Talk:Dialect levelling

Concerning New-Zealand English

Preamble: My job as a social worker involves reducing the number of children on a student exchange program who request to switch host families. . Maybe one could condense the section on NZ-English to a practical level? The issue is well-known in concerned circles so I expect I plurality of data has already been collected for sourcing 121.45.171.107 (talk) 12:19, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm not getting at all how this section can even be defined as Dialect levelling. This is about dialect creation, the opposite process. How can you level a newcomer to a standard form when there is no standard form? 120.17.141.231 (talk) 02:34, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

one dialect??

In the lead sentence,

an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects.

was changed to

an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features in a dialect due to contact with one or more other dialects.

This is a very different definition.

Can the presence of other dialects reduce the variability within one dialect? I would expect the opposite. —Tamfang (talk) 04:23, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

The current definition is clearly wrong. --Jotamar (talk) 21:58, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

A new definition could be based on the one by Peter Trudgill:

Levelling: One of the linguistic processes which may take place in a situation of dialect mixture and which can lead, together with simplification, to the development of a koiné. Levelling refers to the process whereby the number of variant pronunciations, words or grammatical forms that are present in the dialect mixture are reduced as a result of focusing (see focused), to a smaller number of variants, usually one. Levelling usually consists of getting rid of forms which are used by only a minority of speakers or are in some other way unusual.

(Peter Trudgill: A Glossary of Sociolinguistics, 2003). --Jotamar (talk) 22:25, 23 April 2024 (UTC)