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Description:
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Indigenous minority languages have played crucial roles in many areas of
linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, typology, and the
ethnography of communication. Such languages have, however, received
comparatively little attention from quantitative or variationist
sociolinguistics. Without the diverse perspectives that underrepresented
language communities can provide, our understanding of language variation
and change will be incomplete. To help fill this gap and develop broader
viewpoints, this anthology presents 21 original, fieldwork-based studies of
a wide range of indigenous languages in the framework of quantitative
sociolinguistics. The studies illustrate how such understudied communities
can provide new insights into language variation and change with respect to
socioeconomic status, gender, age, clan, lack of a standard, exogamy,
contact with dominant majority languages, internal linguistic factors, and
many other topics.
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