A Winning Dialect

Why did a rural dialect from the heart of Norwegian farm country win a national dialect popularity contest? What were the effects of this win, and what has happened to the winning dialect since? A Winning Dialect tells a story of linguistic and cultural transformation in the rural district of Valdres, Norway. It shows how lifelong residents have adapted to changing social, economic, and political circumstances – particularly the shift from family farming to tourism development – and how they have used local linguistic and cultural resources to craft a viable future for themselves and the places their ancestors have called home for centuries. Once stigmatized as poor and uneducated, the distinctive dialect of Valdres now holds a special place as a valuable part of Norwegian national heritage, as well as a marker of local belonging. Based on two decades of research and fieldwork, A Winning Dialect considers how a traditional dialect is transformed – linguistically and culturally – as it is put to new uses in the contemporary world.

Having been a senior member of staff in a leading academy of a major Premier League club for 13 years, the author has collated some of his major considerations for establishing a winning culture that is repeatable and sustainable. The author reflects on the challenge of creating a winning environment and believes that winning has a specific language represented by deeds and actions. He has drawn on his experiences as a team member of a player production pipeline and team development with unrivaled success. He uses his experiences in the high-pressure world of professional football to show the startling similarities between the pitch and the boardroom. Through The language of winning, the author emphasizes that there are no shortcuts to success and that continuous improvement is the Holy Grail of sustained high performance.

This book presents a new and controversial theory about dialect contact and the formation of new colonial dialects. It examines the genesis of Latin American Spanish, Canadian French and North American English, but concentrates on Australian and South African English, with a particular emphasis on the development of the newest major variety of the language, New Zealand English. Peter Trudgill argues that the linguistic growth of these new varieties of English was essentially deterministic, in the sense that their phonologies are the predictable outcome of the mixture of dialects taken from the.

Much theorizing in language change research is made without taking into account dialect data. Yet, dialects seem to be superior data to build a theory of linguistic change on, since dialects are relatively free of standardization and therefore more tolerant of variant competition in grammar. In addition, as compared to most cross-linguistic and diachronic data, dialect data are unusually high in resolution. This book shows that the study of dialect variation has indeed the potential, perhaps even the duty, to play a central role in the process of finding answers to fundamental questions of theoretical historical linguistics. It includes contributions which relate a clearly formulated theoretical question of historical linguistic interest with a well-defined, solid empirical base. The volume discusses phenomena from different domains of grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax) and a wide variety of languages and language varieties in the light of several current theoretical frameworks.

This volume contains the revised texts of talks and posters given at the Nordic Prosody X conference, held at the University of Helsinki, in August 2008. The contributions by Scandinavian and other researchers cover a wide range of prosody-related topics from various theoretical and methodological points of view. Although the history of the conference series is Nordic and Scandinavian, the current volume presents studies that are of mainly Baltic origin in the sense that of the eight languages presented in the proceedings only English is not natively spoken around the Baltic Sea. Research issues addressed in the 25 articles include various aspects of speech prosody, their regional variation within and across languages as well as social and idiolectal variation. Speech technology and modelling of prosody are also addressed in more than one article.