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Many children grow up in an environment in which the language spoken in everyday communication is not the standard language but a regional variety. The implications of linguistic situations with co-existing varieties for teachers and speech therapists are illustrated by the example of the acquisition of the written language in Ger-man-speaking Switzerland. In the Canton of Fribourg 1641 first through sixth graders were tested using the Hamburger Schreib-Probe. A comparison to the scores of children from Germany shows that for certain graphemes the Swiss children have an ad-vantage when using the alphabetic strategy. This is due to the fact that the pronunciation of these sounds in the Swiss variety of Standard German corresponds more closely to the written language than the pronunciation variants in Germany.

The political controversies surrounding Muslim veiling today involve specific rhetorical elements deriving from long histories of colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism, and Muslim responses to these. A number of different languages – political, religious, patriarchal, feminist, sectarian, aesthetic – often get mixed up when Muslim veiling is talked about by diverse types of people, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Sartorial fashion is also spoken about in multiple registers: in terms of aesthetics, commercial considerations, social distinction and stratification, art, design and creativity. Both veiling and fashion have non-verbal languages, too. This chapter looks into the relationships between languages of veiling and languages of fashion. What happens when veiling becomes fashionable? What happens when fashionable forms of veiling appear, and an Islamic fashion industry emerges? There are three relevant types of language use here: those within Muslim communities, those outside Muslim communities, and those operating between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. These are shaped by power struggles of many sorts. As Foucault recognized, languages shape, hide and (re)produce power relations, such as in Orientalist forms of representation (Said), and in localized forms of silencing subaltern groups like lower-class women (Spivak). Such struggles become more complex when fashion languages and veiling languages meet. Fashionable veiling, or veiling fashion, can be a powerful tool for a Muslim woman, but it can also be rejected as oppressive or demeaning. These contradictory and intertwined elements of veiling languages and fashion languages are subjected here to cultural-historical sociological analysis.

This chapter provides an overview of recent innovative approaches that focus on the distributional patterns of linguistic phenomena in dialects across different languages. We set the stage by discussing a number of geographical factors that are assumed in the literature to have a bearing on the structural make-up of different languages and dialects such as world region, altitude, contact with speakers of other languages or dialects, etc. We then move on to sketch the extent to which dialects of a language exhibit common features (e.g., “vernacular universals” à la Chambers 2004) and identify structural dichotomies and continua that are regularly invoked when it comes to explaining the structural diversity of languages, namely, analyticity versus syntheticity, explicitness versus economy, complexity versus simplicity, and innovativeness versus conservativeness, all within the context of geographic space.

As linguists develop a deeper understanding of the properties of individual varieties of speech, they often find it necessary to reclassify dialects as independent languages, based on the criterion of intelligibility. This criterion is applied here to Jejueo, the traditional variety of speech used on Jeju Island, a province of the Republic of Korea. Although Jejueo has long been classified as a nonstandard dialect of Korean, evidence from an intelligibility experiment shows that it is not comprehensible to monolingual speakers of Korean and therefore should be treated as a separate language, in accordance with the usual practice within linguistics. This finding calls for a revision to the standard language map of Korea