Includes bibliographical references and index.

Koinai and regional standard varieties in Europe : an introduction / Massimo Cerruti and Stavroula Tsiplakou -- Regional varieties in Norway revisited / Unn Røyneland -- Surviving Limburg and Hollandic dialect features and what they have in common / Frans Hinskens -- German regiolects and socio-cultural identity / Roland Kehrein -- Reduction and persistence of phonological dialect features in German / Christian Schwarz -- From dialect to standard : facilitating and constraining factors : on some uses of the Italian negative particle mica / Massimo Cerruti -- Variation, identity and indexicality in southern Spanish : on the emergence of a new variety in urban Andalusia / Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda and Matilde Vida-Castro -- The role of interdialectal forms in the formation of Koinai : sociolinguistic aspects / Manuel Almeida -- Survival of the 'oddest'? Levelling, shibboleths, reallocation and the construction of intermediate varieties / Stavroula Tsiplakou and Spyros Armostis -- Language variation and maintenance in Cypriot Romeika : a case of non-Koineisation / Elena Ioannidou, Charalambos Christodoulou and Theoni Neokleous.

"The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the 'dialect-standard' landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociolinguistic histories, as well as on previously unexplored sociolinguistic situations. The contributions all share the twin characteristics of (a) robust scrutiny of structural variation and its links to both structural-systemic parameters and extralinguistic variables and (b) nuanced approaches to macro- and micro- level categories, with the requisite theoretical and methodological fine-tuning. While focusing on different languages/language groups, the papers in this volume share the common foci of bringing together structural and sociolinguistic considerations and of the concomitant necessary revisiting of methodologies. The data and analyses presented yield a firmer and more nuanced understanding of the dynamic permutations of cross-dialectal and dialect-to-standard convergence and the formation of intermediate varieties in different yet comparable contexts"-- Provided by publisher.