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The large majority of the isoglosses which can be established in the South Slavic dialectal area date from the time of the disintegration of Common Slavic and from more recent periods (e.g., Ivi´c 1958: 25ff). The isoglosses have often shifted in the course of the centuries, so that their original position cannot always be determined. In this study I shall concentrate upon the dialectal differences which originated before the 10th century. At that time, Slavic was still a largely uniform language, though it was certainly not completely homogeneous.
Twenty years ago I discussed the oldest isoglosses in the South Slavic linguistic area (1982). Subscribing to Van Wijk’s view that the bundle of isoglosses which separates Bulgarian from Serbo-Croatian was the result of an early split in South Slavic and that the transitional dialects originated from a later mixture of Serbian and Bulgarian dialects when the contact between the two languages had been restored (1927), I argued that the shared innovations of Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian must be dated to a period when the dialects were still spoken in the original Trans-Carpathian homeland of the Slavs. I concluded that there is no evidence for common innovations of South Slavic which were posterior to the end of what I have called the Late Middle Slavic period, which I dated to the 4th through 6th centuries AD. At that time, the major dialect divisions of Slavic were already established.
This short overview reviews, in the first part, some of the most important fields of investigation where studies on Galician have contributed to variational linguistics, including macro- and micro-sociolinguistic studies (sections 1-3). The second part (sections 4-7) postulates some possible theoretical and empirical areas which we recommend to be included in future research. We propose a critical application of new models of linguistic variation, including recent frameworks such as studies on grammaticalisation, OT, intonational phonology, etc., but also call for the inclusion of established insights into language variation common in the European tradition. The high concentration of research institutions and the strongly dynamic situation of contemporary Galician could serve as an empirical touchstone for these theoretical frameworks, and Galician linguistics should apply them in a critical, flexible and creative way. This means that research on Galician will not only learn from theory but also contribute to it. We also briefly mention some of the areas where the studies of Galician have already contributed some important results to an overall perspective on linguistic variation.
Vorliegender Beitrag geht davon aus, dass das Kulturphänomen "Deutsche Sprache" in Form und Gebrauch eine weitgehend regionale (areale) Inhomogenität aufweist. Im Argumentationsrahmen einer variationslinguistischen Dialektologie wird versucht, die diatopische Variationsbreite der deutschen Sprache zu umreißen und vor diesem Hintergrund eine spezifische bilinguale dialektale Kontaktvarietät des Deutschen (nämlich das sog. ,,Kontaktdeutsch") in ihrer synchron wie auch diachron überaus dynamischen Ausprägungsstruktur zu beschreiben und in das gegenwärtige Varietätenspektrum des Deutschen - sowohl hinsichtlich seiner Vetonung als auch seiner Dignität - einzuordnen. Somit soll auch zur Erforschung der inneren Dynamik der Varietätenvielfalt beigetragent werden.
Sino-Tibetan is a prime example of how strongly a language family can typologically diversify under the pressure of areal spread features (Matisoff 1991, 1999). One of the manifestation of this is the average length of prosodic words. In Southeast Asia, prosodic words tend to average on one or one-and-a-half syllables. In the Himalayas, by contrast, it is not uncommon to encounter prosodic words containing five to ten syllables. The following pair of examples illustrates this.