Dialectometry: an overview and hands-on experience
University of Groningen
In this course I will illustrate various approaches which dialectologists, or rather dialectometrists, have used to investigate the influence of geography (as a proxy for social contact) on language variation. I will start with discussing some of the earlier techniques used in the field, such as multidimensional scaling and geographical clustering. I will also illustrate some recent advances in visualizing dialect data in the case that geographical areas have very different sizes. The earlier dialectometric techniques generally focused only on geography and frequently disregarded other factors influencing language variation. The second part of my presentation therefore focuses on a relatively novel technique, generalized additive modeling which is a flexible, non-linear regression technique. This technique is not only able to take into account the non-linear influence of geography, but also other predictors, such as the speaker's age.
During the two practical sessions, we will gain hands-on experienceon using dialectometric techniques in exploring geographical patternsof language varation. For this, we will use our online tool Gabmap,which is available at http://www.gabmap.nl