Measuring the diffusion of linguistic change

Abstract

We examine situations in which linguistic changes have probably been propagated via normal contact as opposed to via conquest, recent settlement and large-scale migration. We proceed then from two simplifying assumptions: first, that all linguistic variation is the result of either diffusion or independent innovation, and, second, that we may operationalize social contact as geographical distance. It is clear that both of these assumptions are imperfect, but they allow us to examine diffusion via the distribution of linguistic variation as a function of geographical distance. Several studies in quantitative linguistics have examined this relation, starting with Séguy (Séguy 1971 Rev. Linguist. Romane 35,, and virtually all report a sublinear growth in aggregate linguistic variation as a function of geographical distance. The literature from dialectology and historical linguistics has mostly traced the diffusion of individual features, however, so that it is sensible to ask what sort of dynamic in the diffusion of individual features is compatible with Séguy's curve. We examine some simulations of diffusion in an effort to shed light on this question.

A comparison of statistical methods for the aggregation of regional linguistic variation

“…The lack of a clear relationship between the distance matrices can be seen in Figure 3, where linguistic distance is plotted against geographic distance, which notably does not exhibit the type sublinear pattern that has been identified in previous dialectometry studies (Nerbonne, 2009(Nerbonne, , 2010b. These results are surprising considering that regional patterns are clearly visible in maps plotting the raw values of many of the individual linguistic variables ( Figure 2).…”

“…Often all of the links are mapped (Nerbonne, 2010a), but this approach produced a map that was difficult to analyze in this case. An alternative approach is to only map the links between the nearest neighbors (Szmrecsanyi and Wolk, submitted), for example by triangulating the data.…”

“…This method is also sensitive to the density of locations in the dataset. In dialectometry, multidimensional scaling is often used to identify underlying patterns of aggregated regional variation in a linguistic distance matrix Nerbonne and Kleiweg, 2003;Nerbonne, 2010a;Szmrecsanyi, 2008). Multidimensional scaling is a set of statistical methods used for visualizing patterns of proximity between objects in a distance matrix (Cox and Cox, 2001).…”

Evolutionary approaches to cultural and linguistic diversity

“…Nerbonne (2010) examines the effects of geographical proximity on dialect similarity in the absence of strong large-scale social boundaries, showing through simulation that a process analogous to isolationby-distance in genetics can lead to regularities in the sublinear relationships observed between dialect distance and geographical distance. His work emphasizes the importance of spatially localized social interaction biases for the evolution of cultural diversity in such traits.…”

Area formation in morphosyntax

“…We note in particular that the quantitative basis of dialectometrical maps makes possible further numerical approaches to the similarities and dissimilarities underpinning the geographical patterns, as is shown by Rumpf et al (2010) with respect to lexical maps. Promising research avenues include the simulation of diffusion processes (see Nerbonne 2010), as well as the implementation of topological and cultural information in the modeling.…”