Session	Dates	Price
Fall Semester 2009 - German Language and Elective	Early September - Early December 2009	$9,995
Academic Year 2009-2010 - German Language and Elective	Early September 2009 - Early June 2010	$18,995

Full Description

The class will be blended, i.e. students will study online on the world’s largest E-Learning platform in linguistics: The Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com) and deepen their understanding of the topics discussed in the virtual sessions and in the workbook through various activities during fortnightly in-class sessions with the instructor.

Content

This class is based on recent studies into dialectal variation of English, in particular, on two projects in which the Linguistic Engineering Team of Marburg University developed the interactive software in conjunction with the universities of Freiburg, Regensburg, and Kapstadt (Project: Varieties of English) and the University of Pennsylvania (Project: Atlas of North American English). Among others, we will discuss:

• how dialects can be studied and classified• what type of transcription systems can be used• in what way English dialects may differ phonologically• to what extent dialects are morpho-syntactically different• how dialectal differences emerge• how dialect maps can be constructed

In addition to these dialectological aspects we will introduce the main sociolinguistic factors of language variation.