Introduction to Dialectometry

Activity: Talk or presentationAcademic

Description

Dialectometry can be seen as a subdiscipline of both dialectology and computational linguistics. The term was coined by Jean Seguy in the early seventies when he was the director of the Atlas linguistique de la Gascogne. Literally it means 'the measure of dialect'. Patterns in the dialect landscape can be revealed by measuring linguistic distances among local dialects by considering the realizations of a large number of linguistic phenomena. In this talk we focus on the Levenshtein distance as a technique for measuring aggregated distances in the sound components. Furthermore, we discuss some statistical techniques that help to reveal (geographic) patterns once the linguistic distances are found. The several techniques are demonstrated by using LED-A, a web app that makes dialectometry accessible to every linguist.
Period29 Jun 2022
Event titleGeneral Linguistics Colloquium (SoSe 2022)
Event typeConference
LocationGöttingen, GermanyShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • dialect
  • dialectology
  • dialectometry
  • phonetics
  • computational linguistics