Global ETD Search
Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 12 of 12 for “"language variation and change"”.
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Language variation and change: A case study of Shaba Swahili
… of colloquialism, corruption, deterioration and/or sub-standardness. In the Zairian province of Shaba, the variety of Swahili used is characterized by a multiplicity of deviations at all grammatical levels. This variety, commonly known as Shaba Swahili (ShS), has been considered by many as a …
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Chinese Internet Language: A Study of Identity Construction
This study contributes to the understanding of the interaction between language use and identity construction in the Internet arena. Aside from documenting a new type of language contact and convergence in the digital age, this dissertation also informs research on the social and technological …
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Phonetic variation, sound change, and identity in Scottish Gaelic
This thesis examines language variation and change in a context of minority language revitali- sation. In particular, I concentrate on young fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic, a minority language of Scotland that is currently undergoing revitalisation. Data from three groups of speakers are …
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The Englishization of Tanzanian Kiswahili: A study in language contact and convergence
… resulting from the contact between Kiswahili and English. A cusory examination of the research on bilingualism and multilingualism indicates that the vast majority of studies on language variation and change in African languages have generally been undertaken from the point of view of …
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Manx English: a phonological investigation into levelling and diffusion from across the water
… Isle of Man within the sociolinguistic field of language variation and change. Stigmatised features of speech on island communities are often cited as examples to discuss accent levelling (the loss of traditional features), in addition, the research into geographical diffusion (the inclusion of …
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A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Variation in a Rural African Community
This study mainly investigates whether language variation due to sociolinguistic stratification in Western urban speech communities is similar to that in rural African communities, using as a case study the multilingual Chasu of Same district in Kilimanjaro Tanzania. Primarily, the study addresses …
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Northern English Dialects: A perceptual approach
… to deliver a great many benefits to the study of language varieties. It also allows examination of the underlying factors in dialect use such as the ‘beliefs, attitudes and strategies’ (Preston, 1999: xxiii) which make up language users’ reactions to language varieties. In this way it has the …
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"Ye ken fine wha I mean": Variation between you know and ye ken in Scottish varieties of English
… the most frequently studied discourse markers, and bears the hallmarks of a typical discourse marker with its complexity and indeterminacy of function (e.g. Holmes 1986, Erman 1987, Fox Tree & Schrock 2002, Irwin 2006). Much less work has been conducted into the uses of regional varieties of you …
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Social dynamics of Catalan-Spanish contact in the evolution of Catalonian Spanish
… (contact) features of Catalonian Spanish, [ɫ] and [z], inquiring the role of specific linguistic and social factors as relevant in the process of linguistic influence from Catalan, and (2) to empirically uncover the sociolinguistic profile of each of [ɫ] and [z] in the respective social and …
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Language change and evolution in Online Social Networks
Language is in constant flux, whether through the creation of new terms or the changing meanings of existing words. The process by which language change happens is through complex reinforcing interactions between individuals and the social structures in which they exist. There has been much …
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Cross-generational linguistic variation in the Canberra Vietnamese heritage language community: A corpus-centred investigation
… a particular focus on Vietnamese as the heritage language. Specifically, it documents the vernacular and considers key aspects of this data from different theoretical perspectives. Its main contribution is an insight into a rarely studied heritage language variety in a contact community that has …
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Speech in space and time: Contact, change and diffusion in medieval Norway
This project uses corpus linguistics and geostatistics to test the sociolinguistic typological theory put forward by Peter Trudgill on the history of Norwegian. The theory includes several effects of societal factors on language change. Most discussed is the proposal that ‘intensive’ language …