Talk:Dialect levelling

Concerning New-Zealand English

Preamble: My job as a social worker involves reducing the number of children on a student exchange program who request to switch host families. . Maybe one could condense the section on NZ-English to a practical level? The issue is well-known in concerned circles so I expect I plurality of data has already been collected for sourcing 121.45.171.107 (talk) 12:19, 17 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not getting at all how this section can even be defined as Dialect levelling. This is about dialect creation, the opposite process. How can you level a newcomer to a standard form when there is no standard form? 120.17.141.231 (talk) 02:34, 25 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

one dialect??

In the lead sentence,

an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects.

was changed to

an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features in a dialect due to contact with one or more other dialects.

This is a very different definition.

Can the presence of other dialects reduce the variability within one dialect? I would expect the opposite. —Tamfang (talk) 04:23, 20 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The current definition is clearly wrong. --Jotamar (talk) 21:58, 23 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A new definition could be based on the one by Peter Trudgill:

Levelling: One of the linguistic processes which may take place in a situation of dialect mixture and which can lead, together with simplification, to the development of a koiné. Levelling refers to the process whereby the number of variant pronunciations, words or grammatical forms that are present in the dialect mixture are reduced as a result of focusing (see focused), to a smaller number of variants, usually one. Levelling usually consists of getting rid of forms which are used by only a minority of speakers or are in some other way unusual.

(Peter Trudgill: A Glossary of Sociolinguistics, 2003). --Jotamar (talk) 22:25, 23 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

With special mention of user:Wolfdog: I still don't like the definition. Now it is sourced from a well-known specialist, D. Britain, but this apparently comes from an article called Supralocal regional dialect levelling, and regional levelling is not the only possible scenario, there is also new dialect formation (see Trudgill), and it might happen that the current definition applies only to some types of levelling and not all. Besides, I think that a good definition should be made in terms of speakers or at least of speech communities, rather than in terms of dialects. --Jotamar (talk) 23:01, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry that I haven't seen the discussion until now; thanks for pinging me. I think the key element is contact between different dialects, which in Tamfang's comparison of the two lede options above is the element I added. Raymond Hickey in A Dictionary of Varieties of English (2014) defines levelling as "A process whereby the features which separate different dialects are reduced, rendering the dialects in contact more similar". In the long Trudgill quote above, Trudgill is defining the process and using koinéization as one possible outcome of levelling: as he says, this process can lead to a koiné, which implies not necessarily – not in all cases. Jotamar, you're right that Britain is also providing a definition that applies only to some types of levelling and not all. However, I'm a little lost by what you mean in wanting to weigh speech communities above dialects. The word dialect seems to me the focus; it's right in the title of this page. Can you clarify the problem? Wolfdog (talk) 15:04, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Wolfdog: what I mean is that dialects are ultimately abstractions or simplifications made by the researcher, the real process happens at the level of the individual speakers, who, after increasing their contacts with people who speak different from what they're used to, learn that certain variants of their speech (phonological, lexical, etc.) can hinder communication, and avoid those variants more and more to the point of forgetting them. --Jotamar (talk) 14:38, 11 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(Somehow your most recent ping didn't ping me.) So what would you like changed? Wolfdog (talk) 23:46, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'll try to answer that in a few days. Sorry for the inconvenience. --Jotamar (talk) 22:12, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nardog: Perhaps you'd like to contribute to this discussion, since no forward movement has been forthcoming. Right now, the lede reads as though two or more dialects lose their variation, but is that what dialect levelling is, or is it, rather ONE or more dialects losing variation? Wolfdog (talk) 14:56, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I said a few days, and a whole month has gone by ... I could devise a new definition, but I wouldn't have sources to back it up, so for the moment I think that the current definition is good enough or not too bad, and I won't change it. I might come back to the question in the future, I don't know. --Jotamar (talk) 22:43, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I changed "one dialect" back to "two or more" upon further reading/researching. Hope that's more in line. Thanks. Wolfdog (talk) 00:21, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]