The future of dialects
The future of dialects

Author: Marie-Hélène Côté

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 3946234186

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Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

The Acceleration of Cultural Change
The Acceleration of Cultural Change

Author: R. Alexander Bentley

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-08-25

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0262036959

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How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

A Survey of Language and Culture
A Survey of Language and Culture

Author: Michael Shaw Findlay

Publisher: Cognella Academic Publishing

Published: 2015-11-05

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9781634873352

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The book is a survey of language and culture from an anthropological perspective. Students explore everything from the actual definition of language to language acquisition, from theoretical perspectives on language development to applied linguistics.

Researching Cultures of Learning
Researching Cultures of Learning

Author: Lixian Jin

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2013-01-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780230321328

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This edited book examines cultures of learning from the perspectives of education, applied linguistics and language learning. The concept can be used to explore socio-cultural features of language learning and use contexts in educational institutions, and cultural practices of pedagogic activities and classroom interaction.

Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction
Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction

Author: Don Kulick

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-04-24

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780521599269

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This book, first published in 1992, is an anthropological study of language and cultural change among the people of Gapun, a small community in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea.

Strategies for Cultural Change
Strategies for Cultural Change

Author: Paul Bate

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1483163954

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Strategies for Cultural Change develops a conceptual framework for thinking about cultural change. Starting with a discussion of the vocabulary (the concepts) of cultural change, the book moves on to the grammar (the thinking structures), and finally the ""oral"" practice (the applications) of cultural change in the organizational setting. Four main questions are addressed: Why change culture? Is planned cultural change possible? What kind of cultural change is envisaged? How does cultural change occur? The book contains 14 chapters organized into two parts. Part One examines the different types of cultural change strategy in some depth. ""Developmental"" and ""transformational"" strategies are then brought together into a single conceptual framework for cultural change. Part Two shifts from strategy to implementation; from thinking frameworks to frameworks for action. It begins by surveying current practice and examines the various, often strikingly different, ways in which people seek to effect cultural change in their organizations. Accounts are presented based both on the author's own first-hand experiences of working with private and public sector companies on cultural change programs, and on an extensive review of the available literature.

Language Change
Language Change

Author: Leiv E. Breivik

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 311085306X

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TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Changing Literacies
Changing Literacies

Author: Lankshear, Colin

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)

Published: 1997-03-01

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0335196365

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The authors have observed and analysed the components of social abilities and how they influence, through language and literacy the likely outcome of the lives and identities of individuals and groups.