Process / pipelineQuantitative Sociolinguistics
Dialectometry
Dialectometry is a quantitative method for measuring linguistic distances between dialects or languages using objective metrics applied to phonological, lexical, or phonetic data. Pioneered by Jean Seguy in 1973, dialectometry compares word lists, pronunciations, or phonetic transcriptions across speech varieties to calculate similarity scores. The resulting distance matrices and dendrograms reveal patterns of dialect relatedness and geographic or social clustering. This method complements traditional dialectology and contributes to historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.
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Sources
- Seguy, J. (1973). La dialectométrie dans l'étude de l'espace linguistique. Revue de Linguistique Romane, 37, 1-24. link ↗
- Nerbonne, J., & Heeringa, W. (2009). Measuring dialect differences. In P. Auer & J. E. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110215716 ↗
- Heeringa, W. (2004). Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences Using Levenshtein Distance. Groningen: University of Groningen. link ↗