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Starting from the premise that the humanities are still in urgent need of being decolonized and deprovincialized, this forum, titled "The Rise and Decline of 'Colonial Humanities,'" offers insights into the development of the humanities disciplines in what are often referred to as "area studies" (a field itself subject to criticism) since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The forum's perspective on "colonial humanities" acknowledges the violence perpetuated in the name of Euro-American humanities and calls for an in-depth and sustained investigation into the construction of racism and prejudice across our fields. Case studies focus on the "local" development of philology in Turkey (Leezenberg), on critical "coauthorship" with local scholars in literary and historical studies (Berber/Amazigh studies) in Algeria (Merolla), and on the need for increased criticality and self-awareness in the fast-changing field of lexicography (Sear and Turin). The forum is rounded out with a commentary and reflection by Shamil Jeppie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though dialectometric approaches have significantly contributed to the development of dialectology in the last few decades, no relevant analyses have ever been performed on Modern Greek dialects. This article attempts to fill this gap by using dialectometric techniques to measure the degrees of association between aggregate morphological, phonological, and syntactic differences in nineteen varieties of inner Asia Minor Greek (i.e. of Cappadocian, Pharasiot, and Silliot). Our methods include correlations (between pairs of linguistic levels and between linguistic levels and geography) as well as multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis (of the whole dataset as well as of the linguistic levels), which allow us, on the one hand, to draw conclusions about the associations of linguistic levels and the distributions of dialects and, on the other hand, to directly compare our results to those coming from previous dialectometric studies and Greek dialectology. Results show that, although the complete dataset, phonology, and morphology yield—in some instances—similar patterns (i.e. high correlations between them as well as with geography, high agreement of dialect classifications), the level of syntax deviates the most, which is interpreted as a tendency to form larger dialect areas. Our findings are consistent with patterns found in earlier large-scale studies in dialectometry, but they only partially confirm the classifications of Greek dialectology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]