocabulary , and sometimes even grammar . (In Switzerland, the letter ß has been removed from

2346-525: Is among the most important works in the field from that period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology , but the concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme . Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson , one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. Louis Hjelmslev 's glossematics also contributed with

2448-549: Is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and morphophonology ) and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure, according to E. F. K. Koerner . An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague school . One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy , whose Grundzüge der Phonologie ( Principles of Phonology ), published posthumously in 1939,

2550-562: Is influenced by Kanak languages in its vocabulary and grammatical structure. African French is another variety. Standard German is often considered an asymmetric pluricentric language; the standard used in Germany is often considered dominant, mostly because of the sheer number of its speakers and their frequent lack of awareness of the Austrian Standard German and Swiss Standard German varieties. Although there

2652-419: Is language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously, but the output of one process may be the input to another. The second most prominent natural phonologist

2754-743: Is masculine, instead of the Hispanic-American-preferred computadora , which is feminine, from the English word 'computer' (the exceptions being Colombia and Chile, where PC is known as computador , which is masculine). Speakers from Latin America tend to use words and polite-set expressions that, even if recognized by the Real Academia Española , are not widely used nowadays (some of them are even deemed as anachronisms ) by speakers of Castilian Spanish. For example, enojarse and enfadarse are verbs with

2856-461: Is much smaller than the number of non-native speakers of English of reasonable competence. In 2018, it was estimated that for every native speaker of English, there are six non-native speakers of reasonable competence, raising the questions of English as a lingua franca as the most widely spoken form of the language. Philippine English (which is predominantly spoken as a second language) has been primarily influenced by American English. The rise of

2958-459: Is now the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico in total number of speakers (L1 and L2 speakers). A report said there are 41 million L1 Spanish speakers and another 11.6 million L2 speakers in the U.S. This puts the US ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million) and second only to Mexico (121 million). The Spanish of Latin Americans has a growing influence on

3060-490: Is related to British English in its common pronunciation and vocabulary; a similar relationship exists between Canadian English and American English.) English was historically pluricentric when it was used across the independent kingdoms of England and Scotland prior to the Acts of Union in 1707. English English and Scottish English are now subsections of British English. In the modern era, there are several major loci of

3162-490: Is represented by phenomena such as weakening of coda position -/s/, the defricativization of /tʃ/, realizations of /x/ as [x] and [h] and weakening or change of liquid consonants /l/ and /r/. Morphologically , a notable feature in most varieties of Peninsular Spanish setting them apart from varieties from the Americas is the use of the pronoun vosotros (along with its oblique form os ) and its corresponding verb forms for

Peninsular Spanish - Misplaced Pages Continue

3264-531: Is rolled, and with heavier contact with the English language than any of the above the pronunciation has shifted to harder sounding consonants in the 20th century. Cajun French equally has been an oral language for generations and it is only recently that its syntax and features been adapted to French orthography. Minor standards can also be found in Belgium and Switzerland , with particular influence of Germanic languages on grammar and vocabulary, sometimes through

3366-504: Is spoken and the type of communities speaking it. The vernacular varieties of Arabic include: In addition, many speakers use Modern Standard Arabic in education and formal settings. Therefore, in Arabic-speaking communities, diglossia is frequent. The Armenian language is a pluricentric language with two standard varieties, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian , which have developed as separate literary languages since

3468-400: Is taught in schools with British curriculum in countries with descendants of British settlers.) Due to globalization and the resulting spread of the language in recent decades, English is becoming increasingly decentralized, with daily use and statewide study of the language in schools growing in most regions of the world. However, in the global context, the number of native speakers of English

3570-508: Is the language regulator for these varieties. Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people spoke only their local varieties of Chinese . These varieties had diverged widely from the written form used by scholars, Literary Chinese , which was modelled on the language of the Chinese classics . As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of

3672-403: Is the only contrasting feature (two words can have different meanings but with the only difference in pronunciation being that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one). Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers ) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what

3774-465: Is treated as an onset cluster, with both consonants being part of the same syllable. The same is true in the Canary Islands and most of Latin America, with the exception of Puerto Rico. On the other hand, in most of Peninsular Spanish, each consonant in /tl/ is considered as belonging to a separate syllable, and as a result the /t/ is subject to weakening. Thus, [aðˈlantiko] , [aðˈleta] are

3876-421: Is typically distinguished from phonetics , which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds or signs of language. Phonology describes the way they function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics and phonology to theoretical linguistics , but establishing the phonological system of

3978-430: Is usually pronounced by a Swedo-Finn as [ t͡ʃ ] ; in addition, the two tones that are characteristic of Swedish (and Norwegian) are absent from most Finnish dialects of Swedish, which have an intonation reminiscent of Finnish and thus sound more monotonous when compared to Rikssvenska . There are dialects that could be considered different languages due to long periods of isolation and geographical separation from

4080-695: The Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua , created in 1998. However, this institution recognizes that Catalan and Valencian are varieties of the same language. For their part, there are specific varieties in the two major Balearic islands, Mallorcan ( Catalan : mallorquí ) in Mallorca , Menorcan ( menorquí ) in Menorca , Ibizan ( eivissenc ) in Ibiza . The University of the Balearic Islands

4182-545: The Armenian diaspora , especially in the former Soviet Union (Russia, Georgia , Ukraine). Western Armenian is spoken mainly in the Armenian diaspora , especially in the Middle East, France, the US, and Canada. Additionally, Armenian is written in two standard orthographies: classical and reformed Armenian orthography. The former is used by practically all speakers of Western Armenian and by Armenians in Iran , while

Peninsular Spanish - Misplaced Pages Continue

4284-726: The Charter for Regional or Minority Languages . North American French is the result of French colonization of the New World between the 17th and 18th centuries. In many cases, it contains vocabulary and dialectal quirks not found in Standard Parisian French owing to history: most of the original settlers of Quebec , Acadia , and later what would become Louisiana and northern New England came from Northern and Northwest France, and would have spoken dialects like Norman, Poitevin , and Angevin with far fewer speaking

4386-652: The Instituto Cervantes , an agency of the Government of Spain in charge of promoting the Spanish language abroad, has been adopted by other countries as the authority to officially recognize and certify the Spanish level of non-native Spanish speakers as their second language, as happens in Australia, South Korea or Switzerland. The variants of Spanish spoken in Spain and its former colonies vary significantly in grammar and pronunciation , as well as in

4488-709: The Kazan School ) shaped the modern usage of the term phoneme in a series of lectures in 1876–1877. The word phoneme had been coined a few years earlier, in 1873, by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes . In a paper read at 24 May meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris , Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed for phoneme to serve as a one-word equivalent for the German Sprachlaut . Baudouin de Courtenay's subsequent work, though often unacknowledged,

4590-592: The Sanskritized standard Hindi spoken in India. The Malay language has many local dialects and creolized versions, but it has two main normative varieties which are Malaysian and Indonesian : Indonesian is codified by Indonesia as its own lingua franca based on the dialect spoken in Riau Islands , whereas Malaysia codifies Malaysian based on the vernacular dialect of Johor . Thus, both lects have

4692-530: The call center industry in the Philippines has encouraged some Filipinos to "polish" or neutralize their accents to make them more closely resemble the accents of their client countries. Countries such as Australia , New Zealand , and Canada have their own well-established varieties of English which are the standard within those countries but are far more rarely taught overseas to second language learners. (Standard English in Australia and New Zealand

4794-571: The langues d'oïl . However, government policy made it so that the dialect of Paris would be the method of instruction in schools, and other dialects, like Norman , which has influence from Scandinavian languages, were neglected. Controversy still remains in France over the fact that the government recognizes them as languages of France, but provides no monetary support for them nor has the Constitutional Council of France ratified

4896-413: The standard forms of English are almost completely mutually intelligible, but non-standard forms present significant dialectal variations, and are marked by reduced intelligibility. British and American English are the two most commonly taught varieties in the education systems where English is taught as a second language . British English tends to predominate in Europe and the former British colonies of

4998-434: The French language, including Standard French (also known as Parisian French), Canadian French (including Quebec French and Acadian French ), Belgian French , American French (for instance, Louisiana French ), Haitian French , and African French . Until the early 20th century, the French language was highly variable in pronunciation and vocabulary within France, with varying dialects and degrees of intelligibility,

5100-554: The German-speaking area of Europe), and by different terminology employed in law and administration. A list of Austrian terms for certain food items has even been incorporated into EU law , even though it is clearly incomplete. Scholarly scepticism in German dialectology about the pluricentric status of German has led some linguists to detect a One Standard German Axiom (OSGA) as active in the field. The Hindi languages are

5202-523: The People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian . In some cases, the different standards of

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5304-561: The West Indies, Africa, and Asia, where English is not the first language of the majority of the population. (The Falkland Islands , a British territory off the southeast coast of South America with English as its native language, have their own dialect , while British English is the standard.) In contrast, American English tends to dominate instruction in Latin America, Liberia, and East Asia (In Latin America, British English

5406-459: The alphabet, with ss as its replacement.) Sometimes this even applies to news broadcasts in Bavaria , a German state with a strong separate cultural identity. The varieties of Standard German used in those regions are to some degree influenced by the respective dialects (but by no means identical to them), by specific cultural traditions (e.g. in culinary vocabulary, which differs markedly across

5508-455: The analysis of sign languages (see Phonemes in sign languages ), even though the sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds. Pluricentric language A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms , often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in

5610-584: The central dialects of Svealand and Götaland that came to constitute the base for the standard Rikssvenska . Dialects such as Elfdalian , Jamtlandic , and Gutnish all differ as much, or more, from standard Swedish than the standard varieties of Danish . Some of them have a standardized orthography, but the Swedish government has not granted any of them official recognition as regional languages and continues to look upon them as dialects of Swedish. Most of them are severely endangered and spoken by elderly people in

5712-553: The concept of "pure" languages has been rejected by modern linguists. Dialectal variation in the Peninsula follows both north-south and east-west axes. Leísmo is native to a large swath of western Castile, as well as Cantabria and neighboring parts of Leon and Extremadura. In much of eastern Castile, as well as Navarre, Aragon and Álava, the clitic pronoun se can express plural number, becoming sen , when it follows an infinitive, gerund, or subjunctive form used to express

5814-749: The countryside. The vast majority of Tamil speakers reside in southern India, where it is the official language of Tamil Nadu and of Puducherry , and one of 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India . It is also one of two official languages in Sri Lanka , one of four official languages in Singapore , and is used as the medium of instruction in government-aided Tamil primary schools in Malaysia . Other parts of

5916-652: The dialect of Bogotá) is valued for its clear pronunciation. The Judeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino ; not to be confused with Latino ) spoken by Sephardi Jews can be found in Israel and elsewhere; it is usually considered a separate language. Two varieties exist, though only one written standard remains (regulated by the Swedish Academy of Sweden): Rikssvenska (literally "Realm Swedish", also less commonly known as "Högsvenska", 'High Swedish' in Finland),

6018-462: The dialect of Paris. This, plus isolation from developments in France, most notably the drive for standardization by L'Académie française , make North American dialects of the language quite distinct. Acadian French, spoken in New Brunswick , Canada, has many words no longer used in modern France, much of it having roots in the 17th century, and a distinct intonation. Québécois, the largest of

6120-762: The dialects of the language: carro refers to car in some Latin American dialects but to cart in Spain and some Latin American dialects. There also appear gender differences: el PC ('personal computer') in Castilian Spanish and some Latin American Spanish, la PC in some Hispanic American Spanish, due to the widespread use of the gallicism ordenador (from ordinateur in French) for computer in Peninsular Spanish, which

6222-452: The dialects, has a distinct pronunciation that is not found in Europe in any measure and a greater difference in vowel pronunciation, and syntax tends to vary greatly. Cajun French has some distinctions not found in Canada in that there is more vocabulary derived from both local Native American and African dialects and a pronunciation of the letter r that has disappeared in France entirely. It

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6324-691: The eighteenth century. Prior to this, almost all Armenian literature was written in Classical Armenian , which is now solely used as a liturgical language . Eastern and Western Armenian can also refer to the two major dialectal blocks into which the various non-standard dialects of Armenian are categorized. Eastern Armenian is the official language of the Republic of Armenia . It is also spoken, with dialectal variations, by Iranian Armenians , Armenians in Karabakh (see Karabakh dialect ), and in

6426-416: The empire using a common language based on northern varieties , known as Guānhuà (官話, literally "speech of officials"), known as Mandarin in English after the officials. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined. In the early years of the 20th century, Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese , which

6528-473: The ethnic variants of the standard language makes translation and second language teaching impossible"; however there have been many cases of Serbian films shown with subtitles in cinemas and on TV in Croatia, to the amusement of the audience. Spanish has both national and regional linguistic norms, which vary in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but all varieties are mutually intelligible and

6630-405: The extent to which they require allophones to be phonetically similar. There are also differing ideas as to whether this grouping of sounds is purely a tool for linguistic analysis, or reflects an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider basic units at

6732-514: The field of phonology vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Grundzüge der Phonologie (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, which is "the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between language and speech being basically Ferdinand de Saussure 's distinction between langue and parole ). More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to

6834-406: The field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax , its morphology and its lexicon . The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή , phōnḗ , 'voice, sound', and the suffix -logy (which is from Greek λόγος , lógos , 'word, speech, subject of discussion'). Phonology

6936-527: The grammar of their pronominal systems. The result is that communication between the two varieties of the language without previous exposure can be occasionally difficult, although speakers of European Portuguese tend to understand Brazilian Portuguese better than vice versa, due to the heavy exposure to music, soap operas etc. from Brazil . Word ordering can be dramatically different between European and Brazilian Portuguese, without significantly hampering mutual intelligibility . A unified orthography for all

7038-634: The influence of local dialects. In Belgium, for example, various Germanic influences in spoken French are evident in Wallonia (for example, to blink in English, and blinken in German and Dutch, blinquer in Walloon and local French, cligner in standard French). Ring ( rocade or périphérique in standard French) is a common word in the three national languages for beltway or ring road. Also, in Belgium and Switzerland, there are noted differences in

7140-523: The initial consonant cluster in the English word trick . Similarly, the trilled /r/ may also be assibilated to [ ɹ̝ ] in this region. The same pronunciations are also found in much of Latin America, especially Mexico , Central America , and the Andes . In a chunk of northwestern Spain which includes Galicia and Bilbao and excludes Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville, the sequence /tl/ in words such as atleta 'athlete' and Atlántico 'Atlantic'

7242-463: The language across the globe through music, culture and television produced using the language of the largely bilingual speech community of US Latinos. In Argentina and Uruguay the Spanish standard is based on the local dialects of Buenos Aires and Montevideo . This is known as Rioplatense Spanish , (from Rio de la Plata (River Plate)) and is distinguishable from other standard Spanish dialects by voseo . In Colombia , Rolo (a name for

7344-769: The latter, which was developed in Soviet Armenia in the 20th century, is used in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh . In the modern era, Catalan is a pluricentric language with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary. This language is internationally known as Catalan , as in Ethnologue . This is also the most commonly used name in Catalonia , but also in Andorra and the Balearic Islands , probably due to

7446-464: The notion that Macedonian is an autonomous language separate from Bulgarian, which Macedonian politicians and citizens tend to claim. As of 2021, the hypothesis that Eastern South Slavic, 'Greater Bulgarian', 'Bulgaro-Macedonian', or simply 'Bulgarian', is a pluricentric language with several mutually intelligible official standards in the same way that Serbo-Croatian is, and Czechoslovak used to be, has not yet been fully developed in linguistics; it

7548-487: The number system when compared to standard Parisian or Canadian French, notably in the use of septante , octante/huitante and nonante for the numbers 70, 80 and 90. In other standards of French, these numbers are usually denoted soixante-dix (sixty-ten), quatre-vingts (fourscore) and quatre-vingt-dix (fourscore-and-ten). French varieties spoken in Oceania are also influenced by local languages. New Caledonian French

7650-412: The numbers doce , 'twelve', and trece , 'thirteen'. Additionally, all Latin American dialects drop the familiar (that is, informal) vosotros verb forms for the second person plural, using ustedes in all contexts. In most of Spain, ustedes is used only in a formal context. Some other minor differences are: The meaning of certain words may differ greatly between all

7752-467: The official language of Sweden, and Finlandssvenska which, alongside Finnish, is the other official language of Finland. There are differences in vocabulary and grammar, with the variety used in Finland remaining a little more conservative. The most marked differences are in pronunciation and intonation: Whereas Swedish speakers usually pronounce /k/ before front vowels as [ ɕ ] , this sound

7854-477: The popular imagination. That said, different isoglosses intersect and never exactly coincide with regional borders. The Spanish dialects of bilingual regions, such as Castrapo in Galicia or Catalan Spanish , have their own features due to language contact. A simple, north-south division is: Another north-south division would include a central-northern, found north of Madrid and equated with Castilian Spanish,

7956-547: The prestige Shtokavian dialect, major differences in intelligibility are identified not on the basis of standardised varieties, but rather dialects, like Kajkavian and Chakavian . According to at least one linguistics scholar, "[l]exical differences between the ethnic variants are extremely limited, even when compared with those between closely related Slavic languages (such as standard Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian), and grammatical differences are even less pronounced. More importantly, complete understanding between

8058-683: The prestige of the Central Catalan dialect spoken in and around Barcelona . However, in the Valencian Community , the official name of this language is Valencian . One reason for this is political (see Serbo-Croatian for a similar situation), but this variant does have its own literary tradition that dates back to the Reconquista . Although mutually intelligible with other varieties of Catalan, Valencian has lexical peculiarities and its own spelling rules, which are set out by

8160-709: The resulting pronunciations. The Spanish language is a pluricentric language . Spanish is spoken in numerous countries around the world, each with differing standards. However, the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy), based in Madrid , Spain, is affiliated with the national language academies of 22 other hispanophone nations through the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language , and their coordinated resolutions are typically accepted in other countries, especially those related to spelling. Also,

8262-747: The retroflex initials /tʂ tʂʰ ʂ/ found in northern dialects, so that many speakers in those places do not distinguish them from the apical sibilants /ts tsʰ s/. Similarly, retroflex codas ( erhua ) are typically avoided in Taiwan and Singapore. There are also differences in vocabulary, with Taiwanese Mandarin absorbing loanwords from Min Chinese , Hakka Chinese , and Japanese , and Singaporean Mandarin borrowing words from English, Malay , and southern varieties of Chinese. Some linguists and scholars, mostly from Bulgaria and Greece , but some also from other countries, consider Eastern South Slavic to be

8364-671: The same orthographic rules are shared throughout. In Spain , Standard Spanish is based upon the speech of educated speakers from Madrid . All varieties spoken in the Iberian Peninsula are grouped as Peninsular Spanish . Canarian Spanish (spoken in the Canary Islands ), along with Spanish spoken in the Americas (including Spanish spoken in the United States , Central American Spanish , Mexican Spanish , Andean Spanish , and Caribbean Spanish ), are particularly related to Andalusian Spanish . The United States

8466-478: The same dialectal basis, and linguistic sources still tend to treat the standards as different forms of a single language. In popular parlance, however, the two varieties are often thought of as distinct tongues in their own rights due to the growing divergence between them and for political reasons. Nevertheless, they retain a high degree of mutual intelligibility despite a number of differences in vocabulary (including many false friends ) and grammar. Malayalam

8568-411: The same meaning (to become angry), enojarse being used much more in the Americas than in Spain, and enfadarse more in Spain than in the Americas. Below are select vocabulary differences between Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries. Words in bold are unique to Spain and not used in any other country (except for perhaps Equatorial Guinea which speaks a very closely related dialect, and to

8670-425: The same phoneme. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to expect to be able to splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception. Different linguists therefore take different approaches to the problem of assigning sounds to phonemes. For example, they differ in

8772-593: The same phonological category, that is of the phoneme /p/ . (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated [pʰ] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot , native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" /p/ .) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai , Bengali , and Quechua , there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration

8874-453: The same place and manner of articulation and differ in voicing only, were allophones of the same phoneme in English, but later came to belong to separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics . The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicate the traditional and somewhat intuitive idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as

8976-555: The same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, but parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures in this field include Jonathan Kaye , Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette , and John Harris. In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed optimality theory , an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose

9078-442: The second person plural familiar. Language contact of Spanish with Catalan , Basque and Galician in the autonomous communities in which the latter languages are spoken notoriously involve borrowings at the lexical level , but also in the rest of the linguistic structure. Variation in Peninsular Spanish, especially phonetic, largely follows a north-south axis, often imagined or characterized as Castilian versus Andalusian in

9180-412: The sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for deciding whether two sounds should be assigned to the same phoneme. However, other considerations often need to be taken into account as well. The particular contrasts which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] , two sounds that have

9282-798: The standard European dialect, but have undergone their own phonetic and grammatical developments, sometimes reminiscent of the spoken Brazilian variant. A number of creoles of Portuguese have developed in African countries, for example in Guinea-Bissau and on the island of São Tomé . Serbo-Croatian is a pluricentric language with four standards (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) promoted in Bosnia and Herzegovina , Croatia , Montenegro , and Serbia . These standards do differ slightly, but do not hinder mutual intelligibility . Rather, as all four standardised varieties are based on

9384-512: The standard theory of representation for theories of the organization of phonology as different as lexical phonology and optimality theory . Government phonology , which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters . That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially

9486-400: The subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, and in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items." According to Clark et al. (2007), it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language , or the field of linguistics studying that use. Early evidence for

9588-445: The syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and, more explicitly, in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes that interact with one another; those that are active and those that are suppressed

9690-630: The three are based on the Tehrani , Kabuli , and Dushanbe varieties, respectively. The Persian alphabet is used for both Farsi (Iranian) and Dari (Afghan). Traditionally, Tajiki is also written with Perso-Arabic script . In order to increase literacy, a Latin alphabet (based on the Common Turkic Alphabet ) was introduced in 1917. Later in the late 1930s, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic promoted

9792-728: The use of Cyrillic alphabet , which remains the most widely used system today. Attempts to reintroduce the Perso-Arabic script were made. The language spoken by Bukharan Jews is called Bukhori (or Bukharian), and is written in Hebrew alphabet . Apart from the Galician question , Portuguese varies mainly between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese (also known as "Lusitanian Portuguese", "Standard Portuguese" or even " Portuguese Portuguese "). Both varieties have undergone significant and divergent developments in phonology and

9894-502: The use of idioms . Courses of Spanish as a second language commonly use Mexican Spanish in the United States and Canada , whereas European Spanish is typically preferred in Europe. Dialects in central and northern Spain and Latin American Spanish contain several differences, the most apparent being Distinción (distinction), i.e., the pronunciation of the letter z before all vowels, and of c before e and i , as

9996-475: The varieties (including a limited number of words with dual spelling) has been approved by the national legislatures of the Portuguese-speaking countries and is now official; see Spelling reforms of Portuguese for additional details. Formal written standards remain grammatically close to each other, despite some minor syntactic differences. African Portuguese and Asian Portuguese are based on

10098-521: The world have Tamil-speaking populations, but are not loci of planned development. Tamil is diglossic , with the literary variant used in books, poetry, speeches and news broadcasts while the spoken variant is used in everyday speech, online messaging and movies. While there are significant differences in the standard spoken forms of the different countries, the literary register is mostly uniform, with some differences in semantics that are not perceived by native speakers. There has been no attempt to compile

10200-508: Was based on northern dialects . In the 1930s, a standard national language Guóyǔ (國語, literally "national language") was adopted, with its pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect , but with vocabulary also drawn from other northern varieties. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the standard was known as Pǔtōnghuà (普通话/普通話, literally "common speech"), but

10302-410: Was defined in the same way as Guóyǔ in the Republic of China now governing Taiwan. It also became one of the official languages of Singapore , under the name Huáyǔ (华语/華語, literally "Chinese language"). Although the three standards remain close, they have diverged to some extent. Most Mandarin speakers in Taiwan and Singapore came from the southeast coast of China, where the local dialects lack

10404-526: Was initiated with Evolutionary Phonology in recent years. An important part of traditional, pre-generative schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes . For example, in English, the "p" sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [pʰ] ) while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p] ). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations ( allophones , which cannot give origin to minimal pairs ) of

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