This paper presents a topic modeling approach to corpus-based dialectometry. Topic models are most often used in text mining to find latent structure in a collection of documents. They are based on the idea that frequently co-occurring words present the same underlying topic. In this study, topic models are used on interview transcriptions containing dialectal speech directly, without any annotations or preselected features. The transcriptions are modeled on complete words, on character n-grams, and after automatical segmentation. Data from three languages, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swiss German, are scrutinized. The proposed method is capable of discovering clear dialectal differences in all three datasets, while reflecting the differences between them. The method provides a significant simplification of the dialectometric workflow, simultaneously saving time and increasing objectivity. Using the method on non-normalized data could also benefit text mining, which is the traditional field of topic modeling.

The present study offers an examination of attitudes and perceptions of the Ukrainian language by respondents who have lived at least half of their life in Ukraine; they were asked to draw on a map of Ukraine where the most correct Ukrainian is spoken and where the Ukrainian that grates on one’s ears is spoken. Recruitment for the online survey was conducted by placing ads on several Ukrainian-language Facebook pages, along with a link to the survey. The findings presented are from a total of 90 analyzed surveys. Respondents’ maps were analyzed and compared using QGIS software. The research demonstrates that that there is a tug-of-war of correctness between Kyiv and Lviv. It also shows that there is an overall tendency of native speakers to evaluate the Transcarpathian region as the area that grates one’s ears.

Geolectal variation is often present in settings where one language is spoken across a vast geographic area. This can be found in phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features. For practical reasons, it is not always possible to conduct fieldwork in every single location of interest in order to obtain the full pattern of variation, and a sample of them must be chosen. We propose and test a method for sampling these locations, with the goal of obtaining a distribution of typological features representative of the whole area. We apply k-means and hierarchical clustering algorithms for defining this sample, based on their geographic distribution. We test our methods against simulated data with several spatial configurations, and also against real data from Circassian dialects (Northwest Caucasian). Our results show an efficiency significantly higher than random sampling for detecting this variation, which makes our method profitable to fieldworkers when designing their research.

This paper provides a new classification of Central–Southern Italian dialects using dialectometric methods. All varieties considered are analyzed and cast in a data set where homogeneous areas are evaluated according to a selected list of phonetic features. Using numerical evaluation of these features and the Manhattan distance, a linguistic distance rule is defined. On this basis, the classification problem is formulated as a clustering problem, and a k-means algorithm is used. Additionally, an ad-hoc rule is set to identify transitional areas, and silhouette analysis is used to select the most appropriate number of clusters. While meaningful results are obtained for each number of clusters, a nine-group classification emerges as the most appropriate. As the results suggest, this classification is less subjective, more precise, and more comprehensive than traditional ones based on selected isoglosses.

This study uses a modified online version of the “draw-a-map” task and Garrett, Williams, and Evans’ (2005b) “keywords” methodology to explore the geospatial distribution of different accent and dialect labels and descriptors in Greater Manchester, UK. Specifically, we consider the distribution of the three most frequent labels related to “accentedness”: Broad, Strong, and Soft, as provided by 349 Greater Manchester residents. This analysis finds that these descriptors were clustered in separate areas of Greater Manchester, suggesting that they were being used to describe perceptually distinct varieties of English. In order to uncover the nuances in these folk-linguistic terms, we consider how they correlate with other concepts emerging from the dataset, finding that they are being used to differentiate between varieties with contrasting social associations. By combining innovative approaches, this study demonstrates how the subtleties of folk-linguistic modes of awareness can be uncovered through in-depth analysis of the terminology employed to describe linguistic variation on a very local scale. In so doing, it paves the way for further development of draw-a-map techniques that will enable similarly nuanced analysis in different regions, thus pushing the sub-discipline forward.

Sociodemographic information, such as a speaker’s regional origin, is intimately related to the judgments and social evaluations that listeners assign to that speaker. This association between linguistic form and social information can also lead to linguistic profiling, a harmful form of discrimination. The present study examines the geographic classifications and social attitudes attributed to ten phonetic variants used within regional varieties of Iberian (i.e., European) Spanish. We are specifically interested in understanding listeners’ geographical classifications and language attitudes held toward Andalusian Spanish, which is a less privileged regional variety spoken in Spain’s southern region, as compared to north-central Peninsular Spanish (NCPS). The results of an online survey show that 165 listeners were fairly consistent when geographically classifying Andalusian-sounding stimuli as originating from the south of Spain. Importantly, the respondents also attributed less favorable social meaning to the Andalusian-sounding stimuli in comparison to the NCPS-sounding stimuli. We link the findings to broader themes in sociolinguistics, such as language-based discrimination, linguistic insecurity, and the social motivations of language change.

This paper revisits the question of national varieties in German, a concept that still has not found solid empirical proof, at least not from a quantitative-etic perspective. The question raised is how data collected in the course of the international research project, Variantengrammatik des Standarddeutschen (Handbook of Grammatical Variation in Standard German), and the application of spatial statistical methods to geographical variant distribution patterns can contribute to this discussion. With the aid of Factor Analysis and spatially modified clustering of variant distribution patterns it is shown that—at least from a quantitative/corpus linguistic point of view—there is no evidence for assuming nation-specific varieties. Importantly, this result does not imply the existence of a homogenous German standard language; rather, it is argued that geographical variation does not self-evidently legitimize the assumption of standard varieties.

This perceptual-dialectology study investigates how listener-related social factors impact the geographical recognition of regional accents. In contrast to much prior research on English, our focus is on Dutch, which lends itself well to our study, allowing for notable regional accents within a well-defined standard language. Using a map-based recognition task in which 1,578 listeners placed forty representative speakers on a map based on fragments of their speech, we investigated the regional biases in accent recognition and the extent to which each listener’s awareness of these depends on their familiarity and proximity. Education, geographical knowledge, and distance to listeners’ own regions significantly predicted their accent-recognition accuracy. Moreover, we found a curvilinear age effect, which we interpret in terms of age-related changes in geographical and social mobility. We show how these effects in our design lead to meaningful accent-recognition patterns in groups of listeners.

The present study explores how two symbolic boundaries—linguistic variety and race—intersect, influencing how Latin American immigrants are perceived in Spain. To this end, 217 Spaniards participated in an experiment in which they evaluated three men along a series of social properties, but they were presented with different combinations of linguistic variety (Argentinian, Colombian, or Spanish) and race (a White or Mestizo photograph). The results of mixed-effects regression models found that linguistic variety conditioned participants’ evaluations of status, occupational prestige, solidarity, and trustworthiness, and both variety and race conditioned evaluations of religiousness. We contend that linguistic features become associated with a specific group of people through rhematization (Gal, 2005; Irvine & Gal, 2000) and, by extension, ideologies link those people with stereotypical characteristics. We conclude that the “ideological twinning” (Rosa & Flores, 2017) of race and linguistic variety can enhance stereotypes toward immigrants and impact their experiences in the receiving country.

Variationist research has much to gain from deepening engagement with theories about place, defined as space imbued with social meaning. One challenge that variationists face is how to adapt the complex and multifaceted aspects of place orientation into a single measure that can be included in models of sociolinguistic variation. In this paper, I advocate for an ethnographic approach to place, providing an example from Greater New Orleans, where post-Katrina displacement has highlighted individual connections to place. Using an ethnographically informed multidimensional place orientation metric (MPOM), I examine two local linguistic features among speakers from the suburban town of Chalmette, Louisiana according to place orientation. Via statistical modeling and case study of individual speakers, I demonstrate the value of MPOMs in quantitative analysis of sociolinguistic variation, arguing for further theorization of place orientation in our research and providing a model for variationist sociolinguists interested in engaging more with place theory.

Recent sociophonetic research has focused on the ways in which race and ethnicity influence language as well as how language is used to construct racial and ethnic identity. Comparisons of the speech of members of one ethnic group across different regions are still uncommon. In this study, fifty-one native American English speakers of Korean descent, hailing from three different dialect areas of the United States (Los Angeles County and Orange County, California; Harris County, Texas; and Gwinnett County, Georgia), were recorded speaking English in casual interviews. Their speech was analyzed for characteristics of local sound patterns in each region, including the Short Front Vowel Shift (California Vowel Shift) and the Southern Vowel Shift, as well as overall Vowel Space Area. All three groups showed evidence of the Short Front Vowel Shift, and none demonstrated the Southern Vowel Shift. The Californian speakers had the smallest vowel spaces, while the Georgian speakers had the largest. We relate these findings to the ways Korean Americans in Texas and California understand their ethnic identity vis-à-vis a kind of metropolitan or urban speech style in a highly multicultural environment, while, in comparison, Korean Americans in Georgia may use vowel space to highlight their orientation toward or away from local mainstream (white) cultural identity.

The methods of spatial statistics have been successfully applied to the study of linguistic variation, especially for detecting the existence of spatial patterns in the geographical distribution of linguistic features. However, the use of local indicators of spatial autocorrelation for detecting spatial clusters have been limited to continuous variables, and we propose to apply the new method of Anselin and Li (2019) for categorical variables to linguistic data. We illustrate this method with the case of Japanese rendaku, or sequential voicing, whose dialectal variation is still poorly documented. Focusing on regional differences in the frequency of rendaku, we examined the occurrence of rendaku for four lexemes in 4,921 place names from all Japan. A statistical analysis of local spatial association and an unsupervised density-based cluster analysis revealed the existence of two cluster areas of high rendaku frequency centered around Wakayama and Fukushima-Yamagata prefectures. This suggests that rendaku is more frequent in those dialects, and we recommend that further studies in the dialectal variation of rendaku start by looking at those areas.

Phonetic spelling was common practice in English dialect texts until the API (English: IPA), in 1893, launched its normative signs of transcription. Nevertheless, phonetic spellings have rarely been studied, the least in dialects. This paper ventures to trace some of the immanent norms and the sound functions of some phonetic spellings in the Isle of Wight during the Late Modern English period. The investigation is mainly based on data retrieved from EDD Online, which allows for sophisticated aggregate queries so that spelling practices can be quantified and mapped. The paper focuses on spellings unique to the island, such as double a, e, and o before another vowel, that is, in diphthongs, and u-spellings for schwa in posttonic syllables. The figures for non-unique features, such as voicing of fricatives, are normalized and allow for correlation to other counties. In sum, the Isle of Wight accent was marked by its typical “drawl.”

This paper investigates the occurrence of inflected predicative adjectives, an optional yet distinguishing feature of German dialects spoken in southern Switzerland. We provide an in-depth analysis of the patterns of change of this morphosyntactic marker with a particular focus on extralinguistic factors. Historical records from 1950 were compared to contemporary data collected from 192 speakers across 49 localities in 2020–21. Our results corroborate previous reports indicating a substantial, real-time decline in inflected forms. Logistic mixed-effects modeling suggests that the inflection of predicative adjectives occurs more frequently among speakers who report tight social networks, have a strong local dialect identity, and regularly use one or more Romance languages. These findings support the claim that tight social networks and local dialect identity construction may lead to the preservation of conservative grammatical forms. Additionally, the effect of Romance languages highlights the role of transfer phenomena induced by language contact.

Who as a restrictive relativizer in English is an old change from above. In urban dialects, it still acts as a prestige form, whereas it is infrequent or negligible in rural British and American varieties. We compare earlier findings from Toronto, the largest city in the province of Ontario (D’Arcy & Tagliamonte, 2010), with a range of communities from the Ontario Dialects Project (Tagliamonte, 2003–present). While none of the rural locations has as much who as Toronto, there is a substantial range. Regions along the major highways to the north and east of the city have more who, while the smaller towns in less accessible locations have less, consistent with a Cascade Model effect (Labov, 2003). Nonetheless, who shows evidence of diffusion, increasing in apparent time in recent decades. We suggest that this reflects overt pressure from above, consistent with the enduring role that prestige plays in English relativizer variation.

The use of future subjunctive (FS) has suffered a steady decline in written Spanish from the fourteenth century. It is not clear whether it disappeared similarly in each clause, and whether its use was determined by regional distinctions to be considered as a dialectal feature. Granda (1986) suggested that the Hispanic Caribbean countries in the Americas were more conservative in the use of FS in contrast to other regions in a southerly direction. Ramírez-Luengo (2008), however, argued that FS decline occurred uniformly in the Americas, with the eighteenth century being the critical time for the substitution. In a sample of 45 legal documents (60,852 words) from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, issued in northwest and southwest Colombia, the proportions of FS and other alternating forms were equally likely in both regions. FS tabulations were less likely to occur in the nineteenth century within relative clauses, while they were equally likely to occur in conditional protases. This suggests that FS in written Spanish does not show dialectal differences and that its decline might have occurred earlier in relative clauses than conditional protases, probably due to a stylistic motivation.

This paper aims to understand the contribution of geographical information in the perception of linguistic variation. A total of 813 mental maps collected among young speakers from different cities in Tuscany have been analyzed via an open-access web dialectometric tool (Gabmap). In particular, the study seeks to verify the role of geographic distance and the place of residence of the respondents in modeling perceived variation. The relationship between dialect grouping as made by linguists and perceived taxonomies of sublinguistic areas is also investigated. Results show that geographical proximity between mapped areas significantly predicts the perception of dialect similarity. Our participants made their decisions looking at (1) a keen sense of spatial contiguity, and (2) the synchronic presence of linguistic differences between the Tuscan subregions. Moreover, classification uncertainty grows when the mapped areas are very close to, or very distant from, the participants’ places of residence. Methodological and linguistic perspectives of mental maps in folk linguistics are finally discussed.

Describing specific dialect areas in terms of their lexis is an attractive idea now that the latest version of the English Dialect Dictionary Online (EDD Online 3.0, 2019) allows for quick and easy lexical retrievals of English dialect words of the Late Modern English period. This paper uses the Isle of Wight (I.W.) as a test case for putting such an idea into practice. The 137 words uniquely attributed in the EDD to I.W. are analyzed and interpreted in relation to the 1500-odd words used on I.W. alongside other areas of the UK. The paper informs the reader of the available query modes and discusses their pros and cons, quantifying and mapping the different numbers of isolated words in use on I.W. versus those unique to other English counties. The larger number of words that the island shared with the counties of the “mainland” will likewise be considered, thus allowing for first steps towards a “dialectometrical” analysis. The findings are related to the historical background of I.W., particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This article presents the results of an interdisciplinary project that explores street name changes in Leipzig, a city in eastern Germany, over the past one-hundred years. Our analysis focuses on the ways in which semantic choices in the streetscape are recruited to canonize traces of the national past that are “supportive of the hegemonic socio-political order” (Azaryahu, 1997:480). We triangulate results from variationist sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies and geographical analysis to visualize waves of street (re)naming during a century of political turmoil. Drawing on historical archival data allows us to interpret spatial and temporal patterns of odonymic choices as the public embodiment of subsequent political state ideologies. The analysis provides quantitative and longitudinal support to Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) claim that the indexing of officially sanctioned identity and ideology as well as the appropriation of human space are performed by and in turn index state-hegemonic politics of memory.

This paper presents the results of a survey of phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic variation in British English, based on over 14,000 responses. We map twelve variables using geospatial “hotspot” analysis. One of our aims is to document the patterning of under- and unstudied variables. A second aim is to track changes in real time, which we do by comparing our findings to those of the 1950s-era Survey of English Dialects (SED; Orton, 1962). We improve upon previous dialectological work by paying careful attention to the phonemic status of mergers and splits: In our contemporary data, we do this by asking subjects if they have a phonemic contrast; in the SED data, we do this by superimposing the isoglosses for individual phones. We find evidence for both stability and change; we document previously unverified patterns. Perhaps most importantly, we identify a number of directions for future research.