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.

Residential locations of cases are often used as proxy measures for the likely place of exposure and this assumption may result in biases affecting both surveillance and epidemiological studies. This study aimed to describe the importance of domestic travel in cases of human campylobacteriosis reported during routine surveillance in Iceland from 2001 to 2005. Various measures of disease frequency were calculated based upon the cases' region of residence, adjusting location of domestic travel cases to their travel region, as well as separate estimations for travellers and non-travellers. Of the 376 cases included in the analysis, 37% had travelled domestically during their incubation period. Five of the eight regions were identified as high-risk when considering domestic travel whereas there were no high-risk regions when considering only region of residence. The change in regional representation of disease occurrence indicates the importance of collecting domestic travel information in ongoing surveillance activities.