Assessment of aphasia: dialectal and cultural considerations in neurology

In the context of neurological disorders, language assessment is traditionally based on the use of the standard language of the community in which the assessment is performed. Dialectal variables constitute a "forgotten" topic. This review aims to provide resources and working guidelines to overcome this limitation.

The study was conducted as follows: 1) review of basic concepts of dialectology (language, dialect, isogloss line, idiolect, register, "standard variant," bilingualism); 2) characterisation of Spanish and Catalan dialectologies and search for online resources for the development of neurological assessment tools; 3) ad hoc search on the PubMed database (keywords: "dialect," "aphasia," and "multilingual").

We provide online resources to promote adequate development of assessment tools in Spanish and Catalan, accounting for dialectal considerations. We propose a set of working guidelines for the introduction of dialectal variables in language tests to ensure their ultimate objective: to evaluate the real use of the language, and not cultural knowledge of the standard language.