Dialectometric Distance Analysis

Dialectometry is the quantitative measurement of how linguistically different dialect sites are from one another, aggregated across many features at once. Pioneered by Jean Séguy in the early 1970s and developed by Hans Goebl in Salzburg and John Nerbonne in Groningen, it takes the rich response data of traditional dialect atlases and computes, for every pair of survey sites, a single number summarizing their overall linguistic distance. These pairwise distances are then clustered and mapped, turning a sprawling atlas of individual features into an aggregate picture of dialect landscapes, continua, and boundaries that no single feature could reveal.