Dialect differences and grammatical divergence: A cross-linguistic survey

This article presents a new type of comparative linguistic survey, analysing on a database of 1181 linguistic and sociolinguistic variables drawn from 42 genealogically and geographically diverse languages. We focus in particular on grammatical variables, and whether they do or don’t differentiate geographic dialects. We identify three main structural types of grammatical variable: form, order and omission, and find that in situations of close contact between dialect groups, form variables are more likely to differentiate dialects than the other two types. Order and omission variables usually only differentiate dialects that have minimal contact. Our findings suggest that signalling of group identity may have a role in the divergence of grammars, and this affects some dimensions of grammar more than others.