Linguistic complexity of South Slavic dialects: a new perspective on old data.

This article presents the results of a quantitative study in which the complexity levels of dialectal varieties belonging to the South Slavic dialect continuum are measured and analyzed. The sample comprises 919 data points, pertaining to the Bulgarian-Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian dialect continua. Complexity is viewed in this study as a property demonstrating variation across areas and subject to diachronic change which can be associated either with language-internal processes or with language contact. This study discusses which linguistic processes produced varying levels of complexity in the modern South Slavic varieties. In particular, a correlation of complexity with altitude and distance to the Albanian border, two factors which can be associated with degree of isolation versus contact of speech communities, is investigated for a subset of varieties spoken across the areas with bi- and multilingual population. Suggestions on which constellations of societal features could act as determinants of linguistic change are made for several areas within the South Slavic continuum. Particular attention is paid to the contact-related developments in the South Slavic varieties spoken in the areas of intensive past and present contact, such as the west of North Macedonia, the south of Montenegro, Kosovo, and Southeast Serbia.

Map Task Corpus of Heritage BCMS spoken by second-generation speakers in Switzerland.

In this paper, we present a corpus for heritage Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) spoken in German-speaking Switzerland. The corpus consists of elicited conversations between 29 second-generation speakers originating from different regions of former Yugoslavia. In total, the corpus contains 30 turn-aligned transcripts with an average length of 6 min. It is enriched with extensive speakers' metadata, annotations, and pre-calculated corpus counts. The corpus can be accessed through an interactive corpus platform that allows for browsing, querying, and filtering, but also for creating and sharing custom annotations. Principal user groups we address with this corpus are researchers of heritage BCMS, as well as students and teachers of BCMS living in diaspora. In addition to introducing the corpus platform and the workflows we adopted to create it, we also present a case study on BCMS spoken by a pair of siblings who participated in the map task, and discuss advantages and challenges of using this corpus platform for linguistic research.

Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact.

When speakers of different languages interact, they are likely to influence each other: contact leaves traces in the linguistic record, which in turn can reveal geographical areas of past human interaction and migration. However, other factors may contribute to similarities between languages. Inheritance from a shared ancestral language and universal preference for a linguistic property may both overshadow contact signals. How can we find geographical contact areas in language data, while accounting for the confounding effects of inheritance and universal preference? We present sBayes, an algorithm for Bayesian clustering in the presence of confounding effects. The algorithm learns which similarities are better explained by confounders, and which are due to contact effects. Contact areas are free to take any shape or size, but an explicit geographical prior ensures their spatial coherence. We test sBayes on simulated data and apply it in two case studies to reveal language contact in South America and the Balkans. Our results are supported by findings from previous studies. While we focus on detecting language contact, the method can also be used to uncover other traces of shared history in cultural evolution, and more generally, to reveal latent spatial clusters in the presence of confounders.