Political borders and dialect divergence/convergence in Europe

Abstract

Political borders have long been a central concern of geographers, students of international relations, and legal scholars. Since the 1960s, a growing body of sociological and anthropological research has, in addition, provided valuable new insights concerning the sociocultural aspects of border regions. Dialectologists, on the other hand, have given scant attention to the role of modern political borders in the spatial distribution and diffusion of linguistic features, generally viewing such factors as physical geography, earlier migration and settlement patterns, patterns of trade, and the influence of urban centres as linguistically far more significant.