Advances in Dialectometry

Abstract

Dialectometry applies computational and statistical analyses within dialectology, making work more easily replicable and understandable. This survey article first reviews the field briefly in order to focus on developments in the past five years. Dialectometry no longer focuses exclusively on aggregate analyses, but rather deploys various techniques to identify representative and distinctive features with respect to areal classifications. Analyses proceeding explicitly from geostatistical techniques have just begun. The exclusive focus on geography as explanation for variation has given way to analyses combining geographical, linguistic, and social factors underlying language variation. Dialectometry has likewise ventured into diachronic studies and has also contributed theoretically to comparative dialectology and the study of dialect diffusion. Although the bulk of research involves lexis and phonology, morphosyntax is receiving increasing attention. Finally, new data sources and new (online) analytical software are expanding dialectometry's remit and its accessibility. 243

A quantitative approach to Swiss German – Dialectometric analyses and comparisons of linguistic levels

“…In parallel, novel visualization and data analysis techniques from spatial statistics were introduced, such as hierarchical clustering (Goebl 1984), multi-dimensional scaling (Embleton 1993), and correlation analysis (Heeringa & Nerbonne 2001;Goebl 2005). For a comparative review of methods used in dialectometry, see Grieve (2014) and Wieling & Nerbonne (2015). Kelle (2001) provides the first dialectometric account of German-speaking Switzerland.…”

Measuring Language Closeness by Modeling Regularity

“…Other approaches that rely on probabilistic modeling would serve equally well. A comprehensive survey of methods for measuring language closeness may be found in (Wieling and Nerbonne, 2015). Work that is probabilistically oriented, similarly to our proposed approaches, includes (Bouchard-Côté et al, 2007;Kondrak, 2004) and others.…”

Statistical physics of language maps in the USA

“…The earliest known study of geographical language variation was carried out in 1876 by Georg Wenker, who asked 50,000 schoolmasters from locations across Germany to transcribe a list of sentences into the local dialect [3]. Modern computers and the creation of the internet have dramatically improved data collection and analysis [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], and social media has provided a new source of linguistic data [13]. Modelling linguistic evolution has also emerged as a sub-field of statistical physics where ideas and techniques employed to relate the macroscopic behaviour of physical systems to their microscopic components have been applied [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”