Tackling Software Navigation Issues of the Smalltalk IDE

The IDE used in most Smalltalk dialects such as Pharo, Squeak or Cincom Smalltalk did not evolve significantly over the last years, if not to say decades. For other languages, for instance Java, the available IDEs made tremendous progress as Eclipse or NetBeans illustrate. While the Smalltalk IDE served as an exemplar for many years, other IDEs caught up or even overtook the erstwhile leader in terms of feature-richness, usability, or code navigation facilities. In this paper we first analyze the difficulty of software navigation in the Smalltalk IDE and second illustrate with concrete examples the features we added to the Smalltalk IDE to fill the gap to modern IDEs and to provide novel, improved means to navigate source space. We show that thanks to the agility and dynamics of Smalltalk, we are able to extend and enhance with reasonable effort the Smalltalk IDE to better support software navigation, program comprehension, and software maintenance in general. One such support is the integration of dynamic information into the static source views we are familiar with. Other means include easing the access to static information (for instance by better arranging important packages) or helping developers re-locating artifacts of interest (for example with a categorization system such as smart groups).

Geographical Dialectology

This chapter examines how linguists have investigated the very obvious fact that different places house different dialects. We will not look at the results of such work nor how they have been used to answer linguistic and sociolinguistic questions (see Britain 2009, in press). Here we simply examine the steps dialectologists take and have taken to conduct multi-locality research on language variation. In order to do so, five studies from different time periods are presented and critiqued, examining a number of key methodological elements in each: 1. The aim of geographical dialectology is to examine variation across space, in different places. How do dialectologists then decide which places in that space to analyse? Why choose one village and not its neighbour? Why avoid that city? This question goes to the very heart of the geographical motivation of the research. 2. What sorts of speakers will be sampled from these locations? 3. What type of data is to be collected from these speakers? 4. In what circumstances is that data to be recorded? Who will collect it, in what setting and how will the voices of the speakers be captured for later analysis? As we will see, dialectological methodologies always involve compromises, no approach is ever flawless. Ultimately, a good number of difficult practical decisions have to be taken – how long can this research take, and what are the financial restrictions on the project? As we will see geographical dialectology is probably the most expensive and the most time consuming of all forms of language variation research.

Social milieus and worldviews in Mamluk adab-encyclopedias: The example of poverty and wealth

The economic and cultural rise of parts of the ʿāmma due to the particular economic and infrastructural conditions of the Mamluk era fostered the emergence of new intermediate levels of literature that were situated between the literature of the elite and that of the utterly ignorant and unlettered populace, between the Arabic koiné (al-ʿarabīya al-fuṣḥā) and the local dialects (ʿāmmīya-s), between written and oral composition, performance and transmission. The paper proposes to analyze the composition of three Mamluk adab-encyclopedias and their treatment of poverty and wealth in light of the social milieus of their authors and publics.

The diffusion of /l/ -vocalization in Swiss German

Several western Swiss German dialects roughly grouped around the nation's capital Bern show /l/ > [u] vocalization in various contexts. The spatial boundaries of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German are suspected to have been expanding since being described in the Linguistic Atlas of German-Speaking Switzerland in the middle of the 20th century. The present study assesses the overall expansion of /l/-vocalization by means of a rapid anonymous survey in 20 urban regional centers situated just beyond the traditional boundaries of /l/-vocalization highlighted by the Atlas. Results show that the expansion of /l/-vocalization mainly progresses in southeasterly, southerly, and westerly directions, but with much less success to the north and northwest, where the equally influential dialectal areas of Basel and Zürich seem to exert opposing influences. Further analysis of the data indicates that somewhat differing constraint hierarchies are at work in the different places to which vocalization has diffused.

“Jo wunderbar so im apriu kann man nicht mehr erwarten, capisci?” Multilingualism in a German language class for retired Italian migrants in Berne

Our proposal presents some aspects and results of a project of the University of Bern dealing with the consequences of retirement on multilingual competences. Referring to De Bot (2007), who defined "language related major life events" as moments in life relevant for changes in multilingual competences, we assume that retirement can be a turning point in a language biography. Firstly, there are phenomena, such as the cessation of the use of a foreign language, which was formerly related to work. Secondly, retirement might elicit the improvement of foreign language skills as a way to spend excess time after retirement or as a “cognitive exercise”. Many language schools have identified the people of advanced age as a group of major interest and increasingly offer so-called 50+ (fifty plus) courses in their curriculum. Furthermore, the concept of lifelong learning is increasingly gaining importance, as the reference by the European commission (LLP) indicates. However, most of the programs are intended for educated middle-class people and there are considerably fewer offers for people who are less familiar with learning environments in general. The present paper aims at investigating the multilingual setting of an offer of the second kind: a German language course designed for retired, established Italian workforce migrants living in the city of Berne, Switzerland. The multilingual setting is given by the facts that migrants living in Berne are confronted with diglossia (Standard German and Swissgerman dialects), that the Canton of Berne is bilingual (German and French) and that the migrants' mother tongue, Italian, is one of the Swiss national languages. As previous studies have shown, most of the Italian migrants have difficulties with the acquisition of Standard German due to the diglossic situation (Werlen, 2007) or never even learnt any of the German varieties. Another outcome of the linguistic situation the migrants are confronted with in Berne, is the usage of a continuum of varieties between Swissgerman dialect and Standard German (Zanovello-Müller, 1998). Therefore, in the classroom we find several varieties of German, as well as the Italian language and its varieties. In the present paper we will investigate the use of multilingual competences within the classroom and the dynamics of second language acquisition in a setting of older adults (>60 years old), learning their host country’s language after 40 years or more of living in it. The methods applied are an ethnographic observation of the language class, combined with qualitative interviews to gain in-depth information of the subjects’ life stories and language biographies.

Contact, Mobility and Authenticity: Language Ideologies in Koineisation and Creolisation - Poster for CSLS

How are new dialects and new languages represented and evaluated in public discourse?

Crowdsourcing language change with smartphone applications

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), which predicts users’ dialects. For 16 linguistic variables, users select a dialectal variant from a drop-down menu. DÄ then geographically locates the user’s dialect by suggesting a list of communes where dialect variants most similar to their choices are used. Underlying this prediction are 16 maps from the historical Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland, which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. Where users disagree with the prediction, they can indicate what they consider to be their dialect’s location. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Thanks to the playfulness of its functionality, DÄ has reached many users; our linguistic analyses are based on data from nearly 60,000 speakers. Results reveal a relative stability for phonetic variables, while lexical and morphological variables seem more prone to change. Crowdsourcing large amounts of dialect data with smartphone apps has the potential to complement existing data collection techniques and to provide evidence that traditional methods cannot, with normal resources, hope to gather. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize a range of methodological caveats, including sparse knowledge of users’ linguistic backgrounds (users only indicate age, sex) and users’ self-declaration of their dialect. These are discussed and evaluated in detail here. Findings remain intriguing nevertheless: as a means of quality control, we report that traditional dialectological methods have revealed trends similar to those found by the app. This underlines the validity of the crowdsourcing method. We are presently extending DÄ architecture to other languages.

English Dialect App

Do you pronounce the /r/ in 'arm'? Do you call a shelf a 'sheuf'? And what on earth is a 'hoddy-doddy'? There is extensive variation in English dialects: this is why your answers to such questions will allow this app to localize your broader dialect region on a map of England. Did your home dialect change over time? Our algorithm is based on historical data from the Survey of English Dialects. If it guesses where you are from correctly, your home dialect has probably remained stable over the past decades. If the guess is far off, however, it is probably because of dialect change. - Can we localize your dialect based on your pronunciation of 26 words? - Record your dialect and listen to recordings of other users and to historical dialect recordings! - Choose a pronunciation variant, e.g. 'sheuf', and discover where in England it is used...or choose a place and explore its dialect!