How the method can change our view of grammatical variation. The example of rural Spanish
Grammatical variation was generally left aside of atlas questionnaires, which, due to their method (closed questionnaires), were more appropriate to research phonetical and lexical variation. As a result, grammatical variation was considered to be less important than phonological variation and had been disregarded when defining the main dialect areas of European Spanish. Nevertheless, as I will show, a change in method can radically change the state of the art. In order to study grammatical variation in rural Spanish, the Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish (Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural, COSER after its Spanish abbreviation) was compiled. Over a period of 35 years, between 1990 and 2025, a total of 2,000 hours of oral interviews from all over Spain (the peninsula and the two archipelagos, 1469 localities) (Fernández-Ordóñez 2005-) were collected. Research based on COSER materials has opened up new perspectives, making it possible for the first time to identify or modify the isogloss of several dialectal features, develop new hypotheses about known grammatical variation (thanks to the greater amount of data available and access to a more accurate description), discover morphosyntactic variation that had gone unnoticed, compare rural speech with urban speech, and evaluate the diachronic evolution of certain features. As a result, a much more complex articulation of Spanish dialect areas has emerged.
In order to illustrate these widened perspectives, in this talk I will examine an array of grammatical features involving clitics whose knowledge or understanding have significantly improved thanks to COSER, both in terms of the number of features considered and the factors involved: mass/count distinctions, inflected reflexive infinitives, number agreement asymmetries in ditransitive clitic clusters, and null direct objects. Each of these variables shows a dialect area that had been traditionally disregarded. Moreover, some of them demonstrate how dialect data can provide finer-grained explanations for developments that are well-known from a cross-linguistic perspective. Others allow us to prove that linguistic contact played a decisive role in some outcomes. The selected examples will also show that, when possible, comparison with atlases and historical sources can demonstrate diachronic stability or recent emergence.
That Cinderella of Gaelic tongues”: Variation and belonging in the history of Manx
Manx is a Gaelic language spoken in the Isle of Man, the small self-governing island located, on Europe’s periphery, between Britain and Ireland. Famously described by the Irish scholar T.F. O’Rahilly as the ‘Cinderella of Gaelic tongues’ on account of its relatively small territory and corpus, Manx offers an interesting case-study for anyone interested in the fate of variation in Europe’s ‘smaller’ languages.
The first part of this lecture will introduce the linguistic history of Manx, examining how the language has been classified within the broader Gaelic language family and some of the linguistic and sociohistorical factors that have governed that classification. In the second part of the lecture, drawing on a number of recent research projects concerned with linguistic variation and change in Manx during the eighteenth century, we will examine how the translation of religious literature – scripture, catechisms and sermons – shaped the language and governed what did and did not belong in the incipient standard language of Manx.
Identity and Belonging in a Second Language: Navigating Dialect and Standard Language in German
Learning and using additional languages and varieties reshapes individuals‘ identities and their sense of belonging to social groups and communities of speakers. In naturalistic language acquisition, learners encounter the language in many different forms, which is particularly salient in dialect-rich areas of the German-speaking countries. Understanding how adult second language (L2) users position themselves within such linguistically diverse communities therefore offers valuable insight into the interplay of language, identity, and belonging.
The paper examines how adult L2 users of German in two dialect-rich contexts – the German-speaking regions of Switzerland and the Bavarian-speaking areas of Austria – navigate the relationship between dialect and standard language. Drawing on semi structured interviews with L2 users (N = 20 for the Swiss Alemannic context and N = 39 for the Austro-Bavarian context), the paper investigates how speakers linguistically index adaptation, distance, and social belonging by combining analyses of their actual varietal use with their reported perceptions of different forms of speech. Overall, it becomes evident that language variation is an important resource through which L2 users negotiate their position vis-à-vis local linguistic communities, but not equally relevant for all. Even if the use of different varieties is closely linked to being able to express belonging to a community, some L2 users grapple with high demands of authenticity or purist expectations and subordinate the indexical potential of dialect to a general need for comprehension and communication. By situating L2 acquisition and use within broader processes of constructing social meaning and negotiating identity, the paper contributes to our understanding of agency in sociolinguistic approaches and of language variation as a means for expressing belonging.
Last page update: 01.04.2026